Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Claude Simon, the only writer of the nouveau roman group who was not with me at that time, was the only one ever to win the Nobel Prize, some twenty-five years later. I started to publish him from about 1975, when Jonathan Cape, who were now beginning to imitate me in looking for intellectual French authors, lost interest and dropped him.

  That was the next problem with which I had to deal: imitation and competition. Other publishers had of course noticed our reviews and publicity stunts, and they assumed that our improving reviews and the amount of space given by the serious press to our authors meant good sales. But better was not all that good; certainly we were not achieving the sales – either from public libraries, which in those days were a major source of revenue, or from bookshops – that conventional English-language literary fiction could command. The new German authors – Grass, Böll, Frisch and Dürrenmatt – were coming from larger publishers and selling better than the French, but still not as well as English novels. What I could not afford to publish was picked up by others, especially Jonathan Cape, whose star editor, Tom Maschler, made it his business to be trendy and had the financial backing to do what he wanted. So Claude Simon, Monique Wittig and others I would have liked to publish were acquired by larger publishers. I had my hands more than full with Beckett and the nouveau roman authors I had picked up in the Fifties, but I could not ignore a new current of British fiction, which needed to be promoted as a school. In addition, the music list had grown and there were six annuals coming out every year covering all the arts except ballet.

  The annuals had become a big problem. I had found different publishers for them in America, and some were doing better than others. The Opera Annual now sold 2,500 copies through an American publisher, the International Theatre Annual 2,000 and others less. The American deals were as different as the publishers. Then Ken McCormick, managing editor at Doubleday, became interested and I made a deal with him, and a good one. He would buy all the annuals for the following year, 1958, but we had to make a special effort to meet the main conditions: that all had to be printed and delivered in New York by the first of September to be in good time for Christmas sales. Doubleday were buying 10,000 copies of each annual, under their imprint, to supply the American market. We agreed the production price and we were to receive an advance and royalties on each, which made it possible to pay the contributors and editors more generously than previously. Everyone made a major effort: the books were printed in England, not in Europe as in previous years, and arrived in the States on time. Our invoice was paid. Then, as the year approached the end, I began to get letters from readers in the States who had bought the annuals in the past. Where could they get this year’s edition? I sent the letters to Doubleday and wrote Ken that I was surprised that the bookshops did not have the information, let alone the books. I received no reply. But as the complaining letters increased and I also had transatlantic telephone calls, I sent more letters, then cables, but there was still no reply. I was also unable to reach Ken McCormick on the telephone.

  In January I went to New York, and in the Doubleday Bookshop on Fifth Avenue – it was now late in the month – I found my annuals just being unpacked and put out for sale. They had arrived that day. I finally did get through to Ken. He was apologetic, but could do nothing. Something had gone wrong in the warehouse, he said. He thought it had something to do with a computer they were installing. He did not have time to see me and was obviously too embarrassed to face a meeting. There was never any explanation as to why the annuals were not listed in the Doubleday autumn catalogue, why there had been no publicity, nor of how and why sixty thousand books that had arrived in New York during the last week of August were only published in January and then only in the small number of bookshops belonging to Doubleday. The answer was transparent enough: Ken McCormick, having done the deal, had forgotten all about it, had never advised the appropriate departments of the firm and nothing had happened until after Christmas, when someone had noticed the books in the warehouse. They were remaindered in February.

  I now had a terrible dilemma: what to do next year. All the editors were working on the next editions, but quite obviously, after the Double­day fiasco, no other American publisher would touch them, and the continuity had been broken. Doubleday never admitted the truth, so it was assumed in the American book trade that they had just flopped. I produced an Opera Annual, an International Theatre Annual and one more International Literary Annual in 1959, and the first two only in the years after that. I reduced the format to a smaller-sized volume the first year and managed to get a small number of copies distributed in the US, and even found a publisher to take the opera and theatre books, five hundred of each, the year after. The smaller format enabled me to put out a paperback edition as well as a hardback, but they were visually less impressive and sold less well in Britain, so for the final year I went back to the old large format. But my heart was no longer in it and the editors too were discouraged. 1962 was the end.

  A few more political titles appeared in the late Fifties, but I was now concentrating more on the literary list and on playwrights. A few odd titles were still published because of accidental circumstances. Our sales manager now was George Allum, who would periodically make a trip around Irish towns, which he knew well, calling on county libraries as well as on bookshops. One evening I went with him to the station to let him take the train to the north from which to catch the ferry to Dublin. We were early at the station and were chatting in the bar when a uniformed soldier came up and introduced himself, Corporal “Red” Cushing of the North Irish Brigade. “When I hear people having an interesting conversation,” he said, “I always join them.” And neither George nor I could get in a word after that. They were going, Cushing and Allum, on the same train, and apparently they talked all the way to Ireland. When George returned, he told me that Cushing had a real book in him. He was a soldier of fortune, had been in the IRA at ten, a boy soldier at thirteen, then in the US army, then in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and after that in a number of British regiments. His most recent activity had been chasing the Mau Mau in Kenya. Mainly to please Allum, I agreed to commission an autobiography of this colourful character, but I was hardly surprised when it turned out that although he could talk a treat and had a good memory of his long career, he was incapable of writing a word on his own. But George knew a good ghost writer, and after we had brought them together and had a few drinks, subject and author got on well, and the writer wrote the book after a series of long interviews, which cost a bit for the liquid refreshment which kept Cushing going. Our ghost writer caught the style perfectly: loquacious but racy and readable. The book did not sell as well as it might have done with a more general publisher, and Cushing’s too frequent visits to the office were not much help either, but every publisher has a few anomalies in his list.

  Our French writers were now doing much better and attracting more attention – Ionesco in particular was receiving major British productions, even if only for short runs. Alan Schneider had produced several of the short plays, both in New York and London, and having staged an unfortunate first Godot in New York with Bert Lahr and other comic actors – which was billed as “the laugh sensation of two continents” – he had met Beckett, and was now directing him in the US according to the author’s precise instructions. Devine was doing the same in London. As related earlier, Laurence Olivier played in Rhinoceros, and the cast included Duncan Macrae, Joan Plowright, Alan Webb, Michael Bates and Miles Malleson. We published the play just in time in Volume IV of Ionesco’s Collected Plays and sold hundreds of copies in what was a series of full houses, not surprising given the cast and the producer, who was Orson Welles.

  The Square was soon to be seen at the New End Theatre with Leonard Fenton and Angela Pleasence performing the parts that Chauffard and Albertini had played in Paris. I republished the play version in Barbara Bray’s translation, but the Sonia Orwell and Tina Murdoch translation of the n
ovel was reprinting regularly and was soon to appear in my new, smaller-format paperback series, Jupiter Books. Sonia had recently married a wealthy homosexual called Michael Pitt-Rivers, who needed a token wife after a much publicized scandal and a trial that had involved Lord Montagu and a number of boy scouts. Sonia used her new married name until the growing popularity of George Orwell, whose royalties she was receiving as a result of having earlier married him on his death-bed, made her former name more noteworthy.

  I had contracted, among other playwrights from France, Roland Dubillard and René de Obaldia. There was also Arthur Adamov, who had early in the Fifties been associated with Beckett and Ionesco, although dramatically he was closer to Brecht and O’Casey. Obaldia, whose career was to see-saw between an absurdist boulevard drama and plays more inclined to appeal to an university audience, had his moment in Britain when he was much played by students, and then achieved some professional performances in London and elsewhere. He came to prominence in Paris in 1960, and about three years later was being played in Britain in the translations of Donald Watson, who had earlier translated Ionesco for us. But his reputation did not last beyond the Seventies for reasons I have never understood. Obaldia has a light touch and great inventiveness and cleverness, perhaps too much for a British audience. Where there was a part for a star, in his full-length play Wind in the Branches of the Sassafras, it was vulgarized by a commercial management in Britain, who commissioned Galton and Simpson, writers of soap-opera comedy, to do a free adaptation that took all the subtlety out of a mock-Western with its stock characters: it became a heavy-handed farce. The play failed and the translation we published in the end by an American, which was true to the author, also failed to make any impact.

  Nor did Dubillard make headway in Britain, although his biggest French success, Naïves hirondelles, rescued by the protests of Ionesco, Roussin and other French playwrights from the mediocre reviews of its first production, was perfectly suitable for a theatre such as the Royal Court.

  The Fifties and Sixties saw many British dramatists, similar to their equivalents across the Channel, who had a brief vogue, being performed and then being forgotten. Only Beckett and Ionesco broke through among the foreign imports, but by the late Eighties Ionesco had also slipped from fashion. The reason was probably the amount of talent around and too small an intellectually curious audience.

  Aside from the French, Dutch and German writers were also coming onto the list, and others from Yugoslavia, largely the result either of interest created at the Frankfurt Book Fair or of my visits to the latter country. I had already published Ivo Andrić, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1961, and Miodrag Bulatović, who had made himself flavour of the month one year in Frankfurt and nuisance of the week the following year, when publishers were no longer interested in him, in my New Writers series. I met Radomir Konstantinović in Belgrade and published his novel Exitus, in which Judas tells his own version of the Gospel story. His wife had translated Beckett’s Molloy into Serbo-Croat. But he was unsaleable in Britain. I met a charming Serbian novelist, Jara Ribnikar, even had a fling with her, and published one of her novels and some stories, but with equal non-success. In those days there was always a library sale for at least a few hundred copies, so a failure was not as catastrophic as it would become later when the libraries found their book funds reduced to a pittance.

  I had become very friendly with Monique Lange. After publishing her novel The Plane Trees in 1960, we brought out two novellas by her in one volume years later. As I mentioned before, she worked at Gallimard selling foreign rights. Gallimard in those days was a strange place, run in a chaotic fashion by Claude Gallimard, whose more brilliant and literary brother Michel had been killed in a car crash while driving one of their best authors, Albert Camus, who had died with him. Claude was affable, liked his food and wine, and had an ambitious wife who also wanted to be in publishing. He had more than one mistress working in the company and he did not want his wife there as well, so he bought her another publishing house, Mercure de France, to run. He told his friends that it was cheaper to buy her Mercure to keep her busy, even if it cost a great deal, than to give her the leisure to visit the fashion houses, where a dress could cost more than a series of books. I was to conclude a few contracts with Simone Gallimard at Mercure. She was a vivacious redhead, and I can well believe that she had her own life; what was good for the gander was no doubt also good for the goose. One contract was for Valentine Penrose’s biography of Erszébet Báthory, which Sir Roland, her ex-husband who remained on good terms with her, suggested I should publish. I knew Penrose as head of the ICA gallery and art centre and as the biographer of his friend Picasso. I was eventually to publish his translations of Picasso’s plays.

  Many well-known authors had desks at Gallimard, and many of them were editors or directors of series of books apart from writing their own. Raymond Queneau had his nest there. He advised what to publish and selected a few books, but he was a busy novelist, editor of the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, a mathematician, a playwright, a humorist, poet and man of many parts. Several people like him worked there, probably during the hours that suited them because no one kept any kind of check on their movements. There were many others: Jean Paulhan for instance, who was believed to have written Story of O, perhaps the most discussed erotic book of the day, largely because he had contributed an introduction to it (Paulhan was one of the leading literary critics of the day and the lover of the actual author, Dominique Aury), and François Erval, a Hungarian who chose and contracted books from Germany and Eastern Europe. There was Jacques Lemarchand, in charge of the theatrical list, who picked those playwrights, both past and present, that he felt ought to be in print. He was also the conservatively minded critic of Le Figaro. Another was Michel Mohrt, who looked like a belle époque aristocrat out of Feydeau, but thought he looked like an English gentleman, not without reason, and was to complain to me some years later that authors like Robbe-Grillet were taken to orgies in New York by Barney Rosset – whereas he, considered too proper, was never invited to anything like that. They were all like courtiers around the king, who at Éditions Gallimard was Claude, son of Gaston Gallimard, who still occasionally made an appearance. They lived in a world of personal contacts and friendships, mutual literary interests and ever-present sex.

  I knew them all, more or less well. I had much in common with the affable Dionys Mascolo, ex-lover of Marguerite Duras and father of her child, a good person to meet in bars late at night. He owed his sinecure of a job to Marguerite, who like many other successful Gallimard authors wielded considerable influence over Claude. Dionys was in charge of English-language books, but read no English. Mascolo’s name came up many times among those that Duras gave to her characters, mainly amalgams of the names of the men in her life. He was the author of a large tome entitled Le Communisme, which I read, or at least scanned through. Much as I liked the author, I saw no reason to translate several hundred pages that could have been summed up in a short pamphlet, and that was the problem with many other books that were coming from French intellectuals at this time. Many women I knew were attracted to Dionys, but my best memory of him is sitting drinking in late-night Paris bars, sunk in gloom, but always with something interesting to say. He was separated from Marguerite, although they saw each other frequently. He was still in love with her, and the other women in his life were only reluctantly endured substitutes. One of them was Monique Lange, who was also the wife of Juan Goytisolo, also published by Gallimard in French.

  * * *

  In 1961 I started to publish a series of anthologies of new writing, usually three or four authors per volume. The New Writers series enabled me to introduce new work by many who became our regular authors. They included Aidan Higgins, David Mercer, Alexander Trocchi, Alan Burns, Christine Bowler, Vivienne Welburn, Dino Buzzati, Simon Vestdijk, Robert Pinget, René de Obaldia, John Antrobus, Penelope Shuttle and Renate Rasp, among many others. It also enabl
ed us to use short work by Samuel Beckett, Ionesco and similar established names that would not fit into any other formula. I could put twenty pages of poetry into a volume that also contained a complete short novel and a group of short stories, could insert a play, experimental prose, even short philosophical or critical writing. It was like having a literary magazine, and as the series progressed, the number of different contributions per issue increased as well.

  A few weeks after the big promotional tour of Robbe-Grillet, Duras and Sarraute, I telephoned George Harewood. He was now the Director of the Edinburgh Festival, and I suggested we meet at Overton’s, a fish restaurant on St James’s Street, near the Festival’s London office. I told him about the tour, and in particular about the most extraordinary part of it, the Coventry experience. He listened with great interest and then I put my suggestion to him: why not do something similar in Edinburgh? Music and drama were not part of the real Scottish tradition, but literature was. Why not let writers talk among themselves in public to educate that public about their preoccupations, what literature was and could be about, and tell the audience what they were trying to do? The cut and thrust would create tension, break down inhibitions and give the public an insight into what otherwise only a few critics and the authors’ friends knew about.