Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  We looked around Prague, saw the sights, ate badly but enjoyed the local beer, and I decided to leave a day earlier than planned because I had noticed that we might with luck catch Die Götterdämmerung in Bayreuth. On the last day, I took Jamie to the airport late in the morning to catch her flight to Nice to meet her mother, and went back into the town to a meeting of the Czech Union of Writers, where we discussed the position of current Czech literature. There were no more samizdat or unpublished manuscripts of quality waiting in drawers for foreign publishers to come and pick up, I was told. I was far too late for that. Other publishers, especially German, Italian and American, had preceded me and taken away everything of interest that was possibly publishable abroad. But the writers I spoke to were in no way complacent about the political situation. The Russian army might return at any time.

  I left the meeting late in the afternoon, picked up the others and left Prague. The warden at the students’ hostel said he could not refund the previous night’s charges we had paid for and could not understand why we were leaving early. The next morning he must have thought that we had some secret information.

  We drove past the airport, where nothing seemed to be happening at about seven o’clock, stopped to have dinner at Karlovy Vary, got lost coming out of town trying to find the so-called Autobahn and crossed the frontier into Germany after midnight. We had a delay at the customs shed, because we were not allowed to take out our remaining kroner: we could spend it on a Czech doll or a bottle of Russian champagne. We opted for the champagne, but were then a few pennies short, and had to change more money. This annoyed everyone in the car, but it proved that the next day’s bulletins were untrue in saying that the borders had been taken and sealed before eleven o’clock.

  We stopped at the first German village, found a hotel and went to sleep. At seven I was awakened by Jill Mortimer banging on the door. “Wake up. The Russians have invaded Prague,” she shouted.

  “Go back to sleep and have another dream,” I called out. But it was true. Charles had heard it on his radio. The Russians had landed at the airport just after we had passed it. Jill wanted to be Joan of Arc and rush back across the border to save the Czechs, and she never forgave me for leaving early and missing the excitement. We also, three of us, got into Götterdämmerung without difficulty that night because of the international panic. “How can you be so heartless as go to an opera on a day like this?” said Jill.

  Back in London, we republished Last Exit to Brooklyn. It sold well, but not that well. As the jury had discovered, it was not an easy book for a British reader. Bettina found Tanja Howarth’s boarding card and of course believed that she had been with me at Cap Ferrat. My affair continued with her in spite of that.

  It was also the year of student revolutions and unrest, starting with the spring events in Paris at the Nanterre Campus, which had made Daniel Cohn-Bendit (“Danny Le Rouge”) a student hero everywhere. Although I never had anything to do with the so-called student movement, and had trouble in seeing what British students, conducting sit-ins and occupations in imitation, were complaining about, I received several invitations to speak at universities, purely because of my reputation as a radical publisher.

  At the Frankfurt Book Fair the students were everywhere. My friend Giangiacomo Feltrinelli had died in mysterious circumstances, but that did not stop his wife Inge running around the fair telling me and others to close our stands, saying that the police were beating up students in another hall. It may only have been a rumour, but I refused, saying that I was there to do my publishing business, and that if it were true that students were being beaten up, I was prepared to go to protest at the police station at seven o’clock, provided that at least five other publishers came with me. There were no takers: at that time of day publishers preferred to be at parties or have baths or make love or take naps before another strenuous night of dining and drinking with other publishers. Ledig-Rowohlt always gave a big party for his authors, and for publishers and agents with whom he did business, and the students demanded to be admitted, as he was a radical publisher. They ruined his party that year, drinking up his beer and wine, eating his food, and making it impossible to move around to talk. The following year he gave two parties, one with the address announced, which was flooded by students, and another, where the address was kept secret until the last moment, for those he wanted to invite.

  Among the parties that I gave at my Wimpole Street flat, two stick out in my mind. One of them was given shortly after our victory in the Appeal Court for Last Exit to Brooklyn and must have taken place some time during the autumn of 1968. We invited all our witnesses and well-wishers, many members of the DLAS, authors and friends. We also invited the whole team who had lost our case at the Old Bailey. “What can one do with a man like you?” said Lord Lloyd of Hampstead. “We tell him he hasn’t a ghostly of appealing a case: he ignores us and wins. Congratulations anyway.” Michael Frayn was one of the guests, and he lit up a reefer. At this point there was much debate about soft drugs, and some hundreds, although not me, had signed a big whole-page advertisement in The Times, calling for a change in the laws. I asked Michael to please refrain. There could well be spies from the DPP’s office present, resentful of their defeat and looking for another opportunity to get me. “I didn’t know you were like that,” said Michael. “I don’t think I want to know you.” He ground out his pot-filled cigarette on the carpet and left. I have not spoken to him since.

  But the other party, which somehow I confuse a little with the one just described, was on a summer night, which started badly when David Mercer, ever more belligerent just then because he was drinking heavily and alcohol made him violent, picked a quarrel with Mark Patterson, a literary agent who had married David’s first wife, and insulted them both so badly that they left. Then he picked a quarrel with George Lamming, a very gentle Caribbean novelist, and said, “If you think I’m not going to hit you because you’re black, you’re wrong,” and then knocked him down. He then reduced his current girlfriend Kika Markham, a rising actress and a very sweet-natured girl, to tears with abuse until she too left. It was a long party that went on all night. Bettina had gone to bed early, but she called me up to the top floor to stop a disturbance. Elaine Dundy, Ken Tynan’s first wife, an American novelist then having some success, had become rather drunk and had gone up to lie down on a couch on the landing. John Stevenson, a member of the original Merlin group in Paris, who was also a Girodias author and had done some translations for me, had been watching her and had seen her go upstairs. He picked a quarrel with his own wife, which made her leave, then went up to try and make love to Elaine.

  With dawn coming up, and two or three people left who preferred to sleep on the floor or in a chair than go home, being probably incapable of doing so anyway, and the room a shamble of empty bottles and broken glasses, I turned to David Mercer, who had now sobered up and was crying. I took him downstairs and drove him home to Hampstead in my car. There he sat in the passenger seat outside his house for half an hour, crying, reproaching himself and asking me why he was such a monster. He could not control his emotions; he lived in perpetual guilt at having abandoned every principle on which his dedicated socialist father had brought him up, and he was desperately unhappy. He had many women, but could not create a stable relationship and drove them all away sooner or later. I had recently met again his earlier wife Dilys, my companion of the Weathersfield sit-down. She was a lovely person, who figured in several of his plays, but he had written her out of the script that became his most successful one, especially when filmed: Morgan, A Suitable Case for Treatment. She was then a social worker in Nottingham, and I had met her when speaking at a Liberal Summer School where I debated against Mary Whitehouse and my friend John Trevelyan. She would not say a word against David, but I know that he had hurt her dreadfully. He could not live with his pain, but he had a deep self-honesty, which led him to portray himself frequently in his plays as the monster he w
as forcing himself to become. Later he was to start an affair in France with Roland Dubillard’s lady, who directed a film of his there, as well as one made by Alain Resnais. Then he went to Israel on a visit. I was driving to Edinburgh just before the 1980 festival when I heard on the car radio that he was dead of a heart attack. A strange and rather pitiable man. I think that even those he treated abominably still loved him in away.

  Il re pastore crowned the autumn season at Ledlanet. But many things kept me busy. Much of my time, and Marion’s as well, was taken up with the DLAS, which was well represented on the Arts Council’s Obscenity Committee. We met under the chairmanship of Will Hamling, who became a good friend in every way, espousing every Civil Rights cause. His motto was “sans peur et sans reproche”, and he was transparently committed to doing what was right without the slightest thought of whether it was good or bad for his political career. He had won his seat for Labour from the Tories, and it was his personality, humour and directness that enabled him to keep it. He was respected and liked by many who would otherwise never have voted for his party.

  Our Festival Hall booking grew nearer: the programme was printed, but the cost of the large glossy volume was outrageously high, and Anthony Blond had not been nearly as active in chasing the advertising as the articles. The evening was called “An Evening of Depravity and Corruption”. Bill Gaskell had first agreed to produce it, but then changed his mind, and I persuaded George Mulley to take it on at short notice. The compère had an almost identical name, George Melly, the jolly and outgoing jazz singer and trumpeter. I had the rights to the first performance of Beckett’s Come and Go, originally intended for the Soho Centre, my aborted project, and I put it in as a world premiere, which would certainly bring much of the audience. Jenny Paull organized a classical orchestra; others invited a rock group, and individual actors and performers volunteered their talents.

  Then came the first setback. The London Underground, on whose sites we had booked over a hundred spaces for the Alan Aldridge poster, refused to accept it. The stylized naked Eve, and probably the title we had given to the evening, was apparently too strong for them. I spent the night before the event fly-posting copies of it around the West End of London. Tanja volunteered to come with me, and the two of us went around in my car looking for likely spots and then attaching the poster to the wall or railings or trees. We had to wait until around midnight to start, when there were not too many people about. It was probably about 3.30 a.m. or later when a man complained and began following us about. I forget whether it was our activity or the contents of the poster to which he was objecting, probably the latter. Then he disappeared. A few minutes later a police van came and arrested us: the man had alerted the police. We were taken to a police station, charged and released. But it had one happy result. The Evening Standard picked up the police report, showed a picture of the poster and gave me a generous paragraph in the Londoner’s Diary column entitled “Mr Calder Takes a Civil Liberty”, which probably gave better publicity to the concert than the poster would have done.

  As it was, we packed the Royal Festival Hall. George Melly was a good compère, and everything went well until the rock group started and went on far too long, playing at a volume that drove many of our supporters with tender ears out of the hall. They played so long that not everyone was able to perform. The programme that Anthony Blond had produced unfortunately incurred a big loss, but all in all we cleared about £15,000, to be shared between the two organisations, some of which went towards our lawyer’s bill and some towards the general funds of the DLAS, which was also defending other prosecutions. John Neville’s magazine Oz and other publications all reaped some of the benefit. Our stage-manager friend, whom I mentioned earlier in connection with Peter Brook, was one of our volunteer helpers for the evening. There was a little party on stage afterwards. Bettina had left early, and the stage manager looked at Tanja and myself and speculated out loud where I was going that night. I went back with Tanja, the first time I had spent the night at her Battersea Overstrand Mansions flat, where she let rooms to another man, to an African Zulu girl and to Ann Beckett, who was to remain a friend of us both. Once there, I was far too tired to go out again. The concert took place on the ninth of December, and from then on I was constantly seeing more of Tanja.

  I did not however neglect my family, and at Christmas that year went with Bettina and Anastasia to Val d’Isère, my first visit there at that time of year. I started my younger daughter on skis and stayed at the Hotel where I normally went, The Solaise. So ended an eventful year. Jamie was still with her mother.

  In the meantime, the list had grown and as I became ever more involved with the expansion of Ledlanet Nights, I left much of the business management of Calder and Boyars to Marion. She made all of the American trips now, and many American fiction authors were added to the list.

  We had a series called Open Forum for political non-fiction, and Marion took more interest in this as time went by, commissioning titles from the large network of people we knew in politics, the arts and the academic world. We started a second series for more experimental non-fiction entitled Ideas in Progress, and Marion found her ideal author in an Austrian former priest called Ivan Illich, whose special gift was to deflate the traditional wisdom of almost every subject: education, medicine, transport, social life and politics. He had special appeal to the generation that had grown up in the Sixties, especially students who now wanted to pick their teachers, choose the subjects they wanted to study without rules or compulsion. In many ways the mould of society was breaking too fast, and revolt became an object in itself, needing no cause. There was a growing resentment among the middle classes and those of a more conservative outlook of mind, of which I often felt that I alone in the circles in which I moved was aware, perhaps because I had grown up in and understood that milieu. I wrote an article in 1969 for some journal (I seemed to write endless articles on a wide variety of subjects in those days), pointing out that the easy times that youth was having, and the freedom of lifestyles enjoyed by so many, depended on the general high level of affluence then ruling, and that neither the affluence nor the freedoms it made possible could last much longer; I was right, as the future was to prove, but I was much derided for my ideas at the time. People living in a golden age never see it as such, but quickly assume that every improvement in their life is now the norm and will continue for ever. My basic pessimism, which never stopped me doing what I felt I should do, whatever the consequences, came more to the fore as the Sixties ended. Perhaps I smelled Thatcherism on the horizon, as Kafka early in the century had smelled Nazism.

  I had just about abandoned trying to make Ledlanet work as a commercially run estate, but found one way of bringing in regular and substantial income. It was by having shooting parties, five a year. These were organized by Jacques Chaix, who having been several times to Ledlanet and knowing of my problems suggested that he could find French parties to come, about eight or nine individuals at a time, usually with wives or girlfriends to accompany them, paying a substantial amount for a long weekend to shoot grouse in August or September and pheasant between then and January. Not only did this pay for the upkeep of the house and estate, but it also made a contribution towards the loss of running a festival. By the end of the decade I was coming close to balancing both sets of books, and by 1973 we were in total profit, because our membership of over three thousand and annual increases in Arts Council and other subsidies finally covered the artistic loss. By then we had year-round catering staff and could make Ledlanet available for private functions and weddings in the quieter periods. Only in the early years did we have to use outside caterers. In the end, with Attewell running the house and staff during performance seasons and Jill Johnson, an Australian, running the kitchen for all the different activities, we found we could do it cheaper and better ourselves. Jill was resourceful and found occasions when she could do outside catering to the profit of Ledlanet.

  I
n late February I went skiing again, this time taking Tanja, but instead of Val d’Isère, where I would normally meet Jacques and other French friends, I went to St Anton. I would have found it embarrassing to return after two months where the hotel had seen me as a family man. Before going there, I stopped in Zurich. I had been invited by the Duttweiler Institute to take part in a conference on “the future of the novel” and had persuaded the director who had invited me to also issue an invitation to Alan Burns, who I knew could talk well and enjoyed this sort of occasion. I also hoped, since a number of German publishers would be present, that one of them would be interested in taking him on as an author for his own country.

  For two days an interested group of writers, publishers and critics exchanged their views and made their political stances clear: a left-right divide soon became evident, and I found myself duelling much of the time with Fred Praeger from New York, who I knew was financed by the CIA, and Luc Bondy from the Tribune de Genève and various US publishing executives, while Alan Sillitoe, Adrian Mitchell, Alan Burns and others argued on my side. The conference was recorded and no doubt appeared somewhere in printed form, but to all appearances it was mounted for the benefit of a roomful of young German and Swiss university students and editors of publishing companies, all very earnest and making copious notes.