Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  I was concentrating almost entirely on promoting my books, the list becoming increasingly literary, although some unusual titles, as had always happened, came to me by accident. In 1957 I had imported from America in sheet form, for binding under my imprint in England, a large Book of Catholic Quotations, ideal for priests who wanted to sprinkle their sermons with the wisdom or quips of others. It sold quite well both in general and in Catholic bookshops. At the same time, I imported sheets of a quasi-medical book, Variations in Sexual Behaviour, which gave me an opening into a very different kind of bookshop. The latter reprinted endlessly and helped subsidize the serious literature and slow-selling authors like Beckett.

  In early 1958 I published an anthology entitled Is the Monarchy Perfect? The genesis was in a number of articles which had appeared in the August and September issues of the National and English Review the previous year, attracting much comment and some outrage. In particular, there was an article by Lord Altrincham, who was soon to become the second peer to give up his title under a law passed in 1963 as a result of the campaign by Anthony Wedgwood Benn, who wanted to keep his seat in the Commons and not in the Lords. Benn, on inheriting his father’s title, had automatically ceased to be an MP, but went on being elected in by-elections until the pressure to change the law made it happen. This also enabled Lord Altrincham to become simply John Grigg.

  When I contacted Altrincham, he agreed to help me make a book out of the material that had already appeared, supplemented by additional articles. The whole took a neutral but critical look at the British monarchy as an institution, and it included a particularly hard-hitting piece by Malcolm Muggeridge entitled No Bicycle for Queen Elizabeth. The gist of the whole book was that if the monarchy wanted to survive, it should become more democratic as the Scandinavian and other surviving European royal houses had done. There were twelve sections in the book, and one of them, pleading for the Royal Art Collection occasionally to be open to the public, I wrote myself under a pseudonym, Mackenzie John, my two Christian names reversed. Various friends told me that the book had much annoyed Buckingham Palace and that, if I had any hopes of ever receiving a public honour, I had better forget them.

  Pamela Lyon left us to get married, and her place was taken by Ethel de Keyser, a South African and a militant anti-Apartheid campaigner. She was married to an actor, David de Keyser, but about the time she came to work for me the marriage broke up and she went to live with the Caribbean writer George Lamming, whose novel In the Castle of My Skin, published in 1953, had been highly successful and had won the Somerset Maugham Award for Literature. Ethel and David were in daily touch by telephone, and I often answered it myself. When a voice asked for Ethel I might say, “Is that George?” and be told, “No, it’s David”, or the other way round. David’s and George’s voices sounded identical to me. David was unaccustomed to living alone and always wanted to know where something had been put, or where to take his shirts for washing. George’s calls were probably more about their political concerns.

  I am not sure whether it was Ethel or someone else who told me that a book was being written about the notorious treason trial that had followed the arrest of 156 persons in December 1956, all known to be opposed to the Apartheid regime in South Africa. At any rate, she certainly threw her heart and soul into the matter, and I acquired the rights to publish an account of the trial10 by Lionel Forman, a Capetown barrister, and E.S. (Solly) Sachs, former head of the South African Garment Workers’ Union, who had been a refugee in Britain since 1953. The book was written jointly by two people who had never met, but were totally in sympathy, and it is an account, not so much of the trial, which was still going on, but of the treatment of those arrested and the nationwide demonstrations it provoked. The purpose of the book was to state the facts, expose the regime and loaded justice system and invoke further international protest. It succeeded in doing all three.

  I saw much of Solly Sachs, an old-style trade-union leader in many ways, with a limited understanding of my own circumstances as an independent publisher. He came to me one day and asked for a large sum of money. I think it was £10,000. I looked at him. “But, Solly, we have just paid you an advance, a good one, and if the book goes well, there’ll be more. We can’t give you more money just now.”

  “I come to ask you for money and you humiliate me like this,” he said. “When I asked Oppenheimer (a well-known diamond-mine millionaire) for money, he gave it to me right away.”

  “He’s a rich man.” I exclaimed. “We have no money to lend. It all goes into publishing books and paying royalties.”

  “You’re a capitalist, aren’t you?” he went on. “Of course you have money, and I need some right now.”

  I was unable to explain to him the difference between a small publisher with limited resources and a big capitalist like Oppenheimer. We separated on bad terms, although he was happy enough with the publication of the book, which led to many interviews in the press and other media coverage. He never knew about another matter where he might have had a right to complain.

  I met Solly at a party with an Italian lady called Elena, who had spent much time with her English husband in South Africa; he was still there (the husband), a businessman not interested in politics. We talked, liked each other and agreed to meet the next day, a Sunday. I took her to the Hurlingham Club, where there was a swimming pool, because it was a very hot summer day. We warmed to each other, and she came back to my flat, where we started an affair of sorts. I did not want to get deeply involved. She had just tried to get in touch with a previous lover, whom she had met during the war in Italy. He was Richard Hoggart, whom I knew to be an important and sometimes controversial educationalist. However, he was now married and had refused any new contact, which she much resented and saw as a sign of cowardice. After Lisel I was very wary of women whose needs were as apparent as Elena’s, and I no longer let any brief relationship get too heavy. Solly never quite understood how an affair that he considered as in the bag somehow eluded him. Elena returned to South Africa that autumn, and for some years kept up an occasional correspondence with me.

  During that same year I published What Man Has Made of Man by Mortimer Adler, the distinguished American philosophical psychologist, and God in Search of Man by Abraham Heschel, a psychological study of post-Platonism by an American rabbi, whom from the book I assumed would be liberal in his lifestyle. When he came to London and I invited him to lunch, I found that he was extremely kosher and I had to find a suitable restaurant in a hurry – not easy in London’s West End.

  We had many political books on the list just then. That was one reason why I was approached by Chatham House, a semi-governmental think-tank and institute for foreign affairs, to bring out a paperback trade edition of Philip Noel-Baker’s important book The Arms Race, which won him the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1959. It became No. 21 in my Calderbook paperback series, which had started with the paperback edition of Alger Hiss’s ill-fated In the Court of Public Opinion. In the series I was also reissuing my European classics – translations from French, German and Russian for the most part – which came out alongside modern authors, literary, historical, theatrical and musical, and which even included cheaper editions of the literary and theatrical annuals in a smaller format. The covers were largely designed by John Sewell, and on the inside of the covers we advertised other titles in the series. I have never understood why so few publishers use the blank spaces in their books to advertise others on the list.

  One Saturday morning in March 1958, I went over to Paris, intending to spend nearly a week there, and my first call, that same morning, was on Jérôme Lindon, with whom I was now doing much business. In addition to the considerable number of French authors I had acquired from his Éditions de Minuit, he had taken one of mine, the Irish writer Aidan Higgins, about to be translated by Edith Fournier. On this day he handed me a new publication that had already been through two rapid printings and suggested that it mig
ht interest me. It was a book about the Algerian war, the main topic in every French conversation, and the overriding French issue of the day. The author was a French journalist who had been tortured in Algeria by the army: the book was in large part an account of that torture. I took it away, went to the Café de Flore, ordered a light lunch and began to read La Question by Henri Alleg.

  I could not leave the table until I had finished it. It was horrific, gripping and deeply moving, a total and damning condemnation of France’s stubborn determination to hang on to its remaining colonies. The French army was behaving as badly and sometimes worse than German units had behaved in France fifteen years earlier. Significantly, the French Foreign Legion, which traditionally accepted any healthy recruit without any questions asked, now had a majority of Germans, largely ex-SS soldiers, who had escaped from Germany and joined the Legion. They were now carrying out massacres and repressions unthinkable in any civilized country: the worst butchers of the German army and police were now showing the other legionnaires what cruelty and ruthlessness was all about.

  I telephoned Éditions de Minuit. Lindon was still there. He told me that I had one of the only copies. Just after I had left his office, the police had arrived and seized his entire stock. He was lucky not to have been arrested as well. Over the telephone we agreed a contract. I went to my hotel and spent the afternoon going carefully over the book and making notes. The next morning I returned to London and started translating. On Monday morning I hired a temporary typist from an agency and dictated the English translation of the whole book, which was finished and corrected by noon on Tuesday, just as the second post brought in an introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre, which he had written after the seizure of a clandestine edition by the French Communist Party. I had a printer ready and sent off the finished translation; I then translated the Sartre. On Wednesday I had proofs and everything was corrected and returned by Thursday. The presses were rolling off a first edition of 5,000 copies on Friday, ready for binding on Monday morning.

  Then I went with Lesley MacDonald, my production manager, to the binders’ premises on Saturday morning, where the two of us hand-bound about thirty copies. I spent the afternoon and early evening visiting the newspapers that had London offices – not just the national press, but the main provincial papers as well. Most of them were in the vicinity of Fleet Street in those days, and with a car you could get to them all within three hours, often being able to see the editors themselves.

  Sunday morning saw The Question described everywhere in the press. It was a big news story, because the war in Algeria had become front-page material. Some extracts were printed, and the experiences of Henri Alleg created shock and horror. Many more extracts and more news coverage were in the Monday newspapers. We reprinted 10,000 more copies, and soon this smallish hardback book, selling at ten shillings and sixpence, had sold twenty-five thousand copies. Then came the famous date, the 4th of June, when de Gaulle, who had just been called back to power, went to Algeria, spoke to thousands of cheering French colons, all afraid that they were about to lose their ascendancy, and said to them, “Je vous ai compris.” He did not mean what they thought he meant: he wanted peace, the end of the war, and was ready to compromise.

  The biggest villain in the book was General Massu, the commander of the army in Algeria, who was only named by his initial M. Soon there was a widespread conviction that he was about to lead an invasion of Paris with the French army from Algeria and accomplish a coup d’état. I was in Paris again and was taken by John Barnard and my mother to the Tour d’Argent, the most prestigious restaurant in the city, the only time I have ever been there. Claude Terrail, the owner, went around the tables, where everyone discussed the crisis, and came to ours. My mother was quite excited by it all. M. Terrail struck a dramatic pose, presenting himself as a pillar of solidarity in a collapsing world. “When there is a crisis,” he said, “il faut être là!” As long as the Tour d’Argent was functioning, any crisis would soon roll by, at least as far as his customers were concerned. I wondered if he was saying that in 1940.

  More stories kept breaking from Algeria, but with de Gaulle back in power and leading the government, the crisis receded. In Alleg’s book we hear of Audin’s death in custody. He was another journalist active against the French government, and Minuit published a little book about him, L’Affaire Audin. I used it to write a piece for the New Statesman, which was widely noticed. The Question was then published by George Braziller in America, but he omitted my preface, replacing it with one of his own, which was really a paraphrase. He paid for the translation, but gave me no credit as translator. My relations with George Braziller have always been spiky, perhaps because of that early meeting when I failed to recognize him.

  French translations were now prominent on the list. Ionesco’s early plays were out in Donald Watson’s idiomatic translations and getting performed. Peter Hall produced The Lesson at the Arts Theatre Club in 1955 and Peter Wood staged The Bald Prima Donna in the same theatre the following year. The Chairs was done at the Royal Court in 1957 by Tony Richardson, and Peter Zadek produced Amédée in Cambridge at about the same time. Ionesco’s name was known largely thanks to the advocacy of Harold Hobson’s Sunday Times column, and my editions were selling fairly well. The Killer, one of Ionesco’s major plays, only came to London in a small theatre in Islington, but Jack MacGowran was soon to play Bérenger, who became Ionesco’s alter ego in many plays from the late Fifties onward, in a different production in Bristol. Not long after, in 1960, Rhinoceros conquered the world. It is not Ionesco’s best play, but it carried a simple message (about the tendency towards and the dangers of conformity in society) that was easy to understand. It opened in January, on my birthday, at the Odéon in Paris, with Jean-Louis Barrault playing Bérenger, and in London with Laurence Olivier in the same role on 28th April, in a production directed by Orson Welles. Rhinoceros started at the Royal Court and quickly transferred to the Wyndham’s Theatre. Hundreds of copies of my edition were sold by the programme girls every night.

  Beckett had urged me to see Marguerite Duras’s Le Square in Paris, an adaptation of her novel by the same title. I saw it in 1956 in Paris with Ketty Albertini and R.J. Chauffard, and was bowled over by its poignancy. I eventually published both the novel and the dramatic version. Other Duras translations followed. Among French authors appearing on the list at this time were Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Robert Pinget, and others in a more traditional mould, such as André Pieyre de Mandiargues, an erotic writer of considerable quality. I took on some books of a more psychologically political character, such as André Gorz’s The Traitor, which had received major reviews in France – a book that looked at the long-term results of the Nazi occupation, and for which Sartre again wrote a preface. Unfortunately, it had little impact in Britain.

  I now knew most of the French literary publishers intimately, and when in Paris had many lunches and dinners with them and their authors, so I was inside literary Paris in many ways, meeting many more writers than I could possibly publish.

  Then Minuit offered me another book about the Algerian war: if anything, it was more savage than The Question. Called Gangrene, it was a record of more French atrocities and on a wider canvas. I was uneasy now. Sitting in London, sniping at the French government for its colonial policies that were not that much different from those of the British towards their subjugated colonies, was hypocritical. The British were also trading partners with some of the ugliest regimes in the world. I acquired the rights to Gangrene from Lindon, but I was uncomfortable and made no effort to rush publication.

  * * *

  My brother was to marry Jutta Lindtner, the German girl he had met at his school in Zuoz, and the wedding was to take place in Munich. Both families gathered there. I knew nothing of the Lindtners, who lived in a small German industrial town. By 1959, Germany, which had been reconstructed under the Marshall Plan, with her destiny guided by the stern figure of Aden
auer and the economic genius of Erhard, was again a rich country, and even the Eastern part under Russian control was relatively prosperous. We all stayed at the Vier Jahreszeiten (Four Seasons) Hotel. On the night I arrived there was a Carl Orff triple bill at the Prinzregenten Theatre, and I resisted the temptation to skip the reception given by the other family the night before the wedding, though with considerable regret.

  The reception was for about a hundred people, mainly young Germans related to the bride. John Barnard and my mother were there, of course, together with my sister and Raymond de Miribel, whom John Barnard had met through me and now frequently invited around to their new flat in Paris on Avenue Foch, only a few doors away from where my other French friend, Jacques Chaix, also had a family home. A lot was eaten and drunk at a lavish buffet, but Raymond, hearing German voices again in Germany, which sounded very different from the Swiss German we had been accustomed to in Zurich, was now becoming, under the influence of drink, dangerously nervous. As the party broke up, he wanted to go outside the hotel, and I decided I had better accompany him.