Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Then there were The Black Diaries of Roger Casement. These were the extremely private and indiscreet diaries of the distinguished civil servant who had done much to expose the colonial despotism and cruelty that prevailed in the Belgian Congo under the personal rule of Leopold II, and later similar atrocities in South America. Casement, although an Ulster Protestant, was an Irish patriot who took part in the 1916 Easter Rising and was caught smuggling German arms into the country for use in the rebellion. The diaries that were with him at the time of his arrest were a record of his promiscuous homosexual activities, and they were circulated by the prosecution to selected journalists at the time of his trial in mimeograph to minimize any public sympathy for him. Given his past record of distinguished and brave public service, he would normally have been reprieved, but the Irish rising in the middle of the First World War, which was not going well at the time, made the government ruthless, so Casement was convicted and hanged. All copies were supposed to have been returned to the Home Office, but one was not. It came into the possession of Peter Singleton-Gates, a retired journalist, who brought it to Girodias. For him, a book that would excite the prurient, bring to light a historical scandal and above all expose the hypocritical and malign behaviour of the Home Office was the ideal publication, and he produced a large and impressive volume. Singleton-Gates, the journalist, explained the circumstances in which the transcribed copy had been obtained, while Girodias wrote a long and excellent historical introduction that preceded the text itself.

  In 1959 he published the book in France, and set about looking for an American and a British publisher. Barney Rosset finally took it for America, where the press totally ignored it, while I agreed to publish in Britain, where I knew I was taking a considerable risk. I then discovered to my dismay that some British bookshops were receiving the Olympia Press edition directly from Paris. When I protested, Maurice said that the French and European market for such a book in English was non-existent. He had to sell his edition wherever he could, but that should not stop me. With the Alger Hiss fiasco in mind, I withdrew from the contract. He then signed an agreement with Sidgwick and Jackson, run by a very wily individual called James Knapp-Fisher.

  The book was published. Not a single review appeared, not a copy was seen in a bookshop. When I enquired, I was told that the book had instantly sold out and gone out of print. The only possible explanation was that Knapp-Fisher had made a deal to sell the entire edition to the Home Office to prevent it getting to public notice. It has been suggested that the Irish government may have been party to the deal, as it had no desire for one of Eire’s heroes and martyrs to be seen, whatever his virtues, as a member of the banned and despised group of homosexuals, and a particularly active and unashamed one. Knapp-Fisher, however, made one little gesture of conscience: he donated a copy to the London Library, where it is not catalogued and can only be obtained for perusal, and not removed, and then only with the express permission of the chief librarian. Publication of The Black Diaries was a totally quixotic gesture on Maurice Girodias’s part, an arrow aimed at an establishment he hated and despised. It should resound to his credit.

  It should be said that another, much shorter version, authorized by Casement’s heirs, the Parry family, appeared in 1997, in which many mistakes have been corrected, but there is still a controversy surrounding the diaries, which defenders of Sir Roger Casement, hero of anti-slavery in the Congo and on the Amazon, still say are forgeries.

  But the most important and painful of all the deals with Girodias that went wrong was that for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Nabokov could not find a publisher in America, and resorted to publication in France. Via his French translator, Doussia Ergaz, he got in touch with Girodias. Doussia told Maurice that she had a special manuscript, written by a recognized author, a Russian of good family, now teaching at an American university. This particular book had to be published anonymously because of its content.

  Girodias at this point was living with Muffie, the estranged wife of Austryn Wainhouse, whose translations of the Marquis de Sade were one of the mainstays of the Olympia catalogue. Maurice and Muffie read the manuscript, which was entitled Lolita, and enthused over it. It was obvious to Girodias that Doussia Ergaz was an ex-lover of the author by the care she took over the negotiations and her insistence on secrecy where the name of Nabokov was concerned.

  Girodias had many difficulties. The book was a fairly long one for his list, and he would have to publish it in two volumes. It was not the kind of easy erotica on which he could expect to make money. He sold the translation rights to Gallimard, having little expectation that he would sell it elsewhere. The author in any case did not want it to appear in America. It soon became clear to Girodias once he had started to correspond directly with Nabokov that the latter was not happy about being published by a house specializing in pornography and erotica. His disdain for this publisher he never met became greater with time, but he was pleased about Gallimard. It was Raymond Queneau, brilliant author himself and one of the most influential of Claude Gallimard’s advisers, who brought about French publication, overcoming the nervousness of his boss. Éric Kahane, Maurice’s brother, did the translation. The book was attacked in France and successfully defended, but in order to do so it became necessary to reveal the name of the author. This created considerable difficulty for him at his university.

  American publication came about in a strange way. The American publisher, Walter Minton, who had recently inherited the highly reputable firm of G.P. Putnam from his father, was having an affair with a chorus girl called Rosemary Ridgewell, who on a visit to Paris had read extracts from Lolita in a magazine and thought it the funniest thing she had ever read. On her insistence Minton bought American rights, although, according to Girodias’s memoirs, he never found the time to read it. Nevertheless, it became an instant best-seller and soon royalties were pouring into Olympia Press. Rosemary and Walter Minton went to Paris, and Girodias invited them to lunch, a little discomfited when Rosemary insisted on going to the very expensive Tour d’Argent. He was nervously feeling in his pocket to see how much cash he had, when Rosemary insisted that Walter would pay. He saw them again that night when he took them, along with Iris Owens (who wrote novels for him as Harriet Daimler), to a lesbian nightclub. It soon became obvious the couple were not getting on, and the evening ended in a fracas, with Minton hitting Rosemary and walking out. The next morning she turned up at Maurice’s flat with a bag of croissants, spent the day in bed with him and returned to New York on her own the following day. Maurice’s private life was always colourful, and he never had difficulties with ladies.

  But long before this, he had offered the book to me and I had accepted it. I knew nothing about Vladimir Nabokov at that point, but it was evident that this Russian émigré had a wonderful facility with English style and a caustic view of his adopted country. That he was also a fastidious aristocrat who resented having to go to a maverick pornographic publisher like Girodias to get his book into print I only realized later. Maurice’s memoirs14 are revealing and yield many insights into the ambiguities of the author’s complex personality; my own subsequent difficulties certainly had something to do with Nabokov’s prejudice against him.

  I signed a contract for British rights and announced Lolita for publication, taking care to find influential figures who would defend it if attacked. One day I came back from lunch to find a man sitting at my desk with both feet on it, reading my correspondence.

  “What the devil are you doing?” I exclaimed. He looked up, still holding some of my letters in his hand.

  “Are you Calder?” he asked, swinging his feet onto the ground. “Well, I’m Walter Minton. I have a message for you from Vladimir Nabokov. You’re not going to publish his book.” He took another look at the letters in his hand. “Interesting,” he commented and stood up, dropping them on the desk. Then he went on to tell me, as rudely as possible, that Nabokov had checked me out, and believe
d from my past publishing that I was a Communist. He also disliked other writers in my catalogue, especially Beckett. As for my contract with Girodias, the author would repudiate it and go to court if necessary.

  I decided to ask Barney Rosset to help. One of Barney’s recent letters had mentioned meeting André Deutsch at the Harvard Club. Deutsch was also interested in Lolita. Barney made some efforts on my behalf, but when he was told that the objections to me were political, he gave up. Nabokov soon made other enquiries, and I learnt from Barney that George Weidenfeld would be acceptable to him. I decided to compromise. I had lunch with George and suggested that we might publish the book together in partnership. At the Frankfurt Book Fair of 1957 we saw Girodias together. Before the meeting, I had told George that Maurice was sensitive and wanted to be seen as a literary publisher rather than as a pornographer, but at our meeting Girodias was in a jocular mood, laughed about his bad reputation and agreed the proposition. I signed a contract with Weidenfeld whereby he acquired half the rights and agreed equally to share all risks and expenses. The book would appear under his imprint with myself as a sleeping partner.

  But then the trouble started. Our partnership was secret and unknown to the author. Weidenfeld was directly in the firing line in the event of a prosecution, and this created a problem for his co-director Nigel Nicolson, who was the Tory member of Parliament for Bournemouth and had already made himself unpopular with his constituents by opposing Anthony Eden’s attack on Nasser during the Suez crisis, a hypocritical war which benefited only Israel and had little support in Britain except from the Tory faithful. To be seen now as the publisher of a highly controversial book about paedophilia would offend his constituents even further, and he was nervous. Carter-Ruck, the most expensive libel lawyer in Britain, was consulted, and he advised extreme caution. As legal and other expenses mounted, my own attitude, which was that once you had decided to publish a book you went ahead with it, was ignored, and I became seriously worried at the growing legal costs with little hope of getting any of it back for some time.

  Finally, I accepted defeat and passed over all rights to Weidenfeld, in exchange for ten per cent of the profits, which never came to much, because a publishing profit is almost impossible to calculate when overheads are taken into account. Weidenfeld finally went ahead and published. The book was supported by prominent authors such as Graham Greene, whom I had earlier recruited when I thought I might publish the book. The Bournemouth Conservative Party duly deselected Nigel Nicolson, who thereby lost his seat at the next election. Weidenfeld & Nicolson made a great deal of money on Lolita, but also had an option on all the other books of Nabokov, which the firm published over the next few years.

  This account of my deals with Girodias, most of which came unstuck, has been a long but necessary digression, but as my association with him was in many ways as important as the one with Barney Rosset, it needed explaining.

  * * *

  That year in Frankfurt, the September after the Writers’ Conference in Edinburgh, Maurice was flat broke. “Johnny,” he said, “can you lend me some money? I need five thousand dollars.” As much of his revenue during the last few years had been from sales of rights to American publishers, he thought primarily in terms of dollars, which American publishers in his eyes always had in abundance. But I certainly had no spare cash. “Sorry, Maurice, I can’t help you. I have just enough to get me through this Frankfurt.”

  “Well, let me share your room then? You can’t let me sleep in the street.”

  In the end, and very reluctantly, I let him share my room at the Frankfurter Hof, which fortunately had another bed. On the first night he harangued me. A warm bed was not his only motive in turning to me. He reminded me of the “censorship day” at Edinburgh where he had been present, had spoken and had witnessed the acclaim given to Henry Miller, in whom he had an almost obsessive personal interest. His father had first published him, but he, Maurice, had been cheated out of the rights of the two Tropics and other titles by Hachette after the war. He had published some of Miller’s later books in the 1950s at Olympia Press, had on one occasion been to court over them, and had been instrumental in helping Barney Rosset to obtain American rights. Now, he said, was the time for me to publish Henry Miller in Britain.

  Henry Miller had replaced D.H. Lawrence as the most notorious writer still banned in Britain. The Lady Chatterley prosecution in 1960 had been a great show trial, with prominent writers and academics and even a bishop appearing as witnesses for the defence. The publisher, Penguin Books, against all expectation, had won triumphantly. Henry Miller’s acclaim at the Writers’ Conference, said Girodias, showed where public opinion lay, and now was the time to publish him. And who should do it other than me, who had brought Henry Miller to Edinburgh? But I had a simple scruple: although I had had at the back of my mind the intention to bring some of my authors to Edinburgh to make them better known, and this had not worked out as planned, I did not feel that I could take personal advantage of the events that had been thrown up by what happened there. I had performed a public duty as an interesting experiment, and there seemed to me to be an element of corruption if I thereby acquired new authors. I do not think that I am less ethically inclined now as I write this than I was then, but the world was different at the time and ethical scruples were expected from civilized people of my background. But after two nights of listening to Maurice, I began to realize he was right. Many publishers had been in Edinburgh to support their authors or to fish for new ones, and propositions had already been made to Henry Miller’s Paris agent. So why, after all, not me? I looked up Dr Michael Hoffman, founder of the Agence Littéraire Hoffman, who was in Frankfurt, and broached the subject. He said he would speak to Henry.

  Under pressure, I had advanced a few marks to Maurice, which I could ill afford, and he was always asking for more. Then I had a brainwave. I suggested that he should put it about that he was writing his memoirs. He was a notorious character who had been connected with many writers, a libertine publisher whose so-called pornography often included works of great literary merit, a man who had attacked censorship everywhere out of conviction and who had also led an interesting life. He had made important literary discoveries, published best-sellers, made fortunes and lost them again through his follies, the biggest of which had been his restaurant and succession of nightclubs. At one point, underneath or over his publishing offices, there had been a Russian restaurant with cabaret (which earlier had been a Brazilian one), a Blues Bar under the roof, a theatre in the basement, all in the same building on the Rue Saint-Séverin. In expanding his basement, his contractor had dug into the graveyard of the nearby church, and had filled the local dustbins around the Boulevard Saint-Michel with human remains from the Middle Ages. Three of his mistresses were all working in the complex simultaneously at one point, one of them a film star. His memoirs could only be a best-seller.

  He did not take me seriously at first. When could he find the time? That was not his immediate problem, I pointed out. He needed some contracts and good advances. I would help him to sell an autobiography, of which not a word was written, by saying that I had seen extracts that were fascinating and put rumours about the Fair. All he had to do was wait until he was approached, then say that he had thought it too dangerous to bring the manuscript to Frankfurt, but that he would consider offers. Five minutes later I ran into André Deutsch in one of the Fair’s corridors. “Is it true, André,” I asked him, “that you have the book?”

  “What book, John?”

  “Girodias’s autobiography. I heard you had bought English rights. I’ve seen a bit of it. It’s dynamite. But if you have it, I won’t waste my time.”

  “Sorry, John. I’m in a hurry. See you later.” And off he went to find Girodias. I used the same ploy with Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape and other British publishers, and then with German, French and Italian ones. I forget which Americans I spoke to, but I think I probably left it to othe
rs to get the Americans interested. By the next day, Maurice had signed three contracts or option agreements and had £15,000 in cash in his pocket. He took a suite at the Frankfurter Hof, even gave a party in it, and I had my room to myself. The story is told in his own words, rather more amusingly, in the first of the two volumes of memoirs he was later to write, J’Arrive,15 which in English became The Frog Prince.16

  All my dealings with Maurice landed me in trouble. He was unable to make a straightforward deal and stick to it. By the very nature of most of the books he published, he was often doing business with authors who saw him as naive and took advantage of his unwillingness to write anything down or remember what he had given as a cash payment for the manuscripts he accepted, and he was often dealing with publishers and booksellers who did not abide by a culture of honesty and trust. His lack of guile was very transparent, which enabled many to take advantage of him: it was not too surprising that with experience he became very distrustful and often sought to cheat on a contract before he himself was cheated. I did less business with him after the early Sixties, which made it easier to remain friends until his death in 1990.

  * * *

  After Frankfurt, I went to Paris and spoke seriously to Dr Hoffman. Other British publishers had been in touch and had offered contracts, but always with a proviso allowing them an indefinite delay before they had to publish. I offered an advance of £2,000, less than most of the others, but I was willing to guarantee publication within a year, and possibly within six months. Hoffman was anxious to see the book out. He agreed, and Henry Miller agreed as well.