Robin Waterfield

Robert Everard Waterfield, bookseller, publisher, missionary and writer: born Beccles, Suffolk 27 August 1914; married 1940 Pamela Harris (marriage dissolved 1944), 1945 Sophie Harper; died Oxford 9 February 2002.

Strange to think that Graham Greene might have been a secondhand bookseller. "Secondhand booksellers are among the most friendly and the most eccentric of all the characters I have known," he wrote in an introduction to a memoir by his friend the Scottish Polish Jewish bouquiniste David Low. "If I had not been a writer, theirs would have been the profession I would most happily have chosen."

The memoir was entitled "With All Faults", and appeared in 1973 under the unlikely imprint of "The Amate Press, Tehran". The publisher was Low's former bookselling partner Robin Waterfield, who had left London in the 1950s to serve as a missionary in Iran. Waterfield was generally friendly, though he could be dyspeptic, and eccentric in that he embodied an otherworldliness that is the preserve, or the aspiration, of the independent trader. While his career may have appeared to others to dart between one calling and the next, as far as he was concerned it was all of a piece. The more important CV was an internal one, mapping a personal spiritual search that was about life and death and the nature of religion and mysticism rather than traditional career paths.

As a part-time publisher, Waterfield was midwife to more than 50 books; as a bookseller, he founded an antiquarian bookshop, Waterfield's in Oxford, which is still, after more than a quarter of a century, in business; as a writer, he recorded the history of Christianity in Iran and produced studies of the (not all Christian) mystics, as well as translating their works. He and his wife ran children's homes in the Fifties; and in his retirement (insomuch as he retired) he took on a paternal or avuncular role to depressives and others as a lay counsellor or analyst.

Wearing all these hats, he was still anxious not to have others bestowed on him. He subscribed a privately printed Verses (1999) as

Robin Everard (Waterfield) who is not the author of A Life of Khalil Gibran and does not translate classic texts for the OUP but is the author of Christians in Persia and René Guénon and the Future of the West and a few translations from the French.

He was born Robert Everard Waterfield in Beccles, Suffolk, in 1914, the son of Noel Waterfield, a colonial civil servant in the Sudan Medical Service, and Ellen (née Crowfoot), an amateur botanist. (John Crowfoot, father of the chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, was her first cousin.) Robin was brought up until he was 10 at his grandmother's in Beccles; Mr Britten, Benjamin's father, was his dentist in Lowestoft.

When his father retired from the colonial service in 1925, he bought into a practice in Banbury, Oxfordshire, and Robin was sent to the Dragon School in Oxford, and then on to Rugby, which he hated. His relationship with his parents was ambivalent. His father was a disappointed man; he had a brilliant career at Bart's, but felt overshadowed by the royal physician ("that fake, that poodle") Lord Horder. Robin's mother, he said, "joined Boot's Library and that was it".

Although he was destined for medicine, and took his first MB at Bart's in 1934, he made his first career change the following year and through Wilson Harris, Editor of the Spectator and a friend of his father's, got a job with the publishers Allen & Unwin for a year. He then ran away to work for the booksellers Foyle's for a month, moving to Spottiswoode & Ballantyne in Eton, from which he was sacked for reading the books instead of dusting them.

His first job in antiquarian bookselling was at Grafton's, opposite the British Museum, in 1937, under the formidable R.A. Peddie and Fanny ("Frank") Hamel, where he learnt the ways of the runners Dirty Ernie and Old Darby, with sacks of books at a bob a nob, and how to buy in Farringdon Road. In lunchtime he would go to Cecil Court, where David Low held court at No 17. Low, generous, knowledgeable, creative, with a discreet flamboyance, struck a chord with Waterfield and in 1939, just before war broke out, he bought into the business for £1,000.

The Forties were Robin Waterfield's cosmopolitan decade. He fell into the Fitzrovian set and became a friend and support to Tambimuttu, the Ceylonese poet who drew money and patrons from thin air and pub bars for his magazine Poetry London. When "Tambi" later, in the 1970s, sought to revive the magazine, it was to Waterfield he turned, and Waterfield, loyal and long-suffering, helped force the project to a conclusion – Poetry London/ Apple Magazine no 1 appearing with a fanfare, Waterfield as Associate Editor, finally in 1979. It didn't last long, but it was amazing that it was published at all. One of the contributors was the poet David Gascoyne, another friend (from schooldays) to whom Waterfield was unstinting and in whose slow revival he delighted.

Waterfield joined the Army in 1941 and served as an anti-aircraft gunner until the order went out, "Would those interested in music, crossword puzzles or chess apply to the Adjutant." He was sent to Bletchley, to the Japanese civilian/diplomatic department, in which he spent the rest of the Second World War. He was annoyed to get no demob suit.

In 1945 – following a brief and unhappy first marriage – Waterfield married Sophie Harper, whose family had been Church Missionary Society missionaries in India. This was the beginning of another career change. In 1947-49, when they discovered they couldn't have children, he undertook training analysis with Toni Sussman at the Jung Institute. In 1950 he left David Low and took a residential childcare course, and from 1951 to 1956 they ran Berkshire County Council's Children's Home near Reading.

The following year, inspired by Canon Max Warren, General Secretary of the CMS, they went to Iran for the society to run a boys' hostel in Isfahan and bookshops for the churches, supplying libraries and textbooks for students; they stayed there 15 years. In 1967 Robin became Secretary of the Inter-Church Literature Committee for four years, but in 1973 – he always regretted not having been in Tehran for the 1979 revolution – he returned to England.

The architectural bookseller Ben Weinreb had been in the prodigal habit of buying a library for a shelf of books and putting the other 90 per cent in a barn in Milton, outside Abingdon. He suggested to Waterfield that he try his hand at making a postal business of this stock, which he did, first with David (Julian) Marshall, once of the British Council in Iran, as Julian and Everard, then, from 1975, as Robin Waterfield Ltd. The stock moved from Milton to premises in Archer Cowley's old furniture depository in Park End Street, Oxford. In 1976 they opened as a shop, a huge, sprawling place, in those days a bit too far from the city centre, but with infinite old-fashioned possibilities. Waterfield's gained a name for themselves for the enormity of their stock and the energy – driven by Waterfield – of the enterprise.

The restless Waterfield, however, content to delegate much of the buying and selling (to the benefit of his mostly young staff), began to concentrate on other interests: on publishing – "With All Faults" had been the Amate Press's first book – and on Tambimuttu's Poetry London. He fell out with the new owner (Weinreb had sold his shares), and made himself increasingly difficult in the shop. He was an independent trader who had lost his independence. In 1980, and with some acrimony, he retired. The shop, however, went on, and in 1998 moved to the High Street, opposite the Eastgate Hotel.

Waterfield's 22 years of retirement saw prodigious industry. He published poetry, devotional works, ecclesiastical biography. John F.X. Harriott's Farewell to True Bookshops (1984), with an introduction by John Arlott and printed by the young Jonathan Stephenson's Rocket Press, won a design prize. After the death of David Low in 1987, Waterfield edited Dear David, Dear Graham: a bibliophilic correspondence (1989). His friend Iris Murdoch was persuaded to write a foreword to Stella Aldwinckle's poems Christ's Shadow in Plato's Cave (1990). He himself wrote a foreword to her The Existentialist Political Myth (1989).

His own Christians in Persia: Assyrians, Armenians, Roman Catholics and Protestants had come out in 1973. Streams of Grace: a new selection from the letters of the Abbé de Tourville (1985) followed, then René Guénon and the Future of the West: the life and writings of a 20th-century metaphysician (1987), a translation of Luc Benoist's The Esoteric Path (1988) and Jacob Boehme: essential readings (1989).

In 1980, he had set up a self-help group in Oxford, and private counselling took up an increasing amount of his time, first at his house outside the Anglican compound of All Saints' Convent, off the Cowley Road, then at a house inside the curtain wall, and finally from the one room he and Sophie constricted themselves to in St John's Home – what for years Waterfield lugubriously described as the "Departure Lounge".

"Soon after I started seeing [Toni Sussman]," he wrote in 1998,

she told me that we were like two beggars sitting by the roadside, one of whom (her) had found a loaf of bread and was sharing it with the other (me). She encouraged me to listen with the third ear, i.e. to hear what remained unspoken as well as what was said.

Robin Waterfield was astute with his third ear. Even when sometimes he couldn't see what others could see about himself, he could hear what others couldn't hear about themselves.

He had a love-hate attitude towards books and writers. He was always getting rid of all his books, then replacing them. He affected to despise authorship and the production of books, but continued cheerfully in both. Rooted in Christianity, he was constantly seeking elsewhere. In René Guénon, he quotes Christ in Matthew's Gospel: "Not everyone that saith unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven." It is by what you do that you will be judged, he argued, not by the label under which you travel.

Of Tambimuttu, a Catholic of Hindu extraction, he wrote in 1989:

Tambi in all essentials was to the Western, logical, rational, analytical mind, incomprehensible – he had just to be accepted, lived with, argued with, rejected in exasperation for a while, but subsequently found to be just as friendly and affectionate as he ever had been. He may have borne grudges; he certainly didn't like some people; but he was enormously tolerant of himself, of his friends, and, I sincerely believe, of his enemies and those who couldn't stand his inchoate life style and irresponsible obstinacy in search of his ideal.

Both were independent, restless spirits. They had more in common than Waterfield knew.

James Fergusson