Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  During 1946 and early 1947 Lorraine was my steady girlfriend, but we did not progress beyond kissing. It was understood we were in love, that the relationship was permanent and one day, when married, we would enjoy all the pleasures of sex. That day never came. It was now more or less settled that I would go to Oxford after my concentrated year at Sir George Williams College, where the day and evening lectures were giving me an expanded outlook on many branches of knowledge. I was visiting Britain every year and I passed responses (entrance exams) at Oxford, where my tutor would probably have been Lord David Cecil, then a don at New College. I spent an afternoon in his study, and was asked to write, on the spot, an essay on a writer of my choice. I sat down and wrote a long analytical appreciation of the novels of W. Somerset Maugham, which he found interesting. I was in principle accepted for New College, which might not have overly pleased my grandfather with his bias against higher education, but it would have been acceptable because of the prestige of the college and for at least being in Britain. But it was not to be.

  A new influence had entered my life – and not a particularly good one. A returning Canadian soldier, John Barnard, had started to woo my mother, newly widowed. What interested him was my mother’s very considerable income and the life of ease it offered. He began an affair with her of which my sister and I, living in the same house, soon became aware. Realizing the importance of not antagonizing us, he paid considerable court to all three children, and on one occasion took me to New York to show me the sights and introduce me to the nightlife. There were drinks at the Plaza Hotel bar, dinners in Longchamps restaurants (a mid-priced, rather gaudily decorated chain, now long gone), visits to nightclubs and the theatre. I remember Kurt Weill’s Street Scene in its first production, Oklahoma and Carousel and some plays, but certainly not all on the one visit. It was only later that I discovered the Metropolitan Opera. I was rather flattered, I suppose, by being treated as a young man about town by John Barnard, who not long after that married my mother.

  John Barnard was in some ways not unlike my father, but much more motivated. He was the same height, had a similar moustache, and what he wanted was an easy life and to be successful at something without too much effort. Marriage to a rich widow offered him that, or at least the opportunity to start some enterprise of his own. I never positively disliked him, but it was transparent enough what he was and wanted, and I had to humour him, which was not difficult.

  In Montreal there were a number of debutante balls, to which I mostly escorted Lorraine Morgan, dressed in full evening attire, and a group formed of her friends and their escorts rather than of mine, who seemed to have melted away. I saw very few of the boys I had known at Bishop’s. I had shared a room in my last year there with Philippe Stern, who was now in New York, and with Edward Bronfman of the Seagram’s distilling family, who had now moved into his own enclave of rich Montreal Jews, which mixed little with either the affluent French-Canadian community or the Protestant one of the suburbs. My two best friends had been Hugh Evans, a very good-looking Welsh boy, a refugee who came out to Canada rather later than I, whose father was a judge in British-ruled Palestine, and Brigham Day, a Montrealer whose family had been connected with the Canadian Pacific Railway, in which my own Canadian grandfather had had a stake. Hugh had returned to Britain and was in the army. I was invited to sherry parties by Mrs Day – a tall, angular widow who had a very fat man called Fred as a permanent fixture in her sitting room – but I gradually lost touch. I was seeing more of my Montreal cousins, the Ostiguys and Brodeurs, and speaking more French.

  I had developed the ability to move in different circles and be accepted in all of them, and I must have had a fairly generous allowance, because escorting Lorraine to balls and such fashionable meeting places as the Ritz Café, which had a glamorous cabaret of star entertainers, and to plays at His Majesty’s Theatre and concerts at Plateau Hall, would have cost a fair amount. Lorraine did not attend concerts as much as the purely social events. I was often taken by cousins who had subscription tickets, and I remember the very conservative tastes of the audiences, who considered Richard Strauss to be almost unbearably modern and discordant. The repertory consisted mainly of Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Brahms and the better-known works of a few other nineteenth-century German composers, with a smattering of French works. Mozart was a rarity, except for his Masses in Catholic churches, where they competed with Palestrina. I still went to church on Sundays, out of politeness. Mass was usually followed by a big lunch, often at the Ostiguys, who had taken over the Wilson tradition of big family gatherings. Particularly lavish was the réveillon after midnight Mass at Christmas, a party that went on until five or later in the morning.

  One play that I saw at His Majesty’s at this time was Ibsen’s Ghosts. The cast consisted of Hollywood stars on tour, trying to do some real acting for a change, and it included Sybil Thorndike, as well as a strikingly attractive Regina, whose name did not register on me at the time. She was to play a major part in my life in the not too distant future.

  By now, John Barnard had decided to plan the lives of my mother’s three children, since she certainly had little idea of her own what to do with us, although Ardargie was quite plain about my own future, which was to join the brewery as soon as possible. My sister Betty had been to Compton and earlier to a finishing school called Miss Edgar’s, but had never been encouraged in any way to think of education as anything other than preparation for marriage, and higher education never seemed to have come into anybody’s thoughts. It would often make her bitter in later years, when she attempted to take courses to make up the gaps. My brother James, on the other hand, was at Zuoz in the Engadin. He eventually married a German girl from the same school, but only some years later, and after a spell at the Polytechnic in Zurich, followed by MIT in Boston, where he was to qualify as an engineer.

  Barnard read an article in Fortune magazine about Zurich, which was becoming the financial centre of Europe in the emerging post-war world of reconstruction. He suggested that I should go to the university in Zurich and study economics. My visit to Oxford had not overly impressed me. Post-war Britain was a joyless place with its restrictions, shortages, uninteresting rationed food and landscapes of destroyed buildings. And being resident in an Oxford college seemed too much like boarding school. I did not feel inclined just yet to become a kind of apprentice in the Alloa brewery and to live at Ardargie in daily contact with Gaffer and Gran, which was their plan for me. My father had often told me what a tyrant his father was, that the period during which he’d worked for him after the First World War had been an ordeal more excruciating than the trenches – and I believed him. Zurich, untouched by the war, seemed an attractive option, and I assented. My brother, five years younger, was told that he would be going to a boarding school in Switzerland. My new stepfather had decided he wanted to spend much of the year and much of my mother’s income in Europe. He was also probably finding that Montreal was not an entirely comfortable place to be. He had had a pre-war affair with a married lady called Rita Lemay, which had scandalized the section of the city’s society to which my mother belonged. Scandal was, perhaps, always her biggest interest in life, in a voyeuristic way, and having the former lover of a well-known local beauty in her power undoubtedly appealed to her. In Montreal he was known only as an adventurer and a rake, and he certainly felt that he could cut a more acceptable figure in Europe.

  My excellent marks and reports from Sir George Williams College, where I had done two years in one, impressed the University of Zurich favourably enough – they were in any case interested in attracting foreign students and foreign money – and I was accepted for the autumn of 1946. I had studied German privately with an old German-Jewish woman, a Miss Goldstein, for some months. She was a good teacher, very fat and unhealthy-looking, who drank glass after glass of water, causing her to belch constantly during our sessions. But she gave me a good grounding in grammar and pronunciation, so that I had workable
German when I arrived in Zurich in June.

  I had been booked into the grandest hotel in Zurich for the first two weeks, the Dolder Grand Hotel, high on the Dolder mountain overlooking the lake and the town. I remember that the restaurant had the most delicious strawberries, soaked in lemon juice and sugar, and that a piano trio constantly played operatic airs and melodies from the classics, interspersed with the popular tunes of the day, such as ‘La Vie en rose’. The triumphal march from Aida came up every hour. I went to the university and registered for my courses in Nationalökonomie, noting that there were interesting courses in literature that I might be able to attend. I had tea on the Bahnhofstrasse, about which James Joyce (buried in the local cemetery), had written one of his most poignant poems, and also in a café called Der Grüne Heinrich. The menu was full of quotations by Gottfried Keller. On enquiring from the waitress, I was told that the café was named after the greatest novel of the Swiss national poet. I went out to buy the book, which was the first long novel I read in German in Zurich. Years later I was to publish the first, and so far the only, English translation.

  One fine June afternoon I walked past the opera house and saw people going in. I followed them and found that Wagner’s Götterdämmerung was about to begin. I knew that my newly acquired student card allowed me a considerable discount from all ticket prices, so I bought a good seat in the Orchester (stalls) for a very reasonable price, no more than a very ordinary meal would cost. I thought I was in heaven! I had read the story of Wagner’s Ring in an operatic reference book that I had acquired long ago in New York, but knew nothing of the music. The singers included Kirsten Flagstad, Max Lorenz, Ludwig Weber, Elsa Cavelti and Andreas Böhm: the conductor was Hans Knappertsbusch. You could have found no better cast anywhere in the world at that time, and the performance was glorious. During the interval the lady next to me, a distinguished-looking woman of about fifty with a dapper and equally distinguished-looking gentleman, started to talk to me, asking how I liked the performance. I admitted my ignorance of the music, and it was evident that my primitive but adequate German amused her, as well as my overflowing enthusiasm. After the second interval they asked if I would like to join them for supper after the performance, and I accepted with alacrity. They took me to the restaurant of the Schauspielhaus, the city’s repertory theatre, and discussed the performance. They much admired Lorenz’s masculine Siegfried, and I was naturally bowled over by Flagstad’s Brünhilde, which thereafter I never missed an opportunity to hear again. My host was Dr Dembitzer, but I cannot remember the name of his robust mistress. Both were widely cultured: they talked about the theatre and literature, as well as music, bringing me into the conversation and showing much interest in my background, my forthcoming studies and expanding cultural interests, and in my passion for poetry. The opera had started at about four in the afternoon, and it must have been about midnight when we finished dinner.

  They then announced they were to move on to a late soirée thrown by Madame Flagstad in her suite at the Dolder Grand Hotel. Would I care to join them? I could not believe my luck in being seated next to them at the Opera House. We took a taxi up the hill to the hotel and joined about forty people drinking champagne in Flagstad’s suite. After a while Kirsten Flagstad herself emerged from her bedroom – the suite had several interconnecting drawing rooms, and we were by no means crowded – wearing a long, loose flowing gown. She was very tall, broad and buxom, shaped as dramatic sopranos nearly all were in those days, but I would describe her as statuesque rather than fat. She moved around the rooms, alternately drinking glasses of beer and champagne, chatting to everyone, including briefly to me after I had been introduced. I did not dare admit that it was my first Wagner opera, but I certainly expressed my enormous admiration for what I had heard that evening. Her voice, powerful and perfectly tuned, had cut through the heavy sound of Knappertbusch’s orchestra like an arrow of focused tone, eclipsing everything else going on under the stage or on it. Even more than half a century later I can still hear it in my head and in my inner ear. It was probably, up until that moment, the most exciting day of my life.

  The June night sped by, and dawn could be glimpsed coming up on the horizon. Flagstad had drunk a phenomenal amount. How many litres of beer and bottles of champagne could only be guessed at, but from the moment she entered the room there was always a glass in her hand and someone was always refilling it – or rather both, the beer glass and the champagne. Then, the room already quite bright, the lights switched off from the chandelier and table lamps, she sat down at the grand piano, the dawn behind her, and very softly, perfectly audibly, with supreme beauty, began to sing. The Dembitzers whispered to me that it was Grieg. For half an hour she sang, accompanying herself on the piano, then suddenly stood up and asked us to leave, thanking us for coming. At about eight o’clock I went to bed feeling like the dying rose in Berlioz’s Nuits d’été on the morning after the ball.

  The following week I went to hear Flagstad again, in Die Walküre and a second performance of Götterdämmerung. I also went, during that June Festival, to Stravinsky’s Persephone and Hindemith’s Nobilissima visione, an opera-ballet double bill, and soon started to attend performances of plays by Goethe, Schiller, Kaiser and Shakespeare at the Schauspielhaus. The art gallery also became familiar to me, and I went to films in various languages at the town’s cinemas, always for a very little entrance fee thanks to my student card. I was now living in a boarding house where no one spoke anything but German, so my conversational use of the language was improving daily. I had a bilingual dictionary, which I still possess, in which I underlined every unknown word I had just come across. The second time I would put a cross against it. When it had three crosses I transferred the word to a list which I wrote out weekly on a sheet of paper and studied every morning while shaving or sitting on the lavatory, so that my confident German vocabulary increased by at least twenty new words every week – a system I recommend to others.

  I was reading in three languages – English-language paperbacks of classics and standard works, largely from Swedish publishers; poetry; sometimes plays I had seen, such as Shakespeare, which I already knew well from teenage reading, but which came over differently in German performance, where the hammered rhymes made him sound very like Schiller; and of course erotic literature, published in English in Stockholm or Paris: Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and some others without any literary pretensions. I made new friends, one of them an Israeli called Willi Sichel, who introduced me to a Jewish group who were as German in their tastes and behaviour as any Germans I have ever come across. I went to some Friday night ceremonial dinners where word games were played. I learnt a great deal from them, especially Willi, and I had a fling, a chaste one, with one of the more passionate girls, who nevertheless clung firmly to her virginity. Willi was soon to return home to Palestine: he was a Sabra, born there and full of liberal feelings of brotherhood towards the Arabs he had grown up with, but I was fairly certain that he was about to join one of the Jewish nationalist groups who were starting to fight the British.

  I met many people in my first year in Zurich, but there was so much coming and going that friendships tended to be transient. I nearly started an affair with an Argentine girl whom I met during my first fortnight at the Dolder Grand. She declared that she loved me passionately, but when we were in bed together, at the crucial moment she suddenly announced, “But of course we will get married right away.” My ardour suddenly cooled, and the affair remained unconsummated. She was, I gather, a very eligible heiress, so I am sure her parents would have appreciated my reticence.

  What about my Canadian fiancée, if I can call her that? I wrote, at first almost daily, to Lorraine Morgan, and she replied very frequently, but with time the correspondence diminished, and one day I received a letter telling me she had been going out with another young man called O’Keefe, who wanted to marry her – which he eventually did. Long absence is not conducive to maintaining love, and I was in
any case far too young to get permanently involved. I have never seen or heard of her since.

  My courses started in September, and I was registered to study both theoretic and practical economics, international law, economic geography, statistics and sociology. John Barnard had thought of me becoming a banker, which was the last thing on my mind. My interests were still in literature and the arts, but economics, which I thought of as a social science, seemed a reasonable compromise. Economic geography and statistics were not only deadly boring, but those courses started early in the morning, eight o’clock in the winter months and seven in the summer. International law had special difficulties as Professor Giacometti, who was related to the sculptor, had a thick Italian accent in German that no one could understand. We students would compare notes afterwards and try to work out what he had said. My favourite professor was René König, who taught sociology. He assigned different books to each student for individual study in addition to the standard texts, and mine was Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, which I was able to read in English and which greatly influenced my political thinking, although I did not agree with all of it. König was the only professor who treated his students as individual human beings, and he gave seminar dinners which were very enjoyable.

  The core of the course was the economic lectures. I had Professor Büchner for theoretical economics, and I was recommended to read the textbook of his colleague from Geneva, Wilhelm Röpke, Die Lehre von der Wirtschaft (The Study of Economics), as the best short introduction to the subject. I still have it. The other professor was a Russian, Saitzev, who taught us the workings of the stock market, company practices and how international financial dealings encourage growth and new wealth. From him I learnt how holding companies are set up and function, which years later I was to put into practical application with disastrous consequences. Büchner was humdrum but straightforward, not unfriendly to his students. Saitzev was remote, a Russian aristocrat of the old school, who expected military levels of obedience from his class. Questions were not encouraged, and he seldom repeated himself. There were no particular textbooks for his course: you had to listen, take notes and absorb his ideas well enough to be able to analyse them, write about them and in due course pass examinations. He was a director of many of the biggest Swiss companies, especially in chocolate and engineering, as well as the Swiss Railways, and he sat on many public committees. His investments had apparently made him very rich. He would regularly visit nightclubs in the evening and sit there with his attractive wife and less attractive mistress – the three were a ménage à trois – but woe betide any student of his classes if his eye fell on them there. He could refuse to put his signature on the Testatheft which students presented to each professor at the end of every semester. The signature was the student’s necessary proof that he had taken the course.