Introduction

There can be few sideline figures in the margins of early to mid-twentiethcentury pioneering British and European literary history that are more influential, more in-the-know and more effaced than Martin Secker. Mostly remembered today as one of the names in the powerful publishing partnership of Secker and Warburg, he actually began life with a different name and doubtless a different career path traced out for him. He was born into a family of well-established German descent, his father, Edward Henry Klingender, having taken over part of the family trading and shipping company. Secker’s mother distanced herself from the Klingenders, and it was an unexpected inheritance from her side of the family that would seem to have prompted the young Percy Martin to take up employment as a reader in a London publishing company in preference to trade. He changed his name by deed poll in 1910, both to signal his new departure and to avoid the overtly anti-German tensions of the time. He quite unexpectedly came to cross paths with JMM and KM at the same time, having moved into a flat in John Street, Adelphi, where he set up as an independent publisher next door to another emerging publishing figure, Stephen Swift – the business name of Charles Granville – who absconded with the company funds soon after, leaving Rhythm magazine and a host of other emerging writers bankrupt.

Secker’s literary sensibility and keen alertness to new names and talents brought him to enjoy a series of often unexpected and impressive commercial successes. These began with his first publication, Compton Mackenzie’s first novel, The Passionate Elopement (1911), soon followed by warmly received new works by Hugh Walpole, Gilbert Cannan, Frank Swinnerton, Maurice Baring, Ford Madox Ford and, most importantly DHL, who adopted Secker as his British publisher from then on. The two men remained friends, although DHL’s occasionally derogatory, sneering comments about Secker in his own correspondence suggest a lack of any true warmth and sincerity.

After making his mark with British and American works (notably the poetry of Emily Dickinson), Secker went on to become Britain’s foremost publisher of European works in translation, with an impressive line-up of Central European Modernists in translation, including Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse and Franz Kafka.