by John Calder
Lunch was an exuberant experience. I forget what we talked about – about Sam no doubt, and about the recent Godot most certainly, and about the reading we had to do a week away in Stratford equally certainly – but as curtain time approached, Nick was in no mood to go to the theatre. He went to telephone his understudy to go on for him, returned to the table, ordered another bottle of wine and went on talking until late afternoon. I then had to go home to Wimpole Street, and Nick insisted on coming with me. At six, and he had not stopped talking since our meeting at lunchtime, he telephoned his understudy to play the evening performance as well, and this was Saturday night, when the audience would certainly expect to see the star actor. An American professor, who was staying with Marion just then, came round to see me and stayed on for dinner with Nick and another friend of his, Peter Murphy, who worked as his dresser and had been summoned by Nick to join the party. It was very late when the other three men left together, probably for some late-night drinking place that Nicol knew. I warned him that I would be picking him up at 6.30 the next morning in a taxi. “Don’t worry, I’ll be ready,” he said.
He wasn’t ready, and I had great difficulty in rousing him. We just made the flight to Paris, and were the last to board. By then he had taken wake-up pills, sodium something or other, and the vitality was back. He gave the other passengers an impromptu performance, putting on an American accent, prancing in high camp fashion up and down the aisle to the enormous annoyance of the stewardesses who were dying to serve breakfast. I was deeply embarrassed, especially as he tried to bring me into his act.
On arrival we hired a car and started to drive eastward towards Ussy on the Marne, where Sam had his country cottage, stopping on the way to buy wine, fruit and cold food. Sam welcomed us at about eleven o’clock, and he and Nicol got straight down to work in the garden. I had made my choice of texts to be read by the two actors, reserving a few poems for my own reading. The actors had mainly extracts from the novels. It was a hot summer day with occasional clouds, and I lay down on the grass and soon fell asleep to the drone of the two voices sitting at the garden table.
Lunch was pleasant. We had brought too much, of course, and Sam had food of his own prepared. He introduced Nick to French cheeses he had never seen, especially Reblochon. Then they went on working until late afternoon. Sam told us we were going to have dinner at the Haydens’ house at La Ferté-sous-Jouarre about twenty miles away. They had beds for us for the night. We went in two cars, Nicol in Sam’s leading the way. It was a little Deux Chevaux in which I had once had a hazardous trip with Sam, not a good driver, from Paris to London, which I prefer not to remember. A special providence always seemed to protect him in it. I could see Nick gesticulating in front of me. Apparently he wanted to stop at every bistro we passed for a drink, but Sam resisted.
Henri and Josette Hayden had hidden with Sam in the same village, Roussillon in the Vaucluse, during the war. Henri was one of the early surrealist painters, and we were given a tour of his studio, which had work from the Twenties up to the present, when he had developed a flat plastic style of landscape painting and had portrayed much of the local scenery, fields and hills, in a pleasant and individual manner. He was an old man now. The wartime comradeship had made him and Sam close friends, and they were very relaxed together. It was also obvious to me that Josette, much younger than her husband, had a deep crush on Sam.
Henry Hayden was of course the original for the character of Estragon in Godot. Originally Polish, he had spent most of his life in France, and being Jewish had taken refuge in Vichy France, which, not being under direct German control like the north, gave Jews a better chance to survive. Sam Beckett was there because he had had to flee the Gestapo when the Resistance network he had joined at the beginning of the war was betrayed.
There was a large friendly old English sheepdog called Fal. She jumped all over Sam and he fondled her happily. She had been bought at the Falstaff, a favourite restaurant and late drinking place of us all, hence the name. She bounded around the garden while we had drinks, and Nick strode around it, declaiming Shakespeare until Sam made him sit down. He continued to keep up a non-stop entertainment, even when we were at dinner, sitting at the piano to give us his imitations of several popular crooners, and never letting any general conversation get started. Also, there was a language difficulty. Nick spoke no French, the Haydens no English. Henri was soon very tired of Williamson’s exhibitionism and, having eaten, went to bed. Sam was tired of it too.
“Can you not be serious a minute, Nick?” he protested, but nothing could stop Nicol when he was on a high. Sam left immediately after dinner, driving off slowly in his old Citroën, and Nicol, with an audience reduced to two, also went to bed. I talked to Josette for another hour and did the same. The next morning after breakfast we drove off. Nicol wanted to leave the house, but not the district. “Just find a little hotel somewhere,” he said. “I just want to be near that man. I don’t even want him to know I’m here.”
“Don’t be stupid. You haven’t a penny of French money, and you’ve a performance tonight.”
“I don’t care. Just leave me.”
But I drove him into Paris, where I had a parcel to deliver before returning to the airport. Then I had a real problem. I was no more than two minutes delivering the parcel, but when I returned, Nicol had disappeared. For more than an hour I drove around, and finally spotted him in a bar. I dragged him out with difficulty, and we again just made the plane. At five o’clock I dropped him at his flat on Cadogan Street and went to my office, where I received a phone call from Nick’s agent. “Where is Nicol?”
“He should be at the theatre by now. I dropped him off at home some time ago.”
“Well, he’s not. Nor is he at home. He missed two performances on Saturday. The theatre is furious.”
And he missed every performance right through the week. No one knew where he was. On Saturday morning, I had asked the two actors to come to my flat. When Magee arrived at ten, I explained what had happened. I said we would have to do without Nicol Williamson, who had disappeared, and that I had replanned the next evening to give much more for Pat to do, while I would read some of the prose extracts myself. Then the doorbell rang, and in walked Williamson. “Where have you been all week?” I asked.
“None of your business. We’re here to rehearse. Let’s get on with it.”
After he had read the first passage, Pat turned to me. “That’s a perfect Dublin accent,” he said to me in wonderment. Nick had perfectly mimicked Sam’s voice. I wanted the three of us to drive to Stratford-upon-Avon together, but Nick would have none of it. “I’m going with friends, and I’ll be on time,” he promised. Pat and I drove north together, quite a long way on the roads existing then, and discussing what we would do if Nicol didn’t appear. Pat had recently seen Sam. “He told me he had seen Effie again,” said Magee. “He was amazed that she had grown old like himself.” Effie is the girl in the punt in Krapp’s Last Tape, a play written for Pat in which he excelled. I had not known that Effie existed in real life. It explained a little Sam’s fondness for Fontane’s novel Effi Briest.
In the theatre we were sitting at our table, facing the empty seats that in a few minutes would be filled. It was ten to eight, and we were making last-minute changes to the script, as Nicol Williamson had not turned up. Just as the audience started to enter the smaller auditorium of the theatre, Nick came in from the wings and took his seat beside me. The reading went well, lasting an hour and a quarter, and we acknowledged the applause. Then we had a surprise. Williamson strode to the front of the stage and, when the applause died, gave a rendering of Vladimir’s great monologue, ending with a trumpet call of agony that would have awakened all the dead voices that his Vladimir discovers earlier in the play, voices that are hidden in the air. He was given rapturous applause. Patrick Magee turned to me. “Never, but never,” he whispered, “will I ever appear on a stage together with that man.�
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It was in 1964 that we published what is possibly Beckett’s most difficult novel for a reader to comfortably assimilate, How It Is. He had translated it from the French in record time, and I decided to have a public reading to promote it. For this I recruited Patrick Magee and Jack MacGowran. I took the Criterion Theatre on a Sunday afternoon, the same theatre to which Waiting for Godot had transferred after its initial run at the Arts Theatre in 1955, and I asked Martin Esslin to chair the session. Beckett came to London to work with the actors, and he stayed with me, but he would not go to the theatre. I also had a panel to discuss Samuel Beckett’s work. The reading, which I taped, was of passages from several different works and ended with about ten minutes from How It Is. I made a ten-minute LP recording from the tape, and sent it out with the review copies. It certainly helped the reviews. I cannot remember much about the panel discussion, but Bill Watson from Scotland and, I think, Harold Hobson, took part. It went down well with an audience that filled about two-thirds of the theatre.
I was becoming ever more involved with the theatre at that time. As Ledlanet developed, so did my role at the Traverse. When Terry Lane had become too big for his boots and after a row with the committee walked out, Jim Haynes was elected to be artistic director as well as chairman. But he couldn’t direct plays. “Where do we find a director (producer)?” asked Jim or someone else at the meeting. “You go into the street and whistle,” I said. In practice I rang Michael Geliot, who came up from London to take over Pinter’s The Caretaker halfway through rehearsals. Then I brought in Charles Marowitz, who directed the next play, and he soon became an Edinburgh fixture. I introduced plays by Arrabal, Ionesco, Pinget, Obaldia and Beckett to the theatre and directed a successful Beckett evening myself with extracts from different Beckett works, which included poetry and prose, and the Duthuit Dialogues with Leonard Fenton and Michael himself, happy for once to be an actor.
At Ledlanet we went from one ambitious project to another, with operas in the main autumn season and smaller-scale works in spring and summer. Il re pastore in 1968 was followed the next summer by an extended musical and dramatic programme. Then in the autumn we mounted Handel’s Alcina, which had long been my favourite of all his operas. Large-scale for Ledlanet, it needs several brilliant voices, and we found them. Josephte Clément sang the title role and the excellent cast included Sydna Withington, Patricia Hay, Adrian de Peyer and John Graham. But the big surprise was Lorna Brindley, a rich resonant mezzo-soprano. She also happened to be the girlfriend of Jim Colclough, who was grooming her for stardom. He had come to us first as an assistant stage manager, but was now our theatrical equivalent of Attewell, the man who could do everything. He had once been a precision worker in a Birmingham tooling factory, had lost one eye in an industrial accident, had then used his compensation money to train as a chef, and had become one in Birmingham’s Midland Hotel. Next, he used his salary to train as a very high tenor. He had sung Pistol in Falstaff at Covent Garden, had understudied at Glyndebourne, but now did odd jobs around the opera circuit waiting for an opening to come. He had in his second season with us become stage manager, but also ran the kitchen, and was giving much of his attention to turning Lorna Brindley, not herself very motivated as a person, into a star. We were all convinced that she would shortly be one.
Our conductor that year was again Peter Gellhorn and the producer George Mully. Leonard Friedman, who had been leader of several London orchestras and had recently led the Scottish National, had put together our best orchestra yet, and I had on the spur of the moment named it the Scottish Baroque Ensemble. Our chorus, consisting mainly of members of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, was of the same standard. Its members had worked with many of the greatest conductors of the day, and its normal chorus master was Arthur Oldham. The chorus enormously enjoyed singing at Ledlanet, and some of its members were able to understudy our principals. I was proud of our rising standard and of the team we had developed.
Brian Mahoney, senior producer of Scottish Television in Glasgow, was a strong supporter of Ledlanet and took every opportunity to get us publicity. He was overwhelmed by Alcina and decided to take a solid chunk of it for his arts programme. We did a few things in the studio, but that could not capture the atmosphere created by a Ledlanet audience, so Scottish Television paid for one additional performance three weeks after the season had ended. The scaffolding that had been taken down had to be put up again, the cast reassembled and rehearsed, and the audience was an invited one, mainly local people and schools. All this in order to get a few shots of the audience across the stage and perhaps three minutes of music, because the big show-stopping numbers, such as the trio of female voices near the end of the opera, were already in the can. Brian would have much more to do with us in the future.
* * *
I think it was during the winter of 1964 that I was invited by the extra-curricular department of St Andrews University to give a lecture, and as at the time I was deeply immersed in Arnold Hauser’s Mannerism, in which Shakespeare is presented in what to me was an interesting new light, I picked as my subject “Shakespeare and Predestination”, although I doubt if that was the actual title. My main point was that Shakespeare’s villains – Macbeth, Richard III and Iago in particular – had no particular reason to fear damnation as, according to the Calvinist theory much in vogue in Shakespeare’s time, they had been damned by God from the beginning and had no reason to behave other than the way they did.
At the back of the hall a man in a grey suit was sitting alone. He asked no questions afterwards, and did not stay for the drink that probably followed the lecture. Some considerable time later, I received an invitation to talk during the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly, but only at a morning session to a youth group on the last day. I accepted, put the date in my diary and forgot about it. Then my press-cuttings agency began to send me mysterious clippings from Scottish newspapers, often letters to the editor, objecting to me, depicting me as a wicked corruptor of the moral fibre of the nation, having the gall to talk to Scottish youth at the General Assembly. Shortly after, I received a polite letter from Edinburgh, asking, as I passed frequently through the town on my way to Ledlanet, if I would be willing to attend a meeting of the Youth Group Committee. I telephoned, fixed a date and turned up there one afternoon. Among the six or seven grey-suited men seated round a table, I recognized the man who had come to hear me in St Andrews and realized that my talk, which had been inadvertently on a Calvinist theme, must have been the reason for the invitation to speak at the Assembly. I was asked what I intended to say and answered that as the date was still months away I had given it no thought as yet. I assumed, however, that I was expected to talk about the influence the media had on youth, and I would certainly urge my listeners to be sceptical about what they read in the newspapers and other media, and to learn to analyse what was said and the reason for saying it. They discussed this for a few minutes, and the chairman then summed up, “Well, I see nothing wrong in that. We don’t like these pressure groups who try to tell us what to do. The invitation stands and thank you very much for taking the time to come and see us.” The pressure group was, not surprisingly, MRA.
On the night before I was due to speak – this must have been in May 1965 – I was at Ledlanet in my library just beginning to think about the next day, when at around nine o’clock the telephone rang. It was the Daily Express. “Are you looking at the television?” I was asked. “No, why?” I answered. I was told that the Reverend John Gray had just proposed a motion to cancel my invitation to speak the next day, and it had been passed by a considerable majority. In no way troubled, I absorbed the news and stopped making notes. I already knew John Gray well. He was the Minister of the Cathedral in Dunblane, where strangely enough Ian Fraser, the man responsible for my invitation, also lived.
I had on at least two occasions debated against him. In the Sixties I was constantly debating, most often on censorship, a very popular subject t
hen, always certain to attract a crowd, and it was seldom that I did not win. I had debated against John Gray the previous year at Aberdeen University, where his arguments had been all over the place, even accusing me of Nazism in my ideas of teaching people to think for themselves. In the first part of the debate, I had used some new ideas I had thought up, fairly abstruse I suppose, and Gray and no doubt many of those listening may not have understood them. I spoke first proposing the motion and then Gray spoke against it, but at the end, when we each had to close the debate in the opposite order, he launched such a blistering attack on me that I gave him an angry and very fluent reply, knocking his simplistic argument to pieces, for which I received a tremendous ovation and his seconder said that he had no choice but to vote for me. John Gray was a proud, arrogant man, full of his own doctrines, and he had reason enough to dislike me after the Aberdeen debate. Now I suppose he felt he had his revenge.
The telephone rang again. It was the Scotsman newspaper. Had I heard?… Yes, I had. “Well, then,” said the voice on the phone, “could we print your speech?”
I explained that I never wrote out my speeches, but spoke from a few notes. I was then asked, “Can you write it for us? We’ll pay you.” I agreed and sat down at the typewriter, because the messenger would arrive soon to collect the piece. It took me over two hours and came to about four thousand words. I had no chance to revise or correct it, and I had to keep the messenger waiting. The next morning it was in the Scotsman. It took up much of the front page and two entire inside pages. Reading it, I was amazed at my own fluency, argumentation, irony and humour. If I had thought it out for a month, it could not have been better. Of course, it had no connection with what I might have said to the assembled youth, but it was a reasoned attack on censorship generally and in particular on the kind of attitude that had led to the refusal to have me speak. A few hundred people might have heard me speak for about twenty minutes (I was not the only speaker) – now tens of thousands had read me, and the newspaper’s initiative had made the Church look extremely silly. As Ben Lassers, an American doctor, then Registrar at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, who occasionally fished in my loch, said to me the next day, “Congratulations on ruining this year’s General Assembly. It’s just what they needed.”