Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  As soon as the contract was signed, I heard from Barney. Not only had he been obliged to fight obscenity cases, but after winning he had had to bring lawsuits against pirate paperback companies, who had brought out their own editions to take advantage of the strange American copyright law, whereby copyright was lost if more than 1,500 copies of a book printed in another country were circulated in the US. Although there were no figures to prove it, it was obvious that more than that quantity must have been smuggled into the country since 1934, when Tropic of Cancer was first published by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press. A large number had been seized by customs.

  Barney saw an opportunity to recoup his losses through the British edition and suggested that he would like to become my partner and share expenses and profits. I had already had great difficulty in persuading Marion to go ahead with the Henry Miller project. She had watched my Edinburgh adventure with amazement, unable to grasp my reasons for getting involved in such a big and risky undertaking, but was aware that the publicity – front-page much of it and not confined to Britain – had made me something of a celebrity. Several of the writers from abroad had found British publishers and some British writers as well as others present at the conference had attracted the attention of Ledig-Rowohlt and European publishers who had come, and in some cases been themselves put on the platform during the last two days. Norman Mailer’s praise of William Burroughs, hitherto an unknown name outside his immediate circle, had led to several contracts, notably with Grove Press for the US, but I had so far done nothing to take advantage of the success of the conference.

  Marion’s reactions to this were strange. She had bought a half-interest in the company that still bore my name, but she found that at the Frankfurt Book Fair and in general she was not treated as my equal, and she resented it, becoming on occasion rather strident in her assertion: “I own half the shares.” Edinburgh had unfortunately made my shadow uncomfortably large for her. Although she realized that our higher profile benefited her as well, there was a chancre growing in her mind that was to emerge later. Now she voiced her anxiety over getting involved in a book that could lead to prosecution. It was Roy Jones who tipped the balance. He was Marion’s financial adviser, but also a board member, and by nature a risk-taker. At our crucial meeting after I had talked Dr Hoffman into a contract, he finally said that if I wanted to take the risk of publishing Miller, it must be on my own. I would have to pay any expenses to defend the book. It was agreed, against this, that in consideration of the risk-taking I could keep half of the profits. Marion remained negative and frightened, but Roy persuaded her that in this way she risked nothing. We accepted Barney’s offer, because it reduced my own risk and would provide funds for a defence if we needed it. Barney was sent a contract that would give him a half-share in the British edition of Tropic of Cancer.

  I went skiing at Val d’Isère at the end of February 1963. On the bus from Geneva airport, which is a long ride, I sat next to a charming French lady called Jacqueline, and we spent the time talking. She owned a clothing boutique in Paris, and although on holiday, did not intend to ski, but to enjoy the ambience and clear air of the Savoy mountains in winter. She had no hotel reservation, and I persuaded her to come to my hotel. However, she would not share my room, so I let her have it for the night, while I shared Jacques Chaix’s, because the hotel, and indeed the whole village, was booked out. The next morning Jacqueline and I became intimate enough for me to return to my own room. I spent an enjoyable five days skiing, and enjoyed the company of my regular skiing friends and of course of Jacqueline, but then a telephone call came from Dick Seaver in New York, who at that time was Barney Rosset’s principal editor. Barney wanted me to come to New York right away to discuss the contract and publication details. I had intended to stay two weeks in Val d’Isère, but after an exchange of telegrams, with Barney becoming ever more insistent, I reluctantly cut short my holiday by a week. I sent a telegram saying “OK COMING BUT MERDE” and left. Jacqueline later told me that Jacques had suggested she move in with him, saying we were like brothers and shared everything, but she had declined.

  I spent three days in New York, quite pointlessly, and returned to London. We had discussed the contract, to which Barney did not object, but he had mislaid it and would send it back when he found it. Back in Britain we went ahead with publication.

  Our biggest difficulty was finding a printer. We finally found a small one willing to print a first edition of ten thousand copies, but we had to sign an indemnity taking all the risks upon ourselves, because the printer could also be prosecuted. He was a very slow printer with rather old machinery. I also looked for literary support in the event that a prosecution did take place, although on balance I felt that we were probably safe. Miller’s good Edinburgh reception and favourable publicity must have registered with the DPP,17 and his office was still smarting from its defeat in the Penguin trial. I was canvassing my own defence witnesses just in case.

  Those to whom I wrote – who agreed, either to appear in the box if necessary, or to otherwise give support by writing letters or signing a document approving publication – included Anthony Hartley, Anthony Powell, Erich Fried, Charles Osborne, Robert Bolt, Brian Aldiss, Kenneth Allsop, John Gray (a BBC editor in Scotland, who had edited my conference for the daily broadcast), R.D. Smith, Kenneth Tynan, V.S. Pritchett, Naomi Lewis, Professor Maurice Carstairs (that year’s Reith lecturer), David Daiches, Terence Kilmartin, George Devine, G.S. Fraser, William Golding, J.B. Priestley, Sir Compton MacKenzie, Lawrence Durrell, Sir Herbert Read, Colin MacInnes, Arnold Wesker, Sam Wanamaker and others, an astonishing line-up for those days. Sam Beckett would do anything other than appear in court. His earlier experience as a witness in the Gogarty trial in the Thirties in Dublin had taught him what havoc a clever barrister could wreak with his totally honest reactions.

  I wrote a letter to the DPP, telling him we intended to publish, giving him all the reasons we were doing it, and a list of names of those who supported us. We certainly did not expect him to prosecute, but would withhold publication until after the trial if he intended to do so, so that no booksellers would be involved. It was only ten days before publication that we received a reply that after taking advice from counsel he did not intend to prosecute. I decided to keep this information to myself.

  The contract had still not been sent back by Barney. I realized he was waiting to see if there was to be a prosecution or not. A week before hearing from the DPP, I sent Barney an ultimatum: either the contract arrived within seven days or we would go it alone without him. There was no reply.

  On publication day, which was in April, I turned on the radio and heard the eight o’clock news. The BBC announced that long queues were already forming outside Foyles and other London bookshops to buy Tropic of Cancer before it was banned. I had been right to keep the DPP’s letter to myself. Every bookshop sold out that morning, and the telephone kept ringing with re-orders. The book had been published at twenty-five shillings, a relatively high price. The cover design was simple, an exploding white star in a blue background, close to the original Obelisk Press edition that Maurice Girodias had designed as a teenager.

  The problem was now the printer. He promised another ten thousand, but it took him two weeks, and by the time they arrived we had orders for 40,000 copies. Eventually we found another printer who could give us 10,000 a week. As fast as each new printing arrived at the warehouse it was sent out, and we had to ration each bookseller. We were, for the first and only time, on the Sunday Times best-seller list.

  A young man from Germany, Christopher von Schlotterer, had come to work for us for a few weeks to improve his English. On the first morning he turned up at our Sackville Street office, and he was there punctually at nine o’clock, only to find the door at the top of the stairs locked. He sat on the stairs and waited. At about half-past the receptionist was the first to arrive. “Ah, you must be the German boy,” she said, and led him in. His princi
pal job for the next few weeks was dividing up the daily flow of orders for Tropic of Cancer into lots of 1,000 copies so that the books could go out according to the sequence of orders arriving, cutting back on larger ones. There was always a shortage, and we had to ration for over two months until the printings caught up.

  Not only was the press full of the book, but to have a copy of it in one’s hand was both a signal that one belonged to what soon came to be called “swinging London” and an act of solidarity with the new underground culture that was opposing the old traditions. William Rees-Mogg editorialized against the book in The Times, claiming that it should have been prosecuted. I had a considerable volume of abusive correspondence, some calling for me to be dragged to hell, others using language much more obscene than anything in the book, and much more violent (Henry Miller is never violent), and there were telephone calls of the same sort. I was even threatened with assassination, and there was a threat to kidnap my daughter and do unmentionable things to her.

  The appearance of the book seemed to have stimulated every kind of perverted crank as well as obsessive puritans, although that is hardly the right way to describe them. But the book continued to sell well, and within two months we had no overdraft, and I was able to take some of the yellowing manuscripts off the shelf, a number of which had been accepted a long time previously, and others I wanted to publish, and put them into production.

  Success breeds success. All our books began to do better. The nouveau roman titles were selling better. We published Night, a novel about the Korean war by Francis Pollini, which had come to us through Girodias, but we had some problems with the author, mostly as a result of his relationship with Olympia. Bruce Douglas-Mann, our solicitor and an MP, managed to sort that out, and the book did well. Next we published Trocchi’s Cain’s Book, which Grove had brought out in New York in 1960.

  Alexander Trocchi has had several mentions in this book, mainly in connection with his Paris days at Merlin and his appearance at the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference. Cain’s Book is largely an account of what happened to him between those two events. It is a horrifying story of a drug-addict’s odyssey through the hell of earning a living and trying to function while totally enslaved to heroin, although the dependence is not admitted as such in the book. The author, having moved to New York, had married the daughter of a very conventional New England family, much against their will, and persuaded her to become a junky herself; they then lived in the “beat” and “hippie” communities of New York, California, Las Vegas and other cities. At one point he appeared on a national television programme, where he not only admitted to being a heroin addict, but started to give himself a fix in front of the cameras before the producer could stop him. He then ran quickly from the studio. He had always liked being outrageous and had tried everything to make himself noticed in Paris, as I have related elsewhere and as is told in Andrew Murray Scott’s biography.18 He did things on impulse, and such was his over-confident arrogance – which had started at school in Glasgow, where he had found that he could pass exams with ease – he always thought that he could worm his way out of any consequences of his actions. But after the TV incident he had reason to be worried. The FBI were after him. He visited his wife Lyn’s parents one Sunday and, changing trains on their way back to New York, gave himself a fix on the platform. The FBI, who must have been trailing him, ran towards him on the platform, but they just missed him as he jumped onto a moving train. They did, however, manage to arrest Lyn, who did time in jail before being picked up and put under house arrest by her parents.

  Trocchi hid for a few days in New York, staying with a second-hand bookseller, then broke into the apartment of George Plimpton, who was away. He knew Plimpton, editor of The Paris Review from the early Fifties, when they were friendly rivals and frequented the same cafés and night haunts. He took Plimpton’s passport and two of his suits, wearing one over the other, and then caught the overnight Greyhound bus to Niagara Falls, and managed to get over the border into Canada. There he looked up Leonard Cohen, who put him up and helped him to get onto a tramp steamer to Scotland, where he disembarked at a northern port, went first to Glasgow to get help from his family, and then settled in London, where I first met him, and where he soon became a spokesman for drug addicts everywhere.

  Cain’s Book chronicles his time on a Hudson River scow, where he had taken a caretaker’s job and written most of the book, which was really put together from the many fragments he had written before the arrest of his wife.

  Cain’s Book received long and interesting reviews. Sales were good. It was published shortly before Tropic of Cancer, but the sales of the latter helped the former. Then came Tropic of Capricorn, which did well, but not nearly as well as the first book. The first was high fashion, and everyone had to have it, no doubt reading the spicier parts and skipping the rest. The fashion did not extend to the second, because the novelty was gone. Dr Hoffman came to see me. “What about the paperback rights?” he asked. I told him that I saw no hurry. The book was selling well in hardcover. A paperback would make it easier for very young people to buy it, and that might start a new initiative of the censors. “But,” he pointed out, “I am bringing you an offer from a paperback company, and I expect a commission on the offer.” He was Henry Miller’s agent and would receive ten per cent, and for all I knew more, on all the royalties that he would receive from us. Now he wanted an additional ten per cent on whatever we might get from a paperback sale to another publisher, and from that he would of course get a second commission when we accounted to him.

  Hoffman had the whip hand and he knew it. I tried to put him off for the time being. Henry Miller had been reluctant to let Barney Rosset publish the Tropics, because he did not want a mass audience buying them “just for the dirty bits”. He had written them both in exuberance at having discovered the freedom of Paris after the restrictive climate of prohibition America, and he had never intended to write a pornographic novel. He explained in Cancer his philosophical view of the universe as well as chronicling the life he led in Paris, and always in a self-deprecating and humorous style. Money flowed through his fingers, because he was not accustomed to having it. Lawyers and accountants in the US were already robbing him. They had talked him into starting a company with his royalties, out of which they paid themselves salaries and expenses much greater than any tax that they said they were saving him. Now his agent was finding ways of getting additional money for himself to reduce Henry’s future income as well as ours.

  As it was obvious we would have to sell paperback rights, out of which we would keep half the royalties but see our hardcover sales stop, I approached another paperback firm, and got them to increase the offer. Hoffman came back with an even higher one from the first company, which again I managed to get raised. Hoffman said enough was enough and agreed, but insisted that I still owed him ten per cent on the highest offer he had brought. We paid it.

  Now we had to deal with Barney Rosset. A week after publication, he had sent back the signed contract, which I refused to accept. I had given him an ultimatum which he had ignored. He instructed Oscar Beuselinck, whom I knew from previous negotiation and who at the time was Harold Pinter’s agent as well as being a solicitor, to sue me. Beuselinck wrote me and I made an appointment to see him, bringing all my correspondence. He admitted frankly that Barney had not a leg to stand on, and that he had advised him not to sue. But it was an amusing meeting. Beuselinck kept me for more than an hour, talking about books and about our shared interest in music, especially opera. The Mozart operas, so he claimed, he knew well enough to conduct, well… if not exactly to conduct, he knew at least what was coming next. He talked about his legal practice, especially his divorce work. Many husbands, he told me, were unhappy in their marriages because the wives were too sexually conventional. So passed the hour. Barney was furious that he could not sue me and decided to break off all relations: no friendship, no co-operation, no shared translation
s. He would not let me take on his authors or buy any of mine. So started a war that would continue for more than a decade.

  * * *

  It was around that time that we started publishing William Burroughs. André Deutsch had shown an interest after the publicity he had received in Edinburgh, where he had felt obliged to be present as so many of his authors, Norman Mailer in particular, were there. But I had talks with Bill, and he decided he would rather be with me, the man who had brought him to the festival, which had made his name known internationally. The novels were as extreme as they could be at a time when things were loosening up, although not all that fast, and not where frankly descriptive homosexuality and sadism were concerned. Practising homosexuals could still be prosecuted under the law until 1967, when Leo Abse brought in a Sexual Discrimination Bill as one of the many social reforms that made Britain a more tolerant society during the Sixties. But in 1963 the prejudices of judges and juries were if anything greater than those of the population as a whole. Burroughs was a dangerous author to publish, but after several discussions Bill and I worked out a fusion of the three novels that had been published by Olympia: The Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded; we called the new text that emerged from taking chunks out of all three Dead Fingers Talk. What was removed were the orgies, the sadistic hangings, even many heterosexual sex scenes. But the black satirical humour was still there, as was the biting portrayal of American racialist attitudes. We also included non-sexual scenes from homosexual life and the whole culture of the drug scene in America, then very different from the more enlightened and humane British one, which was soon to change for the worse. Even without the sex scenes, Dead Fingers Talk still made a vivid and frightening novel, bringing out all Burroughs’s paranoia about dark forces, some from outside the planet, working towards control of our lives and our minds. We published it towards the end of 1963.