Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  My uncle was now showing his years and couldn’t face the constant pressures from the rival directors, and it was clear that the battle for the future control of the firm had started in earnest. There was a proposal to make a new share issue: this would water down the holdings I had acquired and give Wolfson an opportunity to buy up most of the new shares. Vogel was doing ever more business with Great Universal Stores, and keeping Wolfson happy was important: there was the ever-present danger that Vogel might start a new company and take all his hardwood business away with him, a prospect that would not dismay Rann. My own position was especially precarious, because I had used my shares as collateral to buy more shares. If the price were to fall, my loans would be called in.

  My uncle Jim was no fool, but at his age, he had to believe what it was comfortable to believe, and the possibility of Wolfson buying a block of shares did not seem threatening to him. When I tried to discuss the matter, he would not believe that Wolfson wanted control of the company, but in his heart of hearts he must have known otherwise. Old men who keep active do not necessarily lose their mental powers, but they lose the will to stand up to opposition. My uncle increasingly wanted a quiet life, and it was clear that sooner or later either Wolfson would acquire the company or else Rann would find a way of making a takeover with another backer. Either way I had no future. Aware of this, I devoted ever more time to the publishing company, which now had a list of some hundred and fifty titles. About half of it was fiction, much of it American, but also increasingly European as I acquired French and German books that I had seen reviewed in the literary press or were recommended to me by others, usually authors already published in their own country. Political books tended to have a short life, as national and international issues came and went, so I was publishing fewer of those. The music list was growing and, largely on the contacts I had made through Harold Hobson, I was also publishing plays and books on the theatre.

  One day in 1955 Douglas Mitchell rang me and said he was coming to London. Could we go to the theatre together? He wanted to see Waiting for Godot, which I had already seen once and liked, but with a very limited understanding of what it all meant. Hobson was the only British critic who had given the play a good review, and he had returned to see it again and again, advocating it to his readers more strongly each time, while Kenneth Tynan denigrated it as pointless nonsense. Tynan at this point was mainly interested in plays that showed an obvious political commitment, and was beginning to champion Brecht, still unknown in Britain. I went with Douglas to see Godot, and on this second viewing the power and beauty of Beckett’s masterpiece, in Peter Hall’s first English production, hit me with all its force.

  The next day I telephoned the theatre to ask where I could get the publishing rights. I was given an address in Paris, that of Éditions de Minuit, and I wrote to ask for English rights. But the address was wrong and the letter went unanswered. My second letter arrived some weeks later, and on the same day, but by a later post, as a similar letter from Faber and Faber. As Faber’s letter had arrived first, Jérôme Lindon, the publisher of Minuit, sold the play to them. In the meantime, I somehow managed to get Samuel Beckett’s Paris address and wrote asking if I could meet him, saying I was often in Paris. He wrote back by return, asking me to ring him when I was next over. A few days later I telephoned him from London, went to Paris and we had dinner together. We talked about many things, and walked around Montparnasse afterwards, drinking beer in a café and playing chess. We ended up having breakfast near Montparnasse station and then separated. I was aware that I had had an exciting night of conversation on many subjects of common interest – literature, music, drama, politics, the state of the world and personalities who interested us – and that I had met a remarkable man. We were to remain friends until he died in 1989, but the one thing he would not discuss with me were his publishing rights. He would be very happy to have me as his publisher, but he had delegated all the decision-making to Lindon. When, a few days later, we both realized that Lindon had accepted an offer from Faber to publish Waiting for Godot, he told me not to worry. Faber would lose money on him, and he did not expect the limited success of that one play to be repeated; we would enjoy a better friendship if we didn’t have a business relationship. For many years he had been totally unsuccessful as a writer, and he did not expect what he regarded as a flash in the pan to augur well for the success of his other writings.

  I have often been asked what we talked about all night on that first occasion when we met and on many later occasions. I simply cannot remember. We talked about life certainly, its pointlessness, the cruelty of man to man, the politics of the time, and mostly about the Algerian war which preoccupied all of France. And we also talked about suicide, although it was later, just after the death of Hemingway by his own hand, that we spent an entire night discussing the subject, considering in particular how to accomplish such an act properly in a way which wouldn’t inconvenience others. There were many paradoxes and dichotomies that came out of his conversation, but when challenged he would shrug off contradictions. I realized that in Godot he had identified one great current anxiety, one which is more applicable to the twentieth century, with its greater growth of awareness and loss of religious belief, than to previous ones: the fear of being totally anonymous, of being born, going through life and dying, without leaving a single trace of one’s short existence on this planet. The idea of falling back into the nothingness from which we all come both attracted and frightened him. He spoke approvingly of the Marquis de Sade’s last testament, where he asked to be buried in an unmarked grave in a wilderness. Sam’s extreme honesty with himself, especially when looking at the unpleasant aspects of reality, was like rubbing salt in the wound. But he always saw both sides. On another occasion, some years later, I had dinner with Jean-Claude Fasquelle, publisher at Grasset, and a group that included Roger Vailland, best-selling novelist and author of the macho novel La Loi. Vailland, looking like a skeleton, almost hairless from chemiotherapy, and smoking incessantly, was dying of cancer and everyone knew it, but he was clinging to the hope that he would be cured. The whole table was reassuring him and acting as if it was just another literary evening of gossip and exchange of ideas. When I said to Sam at dinner the next night that I thought it a pity to witness such hypocrisy – surely Roger Vailland had a right to confront reality and not be given false hopes – he turned on me: “Another fucking moralist,” he said.

  * * *

  During a visit to New York I called on a publisher called Ken McCormick, of Doubleday. He told me of a new publisher whom he suggested I should contact, as he was engaged in a very similar enterprise to myself. His name was Barney Rosset, and his new publishing company was called Grove Press. I found him in a small office on Fifth Avenue and we had a chat. A little later, getting back to my hotel, which in those days was the Gotham, I received a phone call from Barney. Was I free for dinner? I was, and he came around at dinner time with an attractive and very well-groomed blonde called Link, an artist and his girlfriend at the time. We had dinner at the Coq d’Or, very near my hotel, and we talked about books, places we had been and politics. He brought up the name of Beckett, whom I now had contact with as a friend, but not as an author. Barney had recently signed up his pre-war novel Murphy, apparently on the advice of Sylvia Beach. On a visit to New York, she had told him about Beckett as a pre-war friend and disciple of James Joyce. Sylvia had done so much to help Joyce, publishing Ulysses and Finnegans Wake from her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company on the Rue de l’Odéon. Barney had acquired world rights to Murphy. He also had the rights to Beckett’s little book on Proust, first published in 1930.

  I read Murphy, which was new to me. I had up till then, of Beckett’s novels, only read the three volumes which became known as The Trilogy, all written in French, which I assumed would eventually appear in translation under the Faber imprint. Barney did not know them, and he was unable to read French.

  During my rem
aining days in New York on that trip I had several more meetings with Barney, always at night – and very late nights they were: dinner followed by the bars and jazz clubs of lower Manhattan. I began to learn more about this unusual and enthusiastic man. His father had been a banker in Chicago – Jewish, but a Catholic convert – and his mother was first-generation Irish. He told me that he disliked Jews on high holidays because in some ways they got in the way of his pleasures, and the Irish on St Patrick’s Day because they fouled up the traffic with their parade. He was a rebel against all authority, and could afford to be, because his father had left him several fortunes, which came to him on key birthdays between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. He had been seventeen when his father died, but by the time I met him he had already received two or three tranches of the money, each consisting of several million dollars. He was obviously spending it as fast as possible, on his personal pleasures, a luxurious property on Long Island and on things that interested him – but he was not generous to others beyond paying for meals. The things that interested him were sex, politics and publishing, in that order.

  When I returned to England, I had an arrangement to import his editions of several titles that were appearing as Evergreen Books, a paperback series in what was then called an “egg-head” format, larger than the mass-market paperback. These included his Evergreen Review, a magazine of avant-garde writing, of which No. 2, devoted to ’Pataphysics, had just appeared. The twenty or so first titles that came in included Murphy and Proust, and later I contracted the exclusive British rights, the first from Grove Press, the second from Beckett himself. This enabled me a year or so later to produce my own British editions, the first in 1963, the second two years later. The reason for the delay was shortage of money at that point. I sold many thousands of the Evergreen editions in the meantime.

  When on my return I told Beckett that I had met Barney and would be selling two of his publications at least, he was very pleased, and it was shortly afterwards that I received a telephone call from him one day to say that Faber were not willing to publish the French novels, which they considered obscene and possibly prosecutable. If I was still interested, I should speak to Lindon, he suggested, and I immediately did. Jérôme Lindon saw no reason to stall and offered me a contract for Malone meurt and L’Innommable, the last two parts of the trilogy; he had sold the first novel Molloy to Olympia Press. Barney acquired the same rights for the US, and we then had to work out how to acquire Molloy.

  Molloy, like Beckett’s first post-war novel Watt, had been published by Olympia because of Maurice Girodias’s connection with the Merlin group. That story is well documented in my history of the literary adventurers who brought the post-war publishing scene back to life after 1950,7 but I will briefly recount the details here.

  Maurice Girodias, who was eventually to become a good friend, but not one I could trust very far where business was concerned, was the son of Jack Kahane, who had left a family business in Manchester to come to France after the First World War and had started a publishing company called the Obelisk Press together with a French partner, a Monsieur Person. Kahane wanted to publish unconventional literature and also write it, which he did under the pen name Cecil Barr. The purpose of the enterprise was to take advantage of the extreme prudishness of British and American laws on obscenity and to publish books in English which couldn’t be published in the countries of their authors. The difference between the partners was that Kahane had an eye for quality, while Person was only after profit; the latter’s taste was for bodice-ripping novels describing female underwear in detail, rather like the risqué French postcards and popular paintings sold in reproductions to tourists. Kahane, having published books that included Norman Douglas’s South Wind and Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool, and the scandalous reminiscences of Frank Harris, was suddenly offered Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. He recognized its quality and originality, but it took him over two years to pluck up the courage to bring out a book that really would shake the dovecotes, and then only after Anaïs Nin – Miller’s close friend and occasional lover – offered to subsidize the printing costs.

  Jack Kahane died at the very beginning of the Second World War, and his elder son, Maurice, who had worked part-time as a teenager for his father and had designed the first cover for Tropic of Cancer, hoped to keep the firm going, Monsieur Person having departed some time earlier. But the German occupation, which forced Maurice to change his Jewish name to Girodias, his mother’s, made a literary career impossible. During the war years Maurice Girodias survived by turning his hand to any enterprise enabling him to live without papers, always in fear of being stopped in the street and searched, and taking the metro in constant danger of being trapped, but at the Liberation he started to publish art books. A series of misfortunes (he was a bad business man and easily deceived by flattery and empty promises) led to his losing everything, but he started again with a new imprint, Olympia Press, which published some later Miller novels and made many discoveries among anglophone writers whose work was too daring for London or New York, while at the same time collaborating and often sharing offices with Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who was busy publishing semi-clandestine editions of the Marquis de Sade and other erotic out-of-copyright French classics. Girodias found in Austryn Wainhouse, the literary and unconventional son of an American diplomat, a translator for Sade. At that point the French authorities were little interested in what appeared in English in France. Girodias had two imprints: Ophelia Press for straight pornography and Olympia for erotic works with some literary quality. The latter appeared in a distinctive green-cover Traveller’s Companion series, and sometimes in hardcover as well.

  Girodias had noticed a group of English-speaking expatriates who frequented the cheaper cafés of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and discovered that they were all literary hopefuls, some of them putting out a magazine called Merlin. The guiding spirit was Alexander Trocchi, a Scot of Italian parentage on his father’s side, a former brilliant student of Philosophy at Glasgow University, who had received a special grant to travel and write, and was now living impecuniously in Paris. He was extremely ambitious and convinced that his chance to forge a big literary career for himself would come. That chance, up to a point, came when Girodias, in return for subsidising Merlin, commissioned the young hopefuls to write pornographic novels for him. Some of them became erotic classics of their kind, and a few others major modern literary works. Trocchi was the most prolific as well as the leader of the group, and he churned out a series of sado-masochistic fictions under a number of pen names, which included Francis Lengel and Carmencita de la Lunas. Many of these were commercially published, often in pirate editions, under his own name after his death. Trocchi also became a friend, advisor and purveyor of ideas to Girodias. Both liked good food and wine, and Alex took full advantage of his host’s generous nature.

  One American in the group was Richard Seaver, who lived on the Rue de Sabot with his girlfriend, a French violinist who later became his wife. Their room, over a junk shop filled with African antiquities, became the meeting place where the Merlin editors planned successive issues of the magazine. The Rue de Sabot is just around the corner from the Rue Bernard-Palissy, where the offices of Éditions de Minuit have a display window with their new publications. It was there that Seaver saw the first French copies of Samuel Beckett’s novels displayed, and he went in and bought them. As a result he and Alex Trocchi read them and became enthusiastic fans of the Irish writer, about whom they otherwise knew nothing. They persuaded Girodias to give them the funds to acquire English-language rights to Molloy and to publish the second issue of Merlin, which appeared in the autumn of 1952 containing a perceptive article by Seaver on Beckett.

  Seaver managed to get to the radio recording of the parts of Godot that Roger Blin, then looking for the money to stage the play in Paris, had persuaded an avant-garde programme of the French radio to broadcast, and he hoped to meet the author, but the shy Becke
tt, very typically, did not attend. When they did meet, it was unconventional and brief. Seaver had been translating Beckett’s nouvelles (short stories), and he was told by Jérôme Lindon that there was a manuscript of an unpublished novel in English. A letter was sent to Beckett enquiring after it, and shortly afterwards, during an editorial meeting of Merlin on a rainy afternoon on the Rue de Sabot, there was a knock on the door. Beckett was standing outside. No one recognized him, but he handed in a parcel with a brief word and left. The group started reading the contents of the parcel, the yellowing manuscript of Watt, aloud to each other. They were soon convulsed in laughter. An extract appeared in the third issue of Merlin, and the whole novel was published by Olympia Press in Collection Merlin, a series financed by Girodias in return for receiving a steady flow of pornographic manuscripts from the editorial group that put the magazine together.8 Girodias later republished Watt as part of his Traveller’s Companion series, not mentioning the previous editions on his copyright page. I eventually acquired the rights to both Molloy and Watt for British publication, but this was some years later.

  When I did finally convince Girodias to subcontract Molloy to me and to Grove Press for the United States, I was at last able to publish the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable as a single volume, in accordance with Beckett’s wishes. This happened in 1959, after long negotiation: Girodias was persuaded when I had the idea of having three editions of the trilogy available, allowing all three novels to be published by Olympia in addition to Barney’s and my own. Buyers of the Traveller’s Companion edition (now quite valuable in the rare-book market) must have been very puzzled to read Beckett’s view of life as seen through the eyes of those at the margins of society in a series intended to create sexual excitement. For some time I imported and sold the Grove Press edition of Watt in Britain, and produced my own edition only as late as 1963. The first Beckett publication that appeared under my own imprint was Malone Dies in 1959.