Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Alan Burns’s short novel Buster, about his period as a national-service man, appeared in our first New Writers volume. His extraordinary surrealist novel, Europe after the Rain – the title taken from Max Ernst’s famous Bosch-like painting – was published in 1965. We followed it with Celebrations in 1967, Babel in 1969 and Dreamerika! in 1972. I always liked Europe after the Rain best, because of its originality and the way the author successfully shifts the reality of his narrative in the way a dream does, from page to page. There is a continuity, but not of waking life. What he was trying to do was create a reality of menace, as reality might be perceived under fascism or in a prison camp, and it was the nearest we ever came to finding a Kafka-like writer. I liked Celebrations, but thereafter was aware that Alan’s main interest was in being well known and earning big royalties, and that his books were becoming gimmicky purely to attract attention, whereas earlier there was an artist at work. The last book, Dreamerika!, a satiric and dadaesque look at the Kennedy family, did not get as well reviewed as his previous books, nor did it sell much. By that point, Alan Burns had become more interested in developing an academic career, and he went to an American university to teach. We published two books by Eva Tucker, who had as a girl been at the same school in Berlin as Marion Boyars (or Asmus as she was then). Contacts was a picture of a marriage and the tensions inside marriage. Drowning, the second book, explored human relationships in a frank way that was only just becoming possible in the Sixties, when people were able to talk about their intimate lives and confront homosexuality and other previously taboo subjects without prejudice. Neither did as well as they should have, but in those days publishers could always count on selling at least a thousand copies to public libraries, even without reviews.

  We published a short novel by Carol Burns, Infatuation, in New Writers 6 and The Narcissist in 1967. The latter was a picture of a very self-obsessed and narcissistic woman, which I really published more as a favour to Alan than because I liked it. One day I received a lawyer’s letter, telling me that The Narcissist libelled his client, Yolanda Sonnabend. I rang up Alan, who admitted it was true. Alan was a qualified barrister, who had been employed for a while as libel-reader for the Daily Express. How could he allow this to happen? He had no explanation. He could hardly have thought that Sonnabend, who had been a friend of his wife, would not notice. Obviously the novel had been written out of malice and jealousy of Yolanda Sonnabend’s established career: she was a successful designer for ballet, opera and theatre, as well as a painter whose work sold well. If it went to court, damages would be heavy, and it became obvious to me, now that I knew the protagonist was a real person, that the libel was a serious one. A libel case could mean bankruptcy.

  I rang up Yolanda, whom I knew slightly, invited her to lunch, and she was nicer about it all than I expected. She thought I could get the damages back from insurance, but we had never carried libel insurance. Not only is it expensive, but one must then get every book read, and we would be in endless arguments with lawyers about cuts. I told her that I would withdraw and kill the book instantly; there had been few reviews and no good ones, so few people would have seen it. I would ask booksellers and libraries to return their stock. She agreed not to take action, and I said I would pay her legal fees. Her lawyer was furious, told me that it was unethical to speak directly to his client, but I took no notice, and the whole thing blew over. Not too long after that, the Burns marriage ended. Not only was the picture of Yolanda an ugly one, but it showed her having an incestuous affair with her brother, and she had a brother who also might have sued.

  Other writers not published by me, but who moved in the same circle, included Eva Figes and B.S. Johnson. When I arranged joint readings and sessions for the public to promote a new kind of English novel, I would sometimes include them with my own writers, especially Eva, with whom I was personally friendly. She had done a number of translations for us, and was now published by Faber. Later on I published her feminist book about drama and death rituals in primitive societies entitled Tragedy and Social Evolution and a monologue – broadcast by the BBC – which appeared in New Writers. But her agent, Deborah Rogers, wanted her novels and her most successful feminist book, Patriarchal Attitudes, to go to a publisher known for larger advances than we normally paid. It is obvious, looking back, that Eva Figes was the most important of the writers outside the fictional mainstream who emerged at that time. She had had a hard time. A bad marriage, not unlike that of another Jewish refugee from the Nazis, Lisel Field, had left her with two small children to support, and she managed to do it, first by translating, then by writing her own books. Her talent was not dissimilar to Virginia Woolf’s, and she never compromised or tried to write commercially. For years she lived on the minimum, sent her children to state schools, but as she lived in Hampstead they were good ones, and they both later had successful careers as adults. When the Arts Council recognized her talent and circumstances – and I played a hand in that – she was one of the recipients of state aid who never splurged or used it badly. Although I occasionally had an argument with Eva Figes, I had a great respect for her character and her courage as a woman, as well as for her talent as perhaps the best serious novelist writing in London during the Sixties. Although she went socially, as we all did, to parties and gatherings, she kept a fence of privacy and discretion about herself, remaining always a little apart, and her private life was very private and kept out of the sight of her children. Above all, she was afraid of scandal, and pride was her dominating characteristic quality. She told me once that she had been invited to a party where the food was very generous and had concealed some in her bag to take home to her small children. But something had been stolen, and everyone was made by the police to turn out their pockets and open their bags. She had never forgotten the humiliation.

  B.S. Johnson was very different. He was strident and militant, very ambitious and very depressive when things did not go his way. This was the period after Labour had returned to power with Harold Wilson as Premier, and Jenny Lee became Arts Minister. Suddenly there was money for the arts in greater abundance than ever before, and this included literature. Eric Walter White, a writer on music, became head of the new Literature Department of the Arts Council, with Charles Osborne as his deputy. Money was made available to help writers trying to get known, providing someone knowledgeable and considered responsible would vouch for them. Sometimes writers applied, or found sponsors to apply for them, for a grant to give them time to write or to finish a novel. Sometimes publishers applied for money to reduce the advance they normally expected to pay. Not surprisingly, the Arts Council – and this applied to their Scottish office in Edinburgh as well as to London – preferred the big established publishers to the struggling smaller ones. The latter received only very minor help, whereas when Collins applied for money to help publish B.S. Johnson, a large matching grant was given of £15,000 to go to the author for his next three books. He probably never received much of it, because he committed suicide, but before that he was militating against all publishers and urging other writers to join him in establishing a co-operative to publish themselves.

  At one such meeting, I recounted the history of Gallimard, founded by a group of French writers, with Gaston Gallimard employed to be business manager. André Gide, chairing the reading committee, turned down Proust as not good enough, and the writers all quarrelled and criticized each other; finances were a mess: finally their business manager suggested that they stick to writing their books and let him publish them, on the best possible terms, and take over both the business and the headaches. At the time I told the story in the Sixties, Gallimard was possibly the largest and most successful publisher of creative literature in the world. The collective had not lasted long.

  Such arguments did not sway Johnson, but he received little support. I was one of the publishers taking on new and experimental writers just then, British as well as foreign, but so were Jonathan Cape, Secker and Warburg,
Faber and even Collins, provided that the Arts Council reduced their risk. I published much that needed subsidy, but I was not good at going through the necessary gestures, and only received subsidy for expensive translations, such as Stuckenschmidt’s massive Schoenberg biography, which Humphrey Searle, the composer, translated. I receive no money towards publishing Ann Quin, but obtained a grant for her, and that was usually the basis on which I applied. Even before her suicide, knowing my authors, I had pleaded with the Arts Council to give a weekly or monthly stipend rather than a lump sum, but they said they could not be paternalistic, and that any other way of paying might attract income tax. This was nonsense. Aidan Higgins asked them to give me the money, and we paid it out to him weekly: he knew his weakness. The Arts Council must be considered to be at least partly responsible for the suicides of Quin and Johnson by doing things in the way that was bureaucratically easier for them. Most of the time they subsidized holidays and drinking bouts, not time to write.

  Aside from money given to writers, there was also subsidy available for the production of literary books where the return would be low, and for difficult translations. I only applied when a book could not be published otherwise. I was more successful in Scotland, however, because I was invited to apply for the reissue of out-of-print Scottish classics. Only one other publisher wrote in to express an interest in the project, a Mr Morgan, whom I met to discuss co-operation. We agreed to start a Scottish Library series of both classics and modern books, and each take on certain titles, giving the books a similar appearance. But it turned out that he was part of Bernie Cornfeld’s empire of newly starting-up companies, financed by IOS (Investors Overseas Services, a bubble about to burst). In the fallout, Mr Morgan disappeared, but I continued on my own.

  The first title appeared in 1970, an anthology entitled Contemporary Scottish Verse, edited by Norman MacCaig and Alexander Scott. It was a good anthology with fifty-one poets in it. Clearing the rights was a nightmare, even with the Scottish Arts Council paying most of the fees. They also paid forty per cent of the production cost, but when we sold out, would not give anything towards a reprint, which would have involved more copyright fees, so there never was one. I continued the series, not always with subsidy, with three volumes of MacLellan plays, the poems of Sydney Goodsir Smith (some time later), several anthologies of medieval prose, short stories and other works. My relations with the Scottish Literature committee were later to sour, as I shall come to relate.

  I arranged lectures, readings and debates for my little stable of London-based authors, and involved their friends who were published by others. The last school of British writing that had successfully established itself was the Bloomsbury Group. There had been interest around the Georgian Poets. There had also been the various movements launched by T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, by Wyndham Lewis, and of course the Thirties Poets were now linked together. After the war there had been an attempt by Wain, Amis, Larkin and their friends to launch “The Movement”, but the name had never stuck: it was a very English and inward-looking group, disliking especially Europe and America, very Oxbridge and middle-class. My group came from the newly educated upward-thrusting working class or lower middle class. Burns had the personality to lead a new group, but not the staying power, nor did he know enough about, or take enough interest in, the others to get their confidence. So, as a new school, it failed.

  One of my best customers in London was Tony Godwin’s Better Books on Charing Cross Road. It was an intellectual bookshop with a charismatic owner who loved literature. He offered me my own Calder Corner, a space where he would leave it up to me to see that it was properly and interestingly stocked. It enabled me to push my new authors along with those who had developed a following, rearrange the books as I wished and add promotional material, so that my corner resembled a display as much as a section of shelving. Then he acquired some more space in the shop next door and asked me to organize events in it. I put considerable effort into a weekly event – I think it was on Thursdays. There were debates between different writers and critics, and there were readings of my authors and of others. Jeff Nuttall, an actor, director and art teacher, who was a leading member of The People Show, organized a “Happening” there with his group. It was a messy affair with pieces of raw organ meat thrown around the room, but the point, which I have forgotten, was well-put-over and led to a lively discussion afterwards. I persuaded the BBC to record the Better Books events in the hope that some of it might be interesting to put on the air, but nothing ever came of it.

  The problem came when other publishers began to be jealous of the considerable success of these evenings. We were filling every seat and usually having to turn people away, and the press was giving us a considerable amount of attention, which was free publicity that attracted many people to the bookshop. When Tony Godwin told me that other publishers would like to have a turn at organizing an evening. I said, “Fine, let them,” and we gave three Thursdays during the following months to other publishers, the first being Jonathan Cape.

  The trouble was that the organization of the Cape event had been left in the hands of an inexperienced assistant. We only had sixty seats, and were beginning to turn away almost as many. The evening was dull. The next one, organized by another publisher, was worse. The public dropped off. After three bad weeks, Tony Godwin stopped the evenings, or rather handed them over to his new manager. Shortly after that, Tony sold out to Collins. He had just been offered a job as fiction editor at Penguin, so I lost my Calder Corner and was then under great pressure to sell paperback rights of authors I had nurtured during the previous several years. I sold Tony a few, and was the only publisher to enjoy the temporary and short-lived prestige of a joint imprint with Penguin: Beckett’s Malone Dies was the first title that appeared in this way. Then Tony went off to New York, where he became an editor at Knopf. I lunched with him occasionally on my visits there. He had split up with his wife, Fay. This was probably the reason behind the move. But he did not live long in the States, and died there within two or three years.

  * * *

  I still went skiing at Val d’Isère every year, and it was probably spring 1964 when I met at Geneva Airport, on the way there, a lady I knew and liked, who for the purpose of this book I shall call Anna. She was the daughter of a European publishing family which had moved to England before the war, but had pursued a separate career as an arts administrator. We had always flirted a little when we met, but now I was on my own, as was she, and I suggested she come to Val d’Isère with me. She hesitated and, had I had more time, I think would not have resisted the temptation, but I looked her up once back in London, and after a while she succumbed to my advances. Our affair lasted some time and was mutually satisfactory, but what she enjoyed most was accompanying me to various European cities such as Amsterdam during the Holland Festival, when she met local intellectuals, and to Scotland.

  During 1964 I wrote two serious plays, apart from the more didactic entertainments for Ledlanet, both heavily influenced by Beckett. I showed Sam the first, a dialogue entitled Tell Me Again, and his only comment was: “It’s very well written”. The second I offered to The Traverse, and Jim Haynes scheduled it for the end of the year as part of a double bill with Stewart Conn’s play about the atom bomb, Birds in the Wilderness. Called The Voice, it depicted a man caught between his wife and his mistress, but in a trance-like state, as if just waking up in the morning and not yet quite awake. The wife urges him to caution, the mistress to adventure, while a voice occasionally breaks in, urging him to various courses of action, in the soothing or militant tones of radio announcements or advertising spiels. Through it I met Leonard Fenton, who played my protagonist and became a good friend. The two actresses were Pamela Ann Davey and Helen Ryan. David de Keyser recorded the voice for me. I turned up for the late rehearsals and found to my dismay that it was being directed by Jack Moore, an American Jim had met on a plane between Dublin and Edinburgh. He had totally changed the
sense of the play. Because he was gay, he made the man a dominant figure over the two women, reversing totally the text, which had them driving him gradually into the ground. Where the text did not suit, it had been cut, and on the opening night the principal actress cut her most important speech, which I had conceived as a set piece like an aria. Elspeth Davie, one of my Edinburgh authors, went to see it and wrote me a letter saying that she did not want to have a publisher who also wrote, although she had never written anything for the theatre.