Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  It is to Jacques that I largely owe my knowledge of Paris and of vernacular French, very different from the polite French of refined society. Jacques was a man of the people: his friends came from every background and class, and their conversations tended to be colourful with argot expressions I might otherwise never have learnt. On visits during my remaining student days I came to know the Paris of Parisians increasingly well, and Jacques, affluent in his own country, was always a good and generous friend.

  I sampled the French theatre and boulevard fare in the company of Jacques or a lady friend, and more serious theatre and the opera on my own. Raoul Jobin, who particularly impressed me, was one of the most versatile lyric tenors I have ever encountered. He had a voice of great beauty that I heard in Carmen, Roméo et Juliette, Werther and Wagner’s Lohengrin, but also in new works where he could act the clown and have the audience in stitches, like Henri Rabaud’s Mârouf, savetier du Caire. He was the greatest of all the French tenors I have ever heard, and one of the best actors. Unfortunately he was soon to give up his career to manage his wife’s, a French-Canadian singer like himself, and to open a singing school in Montreal.

  At the university I continued my studies with reasonable application but little enthusiasm, although a few of the lecturers did attract my attention. René König was by far the most interesting. At a seminar dinner that he gave before Christmas, I believe in 1947, we all drank a fair amount of wine, and a German student, resentful of the presence of someone who represented the powers that had defeated Germany, decided to provoke a quarrel. Insult was followed by counter-insult, and then a glass of wine was thrown in my face, to which the only reply was a slap in the face. The student then formally challenged me to a duel. Duels were illegal at Swiss universities, but they frequently took place. Not long before Heini Sandmeier had taken me to a dinner of his Studentenverband, where part of the ritual was to create circumstances that would provoke a duel. In this way students proved their courage and often sported – unless things went drastically wrong – a proudly worn scar on the cheek. Even at that age the stupidity of the whole thing was apparent to me. A student at such an evening would wait until his large stein of beer was nearly empty, then shout to his proposed victim, “Ein grosser Vor” (“A large before”), to which his opponent had to respond by first emptying his glass (a moment would have been picked when it was full) within a given time span – perhaps a minute, but certainly less than two. If he could do it, he would then reply “Ein grosser Nach” (“A large afterward”) and wait for the opportunity to do the same back. Everyone got totally drunk, and many such evenings terminated in challenges to duels. These were held in the woods early in the morning, and it was rumoured that the Rector was often the referee; there would always be a doctor present.

  When I was challenged I accepted, but being a foreigner and without training, I was given two months to take a sabre course. The rules were complex. You were not allowed to move your feet, the left being in front of the right; your shoulders were protected by a heavy harness of leather and steel; you wore a helmet that covered your head and nose; you had goggles for the eyes, and the breastplate also had a rising section that protected your throat and chin. The purpose was to slash at the cheeks. You moved your wrists to slash, but your elbow had to remain within the levels of your wrist and shoulder. In brief, it was wrist action that mattered. Dick Soukup and Heini Sandmeier agreed to be my seconds, and they negotiated with the seconds of the other man. I began to take lessons and soon learnt I was quite dextrous with a sabre, and that being shorter than the other man I had a considerable advantage: I could slash up and might get under his nose, which was only protected from the top, whereas he, slashing down, could only hit my protected parts unless he slashed my cheek. My instructor, a professional fencing master, was pleased with me and assured me I would come off best.

  Two days before the appointed day the seconds had a meeting. It became obvious that the challenger wanted to get out of it, but had to find the right formula for an apology, while I had to be willing to accept it. Dick and Heini took me out for a drink. “Look, old boy,” said Dick, “we Brits shouldn’t get involved in these outdated customs. He wants to call it off, so don’t be difficult.” I was frankly disappointed, since after so many lessons, and sure of my new skill, I was almost looking forward to this new experience, but reason prevailed. I accepted the apology, we shook hands, and the duel never happened.

  I had many difficult texts to read and master, but the hardest of them all were the writings of the English economist David Ricardo, which I had to read in German because there were no English texts available at the university. Like my Russian Professor Saitzev, Ricardo had turned his theories to practical account, made a fortune for himself and then written important tracts on value theory and the promotion of growth – and he was the very devil to read and understand. Mentioning my difficulty to John Barnard gave him the idea of inviting Heini Sandmeier for a month to the Engadin valley, where with my mother’s money he had rented a castle for the summer. Heini would tutor me through these difficult texts and also give some tutoring to my younger brother, who was now at a school at Zuoz, quite nearby. For a month in Crap da Sass, a gloomy castle sunk in a valley between ponderous mountains, isolated and about two miles away from the nearest village, I slaved over Ricardo and others, occasionally taking a walk with Heini to the village for a beer and on one occasion climbing a fairly high mountain. I forget the name of it, but well remember the last two hours returning downhill, bone-weary and then having to spend two days in bed with mountain fever.

  Some time early in 1948, I was given the degree of Licentiate, probably the equivalent of a BA. This was earned largely by a thesis that I wrote on the theories of Thomas Malthus, whose ideas on population control made much sense to me and still do. He is out of fashion today, but his observations still seem true to me when you look at the world. If mankind does not find a way of controlling its numbers, said Malthus, nature will do it – through war, pestilence, or natural disasters – and these will affect the overcrowded regions most. I read Malthus in French without difficulty, and my long essay, written in German, was well received. I decided that for my doctoral thesis I would make an analysis and comparison of the basic ideas and theories of John Maynard Keynes and Karl Marx. I had already read much of both.

  I was writing poetry at this time, inspired principally by T.S. Eliot, although Ezra Pound also interested me, and I was beginning to get to know the Auden generation. But most of my reading was in other languages, classics for the most part, but modern novels, plays and poetry as well. I sent poems off to British magazines and had occasional acceptances, one in Horizon and one in Poetry Review, and some in other little magazines of the time which have long since been forgotten. It was rather dry, free verse for the most part, conversational in tone, rather like Eliot’s Prufrock. But I knew that although derivative, it was getting better, and that in time I would find my own voice. It was music, however, that enthralled me most. I went, nearly always on my own, two or three times a week to concerts and opera. High points were hearing Artur Schnabel playing the entire Beethoven piano works, sonatas, concerti and variations, over a single month, as well as the Griller and other string quartets, which introduced me to the principal works in that form of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. At the same time, I was also discovering Bartók, Hindemith and upcoming Swiss and other European composers. I made friends with a few musicians, professional players who were not particularly well known and eagerly discussed music with them. One of them, a pianist who played concerts in schools and around the smaller towns, used to pick up Zurich prostitutes and, having had his pleasure, would send them to my room as a present. Nice Swiss girls were not very accessible, although I had a few pleasant nights with some girls from the university, not all Swiss. Sex with so-called “nice” girls was always difficult to get. There were a few, not many, who simply enjoyed sex in the same way as men, and they were i
n high demand and therefore difficult to win. Prostitutes were easy to find, but often did not call themselves that: there was a certain délicatesse when it came to the pretence of mutual pleasure, and it may not always have been pretence. I also received a surprising number of homosexual invitations, and had to find a way of turning these down without giving offence. I knew a few male students who would accept such advances for a payment, and no doubt some of the girl students did too.

  One night during the summer of 1948, I won a large sum of money at poker. Poker games were fairly frequent among foreign students, and the equivalent of about £50 or £200 might change hands. But this time it was different. There were about eight of us, of many nationalities, and I had an extraordinary run of luck. At the end, two of us, a Swede and I, had cleaned out all the others and we were playing the last hand. I had three of a kind, Jacks or Queens I think, and I was fairly certain my opponent had something similar. We eyed each other, looking for signs of a bluff: it was important not to seem too confident, because then your opponent would cease to bet and raise you, while nervousness would indicate you might easily lose what you had on the table if your hand was weaker than your playing suggested. We went all the way until one of us could no longer up the ante, and I won. It was something like £1,000, and it was now broad daylight. We all went to have breakfast at the Bahnhof Buffet, open all night, for which I paid. I then decided to have a really good holiday on the Côte d’Azur, and at the end of August went by train to Cannes, where I stayed at the best hotel, spending all day on the beach, slowly acquiring a fashionable tan, and lunching at the hotel’s beach bar. In the evening I usually went to the casino, where I played roulette. Overall I won a little, so my evenings paid for themselves.

  August turned to September, so the worst of the summer heat was over, and the weather warm and idyllic. I made a few holiday friends, but never saw any of them again. I did however have a very nice little affair with an Austrian lady who owned a factory making rubber contraceptives, condoms in particular, of which she always had a handy supply with her. During my second week in Cannes I was usually sneaking out of her room (in another hotel) at about five in the morning to return to my own to sleep a little before returning to the beach, where I discovered one day from a man next to me that I was not the only one to have enjoyed the lady’s favours.

  When I left Cannes I had used all my money, and didn’t even have enough to buy a snack and a glass of beer at a bistro opposite the station before catching my sleeper back. The barman, seeing my distress as I rummaged through my pockets, told me not to worry. I could pay if I ever came back. Perhaps it was his generosity that inspired my own that night. The train was packed, and there was an elderly lady in the corridor outside my couchette. I let her have it and spent the night in the corridor.

  * * *

  Nineteen forty-nine was my last year at the university, and as the year advanced I prepared for my final examinations, both written and oral. I had much reason to be nervous, because on my Testatheft, which documented my studies, there were one or two missing signatures. It had to have the verifying signature of the professor or lecturer, both at the beginning of the course and at the end. If you missed the end-signature for whatever reason, you had to try to catch the relevant signer in a good mood later on, and persuade him to sign; otherwise you were obliged to take the course again, or at least pay for it and obtain the two signatures at the appropriate times. The most difficult signature to get was of course Saitzev’s. I had about five written exams ahead of me and a thesis to finish. After that there were two oral examinations, during which I would be cross-questioned to make sure I had the knowledge I was supposed to have.

  I holed up in the Dolder again, where by now I had the privilege of a cheap room and began to reread – and in some cases read for the first time – the set books. I was occupied in this way on a Sunday afternoon when there came a knock on the door: it was the room maid. The lady in the room next door was giving her problems, and the maid couldn’t understand her: the lady could only speak English, and not in a very pleasant manner. It seemed there had been many complaints about her, and I was asked to speak to her and find out what it was she wanted.

  I knocked on the door and heard an American voice issuing from the bathroom: “Who is it?” I explained my presence, standing in the open doorway.

  “I’m in the bath,” said the voice. “I’ll come to see you when I’m out of it.”

  After nearly an hour an apparition in pink came into in my room. Long reddish hair that was really a light red-blonde surrounded a carefully made-up face and large grey-green eyes. She was in a kind of playsuit, décolleté, and doing very little to disguise a beautifully rounded young body in its early twenties. Having overcome my astonishment, I found out what the problem was: she was accusing the room maid of having taken some jewellery, although it was not clear whether her complaint was against an individual or the hotel. I was soon to doubt the whole thing. She certainly wasn’t going to contact the police, and her general vagueness about the whole matter should have sent me a warning signal. But I was already too smitten. On one occasion at Cannes, I had played tennis for a few minutes with Rita Hayworth, a similar-looking beauty, to fill the time until Aly Khan came to join her, and of course I had seen and even slept with one or two beautiful women, but I had never seen or been so close to anyone like this, and I was in a state of shock. My memory of the next week is limited to the next few paragraphs.

  I took her to the hotel dining room for dinner that night, which attracted a good deal of attention, although the Dolder was quite used to strange scenes among its customers and rarely blinked. During my first visit there I had become accustomed to seeing a Baron Rothschild sitting every night at his table, opposite a life-sized blown-up rubber doll dressed in a high-couture Parisian evening gown and covered with large jewels of every description. Other diners and the staff had been careful never to stare. But they did stare at us. I took her to a concert in the town on one of the next two nights and was very nearly late because she had no concept of time. In spite of frequently knocking on her door, she took, to my growing annoyance, for ever to do her make-up, get dressed and be ready to leave. It mattered to her not at all whether she went to the concert or was on time: she was only interested in how she looked and how much attention I was paying to her. Somewhere towards the end of the first week I managed to get into her bed. It was of course wonderful, and my lust seemed inexhaustible. If I did any studying, I cannot remember it.

  I was given her account of why she was in Zurich. She had diverted there because London hotels were all full – so ran her explanation – but as I was soon to learn, it was almost impossible to distinguish the truth from whatever fanciful version of events it suited her to tell at the time. She was a Hollywood star, so she said (starlet would have been a more accurate description), who had had to leave Hollywood because Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM studios, had taken out a contract on her life, the reason being that her mother had tried to blackmail him. It gradually emerged that she had been his mistress, had gone away for a weekend with him, and been slightly injured on the way back in a car crash. Most Hollywood hopefuls in those days had to endure a sexual initiation from agents, producers or studio heads in order to get their start. Friends had helped her to leave Hollywood, so she was now in hiding, but with letters of introduction to film producers in London. She had with her a considerable wardrobe – three mink coats and a sable one – and some jewellery, although it was probably fake. Sense, reason and the ability to think clearly had all deserted me.

  What happened next is that we took a train to Lausanne, spent two days there, mostly making love, then went on to Paris, where after some difficulty we finally found a room at the very old-fashioned Hôtel du Quai d’Orsay, now a museum, but then the station hotel of the Gare d’Orsay, serving the suburbs. The room was enormous, with high ceilings and ornate turn-of-the-century furniture. Hotel service, other than a rest
aurant, was almost non-existent, but the room had a big bed and a bathroom, which was all I needed. But the girl wasn’t happy. She wanted to be in whatever was the most expensive and fashionable hotel, to be looked at and admired. Her name – it has taken me a while to come to that – was Christya Myling, which was in fact a stage name. Her real name was Mary-Ann Simmonds, and gradually I learnt her history. She was born in Brooklyn, the illegitimate daughter of a local woman whose grandfather (or perhaps father) had been a Jewish cantor. Christya’s father, who would not publicly admit anything or recognize her as his daughter, had nevertheless helped her mother financially. He was a lawyer called Fabricant of Swedish origin, which accounted for her very northern looks. The man was apparently dependent on and under the thumb of his own very strict mother, who was the overriding influence in her son’s arms-length stand-offishness. Christya was the girl I had seen playing Regina in Ibsen’s Ghosts in Montreal. She had a book of press cuttings, mainly from Hollywood gossip columnists, because she had never actually made a film, although she had been under contract at different times to several studios. The only cuttings that had anything to do with actual performances were photographs and brief reviews of the touring Ghosts production.