GHOSTING,  by Jennie Erdal

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October 30, 2004

My life as a ghost

DAVID ROBINSON

A DECADE AGO, THE FLAMBOYANT Palestinian publisher Naim Attallah had carved out a reputation as one of the best interviewers in the business. Reviewing his sixth volume of interviews, the cream of the literati lined up to praise his interrogative subtlety. Our own Allan Massie was impressed enough to note that Attallah was "masterly and sympathetic, the most self-effacing of interviewers". Self-effacing. That’s an odd word to choose for Naim Attallah, peacock among publishers, former bankroller of the Oldie and the Literary Review, boss of Asprey’s, Quartet and the Women’s Press, master of what Private Eye called a "harem" of beautiful young gals (Nigella Lawson, Rebecca Fraser, etc). Could such a bustling, extravagant, charismatic, infuriating, tantrum-throwing, passionate, generous, vain man suddenly transform himself into a self-effacing interviewer? Surely some mistake?

Picture: David Moir                                    

Jennie Erdal, by contrast, really is self-effacing. For 16 years, as Attallah built up his reputation as a skilful interviewer, she kept quiet about the fact that she’d written almost every question he’d asked. And when he decided he wanted to write novels, she kept quiet about the fact that she’d written practically every word of them too. Love letters to his wife, newspaper columns, book reviews: if Attallah wrote anything under his own name, the chances were it had first been composed by Erdal, 500 miles away from his Mayfair home at her own house near St Andrews.

Her book Ghosting, in which Attallah is disguised with transparent thinness as the ebullient publisher "Tiger", is not, however, a hatchet job. Although Tiger’s constant demands on his staff, odd whims, and even odder idea of what constitutes a good novel, must have made him difficult to work for, her portrait of him is fundamentally affectionate. For all his faults, Tiger/Attallah was both generous and had legendary charm. If there’s an element of betrayal in her portrait of him, it’s mixed with fondness.

Few professional relationships have anything like the same intimacy as that shared by ghostwriters and their subjects. To deduce how someone might write, how they interpret their past, or how they think, is to discover exactly how they see themselves. "Usually, though, it’s a short-lived intimacy," says Erdal. "A couple of weeks of interviews, a few follow-up questions, and both are free to resume their normal lives. With me and Naim it wasn’t two weeks but for the best part of two decades."

She was, however, integral to his success. His 1987 breakthrough book, the 1,200-page Women, a collection of interviews with prominent women, couldn’t have been done without her. She wrote out every question he was to ask, colour-coded them and laid them out in schematic form. If one line of questioning proved productive, she had lined up a few secondary questions underneath it; if it didn’t, there were fall-backs. Not only had there to be enough questions to fill a three-hour interview, but they had to be comprehensible to both interviewer and interviewee. "If the interviewee didn’t understand the question," says Erdal, "Naim wouldn’t be capable of paraphrasing. He’d just read it again from the beginning."

Erdal, in other words, first had to think her way into Attallah’s head to find out what kind of questions he could ask ("The good thing was, he had such chutzpah he’d go where angels fear to tread"), then read up on the interviewees to find out how they were going to answer. From that, she would guess the conversation’s direction, knowing full well that if it headed too far from her list of questions, her boss would flounder.

Oddly, he never worried about that. When going off to talk to some famous person whose work he hadn’t read, he’d often cut Erdal off after the briefest of briefings. As a result, the interview tapes contained their fair share of awkward silences, questions with strange inflections, episodes of sublime embarrassment (To Enoch Powell: "May I call you Eunoch?") and moments of sudden revelation crying out for follow-up questions that never appear.

But even though all that meant Attallah would never make the grade as a radio or TV interviewer, in books it didn’t matter. If his interviews couldn’t become a free-flowing conversation, at least they allowed the interviewees to explain themselves at longer length than they were usually allowed, and by and large they made the most of it. The secret of Attallah’s success as an interviewer was the same as the secret of his failure: he couldn’t have done it alone.

HE MET ERDAL THROUGH A SHARED interest in the work of the painter Leonid Pasternak, whose memoirs she translated from Russian. Other than that, they had nothing in common. If she grew up shy and bookish (childhood in Lochgelly, then off to St Andrews to study Russian and philosophy), he was almost her polar opposite: extravagant, exotic, showy.

After the success of the books of interviews, Attallah craved the recognition that would come from writing a novel. Erdal had never dreamed of writing one, but here she was again, thinking her way into her master’s mind. By book two she was realising what a strange place that was. Her protagonist, he ordained, should be a man who falls in love with two cousins who, because they are born on the same day, are so close that when he makes love to one of them, the other might also experience an orgasm even though she is on the other side of the world (that "would just happen willy-nilly - or, in Tiger’s phrase, nilly-willy", she writes).

"I have a highly developed sense of absurdity and there was certainly a lot of absurdity then, and working for Naim was never dull. But the fiction felt too much of a sham, like a confidence trick, and I got so mixed up in my own head, spending so much time in what I imagined his head to be. In the end, I knew I had to leave."

Erdal’s first book outside Attallah’s head is a joy to read. All the media buzz will be about the unmasking of Attallah, but really there’s a deeper, multi-layered story, and Erdal tells it with intelligence, clarity and insight.

It’s a story of how we drift into the things which, to others, often define us. Being Attallah’s ghostwriter made her, according to one feminist professor at St Andrews, "no better than a common whore". In reality, Erdal shows, working one’s way into someone else’s mind is just like deciphering a text in a foreign language, when the perfect translation has to be invisible to the reader.

But why should anyone be drawn to ghost-like invisibility in the first place? Why should anyone start to care about language? For all the melodrama involved in being the inner eye of the Tiger, it is this quieter, more nuanced story, with its roots in her rather austere upbringing in Fife, that is at the heart of the book. (Coincidentally, Attallah, who is now 73 and reportedly £1 million in debt, also has a memoir out this week - a 70-page story about growing up in Nazareth in the 1940s. Compared to Erdal’s, it is embarrassingly unquestioning.)

Both memoirs and interviews, Erdal points out, are only ever incomplete stories, only ever versions of ourself that we want others to accept. In her time working for Attallah she has had to offer other people versions of her life that weren’t true - that she was "just" his driver or his secretary, certainly nothing to do with his success as a writer.

At last, she can stop pretending to be something that she’s not. Now that she has given up the ghosting, we can see her for what she is. And that’s a very fine writer indeed.

Ghosting, by Jennie Erdal, is published by Canongate, price £14.99. The Old Ladies of Nazareth by Naim Attallah is published by Quartet, price £10.

31 October 2004

Secret confessions of a reformed ghost writer

Jennie Erdal spent years tied to the man who put his name on her books before finally exposing him. So how does it feel to write for herself at last?

By Lesley McDowell

Let me begin by declaring an interest: like Jennie Erdal, I too was once a ghost writer. The job lasted only two weeks and was the most stressful experience of my working life. I would be called at dawn and urged in hysterical tones to come and collect tapes; three hours later I would still be waiting for them (my time, clearly, was not so valuable). When I escaped to the sanctuary of my flat to write, I would be interrupted by hourly phone calls demanding to know how far on I was. Worse, the secrecy of ghosting meant I couldn’t tell anyone what I was doing.

Erdal’s secret life as a ghost-writer lasted not weeks, but years. A legacy of the constant, intrusive phone calls means her working space these days is at the far end of her garden in St Andrews – an insulated log cabin full of books, papers and a telephone that doesn’t ring with the urgency it once did. She ghosted for an important London-based publisher called Naim Atallah and wrote everything for him: letters, columns, non-fiction volumes of interviews, three novels – and her name never appeared on any of it.

Nobody on the London literary scene knew what she did; she was regarded, if at all, as just another of Atallah’s endless array of assistants, most of them very beautiful, very posh and very young (Nigella Lawson was briefly a helper). Then, in 2000, she decided she’d had enough and left. Four years later, she has written an account of those years called Ghosting: A Memoir. Atallah, perhaps unsurprisingly, is not at all pleased.

“I showed him the first four chapters and he loved it,” Erdal says, shrugging slightly. “He loved being Tiger [Erdal’s nickname for him], said he would help with the promotion and even offered to publish it. Except he wanted to control what I said. It all changed when I told him I’d be looking at our ‘creative partnership’ – he wasn’t happy and that was the first time we’d acknowledged between us that anything had gone on. He said he never told his wife and I never told my children.

“I said of course I told my children! They are a part of me, how could I not? He said that I had betrayed him. It’s the last thing he ever said to me. I’ve contacted him since but he won’t reply.”

Erdal is a literate, serious Scot with a strong sense of the absurd – which probably helped her a lot. Born in the Fife, she attended St Andrews University before marrying, having three children and doing translation work. One of her translations was published by Atallah’s company, Quartet. He then asked her to manage his list of Russian writers, and before long she was writing everything.

“It was such an intense relationship,” she says, when I say that her time with Atallah reads like an account of an abusive marriage . “He was obsessional in many ways, not just with me, but with everyone who worked for him. Tiger was such a high-octane person. The smallest thing was made into a life-or-death issue. I did try very hard to please, as everyone who worked there did. We all tried, which meant, too, that we tried not to incur his displeasure.”

Part of the reason she lasted so long, apart from an affection for him that she still has, was that she wasn’t really part of his world.

Erdal only occasionally visited London, although she was always there at the end of the special phone she had installed for calls only from Atallah (“it was called the hotline and my youngest child used to think it literally meant it was hot to the touch. My daughter says she remembers the feeling of panic whenever that phone rang”). She began as a kind of secretary, writing letters for him to editors or politicians before her first literary project, a volume of interviews called Women, which earned Atallah a special mention on the gossip pages and satirical magazines. The interview questions were written up by Erdal, as were the interviews themselves. It didn’t bother her, conscience-wise, she says. Not until Atallah decided he wanted to write a novel. Or rather, wanted Erdal to write a novel.

“I felt and still feel that the novel really matters,” she says. “I always read a lot and it seemed so important, so I was slightly squeamish about ‘ghosting’ a novel. Not that we ever spoke about ‘ghosting’, that word never passed between us. Part of what fascinated me about it all is that Tiger regarded us as a single unit, he didn’t separate us except when it came to the published books. They were definitely his – but throughout the process he regarded us as a single entity, I’m perfectly sure of that.”

How did she cope with the deception? “I quite enjoyed the different levels of absurdity and irony in the whole process,” she says. And why expose it all now? “I think what interests me is how it all happened. One of the reasons he’s called Tiger in the book isn’t to conceal his identity: I wanted the story to work without depending on the identity of one of the protagonists.”

That may be a forlorn hope with such a colourful character. One of the most memorable scenes in the book occurs in France, where Atallah and Erdal lie naked by the pool – Atallah wouldn’t permit anything so prudish as bathing-clothes – while terrifying Dobermans patrol the grounds and they discuss the possibility of simultaneous orgasms.

Erdal laughs. “I’ll never be able to write that again! My daughter thinks that I use comedy as a means of distancing myself and objectifying it all. I’d like to think I’ve written a textured, nuanced story, not one that points the finger. I suppose some will see it as a kiss-and-tell of sorts. There was deception and self-deception on my side, too. If those parts of the book make for uncomfortable reading, well, they were hard to write, too.”

Does she think she submitted to the ghosting process partly from a sense of powerlessness, incurred when her marriage broke down? “Well, for the first 10 years or so, I was trying very hard to keep body and soul together. My job was very important to me. The last five years [with Atallah] I spent so much time in his head I was losing the way in my own. I felt I was pretending in a way I didn’t want to be doing. I don’t think I questioned it for many years, I just did it. Living a lie sounds such a cliché but that’s what I was doing.”

She is, she says, a slow recoverer. “It took me a long time to recover from my marriage break-up, it took me four years to feel normal again. And I feel like a recovering ghost too, like a recovering alcoholic – it might take me quite a long time to get over it.”

When Erdal met the man who became her second husband, “I began to see it from a different perspective. The honesty you bring to things,” she continues, “is anathema to ghost-writing. The words of the ghost are being appropriated by the ghosted, but the ghosted also has words which don’t properly belong to him. That may not be troubling to him, but I cannot imagine what it is like to be ghosted, to have your personal feelings put into someone else’s words. I can’t imagine what that would feel like.”

At last, with this beautiful and sensitive memoir, the ghost has spoken. Atallah may rue the day he invited Erdal to write for him, but we should be thankful he chose a ghost with her integrity and intelligence.

November 07, 2004 

Memoir: Ghosting by Jennie Erdal

REVIEWED BY JEREMY LEWIS

GHOSTING: A Memoir
by Jennie Erdal

Canongate £14.99 pp273

Naim Attallah is the most exotic of London publishers, and he was at his most resplendent when Jennie Erdal first met him in 1981: clad in red lizardskin shoes and different coloured socks, his jacket linings an iridescent flash, the man known as “Tiger” ran Quartet Books like a sultan, buying books on a whim while a bevy of aristocratic beauties manicured his nails, poured drops in his ears and did their best to avert his attention from the unwelcome discharge of bodily fluids (a huge row broke out after he discovered that “one of my girls has done a poo in the loo”). Nobody knew quite how he had made his fortune, but he put it to good effect: until recently he funded both The Oldie and the Literary Review, and although Quartet seems dormant at the moment, it published fine things in its day.

“Tiger” is also a writer, lending his name to interviews with famous figures, a 1,200-page tome on women (“I am famous for love,” we learn. “I glow in their company”), two well-received novels, and an article on knickers for The Erotic Review: and it was his passion to write works that were both “distinguished” and “poetic” that led Erdal to make the transition from being an editor specialising in Russian translations to becoming a full-time amanuensis.

Dividing her time between her family in Scotland and London, Erdal began by researching and writing up Attallah’s interviews. This seemed harmless enough, but then she made the fatal mistake of agreeing to write a book for him — something she had never contemplated on her own account. “We are thinking about a beautiful novel, very beautiful,” Tiger insisted, and — unlike his reluctant scribe — he longed to reach the sex scenes (“Beloved, we need the jig-jig”). They spent weeks together in his house in the Dordogne, where he did the cooking while she typed in another room; and no sooner had the first work been published than he demanded another, involving two girls who enjoyed simultaneous orgasms. Erdal’s life as ghost lasted 15 years: she finally decided to break free when Tiger insisted on installing a “hotline” at her home in St Andrews and took to ringing her up to 40 times a day, driving her husband to despair.

Ghosting is sad, funny and beautifully written, but although Erdal is always interesting and intelligent, Tiger dominates the proceedings to such an extent that one longs for him to bustle back on stage, batting his forehead with the palm of his hand, consulting one of the three watches he wears, splashing like an excited baby at the shallow end of his swimming pool in France or telling an air hostess that, “My wee-wee is yellow” and worrying that there may not be enough bread rolls on board.

Erdal may have been maddened by Tiger, but her portrait is fond and admiring; and although his exposure as a literary Gatsby may seem like an act of treachery, all has come right in the end. By writing her own book, the ghost is a ghost no longer; Tiger has acquired an unwanted immortality; and since he has recently published a book of his own, apparently unaided, it may be that he never needed a ghost after all.

Bookseller

29 July 2004

A kind of self-deception

In Ghosting: A Memoir by Jennie Erdal (Canongate, 4th November, h/b, £14.99, 1841955620), the author relates a funny anecdote about attending the launch party for the first novel to be published under the name of her employer, the flamboyant Palestinian-born publisher Naim Attallah.

Asked by fellow guests whether she had read the book, she was in a dilemma: sometimes she said she had, and she thought it was very good; sometimes she said she had not, but was looking forward to it. The reader appreciates the delicious irony of her predicament, for the truth was that Erdal had written the novel herself, to order, and in a mere six weeks at that.

Ghosting is not a literary kiss-and-tell, its author emphasises, anxious about the book's reception. She points out that for years it was an open secret in publishing circles that Attallah, magazine proprietor and owner of Quarto Books and The Women's Press, did not himself write every word of the journalism or the books that appeared under his own name--notably volumes of his interviews with famous women, and a brace of novels. Private Eye had long ago "exposed" the situation, in very unflattering, black-and-white terms.

Instead Erdal is interested in the intense relationship that developed between herself, an editor, translator and single mother-of-three from a conservative small town in Fife, and the exuberant, obsessive, emotional Attallah, who grew up amid the olive groves of Palestine.

And she is interested in the complexities of the role she took on in his employ. In one way she sees it as just a simple service, comparing her job to that of the letter wallahs in India, who will compose a letter to order because they can phrase it better than the individual who buys their skills. In another, particularly when she came to write Attallah's novels, it became a strange kind of distortion of her own mental space, as she attempted to force her own creative imagination into the shape of another person's brain.

"There's a lot of ghostwriting about and everyone understands that," she comments, on the telephone from her home in St Andrews. "People know it covers everything from celebrity autobiographies to what might be called more serious literary work, but it's a fascinating area for people because it's secretive, sometimes a little bit murky. It's a sort of creative life that dare not speak its name. The publishing trade to some extent colludes in this as well--there are a lot of in-house editors nowadays who are brushing up the efforts of quite well-known writers."

Her working relationship with Attallah--she refers to him throughout the book by her private name for him, "Tiger"--was never referred to between them in those terms. "He always called it teamwork."

DIE BERLINER LITERATURKRITIK

9-11-2004

Hinter den Kulissen 

Jennie Erdal beschreibt ihr Leben als Ghostwriter 

LONDON (BLK) -- Dass oft Ghostwriter die Biografien von Prominenten verfassen, ist allgemein bekannt. Das aber ein Ghostwriter zwei Romane, unzählige Interviewfragen und Kolumnen in Zeitungen schreibt und das auch noch sehr erfolgreich, das ist selten.  Die Autorin Jennie Erdal erzähle in ihrem neuen Buch ihre „erstaunliche Geschichte“ als Ghostwriter, so die Rezensentin der literarischen Beilage der Times. Sie habe fast 15 Jahre lang nahezu jedes geschriebene Wort des Verlegers und Autors Naim Atallah verfasst. „Ohne ihre Recherchen hätte er nicht diese Fragen in den Interviews stellen können, die offene Antworten entlockt hatten […]“. Sie habe gute Kenntnisse in Literatur, Philosophie und Psychologie, außerdem die Fähigkeit, einfache und ausgefeilte Prosa zu schreiben, was in diesem Buch demonstriert werde. Er sei dafür der Inspirierende gewesen, außerdem sei es „sein Name [gewesen], den sie an das Ende jeden Briefes schrieb, der die Menschen dazu brachte, sich mit ihm zu treffen.“ Nach dem Interviewband seien die Romane gekommen, später habe sie unter seinem Namen Kolumnen in Zeitungen veröffentlicht. „Wie konnte diese intelligente Frau ihre Talente so vollständig jemand anderen zur Verfügung stellen, als Kompensation gerade genug Geld, um flüssig zu bleiben?“, fragt die Rezensentin. Die Autorin beschreibe ihren Werdegang mit Humor und Erkenntnis, unter anderem auch die Freude am Verbergen hinter anderen Identitäten oder das Gefühl der Macht, das sie durch das Kreieren einer neuen Persönlichkeit bekäme. Überhaupt gewähre das Buch einen Einblick in die Persönlichkeit von Jennie Erdal, ihrer selbst gewählten Ausbeutung und deren Gründe.

Literaturangaben: ERDAL, JENNIE: Ghosting. A double life. Cannongate Books 2004. 270 S., 14,99 £.

The ghost materialises
(Filed: 17/11/2004)

Anne Chisholm reviews Ghosting by Jennie Erdal and The Old Ladies of Nazareth by Naim Attallah

These two books are very different, and yet part of the same bizarre story. Naim Attallah, the flamboyant Palestinian-born publisher of Quartet Books and backer of the Literary Review and The Oldie, has written a short, simple account with fairy-tale overtones of how, as a boy, his life was changed for the better by his grandmother and his great aunt [The Old Ladies of Nazareth, Quartet, £10, 71pp]. Had this been his first book it would have proved him to be, in a modest way, a writer. Attallah, however, is an experienced author, with umpteen volumes to his credit. Except it now seems that the name on those book jackets is not that of the real writer.

For 15 years, Jennie Erdal was Naim Attallah's ghost-writer. Now, she has emerged from the shadows to tell the story of their weird relationship. She too shows that she can write; her book is original, thoughtful, and often very funny. She exposes Attallah unmercifully, but in the process she also exposes herself.

Ghost-writers have never been highly regarded. A former professor of Erdal's told her she was no better than a whore; but she was desperate for the work and the money. A linguist from a modest background, specialising in Russian, married to an academic, with three children under five, she entered Attallah's orbit after he published her translation of Leonid Pasternak's memoirs.

When he offered her the chance to establish a Russian list, mostly working from her home in Scotland, she could not believe her luck. As she admits, she was as seduced by his charm as dazzled by his wardrobe - "a spangle of silks and cashmeres, rubies and diamonds" as exotic as any of the well-connected girls he picked to decorate his office. He called them all, including her, Beloved. She called him Tiger, after the skin he had framed above his desk.

Gradually, her role changed. She eventually wrote, on his behalf, newspaper articles, speeches and about a dozen books, including a series of interviews and two novels. She also wrote "hundreds" of letters-to editors, politicians and bishops as well as, it is strongly implied, the occasional love letter to Attallah's wife (who otherwise does not feature at all).

They worked by a "kind of osmosis"; she never took dictation. Her claim is that she "often expressed what he was not capable of articulating on his own" and gave him an eloquent sophistication, which he coveted but did not naturally possess.

Erdal presents herself as the intellectually superior, if socially insecure, outsider in the frivolous court clustered around her employer. She weaves her own story into the narrative, describing a narrow-minded Scottish background; there is a whiff of malice in her account of the Arabellas and Sabrinas who were her colleagues: "It seemed that if you were out of the top drawer you did a lot of shrieking."

In many ways she concedes that she had a great deal of fun with Attallah, who introduced her to grand hotels, good wine and the pleasures of naked sunbathing. She also acknowledges his generosity, especially after she was abandoned by her husband; it was at this point that he proposed they collaborate on their first book of interviews, and promised her a large bonus.

Later he arranged for a company loan to enable her to buy her house. She shows him to be endearing, as well as impossibly demanding, with eccentricities bordering on dottiness: he hated his staff coughing or sneezing or using the lavatory. She cannot resist also revealing that he spat copiously when he lost his temper, had never heard of John Buchan or Philip Larkin, wore a hairpiece for years, and had his teeth professionally cleaned daily. She likes to describe him as "squealing" with rage or excitement.

It was only when he made her turn to novel writing that she reached the end of the line, especially when he required her to write graphic descriptions of sex. Fiction, she discovered, was harder to ghost than fact; also, she had married again, and the new man in her life soon found Attallah's demands and endless telephone calls intolerable. The last straw was when he proposed a book about God.

Erdal sprinkles her text with speculation about language and truth, but dodges the awkward ethical question: was it right to break the silence and discretion for which she was paid?

Of the partnership, who now emerges as the more exploited? At least Attallah has now shown, assuming that he wrote his new book all by himself, that he can manage without her. Only her next book will show whether she can do the same.

Anne Chisholm is writing a biography of Frances Partridge.

Issue: 23 October 2004

Her master’s voice

Ghosting
Jennie Erdal
Canongate, 273pp, £14.99, ISBN 1841955620

Reviewed by Caroline Moorehead

For almost 20 years, Jennie Erdal, translator from the Russian of Leonid Pasternak’s memoirs, earned her living as a writer. She published articles and book reviews, collections of interviews, letters to editors and newspaper columns on a wide range of subjects. She even produced two erotic novels. She was successful and well reviewed. However, all this writing was not for herself, or indeed as herself, but for Naim Attallah, publisher and funder of Quartet books and the Literary Review.  Ghosting, Erdal’s account of two decades of invisible authorship, is an extraordinary and very funny story. It is also the subject of an angry feud, for ghosts are not meant to be seen in the light of day, and her longtime subject and employer has taken strong exception to her corporeal appearance. The wrangle promises to be as pleasurable to the literary world as the spat over telling lies between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman that so entertained the reading public in the early 1980s.

In 1981, Jennie Erdal was taken on by Naim Attallah to manage the Russian list for Quartet books. She had three small children and lived in Scotland, and Attallah offered her £5,000 a year and allowed her to do much of her work from home. From time to time, she came to meetings in London, when she would be introduced to and observe the harem of well-connected and glamorous young women who famously filled his office. It was only when her marriage fell apart a few years later that Attallah decided that they would write a book together — or rather that he would interview a series of famous and rich women and that she, pretending to be him, would turn the interviews into a book. Together, they concocted the questions.  The celebrity women — running to 1,200 pages — proved good material, and were soon followed by a collection of well- known men. Erdal got a generous bonus.  And so a writing partnership of sorts was born. Jennie Erdal ceased to edit the Russian list and turned her attentions and, from her wry and humorous account, much of her life to acting as Attallah’s amanuensis. The nickname he went by and the one she uses to describe him in Ghosting, thereby avoiding too blatant a betrayal, was Tiger, after the pelt of a huge South China tiger that hung behind his desk. All went well until he had the idea of writing a novel. It would be, he told her, a love story, very sexy, very passionate and very revealing.

What must have been an extremely difficult task at the time — how, as she asks, can you write from another’s heart? — makes excellent and comic copy now. To avoid having to write about sex, she made her sexy passages more and more excruciatingly absurd and embarrassing, certain that this would cause Attallah to decide to drop them altogether. Knowing of his revulsion for all bodily fluids — he didn’t like people who coughed — she made her characters slurp and slither with ‘droplets of moisture’ and ‘sticky deliciousness’.  And the more outrageously she wrote, the more he urged her on. To her astonishment, the first novel, though proposed as a serious contender for the Literary Review’s Bad Sex Prize, also drew respectful reviews. Tiger was overjoyed, Erdal got a raise and her teenaged children were mortified. A second novel was proposed and written, though by now Jennie Erdal was finding her métier ever more difficult. If fiction is ultimately drawn from personal experience, she asked herself, just whose experience was it that she was drawing on? Among the many funny incidents she records — at the Frankfurt book fair, at Attallah’s house in France, in his palatial offices in London — she describes the day when he took exception to her using Larkin’s lines in his/her weekly newspaper column , ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, directing her to substitute the word ‘screw’ instead.

It is not easy to be a good ghost. There may be a liberating feeling of irresponsibility — after all a ghost receives neither public praise nor public blame — but ghosts need to please their employers, while producing a style that sounds both authentic and entertaining. Jennie Erdal, it is plain, was an outstanding ghost, in that she turned out, month after month, year after year, written work that earned good reviews and steady sales. Her rendering of Attallah’s voice was so convincing that no one appears to have known what was going on. And while she wrote, turning her employer into an established figure in the literary world, she pondered the nature of translation, the interpretation of the work of others, whether in a different language or for another person. Ghosting is not only her account of an extremely peculiar writing life, but a memoir of her own childhood, in a household in which questions of any kind were frowned on, and where she perceived, very early on, the intricacies of language and its chaotic, discordant power.

And then the ghost turned. Something of Attallah’s narcissism and single-mindedness began to madden her. When he rang up 47 times in a single day to check something she had written she found it no longer endearing but tiresome. She remained fond of him, appreciative of his generosity and touched by his vanity and frailties, but she needed to get away. The parting, as described in Ghosting, was amicable. But Attallah, perhaps not surprisingly, felt differently. At first supportive of her project, he soon felt betrayed. His response has been to write a book of his own, The Old Ladies of Nazareth (Quartet, £10, ISBN 0704371162), a short morality tale, 71 pages long, about two elderly sisters in Nazareth, modest, poor, sickly ladies of great kindliness, never speaking ill of others and imparting a sense of virtue and goodness to their only grandson, who is able in later life to draw on his memories of their simple and worthy routines to sustain him during periods of vicissitude. Only, as he reveals in a final paragraph, the old women were his grandmother and great-aunt, and he was the small boy.

However this literary squabble ends, Jennie Erdal has written a book that is hugely enjoyable to read, touches on profound questions about language and writing, and provides a vivid and often affectionate, but fairly merciless, portrait of an exasperating, despotic, self-deluding but in the end likable figure, with the tantrums of a small child and the plumage of a peacock. More important for her, perhaps, she has proved that she has a true writing voice of her own, which she can now take in any direction she likes. As for Attallah, he too has gone beyond the morality of his tale, for The Old Ladies of Nazareth, simply written and pleasant to read, is proof that his writing voice in the end needs no ghost. What is more, as he reports somewhat smugly, writing presents few problems: he tossed it off in three days, not having planned it. It simply happened.

Ghostwriting

Tiger burning bright

Nov 11th 2004

Ghosting: A Memoir.
By Jennie Erdal.
Canongate; 270 pages; £14.99

THE job has a faintly disreputable whiff about it, at least in the West, where artistic endeavour is seen as an individualistic pursuit: the culture is ill-disposed to shadows being paid to write great chunks of someone else's work. Jennie Erdal's “outing” after 20 years spent ghostwriting the letters, memos, articles and books of a flamboyant London publisher might seem at first disloyal, a further step into disrepute. Yet the ghost turns out to write with such substance that any churlish thoughts are swiftly cast aside.

The book is not, in fact, chiefly about ghostwriting, but rather an extraordinary character whose presence almost wholly overwhelms the subtext of self-deception and of the blurring of truth and reality. At first, Ms Erdal looks to maintain the man's anonymity, but by the end the clues are numerous, and it comes as no surprise to find his name lodged in the penultimate footnote.

Ms Erdal calls him “Tiger”. An obsessive personality burns throughout, from the ghosted love letter to his wife on the first page, where he, or rather she, quotes Larkin and the Delphic oracle, to the end, where Ms Erdal finds him sobbing in his hotel room at the Frankfurt book fair. She assumes he has finally broken under the financial pressure on his business empire. But no, it is the death of his beloved Eclair, a dog. The crying, though, soon stops: “The place where he had wept was at such depths of concealment that he could not remain there for long.”

Tiger's financial problems are the source of one of the book's most poignant sections. A shadowy Greek intermediary promises salvation, possibly from Saudi Arabia. Tiger becomes obsessed with this answer to his problems in a way that many a failed entrepreneur will recognise, and some successful ones too. He dedicates a mobile phone exclusively to the Greek and glowers at it fixedly, willing it to ring. “There was a piercing hopelessness to all this,” writes Ms Erdal, “like the lost dream of a Chekhov play.”

The Chekhovian gloom soon lifts. A rich vein of humour runs through the book. At one stage, Tiger becomes a novelist and decides on a book about two women who are able to experience sympathetic orgasms on opposite sides of the Atlantic. Ms Erdal, stretching her imagination to put flesh on the bones of this male fantasy, tries to put Tiger off the idea. At every opportunity, she introduces descriptions of bodily fluids, to which she knows he has an aversion. Thus she tries: “He slides over her moist skin through the sweet damp valley between her breasts”, before “he caresses her and spins a silver spider's web from the threads of her wetness”. Read this delightful book to see if her ploy works. Then watch out for the first novel to appear in Ms Erdal's own name.

From the Nov. 29, 2004 issue of TIME Europe magazine

A Writer's Writer

Jennie Erdal penned 12 books for a London legend. Now she's written one of her own

By DONALD MORRISON

Sunday, Nov. 21, 2004

Four years ago, a London-based, Palestine-born publisher named Naim Attallah sent an overheated love letter to his wife. "The fire in my soul still burns as brightly as the moment I first looked upon you," it said, going on to cite Socrates, God and Philip Larkin. "When I think of you, there is no single name for what I feel, more a constant singing in my heart." But Attallah didn't write the letter — nor the 12 books; the hundreds of newspaper columns and magazine articles; or the countless other missives, from business letters to thank-you notes, that bore his name. For nearly 15 years, his every public word was composed by Jennie Erdal, who masqueraded as an editor at Attallah's London publishing firm but worked as his full-time ghostwriter.

Now Erdal tells all in Ghosting: A Memoir (Canongate; 273 pages), a meditation on literary identity and a surprisingly generous love letter to the person who reaped praise and prestige from her labors while keeping her in salaried obscurity. (Discreetly, she refers to him only as "Tiger," after the lifelike tiger-skin rug that adorned his lavish Soho office.) In 1981, Tiger hired Erdal, then an editor and translator on the east coast of Scotland, to develop Russian authors for his Quartet Books. She found him to be demanding, impetuous and thoroughly charming, with a child's enthusiasm and an immigrant's fractured English. "His sentences were a riot of hangers and danglers," she notes. She soon found herself wrestling not with Russian prose but with Tiger's, and that suited her fine. A soon-to-be-divorced mother of three small children, she needed the money, and Tiger didn't mind her working at home, 700 km from London.

The relationship began to fray only after he started asking for sex. Not the real kind — their relationship remained entirely professional — but the fictional kind. He decided to try his — or rather, their — hand at fiction. "We are thinking about a beautiful novel," he told her. "It will have a beautiful cover." He had his own ideas about what would go inside. "Have we reached the orgamsi [sic] yet?" he would ask, as Erdal struggled to meet his quota of sex scenes. She had a loftier view of literature. "I had believed all my life that writing was important, that the novel mattered, that readers should be able to trust the author," she writes. "Now I had sullied that belief."

Gradually, the novels began to reflect her own preoccupations. "The more I searched for his voice, the more I caught my own breaking through," she writes. She used the death of a child — her own single-mom fear at the time — as a plot device. That, plus Tiger's munificence, lavish parties and working trips to his French estate, helped make the job bearable. Yet the strain grew worse. "Can one write from another person's heart?" she asks. "It's like trying to fake sincerity." Erdal's misgivings came to a head after her new husband objected to Tiger's intrusiveness (47 phone calls in a single day). So she gave up the ghost, parting amicably with Tiger five years ago.

Erdal set about writing a novel of her own. "But this other story kept pressing on my frontal lobes," she said last week. So she wrote a few chapters about her years with Tiger and showed them to him. "He was very encouraging," she notes. "He said he could publish this. He gave me suggestions for what to put in, what to leave out. Very gradually he started to take control again. So I told him, 'No, it's me now, and it's quite different from the way it was.'"

What does Tiger think of the book? "He won't take my calls," Erdal laments. Now in his 70s, Attallah announced that he "did not recognize myself when I read it" before he stopped talking about the book altogether. He has reportedly declined to take legal action and has ordered his employees not to comment. But last month, with remarkable timing, Attallah's Quartet Books published his first book since 2000, a 64-page memoir, The Old Ladies of Nazareth, based on his childhood. Who wrote it? "I'm sure he did," says Erdal. "It's very different from his normal style. Or, shall we say, his previously published style."

Michael Skapinker: The ghost of Naim Attallah

Tuesday, 23rd November 2004 07.05pm

If anyone asks me for my business book of 2004, I have my answer ready. Ghosting, Jennie Erdal's extraordinary memoir, is, perhaps, not as immediately applicable to everyday business as Fish! A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results or Trump: Think Like a Billionaire.

But as a portrait of the vanity and vulnerability of the powerful, of life in their inner circle, and of the ways in which chief executives successfully project themselves as other than they are, Ghosting takes some beating.

For 20 years, Ms Erdal worked for a man she refers to as Tiger, but who is immediately recognisable as Naim Attallah, the Palestinian-born London publisher and one-time chief executive of Asprey, the jewellery retailer. For most of her years with him, Ms Erdal wrote newspaper columns, letters to editors, books of interviews with the famous and two novels - all of which were published under Mr Attallah ‘s name.

No one seems to have tumbled to her role (at launch parties, people often asked whether she had read Mr Attallah ‘s books), although, by her account, his English clearly was not up to the prose that appeared.

Writing a column about Mr Attallah ‘s meeting with a famous woman, Ms Erdal had him saying that he had approached his subject with a "deep sense of humility". Mr Attallah did not like the word. "Isn't it the same like humiliation?" he asked. It is about being humble, she replied. She recalls what followed: "'Humble . . . humble,' he said, trying it out for size, 'no, it's not good for me.' And then, with the thoroughness of a lexicographer, he did an eyes-closed sift-and-search for the right word. When he found it, he said: 'I've got it! I've got it! Foreboding.'"

Ms Erdal's most trying times were at Mr Attallah’s house in France, where they would go for weeks at a time while she penned his novels. Her attempts to keep the books free of erotic content were unsuccessful ("We need the jig-jig!" he insisted), and she raised no objection to his house rule that all sunbathing be done naked. Their relationship appears to have gone no further than this. Mrs Attallah makes a brief appearance in the book, but only when Ms Erdal writes her a love letter on her employer's behalf. ("I want you to know that the fire in my soul still burns as brightly as the moment I first looked upon you.")

As entertaining as all this is, the relationship between a chief executive and his ghost writer is not as uncommon as Ms Erdal appears to think. The nude sunbathing may be unusual (at least, I assume it is), but I bet many public relations managers will chuckle over the rest.

Few chief executives do much writing of their own. They are open about their memoirs and works of management advice: the ghost writer's name usually appears alongside theirs. The speeches, letters to the editor and newspaper articles may carry their names, but they are usually written by people who are employed for the purpose.

In many cases, it is because the chief executives' talents lie elsewhere. "The majority can't write," one public relations consultant, who has written thousands of words on chief executives' behalf, told me. And why should they be able to? They are employed to run the business, not write about it.

There are exceptions, of course. But even those who can write do not have the time. Preparing a 20 minute speech is a full day's work, and often more. The result is that most of the chief executives who can out-write their ghosts tend not to. Having dozed through the speeches of one business leader, I was astonished to discover - after he had been sacked and wrote a few pieces for this newspaper - how good he was at it.

The easiest chief executives to work for, another experienced writer of other people's words told me, are those who are prepared to be involved in the process - discussing their ideas and devoting a few hours to practising the speech that has been scripted. They are also happy to consider the questions their audience might throw at them. The result of these practice question sessions is intriguing, the ghost writer said. You occasionally see company policy being made up on the spot.

The worst chief executives to write for are those who look at the speech for the first time in the car. "It's a nightmare. They don't like something and then they scribble all over it," the ghost writer told me.

Why, if they are written by experts, are so many chief executives' spoken and published words so boring? The corporate ghost writers blame the number of hands each company pronouncement has to go through. Once the lawyers, in particular, have finished with it, there is not much colour left. This is particularly true of the chief executives' quotes appended to the announcement of mergers and other large transactions. One PR consultant recalled having to re-draft a company announcement 37 times before everyone was happy.

The best ghost writers are those who know their principals well enough to write exactly what they would have written, if only they had had the time and the talent. Are any other qualities required? Discretion, I suppose. Chief executives are more likely to open up if they are sure their confidences will remain unbroken.

Throughout Ghosting, I waited for the breach, the act of cruelty, that would have justified Ms Erdal's spilling of Mr Attallah’s secrets. It never came. For all his excessive and often peculiar demands, Mr Attallah seems to have treated her with great kindness. When, abandoned by her husband and suffering from a raging skin infection, Ms Erdal told Mr Attallah that the bank was threatening to repossess her house, he immediately stepped in with an interest-free company loan.

However affectionate Ms Erdal's portrait, Mr Attallah is clearly a proud man and cannot have enjoyed the exposure of his eccentricities. This is a poignant, beautifully written, laugh-out-loud account - as I said, my business book of the year - marred only by the lurking guilt that comes from being witness to someone else's betrayal.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

Ghosting

By Judith Armstrong

December 4, 2004

Ghosting
By Jennie Erdal
Canongate, $39.95

'Tiger" was the name Jennie Erdal bestowed on flamboyant literary tycoon Naim Attallah (The Womens' Press et al) the day he hired her, his larger-than-life presence superimposed on a blazing tiger-skin mounted on the wall behind him.

At that moment, she felt fantasy and reality collide and from then on they could hardly be distinguished.

She was the unassuming translator of the memoirs of Boris Pasternak's artist father, Leonid. Many of his works were kept in the house where his daughters lived in Oxford, and Tiger, intent on buying the whole collection, involved Erdal in the negotiations. He then kept her on, waving away the problem that his office was in London and her home in the north of Scotland, with a husband and three small children. She could work by fax, email and one trip to London per month, "isn't it"?

So Erdal becomes Tiger's amanuensis, joining a staff of well-connected and stunningly dressed Davinas, Nigellas, Candidas and Georgias. A job that begins with thank-you notes and letters of condolence escalates into articles, speeches, the occasional poem and several books, the first based on Tiger's interviews with women ("because I love them. I glow in their presence . . ."). He is entranced by the success of the editorial "we" but never acknowledges either publicly or privately that Erdal is in fact sole author.

If this seems unjust, there are compensations. The bejewelled Tiger sweeps up all his "Beloveds" into the world of his own indulgent, unbridled luxury. Increasingly reliant on Erdal's writing hand, he has her accompany him to the Frankfurt book fair and to a house in the Dordogne.

Recounting this fantastical mode of operation, Erdal can be very funny and a touch malicious, her reflections leading to a kind of universalising irony: in comparison to the nasal affectations of the upper-class Beloveds, for example, the broad Scots of her dour family was at least a vernacular "owned and not just borrowed".

However, Erdal becomes aware, as Tiger never does, not only of "the lengths a man will go in affecting to be something other than he is", but also of "the lengths a woman will go to collude with the pretence".

Soon after a devastating divorce has placed new emphasis on her love for her children, she grabs at this private and painful memory to help her fulfil a new professional demand. The earlier publications were all well and good, chortles Tiger, but now, "we are thinking about a beautiful novel, a very beautiful novel".

A novel on command is the most preposterous of the many tasks assigned to this shaken but ever-obedient hand-maiden and the challenge provokes some interesting observations. Her first jolt is the lack of any connection between reading a lot of novels and being able to invent a plot. (Jennie: "Is the love requited or unrequited?" Tiger: "Definitely requited. Oh yes, very requited.")

Slowly she starts finding out for herself some writerly truths: "You don't know what will happen until you start writing. Only then do you discover things that previously you knew nothing about . . . In the case of the novel the subject matter chooses you." This last is subtly different from - and for me rings truer - than Helen Garner's assertion (in The Consolation of Joe Cinque) that stories lie in wait for their authors. Erdal's description of the "humming in the head" that may for years precede the putting of pen to paper sums up exactly the peripheral consciousness of a novel-in-waiting.

These ruminations are alternated with mind-boggling accounts of Tiger's latest conceit. The second novel, she is told, must include two women in geographically different locations having simultaneous "orgamsis" (sic). She deliberately writes scenes so wet in every sense that she hopes Tiger will cut them. Instead, he is overjoyed, even raising her salary; when published, the novel is rated "a strong contender" for the literary Bad Sex Prize.

This memoir, Erdal's first sui generis effort, is very well-written and vastly entertaining, but memoirs are by definition unrepeatable and the novels she concocted for Tiger were execrable. It will be fascinating to see whether the ghost has a substantial future outside the cupboard.

Judith Armstrong's most recent book, The French Tutor, is published by Text.

December 17, 2004

Interview

I wrote Naim Attallah's every word
Valerie Grove
Jennie Erdal’s new book reveals an extraordinary 20-year writing ‘collaboration’

WHEN Naim Attallah produced his book Women, I was one of the 300 who agreed — out of vanity? Curiosity? — to be interviewed over lunch in his private dining room at Quartet headquarters.

Attallah looked like the BFG — amiable, large-eared: he read out questions in a thick Palestinian accent from a clipboard on his lap. Transfixed by his intense, dark-eyed gaze, we all told him about our sex lives, marriages, childhoods, parents, ambitions and desires.

The resulting book, 1,200 pages produced at speed, was impressive. “There’s a woman up in Scotland,” I was told, “who does the actual writing.” Of course: he was a busy man, his English was imperfect, he would need an assistant to transcribe the interviews and shape the book. I thought no more about it.

But only now, with the publication of Jennie Erdal’s enthralling book Ghosting, does the extent of their collaboration emerge. Erdal wrote everything that appeared under Attallah’s name: the in-depth interviews, two novels, a newspaper column, letters, book reviews (she read the books; he didn’t).

A man of wealth and infinite largesse, Attallah had launched himself on the London publishing world in the Eighties, taking over Quartet Books, surrounding himself with “Naim’s harem” of well-born girls, and saving the Literary Review from collapse. Before he had any money, he told me, he had gazed at a diamond-studded Rolex watch in the window of Asprey, and promised his wife he would one day buy it. Now, he owned Asprey and — he drew back his cuff — here was the watch! In her book, Erdal does not name him but calls him “Tiger”. At first, he had loved the idea of being thus immortalised. “I am a tiger! I am a tiger!” he said delightedly. She sent him the first chapters and told him firmly: “I’m not going to make you out to be a saint. Saints are boring, by the way.”

“Yes, bloody boring! Saints are bloody boring!” But the book’s title is Ghosting: a word never mentioned in their 20 years together. And Attallah regards her book as a betrayal, though there was never any confidentiality clause or any sort of contract. Initially, he had even offered to publish it. But since it became clear that she was writing an honest appraisal of their collaboration and its weird psychology, he has not spoken to her. He is reportedly distressed (naturally) by her “exaggerations”.

Though he may not perceive it, she has in fact produced an affectionate portrait. She recreates vividly his exclamatory, physical way of talking,waving his arms, slapping his thighs, smiting his brow. “He was unconsciously hilarious, like a Dickensian character,” she says. “Magnificent in his self-importance, comical to write about.”

Erdal is a gifted writer. How, one asks, did she get swept up into deploying her literary craft on behalf of someone else? She had been the kind of child who wanted passionately not to displease her parents; and the same applied to her boss. Also, she desperately needed the money after her first husband suddenly walked out (“your self-confidence takes such a battering”), leaving her with three young children. She had to work from home in St Andrews. And Attallah was her financial salvation, for which she is forever thankful.

“At a very deep level he seemed to regard us as a single entity: he spoke about ‘we’ and ‘us’. But just before publication he would acquire sole authorship by some mysterious osmotic process. It was intriguing to observe. He really believed he was doing it himself. ‘They say we can write!’ he crowed as reviews arrived.”

Self-deception is a fascinating subject. His staff always knew the truth — and he did give her half his fees: the Express paid £500 per column, of which Erdal got £250. For the Women book, he paid her a bonus of £8,000. She fully acknowledges his generosity: her own generosity, letting him bask in the satisfaction of sole authorship, was arguably greater.

For the interviews she would intensively research each subject — Claus von Bulow, Diana Mosley, Lord Shawcross, Laurens van der Post — and prepare 50 questions, with colour-coded stage directions. She admits she could never have had the chutzpah to ask the tricky questions. And the end products were much lauded for “subtlety of interrogation” (William Trevor). Attallah was “a magician interviewer” (Robert Kee).

But when she drafted a question for an interviewee that included the phrase “skeletons in your cupboard” he was aghast. He’d never heard the expression. (“Naim Attallah is a dab hand with skeleton keys,” said Lord Deedes.) To show just how comprehensive their collaborative relationship was, she says she wrote a sensitive letter to his only son on his behalf, “and he was visibly moved”. He saw nothing morally questionable in getting her to write a 2,000-word review front for the Sunday Telegraph on abortion, from his Catholic viewpoint. That demanded a real leap of her imagination. “They had misspelt his name: he was so furious he cast the paper aside in disgust,” she says.

A travel piece about his visit to China was tougher. She had never been to China. Where had he stayed? At the Hilton Hotel. She began her research by reading a book of Chinese proverbs. “I opened it and saw, ‘Do not lace boots in melon field’.”

Erdal’s ability to laugh at the absurd contortions demanded of her — imagine having to conjure a novel out of a single notion such as Attallah’s idea of two women, cousins, having what he termed “orgamsi” at the same moment, though separated by continents — leavens her whole fantastic narrative. As she says: “You need to be alone and still, in order to write. And he was never, ever still and scarcely ever alone.”

Erdal would be whisked to Attallah’s house in Dordogne to write. There each activity was given an allotted span, timed to the nearest five minutes. He insisted that they sunbathe naked by his pool. She would hear him on the telephone saying, with staggering self-delusion: “I’m in France, writing my novel.” He knew she could hear him. “The pretence, the masquerade, applied to the whole world, and the world included me.”

She was like a caged bird: even going for a walk alone was impossible. Once only she was allowed through the locked gates. She could walk to the village, he would meet her in the chauffeur-driven car after two hours, that was the deal. “I set off with a delicious, intoxicating sense of freedom. But 20 minutes later a car pulled up and there he was. When I protested, he was all indignation: ‘You’re not grateful? It is raining!’ And he goes into a huff.”

She is an attractive woman and he addressed her as “Beloved”, but there was no intimacy; and her book never ventures into Tiger’s private life. He and Erdal were “a great team”, as Attallah said when the arrangement ended. And a highly improbable one, she adds:

“He growing up in the sunshine and orange groves. Me from a small, inward-looking Fife town, highly suspicious of anyone from ‘abroad’. We were opposites. For instance, he couldn’t understand that life held small, simple pleasures that didn’t cost anything — such as walking on Iona and Mull. He would say: ‘But do they have the opera on Mull?’”

When David Erdal, destined to become her second husband, arrived in Jennie’s life, he was incredulous that she was at Attallah’s beck and call, with a hotline telephone that rang out like a fire alarm and had her dropping everything and running to answer it. In their new life together, such disruptive intrusions could not be allowed to go on.

I met David and Jennie at their pied-à-terre next to the London Eye. I am glad her story has a happy ending. And although some may still consider her revelations a kind of betrayal, in relating it she proves herself a considerable writer. The tale amounts to a 20-year literary hoax, and explains how deception can flourish if one person has the gift and the other the nerve.

Attallah has now published a slim novella/memoir on his own, The Old Ladies of Nazareth, proving that he can: and she has written to tell him that she is genuinely pleased for him. Perhaps she, too, will now write something for herself.

Ghosting is published by Canongate at £14.99.

December 22, 2004

Attallah's words

From Mr Naim Attallah

Sir, I have just read Valerie Grove’s interview with Jennie Erdal (T2, December 17) about her book Ghosting, headed “I wrote Naim Attallah’s every word”. She takes everything Mrs Erdal says at face value, despite her exaggerations of her role during the years she worked for me as researcher and editor, then goes on to refer to that whole period as a “20-year literary hoax”.

It is incomprehensible to me that your interviewer, if she was really after the truth of the situation, made no effort to talk to any of those who also worked for Quartet Books over those two decades and who knew Mrs Erdal as a colleague.

Valerie Grove also seems to share Mrs Erdal’s view about my “imperfect” English, which is preposterous.

Betrayal is obviously the norm in the literary world and I am beginning to question whether my contribution to that sector of the arts over the years has been worth the sacrifice. Et tu Brute is my sad personal retort to your interviewer.

Yours faithfully,
N. ATTALLAH,
25 Shepherd Market, W1J 7PP.
nattallah@aol.com
December 18.

January 17, 2005

Susan H. Greenberg

Ghosting By Jennie Erdal

In this irresistible memoir, the author recounts the nearly 15 years she spent ghost-writing for the wealthy British publisher she calls "Tiger" (otherwise known as Naim Atallah). It was an unlikely pairing: a sober Scottish Presbyterian channeling the thoughts of a brash, needy womanizer. But it worked. Erdal turned Tiger into a literary star, penning hundreds of letters, columns, speeches and articles, as well as a dozen books—including two novels. Probing, intelligent and funny, Erdal's memoir should prove she'll never need to ghost-write again.

Giving up the ghost

The millionaire author and publisher Naim Attallah was rattled by accusations that he didn't write his own books. John Walsh hears his side of the story

Published : 31 January 2005

Naim Attallah wears eccentricity like bankers wear braces - not because he has to, but in order to stand out from the crowd. From his mismatched socks (one blue, one red) to the dressing-gown overcoat he wears en route to lunch, from the glass-shattering squeak to which his voice rises in indignation, to the constant finger-prods on your arm that accompany his conversation, he's a man who'd stand out at the annual meeting of the Eccentrics Club. Two minutes in his company, though, and (provided you're not obviously hostile) you're enlisted as a friend for life, pummelled with gossip and droll stories from his empire of eclectic projects.

He seemed to be everywhere in the 1980s and 1990s, his fingers in a hundred pies, his gangly frame a reliable presence at launch parties and theatre openings. As the publisher of Quartet Books, which he bought in 1976, he was a leading Palestinian polemicist and a godfather-figure to a generation of clever young Englishwomen. He was chief executive of Aspreys, the Queen's jewellers, and chairman of the Namara Group, which owned several arty and glamorous things (such as the Literary Review and The Women's Press), none of which seemed to make any money. He was a compulsive "angel" - a risk-taking backer - of plays, movies and fashion collections, apparently heedless as to whether he recouped his investment. He seemed too good to be true. The press yelped with frustration as they tried to establish three things. Where did he come from? How the hell did he make all his money? And what devilish secret agenda was he pursuing in the heart of the English establishment?

Attallah was back in the news last year, a little uncomfortably, when his former employee, Jennie Erdal, brought out Ghosting, a "fictional memoir" of her 17 years working for a publisher called "Tiger" who produced several books under his name, despite the fact that she had, she said, written them. Erdal had been Attallah's assistant for years, and reviewers jumped to the conclusion that Ghosting was a factual account. Attallah's response was to get writing in earnest. By Christmas he had published The Old Ladies of Nazareth, a slim fable of boyhood that turns out to be a first book of autobiography. And by the end of February he will finish The Boy in England, laying bare his years in blue-collar penury; it's due for publication at the end of April, three days before his 74th birthday. But will it come clean about his hazy past? And is he a real writer or a charlatan?

Mounting the steep staircase at his office in Shepherd Market, in central London, you find Attallah seated in a kind of shrine to his glory days. The walls are lined with photographs of parties, first nights, celebrity bashes, photos of Naim with girls on his arm, snapshots of society beauties and fashion divas. His parties were the stuff of instant legend. The launch of his 1,200-page Women, a record of his conversations with 318 high-profile Englishwomen, took place at the Victoria & Albert Museum, where a tall Amazon, naked except for white body-paint, wobbled on a plinth like a statue.

But away from the parties, a whiff of controversy hung over Attallah's decision to bring out several books explicitly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause. "I had to do it," he says. "I thought, enough is enough, the poor Palestinians are being bashed right, left and centre, I must try to redress the balance." Tongues wagged that he was a PLO mole in the soft meadow of English publishing. And then there was the business of the harem...

It wasn't a real seraglio, with sex, milk baths and ostrich feathers, but it had some exotic girls all right. "Naim's Harem" was the title given by newspaper gossips to the astonishing slew of aristocratic twentysomethings who went to work for Quartet in the 1980s: Nigella Lawson was one of his most prominent employees, but he also drew Lulu Guinness, Emma Soames, Cosima Fry, Sabrina Guinness - their name is legion. Had Naim been attempting some sneaky infiltration of the British aristocracy, via its foxy offspring? "Don't be ridiculous," says Attallah. "I never mixed with aristocrats at all. But the first secretary I had was the Hon Davina Woodhouse, one of Princess Margaret's ladies-in-waiting. And every time we needed to employ a girl, she'd say, 'I have a friend we could ask...' and the friend would know another friend - and suddenly we were the It Publisher."

He speaks of the girls today with fond, mentorly pride: "Look at these names. They're all in the limelight. They all achieved greatness." Probably the only employee whose celebrity he now regrets is Jennie Erdal. "I never thought in a million years she would do what she did," he says, voice rising alarmingly. "She said, 'I want to immortalise you.' I said I didn't want to be immortalised. She said it was going to be 'a fictional memoir'. I said, 'You can do what you like provided you're careful about what you write.' She sent me chapters one and two and said, 'Don't worry, it'll be an affectionate portrait of you' - then I saw an extract in a magazine. I was horrified. She wrote to me after the book was published, saying, 'You are larger than life, what are you getting so upset about?'."

He shakes his head. He is more distressed by his former assistant's disloyalty than by the blow to his reputation. "You can say anything you like about me but I value loyalty above everything else. For her to betray my trust is something I cannot fathom." About the accusations of ghosting, he says, "It was a genuine collaboration. If I am an assistant to Tony Blair, and he says, 'Here, answer Lord so-and-so and say there is no vacancy for such-and-such a job', am I ghosting for Blair?" He is particularly stung by the implication that his famous interviews were not his own work. "Yes, she researched them, for which she got half the credit and half the money. But you know how interviews work, how you depart from the set questions if things are going off at interesting tangents?" Indeed, many of his 400 interviews contain startling moments - as when he asked the seraphically homosexual Harold Acton if he had ever held a naked woman in his arms (yes, actually, Acton confessed - a young Chinese girl, with a completely hairless body). Attallah blithely wound up some of his subjects. He accused the Irish MP Conor Cruise O'Brien of being "a stooge of the British government". He accused Laurens van der Post of embroidering his gruelling adventures in the desert, long before he was unmasked by JDF Jones's biography.

Did he embark on his autobiography in response to those who said he couldn't write? "Subconsciously perhaps, but not intentionally. The Old Ladies of Nazareth got going in August, a very hot day. I was sitting in the garden at my flat in Mayfair, when I had a vision of my grandmother and her sister. All my life I've wanted to celebrate them, immortalise them. I started writing and the more I wrote, the more it flowed. At the back of my mind there was Jennie Erdal saying I cannot express myself, that she did everything for me. And I said to myself, 'Well - let me have a go'."

The Old Ladies is a slender book, a 70-page novella about a boy growing up in Palestine, under threat from a bullying father, a chronic undiagnosed illness and the constant fear of war and homelessness. He is good at evoking the timelessness of the life he grew into - telling time by the sun, drawing water from a well - and the memory of his forebears makes him weep. "I heard my grandmother in the garden, once, with her arms stretched out, saying, 'God, I have only one request, and that is for my little Naim not to be poor as we are, not to suffer as we do, to be prosperous and have a family and not want for anything'. When I bought our house in France, I looked at the land I owned, and I said to myself, 'I wish my grandmother could see this'." The Old Ladies answers the thorny question of whether Attallah can actually write - yes of course he can, once he lights on the fact that his real subject isn't the purity of his female ancestors, but the frustration and ambition seething in his own heart.

Growing up in Haifa surrounded by doting women, becalmed by illness and bullied by his father, Attallah was delighted to be moved to Nazareth to live with his grandmother. It was there he met his hero, a cousin of his father, and an alarming figure. "He was tall, dressed all in white and there were rumours that he was a hitman. When he walked through the town, everybody cleared a path. When I sat next to him, I was a celebrity, I was a somebody." He invited Naim to lunch, showed him his arsenal of guns and gave the delighted youth a pistol of his own. He wasn't, by any chance, being inducted into some Palestinian paramilitary organisation? "Naow," says Attallah, "of course not. I slept with the gun under my pillow, and shot only at five-gallon tin drums."

He has nursed for years an understandable grievance about the politicking that resulted in the persecution of Palestinian families by British soldiers after the partition of Palestine in 1947. "When I read about the abuse of prisoners by British soldiers, and everyone saying it's 'only the minority' who are doing these shocking things - it's just not true. I remember, as a little boy, British soldiers coming at four or five in the morning, breaking down the door of our house, bundling us all into lorries and taking us to an empty football arena for communal punishment. It was because someone had taken a pot-shot at a soldier. They let us roast in the sun all day without water or food, and they'd hit us with the butt of their guns. When I came to England, I dreaded the thought of the place, I viewed the English as I'd seen them, as a colonising power. I was much relieved when I came here and found that the English were such cultured people, that they don't represent the riff-raff they send abroad."

In London (where an uncle lived), he studied engineering at Battersea Polytechnic. Then his visa expired and he had to contemplate going home. "But how could I go back?" demands Attallah today. "The State of Israel had been formed. If I went to university at home, I'd have had to study Hebrew." Instead, the stateless 18-year-old worked at a succession of dirty jobs. He painted electrical transformers on Battersea Bridge. He tightened nuts and bolts all day long. He worked as a bouncer. And he started the long, slow process of becoming a banker, a foreign-exchange dealer and ultimately - where the big money was - a "consultant" to Aspreys and other high-finance concerns, introducing them to stupendously rich new clients all over the Middle East.

The details of these heady days will come out in the three volumes of the autobiography. It's a project of self-realisation for a man who (you get the impression) has been too busy living his life to stop and examine it until now. And while happily in the throes of composition, he is experiencing few regrets. "When I go to bed," he says proudly, "I go straight to sleep and I don't worry about a thing from the past. In the long view, anything that went wrong was an experience worth paying for." His granny would be proud.

'The Old Ladies of Nazareth' is published by Quartet, price £10