Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  “No, I did,” I said. “Don’t you think it’s better now?”

  “I didn’t write it. Take it out.” He was very possessive of his own words. I was allowed to improve by editing and suggestion, but not by rewriting.

  We would work until about six, and then either break up or sometimes have dinner alone or with friends. One night, we dined at Liz Wyler’s flat with the Webbs, and it was a good evening, because Bill Webb liked Aidan’s work, and Balcony of Europe, a year later, was the runner-up for the Guardian Fiction Prize, which Bill awarded. Those prize-givings, which were at lunchtime in the National Liberal Club, were splendid affairs where all of literary London was present. The money, usually £300, was not very much, but the prestige was great and it was just as important as the Booker Prize in those days, and usually given to a better novel.

  During the late Sixties and early Seventies, the drama list had expanded as much as the fiction list. We took on a theatre magazine called Gambit that Robert Rietti, the actor, had started some time previously, largely as a vehicle to publish promising new plays at a time when few publishers were interested in them. We expanded it to carry articles about the theatre, reviewed productions and books on drama, and had regular columns and diaries, including one on opera, which I wrote myself. Gradually, every issue began to have a theme.

  We continued publishing plays, and the magazine grew in size as the subscriptions and sales rose. We had previously offered to take over Applause, which Charles Marowitz edited, and the upside – because such magazines always lose money – would have been the chance to acquire a group of writers which the periodical had promoted, headed by Harold Pinter. He was not yet celebrated enough to have attracted any of the few commercial play publishers, but was beginning to be known, and I was interested. But the wily Marowitz was playing all sides, and he used my interest to make a deal with Methuen instead. Gambit appeared with regularity at first and with the later issues less so until 1986.

  But at the same time the drama list was growing. We had a part-time drama editor, and manuscripts flooded in. I went to see new plays with a double purpose now, not just for pleasure, but with possible publication in mind. We missed Tom Stoppard because in the year when his first play was premiered at the Edinburgh fringe I sent Arthur Boyars to see Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and he came back with no opinion at all, certainly no enthusiasm. My own oversight was Peter Nichols. I went to the Glasgow Citizens Theatre to see A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and although I liked it I did not see how a play with such a subject, about an autistic child, could ever appeal to a large audience. The play transferred to London and was a success.

  We were however taking on many new playwrights, and in some cases also representing them as theatrical agents. One such was Vivienne Welburn, who caught the temper of the time with plays about youth, their frustrations, aspirations and lives in a poetic language that was close to reality. We were able to get several of her plays performed in London and provincial theatres. The most successful was Johnny, So Long, which we sold to the Royal Court, where it had the usual three-week run and good reviews. Johnny first appeared in Gambit and then in a volume on its own in our Playscript series, and was followed by a few other plays, of which Clearway was the most successful. As plays were bought by public libraries in towns with repertory theatres, some were found there by actors, producers and theatre managers and came to be performed.

  A new school of playwrights, influenced by the social and political drama of Ibsen and by Brecht, was developing just then. Just ahead of what I will call the “Seventies playwrights” came Edward Bond, in whom the influence of Brecht, Ibsen and to a lesser extent absurdism could be easily detected. I came to know Edward well, largely through speaking frequently on the same platform, usually about censorship, often together with April Fox, a committed civil libertarian and feminist. Bond’s play Saved, in which a baby is stoned to death by young hoodlums for no reason other than bravado, caused a scandal which made Methuen, his publishers, uncomfortable. When he followed it with Early Morning, which was basically an irreverent dream about Queen Victoria, Methuen refused to publish it. I did instead, and as a result Peggy Ramsay, the most powerful play agent in London, was very angry. I added another good name to my list, but had reluctantly to agree a couple of years later to let Methuen republish the piece in their first volume of Collected Plays, which was the same as losing it again. Bond would have continued with us, but our dozy drama editor, who proof-corrected it, changed John Brown to John Bull. Edward was so furious that he returned to Methuen with his next play.

  It may have been a little earlier than this that I went to see Jean Genet’s The Balcony at the Arts Theatre Club, where it was given as part of the Royal Shakespeare’s London season, because the play could not get a licence from the Lord Chamberlain for the Aldwych.25 Before the opening, a matinée, I had lunch with Harold Hobson and the author. It was an amusing lunch, because Genet, whom I had already met a few times in Paris, was always impish and loved to shock. “Are you a homosexual, Mr Hobson?” he asked the eminent, elderly and diminutive critic. Pédéraste was the word he used in French.

  “Non, pas encore,” responded Hobson, who could be just as impish. They went on teasing each other, then Genet turned to me and asked if I was seriously interested in publishing his play. His regular publisher was Faber, who had an option but had offered no contract as yet. He said that if I committed myself then, at table and sight-unseen, I could have the play for publication, option or no option. I was very tempted, but I had my principles. “No, Monsieur Genet,” I said. “I would love to be your publisher, but I always read or see what I am going to publish first. As soon as the curtain comes down, I will make you an offer.” I was perhaps foolish, but Genet said “then or never”, so Faber published it.

  Gambit had a number of editors, the contents of each issue being planned by Robert Rietti, Marion and I without any disagreement that I can remember. The most eminent of the editors on the masthead was Irving Wardle, who consulted with us, but on the whole we gave him his head. Whenever we did not have an editor, I took on an issue myself, so that most issues between Numbers 28 and 35 were mine. I did one on Beckett that included the first publication of Breath, Beckett’s thirty-second play, one of two special Beckett issues that appeared. Particularly successful were No. 29 (New British Playwrights), with a taped discussion of a dozen younger playwrights, and two issues (Nos. 31 and 36) on Political Theatre. For the first of these I again taped a round table discussion in my flat (I was then at Dalmeny House) with a large number of playwrights including Jeff Nuttall, Ken Campbell, Max Stafford-Clark, Roger Howard, Caryl Churchill and Anton Gill of the Arts Council, which worked very well and still reads well years later. Most of the leading British playwrights and some foreign ones like Simone Benmussa and the actor/director Jean-Louis Barrault also had special issues devoted to their work. The “new playwrights” discussion with Howard Barker, Caryl Churchill, Steve Gooch, David Halliwell, David Colgar, Roger Howard, Mustapha Matura, Alan Plater, Barry Reckord, Micheline Wandor, Tim Whitehead and Snoo Wilson was also successful.

  * * *

  I was having trouble with Better Books in London. Mindful of the need to find other premises, I rented what had been a shirt shop opposite Foyle’s, so that whatever happened we would still have a presence on Charing Cross Road. I moved the poetry section onto the ground floor and the important film section into the basement, giving each more space than previously. I also felt the need to expand the Better Books concept to other cities, because there was a lamentable shortage of good intellectual bookshops in Britain, and the London shop was now producing more than ten per cent of my London sales. As my presence in Scotland was now so major, I decided to start a Better Books in Scotland, and to put into practice – disastrously, as it turned out – what I had learnt from Professor Saitzev in Zurich about “holding companies”. I approached those Scottish friends who were affluent enough
and interested enough in the arts to raise funds for an Edinburgh Better Books, the idea being that fifty-one per cent would be owned by the London company and forty-nine per cent would come from individuals, mostly friends, who I was sure would all be good customers as well. Those who came forward to help included Jim Fraser, Tom Craig, Patrick Prenter, Daphne Kennedy-Fraser – all important supporters of Ledlanet. I found ideal premises near the university at 11 Forrest Row, a short street that ran from the Chaplaincy Centre of the university down to McEwan Hall. It was an L-shaped space on a single floor, and I had little difficulty in persuading other publishers to give longer than normal credit on the initial order, as the shop would be stocking many titles that could not be found elsewhere in Edinburgh. Jim Haynes’s The Paperback was long gone. Charles Street had already been demolished before he left the town to go to London, and the bookshop had gone with it. Nothing new had replaced it. Better Books Edinburgh opened with a party and instantly began to do good business. I shall return to it later.

  There were many problems at the London Better Books, and the biggest was finding and keeping a manager who was both competent and honest. When I went there sometimes at lunchtime and took over the till for a while, I would count the money that was in it, and it would nearly always be more than the amount shown on the roll, which had been taken that morning. If I went back later in the day, I would find that the surplus was even greater. This meant that whoever was at the till had deliberately rung up less than he had taken in order to pocket the surplus at the end of the day. This enabled me to catch some culprits red-handed, but not all, because usually more than one person would ring up the money taken during the course of the day. I should have shut down and started with a whole new staff, but either from a feeling of fairness or simply from procrastination, I only fired those I caught. In retrospect, I am sure that they were all in it – nor were they particularly vigilant in watching out for customer theft, which went on all the time.

  One of the big names in publishing just then was Robert Lusty, chairman of Hutchinson. He was a large man who liked the sound of his own voice, pontificating in the trade press and the newspapers, and I always felt that he was particularly critical of me, intervening for instance in the “UGH” correspondence in a negative and quite irrelevant way. I had noticed, during 1970, that he had published Hitler’s Mein Kampf, because it was there in Better Books. As it was a title of some historical interest, I had not felt that it should not be stocked. But then something else happened. I was invited to debate with him on the BBC Overseas Service on the subject of what a publisher’s responsibility was or should be. I do not remember much about the discussion, except that he inferred I would publish anything to make money (Henry Miller, William Burroughs and other authors of controversial subject matter), whereas he took his responsibility seriously and would do no such thing. Returning from Bush House to Better Books, the first thing that caught my eye was a pile of books next to the till, just arrived from Hutchinson. It was the memoirs, or rather the proud justification by Lieutenant Calley of his Vietnam experiences, in particular of his massacres of all the inhabitants of My Lai, which had occurred not long before. So much for Robert Lusty, who would not publish a nasty book to make money! I told them to take it off the counter, put it somewhere inconspicuous, and try to persuade the Hutchinson rep to take the copies back the next time he called.

  The publishing list kept expanding, and while Marion bought a number of books from American publishers, I concentrated more on developing series that supported the way I viewed literature: as a continuing chain, where each generation tried to build on or revolt against what had gone before, being at the same time interested in the ideas that came from contemporaries in other fields – painting, music, the performing arts and new philosophical thinking. I started a series that I called French Surrealism, for which I took on the novels of Raymond Roussel, a surrealist father figure, whose method was very close to André Breton’s. I collaborated with Viking in New York to publish the Collected French Writings of Jean Arp, contracted Magritte’s Collected Writings, made a selection of Éluard’s poems, bought Penrose’s translations of Picasso’s plays and added Artaud, Vitrac and others to the list, seeing these authors as the immediate ancestors of the nouveau roman, which I had been publishing since the late Fifties.

  J.M. Ritchie, who was teaching German studies in Hull, approached me to translate German Expressionist writers, and that became another series of almost limitless scope. The literary works of that school were many, and hardly any translations had ever been attempted. I published two volumes of the plays of Georg Kaiser, who had been banned by Hitler and died in Zurich at the time I was a student there. Why had I not found out who was currently writing there and met them, instead of discovering the classics? Ritchie put together two anthologies, Seven Expressionist Plays and a collection of expressionist war plays entitled Vision and Aftermath. At the Frankfurt Fair I spotted a book called Expressionismus, a detailed history of the whole movement, with fascinating articles by people who had created it and a Who’s Who of the creators in all the arts disciplines. This became The Era of German Expressionism. I had already published books on expressionist music, and I found more. The Zurich publisher Atlantis Verlag not only became my source for many such musical books, but they also took some of mine. Dr Hürlimann, the director, was connected with the Zurich Opera as well as the publishing firm, and we met, discussed music and exchanged contracts. When he died, his successor, Dr Bodmer, continued the relationship.

  Our Signature series of smaller books, featuring the author’s signature on the front cover in colour on a white background, was intended to include already distinguished writers together with others whose reputation was only locally established, an “elite” collection planned in the days when that word was not yet a football of denigration used by the popular press to sneer at the whole concept of quality. We started with Robert Nye’s Darker Ends. Nye was an Edinburgh friend of Bill Watson’s – a critic, novelist and playwright – and in this collection his poems were natural, lyrical, wise and sensitive, with sometimes the feel of a haiku about them. We were also to publish two works of fiction about this time by Nye, who we thought would stay with us, but when he had discovered a best-selling formula, he moved to a bigger publisher. We followed this volume of poetry with experimental work by new (although not necessarily in their own country) work by Kenneth Gangemi (American), Nicholas Rawson (English and recommended to us by Beckett), Reinhard Lettau (German), Mark Insingel (Flemish), Ted Joans (Black American jazz poet), Peter Bichsel (Swiss), Yuli Daniel (Israeli), Robert Creeley (American), Christian Enzensberger (German), Lyman Andrews (American), Chris Searle (English) and Eugenio Montale (Italian, later to win the Nobel Prize). Through this collection of lesser-known names – at least to the British reading public – we threaded shorter works by Beckett, Sartre, Higgins, Trocchi (his poems) and Artaud, whose Theatre and Its Double would turn out to be one of our most important best-sellers in future years: it started life as Number Four in the series. Number 20 was an anthology of eight writers that included Beckett, Ionesco and Ann Quin, together with shorter work by other quality writers. Many who appeared in the Signature series also appeared in the main list with full-length works. What I was doing, of course, although it did not occur to me at the time, was producing books for the future rare-book and first-edition market: many of those volumes are now in treasured collections. I forget what we printed on average, probably only a thousand or so. The prices were modest, ten shillings (50 pence) for the first, and I do not think any went over two pounds.

  In 1970 we brought out our own mass-market edition of Last Exit to Brooklyn, but as a co-edition, with Corgi, who distributed it worldwide. I wrote a foreword explaining the history of the book and the trial, and Anthony Burgess wrote an introduction in which he said: “Last Exit presents social horrors out of reformist zeal, not out of a desire to titillate or corrupt. Those who found the book capable of deba
uching its readers were evidently most debauchable and regrettably cut off from a desire to expand their charitable propensities.”

  I thought of David Shepherd and Sir Basil Blackwell, on whom the book had had such a “debauchable” effect, and also of Sir Cyril Black, bringer of the prosecution, and his bald round head and hairless pink face, a lay preacher and slum property landlord who in Burgess’s words was certainly one of those “cut off from a desire to expand their charitable propensities”.

  Marion had now bought a large flat in Chelsea and wanted to do most of the entertaining there. Burroughs was a frequent visitor at her parties and continued writing slightly more conventional novels, but now he was interested in them being filmed; Antony Balch, who had made a short, rather playful film in Marion’s previous Paddington flat called Towers Open Fire, now wanted to film The Naked Lunch. Contracts and options were discussed and perhaps signed, but nothing came of it. I was however very aware that many people were trying to cash in on Burroughs’s current celebrity for their own benefit, and that I, not belonging to either his particular world of drug addition or of homosexuality, was often seen as a hindrance, a non-hip “square”. Burroughs was in most ways unpractical and naive, willing to take part in new and often quite crazy plans to exploit his talents, and I could see that he would soon be robbed as Henry Miller had been by hangers-on, so I tried to keep in touch to protect him. Burroughs got involved in a scheme to set up an archive of his work in Lichtenstein, a con trick that soon collapsed. For a while, he was interested in the ideas of the Scientologists. Having gone through their induction in London, he then went to the advanced course in Edinburgh, which must have cost him a considerable amount of money, staying at the same hotel in Newington that I had put him in once before. I saw him there, and afterwards on his return to London, but he was very vague about what had happened to him in Edinburgh.