WHAT a difference a few months make.

Last December, as one year morphed into another, Canongate, the small but highly respected and innovative Edinburgh-based publisher, announced it had secured the rights to publish the autobiography of Julian Assange, editor in chief of WikiLeaks.

The audacious deal, which astounded many major publishers and cost Canongate an undisclosed six-figure sum, reaped instant rewards. Within 24 hours, almost 40 foreign publishers had bought rights to a book of which a single word was yet to be written.

It was more rights, said Nick Davis, Canongate’s publishing director, than had been secured in the previous 12 months. Meanwhile, Jamie Byng, the company’s managing director, confidently predicted the book would be in the shops by early summer.

But what no-one had taken account of was Assange, whose maverick methods and unpredictable behaviour have made him respected and reviled in equal measure.

Having presided over the biggest leak of classified information in history and been accused of rape, his was a story everyone was eager to read. And who better to tell it than himself.

A few days ago, however, the book was published but without Assange’s permission. On the contrary, he was incandescent over what he saw was an act of betrayal. Thus did Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography, become the first -- and perhaps last -- of a kind, a personal memoir which was immediately disowned by its author.

In a statement issued on September 22, the book’s publication date, Assange accused Canongate of “profiteering from an unfinished and erroneous draft” and “secretly” preparing the manuscript for publication. Canongate, asserted Assange, “has found excuses not to interact with me, presumably in order to avoid discovery”.

“This book,” wrote Assange in a lengthy statement, “was meant to be about my life’s struggle for justice through access to knowledge. It has turned into something else. The events surrounding its unauthorised publication by Canongate are not about freedom of information -- they are about old-fashioned opportunism and duplicity, screwing people over to make a buck.”

Replete as the annals of publishing are with tales of writers and publishers at each others’ throats, none compares with that featuring Assange and Canongate. Needless to say, Canongate does not recognise the portrait of itself as painted by Assange.

Back in Edinburgh after a week of media firefighting in London, a weary-looking but upbeat Nick Davis says he could spend hours unpicking Assange’s statement and correcting inaccuracies. In a note which he wrote at the beginning of The Unauthorised Autobiography, Davis observed that Assange became “increasingly troubled by the thought of publishing an autobiography” and by June he had intimated that he wanted to cancel his contract. How, from such a hopeful start, did things get so bad?

In the beginning, explains Davis, all was sweetness and light. The schedule was tight but doable, if all concerned knuckled down. The first hurdle was to find a ghost writer. This was easier said than done. “Julian was particular about what he wanted,” says Davis. “He said: ‘I have all the facts; find me a novelist who can turn these facts into a story’.”

After two to three weeks, the novelist Canongate found was Andrew O’Hagan, author of several celebrated books, including Be Near Me, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It seemed a match made in heaven, though O’Hagan insisted his name be kept off the finished memoir and where possible out of press reports. Although everyone accepts that he was Assange’s ghost writer, Davis still refuses to identify him, in keeping with the agreement they made. “He said: ‘I’d rather you kept my name completely anonymous’, which is why you won’t hear me say his name this afternoon.”

That, says Davis, was entirely his prerogative. O’Hagan -- or “the ghost writer”, as he insists on calling him -- behaved “absolutely impeccably” throughout what was to become an increasingly tortuous and fraught process.

To be closer to Assange, who was living under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, where he was being put up by Vaughan Smith, a former British Army officer, O’Hagan rented a house nearby. Whenever Assange had a spare moment, he would drive over and interview him.

By all accounts the pair got on famously. Often they met at night and drank whisky as they talked. “They formed a very strong bond. They seemed to be getting on terrifically well.” In all, O’Hagan taped more than 50 hours of conversation with Assange out of which, by the end of March, he produced a first draft. Davis and Byng were delighted with what they read. “We thought it was fantastic. We thought it was a very, very strong first draft. We couldn’t have been happier at that point.”

Both of them travelled to Norfolk to have breakfast with Assange and discuss progress. It was, says Davis, an “awkward” meeting and, in hindsight, a harbinger of more troubled times ahead. “It became apparent that Julian had read very little, possibly less than a third, of his own memoir.”

 

Assange, says Davis, talked “quite vaguely” about what he didn’t like about the draft. “It just felt at that point he was slowly putting the brakes on. Our first instinct was to speed things up again. At that time we were still aiming to publish the book in June.”

Not only had Canongate got its deadlines to keep, its international partners had theirs. It was imperative, therefore, to hurry Assange up, which he was not inclined to do. Instead, he “flipped”. Face to face, he was “aggressive-defensive -- or defensive-aggressive -- whatever the phrase is.”

Desperate to move things forward Canongate decided to take O’Hagan off the project and hand complete control to Assange, giving him six weeks “to hand in his homework”. But none was forthcoming. It was as if they were dealing with a bolshie schoolboy.

Come June, Assange told the publisher he wanted to cancel his contract. Reluctantly, Canongate agreed. Normally, when authors fail to fulfill contracts they may be required to return any advance they’ve been given.

Occasionally, publishers will waive this, though much depends on the amount. Assange’s advance was too large for a company of Canongate’s size to lose. Canongate therefore informed him that the contract could only be cancelled if he returned the advance. “OK, OK,” said Assange. “I’ll go and do that.” Only he didn’t. Because, according to Davis, he had already signed his advance over to his lawyers to settle his legal bills and the lawyers were not about to send it back.

Throughout the summer communication between Assange and Canongate virtually ceased. Earlier this month, however, Davis says Canongate decided to bring things to a head. Assange was asked to put in writing a new vision for the book and to offer a revised schedule for its delivery. Again nothing transpired. He was then told that printing of the book would begin on September 19 and he must take whatever steps he felt necessary legally to challenge it. Assange claims that while he would like to have done this he did not have the money to do so.

The wrangling is unlikely to end here. Canongate now has its book but it is not the one it ideally wanted. Nor is it so highly desired by foreign publishers, only a few of whom have so far agreed to publish The Unauthorised Autobiography.

Moreover, Assange, who stood to make millions from his authorised autobiography, will make much less from the one he has publicly disowned. What remains a mystery is why he was once so keen to publish a memoir he has come to regard as “prostitution”. “Only Julian knows,” says Davis. “We think it’s because he thinks that book is far too personal from the signals he was putting out to us.”

For Canongate, the publisher of Barack Obama and the Booker Prize winner, Life of Pi, the experience has been chastening. From the outset, getting a book out of Assange was always going to be a test of its mettle. Twitter, says Davis, is alive with comments enjoying the “delicious irony” of the founder of WikiLeaks fulminating against the publication of his own book. He has yet to reach that stage.

Preventing leaks, it seems, is uppermost in Assange’s mind. To which end two new laptops, both of which were stripped down to their basic software, were bought at the beginning of the project, as were two safes and encrypted memory sticks. Internet connections were disabled. Nothing of interest was sent by emails. Non-disclosure agreements were mandatory. “We’ve been in lockdown,” says Davis.

As for Assange, he was seen recently going into Waterstones in Norwich, his own film crew in tow, where he bought three copies of The Unauthorised Autobiography. Perhaps he may be about to embrace the book which bears his name. Or perhaps he simply wants to stop other people reading it. Who knows. As he himself writes toward its end, “‘Strewth’, as we used to say. Life was easier when it was just sugar ants running up my legs and biting me to death. At least in those days I had the sun on my side.”