I went to a funeral last Saturday, a depressingly frequent occurrence at my age. But it was an exceptional funeral, not only because of its gloriously peaceful rural setting amid the still snow-flecked hills of north-west Hampshire, or because of the beauty of the service that took place in the tiny village of Tangley’s charming Victorian church. It was exceptional because the person there being laid to rest in a wicker coffin was himself exceptional, one Peter Thomas Staheyeff Carson.
I became a good friend of Peter’s more than 50 years ago, when we were both undergraduates at Cambridge — he at Trinity College and I at Trinity Hall next door. We would see each other almost every day as members of what Lucinda Lambton, in her fine tribute in church, described as ‘his wildly-enjoying-ourselves group of friends’. But she could equally well have described us as friends who did no work and drank a great deal too much. And in his idleness and drunkenness Peter was without rival.
I was bad enough, but no match for him. As Lucinda put it, he ‘drank like a Russian’, which reflected the fact that his mother was a White Russian who had escaped from the Revolution in a hay cart with her wealthy family, their jewels sewn into the hems of their coats (his mixed Swiss, French and Anglo–Irish father died when Peter was nine, so he grew up under Russian parental influence). Lucinda recalled him having once been found insensible on the pavement outside King’s College by E.M. Forster, and I can recall returning to my room in Trinity Hall one afternoon to find Peter strenuously attempting to overturn my upright piano. It is the kind of action in which only drunk people can detect a purpose.
‘I mention the drinking,’ said Lucinda, ‘because his triumph in conquering the demon was a remarkable triumph.’ And I mention it for the same reason, but also because it resisted the conventional explanations. Peter could seem world-weary, but not a victim of what you might call ‘Russian gloom’. It did not seem to me that he drank because he was unhappy. On the contrary, he was usually rather jolly. And he was no wastrel. He had won scholarships left, right and centre and was better read than anybody I had ever met. He was also dry and funny and affectionate. So the reasons for his drinking are something of a mystery. And such was his intellect that it did not prevent him getting a first-class degree in classics, while I almost failed to get any degree at all.
Its interest for me lies in the way someone on a seemingly irreversible downward path can recover so strongly as to become, in the words of Peter’s obituary in the Times, someone ‘who had probably more influence on the literary landscape of this country over the past 50 years than any other single person’. I don’t know whether that’s overstating it or not — Peter would certainly have thought it was — but the fact remains that he went from being a warehouseman at the publishers Longman (where he said he spent part of each day sprawled on boxes, recovering from a hangover) to being, with the title Editor-in-Chief, the second in command at Penguin to the American Peter Mayer, with whom he restored that ailing company’s fortunes and prestige in the 1980s and 1990s.
Apart from bringing fame and fortune to such writers as Zadie Smith, Simon Schama, and Robin Lane Fox, he showed himself to be a surprisingly steely character, perfectly ready to fire people, but always in such a sensitive way that those who he had fired remained both admirers and friends. His failure to cultivate ruthlessness as a virtue was only one way in which he might be thought old-fashioned. Another was his habit of understatement. You can’t go to a book launch party nowadays without hearing the publisher praise the book and its author in ludicrously extravagant terms. Peter would never have done that. As his authors have testified, they knew that he was really enthusiastic when he described a book or an idea as just ‘rather good’.
Peter died at the age of 74, a victim of two catastrophic ailments, lung cancer and pulmonary fibrosis. He lost his voice, was permanently on oxygen, and must have known he had not long to live. But he was gentle, smiling, humorous and affectionate right until the end. He was, in short, incredibly impressive, but I should say that he would probably never have achieved this admirable state without the support of his splendid, efficient and devoted wife Eleo, who helped him stop drinking and is still a distinguished editor at Penguin. His old boss, Peter Mayer, made another moving tribute to Peter, having flown over from the United States to be at the funeral. He referred to ‘his extraordinary accomplishments’, but said that what really mattered was ‘that we all loved him for who he was and what he was’. Quite right.
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