Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  The publishing company had moved in 1955 into a small room in the offices in Queen’s House of Francis King and Son – our auditors, who also kept our books – overlooking Leicester Square. Berry Bloomfield, who had been my secretary at Calders Ltd, followed me there, and we were soon joined by Sally Belfrage. Sally was the daughter of Cedric Belfrage and Molly Castle, both well-known journalists, who had divorced a long time previously. Cedric had spent some years in America, and during the McCarthy period had edited a radical left-wing newspaper called The National Guardian, one of the few vehicles where Angus Cameron, Leo Huberman and others like them could advertise their books. It had given sympathetic coverage to the Rosenberg trial and such events as the infamous incident in 1953, when an outdoor concert by Paul Robeson was turned into a riot by a lynch mob in New Jersey. Although he had been many years in the United States, Cedric Belfrage had kept his British nationality. He was deported after his permission to stay, and I presume to work, was withdrawn, and although he tried to edit the newspaper as “Editor-in-Exile”, it did not long survive his departure. I had of course met him in New York, and it was at his instigation that Sally Belfrage came to me for a job, at first a very temporary one. There was a big book exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall organized by the Sunday Times, at which I decided to take a booth, and I engaged Sally for a week to help me run it. I shared the booth with another publisher, Christopher Johnson, who was also the Tory MP for Carlisle. There was a considerable contrast between the nature of our lists, but we got on well enough. However, when the Queen Mother came to make a tour of the exhibition, it was the Johnson side of the booth that met her eye. It featured a rather lewdly jacketed medical book entitled Women in Emergency (Johnson was a medical doctor as well as an MP, and the cover depicted pregnant women who could not get quickly to hospital). The Queen Mother, who until then had been stopping to chat at every booth, hastily averted her gaze and walked on. I had been hoping she would be photographed at our stand.

  The book exhibition over, I gave Sally Belfrage a temporary job at Queen’s House. She did some editorial work there, which she enjoyed, but she also had to process orders from our reps, which she did not. One day I discovered that her desk drawer was full of orders from booksellers which she simply chucked there because routine work, however necessary, bored her. I don’t think I kept her long after that.

  Francis King was an accountant and our auditor. Together with his son Peter, he kept our books and gave me financial advice. We had a sales representative in London, Gorlinsky, one in charge of the Midlands, West Country and Wales, V. J. Camp, and a lady in the north, Kay Knowles, who was adept at queue-jumping in bookshops, saying to reps in line in front of her, all waiting to see the buyer, “Please, I shall only be two seconds,” and then staying half an hour or longer. In Scotland we had a real eccentric, a Mr MacAndrelis, who always wore the kilt, took his wife everywhere with him and drove an antique Rolls-Royce that had once been the Edinburgh Lord Provost’s official car and now had the Lion Rampant flying from the little flag mast on the bonnet.

  After leaving Calders Ltd, I frequently made sales trips myself, often covering ground I knew well from my timber-selling days, but now I stayed in much more modest little hotels and boarding houses. The usual bad British food, brown soup, boiled meat and two vegetables, followed by soggy pudding or acid Danish blue cheese and bad coffee could now be varied by the arrival of Chinese and Indian restaurants, even cheaper and much better. I came to know the dour bookshops of Edinburgh, the cautious provincial shops where to take one copy of one book was to represent the list, the established bookshops of Northern and Midland towns, where sometimes I did well and sometimes not. One Manchester shop put a young man in charge of fiction, and he tried to read every new novel that came in. If he liked a book, he would recommend it to his customers and soon he was reordering much bigger quantities. If I could enthuse him about a book I was subscribing, he would order twenty-five copies, but after he left it was back to half a dozen. Hardly any of these once-revered bookshop names still exist.

  I also met booksellers at the annual Booksellers’ Conference, such as the one where I had encountered Lisel. Robert Maxwell liked to show up and have himself paged over the loudspeakers every half-hour. The Blackwells and the Heffers, university booksellers in Oxford and Cambridge, considered themselves the aristocrats of the book trade. Publishers were there on sufferance and had to pay much of the conference costs; they were always under attack to give better terms and to contribute to bookseller training schemes. They also paid for most of the drinks.

  Among the few people I have really disliked in my life, Robert Maxwell ranks at or near the top. My first dealings with him were over the Simpkin Marshall fiasco. Simpkin Marshall was an old, long-established wholesaler on London’s Marylebone Road, which tried to stock every book in print. Small booksellers who did not want to have hundreds of accounts with different publishers and could only order small quantities, often single copies for individual customers, could get these books quickly and economically from Simpkin Marshall. The business was invaluable to both publishers and booksellers. Some of their staff had been with them for decades, and often had an encyclopedic memory of book titles, authors’ names and who the publisher was, even of highly specialized books. But Simpkin Marshall fell on hard times, and Robert Maxwell made a great show of coming to their rescue and saving the old-established company for the benefit of the book trade.

  The extreme crookedness of Robert Maxwell has been well known to the general public since his death, but even in the middle Fifties he was widely distrusted. He had used his wartime position as an officer of the Allied Control Commission in Germany to acquire valuable technical copyrights for next to nothing, probably by blackmailing Nazi publishers who were willing to give anything to have their names cleared officially. With these copyrights he had built up Pergamon Press, his publishing company in Oxford. The main asset of Simpkin Marshall was their large valuable building on Marylebone Road, and that was his target. He was allowed to acquire control cheaply on the promise of investing new capital to save the company. What he did was to keep it going long enough to sell the building at a fraction of its value to his own family company, and then close down Simpkin Marshall, leaving enormous debts to publishers unpaid. The second calamity came when all the stock – considerable quantities of every book in print – was then offered at remaindered prices. Booksellers went to the warehouse, made a list of the books they wanted and bargained to get them at the lowest price possible. Maxwell did not care, as the money would go to the receivers. This meant that not only did publishers not get paid, but their sales to booksellers stopped until their bookseller customers had sold their cheap purchases. Peter Owen was the only publisher, as far as I am aware, who went to see Maxwell during the period when Maxwell was running and apparently “saving” the company. He ignored Maxwell’s threat that anyone who pressed for payment or sued would do no further business with Simpkin Marshall, and he issued a writ. Maxwell paid him to stop an avalanche of other writs, which would have ruined his plan to strip the assets before putting the company into bankruptcy. I, unfortunately, when I went to see him, allowed myself to be conned, and lost all of the considerable sum I was owed. It was not to be my last unpleasant encounter with this evil man of many aliases. He had changed his original name, Ján Hoch, to Du Maurier (name of a best-selling novelist and of a fashionable brand of cigarettes) before becoming Maxwell, which had the right British sound to it.

  All the old staff were of course sacked as soon as he took over. There were wonderful characters among them. The music buyer, who had been a musician in pre-war Germany, was always telling me which composers needed a new biography, and I think he read all the books on music I published. Although no one in the book trade trusted him – his nickname was the “bouncing Czech” – Maxwell was to wreak much more damage to the publishing industry. Yet, he always managed to get the banks to back him, however bad his rep
utation – and even after Sir Hartley Shawcross, who investigated some of his dealings, had said that he was not of suitable character to be a director of a public company.

  The one room we occupied at Queen’s House was soon too small, and I rented the top two floors of a building in Sackville Street. There were two tailors below us: one of them was Mr Black, who forever wanted to make me a suit and eventually did. Sackville Street is really an extension of Savile Row and runs between it and Piccadilly. In those days it was mainly tailors on Sackville Street, with Sotheran’s, an antiquarian bookshop, at the Piccadilly end. There were mutterings at first about what things were coming to “with publishers moving in!”

  I engaged an editor, the best I was to have, Pamela Lyon, whom I had known for some time. I think Christya had met her at some dancing class and brought her home one day. She was a pretty, vivacious girl from New Zealand, who had come to Britain on a scholarship to dance with the Sadler’s Wells Ballet Company (later to become the Royal Ballet), but had developed TB, which had forced her to abandon that career. The milk diet she was now forced to adopt did not help much either: her legs swelled and she had put on too much weight to be able to dance again. But she was intelligent and well read, and I offered her a job once we had adequate offices in Sackville Street. I was still living at Wilton Terrace then.

  Pamela had been working for me for a few months, perhaps longer, when I received a manuscript from the Professor of Russian at Manchester University. What D.P. Costello had sent me was however a Persian translation, and I took it home over the Easter weekend of 1957. I remember reading it on the Good Friday with dusk falling just as I finished it. I turned on the light, turned back to the first page, and read it again. It was a chilling twice-told tale by an Iranian poet called Sadeq Hedayat entitled The Blind Owl. The atmosphere of the first part was macabre: the narrator, as if in a dream, murders and, as if it were part of a pre-arranged ritual, buries the young woman whom he has seen through a chink in his wall, looking like a Persian miniature. The second part, which also ends in a sinister murder, is more naturalistic: the story of a young boy, dominated by an obsessive sister who seduces him as he grows up.

  On the Tuesday I handed the manuscript to Pamela Lyon. “I thought this quite interesting,” I said. “Tell me what you think.” She came in the next morning. “Did you really read it?” she asked.

  “Yes, do you like it?”

  “It’s extraordinary. I couldn’t put it down.”

  “I’m glad you agree with me. We’ll accept it.”

  We published The Blind Owl in December 1957, on the same day as Beckett’s Malone Dies. Several newspapers reviewed them together, but not favourably. “Mescaline might help,” said the reviewer of a Sunday newspaper, “but don’t count on it.” I think he was referring to them both. And the sales, of course, were terrible. I knew that Beckett would do better with time: he already had an international reputation and was being discussed in the universities. We were selling the imported Evergreen edition of Murphy, while Waiting for Godot had been the talking point of its year. But The Blind Owl was a one-off with the author dead. Once a friend of Sartre, and an opium addict, he had committed suicide in Paris in 1951 at the age of forty-eight. How could I create interest in a book in which I believed, which had fallen into the hands of insensitive reviewers? I decided to try an experiment.

  I went to the library and picked a hundred names out of Who’s Who. They were the names that caught my eye as I leafed through: some were novelists like Graham Greene and Iris Murdoch, some poets with exotic attitudes like William Empson, some important personalities that I had met like Bertrand Russell, and others included broadcasters, commentators and journalists whom I knew to be open-minded and intelligent. At this distance, I hardly remember more than a few names. But they were all people of note, and they included Isaiah Berlin, V.S. Pritchett and F.R. Leavis. I sent them all the same letter, telling them I was enclosing a copy of The Blind Owl as a gift, that I hoped they would read it, and if they did and liked it, that they would talk about it. If they could give me a few words of comment that I could quote, I would be even more grateful. About twenty replied, all enthusiastically, and I could now place advertisements with quotations of approval from well-known names.

  It worked: little by little sales picked up, and we began to get more and better reviews from newspapers that had held back. I sold the rights to Barney Rosset for the US, to Feltrinelli for Italy, to Bezige Bij for Holland and to Helmut Kossodo for German-speaking countries. France had already published it, as I soon discovered. A French diplomat had translated it and published it with José Corti, a surrealist publisher in Paris, but with no contract with the author’s estate. Costello had given me a letter signed by the author’s brother, giving him rights to publish internationally. He was a Major General in the Iranian army, but this was in the days before the Shah seized power from Mosaddegh, backed by the big oil companies. Corti had assumed there was no copyright, but he was wrong, because the author had deposited a copy of his manuscript with the Indian copyright office in Bombay.

  I had a series of office managers whose responsibilities included sales management, although everyone did a bit of everything to a great extent. Peter Bradley was a man who had owned a record shop in Knightsbridge, selling me many records over the years, and he joined the firm and sat opposite me in the offices at Sackville Street. He would go through the orders and send them to our distributors, who at this time were Central Books on the Gray’s Inn Road. The reason I went to Central Books is the following.

  My London sales rep, Henry Jonas, invited me to his wedding in a synagogue and to the reception afterwards, where I sat next to a lady called Margaret Mainert. A director of Central Books, she published mainly communist and left-wing literature and distributed for other small publishers. She was very disdainful of the religious ceremony we had just attended, and when we began talking of books, she said that she would be willing to offer favourable terms to distribute my list, which she liked. So it came about that we moved our stock to Gray’s Inn Road. My manager however would ration the flow of orders sent to Central Books, because he believed that the packers could only handle so much at a time. When I realized why our sales had become lower than they should have been, the discovery led to another row, to his leaving, and eventually to a change of distributor. We moved to a company called Trade Counter in South Kensington, where Miss Sladden, a large, cheerful lady, puffed cigarettes all day, typing thousands of invoices, without, so it seemed, ever making an error, while a large Alsatian dog lay at her feet. The manager, Oliver Moxon, I had first met at the Antelope with the crowd surrounding Sir John Squire. We stayed with Trade Counter for many years.

  Office managers followed each other, most of them really salesmen. One of them, a big bluff man, Michael Hicks, rather fell for a lady author called Iris Merle, who had published her own book, Portuguese Panorama, and now asked us to sell it for her. Heavily smitten by her, he told me that she had had a hard life. He felt very sorry for her, and gave more attention to her book than it really deserved. It was then, after he had left, that I made one of my biggest mistakes: I engaged Lisel Field to work for me.

  Our affair had run its course, and I had gradually let it run down. This was not easy. She had known several men in succession after leaving her husband, whom she had only married to have a home: he was a totally uncultured lower-middle-class individual, happiest in the pub, a man with whom she had nothing in common. All the other men had dropped her once the novelty was over – married men all of them. I was married too, of course, when we met, and still living with my wife, but our lives had become separate. One problem was that I had also started a new liaison with an opera singer. It happened like this.

  I had two tickets for the opera, and whoever I was meant to be taking that night telephoned in the afternoon to cancel. It was six o’clock before I had time to try to find someone else for the second ticket, and my thi
rd call was to Sigi Miller, not at home, but at another number that Phyllis gave me. This was the flat of Marion Wilson, an artist. Sigi was with two girls, Marion and a friend of hers from Paris, called Bettina Yonich, an opera singer. (Later, as Yugoslav names became familiar and fashionable in London, she changed the spelling back to the original Jonic). It was suggested I take Bettina, but she did not care for that particular opera (I think it was Verdi’s Masked Ball), and in the end I took Marion Wilson. I had only just enough time to pick her up and make the curtain. Afterwards we had supper and returned to her flat, where Sigi and Bettina were waiting for us. They were both attractive girls, and I suppose I had started to make the expected pass at Marion, but during the late-night conversation I became more interested in the opera singer. I took her Paris telephone number and not long afterwards saw her there.

  We first met in May 1957. That summer was of particular interest to me operatically. The two London opera houses were producing not just favourite operas, but works I had not heard before. I skipped the first night of The Trojans at Covent Garden, the first time it had ever been done in Britain, to get to the world premiere of Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron in Zurich. It was a memorable night, with a brilliant cast conducted by Hans Rosbaud. Afterwards I took a group of English music critics around the old town of my university days. They included John Amis and Felix Aprahamian. We were admitted without payment to the Cabaret Voltaire, founded by Tristan Tzara and his Dadaist friends in 1916. Back in London I attended The Trojans, surely the most magnificent of epic operas after Wagner’s Ring. Glyndebourne also had a splendid year with two Rossinis, two Mozarts, a Stravinsky and a Verdi opera, and I managed to get to them all.