by John Calder
Conversation started slowly. Then Beckett suddenly leant across the table towards Burroughs and said, “Tell me, Mr Burroughs, about this cut-up method of yours. I don’t think I quite understand what you do.”
“Waal, Mr Beckett,” drawled Burroughs, in a voice that sometimes sounded southern, and at other times Harvard, “what I do is this. I take a copy of the New York Times or some other paper and I cut a column in half, or sometimes I fold it. Then I find another text, perhaps of mine, or perhaps a page of your Molloy, and I do the same thing.” Beckett was listening in rapt concentration. He opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again.
“Then,” continued Bill, “I read across the lines of the two and copy out what I see, so that each new line has half of one text and half of the other. Later I edit the new version until a whole new text emerges. Then, depending on how it looks, I may cut that up into a third text. And of course I add a word or two where it’s necessary.”
Beckett could contain himself no longer. “But you can’t do that,” he said.
“Oh, I do, Mr Beckett, I assure you,” said Burroughs in an even voice. Beckett was getting more excited.
“But you can’t. You can’t take other people’s work like that.”
“Oh, I can. I’ve been doing it for years.”
Both were drinking red wine – a good one, because Girodias had an excellent cellar. They drank faster and faster as they argued, eating little. Both were small eaters at the best of times. The rest of the table ignored them, but I sat fascinated and never intervened. As they drank, the words became wilder, Beckett protesting in ever stronger language, Burroughs explaining that words had to be set free whoever wrote them, and once free they had an independent life and were able to create magic and change the course of human events. He, too, used stronger language as the evening wore on. They reached the stage of total drunkenness at exactly the same time. We were sitting along the long refectory table, I think on bench seating. Both men were suddenly unable to keep their elbows on the table and began to slide under it, and there was nothing I could do to stop them.
Then the table came to life. One waiter picked up Burroughs and others helped me to get Beckett on his feet. Taxis were called. I am not sure who took Burroughs back to his little hotel on the Rue Gît-le-Cœur, but I took Beckett to the Boulevard Saint-Jacques, got him in the door and somehow into his flat.
* * *
During 1963 I was preparing my second Edinburgh conference. At my meeting with Harewood after the first one, he had agreed Drama as a theme. Now I was thinking of mixing playwrights with other theatre professionals, with directors and actors in particular. It would be easy to get well-known names and faces, and that would draw the crowd, although I now had little worry about that. The theatre itself was changing: new names from Europe as well as Britain and America were becoming known, new styles were emerging and a new intellectualism was in the air. The clash of ideas could make a drama festival riveting listening for the public, which needed an education in modern drama as much as it needed one for the modern novel. I also told Harewood that I would like to make suggestions for his next year’s drama programme. Harewood more or less gave me carte blanche for the conference and would listen carefully to my other suggestions.
I did not ask Sonia to help me again. Her growing alcoholism had often been an embarrassment, and she had done little practical other than helping me to recruit some of the big names, nearly all of them people she had met during her time as fiction editor. On the other hand Jim Haynes had been a splendid helper. He had found big and comfortable homes for the stars, more modest ones for the lesser-known, had housed Burroughs and Trocchi with Andrew Boddy, a tolerant young Edinburgh doctor who could give them their necessary prescriptions, and investigated boarding houses and small hotels for others who were not being housed by the British Council or their national embassies. He had also found willing hosts to give parties every night. He had kept a bookstall going throughout the Conference at McEwan Hall with relevant titles and had mounted with my help a display of “Censored Books” for the day on that subject. This was raided by the police on a tip-off, which a year or so later I learnt had come from the Lord Provost’s secretary, a Mr Murdoch. The police went away when they discovered that it was a historical display of “Censored”, not banned books. In any case the books were not for sale. I asked Jim to be my deputy with the title of “Edinburgh Organizer”, and he immediately accepted.
During that year, Jim became involved in a new activity in Edinburgh, in which I was also later to play a minor role. He had previously had readings in his bookshop, and this had led to him backing a kind of cabaret nightclub called The Howf. This failed because the folk singer Roy Guest, who was running it, absconded with all the box-office receipts just at it was beginning to do well – but, undaunted, Jim persuaded a local entrepreneur, Tom Mitchell, to let him use an old doss house called Kelly’s Paradise on the Lawnmarket, just below the castle, for a nominal rent. This became the Traverse Theatre, so-called because the stage was between the two banks of seats that could take a maximum of fifty-five spectators. The theatre itself was the brainchild of its first artistic director, George Malcolm, but he left before the refurbishment was completed, being replaced by Terry Lane, whose girlfriend Rosalind was cast in every production during his time there.
After it had been established for a while, which must have been the end of 1963, I was asked to join the board. This consisted of a mix of establishment figures like Lord Cameron, a judge, and Andrew Elliott, an accountant, and various local literati and art lovers. There was a scandal on the second night when, at the end of Sartre’s No Exit, Rosalind accidentally knifed Colette O’Neill, another actress, who just managed to get through the last minute of the play before collapsing. The members of the board present were in a panic. “How can we hush this up?” they wailed. “Nonsense,” I said. “Tell the press instantly. We need the publicity!” And the publicity helped. Colette was back after missing a performance. I shall return to the Traverse Theatre later.
Early in the year I invited Harewood to lunch again to discuss progress, but above all to get his ideas on who should be the conference chairman. I had a list of names, but when I came to Kenneth Tynan, Harewood let me go no further. “That’s the man we want,” he said. He was certainly not my first choice, but Harewood was not interested in other names. When I contacted him, Tynan enthusiastically agreed, and he quickly had his own ideas on how to run the conference. To me it was a way of educating the public, who were in any case paying for the privilege. To Tynan it was a get-together of theatre people, and he was interested in having private as well as public sessions.
We started to work out a list of names to supplement those I had already approached. Many on Tynan’s list had little to do with the theatre, but were cronies from Hollywood or New York to whom he owed a favour – Jack Garfein, for example, a director of Hollywood “B” movies. He was however married to Carroll Baker, who had just had a success in the film Baby Doll; she would add decoration to the conference at least. Many British and American playwrights were on the list, and some French and German – this time I was determined to get Robbe-Grillet to come, as well as the new school of French playwrights – and leading directors and actors. Berry Bloomfield was busy sending out letters, and so was Rozina Adler, Ken’s secretary, a well-turned-out, very self-conscious lady, rather haughtily aware of her status in working for a top drama critic who made it his business to be the trendiest figure in trendy London, wearing lilac suits and taking care to be noticed in the best restaurants and night places.
I was also now a laird at Ledlanet. I had much to do there. My uncle had, in his will, allowed all the farmers to buy their farms at a very favourable price, except for the home farm, which was let to a local farmer called James Provan, and another small one, some distance away, which was run by a manager. The farmers all took advantage of their opportunity, so that the
estate was effectively reduced to half, but I still had shooting rights over these other farms and a first option to repurchase. I was still a large landowner.
My uncle’s will was an old one. Unfortunately the bank, which administered the will, had never kept up with changes in the tax laws and, because of their negligence, a large amount of inheritance tax had to be paid on the money. I agreed that this tax should be paid out of the estate. There were many other complications.
I began to use the house from that autumn, dealing with estate affairs as best I could and enjoying the house, its amenities, its wonderful views, its walks through the woods and the hills and its leisure opportunities. It was a particularly fine autumn. I brought up some of my library from London, but most importantly put together for the first time a collection of all, or nearly all, the books I had published. What was previously the drawing room, unused for years, became a library and study. The room that had had the greatest use, the morning room, where my uncle had sat to read, talk or write letters, usually with Margery Manners present, remained what it had always been, the centre of things most of the time. A large billiard room, where the tiled floor had since the war been used for drying apples, became the new drawing room. There was already a piano here, a boudoir-grand Bechstein, which my great-aunt Mildred had played. I now had it tuned, and it was used again. There was a wall of books in the morning room, mainly the best-sellers of the previous twenty years, some of them gifts, and those that had been sent by various book clubs to which my uncle had subscribed. The dining room, between the morning room and the new drawing room, was a handsome oak-panelled room with two traditional Scottish academic paintings of grouse flying over the Highlands hanging over the sideboard, and the windows had a spectacular view over the valley towards the Cleish Hills. You could seat twenty around the table, which could expand with extra leaves or contract for an intimate gathering. I loved that room.
There was also a small conservatory just off the new library; all these rooms were in a line along the front of the house, with the entrance hall under a square tower in the middle, which opened into the large main hall.
On the east side, behind the library, was a gun room, which also had locked bookcases filled with older leather-bound books, and behind that lay a long corridor which gave onto the kitchen, pantries, servants’ hall and a variety of different rooms where things were kept, washed or cleaned. There was a special larder to hang game and meat and to dry fish. Above this corridor was another, reached by the back stairs, off which were the seven bedrooms not at the front of the house, while the three servants’ bedrooms were all behind a green-baize door on the west side. A staircase next to the master bedroom led up to a small room in the tower, which was over the front door. Although it was the smallest bedroom, it had the best view.
I have already given some idea of the main hall around which everything was clustered. The staircase divided after a few steps and went to each side of the balconies overlooking the hall. There was much old comfortable furniture in the hall, a large fireplace – never used – and large paintings, not very good ones, of my great-uncle and great-aunt hung among many other paintings that they had acquired. Above the large expanse of wall over the doorways on the south side of the hall was an enormous copy of a famous Velázquez, which at a much later date would be attributed to the master, although this claim was soon disproved.
I have lived in many places, but Ledlanet, which I occupied from 1962 to 1976, was the only one I really loved. I began to spend more time there, especially on weekends, bringing editorial work with me. It was a long drive from London, 430 miles, but I drove it often in the days before motorways shortened the journey. also frequently took the train and flew. British European Airways (BEA) had early-morning and late-night flights for two guineas, and in daytime it was not much more. Friends from Edinburgh and Glasgow came to visit me, and I began to meet the locals. I was invited to dinner parties and to go shooting, and I myself had the best shooting in the district, although I was too busy to take much advantage. There was also a large trout loch about five minutes’ walk from the house, one of my uncle’s greatest pleasures, but fishing, which I could do adequately, always bored me, and I cannot remember fishing after I inherited the house except perhaps once or twice with visitors.
In addition to Attewell, I had inherited a cook and a cleaning maid, two gamekeepers, a gardener and a farm manager. One of the gamekeepers, I am sure, had taken my great-uncle’s very valuable Purdy shotgun, which disappeared after his death. I soon suspected him of other misdemeanours, and a year or so later dismissed him.
Bettina began to make changes at Ledlanet. She got rid of the large stags’ heads which dominated the hall between the paintings, had some large Jacobean tables cut in half and one antique round table lowered to become a coffee table in the drawing room – crimes I should have prevented – and she began to direct the servants as if she had been doing it all her life. Backstairs they soon began to call her (a moniker almost certainly invented by Attewell) “The Duchess”.
My mother had inherited some furniture from her father’s house in Montreal, and having sold her own house there, now had furniture in storage. I received, and now had room for, the Louis XVI suite of tapestried chairs and sofa from my Canadian grandfather’s house – reproductions, but very impressive just the same. They added lustre to the drawing room, which soon also featured two large modern abstract paintings, one blue and one black, by Charles Pulsford, a Scottish expressionist painter who was the great guru teaching at the time at the art college in Edinburgh. I came to know Pulsford through some of his ex-students, painters who lived near me in Fife. When he later moved to teach at Loughborough, he occasionally invited me to give lectures on modern literature to his class.
It must have been towards the end of 1962 that we had a house party. The principal guests were Roy and Lucy Jones, the music publisher Bill Colleran, then London manager of Universal Edition of Vienna, who had been a friend for some time, and Rosemary Reuben, a lady who worked for Roy and who was married to a violinist. Bettina had brought an American pianist, Tom Gligoroff, who accompanied some of her recitals and was about to become répétiteur to London opera houses. The others had arrived the day before, and Rosemary and I were to follow on the Saturday morning by plane. Rosemary came to the opera with me the night before (I think it was Die Walküre), which had such an effect on us that she stayed the night with me, following that experience by joining the mile-high club the next morning on the plane, partly from lust, but as much for the challenge.
That evening at Ledlanet, after dinner, Tom Gligoroff, after a few words of introduction, played one of the Schubert posthumous piano sonatas. He played very beautifully, and his small audience, comfortable after a good dinner, listened with rapt attention; it was a half-hour of pure magic. Roy Jones looked as if it were the happiest moment of his life. The whole weekend was a success. Bill tried hard to seduce Rosemary, and perhaps he did, but she certainly seduced me the next day when we went for a walk up the snowy hillside into the heather line and found a convenient hollow in the ground.
I had the whole family there at Christmas. There were some excellent wines in the cellar and much vintage port. I had begun to restock it with the help of my friend Jacques Chaix. I asked him to buy several cases for me every time he bought wines for himself or his relatives, and soon I had excellent reds and whites to lay down in the cellar. I found one bottle of 1812 Cognac there, bought at some long-past French hotel sale. I opened it on Christmas day, and we all had a little. I put it away, and on New Year’s Day we all had a little more. Then I put it away again to await the next Christmas. I could not have been more stupid: the following year it was ruined.
The Writers’ Conference had made me a celebrity in Edinburgh, in spite of my backroom role, but the Scotsman, thanks largely to its key features writer Magnus Magnusson, now a friend, and its literary editor Bill Watson, even more of one, constantly feature
d my name. As a result, I was invited to address Rotary Clubs, Farmers’ Unions and ladies’ groups, all of which was good for spreading the names of the authors I was publishing and, I hoped, for assuring audiences for the next Conference. But I was also involved in a number of issues. I was still active in the Committee of 100, and for some time I had been asked to campaign for other causes. Antony Grey, whom I knew at the time, although I cannot remember how I met him, asked me to help his work at the Albany Trust, which was pressuring the government to have homosexuality decriminalized. The law as it stood, where any homosexual activity at any age could lead to prosecution and imprisonment, was not only blatantly unjust and based on biblical dogma and much hypocrisy, but it provided a wonderful opportunity for blackmailers. Antony Grey ran the Homosexual Law Reform Society and the Albany Trust, which between them were trying to educate the public towards tolerance as a first step to changing the law. In the late Fifties public opinion, according to the polls, was overwhelmingly against such a change, but the climate was gradually becoming more liberal as the many radical causes of the day attracted more supporters. The working class, usually very conservative where moral matters are concerned, now had its own educated intellectuals, and they could influence others. I was persuaded to go on the Rotary circuit and soon found myself addressing Rotarians at their weekly lunches. The formula there never varied and was very strict. You met at 12.45, had a drink, sat down to lunch at 1.00, and the talk came punctually at 1.40. You had twenty minutes, and no more, to say what you had to say.