Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  On the day they arrived, a Sunday, there was a small reception, given on this occasion at Marion’s flat near Paddington. A number of journalists with an interest in European literature were invited to meet the authors. They included John Ardagh, then the principal cultural features writer on the Observer, who already had a deep interest in everything to do with France, and a photographer from the same paper. Terence Kilmartin, Rayner Heppenstall and John Weightman were there, and perhaps a dozen more. The next day we held a press conference in the restaurant of the Arts Theatre Club, the venue for many important plays of the previous decade, including Waiting for Godot, Ionesco’s early plays and such memorable productions as Shaw’s Man and Superman, Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning and a string of modern plays and classics mounted by that wonderful acting couple, John Clements and his wife Kay Hammond. The restaurant was a favourite haunt of mine, and the staff were mainly Cypriots whom I would keep encountering in later years at Beoty’s Restaurant on St Martins Lane, only a few steps away. I had chosen it for its proximity to Fleet Street, where nearly all the newspapers in those days had their offices.

  The press conference was well attended, not just by the serious press, which had been largely represented at Marion’s the previous evening, but by the tabloids and some women’s journals which, needless to say, knew hardly anything about the authors and what they represented. The first questions put to us tended to be naive, even idiotic, such as “Why do you write?” But it warmed up, and I had my stock of clichés and soundbites to feed them, apart from the reasoned explanations of Robbe-Grillet, which had to be translated, and the comments from some of my better-informed academic friends who had come to the conference.

  The three writers were to start the tour that afternoon at Reading, then on to Bristol the next day, accompanied by Marion, who was to hand them over to me at Oxford later in the week. There were many news items about the press conference and the tour in the next day’s papers, and as a result I received a telephone call from Terence Watson of the Umbrella Club in Coventry, a small cultural centre to which I had often sent authors to read or talk and where I had appeared myself. Just minutes before, the Professor of French at Birmingham had rung me to cancel the session he was to chair, because he did not believe there was any local interest. Watson was indignant that I had not included Coventry in the tour. Those two phone calls turned out to be the most significant events of the whole project, given their long-term consequences.

  The writers were in the west country; I was organizing things from the office: we had a good press, and the French Embassy officials were trying to find a way to help without totally disobeying the instructions of Paris. The press had created a sense of excitement, and Watson had picked it up. He would not listen to my explanation that I could see little point in going to a town without a university or any group that would ever have heard of the nouveau roman. “Nonsense,” he said. “Bring them here and I guarantee a big audience.” So I gave him the Birmingham date for the following Friday, although I feared the worst. The Belgrade Theatre and Coventry Cathedral did not yet exist in Coventry, and the Umbrella Club, which might get fifteen people for a serious lecture, was otherwise a lounge and bar where members played chess and put on amateur theatricals.

  On Thursday I met the three writers in Oxford, collected them from the station and put them into the Randolph Hotel, while I was staying at a cheaper hotel near the station. All had gone well, although Richard Coe in Reading had become a little confused by Duras’s provocative way of saying what she didn’t believe, to get reactions. Donald Watson had looked after them well in Bristol, and I forgot where else they had been.

  Our Oxford host was initially the French Club, run by students, who gave us a dinner before the public session. They all spoke reasonable French, but quickly admitted that “no French literature after 1830 is taught in Oxford”, so they were all a bit baffled and intimidated. Robbe-Grillet, with his considerable sense of humour, took it all in his stride. If French literature after Stendhal was unknown, he could as easily introduce the students to Balzac or Flaubert as to his own work; they were his literary ancestors after all, and he brilliantly explained the line of descent of a hundred and thirty years that culminated in his own novels. He was clear and logical, convincing and humorous. The two ladies were less happy: they saw themselves being sidelined by the fluent Alain Robbe-Grillet and had to concentrate on their own hobby-horses: a strong political commitment in the case of Duras, who saw her novels as a way of changing attitudes, and a narrower vision in the case of Sarraute, whose work was based on her observations of tropisms, little marine cells that respond to light by opening and closing, which she uses as a metaphor for the ways in which we respond to each other. Human beings, she explained in careful and faultless English (she had once studied at Oxford), behave in the same way: our little tics and mannerisms give away what is really happening in our minds and emotions, and underneath the mask we present to the world; and there are jealousies, rancours, frustrations and attempts to make ourselves more important, usually at the expense of others, thus creating similar or opposite reactions in those we are trying to impress or humiliate. Sarraute had invented a highly intellectualized new form of social novel.

  The triple lecture, for so it proved to be, was a great success. Many Oxford dons had come out of curiosity and found themselves well rewarded. One of them had organized a party afterwards in her rooms at her college and later tried to seduce Robbe-Grillet, who was not interested, saying he missed Catherine, his wife. Baudelaire’s biographer, the very eccentric Enid Starkie, was there, speaking in a very loud masculine-sounding voice, and there were many other famous academic figures. I wish I had taken notes, but I only seem to remember Isaiah Berlin talking to Nathalie Sarraute in Russian. I finally delivered them back to the Randolph and went to my own hotel by the station.

  I had a strange adventure that night. It was so strange that I wrote a play about it a month later that very accurately reproduced it. But I never offered it anywhere. It may have been about eleven o’clock – it could hardly have been earlier – when I arrived at my hotel. There were about a dozen people sitting in the saloon bar, which was certainly closed to the public at that time, and I decided to have another drink, which as a resident I could legally do. All the remaining people seemed to know each other: they were locals and frequent customers, while I was the only resident. The barmaid, attractive but not young, served us all, sat with us and took part in a conversation that became increasingly bawdy and suggestive. Some went home, until only men were left, and there was an obvious rivalry between two or three of them for the barmaid’s favours. When everyone was out of the room for a moment I told her the number of my room. “I know,” she said, and half an hour later she was in it. It was however the conversation, very like a late Eugene O’Neill play, that inspired my own literary effort, not how the night ended.

  The next morning I picked up my three writers and we drove to Coventry. There something extraordinary took place. Terence Watson received us at the Umbrella Club, where we were given an early dinner, after which we were taken to the Town Hall, which had been rented for the occasion. It was packed. I had filled the boot of my car with books, and these were piled up on tables at the back for sale by Terence’s volunteers. They were what I had published by the present trio – perhaps a dozen titles with ten or more copies of each. As we walked up to the platform, I looked at the audience: there were over eight hundred people there, jostling and talking and staring at the party of six of us walking up to the table on the stage. They were mostly young – late teens and early twenties – and I wondered how Terence had managed to get such an audience at a few days’ notice.

  I had worked out a formula for the occasion, but with misgivings. The Umbrella Club members, perhaps a hundred of them, were buried in the crowd – thoughtful, professional people in their thirties and forties – and I was totally unprepared for so young an audien
ce. First Terence introduced us, then I talked for a few minutes about what each of the writers did and what they had written, what their books were about, what they had in common, where they differed – above all why they were unlike other writers whose novels were intended only to entertain or reassure.

  First Robbe-Grillet spoke, in French and never for more than a minute at a time. I then translated or paraphrased him. Although he claimed to know no English, he often interrupted my translation to make me get it exactly right. This went on for twenty minutes. Then Nathalie Sarraute spoke in slow, careful English, explaining her tropisms and why we behave like them. Then Marguerite Duras spoke in French, very animatedly, and Sonia Orwell, who had arrived in Coventry that evening, and was a good friend of Duras, did for her what I had done for Robbe-Grillet. The audience was attentive, and we had been there for less than an hour when the chairman asked for questions. The first one came from a man in the front row, the Professor of French from Birmingham, where we should have been that evening.

  “Whatever are you doing in Coventry?” he asked.

  “There’s obviously more interest here than in Birmingham,” I replied acidly, and he never said another word.

  The questions then came slowly. “You seem to write to make us sad,” said one youth. “Why don’t you write to make us happy?” I put the question to Robbe-Grillet, who shrugged his shoulders, so I answered it myself, telling the young man that the purpose of literature was to help him understand himself and his life, and maybe to make it better. Then came other questions, getting ever closer to sophistication, which increasingly interested the writers, whose answers became fuller and more thoughtful. There was an excitement spreading through the hall as more and more hands went up, and soon there was a forest of them. I was working very hard, translating back and forth, and so was Sonia as the questions followed each other and a real dialogue with continuity began to take place in spite of the language difficulty.

  Suddenly I felt a tap on the shoulder. It was the caretaker. “Sorry, Sir,” he said, “but it’s nearly eleven o’clock. The hall was booked until ten thirty.” We had been there for three hours and everyone wanted more. In the street outside, my three literary stars were mobbed. I went to collect the books: they had all been sold, and the writers were now being asked to sign them. We were taken back to the Umbrella Club, which overflowed with the crowd that had followed us, and we left to drive to London well after midnight.

  On the way back my mind was racing. I knew that something extraordinary and unexpected had happened in Coventry. A new public had been created almost by accident. The nouveau roman school of avant-garde writers had established a base in a working-class town without even a university!

  The following day was the day of the French reception that M. Chauvel had been told must be cancelled. He had arranged that the cultural attaché would give a smaller party in his private flat and in his own name, and that he, the Ambassador, would accidentally drop by in the middle of it. But in the afternoon, just before that, I had arranged a radio discussion on the BBC’s Third Programme. This was to be between the three writers and Rayner Heppenstall, a writer and broadcaster, and William Golding; a studio had been booked at Broadcasting House from 4 p.m. until 6 p.m. I had spent some time with Robbe-Grillet earlier in the day, having paraphrased his principal theories into paragraph-long phrases, and had rehearsed him reading them in English. The BBC had taken much persuasion, both because of what was believed to be the obscurity of the nouveau roman and because of the language, but I had not dared tell them that two of the three spoke no English or refused to do so. Rayner Heppenstall was confident that he could get over the difficulty, and he did. He translated where necessary – there was a little French allowed – but Nathalie Sarraute was able, for the first time so far on the tour, to dominate the conversation. Besides, she and Golding got on splendidly together. The recording, however, with many retakes of parts of the conversation, took nearly four hours, and it was after eight o’clock that we showed up at the reception, where we had been expected at six thirty. M. Chauvel had been there nearly all that time.

  But things soon warmed up. Marguerite Duras promised the Ambassador that she would recommend his poems to her editor friend, and the evening ended well. The tour continued, but halfway through the second week we lost Robbe-Grillet, to the considerable relief of the two ladies. He had constantly made little jokes at their expense, which they did not appreciate, and they had formed a solid feminist resistance to his self-confident masculinity. We ended the last week in Edinburgh. A very casual party was given there in Jim Haynes’s The Paperback bookshop, which was well stocked with all my books. This is a good place for a little digression to introduce a man who will appear quite frequently later in the book.

  Jim Haynes was an American from Louisiana who had chosen to go to Edinburgh University under the G.I. Bill of Rights. There he studied Spanish, although he still worked for the army at a listening post that monitored European telephone calls for the CIA. He did not stay long at the university, but bought for £50 a hovel-like junk shop at 22 Charles Street, a short thoroughfare that linked George Square and Bristol Street in the middle of the university district, where students and staff passed in considerable numbers. The old landlady, who was retiring, left him all the contents of her shop along with the freehold, and Jim got rid of them by putting up a sign that everything was free. Then he painted and shelved the shop and started what might well have been Britain’s first paperback bookshop in 1957.

  I have already spoken of the extreme conservatism of Edinburgh’s bookshops. Jim, one of whose great advantages was an excellent memory for the names of authors and publishers, the titles of books and even their prices, had filled his shelves not only with the usual Penguins, Pelicans and other British mass-market paperback series, but the larger-format American “egg-head” imprints as well, and foremost among these were the Evergreen series of Barney Rosset, which I distributed and which were a model for my Calderbook paperback series, published from 1960 onward.

  I cannot quite place my first meeting with Haynes, but I remember the shop well as I first saw it. There was no cash register, change being kept in a drawer, and Jim could easily be persuaded to lend books to those who could not buy them; they were seldom returned. He also – and this really shocked the local book trade – offered free coffee and tea, and had soft music playing. He was only a business man in so far as he had to take enough money to live and pay publishers: his motivation was enjoyment. His casualness and easy friendliness, so unlike the other Edinburgh booksellers, went down well among all classes. Not only did university students and faculty use the bookshop to buy and order books, but it was a social centre as well, where people met, not just academics but also members of the business and professional establishment. The Chairman of the Bank of Scotland, whose head office was close by, was a customer; so were broadcasters, actors, doctors and every variety of Edinburgh citizen who bought books.

  Jim Haynes loved women. His approach to them was direct and uncomplicated. He would stare hungrily until he received a response, then he would date and proposition. There was no promise of long-term attachment in Jim’s amours: an affair might last a week or a month or only a night. Attraction had to be immediate and satisfaction quickly follow. He never made promises, but his casual manner worked very well in this Calvinist city, and he never had to spend a night alone. His trust in everyone was also unusual, and many took advantage of it. But Jim’s transparent openness and charm made him many friends, and it was a pattern that would continue into the next century. When he eventually had to retire at age sixty-five from a university in Paris, he had an address book with thousands of names. Only politicians and public entertainers could meet as many people as Jim, and his character never changed.

  Jim Haynes quickly became my best customer in Edinburgh, but thanks to him I found it easier to sell my books in other shops as well. This was because by stocking books th
at others would not, he created a demand for them, and they were asked for elsewhere as well. It was natural, after the session at Edinburgh University, that I should bring Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute to The Paperback.

  Let me now get back to the occasion itself. There were two professors of French in Edinburgh, one in touch with modern literature, the other not. It was the latter, Professor Green, who chaired the joint lecture of the two ladies, and with them sitting on each side of him he stood up on the platform and said: “My introduction will be as brief as what I know about these two ladies.” He then sat down. But in spite of his dourness it went well. Jim Haynes had been selling their books, and many people were carrying them. They were listened to with attention and the questions were relevant. It was the other professor, Professor Steel, who came to the party afterwards. There is a photograph of that occasion in this book.

  The tour ended back in London, and then everyone returned to Paris. The Sunday papers covered the tour and the new interest in Britain in a literature that could look at the world in a new way. Britain was just beginning to wake up to other European writers. The Germans of the Gruppe 47, the post-war school, were now being translated, especially Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll, then others – and Brecht, first translated in America, was just about to have an impact on the British consciousness. Soon a number of younger British writers would be looking to Europe for their models and influences, although the predominance of the English social novel was never even slightly threatened.

  My sales became significantly better, and I added Robert Pinget, Claude Mauriac, Claude Oilier, Daniel Castellain and Philippe Sollers to the names in my catalogue, although in some cases only one of their works. My main source remained Éditions de Minuit, but authors came from other publishers too. Robbe-Grillet was now reader and advisor to Jérôme Lindon, spending a day a week in their office reading manuscripts, and he also pointed me towards new talent. Unlike most of his colleagues, he was generous and helpful to other writers. His self-assurance put him above the jealousies of others, and his skill at literary conferences kept his name in the forefront of the literary press, especially in France. Although he adopted political stances and signed manifestos when he agreed with them, he took the position that a writer’s commitment had to be to literature and his own writing, not to a cause. First came style and form – and that, driven by the writer’s own instincts, would shape the content. Ultimately form and content, for him at least, were the same thing.