by John Calder
“Mr Calder.”
“Yes.”
“Am I talking to John Calder, the publisher?”
“You are. How can I help you?”
“I understand you intend to publish a book about the Rosenberg case.”
“Yes, I am. I consider it an important book.”
“Mr Calder, I must advise you not to publish that book. It contains serious libels.”
“Who is libelled?”
“Mr Herbert Brownell is libelled for one. He will sue you personally if you publish that book.”
The official, whoever he was, would not give his name, and I ignored the matter at first, but then as a precaution I bought a defunct publishing company off the hook and used it to publish the Wexley book. It was the only publication to ever appear from Bookville Publishers Ltd. There was no libel case, very few sales and I cannot remember if there were any British reviews – certainly no prominent ones. But there must still be copies in the more important libraries, and I was pleased to have published it. It may yet get republished.
I am not sure how I came to publish Paul Baran’s Political Economy of Growth. My own grounding in economics at Zurich had given me an ongoing interest in the subject, but more from a political and academic point of view than from its application to business, which was Saitzev’s speciality. I do not remember ever meeting Baran, and it was probably offered to me by Huberman, because he later wrote a book about the author. But I do remember reading it and being much impressed. The author was Professor of Economics at Stanford when he completed it in 1955, then the only left-thinking academic in such a post in the United States. I published the book in London two years later. He was of course under major attack, but he was immensely popular with students and, having tenure, the university found it impossible to fire him without losing face. He had been a more than impressive official during the war with the OSS, the American wartime intelligence, and John Kenneth Galbraith in his memoirs praises him highly, saying that this Russian-born Jewish-Polish immigrant to the US, a slovenly soldier who never rose above the rank of technical sergeant in the American army, but had played a major role in investigating the effectiveness of Allied bombing during the war and questioning Nazi officials, “was one of the most brilliant and, by a wide margin, the most interesting economist I have ever known”.6
Let me offer the reader a single Baran quote from the last paragraph of his book:
“To contribute to the emergence of a society in which development will supplant stagnation, in which growth will take the place of decay, and in which culture will put an end to barbarism, is the noblest and indeed the only true function of intellectual endeavour.”
From the mainstream commercial publisher Putnam, soon to apply political censorship to their own list, I acquired a good novel about the witch-hunt then going on in Eastern American universities. Entitled The Searching Light, it was written by the daughter of an American ambassador, Martha Dodd, who had been fired from her own university as a radical thinker. I followed this with The Unamericans by Alvah Bessie, who had been one of the Hollywood Ten, and whose brother Michael Bessie was soon to emerge as one of the most interesting of a new generation of American publishers. I published four novels by Lars Lawrence, the pen name of an established writer, Philip Stevenson, also under a witch-hunt cloud, brought to my attention by his friend Albert Maltz, another of the Hollywood Ten. Two of them had appeared in the States under the imprint of International Publishers, which was a Marxist imprint run by the colourful Alexander Trachtenberg. This latter had established his firm in 1924 and had flourished up to the advent of McCarthyism, being one of the only publishers willing to publish black authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois and histories of labour struggles in the US, as well as the works of Lenin, Trotsky and Bukharin. He was jailed about the time I was corresponding with him, under the Smith Act, which by implication convicted people of conspiring to overthrow the American government by force through the contents of the books they published. I sometimes wondered in those days why publishers of crime fiction were not prosecuted for advocating murder. Lars Lawrence wrote in the tradition of John Steinbeck, and his novels about industrial exploitation in New Mexico were intended to be published as a trilogy under the title The Seed, each part to consist of two large volumes. The first two I imported in sheet form, the second two were set and printed in England (Trachtenberg being then, I now presume, incapable of publishing anything), while the third – and I here hang my head – was probably lost when we moved offices in late 1962. Our building was to be demolished in the next few days, and tons of paper, including some unpublished manuscripts mixed up with submissions went missing in the rubble. The third part, to be called The Sowing, barring some miracle, is now lost for ever.
We also published two novels by Albert Maltz himself. One came through Angus Cameron, A Long Day in a Short Life, set in a prison and exposing American racialist attitudes. The second, which was about two people who manage to escape from Auschwitz at the end of the war and fall in love, but do not survive, was published only by me. Maltz would turn up periodically in London, bringing manuscripts, looking with some dismay at other authors we were publishing such as Beckett, who, he did not realize, was exploring much of the same vein as himself, but in a very different way.
Angus Cameron, after leaving Little, Brown, now started Cameron and Kahn with financial help from Albert Kahn, a best-selling writer of political books. This soon became Cameron Associates, and eventually Cameron and Marzani. Cameron came from Indianapolis from mixed Scottish, Irish and German bloodstock, one of his ancestors having fought at Culloden. He had been a bookseller as well as a publisher. He had a fiercely independent nature, and built up a sizeable list of books that could no longer find publishers on Madison Avenue, many of which came to me. I also imported small quantities of his titles, whose British sales would not exceed a hundred copies, mainly to be sold to libraries and the political bookshops. In character, Angus made me think of the old Scotsman in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, who being crushed to death, still will not yield. Carl Marzani, his last partner, was an old Marxist who had spent some time in prison on a treason charge, having previously worked for the State Department. Although I became fairly friendly with him, I think Marzani considered me to be an old-fashioned liberal to be treated warily by those further to the left, and no doubt he was right. I.F. Stone, the journalist, whom I first met around this time, disliked him and distrusted him totally.
I came to know many writers in New York, and one was the poet Norman Rosten, a close friend of Arthur Miller’s, whom I subsequently met through him. On one occasion I wanted to see Sean O’Casey’s play Red Roses for Me, but it was about to close, and suddenly there were no seats. I rang Arthur Miller, who said that he had wanted to see it too, and he was able to pull strings to get two seats. Afterwards we discussed it. “I don’t know what it is about that play that appeals to me so much, that makes it different,” he said hesitantly. At that point he and similar playwrights were having to deal with political subjects through metaphor. “Could it be that it simply says what it has to say directly without looking over its shoulder?” I ventured. He nodded his head. “That’s it. None of us dares to be direct any more.”
George Braziller was starting to publish his own list just then. He had been a packer at the Book of the Month Club and had observed how a book-club operation worked. The public that was too lazy to read reviews or form their own judgement of what they wanted to read were happy to allow others, literary critics and editors, to choose their reading for them. What counted to win the trust of members of the Book Club was the prestige of the jury of choosers. Braziller noted that the choices were nearly all best-sellers and required little attention from that jury. What if a prestigious group of literati were to pick books of a higher intellectual calibre that would look well on the shelves of those who wanted to impress? This was the idea behind the Book Find Club that he star
ted, which was brilliantly successful for a while. When it began to decline, due largely to other book clubs starting up, he sold out and began publishing his own trade list, largely books on art, but with some literary titles as well. He had been contacted by Maria Jolas, a forceful, determined lady whose own literary background as the patron of James Joyce and wife of the founder of Transition – the best pre-war English literary journal in Paris – was impeccable. She convinced him to publish Nathalie Sarraute and later Claude Mauriac, as well as other French writers, and he had an editor called Edwin Seaver (no connection with Dick Seaver) to look after the literary part of this list. I had met Braziller at some function and made an appointment to see him in his office early one morning. I was put into his room by a secretary, and Seaver came in to chat for a moment, then left just as the secretary returned to tell me that Braziller had phoned that he was held up, but would get there as soon as possible. Within a minute another man came in and began to talk to me. After a quarter of an hour I said, “I wonder how long Mr Braziller will be?”
He looked at me, and the look was not friendly. “I’m George Braziller,” he said. I apologized for not having recognized him at this second meeting, but he was very annoyed and over the subsequent years I think he always held it against me. He was very sensitive about his lack of higher education and his inability to read other languages, and always on the lookout for snubs. Most of his publishing was to consist of art books bought from other publishers, where the text was less important than the visual appearance, which he could judge without having to read anything. On all our subsequent meetings he had a reserve towards me, and our dealings, mainly over authors where we had separate rights for our respective markets, were always strained.
Angus Cameron was having trouble distributing his books, because booksellers became increasingly nervous of having titles on their shelves that could make them vulnerable to attack. He would advertise in what remained of the left-wing press, such as PM and The National Guardian, both soon to close, and Monthly Review. He started the Liberty Book Club so that he could get subscribers and send books through the US mail. But it was difficult, and he eventually handed the whole thing over to Marzani, finding a position, although only a junior one, with Knopf. I received books from other publishers, and one that did well was Fräulein (1957), a novel about the fall of Berlin to the Russians, by James McGovern. It sold several editions, probably because of the raunchy rape scenes. We followed it with another novel by the same author, No Ruined Castles, in 1958.
The success of the Opera Annual gave me the idea of publishing a similar volume to cover the theatre, and I approached the drama critic I admired most, Harold Hobson, whose column appeared weekly in the Sunday Times, to edit an International Theatre Annual. Harold was another enthusiastic personality, and the first annual appeared in 1957. It was followed in subsequent years by a Concert-Goer’s Annual, edited by Evan Senior, who also edited the monthly magazine Music and Musicians; a Film Annual, edited by William Whitebait (the pseudonym of Campbell Dixon, reviewer for the Daily Telegraph,) and an International Literary Annual, edited by John Wain (the novelist, poet and Oxford don). But Hobson did more than edit my annual: he was then the most ardent advocate in London of the current French theatre, and he brought new authors to my attention, the most important of them being Eugène Ionesco. I frequently met Hobson in Paris and would go to the theatre with him. Together we saw The Chairs and The Lesson, a double bill at the Théatre de la Huchette, and I tracked down the author, who was beginning to earn just enough to give up teaching, but still lived in a rather humble Paris suburb. I offered to publish him in English, but he was nervous of committing himself as he did not yet have a French publisher. It was only when Gallimard had taken him on that I was able to get a contract for English-language translation, signed with them.
Hobson’s French was not very fluent. I went several times with him to see Edwige Feuillère in different plays, but mainly La Dame aux camélias, one of her greatest roles. To say that he was in love with her would be an understatement: he worshipped the air around her and the earth under her feet. On two occasions he took us both to lunch at Le Grand Véfour, the fashionable restaurant near the Palais Royal, so that I could keep her in conversation while he looked and worshipped. He was later to write a book about her that I would have published had it been less of a hagiography. It was actually announced in my catalogue for 1959, and I rather regret not having published it now. I have produced worse books: it could have been salvaged with heavy editing, as Lockspeiser had done with Henri Hell’s Poulenc biography, and it would have given Hobson much pleasure.
Harold Hobson was a remarkable character. As a child he had been stricken with polio, which stunted his growth, so that he was only four feet high at most and walked with great difficulty, using two sticks. He had very bright eyes, always searching, observing, and usually mischievous. His mother had belonged to the Christian Science Church, and it was her faith, so he believed, that had pulled him through the polio and saved his life. He still adhered to Christian Science and was London drama critic for the Christian Science Monitor in Boston as well as for the Sunday Times. He was open-minded and perceptive as a critic, and also unusually kind, especially to new playwrights. His taste was catholic in every sense: he enjoyed musicals and farces as well as Shakespeare and the great classical dramas of past and present. He had a particular passion for French theatre and would go to see the Comédie Française’s productions of Molière and Marivaux, and to the boulevard theatres to see Anouilh, Sartre and Feydeau, but also to the pocket theatres to see the new emerging playwrights of the avant-garde: Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov and Duras, all of whom he promoted in his Sunday Times column. The French theatre came up very often in his reviews, but so did every kind of play: he was a genuine eclectic who loved the theatre, bending over backwards to be kind and to register the best aspects of plays that were mediocre. Unlike Kenneth Tynan, soon to become theatre critic of the Observer, he never tried to show off his cleverness by recourse to cruel invective, or by satirizing material whose meaning had eluded him.
Harold Hobson and I lunched often as we became both collaborators and friends: he frequented the best restaurants, provided he could get his car parked and didn’t have to deal with steps to get to his table. We went regularly to the Caprice, the Ivy and sometimes to the Ritz Restaurant overlooking Green Park. Once I was walking down Piccadilly and heard my name called. He had stopped his car across the street and was beckoning to me. When I reached the window, he handed me sixpence, which on a previous occasion I must have lent him for a telephone call, with a mischievous smile. “I won’t have you saying I don’t pay my debts.” He twinkled at me and drove on. The International Theatre Annual came out for seven years and then stopped for reasons I will explain later. Hobson also wrote an excellent history of the French theatre, which I published in 1978 and which continued to sell slowly for many years after his death.
I also saw Harold Rosenthal quite frequently, but never became intimate with the other editors of the annuals. John Wain I found to be rather in the mould of Sir John Squire, very English in a pub-loving, xenophobic, academically stilted way. He was pleasant enough, but like the other members of “The Movement”, which had attracted some attention in the early Fifties, he was limited in his thinking and knowledge, and opposed to the avant-garde. Nevertheless, he did a good job with the three issues of the International Literary Annual which appeared.
* * *
I was at home with Christya one Sunday afternoon when the doorbell rang and in walked my old university friend Dick Soukup. With him was Su Kleinert, whom he had once asked me to discourage. They were married now. Su kissed me and whispered in my ear that the drunken evening in Zurich, when I had disobeyed Dick’s instructions, had been the real cause of her sticking to him. Now they were happily married. They stayed an hour and, although we spoke once or twice on the telephone, I never saw them again. Our worlds were too diffe
rent now.
It was the summer of 1956 in which Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge was being produced in London. Since I knew him from New York and had kept up a correspondence with him, he invited me to the opening, asking me to telephone him at the Savoy Hotel. He had only recently married Marilyn Monroe, and this put him doubly on the map. He asked me to come round for breakfast on the morning of the opening, and I was shown into their suite, where Marilyn stayed in bed drinking coffee and chatting to us, while Arthur and I sat at the table over breakfast. I cannot remember the conversation, but even at that time of the morning she was stunning.
I waited in the foyer of the theatre (I think it was the Comedy) to say hello, but I couldn’t get anywhere near them. There was a battery of photographers, blinding TV lights and film cameras, and when they entered the theatre, he in a white dinner jacket, she in a white sequinned full-length dress that looked as if it had been sewn onto her, it was as if the Gods of Olympus had arrived. I think Christya was with me, and if so she must have been very jealous. But I lost touch with Miller after that, partly because from about that time I was going less frequently to New York and had so many other people to see when I did.
There were not that many new friends. Life was too busy, combining publishing with a job in timber which had become increasingly meaningless as the other directors ensured that I was given no further responsibilities. There were plans to move me to a yard at Port Talbot in South Wales, but not in a managerial capacity – and to avoid this I feigned a stomach disorder.