Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Jenny and I kept up a pleasant and arduous relationship for a few months – I had to rent a room for us to meet, because she also had a husband – then it simmered down and we became just friends. So were things in the free-and-easy Sixties. But Jenny later helped me to give fund-raising concerts, which I shall come to, and other complications lay ahead.

  * * *

  I had met Pablo Fernandez, a Cuban poet, who was also cultural attaché at the Cuban Embassy, through the normal channels by which publishers with an international list meet such people, and he came a few times to my flat, where he met Bettina. He persuaded her to look at the songs that Lorca had written, because Lorca was a composer as well as a poet. She could not make head or tail of them and showed them to me. I started to reread Lorca’s poetry, and the more I did so, the more I realized that there was a strong autobiographical element that ran through his work. I read his biography and came to the conclusion that, although a recital of his songs, interspersed with readings of his poetry, was a possibility, it would be far more interesting to write a play about his life and work, using his own poems as a major part of the text. We could also use his music, so that it would be a work of music theatre. Bill Colleran was consulted, and he introduced me to Harrison Birtwistle, one of the composers in his stable, who was just beginning to make his reputation as a member of the so-called Manchester Group of British musicians. Birtwistle’s role would be to arrange Lorca’s music so that it could be more effectively performed, and at that point all that was envisaged was a simple recital of the songs by Bettina. I met Harry Birtwistle, whose main activity at the time was conducting and writing music for the Pierrot Players, a chamber orchestra named after Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, now a key work in the repertoire of any small orchestra performing twentieth-century music. The Pierrot Players were all virtuoso freelance musicians, such as Alan Hacker, the well-known clarinettist. Birtwistle instantly thought of anything that he might do on the project in terms of using the Pierrot Players, and he quickly lost interest in Lorca’s music, although he was willing to collaborate with me in setting such poems as I selected. He was even more interested when I told him I had a stage work in mind.

  David de Keyser, ex-husband of Ethel, who previously had worked for me as editor, was then asked by Bettina to collaborate with me. Although I saw no reason for this, I agreed, and David, Bettina and I went up to Ledlanet on a Friday night to work on the project. I cannot pinpoint the date, but it must have been early in 1966, even possibly a year earlier. We talked about it at dinner, discussed it throughout the evening and went to bed with a plan in mind. The next morning, I rose early and went to the library, where I started typing a prologue. This depicted Lorca in front of a firing squad, and I scripted his last thoughts, which would then lead to a depiction of his life in flashback. I finished this, put another piece of paper in the typewriter and started on Act I, a fine morning in Barcelona with the boy Federico García Lorca and his brother planning a play for the household. I was on page 4 when David came in.

  “What are you doing?” he exclaimed in surprise.

  “I just started on the play.”

  “We have to talk about it first.”

  “We talked about it all last evening. Now we have to write it.”

  We had breakfast with David still protesting. He gave me no help for the rest of the weekend and soon dropped out.

  In London, my affair with Rosemary Reuben was continuing on an irregular basis. She was no longer working for Roy Jones: she was divorced and living in Hampstead’s Frognal with a personable pet called Topcat, doing freelance typing for a living. I asked her to help me produce a script quickly, because Bettina had already approached Peter Diamand, the new Edinburgh Festival director, and had told him she was writing a musical play about Lorca. My name could not be used because of the Happening. Diamand agreed – subject to seeing the script quickly – to do it.

  Weatherstone was still Provost, although he had increasingly become a joke. His malapropisms rivalled Sam Goldwyn’s, but without being as funny. For instance he had looked at a Festival exhibition of Braque’s work and quipped “It braques my heart,” and having seen a Britten opera in a festival that featured Britten and Berlioz, had confused the two and said to the press, “The next time that Mr Berlioz wants to write an opera, I’ll give him a better libretto than that.” Being around Edinburgh frequently, I occasionally saw him and even spoke to him, but although he had probably forgotten who I was, there was no question of my doing anything in the Festival, especially as Diamand was very careful to avoid all controversy.

  I spent several afternoons with Rosemary, dictating much of the script and giving her what I had typed myself to retype, and by early summer it was finished. I will not pretend, Rosemary being a very sexy lady, that we did not take some time off during those afternoons, but she did a professional job for me nevertheless. The play was accepted, and Birtwistle was soon writing his music, both to accompany some of the dialogue, which became a form of Sprechgesang or rhythmic speech, and the Lorca poems. There was background music and incidental music and songs written for Bettina to sing.

  Lorca emerged as a three-act work, and about sixty per cent of the script remained in the poet’s own words. In the first act I depicted the child, then the young man who loved gypsies, which gave Birtwistle scope to write a gypsy dance, with a ballroom scene to close the first act. The second act showed a segment of Blood Wedding in the context of the author rehearsing it, and the whole of the lament for his male lover, Mejías, a bullfighter killed in the ring. This was to be recited against a mimed bullfight. In the third act I used the Poet in New York poems to show him in a nightclub there, then moved him back to Spain during the Civil War, when Lorca and his troupe of actors were trying to come to terms with the reality of the time. There is a scene from The House of Bernarda Alba, put in largely for Bettina to have something dramatic to sing at that point, having given her a militant La Pasionaria-like speech earlier in the act. It ended with Lorca’s capture and last night in captivity (and he did write a poem on the last night, which I used), and then back to the opening scene, standing before the firing squad, and his last thoughts, interrupted by the fusillade.

  It was conceived in part as a vehicle for Bettina. Harry Birtwistle turned out a score suitable for the Pierrot Players, with vocals for one singer only, but with much incidental music to accompany mimed action and to accompany speech. As the text in places was deliberately stilted, being Lorca’s own verse – sometimes lyrical, sometimes not – the rhythmic structure was very important. And some of the music was for dance.

  The Edinburgh Festival accepted Lorca as a musical work by Bettina Jonic and Harrison Birtwistle in 1967. As Bettina and I had separate careers, only a few people knew we were married, and apparently nobody to do with the Edinburgh Festival at that point did. It needed a company structure to package and finance it, however, and I organized all that, raising money from friends. It was sold as a package to the Festival with a minimum guarantee that would not cover all the cost, but I was confident it could come to London afterwards with a London management. To this end, I found a well-connected agent who fronted the whole thing and helped to cast it. I asked Ande Anderson to produce it, knowing his versatility and ability to work in unusual circumstances. His reputation as House Producer at Covent Garden helped us in many ways to get the project going. We also had Royal Opera House rehearsal rooms available to us because of him.

  Tony Beckley, a minor film star who resembled Lorca, was cast in the lead. Nicolas Chagrin, a dancer and actor, who had played Puck in the first production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, played a number of parts, including Mejías, whose bullfight and death he mimed against Beckley’s dramatic recitation of the poem. We had an experienced choreographer, Gillian Lynne, to plot the movement and to direct Nicolas Chagrin. She had choreographed Chagrin as Puck at Covent Garden and obviously had a fixation on him, which bec
ame ever more evident as she danced with him in the rehearsals of the gypsy scene. Beckley, who was quite openly gay, was also very attracted to him, as were all the women around. Rehearsals were always infused with an underrunning erotic feeling. They started in early July, and as they progressed an excitement began growing among the cast, as they all began to realize that they were taking part in a radically new form of music theatre. Lorca’s music had been totally dropped. The actors were moving and delivering their lines against Birtwistle’s score, and Bettina was singing it.

  In Edinburgh we were performing at the Gateway, a theatre that had previously belonged to the Church of Scotland, and that in the future was to become a television studio and then a theatre again. It was managed by the formidable Sadie Aitken, a lady who claimed she always knew at rehearsals what would be a success and what not. She had strict views, but had been known to be unconventionally forthright on occasion. For instance, when an actor, forgetting his lines, inadvertently said “Fuck” on stage, loud enough to be heard by the audience, Sadie summoned him to her office the next morning and said, “If you think I’m firing you because you said ‘Fuck’ on stage, you’re wrong. I’m firing you because you’re a fucking awful actor.” Lorca was far too removed from mainstream theatre for her taste, so she predicted a flop.

  Rehearsals had gone well in London with piano. Now we had a small virtuoso orchestra to play Harry’s not simple score, and a theatre that left much to be desired. We had been programmed into the last week of the Festival, and we had only a Sunday to use the stage, as the previous play had finished the previous night. Ande had to use most of that precious Sunday on a technical rehearsal. Unfortunately our technical requirements were complex, and there were many of them in a show that depended on back projection, several lighting and other cues, and curtain drops. When we had the final dress rehearsal on the Sunday night, the stage hands, exhausted after moving out scenery the previous night and having to move us in the next morning, refused to come. We had the dress rehearsal without scenery, or any scenery changes, and with the orchestra. Although we rehearsed Monday before the opening, there was no time to do everything.

  I also was dead tired – my own fault. The lady who I have mentioned before as Anna turned up at the theatre on the Sunday and came to my rehearsals. I took her back with me to Ledlanet that night, but she suddenly decided not to spend the short night with me, so I had to drive her back to her hotel in Edinburgh, then return to Ledlanet again and after a short sleep get back to the theatre, arriving rather late at the rehearsal. This was remarked on, especially by Harry, who had expected me to have dinner with him the night before. I was in a state of pretty total exhaustion during Monday’s final rehearsals, trying to help Ande deal with the many problems that always come up when you immediately follow another production into the same theatre and the technicians are away just when you most need them.

  I saw the first performance from the producer’s box. The prologue went fine, but to my horror, when the lighting came up on the Lorca family drawing room on what was meant to be a sunny morning, what the audience saw were the bricks at the back of the stage area: the scene shifters had not brought down the right flat. The stage manager then threw the stage into semi-darkness, which totally disconcerted the two boy actors playing the young Lorca and his brother, who forgot their lines. At the third scene things were running better, but the damage had been done, and the reviews were mixed and far from ecstatic.

  At the second performance everything worked properly, but the press reviews had already appeared and audiences were not encouraged to fill the house. Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish film and stage director, who attended the third performance, liked it and wrote Bettina that he would like to stage his own production in Stockholm. I wrote him that it was felt the script needed revision, especially where the child actors were concerned, and said that I would come back to him. Such was the pressure on my time that year, I never did.

  Bettina was asked to attend the Festival’s daily press conference. Birtwistle was not with her, and she had nothing much to say about the play, only about her own performance. The plans to take it to the Arts Theatre in London, hopefully preliminary to a run elsewhere, fell through, because the stage was too small for our set. Friends and acquaintances had backed the play, and my depression was increased by their loss.

  On the last night, which was also the last night of the Festival, there was a late-night concert in the Usher Hall, where various Festival artists were asked to perform. Bettina sang an aria: I forget what it was. Afterwards she was invited to Peter Diamand’s supper party, given for the artists in the concert, and as her husband I was invited. As soon as Diamand saw me arrive, his face fell. He knew who I was, had often met me, but very coldly, and had not realized that I was Bettina’s husband. He must soon afterwards have realized who had written the play.

  I had another problem at that year’s Festival. I had been much taken with a Roland Dubillard play when I saw it in Paris, Naïves hirondelles. On its first Paris production it had flopped, but was saved by the support of other playwrights including Ionesco, Anouilh and Roussin, and thereafter had a long run and several revivals. I sold it to the Traverse in Edinburgh for the Festival period and hoped for a transfer to London. Unfortunately the director, Ronald Taylor, to whom I had entrusted the casting and the direction, had not properly understood the play, and he engaged Ewen Hooper, an established older actor, to play one of the men and a young actor for the other, so that the age imbalance, on which the play depends, was not apparent to the audience, who never saw the only-too-understandable tragedy of the older woman. I had no time to go to a rehearsal or to see it at the Traverse, and was horrified when I finally did at the Arts Theatre in London.

  I had intended to bring Lorca to the Arts Theatre from the Gateway, but as already mentioned could not because of the different stage size, so I put in The Swallows instead. I think, although at this distance I cannot be too certain, that I had raised a single pool of finance for the two productions, but in the event no one received any money back. In the theatre, luck plays a bigger part than talent and even genius, and one must always be prepared for everything going wrong. There are so many unpredictables from weather, world events, illness and human nature that can defeat the most careful planning. This applies especially to a production mounted for a week in the context of a crowded Festival schedule, where everyone is overworked and overstretched. The same unpredictabilities can apply to publishing, but there is more time for luck to change and for new solutions to be found. In the theatre when things do not go right, it is sudden death. The Swallows had its run to mediocre reviews and small audiences. I have so far not been able to negotiate a revival of what I know to be a beautiful, poignant and sensitive play. But I think Lorca might be revived one day.

  Bettina and I, although married and living together, and sharing most of our activities, increasingly had private lives. I was however always discreet about my own amours, and I would, when necessary, tell outright lies to protect the women in my life from gossip, although in the freer and franker climate of the Swinging Sixties everyone was far more open, and increasingly women didn’t care. Relationships changed so often, and the pill had given women such freedom from pregnancy that the secrecy which had accompanied non-marital relationships up to then was less and less necessary or practised. My friends were frequently getting married, but few of their marriages lasted, and divorced or not, the situation in the circles in which I moved was a fluid one. I knew that I shared some of my liaisons with others, usually male friends, and women did not particularly hide their sexual lives. It was not unusual to go out to a party with one person and end up with another, or for that matter alone. There were jealousies, of course, but they seldom lasted long or had consequences.

  I had rather fallen for a young female journalist who worked on Harper’s Bazaar, who often commissioned me to write articles on operas, concerts and plays that I saw on my Europea
n trips. One summer night in 1966, I took her to a large party that Liz Smart, an American in London, then literary editor of Cosmopolitan, gave at the Roundhouse in Camden Town to celebrate the republication of her short novel By Grand Central Station I Lay Down and Wept. There were several hundred people there and, if I remember right, one was asked to bring one’s own bottle to supplement whatever Panther, the publisher, reissuing the book, were willing to contribute to the cost of the party. The Roundhouse had at the time been rented by Arnold Wesker, who intended to turn it into a theatre for a working-class public. He was still trying to raise the money (he never did, but it became a theatre anyway), and he let Liz Smart have it for the evening. It was an extraordinary party, with all of the London arts crowd in a still empty and undecorated building.