Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  I did other things at The Traverse; most memorably I put on an evening in which Michel Geliot, Leonard Fenton and others acted out or recited scenes from Beckett’s plays and other work under my direction. It later moved to the Arts Theatre Club in London.

  Some time in the spring of 1964, Jim Haynes came to call on me in London and he, Bettina and I were sitting in my bedroom listening to a recording that had just been released of the Brecht/Weill Happy End. Suddenly Jim said, “Why don’t we do it in Edinburgh?” Somehow the idea took hold, probably because Bettina wanted to sing it. Traverse Festival Productions Ltd was formed to put it on, money was raised, and Michael Geliot, engaged as producer. I was a little sceptical, because it would have to be done outside the official Festival, but a large hall was found, and Robin Richardson, the best-known theatrical agent in Scotland, agreed to be responsible for the management of the company.

  My role was largely confined to raising funds and to negotiating with London managements, so the very successful production that resulted owed more to Jim Haynes’s enthusiasm and Bettina’s good performance than to anything for which I could claim credit. Guy Wolfendon was the conductor, much criticized as he claimed a fixer’s fee from all the orchestra. Joseph Melia was the male lead, and I only remember Declan Mulholland among the members of the cast, because he got very sick after drinking too much at Ledlanet after the last night of the run. It transferred to the Royal Court in London, a theatre too small for it to make any profit, where it had excellent reviews. A transfer was expected and certainly would have done well. But Michael Codron, with two shows to transfer and only one theatre available to him, decided on the other, a dance show that featured Claude Chagrin, whose brother Nicolas would soon be in a play of mine, so Happy End died at the Royal Court. Her success was the beginning of Bettina’s next career: putting together evenings of Brechtian songs by Weill and other composers . She continued to do this for years with varying success.

  * * *

  Until the mid 1960s I remained active in the Committee of 100, but little by little extremists, who were obviously agents provocateurs, usually young men, would take over the meetings, never allowing such distinguished members of the Committee as Herbert Read to say anything, and always advocating violent demonstrations. One by one, the distinguished personalities in the arts, science and politics, whose names had given the movement credibility, dropped out, and eventually I did too.

  One weekend, Bertrand Russell invited me to his cottage at Penrhyndeudraeth to discuss the campaign. He told me that he distrusted Schoenman, his assistant, who was in control of the finances, and who every time he saw him insisted on pursuing paths of activity that he thought would alienate supporters, but he confessed that he now felt too weak to out-argue Schoenman and he saw no way that he could effectively say anything in public. I told him of my own misgivings, and we talked until late into the night, but got onto many topics besides politics. I was then put into a bedroom, where I found the lives of the saints and many religious books. I was amazed, because Russell was a well-known atheist.

  At breakfast with the two Russells the next morning I expressed my surprise. “It’s for my grandchildren,” he explained. “I was brought up with religion all around me, and I eventually rejected it. I brought my children up without religion, but they all took to it. One is even a missionary. So now, when my grandchildren come (they may have been great-grandchildren), I let them read religious books in the hope that they will react like me.” At his great age his mind was as sharp as ever, and he still worked on philosophical and mathematical problems, but as I had noticed with my great-uncle Jim, old men lose the will to fight determined opposition and give way when opposed. What the old want most is a quiet life and tranquillity. I never saw Lord Russell again after that. He died in 1970, and his will specifically dissociated himself from Schoenman to prevent him continuing to claim that he was wearing the Russell mantle. I am not sure what happened to Schoenman after that.

  One of the bravest of theatrical impresarios of my years in London publishing was Peter Daubeny. He had started as an actor just before the war, but having lost an arm while serving in the Coldstream Guards, he changed to management when he returned to the theatre in 1945. As an impresario he brought overseas companies to London, at first mainly dance groups from Eastern and Western Europe, because they presented no language difficulty, but after his big success with Edwige Feuillère in La Dame aux camélias, he increasingly brought over drama companies. This developed into his annual World Theatre Season, which ran from 1964 to 1973. Towards the end of this period I commissioned a book from him, Peter Daubeny Presents, but he died in 1975 before he could complete it.

  One of the productions he brought over from Paris in the Sixties was Naïves hirondelles, by Roland Dubillard, which is mentioned elsewhere in this book. I was eventually to publish it as The Swallows and also to mount the first English production. I had seen the play in Paris, met the author, brought him to Edinburgh in 1963, and had kept in touch. I was delighted when Peter Daubeny brought the French production to the Piccadilly Theatre: the French Ambassador gave a lunch for the company, and I was invited and seated next to the author. I have an egg phobia, a quite irrational one which I think goes back to a dream that I had as a child, although I cannot be absolutely sure of that. I have known several other people with exactly the same egg phobia, but at the Ambassador’s lunch, I discovered that Roland Dubillard had it too, and worse than me: I could not eat an egg, but he could not look at one. We had eggs as a starter, and Roland took one look, turned green, closed his eyes, waved it away, and throughout the whole meal nibbled at his bread roll and drank the wine in his glass as quickly as it could be refilled. I cannot remember any conversation at all, and I am sure there was none.

  After lunch, I went to his hotel with him, because I wanted him to sign a contract for English rights which I had in my pocket. He felt too unwell to do anything, was drinking more, and asked me to ring him the next day. I had seen the play the night before and went again that night. Roland, who played the principal role, with his girlfriend Arlette Reinerg, who had directed the play and was the ingénue in the four-actor cast, was obviously drunk throughout the performance. He mumbled and sometimes forgot his lines, forgot to change from his costume, a suit in the first two acts, to pyjamas in the third, and was probably keeping up his alcoholic level in the intervals. He did eventually sign the contract.

  * * *

  Early in 1964 Marion had married Arthur Boyars. I cannot remember where they married, probably in a synagogue in Hampstead. I remember that Arthur’s mother was very difficult and made Marion produce documentation from East Germany to prove that her mother, who had died at Auschwitz, was really Jewish, which her father, Johannes Asmus, a small publisher whom I had met at the Frankfurt Book Fair, was not. I was not invited to the ceremony, but to a lunch at a Chinese restaurant in the East End, the Old Friends, which was in fashion at the time. That evening, or it may have been the next day, I gave a reception for them at the Caledonian Club. In my congratulatory speech, I made a heavily veiled allusion to a “birthday party” which had brought them together. They probably did not appreciate this.

  Shortly after that, Marion told me that she wanted to change the name of the company to bring in her name, and it was the new married name she wanted. At a board meeting I agreed to a change to Calder and Boyars Ltd, but stipulated that Marion must now give up her claim to getting her money back ahead of me in the event of a dissolution. Roy Jones was against this and saw no reason to change the name, but Marion got her way and lost her financial precedence. Ever since Tropic of Cancer, we had been solvent and making profits, although I had not done as well on Miller as I should have done. It had been agreed that in return for taking the legal risk on the book I would get a higher percentage of the profit, but Roy Jones then insisted, once the risk had passed, that this only applied to the first impression of 40,000 copies, and as he had the ca
sting vote, I had to accept.

  We now had three notorious authors who had done well with us: Henry Miller, William Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi. The profit from Miller now came mostly from paperback royalties rather than sales of our own editions. We had also published and sold well the Burroughs’s trilogy of novels which had formed the basis of the anthologized volume Dead Fingers Talk, which had started all the brouhaha in the TLS.

  Revenue from paperback companies was increasingly important to us. Aside from Penguin, who had sub-contracted some of the more serious literary authors, we were dealing mainly with Panther and Picador, both paperback companies that were owned by American publishers, and to a lesser extent with the New English Library, which had been set up by New American Library. For this latter, then being run by two highly eccentric characters, I produced a Samuel Beckett Reader, an anthology which I prefaced with a long explanatory introduction and much comment on the works extracted. Published in 1967, this sold well, helped to extend the interest in Beckett, earned money for Minuit, Beckett himself, and myself as editor, and helped rather than harmed our sales of Beckett’s novels and poetry that we had published.

  The two eccentrics were Gareth Powell and Christopher Shaw. The former had started life as a lorry driver in Australia, but having a charismatic personality had persuaded his American principals to make him managing director of their British subsidiary (which in its proper context was really sales director), while Christopher Shaw looked after publicity and editorial content. Christopher was an Old Etonian, married to the daughter of a Hollywood film mogul.

  I spent an amazing weekend with them in a large country house they had rented near Oxford. There was endless game-playing, bridge, poker, billiards, ping-pong, croquet and golf – all for money and for the highest stakes that the hosts could con their guests into agreeing. The Shaws nearly always won, and it was an obsession with them to do so. On the Sunday morning I was induced to play golf for the first time since I had left Canada as a teenager. I played no better and little worse, but had to shell out money on each hole I lost, which was nearly all of them. After lunch we went around antique shops in the area and, at my instigation, paid a visit to Prinknash Abbey as we were passing it, to call on Dom Sylvester Houédard. He was an eccentric Church of England monk, who was also fairly well known as a poet, and who had given evidence along with myself for the defence at a recent obscenity trial of a small publisher.

  Christopher Shaw, in his capacity as publicity director of NEL – he might even have been sales director by then – took the Royal Pavilion at Brighton during a Booksellers’ Conference to give a lavish all-night party, where champagne flowed like water, and lobster and caviar was on offer on the sumptuous buffet tables. There were several bands, and the dolce vita night, which must have cost more than their year’s sales, passed in a daze. Not long afterwards, Christopher was in charge of a large office in New York for the parent company, from which he eventually moved on to other adventures. He looked like an adult Billy Bunter, round and beaming, full of jokes, and even fuller of mischief at someone else’s expense. His wife, who had a new baby in a cradle during my weekend with them, was in her way as offhandedly eccentric as he and as uninhibited. As for Gareth Powell, he had earlier decided to publish the erotic classic Fanny Hill, and did it so provocatively that he was prosecuted, but only in a magistrate’s court, using the resulting publicity to make the book a paperback best-seller. He then crowed about this clever exploit in the Bookseller. That kind of self-publicity normally does you little good in the book trade. Shortly afterwards, in Australia, as a stunt, he drove a lorry of his own paperbacks across the country and became stuck under a low bridge. In the humiliating publicity that followed he lost his job.

  Panther Books brought out paperbacks of our Henry Miller novels. The two editors there were William Miller and John Booth. Once, when asked how he decided how much to offer for paperback rights of a potentially best-selling novel, Miller replied that he offered a thousand pounds for every erection it gave him when he read it. He was flamboyantly gay, humorous and witty, but nearly all the paperback executives in those days tended to be characters who brought colour into what had been in the past a rather staid profession, dominated by paternalistic patriarchs from old-established, often family firms.

  It was Corgi, then run by Patrick Newman, who bought the paperback rights to Burroughs’s novels. I had designed the Naked Lunch cover myself, using a photographic montage by Brion Gysin, Burroughs’s artist friend, that showed Burroughs’s face made up from other tiny photographs. I cut out the eyes to put in red circles where the pupils would have been, giving his face a demonic look. Corgi used the same cover, which became iconic.

  Those were the days, the middle Sixties, when hardcover publishers published largely to get reviews and library sales, and then sold paperback rights, which became their most important source of revenue, often exceeding the money earned from all other sources. I had my own large-format series of paperbacks, Calderbooks, using the same sheets as the hardcover, either holding them when the hardcover was printed for a year or two, or printing another edition if the hardcover sold out. This was rarely done among publishers. Not all my titles were suitable for mass market, and my Calderbooks mixed fiction and non-fiction.

  In 1963 I started a new series in a mass-market format, but heavier and better produced than most, on good paper and thread-sewn. These were called Jupiter Books, selling for around five shillings or a little more. The first four titles were Beckett’s Murphy and Watt, a volume of three plays by Ionesco and a novel that had done well, André Pieyre de Mandiargues’s The Girl beneath the Lion, a fruit of our early collaboration with Grove Press. Mandiargues’s novel The Margin would later win the 1967 Prix Goncourt and be published by us two years after that. All the Jupiter series had the author’s face on the cover, which worked well for some books, but not where the face was overly grouchy or off-putting. Later we were to start other series.

  Of the three notorious or scandalous authors I have mentioned, we had so far been able to avoid prosecution, and I credit this almost entirely to the public acceptance of all three at my first Edinburgh Conference and the TLS correspondence over Burroughs. But trouble now loomed for Trocchi, who had made himself, through self-publicity, the best-known drug addict in Britain. In those days an addict would get a prescription from a doctor that would enable him to get a daily dose to feed his habit, and this was free on the National Health. Many Americans staying in London took advantage of this. A little before midnight every night, the Boots shop that used to be open twenty-four hours a day on the south side of Piccadilly Circus would have a cluster of mainly American hippies gathering outside. At midnight they could get their next day’s prescription for heroin filled. The shop assistants did not like them, treated them with barely concealed contempt and much sharpness when they were impatient, but they had to fill the prescriptions. British addicts usually had a local chemist near where they lived, and they were less in evidence at the hub of London.

  Trocchi had created a niche for himself. He appeared on radio and television programmes and was interviewed by the newspapers, because drugs were one of the main topics of the day. His attitude was that individuals should be free to live as they wished and dose themselves as much as they wanted. He cited Coleridge and De Quincey as evidence that drugs were useful to the creative mind. He himself, however, had ceased to be creative. We had published his most celebrated novel, Cain’s Book, and republished Young Adam, written shortly after leaving university and published by Girodias in Paris, with obscene material added to make it more suitable for the Travellers Companion series. Subsequently it was republished in London by Heinemann as originally written, but without much success. In later years, and especially after his death, his pornographic fiction, written for Olympia Press in the early Fifties, would be rescued, mainly in American pirate editions, but now Trocchi had only two books in print, and his addiction made him inca
pable of any new sustained literary effort. He could talk, get and express creative ideas verbally, but lacked the concentration and energy to write, except briefly. We kept him going with translations: La Gana by Jean Douhassot and other French novels by René de Obaldia, Valentine Penrose, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, and I, Jan Cremer, a hippie novel by a notorious Amsterdam writer, with which a Dutch friend helped him. But as he could only work for an hour or two at a time, and then only when in immediate financial need, we paid him by the page. I think it was a pound a page, and we checked what he brought in against the original. He would leave with ten or twenty pounds. Burroughs was also in London now, but Bill was more withdrawn, willing to appear on a television programme occasionally, but not actively seeking the opportunity, like Trocchi, who saw himself as the spokesman for the British beat generation.

  We heard from a bookseller in Sheffield that the police had seized much of his stock, and Cain’s Book was one of the titles taken. We could either ignore the whole matter and allow the copies in question to be destroyed, or we could go to court to defend the book. It had been well received and had sold well on publication, but now, more than a year later, sales had dropped, and I decided that publicity would give it new life. I informed the police that the novel would be defended and found a number of witnesses, the most eminent of them being Kenneth Allsop, a well-known face on television and a literary journalist, who had given the book a major review in one of the popular dailies. Among other witnesses were Kathleen Nott, a distinguished poet and critic and a very forthright and robust woman in her fifties. There may have been some minor figures as well. Marion Boyars was there, as well as Trocchi and myself.