Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  I no longer remember how much rent I paid. It was considerable, but I am sure low for the place I was renting, and I managed to furnish it in suitable style. Philip Frere once invited us to a day at Ascot, which consisted of spending much of it lunching in a private dining room, occasionally going out onto a balcony to watch a race, and having general conversation. We did not go into the Royal Enclosure. It was one of only two days I ever spent at the races, but my presence at other sporting events was no more extensive.

  After a spell at head office, with many days spent back at Rotherhithe, where I was now usually asked to compile statistics, I was sent to Boston to learn from Ashley. This meant living in a hotel at Boston Spa and driving every day to the yard. Christya was hardly ever there, and I would return to London on weekends. I learnt about the treatment of telegraph poles, mainly watching the work and tallying numbers. I spent time with the assistant manager, calling on customers and meeting suppliers of machinery and other necessities, and I also spent time with a salesman called Reggie Graves, with whom I got on well, but whose sales techniques I was sure I could improve upon. I noticed his extreme nervousness before each appointment: he would sit still for a moment in the car to order his thoughts and screw his courage up for the coming encounter – made no easier, I am sure, by having to drag me along with him. So passed the summer of 1950.

  In the autumn I was back at Eros House, but was sent out for half of the week to learn about making boxes at the factory at Peasmarch, near Guildford. There I watched the construction of beer crates, mineral-water crates, ammunition boxes for the army and various other wooden containers. Most of it was done on an assembly line, but some special orders were knocked together by hand. This was under Philip Rann’s jurisdiction, and he came down about once a fortnight, had a long boozy lunch with the manager, greeted me briefly if he saw me and returned to London.

  Again my time was largely spent compiling statistics, as I had to do something other than just watch, but I also now started writing some advertising and promotional copy. That was the winter of 1950–51, during which I was often sent out by Vogel to sell in London’s East End to furniture-makers. The buyers made constant mischievous complaints about the quality and the quantity of the hardwood that arrived, trying to get the invoice reduced, which Vogel then had to sort out. In spite of the difficulties, I did reasonably well, and I was also selling to builders, mainly joists and scaffold boards. I was never quite sure whether Vogel saw his interest in discrediting me with my uncle, as Rann would have liked to do, or in binding me to him as an ally. Perhaps a bit of both. He was still the only director I saw socially, except for Ashley, during my time in Boston, and then not often. Ashley was certainly not a stimulating conversationalist. I remember him showing me a long-past wedding present from my uncle, a set of silver-plated cutlery in a fitted box. It was heavily tarnished and had never been used.

  The publishing company, John Calder (Publishers) Ltd, had in the meantime accepted a number of books, one of which I have mentioned earlier. One day Eric Turrell handed me a manuscript whose title I forget, about the current London scene. Reading it I realized that the author could only be Eric himself. He had given it to me saying only, “This came in. I thought it rather good. What do you think?” Not only was the hero an amalgam of Eric himself and other recognizable members of his circle, but there was an accurate portrait of his current girlfriend, while incidents related were very close to the amorous problems of Eric’s friends. There was also a heavily disguised picture of myself and Christya.

  “Eric,” I said the next day, “the novel’s not bad, but how would you react if I suggested publishing my own poetry? We can’t start a publishing company by publishing ourselves.”

  He swore that he had not written it, but very unconvincingly, and in the ensuing quarrel said that he would not stay unless he had editorial control. Just then I was seeing a little of the above-mentioned poetry editor Howard Sargeant and, largely at the bidding of Christya, suggested that he might like to join us. There was a board meeting with a formal agenda I had drawn up, and Eric supported the idea of bringing Howard on board, but he still wanted editorial control. In the end he resigned and Howard warily declined as well.

  Two publishers whom I had met were then consulted. One was George Weidenfeld, then living at Eaton Place. He was mainly interested in getting my uncle to put money into some Israeli venture of his, but I could certainly make no promise there. He had recently been a secretary-advisor to Chaim Weizmann, President of Israel, and was heavily involved in Israeli politics. He had teamed up with Nigel Nicolson, an establishment figure and son of Sir Harold, the diplomat and author, and of Victoria Sackville-West: Weidenfeld & Nicolson were beginning to become known. I remember George waving his arms around in his living room as he told me he was thinking of making “a Victorian-Edwardian marriage”, by which he meant that he was hoping to marry the daughter of Marcus Sieff of Marks & Spencer, with whom he had already negotiated a deal to produce popular classics for their chain stores under the imprint Contact Books. It was obviously money, not love, which was the incentive, and the marriage did take place, but was eventually dissolved.

  The other publisher was André Deutsch. André had been sales manager of a technical publishing house, Ernest Benn, which among other things published the trade journal of the timber trade in which I was otherwise engaged. He had started Alan Wingate Ltd some two years earlier with a number of other directors, one of whom was Anthony Gibb, the son of Sir Philip Gibb, the historian. I had a meeting with Anthony, an English gentleman of the old school, and quickly came to the conclusion that he didn’t like foreigners, especially Jews, such as André, who was a of Hungarian origins. As more investors were introduced into Alan Wingate, all with directorships, most of them in the same mould as Gibb, André’s position in the company he had founded became ever more untenable, and eventually he had to leave. Then he raised funds, largely through the agency of the publishing solicitor Stanley Rubinstein, and started André Deutsch Ltd, just at the time when Eric Turrell and I were breaking up.

  We made a deal, and he moved into my basement. He would have free rent in return for being the caretaker of my fledgling publishing company, and we agreed to share a secretary. This was at the time when my days were spent at Eros House or at Rotherhithe. I would tear back in the late afternoon to get some letters out and deal with business matters, but André was not very cooperative. Stella, our joint secretary, was always loaded up with his work, and everything she did for him was urgent, while my affairs could wait. André had also developed a crush on Christya, which she did not encourage. When, after a few months, he left, it was with more insults directed towards her than me.

  He did, however, prosper. Both he and Weidenfeld, as well as some other publishers who had arrived in Britain in the Thirties as refugees, were able to use their knowledge of German to get books for translation from old Nazis, which had a ready sale. Deutsch’s great coup was in publishing the memoirs of Von Papen, Hitler’s foreign minister, and selling serial rights for a large amount to a Sunday newspaper. By publishing books by prominent new German politicians he made himself well known in Germany, so he had first refusal on potentially best-selling titles.

  It was around that time that I met Neville Armstrong, one of three partners in a small and very new publishing company, Peter Neville. Neville Armstrong and Peter Owen had put their first names together to form the imprint; the other partner was Malcolm Kirk, an accountant, who looked after the financial side. Armstrong and Peter Owen had recently fallen out, as happens more often than not in publishing, and the former had started Neville Spearman Ltd. Neville’s background was in the theatre (he had been a theatre manager and looked very much like one), and at about this time he had rented the Bolton’s Theatre Club, a small theatre in Chelsea, where he was mounting a season of modern drama with Basil Ashbourne as his artistic director. I went there to see Henry James’s play Guy Domville, with th
at fine actor Hugh Burdon, later to play Vladimir in Waiting for Godot, in the cast – and this was to be followed by Dulcinée by André Obey. Hoping to attract some money from me to channel into his theatre, he proposed casting Christya in the main part. There were negotiations, but for reasons that have escaped my memory – probably difficulties brought about by her – this never happened, although at one point she was certainly attending rehearsals. But Armstrong also made me a publishing proposal, which I considerably modified, whereby we could publish a list under a joint imprint, and this became Spearman and Calder – not a limited company, but a partnership of two existing companies to publish a number of books together.

  It was Neville Armstrong who then brought me a number of unpublished translations from the Russian made by April FitzLyon and her husband Kyril, whose real name was Zinovieff. I met this extraordinary couple, he a Russian aristocrat who worked at the Foreign Office, she a trained musician who had never entered the profession, but had learnt Russian from his mother and spoke several other languages. I was to retain a friendly contact with them until April’s death in 1999.

  The first joint lists of Spearman and Calder contained the FitzLyons’ joint translations of two novellas by Tolstoy, Family Happiness and The Devil, April’s translation of a collection of previously untranslated Chekhov short stories, The Woman in the Case, and Kyril’s English rendering of Dostoevsky’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, the last in a particularly elegant edition with a cover design and illustrations by Philippe Jullien. They were well reviewed by Desmond McCarthy in the Sunday Times and went through several impressions. Spearman was not involved in this last project, because by then we had broken up. Among the other, rather bizarre, volumes that appeared under the joint imprint were books Armstrong had acquired, where I agreed to take my share of the risk in order to fill up the catalogue. There was a book on cooking with beer and another on crocheting and needlework, both of which did fairly well. Titles that Armstrong found and thought the most commercially viable he kept to himself. We also, and this was our very first joint title, published an unexpurgated edition of The Satyricon of Petronius in English, which was both risqué and risky. Other editions had left the most erotic passages in Latin.

  Armstrong took on the responsibility for distribution, while I did most of the editorial work. The stock was housed with a trade distributor. My arrangement was that Armstrong would get most of the production money out first, but I would get more of the profit if the books did well, which they usually did. I forget exactly why we separated – there were many disagreements, most of them about money and the agreed division of it – but when we did, I made a deal with Arco Publications, run by an East End cockney called Bernard Hannison, soon to give up publishing for property speculation, to which he was probably better suited.

  I was living different and parallel lives, but I seemed to have time for everything, although somewhere in the late winter of 1950 I had a bad bout of yellow jaundice, which kept me for at least two weeks in bed. It was also during that January that I decided to give up smoking. I did it by forcing myself not to smoke during the day (in those days smoking in the office was not allowed, and it would have been dangerous in a timber yard), and in the evening I put severe restraints on the conditions under which I would smoke. For one week it was only while sitting on the side of the bath, which was boring, so the cigarette was quickly extinguished. During the second week I made myself go down into the street and smoke there. It was a cold January, so that too was short-lived. The third week I picked a spot some two hundred yards away where I would allow myself to smoke out on a cold corner, and the discomfort quickly put paid to that. The fourth week I went to stay with my grandfather at Ardargie, where no one was allowed to smoke. After that the habit was gone, although for at least a year I still dreamt about smoking.

  There was always time for holidays. I would go shooting at Ledlanet during the grouse season for a week. The first time, I remember a particularly hot and gruelling day, up and down steep hills in the heather. By the late afternoon I was puffing badly. I overheard one of the guns say to his neighbour, “Young Calder looks a bit tired.”

  “Fucked out, poor chap,” said the other. “What do you expect with a wife like that?” Christya was staying too, and she looked very different from the other wives in the house party, who took care not to associate with her any more than was necessary.

  I managed to go skiing at Val d’Isère with Jacques Chaix, which soon became an annual ritual, and that same year, in the summer of 1950, I went to Italy and travelled around the north in a hired Topolino. This trip culminated in a strange week in Rapallo. There, Christya refused to stay in the small hotel we had booked and moved to the grandest, a palatial establishment overlooking the town and bay. After two days we had to move to another floor because King Farouk of Egypt had arrived with his yacht and his entourage. They took over a whole floor of the hotel and would feast all night and sleep all day. Egyptian guards with sub-machine guns patrolled the corridors. That August we also went to the Edinburgh Festival for the first time. We saw a performance of Ariadne auf Naxos at Glyndebourne, and The Marriage of Figaro at the King’s Theatre. It was an unforgettable performance of the first version of Ariadne, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham: the opera was set into a shortened version of Molière’s play, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, with the appropriate accompanying orchestral music, and Miles Malleson in the lead.

  My grandfather then offered me an old Vauxhall car if I would pick it up in Alloa. Although it was constantly breaking down, it was useful at the festival and afterwards I drove it to London, stopping at Newcastle and Doncaster overnight on the way. It looked very out of place among the Bentleys and Sunbeam-Talbots of Belgrave Square, but it meant that I could often drive to Rotherhithe instead of taking the Tube.

  In 1952, or it may have been slightly earlier, I met a man called Sinclair, who answered an advertisement I had placed looking for a partner in publishing. I forget if money was the main reason for the advert, but I remember having several telephone conversations at the time with possible investors. Sinclair turned out to have a half-interest in a printing press at 22 Cross Street in Islington, in which his principal partner was a publisher of rather fundamentalist religious books called Parry Jackman. Jackman was very Welsh and very smooth in his own way. He was an artist of sorts and employed other artists to illustrate some of his books and others which he packaged, and at some point in our negotiations he persuaded me to produce a children’s book on the lives of some popular saints with coloured illustrations in the manner of a children’s bible. This later appeared in 1957 under the Acorn Press imprint, a small publisher of children’s books which I acquired somewhere in the middle Fifties. Jackman was a member of the Author’s Club, where I had met T.S. Eliot, whom I occasionally saw again when Jackman brought me. Jackman used the club above all to impress his American clients, who sold the books he produced for them in the Bible Belt. I discovered that one of his ploys was to go to religious lectures, tape them secretly, and then produce a book without notifying the lecturer that he was using his work. Such is the nature of that particular fraternity that he could usually rely, when found out, on the author’s vanity having been satisfied, offering copies of the book in compensation. My negotiations with Sinclair led me to acquire a printing press – one more activity in addition to those I was already engaged in, and soon one more worry.

  I then found myself dealing with sellers of second-hand printing machinery, paper merchants and, of course, the printing unions. And I had to keep the presses busy, not just by printing for myself. In fact I printed very few books that I was publishing and mainly did work for other clients. I think it was through Baron, the photographer, that I met Richard Buckle, a ballet critic, who wrote for the Observer and edited Ballet Magazine, for which I acquired the contract to print it monthly. One of its backers was the Earl of Harewood, who having started to contribute an opera column to Ballet, then
started Opera magazine as a sister publication in 1950, employing Harold Rosenthal as assistant editor. He was then the archivist of the Royal Opera House and he was the one who did all the work in practice. I had to make sure that the two magazines were produced by the end of every month, and soon I also had a contract to print for the British Film Institute: this included their bulletins and the monthly magazine Sight and Sound. I found a manager, but was myself frequently in the plant, which ran between Cross Street and the street immediately north of it, just off Upper Street. When there was a dispute between the machine minders and the compositors, the latter were not allowed by the machine minders to pass through their part of the premises to get to the lavatory. This meant that they had to go out into the street and walk about two hundred yards to go round the corner into the next street and come in by the back door to use the facility, and then return the same way, a considerable loss of time, made worse in winter or wet weather by having to put on extra clothing for the trip. Eventually I sold part of the company to a young man who ended up buying me out.