Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  When talking on behalf of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, or for any other topic for which I was invited to speak, I would divide my twenty minutes into three parts. For the first five minutes I praised my listeners for being men of the world, pillars of the community, above petty prejudices – in short I told them they were tolerant and civilized human beings. Then for seven minutes (if homosexuality was the subject) I put them through hell, while they looked at their shoes through the table. I reminded them that there must have been moments in their adolescence when some act took place with another boy or at least the temptation was there. But we all, unless nature has decided otherwise, grow out of that, I went on. In my concluding eight minutes I had to build up their self-esteem again. They were big enough to understand such things, and as leaders of the community they had an opportunity and an obligation to change public opinion. Some people were homosexual by nature, and nothing could change that. What they did in private was their own concern, and no danger to others, just as what heterosexual people did in private did not concern others either. I can remember no occasion out of the forty or so such lunches that I attended over the years when I did not get applause and congratulations “for my courage”, as they often put it, in the way I explained what was wrong with the law and in speaking out on such a delicate subject. I was, of course, only one of many speakers doing the same thing. I also campaigned against capital punishment and against censorship, as well as on many purely political subjects. It did me no harm as a publisher, because I was frequently referring to books, which brought custom to booksellers and to me.

  There was a little opera company called Kent Opera, run by two singing teachers, Audrey Langford and her husband Andrew Field, to whom Bettina was going for coaching. Ande Anderson, who at the time was the resident producer at Covent Garden, worked with them occasionally, and I came to know the whole group, who sometimes used well-known singers in their productions. One day I had the idea, which must have come from the successful house party mentioned above, of having the group perform at Ledlanet. We planned a small festival to take place over two weekends in October that year, some weeks after the end of the Drama Conference. I think the impulse came largely from my not quite knowing what to do with Ledlanet. It cried out to be used, and I always had the soul of an impresario inside me. But that first year I left the programming to Audrey Langford and Ande Anderson.

  * * *

  The censorship debate at Edinburgh and my various brushes with both political and moral censors in Britain and elsewhere had given me the reputation of a crusader against state interference in what people could read, know or do. I now received an urgent request from Carlos Barral to attend the International Publishers Association Conference, which was to take place in Barcelona that May. Carlos Barral was one of the partners in Seix Barral, a literary publisher with a list fairly similar to my own. His main interest, however, was in undermining the Franco dictatorship, which was extremely repressive where civil liberties and any political opposition was concerned.

  Barral had been the leading figure in setting up the Prix Formentor. Formentor was a small island with luxury hotels in the Mediterranean off the Spanish coast, and Barral’s initiative had been to found a literary prize to be judged and given there every year by an international jury of well-known writers, brought together and financed by their publishers. That year, 1963, had just seen the second Prix Formentor. Barral had persuaded Gallimard from France, Barney Rosset’s Grove Press from America, Rowohlt from Germany, Einaudi from Italy, Weidenfeld & Nicolson from Britain, and publishers from other European countries, to become members of the ring that presented the prize. But once they had met, they decided there should be two prizes, the Prix des Éditeurs, which would go to an established writer whose international reputation was less than it should be (rather like the Nobel Prize for Literature) and the Prix Formentor, which would crown a manuscript from the ones submitted by the publishers in the group. In both cases it was the jury of writers that made the choice, but as those writers were all there because of the publishers who had brought them, those who paid the piper also expected to be calling the tune.

  It soon became evident that the writers who were best read and had dominating personalities would ultimately prevail. Each publisher brought about half a dozen writers to Formentor with him, and most of them were naturally chosen from their own stables. Alberto Moravia, brought by Einaudi, turned out to be the most forceful, chairing the jury. Grove Press brought Mary McCarthy in their group, and she argued strongly for William Burroughs, whom she had of course met a few months before at my Edinburgh Conference. But the jury, unable to choose the previous year between Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges, had then finally divided the prize between them. As Borges was not published in Britain at the time, Weidenfeld had immediately bought him, but had little success when they published, and eventually they resold Ficciones, his most important collection of short texts, to me for my paperback series, Jupiter Books. It appeared in the collection in 1965. The other prize went to Renate Rasp, a very attractive and trendy author. She too ended up on our list with her novel Family Failure, which came out in a translation by Eva Figes in 1970, and her short novella The Walk to St Heinrich, which was published in New Writers a few years later. The Formentor was an expensive luxury for a group of publishers who had little in common except liking a good time. One group, which included Barney Rosset, Einaudi and, of course, Barral, were primarily interested in politics. Gallimard did not want to be left out of any grouping that might turn out to be important, and the same could be said of Weidenfeld. Ledig-Rowohlt was interested in publishing good literature, but a good party was what he liked most. There were only four Formentor meetings. But while they went on, the representatives of the big publishers involved busied themselves with meetings throughout the year, at Frankfurt, in Paris or New York, and I could not help but be envious until I realized what it was costing each of them. Soon Weidenfeld pulled out when he realized he was not getting saleable authors out of the prize and was paying a lot of money for a dubious prestige.

  The second Formentor Conference had taken place just before the international publishers’ meeting in Barcelona, and I agreed to go to it. It would in any case increase my contacts for future literary conferences at the Edinburgh Festival, which at that point I assumed would be a permanent fixture in the future. The item on the agenda that ensured a bigger turnout than usual for such an event was a discussion on “literature and the public powers of the state”, which in essence was about censorship. The motion was that the state should be pressured to relinquish their power to control what was published.

  I arrived with Bettina. We stayed at one of the better hotels, where enormous steaks topped with truffles seemed to be the most popular dish, and I developed a liking for the rarer Spanish sherries. A large party was given by Carlos Barral at his luxurious villa on the beach, rather like the party in Antonioni’s film La notte, which had been released a few years earlier. It went on until dawn, was very uninhibited, and probably started more affairs than political discussions. At the hotel there were meetings of groups of publishers in suites and hotel rooms to discuss tactics and draft manifestos, and I was kept busy translating these between English, French and German. The waiters who came in and out with food and drink tended to linger and listen, and some were undoubtedly police spies.

  The debate itself was lively and emotional, with radical publishers from totalitarian countries sticking their necks out. Mr Castro from Portugal told how he had spent twelve years in a concentration camp on a kind of Devil’s Island, sent there by the Salazar regime as a dissident, and predicted that he would be arrested on his return for speaking out in the debate. Everyone had something to say, including myself and Robert Maxwell, who, arriving in the middle of the debate, made a very hot speech in favour of the motion and was heavily applauded, but not by me, knowing him for the hypocrite he was. The following day he was back, saying exactly t
he opposite, to the general confusion of his listeners. He had been got at, probably by the Russians, with whom he was doing considerable business, and by others on the right of the spectrum, with whom he also had ties. But the motion was carried.

  At the final banquet a Minister from the government made a speech, deploring the debate and its outcome, talking of responsibilities and family values. For the first time in its history, the International Commission of the International Publishers Association, representing the Conference, was not allowed to call on the head of state, General Franco himself. Several people I met in Barcelona promised to come to Edinburgh in August.

  That summer I was in Yugoslavia again and tried to see Miroslav Krleža, their most eminent playwright, but in spite of my contacts I was not even able to talk to him on the telephone, let alone see him. He was about seventy years old at the time, and was not sure, as I was told, whether I was important enough for him to meet. His name might have become known outside Yugoslavia, had he been less arrogant. On the way back, I stopped in Rome for a day to see Max Frisch, who had not answered any of my letters inviting him to the Drama Conference. I went to the address I had for him and was given another address. When I rang the doorbell, Frisch opened the door in casual clothes, with a paint brush in his hand. It was his first day in his new flat and with his new girlfriend Marianne, a Swiss girl who had moved in with him. He had only recently broken up with his previous partner Ingeborg Bachmann, one of the most original and sensitive Austrian poets of the time, who was later to take her own life. She too would eventually be published in English in our New Writing series. But on the day I called on him, Frisch was ecstatically happy and said that my visit on that particular day was a good omen. He had not intended to come, but now he would. He must bring Marianne with him, though. I returned to the airport and took the next flight to London.

  That summer a rather strange event occurred, which had an important consequence. It was Arthur Boyars’s birthday, and a group of us went to some other party and then back to Arthur’s basement flat, which was three floors below my old one, now occupied by Lynette Perry. We were all in a good mood, and in the party were Valerie Desmore, Tondi Barr, Marion, the Kronhausens and myself. The Kronhausens have not yet been mentioned. They were two American psychoanalysts who had already written a number of books about sex, and they were totally absorbed by the subject. A few weeks previously they had shown me a pornographic film made in France by Jean Genet, based on his prison experiences. They had watched curiously to see my reactions, which were milder than they had expected, and they were a little discomforted to see that my tastes ran to such, for them, boring subjects as music, drama and literature. They had recently met the famous Dr Eustace Chesser, a gynaecologist whose liberal attitudes had occasionally led to his being called as a witness in obscenity trials. In one celebrated wartime trial concerning his own book, he had turned to the jury and asked, “If there is one man among you who has never masturbated, let him now stand up” – and no one did. Phyllis Kronhausen at their meeting had walked up to the eminent physician, opened his trousers and shaken his penis rather than his hand. Eberhard, her husband and co-practitioner, originally German, had had his balls crushed by the Gestapo during the war, which gave him great sexual problems, but he somehow managed to overcome them, and in no way did this inhibit him. In short, Phyll and Ebe were a remarkable and notorious couple who at that point were trying to persuade me to publish their next book.

  Back at Arthur’s, supposedly just for a drink, the Kronhausens got to work. First they passed around joints, then began to take their clothes off, and very soon, with little resistance, persuaded the rest of us to do the same, all except Marion, who looked on with horrified fascination and sat on the sidelines watching what happened next. This was an orgy of everyone in the party on Arthur’s double bed. At one point I found myself inside Phyllis, while Ebe was doing what he could to Tondi, but she suddenly cried out, “No, I don’t want you, I want him,” meaning me, and suddenly I was with a new partner, leaving Arthur with Phyllis. We enjoyed ourselves so much that after a little while Tondi and I disengaged ourselves from the other bodies and occupied a couch in the next room. I eventually took Tondi home and spent the night with her, the beginning of an affair that went on for a year or two and developed into a close friendship. But that is not the point of the story.

  The next day, I had two tickets to Glyndebourne, and I took Arthur with me. In the car we discussed his birthday party and what the Kronhausens had turned it into. “You know,” said Arthur thoughtfully, “I think Marion rather fancies me.”

  That was a surprise to me. I had assumed from what they said about each other that there was a mutual dislike between the commercially minded Marion and the poetic Arthur. But he had been in good form during the orgy, potent and randy, and she had witnessed it. The opera was Capriccio, a perfect work for Glyndebourne, with its eighteenth-century decor, pre-revolutionary aristocratic elegance and neoclassical style, and it was the wonderful Elizabeth Söderström singing the Countess, wooed by Horst Wilhelm and Raymond Wolansky. It was also a perfect evening, the thirteenth of June, as my opera record book tells me.

  I was to see Capriccio at Glyndebourne again in July the following year, and this is perhaps a suitable place to record another incident of that same month, because on the occasion in question I had Samuel Beckett and Bettina with me, and I would like here to counter the assertion made by some who, not liking opera themselves, have foisted their dislike onto Beckett. Beckett liked all serious music and went on a number of occasions to the opera with me, and always enjoyed it. His problem was that he felt he should not enjoy it, and there was always guilt mixed with his pleasure. He always said that he did not like Mozart, but the real reason was that music came too easily to that composer, whereas Haydn, whom he said he preferred, was a craftsman who had to make the daily effort to compose like every other craftsman. Beethoven also had to make that effort, hampered by ill health and deafness, therefore Beethoven was a favoured composer. Schubert, another favourite, found that music came easily, but against that there was his difficult and short life, and the overriding sadness of the works Sam liked best, especially the last song cycles and quartets. But underneath his attitude to life, which coloured his declared tastes, lay an ability to appreciate all that could be called real art, heavy or light, although he inhibited that appreciation in the same way that his character Krapp, having decided that storm and stress had to be his lot in life, accepts the melancholy and hermetic existence of a man who lives entirely in his reflective mind. Beckett had an emotional, not logical, reaction against art that depended on facile genius. It was part of his idiosyncratic view of the world.

  It was not to see Capriccio with Söderström again that I took Sam, but something even lighter, Rossini’s Pietra del paragone, on 19th June 1964. The day before I had suddenly remembered that almost everyone goes to Glyndebourne in a dinner jacket, and of course Sam did not have one. I suggested going to Moss Bros. to hire one, but he would not hear of it, so I telephoned Michael Geliot, working at Glyndebourne that summer, to ask his advice. “Don’t worry,” he said, “come as you are.” I warned him we would both be wearing sports jackets. On the way out of London I stopped to get petrol and exchanged some banter with a very jolly-looking plump girl in white overalls who filled me up. Sam had been watching from the car. “You seemed to be enjoying yourself there,” he remarked as I climbed back in, his voice tinged with a definite note of envy. “A very jolly girl,” I said. “You should have got out with me.”

  We arrived at Glyndebourne to find a welcoming committee awaiting us. There was Gunther Rennert, intendant at the time and producer of that evening’s opera. With him was John Pritchard, conductor that night, and Michael Geliot. They were all wearing sports jackets, and they chatted with us for a quarter of an hour, then had to go to change. As I remember, we all enjoyed the evening.

  To return to the previous summer, I was bu
sy as August approached with the arrangements for the Drama Conference, which Harewood had put into the third week of the Festival, a week that always sags, because it is September by then and the excitement of the first two weeks has diminished, while the box office drops off. The previous year had been such a success that he hoped the Drama Conference would bring up that last week. There were 130 people to look after as against the 70 of the previous year, but now there was confidence that the big names were coming and that the conference would work.

  Advance bookings by the public were excellent. Ken Tynan’s secretary, Rozina Adler, sometimes seemed to be operating on her own. She was almost as high-handed as her boss, and she constantly snubbed Berry, who was handling my list of names. From the US we now had Edward Albee, Harold Clurman, Alan Schneider, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Kopit, Jack Garfein and his film-star wife Carroll Baker, some of the newer playwrights, and from Britain John Arden, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, Wolf Mankowitz, David Frost, Bernard Levin, Martin Esslin, J.B. Priestley, Barry Reckord, John Mortimer and his wife Penelope, several Scots, including Robert McLellan and the actor Duncan Macrae, and from France Eugène Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, Roland Dubillard, Arthur Adamov, René de Obaldia and others. We had personalities who had become well known through the satire boom, like the Saturday-night television programme That Was the Week That Was (TW3), Bernard Levin and David Frost in particular, and Peter Cook, who had started a nightclub, The Establishment, famous for satire. Other countries sent their stars, and once again the British Council helped. We had invited many members of the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht’s company, as they were Tynan’s great passion, but my German authors Peter Weiss and Martin Walser were also on the list, along with the Swiss writer Max Frisch. I made a point of bringing back two people who had attracted much public attention the previous year: Erich Fried and Alexander Trocchi. I had some problems with Tynan here, but I had the final say and insisted that little as they might have to do with the theatre, they had a following in Edinburgh and would be good debaters. Several actors agreed to come, most notably Sir Laurence Olivier, Alec Guinness (who was in a play at the festival), Moultrie Kelsall and the above-mentioned Duncan Macrae.