*
The next part – concerning the sixteen-year journey from the final killing us softly event (in March 2003) to the publication of this first book (in 2019) – can only really be related as a narrative, with all its twists and turns, and lessons learned along the way, so I will try to summarise the main chapters in the story here:
The evolution of this work from a live event to a sequence of books began with John Berger’s passionate response to the killing us softly event in March 2003, after which he urged me to consider how the spoken words of the event might become words on a page. And the weeks which followed, including time at John’s house in Paris, were critical in giving me direction towards making this transition. I can still remember sitting under an apple tree in blossom, in John’s garden in Antony, and him saying to me: ‘Well, you’ve got so much material there already! I mean, what, it might take another six months? A year?’ Over the course of the next fourteen years, we’d occasionally recall this moment and laugh uproariously, before John would say: ‘But it’s not about the length of the journey is it? No! It’s about everything you’ve experienced along the way – just like the Cavafy poem, ‘Ithaka’!
Along the long, and sometimes rocky, path I was lucky enough to experience several happenings, which in retrospect seem like miracles. In January 2005 I received a phone call, out of the blue, from Patrick Lannan, the founder of the Lannan Foundation in America. Patrick told me he’d just heard about my work on the ‘desk killer’, which seemed to him of critical importance, so what did I need to complete the research and the writing? Six weeks later, aided by the redoubtable Jaune Evans, then executive director at the Foundation, I received a major grant, giving me funding for more than a year – enabling me to undertake two further research trips, employ a part-time researcher and take a six-month sabbatical from Platform – which gave me the space I needed to start the process of writing. A lesson here – sometimes the answer comes from a direction you’re not even looking in.
There followed a frenetically busy period at Platform, (the period when we were working intensively on the Remember Saro-Wiwa campaign), and so inevitably I had to put the book on the backburner for a couple of years. The second miracle occurred in summer 2010. And again, it came at a moment when the project needed it most. I received an email quite unexpectedly from Philip Gwyn Jones, then executive publisher at Granta and Portobello Books, saying that he’d been looking at maps, planning a family holiday through northern Switzerland, and this had triggered a memory. He’d heard some time before about the research I’d done into the Swiss company that manufactured the gaswagen used in the Holocaust, and thought I was developing a book proposal. Did I have a publisher? Would I like to have lunch and update him on the work? This led to the book, (then titled The Desk Killer), being commissioned in 2011, and an extremely creative working relationship followed. For the first time in my life, I was able to write full-time with no distractions, and the combination of Philip’s strong commitment and gentle encouragement together with my exhilaration at having discovered a rhythm of writing in Wales created a remarkable flow of work between 2011 and 2013, and laid the foundations for the four books of I You We Them.
This period ended abruptly in May 2013 in a very difficult period at Granta, when most of the senior editorial staff, including Philip, left the company. At this point, because I’d lost my commissioning editor, I decided that I now really needed to guide I You We Them to a new home. I embarked on a search for an agent who would be able to help me through this challenging territory and also be a powerful advocate for the work. Over these months I had fruitful meetings with David Grossman, Victoria Hobbs and Peter Straus among others. (Peter, thank you for suggesting that I You We Them should be published as four books – I appreciated your ambition!) Thanks also to Hisham Matar for suggestions and facilitating some of these meetings. And to Robert Macfarlane for further, extremely helpful, advice at this time.
My third great stroke of luck came in September 2013 when the agent Jessica Woollard replied to an exploratory email with enormous excitement. A couple of days later, when she’d read all four books, she rang me from India and we spoke for more than an hour. I knew instinctively that I had found the agent I’d been searching for, somebody who could be a passionate advocate for the work. What I didn’t know then was that I’d also found a brilliantly perceptive reader and editor, and a person of immense integrity and kindness, who would become a dear friend.
In early 2014 we worked intensively on the manuscript, and by the spring Jessica started to arrange meetings with prospective publishers. On a sunny day in March, at a café outside the British Museum, Tom Avery, senior editor at Heinemann, arrived on his bike, smiling, but looking at me rather nervously, as if I might bolt off at any moment. He was effusive about the manuscript, and we talked animatedly for the next hours, ending up in a nearby pub. By the time he left I had a strong intuition that I’d found my new publisher. Within weeks the deal was agreed, and we began to work energetically on how these four books could best be edited and published.
Tom’s remarkable energy and total belief in the project over the last five years has been exceptional. He was undaunted by the considerable length of the original manuscript, and has always had an extraordinary ability to see the wider ‘architecture’ of the whole work in his head, and make striking suggestions about re-positioning chapters, or proposing where new pieces of writing would help the reader. Other editors may have baulked at the prospect of my adding to the original manuscript – by, for example, writing additional sections on Hannah Arendt and Adolf Eichmann for Book Four. But Tom recognised the essential place of such pieces in the work, and was extremely encouraging about my taking time to write them. There have been several moments, over the last years of working together, when I felt that he knew my manuscript better than I knew it myself – a slightly unnerving experience for any writer, but rather wonderful at the same time. I’m not sure that either of us understood quite what a massive undertaking it would be for me to finally relinquish more than two decades of research and thought, and move to the finality of a finished text. Perhaps I’d always been influenced subconsciously by one of Thomas Mann’s more cheery reflections?: ‘When the house is finished, death comes’. And so, maybe understandably, I’d wanted to put this point off for as long as possible …
In February 2015, in the middle of the iciest east coast winter for years, I travelled to New York to meet Ileene Smith, executive editor at Farrar Straus and Giroux, to discuss their interest in publishing the American edition of I You We Them. Again, the first meeting was a conversation – in Ileene’s apartment, high above the streets of Manhattan. And again, just as with Jessica, and just as with Tom, I knew almost immediately that we would be able to work well together. She told me that all editors rely on a ‘sixth sense’, and she’d known as soon as she’d started reading the manuscript that FSG must publish this book, which combined the urgency of the subject matter with a voice that was able to interweave historical and political themes with such personal and intimate material.
With these two foundations now in place, (financial security from the two publishing contracts and feeling supported by this dynamic triangle of agent and editors), there then followed a period of time that writers can only dream of – three uninterrupted years of thought and creativity. By 2015 I was living mainly in Wales, on Pen Llŷn, having found a house overlooking the mountains and the sea, close to where RS Thomas wrote his last poems. I could now focus totally on editing the books, and finally bringing two decades of work to fruition. Over the next three years, Tom and I, (helped greatly by Ileene’s incisive suggestions), worked assiduously on re-shaping the whole work, and editing Books One and Two into the volume that you have in your hands. By the end of 2018 the writing was finished.fn1