Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  He led the way into a little bar, where we overheard a conversation about a vierter Reich (fourth German Empire). Raymond pricked up his ears and began to swear in a loudening voice, soon expressing his hatred of all things German. The little group in the bar turned towards us and was obviously prepared for violence. I went up to them. “Listen,” I said. “My friend is drunk. He was in Buchenwald. You know what that means. Please leave him alone.” They grumbled, but turned back to their own conversation and I managed to get Raymond back to the hotel.

  I was expected to make a little speech at the wedding reception, and in the bath the next morning I thought about it. The incident with Raymond the previous night was still on my mind, but I thought up some conventional little speech and framed the right German words to deliver it. There was a ceremony in a church, and then we all returned to the hotel, where the banquet began at about one o’clock. After it, there was an interminable speech from an uncle of the bride, referring often to the “knightly Jimmy” and the “fair damsel” or whatever German equivalent he used. Such was his pomposity that those who were not politely bored were having trouble in not giggling. My mother had said to me, “Keep it short,” but as the drone went on, my inclination was increasingly to send him up and mimic him. I was sitting next to a very pretty Hungarian girl, not a relative of the Lindtners, whose reaction was similar to my own. “Wake them up a bit,” she whispered to me, and when my turn to speak came, I gave her a wink and launched into not what I had prepared in the bath – in fact nothing that I had prepared at all – but an improvised, deliberately sarcastic imitation of the uncle’s tone of voice, in which I picked up his words about troubadours and medieval references. Then I went on to give a political speech about the war in which our nations had been engaged – which this union symbolized as being over – the overheard remarks in the bar the previous night, referring as well to what Raymond de Miribel had undergone in Dachau and Buchenwald, and to the Holocaust, expressing my hopes that no one present had either taken part in or approved the evils of the Nazis. None of this was intended in advance. Raymond kept clapping his hands and shouting: “Bravo.” My German, which had been little used of late, suddenly became fluent, and I can only use the Welsh word hwyl to describe what took me over. I sat down to deafening silence except for Raymond, received a kiss on the cheek from the Hungarian girl – and not a single member of the bride’s family, apart from the bride herself, ever said a single word to me thereafter.

  That afternoon I took a plane to Paris, but had no onward reservation. While trying to get my name put down on the waiting list at Orly, I found myself behind a tall Englishman who looked familiar. “Aren’t you John Stonehouse?” I asked him. He managed to get his name down on the list before mine, and then we went for a drink together. He was at the time Shadow Labour Party Secretary for the Colonies. He knew about the books I had published, and I told him about my problem with Gangrene. He then revealed that he had an extraordinary document in his possession. It was a report made by a Captain Law, who had been a prison officer in the Hola camps in Kenya. The tabloid press had created a great panic about the Mau Mau, a militant group of Kikuyu tribesmen. They were few in number and reputedly led by Jomo Kenyatta, a nationalist who was working for Kenyan self-rule, but who always denied any terrorist associations. The Kikuyu had been largely driven off their ancestral lands by white settlers, who had a vested interest in creating an emergency to keep British troops active in repressing the natives. Mau Mau activities had started in 1952 and had consisted largely of threats against non-militant Kikuyu and other native Africans, but the Daily Express and much of the British press had whipped up public opinion into believing that a general massacre of white people living in Kenya was imminent. The British army’s answer was to build giant concentration camps, the Hola camps, and to intern tens of thousands of Kikuyu tribesmen on suspicion of being part of a Mau Mau conspiracy. There were over 80,000 Africans detained in the most brutal conditions, with beatings and torture. Many had died from deprivation and violence. Captain Law had made complaints to the authorities, which were ignored, but eventually led to his being victimized, imprisoned, dismissed from the service and sent back to Britain. His report on the camp was now with Stonehouse, who was uncertain how to bring it to public attention with the press being almost universally favourable to the army and the settlers. As a previous Secretary for the Colonies under the last Labour government, and now Shadow Secretary, he also had much information on the bad behaviour of the army in Cyprus, where the EOKA campaign for union with Greece was the object of repression, and in Aden, where the conflict was not to erupt for some time yet. We sat together on the plane to London, and by the time we arrived, the blueprint for an expanded Gangrene had been worked out: it would document the excesses which had been covered up by both the French and the British governments.

  Peter Benenson, a barrister who had founded the organization Justice, a pressure group of concerned liberal lawyers, wrote the long and lucid introduction. It was followed by French texts written by various hands, largely eyewitness reports, which I had acquired from Jérôme Lindon; then came the British material by John Stonehouse and Captain Law. We intended to publish in September 1959, but Britain was suddenly hit by a printing strike. It was not a reasonable strike: printers were very well paid compared to other trades, but the newspaper compositors and machine-minders, the aristocrats of the industry, who were the best paid, wanted to keep ahead of the other unions, which then had the country by the throat. It was the period of “I’m all right, Jack!” attitudes, which did so much to put the middle classes, together with those who did not have the power of the biggest and most militant unions behind them, into a state of boiling resentment. Two decades later, this was to bring in a triumphant anti-union Thatcherism. But at the time powerful unions had become accustomed to getting their way.

  There I was with an urgent book and no way of getting it printed. I had announced it, and the word had gone around interested government circles – Henry Brooke was Home Secretary then (strangely enough, he had given Captain Law a job as a parliamentary messenger) – and suddenly I received a “D” notice. This is a warning that the book or article one intends to publish may contain secret government information and is liable to prosecution. The offending person is liable to arrest on a variety of charges that may include treason. It is less dangerous after publication than before, because once the facts are out they cannot be withdrawn, and action by the police then is punitive rather than precautionary. This became bluntly clear years later with the “Spycatcher” and similar cases, where secret agents published what they knew.

  There was only one thing to do if I intended to proceed, and that was to get the book printed abroad. But it was autumn, and the Frankfurt Book Fair was coming up. Every publisher in Europe was anxious to display its new books in Frankfurt, and all the book printers of Europe were working overtime. Getting the book printed in America would create transport delays and also a greater risk of seizure by customs.

  In the end I found a printer in Regensburg in Bavaria, largely thanks to my musical contacts, as the Heinrich Schiele printing firm printed scores as well as books. I flew to Regensburg with the manuscript, and on my first evening was taken to dinner by the two brothers who owned the press. We went to a restaurant outside the town in a sports car driven by one of them at a speed that must have been around two hundred kilometres an hour: the driver simply put his foot down to the floor when there was a straight stretch of road ahead and braked violently when we approached a turn; I cannot remember ever being so frightened in my life. We discussed music that night, and from odd bits of conversation I realized that their politics were far to the right. I told them as little as possible about the book they were to set and print.

  During the week I corrected the proofs as they emerged, and printing was to start that weekend. I had found a photograph for the cover of a Promotheus-like figure (Roland furieux by Duseigneur from the co
llection at the Louvre). Talking to the workers I discovered that the bosses, the two brothers, had instructed the machine-minders not to hurry. Having realized that the book would embarrass a right-wing government, they had decided to hinder, not help. I persuaded the workers, who seemed to support the Social Democrats locally, to ignore the hints of the brothers, and 10,000 copies were printed. I was back in England when I was told that the binding machine had broken down. I had to get the flat sheets imported on pallets by air and then managed to get them bound in Britain, the strike being over.

  The British General Election was now imminent, and this book could play a role. Stonehouse did what he could to persuade his Labour Party colleagues to make use of the book to attack the government, but Morgan Phillips, the General Secretary of the Party, decided that any book exposing the misdeeds of the army would not win votes, and he ignored it just as I was rushing it into the bookshops. The book did much better in the North than the Tory heartland of the South, and I soon sold out and reprinted in Glasgow.

  The Conservatives won the election, but with a much-reduced majority, and the Harold Macmillan cabinet, at its first post-election meeting, discussed the book and decided to wind up the Hola camps and release the suspected Mau Mau detainees. None of them had ever been charged. This was not followed by riots and massacres of whites, as had been predicted by the right-wing press. The Kikuyu made no trouble, and shortly afterwards, with the nationalist movement pursuing a moderate course, independence arrived. Eleven years after the emergency, Jomo Kenyatta became President and opted to keep Kenya in the Commonwealth. I had successfully ignored a “D” notice without prosecution and had reason to be proud of Gangrene’s influence in righting a wrong and changing the course of history. My second and third printings brought the sales up to 20,000 copies, but with the emergency over, returns came back, in particular from the Home Counties. The original cost of printing the first edition abroad and airfreighting flat sheets could not be recovered on a paperback selling at seven and sixpence, so commercially the publication was a quixotic gesture.

  Public reaction was another matter. The book was debated in the House of Lords, and several peers demanded my arrest. One proposed that I be charged with High Treason – and no doubt then taken to the Tower for execution. Letters in the press all assumed that I was making money by humiliating the British army, and I received abusive telephone calls as well as ugly correspondence and even death threats.

  This kind of idealistic publishing was causing other problems – financial ones. The list consisted largely of slow-selling literary titles by authors such as Beckett, Robbe-Grillet and Duras, and some British and American authors. They often received good reviews, but these seldom translated into good sales. I made regular trips around the provinces to see booksellers and promote my books. Booksellers were nearly all a very conservative breed in those days (and they have not changed much since), and they did not like what I published very much. The odd enthusiast would support me, like John Sandoe in London, a Mr Jackson who had a good bookshop on Albion Street in Leeds and a few more. But I was an eccentric publisher outside the accepted mould, bringing out literary books that few people could or wanted to understand, and that sold too slowly. Bookshops that ran their own circulating libraries, like the Edinburgh Bookshop on George Street, found that no one wanted to borrow my books. The popular author of the day was Nevil Shute – that is until he blotted his copybook with On the Beach, a novel predicting the end of the world after a nuclear war. There was also a suspicion that my creative literature, not being written just to make money, was in some way subversive. One day, when I called on Ainslie Thin, the principal university bookseller of Edinburgh, he said to me, “Some of my customers have been asking for your dirty friend Mr Beckett. But I’ll no stock him.” It was on that same visit that I offered him Gottfried Keller’s Green Henry, just published, the first English translation of the Swiss classic – a fat book of 706 pages. Mr Thin’s long, dour face smiled slightly. “Yes, I know it,” he said. “We sell it in German. It’s a wee little book.”

  “Not so wee, Mr Thin,” said I. “In fact it’s rather a large book. Here it is,” and I took it out of my bag. He picked it up gingerly, looked at it, turned it over, glanced inside and handed it back. “No,” he said, “that’s not it. It’s a wee little book.”

  Edinburgh bookshops were not easy territory for my list. There were other university bookshops and some general ones, but they liked books they knew, and disliked those they didn’t. Resistance to anything new was almost total. Glasgow was better, but not much. There were library suppliers there who bought some of the books I offered, novelists like Beckett and Aidan Higgins, playwrights like Ionesco, or books on musical composers or on current political and social issues. A few of the less conventional bookshops, those that could sell books that were often slightly erotic, took some titles, novels like Fräulein and non-fiction titles, like Variations in Sexual Behaviour. Often they were the bookshops interested in radical political books as well. Political titles had a short life, and I had to push them hard when the issues they covered were still in the news. I came to know all the radical and sexually open shops from Aberdeen to Brighton, usually on backstreets and the seedier parts of town, like Soho and Camden in London.

  David Austick was the university bookseller in Leeds. Years later, when we were both Liberal Party activists and I campaigned to help him become MP, we became friendly, but in the late Fifties he was quite hostile. “Why should I sell funny books?” he asked in his strong Yorkshire accent. I pointed out that these were exactly the books that interested the lecturers at the university – Leeds after all was more open to new literature than Oxford and Cambridge. One of my translators and authors taught in the French department, Richard Coe; he had given me some splendid renderings of the musical and travel literature of Stendhal, on whom he was writing a book, and he had also translated Robert Pinget for me. Austick would reluctantly take a little, but not much. My best Leeds customer was the aforementioned Mr Jackson. There was a similar bookseller in Hull and another one in Colchester, who having told me that his accountant had forbidden him under any circumstances to put another book on his overcrowded shelves, then took nearly everything I could offer him. The man and the shop are both long gone, but bless his memory!

  We took on two new authors on the recommendation of Samuel Beckett. One was Aidan Higgins, a young Irish writer from a small town outside Dublin, who wrote about relatives of an earlier generation, decayed minor Irish gentry. Aidan was a brilliant word-spinner: he had trained as an engineer, spent time in South Africa, was married to a New Zealander and had two small sons. He was greedy for fame, and the money he expected to go with it. We published a collection of his short stories under the title Felo de Se, the legal term for suicide. It was a book of high style and considerable morbidity. One story, the longest, was about a depressive alcoholic, looked after by a minder (who in real life had been the author), while another was a dry run for the novel that followed, Langrishe, Go Down. This was well reviewed and won Aidan the James Tait Black Prize, which is given annually by the Professor of English at Edinburgh University. Both books were well received by the press and had reasonable sales. In Ireland they established Aidan Higgins as a leading new writer in the great tradition of Irish prose.

  Aidan was living in Muswell Hill in North London, writing in starts and stops, drinking heavily when he had money in his pocket. His wife also worked at occasional jobs. He was a talented cartoonist, and he would adorn his letters to me with drawings, especially self-portraits of his Goyaesque face and red beard. We were successful in getting him a number of subsidies, several grants from the Arts Council over the years, an invitation to spend a paid year in Berlin with no obligation to do anything, and some American money. Some years later, after he had returned to live in Ireland, he also won the Irish-American Prize, which is given annually in Dublin by the American ambassador.

  The other write
r sent to us by Beckett was Nick Rawson, from the north-west of England. Like Higgins he was eccentric, but unlike him never knew success. He was a poet who wrote poetic prose works with striking imagery, but only on the edge of the non-abstract. We published him first in a new series for experimental work, New Writers, the first issue of which appeared in 1961. Many years later, his book-length Shards was published in another series for individualistic literature called Signature. I kept up a correspondence with Nick for some years, during which he wrote much verse that mostly crossed the line into rather crude pornography, leaving me quite cold.

  A young musician called John Carewe came to see me one day. He had noticed my publication of books on Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, on Janáček and other twentieth-century composers, and the Rollo Myers book that surveyed the whole spectrum of modern music. He wanted to start a society to promote new music, of which little was heard in London in the Fifties, where the concert scene was firmly wedded to the big names of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Carewe was a conductor. He had also recruited the young English composer Marc Wilkinson, whom I already knew slightly as he had set passages from Waiting for Godot in an effective short piece for voices and chamber orchestra called Voices. I took up the project enthusiastically and soon our committee included Lord Harewood, the composers Iain Hamilton and Susan Bradshaw, the critic, music publisher and later agent Howard Hartog, the violinists Paul Collins and John Woolf, and later Sir Robert Mayer, a music-loving financier who ran children’s concerts at the Royal Festival Hall on Saturday mornings and who became our most generous donor. There was also a John Croft in attendance, I think from the Arts Council. I suggested that there was one avant-garde public for music and another for literature, both small and little aware of each other, and that it might be possible to mix them. We did this by putting a literary spot in each concert, which became my special responsibility.