I was afflicted at the time with a bizarre form of body-wide psoriasis (dozens of circular raw scaly patches the size of fifty pence pieces all over my arms and torso, like badges — which turned out to be eczema, in the end), which was definitely stress related. The Balland affair sent it raging out of control for a few weeks.
My publishing house in France, Editions André Balland, was a small, independent one, but of some renown (they numbered a Goncourt Prize winner among their authors). They had published my first novel, A Good Man in Africa (Un Anglais sous les Tropiques), with some critical success, but no one had foreseen the huge sales of the second. In the warm afterglow of bestsellerdom, I had sold them my third novel, Stars and Bars (La Croix et la Banniere), which had been published before the storm broke. Payments were outstanding on that book also. The eponymous head of the firm, André Balland lui-même, was a tall, lean, much-married, droll littérateur, hugely experienced and widely liked. I liked him too. He had one of those badger-grey, cropped, US marine-sergeant haircuts that many elderly Frenchmen favoured long before they became the mark of the fashionable young. A month or two before the nonpayment crisis, he had invited me to a grand literary lunch at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris where we had eaten and drunk well and, afterwards, we had strolled back down the Boulevard St Germain towards the firm’s offices, chatting about this and that writer who had been present, talking amiably about the novel I was writing and so on. The literary life à la française—real, not idealized. I didn’t know that would be the last time I would ever see him.
Back in London my agent could make no headway — phone calls went unanswered, letters were unreplied to. I was told that André Balland would be writing to me himself. My journal, 9 June 1986: “Pathetic letter from Balland saying he hadn’t read my contract properly and that he has a cash-flow problem. I’ve written to him demanding 250,000 Frs up front and the rest in monthly instalments. A good letter, it was, but a sad compromise.”
It was a good letter — it took me about two days to write, hunched over my French dictionary and grammar book. I have copies of our subsequent correspondence. Boyd: “Je me trouve au bord des embarras financiers vis à vis le fisc. Souvenez-vous, c’est mon argent — pas le vôtre — que vous gardez à ce moment.” And so on. Balland: “Cher William, Merci pour votre gentille lettre. Je suis extrêmement soulagé de voir que nos relations puissent reprendre leur cours normal.”
The lawyers met in Paris. Various documents that were copied to me attest to ways in which I was to be reimbursed. In August I received a cheque for 150,000 Frs—50,000 Frs less than had been agreed. In October I received another 50,000, the money seemed finally to be on its way. Boyd to Balland: “Cher André, Merci bien pour votre lettre. Vous savez que, moi aussi, j’ai eu les ennuis fiscaux cette année et, par conséquence, c’est crucial que les versements arrivent ponctuellement. Comme ça peux régler ma vie, vis à vis mon banquier et le fisc. Le nouveau roman marche bien et j’espère vivement que nous pouvons oublier nos difficultés de l’année dernière et continuer notre association dans le futur. Bien à vous, William.” Balland to Boyd: “Cher William … si des choses heureuses in-terviennent dans ma vie professionnelle, vous pouvez être assuré que j’augmenterai le montant de ces mensualités afin d’être en défaut le moins longtemps possible. A très bientôt, j’espère, André Balland.”
The monthly payments continued for a while and then stopped. I was still well short of what I was owed. My agent and I decided to sue and so we engaged a firm of English lawyers, Heald Nickinson, that had an office in Paris. There was some kind of judicial hearing (my agent and I shared the costs of the lawyers’ fees) and a form of repayment was set out. I was to receive a down payment of 200,000 Frs (say £20,000) and then monthly payments of £5,000 until the amount due was settled. Matters were further complicated when we discovered on analysing Balland’s accounts that other payments were also delayed, not just on An Ice-Cream War, but on my other two novels that Balland had published — it now appeared that I had actually been owed some £65,000.
It was by now mid 1987. By October 1987 another deal was sorted out between our lawyers and Balland’s to regularize repayments. Beyond all this, life was going on: my fourth novel, The New Confessions, was published in Britain and was sold to a different, and very eminent French publishing house, Le Seuil (who, significantly enough, had also published the paperbacks of the first three).
And then it all goes quiet for three years, a kind of phony peace. I was now happy with my new French publisher; I’d had a fair chunk of the money owing to me, paid in dribs and drabs (I was still short by £15,000), but Balland seemed to have gone off the radar, at least as far as my journal was concerned: there is no reference between October 1987 (when the repayments scheme was formalized by the lawyers) and April 1991. More than three years of silence. The monthly payments were coming through and when they stopped, it seemed I made no fuss. I put this down to a kind of malignant unworldliness that tends to afflict novelists (there are exceptions, of course). To describe it at its most simple I think the reasoning goes like this: you, the novelist, can’t believe you are actually earning your living writing novels — and to complain about being defrauded, messed about, unpaid, or ripped off under these circumstances seems somehow churlish. True, in my case, everything was going fairly well, especially in France, and I suppose I had written off the Balland affair as just one of those bad experiences that afflict writers from time to time. But looking back over my papers and journals, as I researched the background to this story, I found myself baffled and angry with myself for being so compliant and complacent. So they still owe me £15,000?—well, let’s not rock the boat.
In early 1991 Editions André Balland formally declared themselves to be in financial difficulties. In French the expression is to déposer votre bi-lan. No exact equivalent exists in Britain (it’s not like going bankrupt) but in the USA the expression is “to file for Chapter 11.” What it means, in real terms, is that your bank (supervised by a court official) takes over the running of your business and you, the enterprise, admit you cannot meet your financial responsibilities. Creditors are thus warned. And I was a creditor.
In 1991 I started to receive registered letters from Paris about my status as said creditor. I had to notify the authorities exactly how much I was owed by the moribund Editions André Balland. I really didn’t know what to do. And here my translator steps in. Christiane Besse (a truly remarkable woman) had (and has) translated all my novels into French and had become a close friend. As a result of the new association with Le Seuil it became clear that, over the last few intervening years (since 1989), royalties from my paperback sales (of my three Balland titles) had been properly paid to Editions André Balland but I had not received a penny. When Balland had déposé son bilan it had been bought by another company called Copagest. “Copagest” is an acronym for “Com-pagnie Parisienne de Gestion Automobile de la Gare de l’Est”—in short, a taxi-firm. Balland-Copagest, this unlikely coupling, had been receiving the monies due to me (from Le Seuil, from another paperback company and from book clubs) but had neglected to pass my share along. As well as the £15,000 Balland had not paid me, and for which Balland-Copagest was liable, it seemed I was also owed other sums of money by way of unpaid royalties by the new company.