Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Jim Haynes, whom I had known so well in Edinburgh, was there. He had been forced to leave that city when the Traverse Committee lost confidence in his ability to run the theatre on a budget or for that matter to co-operate with anyone other than with Jack Moore, who I considered to have ruined my play The Voice. Jack had become his guru, and at the Traverse general meeting of members at which Jim finally was deposed, with Nicholas Fairbairn becoming the new chairman, Jim had said that he could not work without him. His subsequent history I shall relate later. He was now living in Amsterdam and editing a seriously pornographic sex-paper called Suck. Presumably that was why the relatively mischievous conference director, a young Englishman, had invited him. Both Adrian Mitchell and Klaus Wagenbach, a publishing friend from Berlin, made determined passes at Tanja, who managed to be very provocative and decolleté in spite of the cold Zurich winter weather. We left for St Anton by train and I started to look at the first issue of Suck, which Jim had given me, until the horrified eyes of the other passengers made me desist. Aside from a few short stories and gossip, it consisted mainly of orgy photographs in which Jim Haynes was prominently recognizable among the tangle of bodies.

  That first issue of Suck succeeded to a certain extent in its erotic intention to excite the reader’s lust, but the subsequent issues – and there were not many – were increasingly the same, but duller, depending on rather bad photos of the editors and their friends disporting themselves self-consciously in various sexual positions. Germaine Greer soon resigned from Suck and claimed that she had no idea she was being photographed. Jim Haynes also started a Wet Dream Festival in Amsterdam, which was more of the same and consisted mainly of showing pornographic films on day trips on a hired boat. His own account of these activities can be found in his rather unconventional volume of autobiography, Thanks for Coming.23

  It was a short holiday in St Anton, a very dull resort compared to my usual Val d’Isère. Tanja received many business calls at the hotel, so both our names were known to the desk and appeared on the final hotel bill. It was the first time that I had gone skiing with someone who was quite a good skier, and both sides of our relationship, bed and sport, went well. But she herself was nervous of that relationship becoming known to Rainer Heumann, an important literary agent in Zurich, who had also been an occasional lover and whose business provided a large part of her income. Heumann had a conventional marriage, but Tanja was something of an obsession with him: certainly he was in love with her. He was the principal agent of many best-selling authors, such as John le Carré, and she was the British sub-agent for many of these; she also scouted for German and Scandinavian publishers, and many of these contacts had also come through Rainer Heumann. Whenever the telephone rang in our bedroom, she would start suddenly: it had to be for her, because I had told no one where I was.

  On the way back to London, I looked through all my pockets to find the hotel bill, so that I could hide or destroy it, but it was not in my pocket. I arrived back at Wimpole Street, left my suitcase and went straight to the office. Two hours later the lawyer who had handled my divorce a decade earlier rang me. I was not to return home. The locks had been changed, and I was locked out. Bettina had opened my suitcase and found my hotel bill on top of my skiing clothes, with Tanja Howarth’s name on it.

  It had been an open marriage, not based on passion or deep love, and neither of us had been faithful, or even intended to. In the climate of the Sixties and the ethics of our particular peer group, fidelity was not important. But in its way the marriage had worked well enough. Now it was over. I had been through much stress and many problems in ending my first marriage. All that was nothing compared with what was to come.

  Chapter 6

  Politics

  It was now March 1969. I spent a week staying in the Caledonian Club and then took a small room with a bath in North Kensington, a once middle-class area that had a little shabby elegance left, but had gone to seed and offered short-term accommodation to migrants and the displaced, like myself, at low weekly rents. I still had a discreet relationship with the novelist I have called Vera, but I always had to be out before six in the morning, which was a bore. When I told her my situation, she laughed and asked if I intended to commute daily from Ledlanet. Tanja had gone abroad again, and when she returned there was always some problem at her place, where two or three other people were boarding, and where she received frequent nocturnal calls from John Wolff, a previous lover who was usually drunk by the evening but did not want to give her up. John was also a literary agent, and he had an attractive wife, Charlotte, whom I could not help fancying myself. There was one night when the four of us had dinner, and we somehow ended up in my North Kensington room that had one double bed, where we all slept chastely, although John tried to get Tanja alone into the bathroom during the night and I woke up to find myself snuggled pleasantly against Charlotte. We were all partly undressed, but not totally. A funny night, made worse by the necessity of having to find a shilling for the gas meter every two hours. The situation seemed designed for us to sleep two and two with new partners, but the logistics of the situation made this impossible.

  John became ever more alcoholic and then moved to Europe, while Charlotte, who I think was going through a period of acute depression, killed herself shortly afterwards. At about the same time, I abandoned my uncomfortable and inconvenient room and moved in with Tanja at Overstrand Mansions, which faced the south side of Battersea Park. Her boarders gradually moved out, Ann Beckett being the last.

  Tanja had another suitor: she went out with him occasionally and she did spend a night or two at his place. He was André Deutsch, who also had a long-term relationship with a lady called Gwen who nobody I knew had ever met. I think that André was unaware of my presence on the scene. Rainer Heumann found out about me with time, but was not overtly hostile. When the three of us went out to dinner, I was a little uneasy about the many compliments he always tossed my way – not about anything serious, but about my clever driving to pass another car or my taste in wine. He brought Tanja an air gun, a kind of pistol with which you could kill pigeons or small animals. At one point I threw it out of the window and, after she had rescued it, removed it to my office, where it sat in a drawer.

  Tanja’s home was also her office. She would sit all day at her desk, telephoning publishers, and part of the ritual of her long telephone calls, which mingled trade gossip with flirtation and business, was having a cigarette in her hand. When I finally persuaded her to give up smoking, the hardest part of doing so was her habit of lighting up and exhaling smoke while talking and joking, which gave her a confidence she associated with the ritual. I was quite often asked by her to look over manuscripts British publishers had sent her for others in Europe she scouted for and helped in various ways, but of course I was usually at my own office during the day. On weekends I was repeating the old routine of taking my daughter, Anastasia this time, to the zoo or elsewhere, and she came to Ledlanet with me when possible. Jamie was with her mother in Monte Carlo. Victor Churchill was now her second husband. I only saw Churchill once or twice more, the last time when he came to Brewer Street to my offices to try to blackmail me in some way. With the help of Michael Hayes, who had succeeded George Allum as our sales manager after his death, I threw him down the stairs. Victor Churchill was a petty crook – a spiv in the parlance of those days – who together with Christya became involved in some scheme to import refined oil, declaring it as crude. They were caught and prosecuted and he, having gone to prison whereas Christya got off scot-free, came out, was arrested again on another charge and, while awaiting trial, killed himself in an Edinburgh hotel room. After that, Christya went to America, calling herself Lady Spencer-Churchill. The complications that followed are part of her life that the world will never know and are not in this book.

  Tanja would sometimes come to Ledlanet, but she was not really comfortable there. Eddie Strachan was the surviving gamekeeper, and when his black
Labrador had puppies, I decided to adopt one of them. I did this about the time of Tanja’s visit – largely, I think, because she said she would like to have a dog. We then spent a weekend with Tom Craig, who had an engineering business in Edinburgh, at an island he owned with his family near Glencoe, called Shuna. Liking the name and having agreed that weekend to adopt the puppy, we named her Shuna. When the dog was about two months old, I brought her to London, and Battersea became her home for a while. The park was handy for early-morning and weekend walks, and at night I took her round the back gardens. I came to know Battersea Park well, and quite liked an area where I could park my car in front of the door, most days driving into Soho to my office. One day, Tanja took Shuna to the hairdresser in central London, and she slipped out, being found two hours later, frightened and cowed, but not run over. She was a country dog who loved going back to Scotland and drove there with me frequently. She seemed to sense when Ledlanet was getting nearer, and when I changed gear for the steep climb up the drive, she whined with delight, her tail thumping against the car doors. Sometimes I left her with Eddie Strachan, who lived in the lodge at the bottom of the drive.

  I suggested going to Aix-en-Provence in the summer, but Tanja, with little French, was nervous of a town where I would be involved with French intellectuals and listening to music. She rented instead a flat overlooking the sea in a villa at Cap-d’Ail and went ahead with her son Peter. I was to follow when I was free, bringing Becky (Ann Beckett) with me by car. I went there straight from my last Harrogate Conference, about which I wrote in the last chapter. What I did not relate there was that when I arrived in Harrogate a day before the others in my Sovereign (Daimler) car, which I had just bought second-hand in London, I had driven it down the steps at the station – steps I did not see. I had assumed they were the station entrance, and I damaged the undercarriage, which was only repaired on the day I had to leave. It gave trouble ever after. I had spent the previous evening with Jim Fraser, who harangued me not to employ Jenny. This had led to my drinking too much, and I had a ferocious hangover as I drove south. I had to pick up Becky in London, and then drive on to Paris, arriving late that night. Fortunately, she did much of the driving. The next day was the long drive to Cap-d’Ail, where I spent about a week, Tanja staying on for the rest of the month. We spent several evenings with Jacques Chaix, whose villa was only a short distance away. When everyone went swimming in the nude one night, Tanja and Becky declined, but not out of prudery: the returning party found the two of them sitting naked in comfortable chairs on the terrace of the villa.

  The villa that Tanja had rented belonged to a Russian lady, the widow of a Dutch gin distiller. Mrs Bootz had two floors for herself and let out the two top ones. The other one, that year, was let to a one-legged British General, always challenging me to swim farther out to sea than I wanted. I was a reasonable, but not particularly strong swimmer, and I quickly ran out of breath.

  In London my relations with Bettina became ever more poisonous. We had several meetings, but each time she exploded into a tantrum. Meeting her in restaurants was always embarrassing, because she raised her voice, wanting everyone to hear her, and on the second such occasion I stood up and walked out. She went around London usually in the company of three other ladies, not knowing that two of them had at one time had a fling with me. Others with whom she was constantly seen were Liz Kustow, recently estranged wife of Michael, one of Peter Brook’s assistants, and Yvonne Ball.

  Yvonne Ball had been Bettina’s understudy in Happy End, and I had come to know her husband Jimmy, as a private detective, through that contact. Jimmy, who became a friend, quite brilliantly traced the whereabouts of a rogue printer who brought out pirate editions of best-selling books, and in my case of Tropic of Cancer. Jimmy had good police contacts, and in Leeds they were able to tip him off that he might find it worth his while to visit a certain building on the moors, mentioning that there was a full moon that night. In the yard Jimmy found proofs and pages that had been thrown away, that enabled us to shut the printer down. Jimmy at this time was starting to study to become a lawyer, but he never took the time to become fully qualified. He had a flamboyant and romantic personality, and took up activities that fitted his self-image. He only studied enough law to enable him to work from a solicitor’s office, but took a more glamorous course in criminology, which hardly advanced his career. He eventually took over the criminal-law department of a large firm that represented trade unions and defended their members who were prosecuted. He was good at this and was also a brilliant negotiator. I saw much of Jimmy over the next few years, and he became my unconventional lawyer, often working as an individual and a friend, rather than as a member of a firm. He also represented me in some of my later court confrontations with Bettina. But in 1969 he and his wife were friends to us both and were trying to bridge the growing gulf between us.

  I saw my daughter Anastasia frequently, and she often came to Ledlanet, as did Tanja on occasion, but the latter was never comfortable there, especially when performances were taking place. She could not understand why I would give up my own room to stars like Ian Wallace or to a conductor.

  In Frankfurt, where she had to go for several days before the Book Fair every year to confer with her publishers, Tanja had a room permanently booked in a small hotel, but that year she spent many nights with me in mine at the Frankfurter Hof. I became aware that in Frankfurt, where sex is often as much on the minds of the participants as books, Tanja was a prime target, being always flamboyantly dressed to look as sexy as possible. She was invited to dinner by everyone, and that year Tom Rosenthal, then sales director of Thames & Hudson, was making a big play for her. She finally had to tell him about me, but that did not put him off at all. That year a German television crew decided to make her their focus, and they followed her around the fair as she called on different publishers’ stands doing her business as a literary agent and scout. When we drove away together, she was frustrated at not having seen the programme in which she was featured, tired by the fair and no doubt of me as well, because just then I stood in the way of her normal social life and took her too often to performances in the theatre or at the opera that interested me, but not her.

  That autumn season at Ledlanet was a brilliant one. When preparing it and putting the programme together, I had asked Leonard Friedman to create a new Scottish-based orchestra for us, which I called the Scottish Baroque Ensemble, because that was the season when we performed a baroque opera, Handel’s Alcina. The name stuck, but eventually became the Scottish Ensemble. Not surprisingly, because Leonard loved women, there were many female members of the Ensemble, which varied in size from sixteen to about twenty-four. That was also the year when Jim Colclough became a permanent member of the team, replacing Rita Guenigault, who had been with us for a long time and had also stage-managed Lorca and Happy End. Rita had now moved to London, and Jim Colclough involved himself in every side of Ledlanet’s artistic life.

  From 1969 the Scottish Baroque Ensemble played four concerts a year at Ledlanet, and Leonard found them outside engagements as well. It became a well-drilled group that was consistently well reviewed. When Lord Goodman paid us a surprise visit one afternoon – I had written to him asking him to use his influence to get the Scottish Arts Council to be more generous – he found Richard Demarco putting up an exhibition of paintings and the SBE rehearsing for a concert that night. He talked to Leonard, listened for half an hour, went away delighted and, sure enough, our grant was considerably increased. The programmes were, however, eccentric, sometimes quite long and unexpected, because Leonard Friedman had a habit of introducing extra works not in the printed programme at the last minute, often with extra soloists who were not budgeted for, leading to difficult negotiations after the event. Leonard always claimed to share Beethoven’s birthday, and it was only after his death, when writing his obituary, that I discovered it was in fact two days away. But he would use this as an argument, once I had agreed to h
old a Beethoven birthday concert every year on 16th December, to try my patience to its limit.

  * * *

  Two things happened late in 1969 that changed my life. One was my entry into bookselling. Better Books, once a wonderful outlet for my books, had become under Collins just another general bookshop, trying primarily to sell the Collins list, but not successfully. It had always been known as an avant-garde shop, and its clientele were not right for a middle-brow publisher aiming at the more general reader. Suddenly they offered the shop to me, and after some negotiation I agreed to buy it, the sale being concluded in the first week of January 1970. Within a few days, I received a letter from the General London Council, telling me that the property was being requisitioned for demolition and redevelopment. Collins must have had some foreknowledge, although they denied it. This meant that for most of the year I was looking for new premises on Charing Cross Road. Also, I discovered that Collins had let the considerable overseas library business, largely supplying Canadian public and university libraries, slump; in many cases they had simply written to their customers to say that they were discontinuing library supply. The following winter I made a trip across Canada, stopping in Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia and elsewhere to try to recover what Collins had given away, but that essential bread-and-butter business had already been snapped up by other eager booksellers.

  In the meantime, I tried to restore Better Books to what it had been, a haven where the serious book lover could find titles rarely stocked elsewhere. In the basement, run by a specialist, was the largest collection of books on films and everything to do with the cinema to be found in Britain. Alexander Walker, critic for the Evening Standard, was in almost daily to see what was new, as were London’s other film buffs. Lee Harwood, a poet, was in charge of poetry, and this was a real mistake. He refused to order and stock Mary Wilson’s poems. They might not have been very good, but she was the Prime Minister’s wife, and her poems were being asked for twenty times a day. Nor would he stock John Betjeman, because he considered him a poor poet. Those easy sales of popular poetry in fashion would have helped pay for the hundreds of volumes that we seldom sold, including his own. People simply went to Foyle’s across the street, and the next time did not come to us first when looking for a particular title. A series of managers were not satisfactory, allowing stealing on a scale that became ever bigger. This was in the wake of the student agitation of the late Sixties, when one of their slogans was that books should be free – and as they weren’t, they just stole them when they could. Unfortunately, Better Books had exactly the books that students wanted just then, so we were the major losers. During the first half of 1970, Better Books took up far too much of my time – but I shall come back to that.