Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Lectures started first thing in the morning and could go on until seven at night. There were days when I had an early lecture, a late morning one and perhaps one or two in the afternoon, often separated by several hours; the problem was how and where to spend the intervening time. The most obvious answer was the library, where I not only went over my lecture notes and read the required texts, but found recreational reading as well. Another answer was to go to lectures for which I was not registered but which interested me, often more than my own studies. There was a world authority at the university on the novels of Thomas Hardy, and I went to hear him. I attended lectures on German literature and sometimes French. Carl Jung was lecturing at the Polytechnic, about two hundred yards away, and I attended his sessions fairly often, sometimes at the expense of my own subjects.

  I took no part in other student activities or sports other than going to drinking places with classmates on occasion. There was often some form of challenge, usually to prove you could still do something difficult after so many glasses of wine or beer. I found these stupid. There was a bar in the old town run by a motherly lady called Mary – although I am sure that was not her real name. The bar was called Mary’s Old Timer’s Bar, and I became an habitué, making drinking friends there. One in particular was a French-Swiss, Paul Pettivel. He also was a student of Nationalökonomie, but he had largely dropped out and seldom went to the university, knowing that the day of reckoning would soon come when his family would stop supporting him. I met them when he invited me for a weekend to his home in Neuchâtel: I was well looked after, even pampered with breakfast in bed, and taken to a new wine festival, which gave me a severe stomach upset.

  American GIs on leave from Germany were frequently in Zurich, and many found the Old Timer’s Bar and would confide their troubles and homesickness to Mary. Another bar, much more cosmopolitan, was the Huguenin on the Bahnhofstrasse. I met Dr Dembitzer on a few occasions there, but the clientele was very varied – some very smart men with well-dressed and worldly-looking ladies, diplomats and business men, and a great variety of languages. There I met a man one day of indeterminate nationality who handed me his card which read “American Secret Service”. But among the many mythomaniacs and phoneys in post-war Zurich there were real spies – American, British, French and others from the Soviet bloc – and one became aware of them in various ways. They were also among the student body. One, a German who had spent the war in America, told me late one night that he had been ordered to return to East Germany by his controller and was afraid to do so. He did not know what might have been reported about him and if he might have been a scapegoat for someone else’s mistake or report. He was a genuine communist with a materialist flair – he had made some money in Switzerland by importing and selling second-hand American clothes – and he wanted to lead a normal life and not be in constant fear. All this came out over a bottle of Pflümliwasser, the local plum brandy. For some reason, I have all my life received confidences from people who trusted me not to betray them, and I think I have been able to justify those confidences.

  I found some interesting ways of supplementing the considerable allowance that I received from my mother, and this enabled me to live more comfortably, have the odd good meal in one of Zurich’s many good restaurants, pay for skiing holidays and buy books and tickets to performances of music and theatre. I met a painter who had a profitable side line importing art works from Germany. German families under four-power occupation, often in considerable difficulty because of their Nazi pasts, would sell valuable paintings and other possessions for very little to get foreign currency, and my friend would sell these quite illegal imports to individuals, often professional or business men, living in or visiting Switzerland. He recruited me to make contacts, especially as he spoke little English. I would go to the bars of the leading hotels, such as the Dolder, the Baur au Lac and the Savoy, sit at the bar with my patron’s money and talk to lawyers and business men, most of them American, eventually confiding that I knew where they could buy old masters and work by the most celebrated early-twentieth-century painters for much less than the going market price. Although they had been smuggled out of Germany, the owners had signed away any entitlement, and they could be legally acquired from the present owner, who was adept at acquiring export licences if they were to leave Switzerland.

  There were several Vermeers among the paintings I negotiated. As this was the period when Van Meegeren, the expert Vermeer forger, was at work, it is possible that some of them were forgeries. The other source of a little extra money was the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the very serious local paper. I met one of the financial editors in a bar, who asked if I would be willing to read through for him the British and American financial newspapers and do a summary of the most interesting information. I did this for a few weeks, gutting the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, The Times and Financial Times, and giving him a two- or three-page resumé. Then he gave me my own column in the paper, but not under my name – this would have given me some kudos at the university. I produced the same summary as before in my best German, sometimes with a little help from a friend. It was a nice little source of revenue and took up only two or three hours a week.

  One of the earlier boarding houses I stayed in, near the lake and the Opera House, was also home to a member of the chorus who lived in the room next to mine; she was strikingly beautiful, and her name was Lisa della Casa. She had a considerable number of male visitors and at night I would go wild with jealousy at the sound of their love-making. Soon she had become a principal singer at the opera house, and she moved to her own apartment. Thereafter she became an international opera star, whom I would later hear at Covent Garden, the Met in New York and elsewhere.

  Later, for a considerable time, I was at a boarding house run by the headmaster of a local school, half way up the Dolderberg. On my first night there I met another British student, Dick Soukup, an ex-RAF and Battle of Britain pilot, who was studying at the Polytechnic. We had a party in his room on my first night there, and I remember Dr Kleinert, our not very genial host, coming in and looking at his new arrival accusingly: “Herr Calder,” he said to me in German, “I had expected better of you.”

  Dick and I soon became good friends. There was also a German-Swiss staying there called Heinrich Sandmeier, about to finish his studies, of whom I was to see more later. He was a very serious student, very Germanic, and did not join in the antics of others like Dick and I, who saw no reason not to make our student days as enjoyable as possible.

  Dick started to have an affair with Su Kleinert, the headmaster’s daughter, living in the same house and engaged to an Austrian count, a match much encouraged by her parents. She was soon mad for him, and trouble loomed ahead. It was Christmas-time and Dick was returning home to Sidcup, outside London, for the holidays – it must have been the end of 1947 – and he, Su and I went to the station together to see him onto his train. He wanted to break off the affair because Dr Kleinert would soon learn of what had happened and he did not want to be tied down to marriage. I had been charged to take Su to dinner, explain that he was not really serious, and she should think about marrying the Count. We drank a great deal and, resenting the dirty task that had been foisted on me, and swayed by the passionate insistence of my companion that she and Dick were madly in love and ideally suited to each other, ended up saying the exact opposite of what I’d been asked to say. I told her that I was sure that everything would work out, that the English were never very demonstrative in love, and that Dick’s recent coolness towards her meant nothing. As a result of telling her what she wanted to hear, we had a pleasant if rather drunken evening.

  Some time before my twenty-first birthday, I moved into a small hotel, the Rigihof, not far from the university, where I had a sort of flatlet with cooking facilities. Here I made a new friend, a French student with an aristocratic background called Raymond de Miribel. He had been caught by the Germans while doing work f
or the Résistance under the occupation and had been sent to Dachau and Buchenwald, surviving by constantly changing his name and presenting himself as a tradesman, an electrician or plumber, and therefore always in demand and getting better treatment than the other prisoners. On his arrest he had had enough wit to inform his father of what had happened to him by addressing the short and monitored postcard he was allowed to send before being sent to Germany to Château des Déportés, rather than Château de Miribel. He had weighed less than a hundred pounds at the end of the war, but was now bordering on obesity. Like me he was studying to get his doctorate in Economics. He hardly ever seemed to leave his room, drinking cognac all day, reading and studying. We often ate, drank and talked in the evening. In 1948 we celebrated the New Year at a hotel party at the Rigihof, and later that month I turned twenty-one and organized a similar party. On that occasion the hotel manager tried to seduce me when I was drunk, but I managed to dissuade him by a hard kick.

  I spent a few pleasant days with Raymond at his family chateau near Grenoble. I well remember the first evening, when the two of us sat up late drinking a bottle, perhaps two, of Chartreuse. The next day, after having breakfast brought to me in bed, I met his father the Comte and the family, was given a tour of the grounds and lunch with many guests, which I did not enjoy as it started with black pudding, continued with tripe and ended when the cook, who told me with pride that she had spent some time in England and had specially made an “Eengleesh pouding” for me, stood over me to watch me eat. I got through the pudding with the utmost loathing, trying to smile.

  My mother and John Barnard would occasionally show up in Zurich and stay at the Dolder Grand. I would go for dinner and be questioned about my studies, but I had more to say about the theatre, the opera and the wonderful concerts. In addition to such great singers as Flagstad, who returned to sing Wagner every summer, there were leading singers from Germany and Italy, and all the great instrumentalists. I heard Gigli and Tebaldi in Aida, not at the opera house, but in the Tonhalle (concert hall), where the stage had been adapted with a proscenium for the occasion. Franz Lechleitner was the local Heldentenor, very popular with local audiences, and among those performers I particularly enjoyed were Andreas Böhm, a wonderful Boris Godunov as well as a great Wagnerian bass, Maria Reining in Der Rosenkavalier and a long roster of international singers, including of course Lisa della Casa, now developing into a major prima donna. At the Dolder, when my mother and John Barnard were there, I met a lawyer from Washington, DC, Jim Mann, who having worked for the US government blocking suspect bank accounts of European investors in the States, and of Americans in Switzerland who were avoiding tax, was now in private practice doing the opposite, trying to unblock the same accounts. One of his clients was Baron Thyssen, the elderly German steel magnate, who having been released by the Allies, was living in Switzerland in a large house, having succeeded in getting most of his money out before the war ended. His much younger and elegant wife was a princess, and she was having an affair with Jim Mann. He used me as a reluctant go-between to carry messages, because his wife was frequently around, as was Thyssen. It was Jim Mann who first excited my interest in the Alger Hiss case, because the Hiss scandal broke at that time. Jim was a good friend of Hiss’s and could not believe the accusations being made against him by Whittaker Chambers, a Time Magazine editor, who claimed that he and Hiss had both belonged to a Communist cell before the war, and that they had regularly passed information over to the Russians. I followed the events of the scandal and the two trials which were to lead to Hiss’s conviction and imprisonment by reading all the newspapers, which I had in any case to scan for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Later, when I became a publisher, I was to take both a personal and a professional interest in Hiss, and publish his book. Talking of politics, I also remember the night in November 1947, when Harry S. Truman, the US President, was, against all expectations, re-elected. I listened all night to the radio, hearing the numbers add up in Truman’s favour while commentators kept insisting that Dewey had already won and that what we were hearing could not be true. They must have had red faces the next morning, like the editors whose newspapers, printed too early, gave Dewey the victory.

  In March 1948, during the Easter holiday, I went skiing at Zermatt, the highest station in Europe, where great snowfields lie under the shadow of the Matterhorn, a mountain of awesome splendour. I stayed at the Zermatterhof, one of the best hotels, and skied from the first light to dark. There I met a man who was to become one of my closest friends, Jacques Chaix. We had both spotted a lady on the slopes worth pursuing, and at one point, all skiing too close together, we collided and ended up in a heap together, which served as an introduction. The woman, Heidi, was a nurse at the local hospital. Jacques and I were in the same hotel, and we agreed to have dinner there together. During the following week we all skied together, but Jacques won Heidi, which I accepted with good will, even going so far as to facilitate her entry into the hotel late at night by opening a window at the back. Our last day in Zermatt was a Friday the thirteenth, and on that day every member of the group of half a dozen of us who had become friendly enough to ski together had an accident, except me. Most of them were minor – a broken ski at the end of the day in Heidi’s case – but Jacques Chaix had a bad fall that would trouble his back all his life. It was late in the afternoon and the sun was setting when the remaining members of the party still able to ski passed through a long descent on a narrow trail through a wood with many corners. Heidi, who was very fast, was first, then came Jacques, with myself at the rear. Turning a corner, my eyes on the narrow piste, I thought I saw, out of the corner of one of them, something moving in the snow. Stopping with some difficulty a hundred yards or so further down, I herringboned my way back up the hill. I had not been mistaken. A pair of skis were waving in the air above a large snowdrift. I unburied Jacques, who had gone in upside down and was unable to move and nearly unconscious. We descended slowly, found Heidi at the bottom, who had broken her ski at the end of the run against a tree, and we spent our last evening together. Friday the thirteenth has never been unlucky for me, but it certainly was for all the others that day.

  The next morning Jacques and I took the train to Brig, from whose junction different trains took us off to Paris and Zurich. We had exhausted our last funds, but by now were good enough friends to evenly divide up the few coins we still had, hardly enough for a sandwich. I promised to look Jacques up in Paris, and a few months later did so. Many of my evenings there were at the opera – I saw most of the French repertoire at the Palais Garnier and Opéra Comique, then and on subsequent visits, with singers like Nadine Renaux, Denise Duval, Mady Mesplé, Raoul Jobin and René Bianco – and Jacques introduced me to the nightclubs of Montmartre and Pigalle, when it became only natural to end up in bed with someone I had met or picked up there: it all seemed very innocent in Paris. There was an evening at the Moulin Rouge where we dined with two of Jacques’s girlfriends, an old flame that he was trying to pass on to me and a new one he was cultivating. The evening did not work out as planned. Both girls were only interested in Jacques, loathed each other and bristled throughout an evening whose end I cannot recall. Over a period of time I came to know them both quite well: the first was to take her own life some years later, not as far as I know because of Jacques, and the other, then a young concert singer, was to become a friend and remain one more than fifty years later. But I learnt then how insensitive this new friend of mine could be where women were concerned, although his nature was generous and he was intelligent enough to realize the pain he inflicted by playing the role of the stolidly dominant male who did everything to suit his own convenience. He never married, and juggled many women, usually simultaneously, throughout his life: most of them were genuinely in love with him, but on only one occasion did he ever admit to me any guilt, and that was regarding the first of the two ladies mentioned above, and several years later.

  As Jacques Chaix was to be a close friend
until his death in 1989, a short portrait is necessary. He came from a family of small industrialists who had land and vineyards in the Vaucluse region as well as a factory just outside Paris, making washers and small metal objects for motor cars and industry generally. He had spent the war with the Maquis in the area where his father’s family originated, and by 1942 was commander of the whole guerrilla army in the region of south-east France, with many thousands of men under his leadership. He harried the German garrisons, blew up trains and bridges, and exerted whatever force was needed over the local population to ensure the procurement of provisions, tactical information and loyalty. When necessary he was ruthless, and collaborators did not live long. It was Jacques who met the British commando force that invaded the south of France in one of Churchill’s less successful adventures, and it was he who had to do the interpreting. His English was so rudimentary that I cannot imagine how he managed, and it is incredible that a British commando leading the invasion had no one able to speak French. Jacques was an effective Maquis commander, and he became an effective administrator when he took over his father’s business in the late Fifties. But his objective in life was always his personal convenience and pleasure. Business lunches and dinners were not part of his professional life. He only liked to eat with people he liked. Being good-looking, healthy and fond of physical sports, he had as many women as he wanted and spent as much time as possible on holiday – which never seemed to affect his business, where his sister was also in the administration. Over many years I was to ski with him in late February and early March, and after 1963 he would come shooting with me in Scotland; I would go to stay with him at his villa at Cap Ferrat and meet him in different parts of the world. We had nothing in common except for a liking for the opposite sex, skiing and tennis, and a male bonding based on mutual respect and loyalty. He considered me his most eccentric friend, whose motivations could not be understood but had to be respected. Politically he was on the right and I was on the left, but we never argued. He had no more belief in religion than I. Jacques was no intellectual, but certainly no fool, and in no way anti-intellectual, counting artists and actors among his friends. He had a great tolerance for other people, for lifestyles different from his own, and was no snob in any of the categories where snobbism applies, but at the same time he had his intolerances, usually towards any group, culture or phenomenon that could in some way affect him adversely. He was politically on the right because not to be would threaten his economic freedom and thereby reduce his capacity to live for his own pleasure – and he considered that whatever applied as being in his own interest also led to the well-being of France. He perfectly understood the French colonies’ desire for freedom, but was against giving it to them. He would always side with the police against any radical demonstration.