Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Bernard Levin, sitting directly behind me, wrote a wonderful piece about the trial for the New Statesman entitled ‘Lady MacChatterley’. It was a comic experience for an outsider. I already knew that there would be no more conferences – the Lord Provost’s ignorant and intemperate statements had made that clear enough – but there were other fertile furrows to plough in Scotland, as well as in England. Two elderly ladies appeared in the witness box, who said they had been missionaries; they were very alike, and not personages one would have thought likely to be interested in listening to an intellectual arts conference, but on behalf of the prosecution they claimed to have been deeply shocked. There was a man who said he was a journalist, but could only claim to have written one or two freelance articles and was vague about where they had appeared. They had obviously been put into the conference by Moral Re-Armament to describe anything to which exception could be taken in the discussions, and the Happening was an unexpected bonus. The earlier days had been disappointing for them, because such issues as sexuality had hardly been mentioned during the week, unlike the year before.

  Our own witnesses were splendid. Duncan Macrae, veteran actor of stage and screen, had not been bothered even to look behind him at the model on the balcony, but he had enjoyed the whole experience, in which there was nothing shocking at all. Robert McLellan, a deeply serious historical playwright, denounced Moral Re-Armament and all it stood for, and later wrote a play, The Hypocrite, inspired by the trial, which I later published. David Jones had been the producer for the BBC monitor programme which had filmed and transmitted the conference. He had been subpoenaed by the prosecution to give evidence about the model, but his evidence helped us, the defence.

  The most telling witness was a housewife from Fife, an ordinary member of the public who had come to the conference on that last day, had found it entertaining, funny and very educational. She had stayed to the end. Her straightforward, honest evidence was a wonderful contrast to the put-up, obviously planted, prosecution witnesses.

  Throughout, Nicholas Fairbairn was brilliant. He showed up the prosecution witnesses as frauds and brought out the best in our own team, and when Ken Dewey appeared – not that Ken needed any help – handled him properly. The Procurator Fiscal glared at Dewey when we put him in the box. “We wanted to arrest him, but he fled the country,” he declared. Ken quietly explained his credentials, what he had done in the theatre and the arts, and produced for the magistrate, who happened to be the only city councillor not on the Festival council, a beautiful little terracotta statuette he had made, a female nude in the classical Greek style. The magistrate looked at it with interest, and I think with awe, and handed it back. Dewey explained what it was he wanted to get over to the public, as he had in the final debate, as well as his gratitude to me for bringing him, a young artistic theatre director, to Edinburgh to demonstrate his ideas, and his pleasure at the favourable public reaction, totally different to what the tabloid press had described.

  The Procurator Fiscal made his final speech. An exhibition like this might be all right in some places, he summed up – a Paris nightclub for instance – but in the McEwan Hall, at a Drama Conference, no! The last word was expelled with all his force. Fairbairn addressed the magistrate with a combination of humour and reason. No law had been broken. Anna Kesselaar had not moved: she had been carried around. The nation had seen her live on television without a single complaint. David Jones’s evidence had been conclusive on that. The court’s time had been wasted by three people who had been sent there to make trouble, who had no interest in drama or anything artistic or intellectual. The Procurator Fiscal had made much of the Queen having, on some past occasion, been present at McEwan Hall, which had dignified it. The Drama Conference and the Happening had not degraded it. One thing had nothing to do with the other. People had enjoyed the conference and had learnt from it, which was good.

  The magistrate took little time to throw the case, which had lasted two days, out of court, declaring Anna Kesselaar innocent, so there was no case against me. He also criticized those in high places who had launched the prosecution.

  * * *

  I took Sheila to Glasgow to see John Arden’s Armstrong’s Last Goodnight at the Citizens’ Theatre, in which I was impressed by two Scottish actors, John Cairney and Leonard Maguire. I was at the time planning a Happening for Ledlanet. It was the year of the Shakespeare Quatercentenary, and I had been doing much reading and thinking about the place of Shakespeare as a mannerist renaissance figure, largely from reading Arnold Hauser’s masterly book Mannerism,20 which influenced me deeply and was the basis of a book I was starting to write about opera. Cairney had an uncanny resemblance to Robert Burns, my birthday mate, while Maguire could easily be made to look like Shakespeare. I sat down to write a play for Ledlanet, A Happening with Robert Burns. After all, a Happening had made me notorious, and I might as well make use of that notoriety. I had also realized that the technique of blending unfamiliar objects and ideas with the familiar in a collagist way to put over a point could heighten a drama, even in an otherwise conventionally written play. What I then wrote, much of it dictated to Sheila Colvin, was a verbal duel in which the idealistic and romantic Burns confronts the more coldly classical and “mannerist” figure of Shakespeare. Inside the play were set-piece extracts from the work of both, a shortened ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ in the first act, for example, which had music, mime and ballet set against the narration. In the second act there was a trial of the modern arts with the two central figures as leading counsel: Shakespeare cynically attacking them, Burns defending. Each ended with a plea to the audience, which became the jury. As we were in Scotland, there was no doubt what the outcome would be every night. There were mime parts, diversions and surprises, quotations and passages from different modern writers including James Joyce.

  At the time I was being constantly asked to give talks and lectures, to take part in university debates and to defend the positions I had taken on censorship, social reforms and the innovative arts. This meant that I was always scouring my books for support for my arguments, quoting my own authors where possible to make their names and works better known, and using my growing library, increasingly housed at Ledlanet. This library grew dramatically during the summer of 1964, when I put on an exhibition of modern literature in the salon, heavily captioned with explanatory showcards, blown up from the explanations I had written of movements, influences and connections between the writers and schools of the early twentieth century. The books came from all the publishers of the authors concerned: they were displayed, and as no one ever asked for their books back, I kept them. Increasingly, I was turning into an auto-didactic freelance academic, trying to popularize the arts and to push up public taste, in sharp contrast to what governments and the media were to do later. Perhaps that was what I always was at heart: a popular educator with a fire in his belly to make life more interesting for others by opening up new horizons in the arts and literature.

  A Happening with Robert Burns was contrived to be a didactic entertainment that would give new ideas to audiences. It was a considerable success, and I was often asked to revive it. I asked Ande Anderson, with whom I had become friendly since that first Ledlanet season, to produce it, and he gave it a week, blocking out the moves and plotting the lighting (we had only six spotlights then). Michael Geliot then took over for most of the other rehearsals; the last days I directed myself.

  We had built a new removable stage in the middle of the hall with raked bench seating on both sides, but the benches were cushioned and had backs. My two gamekeepers were kept busy as carpenters. The double staircase greatly increased the playing area, as well as giving height and variety to it. The eleven rows of seating – from now on we only used the main hall for performances – could take 98 people, much more than the Traverse. In the years to come, the shape of the hall, with its two banks of stairs, its high-up aperture in the middle of the first-floor balcony, its outer hall, wh
ich from that autumn became the orchestra pit, and its central playing area between two banks of facing seats, would give opportunities for a great variety of theatrical effects in an intimate setting.

  That summer season in 1964 also had concerts, which became a regular feature with the same string quartets, chamber groups, pianists and singers returning frequently with different programmes. Although the Burns Happening went down very well with the audience, and proved that the ideas I was developing could work, there were many problems. John Cairney’s flamboyant style of acting and frequent ad-libs, which the audience loved and were in keeping with the character he was playing, much annoyed the gentle and more discreet Leonard Maguire, who told me he would never act with Cairney again.

  Ledlanet was three and a half miles from the nearest village, Milnathort, and we never saw a policeman. I would keep the bar open until the last member of the audience left, and it became increasingly profitable. During the first seasons the marquee – which had to be hired, erected, dismantled and returned – and the catering staff, carrying food a considerable distance from the kitchen, made it impossible not to lose money on feeding the audience, but soon we could do without the marquee, because an angel, in the theatrical sense, came into our lives. His name was Jim Fraser.

  Bettina talked to Jim at the bar one night and then suggested I should pay him some attention. He had come with a party and was spending a large amount on drinks. As we became friendly, he returned very frequently, more for the bar and the atmosphere than for the performance, I think, although he did enjoy music. Together with some of his friends, all in the building trade, Jim Fraser, whose company was the Fraser Construction Company of Dundee, extended the conservatory, which was next to the library (the bar during our seasons), out into the garden, so that it became a restaurant able to seat about a hundred. He also extended other wings of the house so that there were urinals and extra lavatories for men and a row of four of them at the other end of the house for women.

  1964 was Harewood’s last Edinburgh Festival. At that point he was deeply involved with another woman, the sister of Barry Tuckwell, perhaps the most noted French horn player after the late and much-lamented Dennis Brain, who had died in a crash after driving home to London immediately after a concert at the 1957 Edinburgh Festival. Like Marion, his wife, she was a concert pianist. Harewood’s affair with Patricia Tuckwell was no secret in Edinburgh. The scandal of my conference, and in particular the never-ending attacks of the Scottish Daily Express and some other newspapers, had weakened his position. I still say that his biggest mistake was in being too democratic and allowing the town councillors to call him George rather than Lord Harewood. Had he kept his status as the Queen’s first cousin and a belted Earl, they would have stayed in awe of him, but he had allowed himself to be just another festival director and therefore was expendable. There was a scandal at the 1964 Festival when Harewood went backstage to see an artist after a concert and Marion, seeing Patricia Tuckwell there, slapped her face with much invective in front of everyone present. A divorce followed, in which Harewood lost his London home and much else, and eventually he married Pat (Bambi) Tuckwell.

  Bettina had made herself friendly with Marion Harewood, attending meetings of musical committees at 2 Orme Square, the Harewood London townhouse, and she became as much socially involved in London music as artistically. I played no part in all this, being too busy with publishing and Ledlanet. Both Harewood and Sir Robert Mayer agreed to be sponsors of Ledlanet Nights, but neither ever attended a performance. When the Harewood break-up came, Bettina was resolutely on the wife’s side.

  Sentiment against Harewood, who was also criticized for his highbrow programming, had grown to such an extent that he resigned after the 1964 Festival. Before that, he had been targeted not only by MRA and the local philistines, but by a sociology lecturer at Glasgow University for having bare-breasted African dancers at the Festival. Had they been white, he said, they would not have been allowed to perform. Interviewed on the BBC, Harewood told a joke about a psychiatrist who really wanted to be a sex maniac, but failed his practical. The Glasgow lecturer sued both Harewood and the BBC, which paid damages. All this added considerably to the poor man’s problems.

  During the second Ledlanet Nights season in June 1964, I had programmed a mini Schubert festival with two concerts by the Edinburgh Quartet – with whom I had become friendly, especially so with Miles Baster, its leader, and two evenings of Schubert song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise, in which both Thomas Hemsley and his accompanist Paul Hamburger appeared in period costume, the last looking exactly like Schubert. Although the audiences were small, they were very appreciative. Geraint Evans, a major opera star then, especially in Mozart comic roles and Verdi’s Falstaff at Covent Garden, had been persuaded to sing Cimarosa’s Il maestro di cappella, in which the singer pretends to conduct the orchestra. And the other major production was the Happening with Robert Burns.

  In the autumn we had a double bill of Bernstein’s little opera about a marriage gone stale, Trouble in Tahiti, coupled with Lennox Berkeley’s A Dinner Engagement, a very snobbish, very English comic opera. Our big production, a week later, was Handel’s Parthenope, with orchestra, conducted by Audrey Langford and produced by Michael Geliot. The cast included the tenor Adrian de Peyer, who had sung the first season in the Rossini song cycle. He arrived on the stage Tarzan-like, on a rope swinging from the gallery, to much applause. Bettina was in the cast, together with Judith Pierce as our main soprano and several others.

  The following year in the autumn – there does not appear to have been a summer season – we had Pierce back in a revival of Serate musicali. In 1965, we performed another Handel, Agrippina, again with Bettina in the cast, and an amazing American coloratura in the lead, Alice Robiczek, who said she would sing any time for the tapestried chairs in the salon, as well as other good singers, some of whom would appear again at Ledlanet in the future. That was the first time we had Peter Gellhorn as conductor; Ande Anderson was back as producer. Larry Adler gave his one-man-show that season and was prevailed upon to compere the night, failing at the time to extract from me an extra fee for it. In his Sunday Times column the following week he commented, “Plumb forgot I was in Scotland”. Jim Fraser frequently entertained our artists, taking them out to dinner and occasionally to play golf. When he took out Michael Geliot and Adrian de Peyer, and the latter won, it was Geliot who was upset. “I never thought tenors had anything between the ears,” he said. “What a humiliation to be beaten by one.”

  From this point, although I was having problems finding the money to pay for productions with good singers and a sizeable chamber orchestra of about sixteen players, Ledlanet Nights had established itself as an important part of the Scottish musical scene. I began to build a supporting organization and started a membership to raise funds. Soon we were giving fund-raising balls and special Members’ Nights, when artists taking part were asked to contribute their talents to performing one or two party pieces in a kind of cabaret, followed by a dinner dance.

  As Ledlanet Nights developed into four annual seasons and nearly a hundred performances a year, it became necessary to justify a full-time catering staff, supplemented by temporaries, and to use box-office money from advance bookings to pay current bills. Soon we had two thousand members, a committee of about twenty and many fund-raising initiatives. I eventually began to get funds from the Scottish Arts Council. Visits by Lord Goodman, the Chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, and Jenny Lee, the Arts Minister, helped to get this increased from a very low starting level. But after a while we also received subsidies from different county councils within a fifty mile radius and even from the City of Glasgow after a number of councillors had been to performances and felt us worthy of support.

  * * *

  It was a period when the publishing company was flourishing. In spite of the extra activities, many of which brought in new authors, the Scottis
h list especially increasing as a result of my high northern profile, I still spent most of my time in the London office. Marion had taken over much of the administration, and we had more staff to do editorial work, more salesmen and full-time accountants and production managers. We had left our Sackville Street offices, as the building was being demolished, and had rented two floors in a building in Soho at 18 Brewer Street. We had Lina Stores, a large Italian grocer below us on the street level and our landlord, Hyman Fine, on the top floor above us. The entrance was in a small passageway called Green’s Court. After about a year, Mr Fine moved and we took over the top floor as well. Our landlord was one of the largest landowners in central London, possessing a large part of Soho and properties elsewhere, but he did everything himself. He sent out rent demands in his own handwriting and employed no secretary. We, on the other hand, had grown considerably. We had young editors, fresh from the universities, who did the copy editing on the manuscripts that Marion and I accepted. Marion began to make frequent trips to New York, coming back with books to publish. We also took on Denis Williams from Africa, Paul Ritchie from Australia, Dino Buzzati and Paolo Volponi from Italy, Radomir Konstantinović and Jara Ribnikar from Serbia and several South Americans including Julio Cortázar. D.P. Costello, who had translated The Blind Owl, now sent us a nineteenth-century Russian novel in his new translation. It was Nikolai Negorev by Ivan Kushchevsky, which had become a Soviet classic, and we published it.

  Three new British novelists were taken on, two of whom became quite prominent. They were Ann Quin, Alan Burns and Eva Tucker. There was also Alan Burns’s wife, Carol, whom we published, but there was a mishap there, which I shall come to. Ann Quin’s first novel, Berg, was very different from the run of British fiction. In it, the seedy atmosphere of Brighton during the off-season is beautifully described. Its three characters, Berg, a young protagonist, his father (really a portrait of the author’s father) and his mistress weave around each other in a situation where sex and violence are always present. It ends in murder, and the body of the older man is washed up by the tide, prescient of what, in a short time, would happen to the author herself. Not long after publication, Ann Quin met the elderly, distinguished and eccentrically fascist-admiring author Henry Williamson in a Chelsea pub and started an affair with him. She won the D.H. Lawrence Fellowship through his influence and then the Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship, which allowed her to travel on a grant and spend two years in the United States. Before she left, we had published two more novels. Berg came out in 1964, and was followed by Three in 1966 and Passages in 1969. When she returned from America, she had written little else, but had spent much time with American hippies, was drinking too much and had experimented with a number of drugs. Williamson by now had lost patience with her. I managed to get her an Arts Council grant of £2,000, but they ignored my suggestion that it should be doled out over a year. She cashed her cheque into liquid currency, went to the airport, took a plane to Dublin and spent some time in Ireland. I heard rumours that she had been sighted in a number of Dublin pubs. Then she returned to Britain, took the next plane to Amsterdam and no more was heard of her until, in mid-winter, she was rescued, half-frozen from a snowdrift in Stockholm. After lengthy hospitalization there, she was returned to Britain, but her mental condition was precarious, and she had to take daily doses of lithium to regulate her body and mind. This made creative writing impossible. She took a job as a secretary, seemed better, but was obviously unhappy. I spent an evening at her flat with other friends of hers, and could see that she was now a manic-depressive and just moving into a manic phase. She was also trying to reduce the Lithium in order to start writing again. Shortly afterwards, she went down to Brighton to stay with her mother. A fisherman saw her on the beach at twilight, taking off her clothes and entering the water naked. Her body was found, a week later, washed up further down the coast. It was a waste of a great talent, which blighted my intention to try to form a group of writers, including Ann, into a school like the nouveau roman in France and the Gruppe 47 in Germany.