Are you afraid of me?” asks Carmen Callil, grande dame of publishing, founder of Virago and now the author of a hefty tome on an unsung villain of Vichy France. No, I say; should I be? It’s an odd conversation to be having with someone who has just made you a cup of tea, in their cosy front room amid plump, flowery cushions. It’s a home designed for cheer and comfort: not showy but full of colour. Coming in off a London street on a grey winter’s day, you are struck by its vigorous style – as befits a woman who has been called many things but never dull.
Later we’ll get onto collaboration with the Nazis, and therapy, and suicide, but first we have to dispense with her fearsome reputation. In her 20-odd years in the book industry – first at Virago, the feminist publisher she set up in 1972, and later at Chatto -& Windus – Callil earned a name for herself as a trailblazer. But also as a tyrant. “Brash and nasty” is how one former colleague remembered her. Another said: “You dreaded going to the loo. Someone was always in there sobbing.” Even now, you don’t have to look far to find a perfectly generous person ready to describe her in the blackest terms: “a monster”, said one acquaintance; “a witch”, said another.
On the other hand, her friends can’t speak too highly of her. Liz Calder, who co-founded Bloomsbury Publishing, calls her “incredibly loyal, funny, direct and impulsive; an exhilarating person”. With a soft side? “Oh God, yes. Soft as a jar of worms.” Callil has no children of her own, but countless godchildren and two border terriers. “She’s what the French call un personnage” – a character – says Suzanne Lowry, who has known her for over 30 years. “She’s fiery, impatient, uncompromising. Everyone has rows with her, but she’s a wonderful friend. She’s just not always very diplomatic.”
Was the tough image deliberately cultivated, her weapon against a world that couldn’t handle a woman with ideas above her station? “No,” says Callil. “I found it very painful.” Would she rather have been liked? She sighs – the magnificently patronising sigh of an ageing matriarch (she is 67 now, and grey-haired). “Actually, Kathy” – she uses your name a lot, particularly when she thinks you’re getting it wrong – “to be truthful, I do have a lot of people that like me, and that helped. The stuff that was written I found painful. But sometimes I found it very accurate. And as much as I can I’ve apologised.” She pauses. “I wasn’t always as bad as they painted me.”
No, I’m sure, I say: she must have been an obvious target for any anti-feminist flak flying around. “No, you don’t have to be sure,” she counters, snippily – she’s disappointed when people agree with her. She frowns, not wanting to appear to be making excuses, as she says how difficult it was to be a powerful woman in the 1970s and 80s. “You were really shat upon. I worked with some bloody awful men, and I used to think, ‘Why don’t they get it?’” She admits she was demanding. “I didn’t suffer inefficiency, or people who weren’t quick. I could have done with a lot more patience. If I made secretaries cry, I probably shouldn’t have. On the other hand, if she was here now I’d probably throw another cup at her [and say], ‘What sort of bloody wimp are you?’ I’m not too saintly.”
Enough. It’s more than a decade since Callil left publishing, and she is now Carmen Callil, publisher turned author. “Have you read the book?” she asks, with a slightly forced jolliness. She got a book deal to write her autobiography. “I said I’d write it so I could get an advance,” she says, and laughs abruptly. “I had no intention to write it, and I still won’t… Aren’t I vicious?”
Now, she says, her publishers like this book so much they don’t mind. Bad Faith, which comes out next month, is the story of Louis Darquier, commissioner for Jewish affairs in the Vichy regime from May 1942 to February 1944, under whose tenure 13,000 Jews living in France were sent to the death camps, a third of them children.
It’s also the story of his daughter, Anne Darquier, who grew up in England ignorant of the truth about him until she was 15. And because Anne Darquier was, for seven years, Callil’s psychiatrist, it’s the story, too, at least between the lines, of how Callil grew from a troubled young woman in her early twenties to the resolutely steely person she was by her early thirties – and still is. It took her five years to write, in which time she did little else. “I like going into an igloo of creation. It reminded me of when I started Virago – I went into a haze, a bell jar. I used to work in my nightie, you know?”
A book delving into the complex history of Vichy France would be a daunting prospect for anyone, but it was a book she felt compelled to write. “This was an idea that had been haunting her for a long time,” says Lowry. “I don’t think she knew it would become such a huge undertaking, but she’s a terrier, she won’t let go.”
Louis Darquier was born in 1897 to a good Catholic family in Cahors, southwest France. His father, Pierre, was a well-respected doctor and later the town’s mayor, a “big and solid, cordial and joyous” man, “much loved” – not least by his many mistresses. “One must know when to shut one’s eyes,” his wife, Louise, would say. Perhaps she employed this same psychological device later on, when her middle son, Louis, became – in the words of a British report in 1942 – “one of the most notorious anti-semites in France”. It was fame, of a sort, and she had always been considered “excessively ambitious for her sons”.
Anti-semitism was flourishing in France during Darquier’s childhood. “We must bring an end to the corruption of the race,” proclaimed the Catholic newspaper La Défense, while the poet Charles Maurras declared himself “struck, moved, almost hurt” when he arrived in Paris to find so many street names that included a K, W or Z – names almost certainly foreign and Jewish.
Darquier seized upon this anti-Jewish feeling and made it his own. He was an arrogant waster, singularly devoid of redeeming features. On February 6, 1934, he took part in far-right riots against the French government. Seventeen protesters were killed and 1,500 wounded. Darquier was shot in the thigh by police, which made him a hero – he said it was “like having a winning ticket to the lottery”. Spotting a great way to make money, he founded the Association des Blessés et Victimes du 6 Février (Association for the Wounded and the Victims of February 6), ostensibly a charity but in effect a way to line his own pockets. It was the first of many dubious organisations he set up to benefit from far-right money. Soon he had a job on a far-right newspaper, Le Jour, then he became a Paris city councillor for the National Front. By 1936 he was being funded by the Nazis. He shared their enthusiastic hatred of all things Jewish – his reaction to Kristallnacht was “Bravo, Fritz!”
Darquier’s private life was no more pleasant. He bedded anything that moved and was sacked from at least one job for groping secretaries. His wife, Myrtle Jones, from Tasmania, was a failed actress and singer with high pretensions who already had a husband when she met Darquier at a casino in 1927. But this didn’t stop her from marrying him, possibly without getting a divorce. A tragicomic figure, more tragic than comic, she had pathetically low expectations; her first husband had hit her once, she said, but “only when maddened by drink”. Darquier frequently left her so battered and blue she barely dared venture out. Regardless, she clung to him like a limpet, professing to love him till the end.
