Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Miller did not speak long, but he was clear, moving and direct. Why could a writer, the most harmless of human beings, not write what he wanted? People who did not like his work were not obliged to read him. Why should the public be protected from the author’s point of view, his recorded experience, ideas and even fantasies? It was Authority’s old need to restrict knowledge, as witness the Inquisition. He received a standing ovation from the audience, then modestly sat down. He was of course at that time still unpublished in Britain as far as his major writings were concerned. Trocchi had, naturally enough, a great deal to say, but Burroughs so far had only listened. The day was a great success with the audience, but so had been every other day.

  On the Wednesday I received bad news. My great-uncle Jim had died, only a few months after my grandfather, his elder brother. He had been heavily sedated and only semi-conscious for some months. The funeral was to be on the Saturday, not in Scotland, but near Wheeting Hall, where his wife had died and been buried. There was also some ceremony in Kinross the day before. How could I get to it? There was no way I could leave the conference, my brainchild, which was going so well in spite of the dire predictions. The newspapers were giving us more and more space every day. I had persuaded the BBC to record the conference, and every evening an edited version of the day’s proceedings was going out to the listening public. The whole country was talking about it. But anything could happen, and I could not leave. I booked myself onto an early flight to London for Saturday morning, saying I would get to the burial late that morning, which would mean leaving Sonia and Jim to clear up and get the writers onto their trains and planes. From Heathrow I would hire a car to take me to Suffolk.

  On the Thursday evening we had a party at the Circus Place flat, where Sonia was staying, and now Norman Mailer as well. Mailer pinned me against a wall. “I want to be one of the moderators tomorrow,” he said. “Khushwant Singh can be the other.” I had had other plans, but Norman was not easy to refuse, and I eventually agreed. Morning briefing sessions were now no longer necessary, and Mailer and I planned that last day of the conference there and then.

  The subject was “The Future of the Novel”. Different writers outlined the future as they envisaged it, but the big sensation of the day was William Burroughs. He had earlier been described by Mailer as “possibly the only living American writer of genius”. He had become a friend of Trocchi, and they were to remain friends thereafter; Henry Miller had also been friendly to Burroughs, another writer who had been censored like himself (Burroughs had been at that point banned in Chicago and only recently published by Girodias), but the great womanizer did not otherwise have much in common with a totally frank and committed homosexual. At this time, in 1962, homosexual behaviour was still a crime in Britain, and the platform outspokenness of militants like the Dutch writer Simon (Gerard Kornelis) van het Reve, who had been constantly on his feet to attack the homophobes like Khushwant Singh and Rebecca West, had titillated and no doubt shocked much of the audience and delighted the press, from the tabloids to the most serious, who were able to report views expressed in public that their editors would normally have suppressed.

  William Burroughs had a similar voice to T.S. Eliot’s, drawling and matter-of-fact, with something like a Harvard accent. He was always dressed in a suit and tie, neatly but not fashionably, and looked like an accountant. In a dry monotone, he described how he wrote and explained his fold-in, cut-up method of writing. He would put together very different texts, some from newspapers, some from other writers, some from his own past work, and by folding or cutting create a mixture or blend with fragments of different sentences which he could then edit and rewrite until it made some kind of sense. He might have added that this method, which has its painterly equivalent in collage and in various forms of surrealist art, was really what T.S. Eliot did in his mind in poems like The Waste Land, but without the deliberate use of hazard. In doing so, by freeing the words from the prison into which the original writer had put them, and letting them take on a new meaning outside the preconceptions of the writer, Burroughs believed he was a magus. He really thought that he had once caused a plane to crash by putting down randomly the name of the pilot and describing certain circumstances related to the accident. Most importantly, he had been cutting up and editing his text at exactly the time that the crash had occurred. “Are you serious?” asked Singh. “Perfectly,” replied Burroughs.

  The last night’s party was very eventful, and it again took place in the Circus Place flat. Everyone was jubilant at what had been, by general consent, a triumphal week. My own feeling was that I had stumbled onto a great discovery, and had justified the conclusions I had drawn from the Coventry experience. This was the way to showcase new writing to the public and to create an interest in the writers: by putting their ideas and personalities in conflict with each other. Novelists work on their own, and the blank white paper is a lonely challenge. The chance to meet one’s public and to become for a while an actor could make all the difference. This did not apply to the shy or withdrawn: L.P. Hartley, Henry Williamson and one or two others had not said a word. But it had made stars of Fried and Singh, of the two tough ladies McCarthy and West, of Miller and Burroughs, of Trocchi, Mailer and Angus Wilson. They had found their admirers in the audience and had played up to them, relishing their applause.

  At the party, which was attended by some who had been at the conference, but not as delegates, Max Hayward, co-translator of Doctor Zhivago and an Oxford don, got very drunk and made a pass at Sonia Orwell who, elated like everyone else, was looking her best. Mailer decided to take umbrage at this and half-lifted Hayward by one arm over his shoulder. “Calder,” he shouted, “get his other arm.” When I did, he dragged the poor man, myself taking part of the weight, out onto the landing and told me to let go. When I did, he heaved Hayward over his shoulder and onto the stone stairs, whereupon he rolled down all the four or five flights to the bottom. Five minutes later he reappeared, blood flowing from several places, and quietly resumed drinking. His previous drunkenness had protected him during a descent that could easily have killed him. Burroughs witnessed some of this, but did not understand what was happening. He later told his biographers that groups of youths were roaming the streets of Edinburgh beating up passers-by.

  Sonia Orwell was on as much of a high as everyone else, and for once she had not drunk too much. As the flat emptied towards four in the morning, a strange hunger took her over. She seized my arm and wanted me to go to bed with her. To be honest I had the same desire, and not only to wipe out the memory of my last humiliating experience in bed with her in London on the night of Lisel’s funeral. The week that had begun with trepidation had ended in incredible success, and that often goes to the gonads. But I had to catch the first plane at seven o’clock and first I had to go home to where I was staying, shave and change. There was just no time. I explained my situation and left.

  I took the early flight and drove to Brandon, where the burial had taken place an hour before I arrived. I joined my relatives at the hotel, where there was a lunch, and explained my late arrival. Of course my name had been much in the news, but I was treated with coldness for my lateness, especially as I was a possible heir. I drove back to London, taking my brother with me, who had flown from Germany to be both at the funeral in Scotland and at the burial in Suffolk. We both stayed at a big hotel off Sloane Street, near my old Lowndes Street flat. My brother and I had never been able to get on well, and I vaguely remember that our dinner together was a difficult one.

  The next morning, Sunday, I flew back to Edinburgh. Nearly all the writers had departed, and Sonia had also left that day. Bettina had been in Edinburgh, but being pregnant had stayed in the flat I had rented for the duration of the festival, and she seldom left it. On Monday I went to a morning concert at Freemason’s Hall, where the Drolc Quartet played Shostakovich, and that afternoon received a message, asking me to call on Shepherd and Anderson, the Edinburgh s
olicitors. I went the next day and was told that I was my uncle’s residual heir. He had left me Ledlanet and all his estate, other than a few legacies.

  I was thirty-five years old, had just pulled off the biggest event of my life so far in terms of prestige and imaginative thinking, had become a national celebrity, and was now the owner of a country house with ten thousand acres attached to it. Still dazed, I went to see Lord Harewood, who beamed at me. He had been much criticized the year before for introducing so much Schoenberg and difficult music into the Festival and that year for allowing me to stage a massive literary jamboree. Both innovations had worked, and my event had brought the festival onto the front pages of the national press and even been discussed in foreign newspapers.

  “What about next year?” he asked.

  “A drama conference,” I ventured.

  “Good,” he said. “Get on with it.”

  Perhaps I should close this chapter with a quote from a letter that Mary McCarthy sent to her friend Hannah Arendt: “People jumping up to confess they were homosexuals or heterosexuals; a registered heroin addict leading the young Scottish opposition to the literary tyranny of the communist Hugh MacDiarmid… an English woman describing her communications with her dead daughter,13 a Dutch homosexual, former male nurse, now a Catholic convert, seeking someone to baptize him; a bearded Sikh, with his hair down to his waist, declaring on the platform that homosexuals were incapable of love, just as (he said) hermaphrodites were incapable of orgasm (Stephen Spender, in the chair, murmured that he should have thought they could have two…)”

  Chapter 5

  Ledlanet

  The years with Calders Ltd had given me self-confidence, and the sale of my shares to Wolfson had given me a temporary affluence, but it was not to last long. Lawyers ate up my ready money very quickly as Christya and I confronted each other in court. There was the custody issue, which I lost. Then the question of a divorce dragged on as Christya changed her mind as to whether she wanted a divorce or not. The decree absolute came through in 1960, and immediately after it I was married again, not this time out of great passion, but for reasons that have been explained earlier. And although publishing eats up money very quickly as cash is turned into unsold stock, in August 1962, I had reasonable affluence again and landed property as well.

  I went to Ledlanet a day or so after seeing the lawyer. All the staff were still there: Reginald Attewell, the butler, had been hired by my Great-Aunt Mildred as a boot-boy in the 1920s when he was still a teenager. He had worked in their house at Park Lane and at Wheeting Hall in Suffolk, and after the death of my aunt from diabetes, shortly before the Second World War, when Wheeting was sold – my uncle had only kept the shooting rights – he had moved to Scotland. Attewell was to be described by an editor of Private Eye, a few years after I had inherited him, as making Jeeves look like an amateur. There will be more about Attewell later. The other staff included two gamekeepers, a gardener, a cook, a housemaid and some temporary staff recruited by Attewell as necessary in the nearby village of Milnathort. The gamekeeper, who lived in the lodge at the foot of the drive, doubled as chauffeur. But in practice, Attewell did nearly everything himself.

  I spent two days there reassuring the staff that I intended, as far as possible, to make no changes. I stayed in in the west wing in a room I had often occupied before, facing south and with an alcove that was part of a turret built into the corner of the house. There was a big central hall, open to a central skylight, and at the first floor level, a gallery ran around three sides of it. Nine bedrooms lay off this, and a green baize door led to three servants’ bedrooms with a bathroom in between. There was another bedroom in the square tower over the front entrance, and a total of three other bathrooms. The front façade, built of stone in the Scottish baronial style, faced due south. Behind the house was a field, and beyond it a large wood, above which rose the Ochil Hills, overlooking two counties: Perth to the north, Kinross to the south. I was the fourth generation of Calders to own Ledlanet, allowing that my father’s generation was missing, and to me the place was magical.

  My uncle’s cairn terrier was still in the house. She was called Wootsie and knew me from past visits. A distant cousin, Margery Manners, who had hoped to inherit herself, moved out as soon as she knew the contents of the will. She had been left a legacy in cash and also the right to take valuables from Ledlanet up to a certain limit. Probate value being low, she arranged to take all the silver, many smaller pieces of furniture and other objects that were readily saleable. Attewell had his own house, some distance away, where he lived with his family; he had a wife who had previously worked in the house, two sons and a daughter. The house had belonged to my uncle, but it was left to Attewell in the will.

  On my first night there, I found myself alone with Wootsie and took her to my room with me, where she curled up at the foot of the bed. It was a warm evening and I opened one of the sash windows wide, read for a bit, then fell asleep, perhaps around eleven o’clock. Suddenly, I woke up. The open window had banged down and simultaneously the door of my room had opened. Wootsie began barking furiously, jumped off the bed and ran out of the door. I followed her onto the landing. It was a pitch-black night, and no light came from the large angled skylight over the middle of the hall. Across the intervening space on the other side of the well above the hall was another balcony, and behind it my uncle’s room, which had been locked. In spite of the blackness I could see Wootsie in a dim light sitting outside its door, tense and expectant; soon she began to whine. There was no apparent source for the light, a rather bright glow that surrounded the dog. No electric light was switched on, and there was certainly no light coming from the skylight overhead. Feeling very frightened now, I put on a dressing gown and walked around the gallery to where Wootsie was sitting, gazing intently up at the door. I could no longer see any light, and I flicked on an electric switch to see my way back. My uncle’s door was still firmly locked. I picked up Wootsie, returned to my room, closed the door and opened the window again. It was after midnight.

  Then I was awakened again in exactly the same way. The window had slammed down, the door opened – had I locked it when I came back? I could not be sure – and a barking Wootsie ran around to my uncle’s door. The same glow illuminated the door and the dog. This time, even more frightened, I turned on every light switch as I went to pick up Wootsie. The glow was gone, but the dog resisted being picked up. This time I locked my door and put a chair against it. It was 2.30 a.m. It took me a while to fall asleep, and when I did, I slept until morning. This strange experience never occurred again.

  I gradually took over the house and spent some time there, going through all the books and papers. I moved more of my own things into the house, which I came to love more and more. I also had Bila, the white poodle, but when she came to Ledlanet there was instant animosity between the two bitches. I finally found a lady who was about to move to Skye who wanted a dog, but not a young one, and she adopted the cairn terrier. A few months later she wrote me that Wootsie had settled down and was very happy on the island.

  * * *

  At the Frankfurt Book Fair that year the first person to greet me, as I was setting up my stand, was Maurice Girodias. We had become very friendly since we first met in the mid-Fifties, although many of the projects we discussed did not come off for different reasons. This is an appropriate place to record what some of these projects were, but the order in which they appear is not strictly chronological.

  Of the four incidents I have to relate, the one I did not have to regret, and which I talked about on in the last chapter, concerned The Beckett Trilogy. As previously related, I had acquired Malone Dies and The Unnamable from Éditions de Minuit and had published the first in 1958 in a hardcover edition with a striking cover that depicted a particularly gruesome skull. This was in Beckett’s own translation. The Unnamable came out on its own only many years later, also in the author’s own translation, because
in 1959 I managed to put the three novels into a single volume. We had a problem over Molloy, the first part of the trilogy. The English language rights had been acquired by Girodias at the instigation of Seaver and the Merlin group and published as an Olympia Press Collection Merlin book in 1955, then it was sold to Grove Press, and at first it was the Grove edition I was selling in the UK. It had been translated by Patrick Bowles with some help from the author, who found the collaboration difficult and unpleasant. Sam himself saw the three works as a whole and wanted them published as such. This never happened in France, but I was anxious to please him. Somehow I had to get around Girodias, who had become defensive and was not keen to have competition for his own edition, which sold badly in his own market.

  The Trilogy is central to all of Beckett’s work, as much so as Waiting for Godot. It was written during the same period of creative white heat between 1947 and 1949 that produced Godot and Texts for Nothing. Beckett thought that a tumour, growing in his right cheek, was cancerous and that he only had a short time to live. Fortunately, he knew what he wanted to say and the tumour turned out to be non-life-threatening, although the hollow in his cheek after it was removed was to give Sam trouble all his life.

  I finally found a solution, and it was a simple one. Why not bring out three editions of a one-volume trilogy, allowing Girodias to do his own, thereby acquiring two other major Beckett novels in exchange for letting me have British rights in Molloy, with Grove Press also doing their own? As he was getting more than he was giving, Girodias agreed and I was able to publish the trilogy as a hardcover.

  I also had a contract with Girodias to publish The Ginger Man. J.P. Donleavy, the author, had submitted it to Girodias, who had liked it and contracted it in the normal way. But apparently Donleavy was also negotiating with other publishers in London at the same time. Not knowing what was going on behind his back, Maurice offered The Ginger Man to me and I accepted it, only to find myself being threatened with legal action by the author, who claimed Girodias did not have the rights to sell to me. Donleavy had made a separate deal with Neville Armstrong for Spearman to publish the book after Girodias had taken the initial risk. Caught in the middle and with the threat of writs flying about, I backed out.