Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  I was not happy about Trocchi appearing in the witness box, but having made the decision I could hardly stop him. We were defended by Bruce Douglas-Mann, a solicitor whom I had known for some time through John Stonehouse, soon himself to become an MP. Sheila Colvin came to take a shorthand transcript. We stayed overnight in a Sheffield hotel, and the case, in front of three magistrates called Needham, Weedham and Boddy, took place the next morning.

  Given the obvious conservatism of the magistrates, I think that we would have lost in any case, but we put up a good defence with sensible and persuasive witnesses. It was Trocchi who ensured we could not win. In the box he was jaunty and provocative. Asked to explain a quotation from de Sade that he had put at the front of the book, which states that literature can extend the crimes of those who commit them beyond the grave, Trocchi said he agreed with every word. When the prosecutor put it to him that the book used obscenely objectionable words such as “motherfucker”, he replied that such a word was in common usage in America. His most damning statement was that drugs were good for people, and he would like to see their usage spread. He had followed me into the witness box, where I had said that books do not influence people’s behaviour, only their ideas, by making them analyse them. Trocchi affirmed bluntly, “I disagree with my publisher about the effect of books. If I didn’t think that they could influence behaviour, I wouldn’t bother to write them.”

  We lost, of course, and when we went to the Court of Appeal in London a month later, we lost that as well. The appeal judges also brought a new concept into the law: that a detailed description of drug-taking was obscene under the Obscene Publications Act.

  As I arrived at King’s Cross Station from Sheffield, I was met by a man from the BBC. I had been booked to give a talk on Max Frisch on the Third Programme that night. The talk had been cancelled. I forget the excuse, but the BBC did not want to be associated with a just-convicted pornographer whose case was on the front page of the evening newspapers. As I was just coming down with a streaming cold and was losing my voice, I was not too sorry, but I had another engagement that evening, to give the same talk on Frisch at the Swiss Embassy and in front of the Ambassador. I got through that one – adrenalin bringing back my voice – and I was congratulated by His Excellency. We continued selling Cain’s Book, but in a very low-key way, without advertising, and not in Sheffield.

  Max Frisch remained a friend, and I would see him quite often when he came to London, sometimes staying with me at Wimpole Street. On one occasion, Sam Beckett was also in London, but not staying, and Max was, and I introduced them. Frisch felt exactly the same way about seeing a performance of a play of his with the audience present as Sam did, and when the National Theatre put on The Fire Raisers I went with Sam, while Frisch stayed in the building but would not take a seat. There was one memorable Sunday afternoon around then when I had the two of them, and also the cartoonist Victor Weiss (Vicki) and his wife or girlfriend (I forget if they were married or not) to lunch. Afterwards we decided to play chess, and we played several matches against each other. Max eventually beat the three of us, and I came bottom. I cannot remember whether Vicki or Sam came second, but both were good players. The conversation was superb, going from the theatre to politics, from painting to world events, and I regret that I can remember the conviviality and the brilliance, but nothing else. Everyone got on well, Sam and Max being very new friends, and Vicki, the most brilliant cartoonist of the day, was meeting for the first time two men he idolized.

  Shortly after that came the 1964 General Election that brought Wilson and the Labour Party to power. My mother was in London and had dropped in. Vicki had come to dinner, and we were watching the election results on TV as they came in. We were all – except my mother, who knew nothing of politics, but would have wanted the Conservatives to win – hopeful of a Labour victory, and we toasted every announcement of a Labour gain. That was the last time I ever saw Victor. His cartoons continued to be as brilliant as ever, but he was soon so disillusioned with the Labour government that he committed suicide two years later in a deep depression. My author Howard Barker later wrote a play about him, although Vicki is not named. His hero is a Hungarian artist, like him, who survives many tyrannies and revolutions, to reach Britain in the Thirties and become a war artist during the last war, where he is savagely attacked by the British wartime establishment, especially by Churchill. Barker’s point was that of all artists the most dangerous to the politician and to authority is the political cartoonist.

  * * *

  Ledlanet continued to take up much of my life. The year after Agrippina, Ande Anderson produced, during our September-October season, two operatic shows. First there was a double bill of Mozart’s early opera Bastien et Bastienne, sung by the wonderful Australian soprano Maureen London with Kevin Miller and Ian Wallace, then making his first Ledlanet appearance, and the Scottish premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg’s eerie masterpiece, which was sung in English by Pamela Smith and effectively mimed by Alex McAvoy; it succeeded in shocking an audience who would have been, for the most part, politely bored if it had heard it in German.

  My policy at Ledlanet was to do as much as possible in English, and to find ways of putting over the meaning, the emotional content and the aesthetic value of everything performed – not only to make it enjoyable, but to enable a very mixed, but largely uninformed audience to go away with a new appreciation and enthusiasm. I was trying to educate those who came mainly out of curiosity, or for the social cachet, and to give additional pleasure to those who normally came to such events.

  Our main production that season was Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. It was a notable success, received excellent reviews and was picked out for special mention in the report of the year by Ronald (Bingo) Mavor, who having for years been drama critic of the Scotsman, was now director of the Scottish Arts Council. I remember driving to Ledlanet from London on a Friday night, and arriving very late with rehearsals still continuing. One advantage of putting on a performance in your own premises is that a producer can rehearse as late as he likes or the cast will tolerate. Ande had decided that in an intimate setting the ghosts would look too substantial, so arranged that only their voices were heard, and they were only seen as shadows. I arrived just as the shadows were seen for the first time by the cast, and it was late-night: in that setting they were frightening enough for a shiver to go through all the artists present. “Are there any real ghosts in this house?” I was asked, and so was Attewell, who was evasive and non-committal enough to increase the general fear. This communicated itself to the audience during the eight performances we gave. Among the cast were Angela Hickey, an effective, well-sung governess, and Judith Pierce as Mrs Grose. The boy Miles, played by two Edinburgh boys in alternance, attracted much attention. They were both good, but Denis Sheridan was so self-assured a ten-year-old that Jim Fraser commented that if he had had a whisky in his hand instead of a Coca-Cola in the bar afterwards, he would, given his grown-up demeanour and conversation, have seemed perfectly natural. Roderick Brydon, an excellent conductor who gave much time to the boy sopranos, pulled off the opera perfectly together with Ande. I have never seen a better or more concentrated performance, although I have seen the opera very many times.

  The pattern was now that I put on the summer season at Ledlanet and used Kent Opera for the main productions in the autumn. Each season lasted two or three weeks, with a fund-raising ball to start the season or to finish it when the scaffolding had not yet been put up or had been taken down. The scaffolding was Jacques Chaix’s idea: he had after all once been trained as an engineer. By putting up scaffolding in the hall, we had a balcony with four rows of seats on each side of the stage and thirteen rows below, seven on one side, six on the other. We could now seat nearly two hundred. The catering was divided: the conservatory could seat over a hundred for a three-course meal, the menu limited to what people liked best, like smoked salmon, steak, sweets and cheese;
the salon was now a buffet during the season, with a substantial choice of food and drink at a reasonable price.

  From Jacques Chaix’s cousin in Mirabel, I brought in quantities of an excellent red and rosé wine, on which we now had our own label. Many customers liked it so much they bought cases to take away. Our house white was a dryish Rhine wine, and we had an assortment of more expensive wines and other drinks from our main suppliers in Leith, which was usually the biggest of the end-of-season bills we had to pay. A staff of about a dozen did the catering under Attewell’s direction.

  Early in 1964 I was approached by John Watt, who worked as a salesman for the firm that did our printing in Dumfermline, David Watt and Sons. Although he had the same name as the firm, I think the family connection had become minor. He was also a folk singer, and a good one, who wrote many of his own songs and was well connected in the Scottish folk-song movement. He suggested putting on an evening of folk songs, and starting in the June of that year we programmed, or rather he did, two such evenings every year. In this way I became acquainted with Ray and Archie Fisher, The Tregullion, Matt McGinn, Tommy Bonnar, Barbara Dickson, Aly Bain, Hamish Imlach, Alex Campbell and Billy Connolly, and many others, some of whom were to become stars and not just in Scotland. Our folk song nights always filled the house, were cheap to do compared to most of our other shows and brought in a new audience, much of which came back to evenings that were more demanding but just as enjoyable.

  Ian Wallace, an opera singer who was also a popular entertainer with his one-man evening of chat, anecdote, operatic aria, traditional song and whatever else suited his audience, was especially popular in Scotland, although known to audiences at Glyndebourne, Covent Garden and abroad, and to those who listened to a popular radio quiz called My Music on the BBC. He became a regular with his An Evening with Ian Wallace, as well as our productions. When Scotsdisc, a Glasgow record company run by Douglas Gray, wanted to record Ian Wallace, they did it at Ledlanet, and Ian Wallace’s Evening at Ledlanet had a considerable sale in the record shops as an LP, and later on tape as well. When I was asked, in the Seventies, to pick records and talk about myself in a BBC radio programme called Man of Action, I included among my choices of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, etc., a song about a plaintive Glasgow lover with a bad cold under his beloved’s window in Glasgow, which was Ian Wallace singing West-End Perk (Park). He also compèred a number of Members’ Nights. We never had an empty seat with Ian.

  One of the remarkable Edinburgh characters whose career was helped by the arrival of the Traverse Theatre, which became one of the centres for non-Calvinist and pro-cultural activities in the Sixties, was Richard Demarco. An artist and art teacher, he took over the Traverse dining room in its earliest days to display paintings, his own and other people’s, constantly in conflict with whoever was running the theatre itself, just underneath, where footsteps and noise would interrupt the play. Demarco much resented having to take second place to drama, and once he found backers – and they included the Edinburgh designer John Martin and his friends, together with a few local grandees such as Lord Haig – he moved his activities to a number of galleries, where he displayed more paintings than he sold, and acted more like the curator of a civic museum than a commercial art dealer. In time, his interests and contacts growing with trips to America, where he found opportunities to lecture, and to Europe, especially Eastern Europe, where he developed the reputation of a major arts impresario, he branched out and began importing foreign artists. As many of them, particularly from countries like Poland, were involved in the theatre too, he also began to bring in foreign theatre companies. Notable among these were Tadeusz Kantor from Krakow, Józef Szajna from Warsaw and the German artist Joseph Beuys, so that Demarco was soon linked with the European avant-garde everywhere. All this energetic activity was paid for by his long-suffering backers and a little, very little, public money. He was a good talker, good at self-publicity, and able to persuade many of his listeners that everything he displayed had an element of genius. Although some saw him as a clever charlatan, others believed absolutely in his ability to spread enthusiasm and make the public art-minded. He bubbled over with energy and an unstoppable flow of words.

  In the late Sixties a group of us – I cannot remember whose idea it was initially – decided to raise money for three institutions that needed it, The Traverse Theatre, Demarco Gallery and Ledlanet Nights. The designer and theatrical personality Alan Sievewright was approached, and he agreed to design a large ball to be held in the Assembly Rooms on Edinburgh’s George Street, where in those days big civic functions took place and which during the Edinburgh Festival became the Festival Club, because places to eat and drink after pub closing hours were very few. He made black and white the motif of the ball, and the Black and White Ball it was named, people being asked to come in appropriately imaginative costumes in line with the theme. Lord Primrose, the son of Lord and Lady Rosebery, who had largely financed the first Edinburgh Festival, joined the Ball Committee and wanted to do the lighting. A number of bands were engaged, and I obtained an American blues singer from Paris, Mae Mercer, whom I knew from Girodias’s Blues Bar. Girodias, in a sudden fit of generosity, paid her fare to come, and anything she was paid came from him. Mike Hart, an Edinburgh trumpeter and bandleader, who also played at Ledlanet’s fund-raising balls, was delighted to have an artist of renown. Alan Sievewright was also a great friend of Tondi Barr, who helped in various ways and came up to Edinburgh for the ball. It was well publicized, supported by the local serious press and very well attended, becoming one of the main social events of Edinburgh that year.

  I was in the Assembly Rooms office on the morning of the event when I received a phone call from Immigration at Heathrow. A confused official told me that this large black lady, a singer with no work permit, had arrived to work in Edinburgh, and he could not admit her. A minute later I was talking to Mae. “That you, John? Listen, you tell this man Girodias sent me here to sing for you. I ain’t getting paid. Girodias, he say, you go England, sing for John Calder and here I is.” I explained that Mae Mercer was coming for one night only to sing as a volunteer at a charity ball, that she was threatening no one’s job, and a relieved and no doubt much harassed official let her through to catch the next plane to Edinburgh. She was a triumph, adored by Mike Hart, all his band, and all those who listened to her.

  The ball went on in several large rooms with different events in each, until the early hours. Several of my current girlfriends were there and I had to be busy doing many things before I ended up at dawn in bed with one of them – not Tondi on this occasion, who was in the George Hotel. The ball was repeated the following year, but with less success. My memory of the end of one of them, probably the first, was of Lord Primrose on a stepladder unscrewing his lamp bulbs from projectors and handing them down to his wife. “We’re taking back our property,” she explained to a bewildered questioner.

  In 1966 I programmed an unusual opera which I knew about from April FitzLyon’s Lorenzo Da Ponte biography. It was Martín y Soler’s Una cosa rara, with a Da Ponte libretto, which had first been given in Vienna exactly a month after the premiere of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and with the same cast. The best-known tune in it is quoted in the supper scene in Don Giovanni, which was written a year later, attesting to the popularity of the Soler opera when first performed in 1787. I was told that Una cosa rara, which had not been performed for 150 years, could not be reconstructed, but we found a musicologist, Roy Jesson, who travelled all over Europe looking for the orchestral parts to fit the vocal score, and he lovingly put the whole opera together. I attended all the auditions. We could usually find one star singer for an opera and then audition from the large pool of available talent, at first in London, but later in Glasgow as well, for singers to fill the other parts. I forget who it was that I liked best for the soprano lead, but Ande Anderson was very keen to have a young unknown singer called Josephine Barstow, and I gave way to him. I did
not realize that he was having an affair with her, but after we had engaged her, it became obvious. He was at the time getting a divorce from Josephine Veasey, who about that time was starring in The Trojans, and he soon married his new Josephine, who in a short time developed an international career that had started at Ledlanet.

  Our cast was a good one, with Ann Hood, Elizabeth Tippett, Beverley Bergen, Robert Bateman, Kevin Miller (a regular by now), Anthony Rafell, Michael Rippon and David Lennox. Roy Jesson conducted. It was well reviewed, performed by Kent Opera again in London a few months later, and eventually taken up by the BBC, although with a different cast.

  1967 was a busy year at Ledlanet. We had introduced a spring season in March welcoming Scottish Opera’s touring group, Opera for All. I was friendly with Scottish Opera, which had been founded in 1962 by Alexander Gibson and Peter Hemmings, and had attended their opening productions of Pelléas et Mélisande (given in recognition of Mary Garden, the Scottish singer who had sung the first Mélisande for Debussy, but was too frail to leave Aberdeen to attend a performance) and Madama Butterfly, and we co-operated in many ways as the only two operatic institutions active in Scotland at the time. Many singers worked with us both, and conductors as well, and Peter Hemmings in particular attended most of our productions. Opera for All performed in costume with piano only, and they brought Così fan tutte and Cinderella (Rossini), which in spite of poor weather attracted good audiences. Two of the singers with the company, Sheila McGrow, and John Graham were to become Ledlanet regulars.