by John Calder
I imitated Glyndebourne by having the interval in the middle, but the food was not a great success on the opening night. The set menu in the rented marquee, in which everyone was too cold, started with avocado pears, which many had never seen before, filled with lumpfish roe, followed by barbecued sheep. Although the spit had been turning all day, the meat was still too red for the taste of the audience.
The opera that followed was played in the hall, where we had moved the chairs into a semicircle around the foot of the staircase, and the action of Arnell’s comic work was played out on the bottom stairs and the small platform where the stairs divided and went up to the overhanging balconies. It was a light, pleasant evening, enjoyed by as big an audience as we could seat, and performed three times that weekend. By the third performance, we had found a way to heat the tent and cook the meat to the audience’s taste.
The following weekend Bettina gave a recital on the Friday night, which I quickly realized was a mistake, as it gave the impression that the whole endeavour was to showcase her voice. For the Saturday and Sunday I brought in two performances of James Saunders’s enigmatic play, Next Time I’ll Sing to You, from the Traverse Theatre. It was a favourite of mine, but it was not much liked by the audience.
That first short season of Ledlanet Nights, however, made its impact. The loss was fairly heavy, but I could identify where more could be achieved with less expenditure in the future. The major Scottish newspapers gave favourable notices, and my notoriety because of the Happening did not hurt at all where the theatre-going public was concerned.
Ledlanet was soon followed by another Frankfurt Book Fair. My memories of the Fair are so numerous, and things that happened there so bizarre, that it is impossible not occasionally to get the years wrong. Because of the rift with Barney Rosset in 1963 the following two anecdotes must have belonged to earlier years, but I connect them in my mind with those eventful early Sixties, when for a change Lady Fortune was smiling on me.
It may have been the year before that there was a dispute between Grove Press and my own firm, not a matter of great consequence, but nevertheless one involving a principle that neither one of us could afford to concede, even though both would have accepted either result. Marion had tried at some point to come to an agreement and had been treated with scorn by Barney, who said he would only deal with me. In Frankfurt I always spent one or two nights with Barney in nightclubs, some of them very sleazy and all filled with prostitutes, who were his obsession: he filled his mind with fantasies about their lives. On this occasion we found ourselves, together with Dick Seaver and I believe Jason Epstein (who either left early or was present on some similar occasion when he found Barney’s sexual preoccupations unstomachable) in a small room with a stage which was part of a large nightclub called Die Hölle (Hell). Girls were doing some striptease act. Suddenly I said to Barney, “I have an idea. Why don’t we settle the dispute by chance, by flipping a coin.” He thought about it.
“No, I won’t do that, but I’ll play you at the Marienbad game,” The Marienbad game we both knew from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s film Last Year in Marienbad, which we had both published as a film script. It is played with three rows of matches, and the point is to leave the other player with the last match. Unknown to Barney, I had played it before and had winkled out its secret. When I had played it with Beckett, his quick mind had discovered that secret after one game, but there is a visual pattern that makes winning easy providing one is the first to play. You can usually allow a naive opponent to win once or twice before winning every time. Hiding my real feelings, I accepted and let Barney move first. Although he made wrong moves, and with several moves to play I did as well, I won. “We said two out of three,” he said after a pause.
“I don’t think we did,” I countered. He appealed to Seaver, who wriggled uncomfortably. “It’s only fair, two out of three,” he said. I agreed with much show of reluctance, and then let him win the second game, but looking worried about every move in order to reassure him. The last game was tense. Our three heads were poised over the matches with concentration. On the stage, the girls who had stripped were doing erotic dances, but the other tables, about twenty of them, all with men who should have been looking at the dancers, were largely looking at us. What was going on at our table? The manager came over and complained, both on behalf of the girls, who were not being looked at, and the management, which wanted its customers to be drinking and looking, and certainly not at us. I told him we would not be long.
Then I won the last game. Barney exploded into a fury, and we left Die Hölle. Outside a GI was arguing with a girl and pushing her into his car. He drove off and Barney gave chase. We raced through the streets of Frankfurt and out into the country at speed. Barney saw an American Military Police car and signalled it down. He showed his American officer’s pass (years out of date) and persuaded the police to give chase, saying the girl had been kidnapped. When we stopped the GI, the girl began to berate us all. Why were we following them? What business was it of ours? The deflated Barney returned to his hotel.
I think that it was that year that I persuaded him to take on Aidan Higgins for the States. It was probably 1962 when I sold Higgins’s novel Langrishe, Go Down to the German literary publisher Carl Hanser Verlag, from whom at about the same time we acquired Reinhard Lettau, whose short works combined whimsical humour with a radical political stance. In 1963 the Higgins novel was coming out in German at the fair, and Hanser gave a big party for it at the Savigny Hotel. Higgins had been sent his air ticket, but he mislaid his passport, then missed his flight and arrived by a later one. He was met by a fast car to rush him to the party, which had nearly broken up when he arrived. I had waited for him, but having another appointment was obliged to leave before he finally was rushed in. Later that evening I was at dinner with other publishers in a restaurant, when Giangiacomo Feltrinelli came in, saw me and came over. “I have just met your author, Aidan Higgins,” he said. He had arrived late at the Hanser party when there was hardly anyone left and had spoken to Aidan. “I liked him instantly,” he went on. “I am sure he is a good writer and I should publish him.”
“But Giangiacomo,” I said, “you had an option for a year. I urged Foa (his editor at the time) to take it, but he never made up his mind. Now that he is an independent publisher, he is thinking about it again.”
“It’s not a book for Foa. How can I read it?”
“We’re both staying at the Frankfurter Hof. Ask for my room key. You’ll find a copy there. Take it and speak to me tomorrow.” And writing down my room number, he left the restaurant.
Later that night, I met Barney Rosset (which means it must have been 1962 or earlier, as we were not speaking after that) and spent a white night with him around the nightclubs and bars of the city. At eight we had breakfast in his hotel room, and only then did he sign the contract I had in my pocket, which he had resisted for hours while concentrating on the decadence of the Frankfurt night. Then he started packing to catch his flight to New York, and I returned to my room to sleep until noon, when I had to get up to attend a German publisher’s lunch to meet their young authors. When I arrived in the afternoon, more than a little tired, at the Fair, it was four o’clock. I was all alone in Frankfurt that year, and on my stand, unattended all day, so prominently in the middle that no one could miss it, was a large piece of white cardboard, obviously from a laundered shirt. It read:
My Dear John
I sat up all night reading Aidan Higgins’s marvellous novel. I am willing to make you an important offer for it right away.
Below was the well-known signature of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, one of the stars of the Fair, publisher of such literary best-sellers as Doctor Zhivago and The Leopard. While I was reading this – it had been on my stand since early morning – I had a tap on the shoulder from a Swedish publisher. “I too would like to buy this novel,” he said. By that night I was inundated with offers, and Langrishe,
Go Down was soon sold for translation into virtually every language of Europe. Aidan’s presence in Frankfurt, his photograph that week in the literary columns of German newspapers and his face on television screens did not hurt either.
On the last night of the Book Fair a group of us that included Maurice Girodias, the female literary editor of Le Monde, my brother, who for some reason had turned up in Frankfurt, and some other, mainly French, publishers and journalists (one of them was Nigel Dempster, the British gossip columnist), after dining together went to a nightclub called Elliott Elliott. Maurice performed his habitual party act, which may well have shortened his life, by biting pieces off a wine glass, then chewing and swallowing them. He and I must have been fairly drunk, although not incoherently so, but being bored with the floor show, we improvised our own, which was applauded by the other tables as well as ours, but not by the management, which made us leave. Our act featured in Le Monde’s coverage of the Frankfurt Book Fair, which also reported my coup in selling Higgins to a dozen different publishers, but suggested that it was a con trick. During the Sixties there were quite a few gimmicks to sell authors and some hoaxes. One was created by Paul Flamand of Éditions du Seuil: he announced he was publishing an author whose name was vaguely Slav or Hungarian or Nordic or Latin, a composite name: he received several offers. The author did not exist.
The Frankfurt Book Fair was also a good place to launch petitions, especially to get support against a prosecution for obscenity or to show solidarity with a publisher being prosecuted for political activity. I was later to get up my own petition, which was signed by almost everyone I approached.
On 22nd November that year, I went to the Royal Festival Hall in London to hear a concert performance of Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana. It was the composer’s fiftieth birthday, and the hall was full, with Britten present. At the interval I ran into Sir Jack Lyons, head of the Leeds chain of clothing stores, who was also Chairman of the London Symphony Orchestra, playing that night. “President Kennedy has just been assassinated,” he said, “but Britten doesn’t want anything to interrupt the concert.” All over London announcements were being made and theatres were closing, their audiences leaving in mid-performance in a state of shock, but not at the RFH. When the applause ended, Bettina and I walked across the footbridge to Charing Cross station, where all the newspapers had brought out special early editions. It has been said that everyone knew where they were when the news of Kennedy’s death became known. I was watching Gloriana at the Royal Festival Hall.
At home the next day we watched events unfold on television. Oswald was arrested, taken to the police station and shot by Jack Ruby. We saw it all on the screen, live as it happened. A few minutes later, the telephone rang. It was Erich Fried, very excited. “Do you realize, John,” he said, “that this man Ruby is a Jew?” He seemed afraid that the shooting, which was convulsing the world, would initiate a worldwide pogrom. The mystery of “Who Killed Kennedy?” kept my interest high into the next year, as the many conspiracy theories developed and competed. Nearly forty years later we are still in the dark.
* * *
Somewhere towards the end of the year I was told that a prosecution was to be brought against me. Complaints had been laid against the Happening by three persons who had been present, and the Procurator Fiscal, whose office in Edinburgh decided what prosecutions should be brought, formally charged Anna Kesselaar with performing an indecent act in public, and myself, as conference director, of being “art and part” of the offence. It was soon obvious from the publicity that Moral Re-Armament was behind it.
Moral Re-Armament needs some explaining, because it has since gone underground for a number of years. It started as the “Oxford Movement”, which had nothing to do with the nineteenth-century phenomenon instigated by Cardinal Newman, although the confusion of names might have been deliberate. Its founder was a German, Frank Buchman, who launched it as a quasi-religious movement (quasi because he wanted all religions to identify themselves with it) and at one point in the Thirties had praised Hitler as representing his ideals. Later he would quote Nehru, who apparently gave him some support. Moral Re-Armament was a puritanical organization that tried to identify all liberal attitudes with Communism. Buchman had even been able to get the American government to finance special flights to his conferences around the world, presumably because they saw MRA as anti-Communist. The best book on the organization is by Tom Driberg,19 which effectively exposed their hypocrisies and their methods. At this time they were very powerful in Scotland, receiving money from rich landowners and much support from the more extreme Church of Scotland sects, especially the Free and Wee Free branches. In the early Sixties, Moral Re-Armament was run by Buchman’s successor, Peter Howard, a former sportsman, then a sport reporter and frequent editorial writer on the Daily Express, a newspaper whose policy then as most of the time since, was to attack every kind of permissiveness. Howard’s key words were “Godlessness and dirt”. They were being used as a slogan against the newly founded Traverse Theatre, which was performing modern plays, against the Edinburgh Festival on every possible occasion, against Harewood, and just then very much against me. Howard’s purple prose struck me as being reminiscent of that of John Ruskin, another great puritan, which was replete with disturbing words that recalled bodily functions and sexual associations. Ruskin, we might recall, was impotent and made his young bride kneel down with him to pray to God to take away her sinful lust. I made certain deductions that might apply to Howard as well.
One weekend I invited a few people to a conference at Ledlanet to discuss setting up a new association to support and develop the arts in Scotland, including, of course, literature. Among those who came were Peter Hemmings (administrator of Scottish Opera), Finlay MacDonald, Duncan Millar and Magnus Magnusson. Finlay was particularly impressed by being in a home with a butler, although Attewell, a free spirit if there ever was one, had a bantering and familiar relationship to me that would have been impossible in my uncle’s time. It was Bettina who put him in his place, and he did not like it. At this so-called conference, which never came to anything other than an interesting exchange of ideas, lubricated by wine and whisky, my forthcoming trial was much discussed. Finlay MacDonald was especially troubled. “You must win this, John. Otherwise it will be a disaster for all the arts in Scotland.”
I made enquiries, and was told that the best criminal lawyer in Scotland was Laurence Dowdell in Glasgow. I went to see him. He had no doubt who my counsel should be: Nicholas Fairbairn was my man. There were two successful and unconventional criminal barristers in Scotland at that time: one was Lionel Daiches and the other was Nicky Fairbairn, who was a peacock. He was Scotland’s Oscar Wilde – flamboyant, designing his own clothes, supremely self-confident, cocky, arrogant, loving publicity and always attracting attention to himself. He was also an artist and had cartooned all the judges in front of whom he had appeared. He believed himself capable of almost any feat: he would proposition almost every woman he met to go instantly to bed with him – and many did – and, as I learnt after his death, sometimes men as well. He had a wife from the Scottish aristocracy, the Reay family (his own origins were much humbler), and he now owned a castle in Fife, called Fordell, which, as David Steel was later to say, was really a tower.
My legal team was now Laurence Dowdell and Nicholas Fairbairn, who quickly became a friend – but not, I now think, a very sincere one. As Kenneth Dewey was the author of the Happening, it seemed sensible to get him to court, and he agreed to come at his own expense. We found other witnesses who had been present at the Happening, some eminent participants, and some members of the audience who, having read that I was to be prosecuted, volunteered to appear.
The day before the case began, I met Ken Dewey at the airport in Edinburgh and drove him to Ledlanet. I was invited to a McGonagall Dinner in Fife that night and was taking Ken with me. I prepared him by giving him a volume of McGonagall’s poems to read. He soon had
tears streaming down his cheeks from laughter, and he became an instant fan. The dinner, organized by a group of Fife artists, was in honour of Scotland’s worst-ever poet, a man who sincerely believed in his own genius. His verse is really doggerel, where every second line rhymes with the one before it, but there is no detectable metre. Lines are uneven, references to classical myths and romantic imagery abound, and the juxtapositions of high-flown sentiments and utter banality can only bring mirth. But anything so bad must have its adherents, and McGonagall is much quoted, read for fun and, during the last century has rarely been out of print.
The dinner, an annual event in a small Fife town, was attended when possible in Victorian costume, and Ken and I managed to rustle up frock coats and top hats for the occasion. There were about fifty people present at the dinner. A brass band played sentimental or military melodies, McGonagall was read and quoted, and there were speeches, all comic except for one unsuspecting senior Royal Air Force officer, who had been asked to toast the British Empire and did so in traditional style, becoming uneasy as his listeners tried to restrain their mirth. Needless to say, we all got quite drunk, and on the way back my car broke down, I think running out of petrol. Sheila Colvin was working for me then and staying at Ledlanet, and I managed to phone her from a farmhouse. She told me that Sigmund Miller had suddenly turned up at Ledlanet, and then came to fetch me in her own car. With Sigi, more was drunk, and we went to bed late, but somehow turned up on time at the Edinburgh Central Court the next morning at 10.00 a.m.