Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  My own list was filling out with American imports, sometimes sheets bound up with my own imprint and price, but part of the American printing, sometimes whole series in the American edition, stickered over with the British price. From Barney Rosset I began to import several hundred copies of each new Evergreen title, and these included the novels of Henry James and Herman Melville, both of whom had been published by Grove Press before Barney Rosset bought the company while still a student. From Hill & Wang, New York drama publishers, I imported a series of drama books, mainly plays from the Jacobean and classical repertoire. I also bought a large quantity of sheets of an Encyclopaedia of the Opera, edited by an American anthologist of popular books on music, David Ewen, which sold well. I had published a few children’s books as well, some of them packaged by Parry Jackman. One of them, a book called Nico, was by André Maurois, the story of a boy who turned into a dog, illustrated with photographs by his son Gérard. This I translated myself in a single evening. I acquired a production manager, Lesley MacDonald, a Scots lady married to a German artist who was teaching drawing in London. They had started their own firm, Acorn Press, and they offered it to me for nothing if I could keep their small backlist going, add a few new titles and occasionally employ Helmut Weissenborn, the husband, to design a few covers for us. He also illustrated a few books, most notably a fine edition of the early German novel Simplicius Simplicissimus by Grimmelshausen, the source from which Brecht drew his inspiration and subject matter for Mother Courage. The Lesley and Helmut had translated it together. Whenever Lesley was involved in a manuscript to which she and her husband had devoted their joint talents, she made it a book of which any bibliophile could be proud.

  When skiing at Val d’Isère with Jacques Chaix, I had bought a novel from the local bookseller called Les Gommes, a crime novel, but rather unusually written and with many enigmas. I enjoyed it, but only partially understood it. Some time later, in the office of Jérôme Lindon, during negotiations over some other book, I noticed Les Gommes on the shelf behind him. I had in the meantime come across the author’s name, Alain Robbe-Grillet, bandied about in the French literary papers, and knew that he was associated with a new school of fiction which was attracting some attention. I discussed the book with Lindon and eventually made him an offer to publish it in English. I then wrote to Barney Rosset to suggest that he might acquire the American rights. By now Dick Seaver, one of the former editors of Merlin, was back in the States and had become an editor at Grove Press: he was making suggestions to Barney for French and other books. Barney’s taste did not often rise above the erotic and the political, his main preoccupations. He occasionally had an instinct for a writer such as Beckett, but he was also becoming interested in the “Beats”, some of whom he had met in San Francisco; he liked their passion for freedom and their anti-authoritarian ethos. Together with Donald Allen, who edited it, he was planning a large volume to be entitled The New American Poetry, which I eventually distributed in Britain. Seaver approved Robbe-Grillet, but Barney insisted that he wanted an American translator and settled on Richard Howard, a poet and an academic who was teaching French. Then Barney decided, having had the other novels of Robbe-Grillet explained to him, that The Voyeur, written later, sounded sexier. Since it was also shorter, he wanted to publish it first. Barney had the money, and therefore the whip-hand, and I had to agree: we both published The Voyeur and followed it with Robbe-Grillet’s other novels, of which the most successful became Jealousy, a short and very vivid picture of a man’s jealous mind, obsessed with the fears he has regarding his wife’s fidelity during his absence. Robbe-Grillet represented the beginning of my involvement with the French nouveau roman, and I was eventually to publish most of its practitioners.

  I had been much influenced by a dramatization of Wyndham Lewis’s trilogy of novels, The Human Age, on the BBC Third Programme, especially by the first part of it, The Childermass, in which Donald Wolfit, one of the outstanding Shakespearian actor-managers of the day, gave a memorable radio characterization as the Bailiff, who is really the Devil. This modernization of Dante’s Divine Comedy is set during the First World War, and the two main characters are an officer and his batman, who are killed in the trenches. They then go through a series of landscapes, limbo, hell, purgatory and, in the unfinished fourth novel, of which only a few pages were written, heaven. I bought the novels in the Methuen hardcover editions, illustrated by Michael Ayrton, an artist I knew, and was fascinated by the visual images, as well as by the writing, of Lewis, a painter-writer who had once led the Vorticist movement.

  Methuen, I soon learnt, had lost interest in Wyndham Lewis. I probably heard this from Lewis himself, because I arranged to meet him to contract his out-of-print novel Tarr and then acquired paperback rights to The Human Age. Lewis was old, blind, rather grumpy, but quite friendly with me, and I had tea with him on two occasions, when he reminisced a bit about the old days and the painters and writers he had known. He wrote like Proust, long-hand in bed, throwing the pages with only a few lines on them in large handwriting onto the floor, where his wife picked them up and typed them out. He could not read what he had written and his very late work must have seen but little revision. I had the impression that they were living on a subsistence level and that every penny he could earn was important.

  He died soon afterwards, in 1957. I kept in touch with his widow and later contracted his autobiographical Blasting and Bombardiering (first published in 1937), a fascinating account of his life in Paris and London as a young artist, followed by a very personal account of the First World War. Once, in the late Sixties, I saw a small Lewis landscape in an art gallery. It was under £1,000 and I bargained to get the price down, or alternatively pay in instalments, but in the end did not get it. It would be worth much more now, but I probably would have lost it anyway for reasons that will become clear later in the book.

  Most of my publishing up to the late Fifties had been in the conventional hardcover format, and there was nothing to distinguish my books from those of other publishers visually. But with a new designer, John Sewell, our covers began to have a modernistic look, often based on cubist, surrealist and collagist models. We began to issue our own paperbacks in the same format as our hardbacks, which made them appear similar to Evergreen Books. The typography was the same for both editions, and soon we were dividing the sheets we printed between hardback and paperback editions. The term “egg-head” was now applied to these large format paperbacks to denote the presence of a more intellectual content than was contained in the smaller mass-market paperbacks. This was also the period when a new generation of state-educated intellectuals had arrived on the scene and were open to new ideas and serious culture: many of them were making that culture. The better bookshops accepted these books, but they were treated with considerable suspicion by the more traditionally minded. University bookshops sometimes stocked titles that they thought would appeal to academics and the more adventurous students. The “egg-head” paperbacks had an easier time in America, because the example of Barney Rosset was soon followed by the big companies. Random House put out a series of Anchor Books aimed at the educated reader, largely non-fiction. The editor was a friend of Barney’s, Jason Epstein, who soon came to be much admired in the American book trade. I met Epstein many times with Barney, both in New York and later at the Frankfurt Book Fair, but Barney’s love of nightclubs and the lust industry that went with them quickly turned Epstein off. Evergreen and Anchor were soon followed by other series competing to get into the university market.

  At Calders Ltd my position was becoming ever more problematic. At head office I was more or less left to my own devices, but had little to do. I had a small room and a secretary who worked for me, called Berry Bloomfield, who occasionally came to Wilton Terrace to do some publishing work for me.

  Then the inevitable happened: the deception over my son who was really a daughter was discovered. We had a nanny, who was of course in on the secret and real
ly wanted to see it come out. One day she let my sister change the baby’s diapers. Betty did not tell me she knew, but she told the whole family, starting with my grandfather, and I was disgraced. Soon the directors at Calders Ltd knew about it as well, and I was met everywhere by unfriendly, knowing smiles. Explanations were of course provided, but they did nothing to alleviate the censure, although with time things calmed down. My grandfather immediately set about disinheriting me. He decided first to leave his estate to my brother – but he didn’t like him, nor had Jimmy ever had the slightest connection with Scotland, and he eventually decided to will Ardargie to a cousin of mine, who had other characteristics that, had the Gaffer known about them – would have disqualified him as well; the rest of his property he eventually willed to a convent.

  Now the battle for the future of Calders Ltd came to a head. Vogel was arguing to enable Wolfson’s Great Universal Stores to acquire a block of new shares. Rann, although he disliked and feared Vogel, felt at the time that I represented the biggest danger to his own future, and now that I was in disgrace with my relatives he saw the possibility of pushing me out, whereas up to now he had only tried to block my progress. I had used the security of all my shares to borrow money to buy more, and with my options from the Robertson sisters I was, after my great-uncle, the largest shareholder. Many shares belonged to cousins of mine, mainly on my uncle’s wife’s side (not blood relations), and they were all up in arms against me. It was obvious that I could soon be pushed out, but now I had a heavy bank debt, and the issue of more shares would bring the value of mine down. I went to see Uncle Jim at Ledlanet, explained why I had carried out the deception, whose single purpose had been to get my grandfather to release funds that were mine. This had enabled me to become a major shareholder in a company in which I had already proved my ability, but where I had enemies who saw me as a threat to their future. The company was about to pass out of my uncle’s hands as well as mine unless he took a decision to issue no more shares and thereby stop Wolfson coming in. The company had ample reserves, did not need more capital, but might have lost business if it offended Wolfson.

  Uncle Jim understood everything I said, and weakly replied that he did not believe Wolfson really meant any harm. We both knew, however, that he really thought otherwise. An old man (he was nearly ninety) may not lose his capacity to think and understand, but he does, as I commented earlier, lose his power of resolution and the ability to stand up against hostile pressure. My uncle was thoroughly sick of the turmoil in a company that he had built up from a small family concern into a publicly quoted national enterprise with timber yards all over Britain. He was sick of it all because he had no peace as the jackals fought over their pieces of the main body and the vultures outside swooped in, looking for an opening to take over the company. I told my uncle – of whom I was genuinely very fond, and who had treated me with great kindness and encouraged my initiative – of my dilemma and my peril. But he was now incapable of standing up to pressures from Rann and Vogel, from the scheming accountant Billington, and from the Wolf at the door who could take his profitable business away from the company if he did not get his way, thus creating a big hole in the firm’s profits.

  One of my functions, during those last two years at Eros House, was occasionally to entertain relatives of people who were important to Great Universal Stores. The company had the use of a shoot in Suffolk, near our timber yard at Brandon, where Weeting Hall had once stood, the pre-war house of my great-uncle, which his wife, Lady Mildred, had made him buy and where she entertained her friends. The house had been demolished, and the land probably sold to local farmers, but with shooting rights retained. In the early Fifties my uncle took me with him to Brandon occasionally for a weekend’s shooting, usually near Christmas. We stayed at a local inn with a hearty Scottish landlord: the food was good and the inn warm, but outside on my first visit it was snowing, as usual. There would be two days shooting driven pheasants in the crisp cold air. By the middle Fifties I was often myself in charge of a shooting party, which meant having three or four customers of the firm and perhaps a friend of my own. On two occasions I brought my musicologist friend Edward Lockspeiser. Edward, who loved food, was overweight and on the doctor’s advice was going in for various forms of exercise, such as riding in Epping Forest twice a week, was delighted to come shooting and to mix with people totally outside his usual range of acquaintanceship. On one such weekend I took Edward down with me in my car, together with a keen sportsman called Freddy Fox from somewhere in the Midlands and an older man, whose son was the manager of one of Wolfson’s many furniture factories. Edward had never touched a gun before, and none of the others had ever met anyone who earned his living from music.

  “Thinking of sticking to it,” said the older man, scratching his head.

  “I think I should after thirty-five years, don’t you? Most of us stick to what we’ve always done,” Edward answered mildly. It was an amusing weekend, and Edward’s delight when he actually hit a pheasant was touching. He crowed about it for weeks.

  Edward Lockspeiser’s special study was Debussy, and at that time he was well into his important two-volume study of the composer, for which he had presumably received a large advance from the publisher. What he brought to me were less commercial works, like the Henri Hell biography of Poulenc and a proposed autobiography of Galina von Meck, granddaughter of Tchaikovsky’s patron.

  The list had expanded considerably by the late Fifties, helped by many American imports. Barney Rosset and I bought a series of heavily illustrated paperbacks from Éditions du Seuil, which we translated and named Profile Books. I was mainly interested in the series on music – composer biographies for the most part – but Barney’s interest was purely in the jazz volume. When I commissioned some English titles, a Handel and a Mozart from Stanley Sadie and a book on Wagner’s operas from Audrey Williamson, Barney wouldn’t take part. But he was very interested in a semi-sociological series, one of whose titles was on Hollywood film stars, and he also translated several historical titles. I also took on some British series which were produced to be sold in market places and cheap stores, such as the Abbey Classics: these were published and printed by a remainder dealer who was unable to reach normal book outlets and only ordered small quantities of a single title. By 1957 there were several hundred different titles listed in our catalogue, and every year the number increased. They were not there without reason: whatever the edition, each title was a book I would have been happy to publish myself or at least read and keep on my own bookshelves.

  Barney occasionally came to London, and I took him around the nightclubs; he often ended up with some girl he met there. We also met in Paris, occasionally saw Beckett together, but more often separately. On one occasion, Beckett, having spent the evening eating with Barney near his hotel, the Port Royal, and gone on to several bars, spent the night in Barney’s room. They were both totally drunk, their situation calling to mind a scene in Beckett’s novel Mercier et Camier. I was not present on that occasion, but heard about it the next day.

  Once I spent a weekend skiing with Barney and Link at a ski resort called Hunter, in the Catskills. Barney drove us up, and we spent the evening at a small comfortable hotel where, after dinner, Barney distributed manuscripts among the three of us. One of these was a barely disguised homoerotic novel (it was still difficult to be frank about homosexuality in those days) by Richard Howard, who was translating Robbe-Grillet for us at that time. We each read a part and passed it on. Link and I liked it, Barney didn’t, and went on to talk about his bewilderment as to how a good-looking athletic man could be homosexual.

  I was occasionally approached by professors at British universities to publish anthologies from Eastern Europe, for which the country of origin was willing to subsidise printing, if this was done in their country. In this way I published A Century of Latvian Poetry and The Parnassus of a Small Nation (lyrics from Slovenia), soon followed by other similar books, which
even decades later led to invitations to attend conferences in those countries, as I was obviously “seriously interested” in their literature. The cart usually came before the horse, but reading later on what I had agreed to publish – my original motive having been to increase the list and make it more international – often led to my taking such a serious interest. The amount of good literature in the world not known outside its own national borders is staggering.

  I was always meeting new people and entering literary enclaves previously unknown to me. The small literary publisher who was in some ways most like me was John Lehmann, who in spite of his name had come mainly from a Scottish background; his family had been the founders of the Edinburgh firm of Chambers that produced the famous dictionary. His career in publishing, starting just after the war, came to an end in 1952, not for any reason that seemed very valid to me. If you have a list that sells badly, you have to diversify it so that books you might not care for personally help those that you do, and you have to learn to work hard on a shoestring. Lehmann was well connected in literary circles, much in touch with the old guard of Sitwells, Woolfs and the Bloomsbury circle, and with European literature too. When he gave up, I was approached by many who had worked with or for him. One such was Nora Wydenbruck, an Austrian countess living in genteel poverty, but always keeping up appearances. She was married to a painter, also Austrian, called Alfons Purtschner, and they had a house in the elegant Holland Park area. Purtschner was very gentle, very elderly and very lecherous. His tall stooping white-haired figure might never have left the court of Franz-Josef. He painted richly textured portraits, while, hidden at the back of his studio, were erotic nudes, extremely well and naturalistically painted. Nora Wydenbruck called on him for support and decoration. She had written a book on Rilke, published by Lehmann, and had also translated Rilke into English. She always had some new book coming out, usually a translation. Her afternoon parties, normally on Sundays, were decorous affairs. There would be one glass of spritzer, and then a Lieder recital or piano piece from her current au-pair or a professional friend, then a few words from the hostess about her new publication, copies of which were piled up on the piano. If you were there, you had to buy a copy. In such ways she made ends meet.