Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  I should put in an aside here about Liz Smart. She was an American of a certain age, perhaps fifty, living just round the corner from our Soho offices, a poet and journalist, who managed to get Cosmopolitan to give considerable space to the more forward-looking arts and especially the kind of literature I was publishing. Her reviews helped us to sell to fashionable young women, and in the Sixties this was important. She was much loved in literary circles for her taste, bubbling personality and forcefulness in supporting the right causes, a good person to have on your side. She had a very sexy lookalike daughter, whom I often met in the local markets. These were on either side of our office, meeting places for those who worked or lived in Soho, where the stall-holders were all personalities in their own right. My favourite restaurant, Otello on Dean Street, to which a friend had first introduced me, always had several people I knew in it, while overhead was Muriel’s, a private club where you could drink all afternoon, and where Francis Bacon, the painter – who lunched two or three times a week at Wheeler’s, the fish restaurant on Old Compton Street – could usually be found. The Sixties are inextricably associated for me with Soho, where I spent my working days and where, a decade later, I would also be living.

  * * *

  1967 was a particularly busy year, and some of the most significant events have not yet been told. There was a great need to raise funds, and Jenny Paull, the first oboe in Il re pastore at Ledlanet, with whom I had had a tempestuous but short affair, was the greatest help to me in bringing together musicians to play to raise funds for a cause.

  I had also been asked by Clive Wilson, the town clerk of Harrogate, a spa town in Yorkshire which had a summer festival, to put on a writers’ conference, and I organized a small one in 1968 and a larger one in 1969, when I was given a bigger budget. The second Harrogate Conference was devoted to science fiction, and my idea then was to bring together scientists, particularly those who were planning our futures in terms of innovative practices, inventions and planning, and those who were imagining possible futures in their writings. I persuaded my namesake Nigel Calder (no relation), editor of the New Scientist and a distinguished science writer, to chair it, brought novelists Alan Burns, Eva Figes, Norman Spinrad, Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Margaret Drabble, Michael Moorcock, B.S. Johnson, and among others Erich Fried, Robert Jungk, G.W. Targett (who wrote largely for religious publications from a liberal perspective), Chris Evans, Walter Perry, D.L. Jayasuriya, Charles Marowitz, Robin Blackburn, Christopher Priest, a Mr Jones (first name unfindable), Jeff Nuttall, a Professor Todcroft and a few others. Some of the above names may have defected and been replaced by others. I can no longer be quite sure. They were a mixture of creative writers, journalists and scientists in different disciplines, and the two-day conference was lively.

  From the start there was obvious hostility between science fiction writers and psychologists and psychiatrists. There was also hostility on the part of the English audience to a large group of German students who had followed Robert Jungk from Berlin and camped on the lawn of the hotel where he was staying. We were treated to several amazing descriptions of what the future might be like, for instance that future towns would be designed as long strips with a motorway running down the middle, and residential or industrial areas lying on each side, with the civic centre located in the middle of the strip and the central fast through-road running underneath it. The Mr Jones who put this forward, a civic-centre planner, later approached me to write a book, and I know we accepted something he had written, but apparently it never was published.

  The conference was lively and much enjoyed, but the cost was found prohibitive by the Festival Committee, who did not repeat the experience. I met Stan Barstow there, saw his play at the Festival, a new adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People in a modern British context, got on well with him and eventually published his play. Ian Wallace, always a major draw at Ledlanet, was part of the Festival and in an article he wrote later said that I, looking like a plain-clothes policeman, had claimed to have invented the permissive society. I’m sure I didn’t, although it was a subject much discussed just then. My principal recollection is of Erich Fried walking out in a huff after I had to stop him hogging a debate, shouting: “John Calder is a fascist”.

  I have mentioned Ian Wallace several times. A veteran opera singer, specializing in comic bass-baritone roles, he had often entertained me in Mozart, Rossini and the like. I had seen him in Weber’s Peter Schmoll at Hintlesham, a small festival in Suffolk run by Tony Stokes, who had constructed a theatre in his large garden. I had enormously enjoyed Ian’s high jinks in Glyndebourne’s famous production of Rossini’s Le Comte Ory in 1954, where he had played a crusader masquerading as a nun. In fact, it was so memorable that when I published the Richard Coe translation of Stendhal’s Life of Rossini, I used a colour photograph of the production by Armstrong Jones (later Lord Snowdon) on the dust jacket with Ian in it. Wallace sang less opera now, but his one-man show, with David Money at the piano, consisting of operatic extracts, songs of every kind, including Scottish ones, and a lively patter peppered with jokes, could be immensely popular with family audiences. He appeared regularly in a BBC musical quiz programme, and this helped to make him a celebrity. Although Ian Wallace’s political views were far to the right of mine, we became good friends. He first appeared at Ledlanet in 1966, and thereafter annually. We had his ideal audience there, as is attested by his recording, which in spite of a few technical deficiencies is very pleasurable to listen to. On one occasion, when I was giving a party at the Caledonian club in London for an author and he was present (it might well have been for his own book), he was persuaded to sing a song a cappella. Within seconds, members in other rooms, hearing his well-known voice, had asked if they could come in, and he was prevailed on to sing two or three more. Although most popular in Scotland, he lived in Surrey. I commissioned his autobiography, which it took him a considerable time to write, but when published, it went through three editions. He made personal appearances in Scottish department stores with book departments, doing particularly well at Jenner’s in Edinburgh.

  One day, Ian Wallace rang to ask my advice. He had been offered the post of Principal of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in Glasgow. I felt he should take it. He was a natural teacher and could influence the growth of the performing arts in Scotland, an inspiration to young people entering the profession. In the end, however, he decided not to accept. His main reasons were that he wanted to remain an active entertainer, and that a move back to Scotland would disrupt his old mother, now living near him in the south. His autobiography Promise Me You’ll Sing Mud! amusingly and very readably recounts his career, the title taken from the Flanders and Swan ‘Hippopotamus Song’ that he often gave as an encore. Ill health shortened his career after 1975, but several honours came his way, including the Rectorship of St Andrews University.

  I have mentioned Hintlesham in connection with Ian Wallace. I paid several visits to this delightful summer festival, given by the highly eccentric Tony Stokes. He apparently had strange tastes, such as having his wife, estranged when I knew him, pull him around his garden in a dog cart, encouraged by a whip, both naked. This had earned him space in the Sunday tabloid press some years earlier. He invited me onto his executive committee, largely influenced by a musical agent, who was always urging him to mount works for Ana Raquel Satre, usually called Mimi, a personable and attractive mezzo-soprano, who in my opinion ruined her chances of getting singing engagements by always trying to be present at meetings of committees, where her presence stopped her being discussed. Her agent wanted Hintlesham to mount Norma for her. The committee meetings were a waste of time for me, but I always enjoyed lavish hospitality at Hintlesham, which was near Ipswich.

  One day I took Sheila Colvin there – it was probably Peter Schmoll in July 1968 – and she was in considerable pain having eaten her first ever oysters the night before, and having had a bad one, but she too fel
l under the spell of a stage where you saw the moon rising through the open aperture at the back. The partly open-air theatre at Santa Fé has the same effect.

  * * *

  I must now go back to 1966. I was skiing in Val d’Isère with Jacques Chaix and the group of my French friends, and I received a parcel from London, sent to me by Marion Boyars. It was an American novel entitled Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr, and she had read it. She thought it risky, given the considerable amount of sexual content, but there was a good sales potential. I read it and liked it instantly, seeing not so much the sexual detail, which was natural for a section of American society that knew nothing but lust for money and instant gratification, but regarding it as a strong social document about what a community becomes when it is totally devoid of any contact with real education and the culture that breeds civilized values. Most of the action is centred around violence, bullying and sex. The two most potent chapters picture a trade-union leader who, during his brief period of power in a strike, discovers his homosexual nature, and a narcissistic young prostitute who ends up literally on a rubbish heap after a gang rape that she brings on herself. It all rang true, and it reminded me of Zola’s novels of Parisian low life.

  I telephoned Marion and told her that of course we should take on Last Exit, and we published it a few months later. It received good reviews, but not extraordinary ones, and the sales were not particularly better than most of our other current fiction. Paperback publishers were not besieging us yet for the rights for a mass-market edition.

  In those days we were friendly with many MPs, and one of them rang me to say that a Conservative member had asked the Attorney General for a certain book to be prosecuted for obscenity. The Tory MP was passing on the title to the Director of Public Prosecutions in the hope that he would bring a case against the publisher. The book, I was told, was Last Exit to Brooklyn, and the Tory MP was Sir Charles Taylor. I then placed an advertisement in the Sunday Times, quoting the best of our reviews, but also quoting Sir Charles in an ironic way. He complained to the Speaker of the House that we had breached parliamentary privilege, but the House laughed at his protests and the Speaker refused to accept his arguments. Several Labour MPs wrote to the DPP, pointing out that the book had been well reviewed and should certainly not be prosecuted. He eventually announced that he had taken advice and would carry the matter no further.

  The next thing we heard was that a private prosecution was to be brought against us by another Tory MP, Sir Cyril Black, Member for Wimbledon, a property developer and Baptist lay preacher. He was also Treasurer of the Billy Graham Campaign and, as we were later to learn, Billy Graham, at a recent fund-raising breakfast in London, had urged that action should be taken “against the flood of pornographic books being published in Britain”. Largely because of Taylor’s initiative, he had pounced on our book, which I certainly did not consider in any way pornographic. In fact, it exposed exactly the kind of social conditions created by slum landlords like Sir Cyril.

  The complaint was duly made, and we received a visit from the Vice Squad, led by a certain Detective Inspector Alton, who examined our offices and looked at books in languages he could not read, including Russian. He was obviously surprised at the conventional appearance of our rooms, which in spite of being in Soho, obviously dealt in serious books. He formally bought a copy of Last Exit (we always kept a small stock of our current books in the office for sale) and left. Some years later, I was to hear that Alton, who obviously took bribes from pornographic bookshops, had been convicted of corruption and imprisoned. He never dropped any hints of expected bribes to us.

  The case was heard at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court by a stipendiary magistrate called Leo Gradwell. What was new in this case was that the prosecution brought witnesses, which had not happened before where a serious book was concerned, even in the Lady Chatterley case. It had always been assumed by the prosecution that the obscenity of a book was so obvious that judge or jury would automatically convict just on the presence of certain words or of any sexual description. But the Obscene Publications Act, which Roy Jenkins had managed to get passed in 1959, had for the first time allowed defence witnesses to give evidence of a book’s literary merit, so that now a judgement had to be a balancing act between the amount of obscenity (which for a century had been defined as the tendency of a book to deprave or corrupt) and the literary merit. The DPP had been astounded by the witnesses produced by Penguin Books in 1961, not only writers and academics, but even a bishop, and they had convinced the jury. Until then it had been assumed that the old Anglo-Saxon word “fuck”, which almost everyone knew and which certainly had much vernacular use, was sufficient to get a conviction. Until after the Penguin trial, it could not be found in any English dictionary.

  The witnesses against us were the expected clutch of school teachers who saw adults as needing censorship as much as their pupils – obsessive characters such as H. Montgomery Hyde, a barrister who had written much about the Oscar Wilde trial and who carried around with him photographs that were too obscene to be viewed by anyone other than himself, some right-wing journalists and one MP, none other than the slippery, publicity-seeking Robert Maxwell, who in addition to his other activities was now the Labour Member for Buckinghamshire. We knew he had not read the book, because we had heard from an employee of his Pergamon Press, to whom it had been given to read, so that he could know what it was about. The man had told Maxwell he was wrong to appear in court against it, but Maxwell believed that a puritanical stance would make him more popular with his constituents. He was not a very convincing witness, but Leo Gradwell was the type of magistrate who would be against us on principle.

  Our solicitor was again Bruce Douglas-Mann, but this time we had a barrister, Peter Benenson, who had written the preface to Gangrene for us. He floundered a little, got out of his depth and did not really cross-examine well, nor did he explain to the magistrate what the Obscene Publications Act really said. Our own witnesses included Kenneth Allsop, the popular journalist, Reginald Davis-Poynter, another publisher, Elkan Allan, a broadcaster, Dr Alex Comfort, later author of The Joy of Sex, Anthony Burgess, the novelist, and one or two others.

  We put up a reasonable case, but we did not have a good barrister. Against us was Michael Havers. He was very smooth and urbane, unlike Peter Benenson, whose heart was certainly in the right place, but who was too excitable and could not match the concentration of his opponent. We lost, of course. Afterwards Havers took me aside. He said he admired our list and liked literature, and was sorry to be prosecuting us. He had a special reason for taking on this case, but he did not divulge what it was. We learnt it later. When Sir Cyril Black resigned as an MP in 1970, it was Michael Havers who took over his safe Conservative seat, and thereafter occupied the top legal posts in later Conservative governments, mainly under Margaret Thatcher.

  At that point I had a word with Douglas-Mann. What had happened in one London area, the jurisdiction of a particular magistrate’s court, did not apply elsewhere, but Marlborough Street Court was in central London, with its many bookshops, and the situation was very different from our Sheffield experience with Cain’s Book. Bruce then wrote a letter to the DPP. It was not the letter I wanted him to write, and I did not see it in advance. Instead of a conciliatory and soft-spoken letter, he sent a provocative challenge to prosecute us in a national case, saying that the book would be vigorously defended. He was soon to be a member of parliament as well as a solicitor, and he probably saw his practice becoming a famous one in the light of a show trial that would enable him to bathe in the limelight, and would in any case be profitable to him. But Marion and I were horrified and decided we had to drop him. After much thought, we went to Goodman Derrick, of which the leading partner was Lord Goodman, personal solicitor to Harold Wilson, who also represented the Labour Party. He had become Chairman of the Arts Council in 1965 and was an effective hands-on chairman who expanded its activities and its
scope. He seemed the right man for us. He also represented Reginald Davis-Poynter, a good friend of mine, and it may well have been he who suggested Goodman. I would have much to do with him in the future.

  At the first meeting, Goodman went over the logistics of the case. The barrister he wanted was a right-wing Tory peer, Lord Hailsham (Quintin Hogg), who instinctively would be on the other side of the fence. When I pointed that out, Lord Goodman pooh-poohed me. “Barristers don’t have to believe in the case they’re pleading,” he said. “They are too professional for that.” I disagreed. Gerald Gardiner, who had won the Lady Chatterley case, believed absolutely in the cause he was defending; he would never have adopted the tactics he did if he had felt otherwise, I argued. Goodman took umbrage. “Well, if you won’t take my advice, I shall pass you on to my partner,” he said, and so our solicitor became Mr John Montgomerie, a big bluff man, not so different from Goodman, but more willing to listen. The barrister he picked, although a man of great intelligence, was also wrong for us, and for largely the same reason that I did not want Hailsham. His instincts were not particularly libertarian, and as a practising Catholic he believed in authority, that is in giving the jury the authoritative opinions of others, rather than in trying to make them understand the arguments for themselves. But Patrick Neill, who was selected by Monty (as he was usually called), was known for his skill in dealing with complicated financial cases, and he did his best, although I know he was never comfortable with the case.