by John Calder
In London I made the mistake of taking him to the Caledonian Club one summer evening, after meeting him for a drink at his flat off Piccadilly. First he kept lighting up cigarettes, which was not allowed in the dining room, and after he had put each one out at the request of the steward he would without thinking immediately light another. He became more and more agitated. As he had no sense of decorum, his voice got louder and louder, and the consternation of the other diners in a very conventional club was evident. Having had our first course, I cancelled the rest and took him out to a quiet restaurant nearby, where it didn’t matter. If we had stayed longer, my resignation would have been demanded. Not too long after that, Burroughs left for New York, where Ginsberg managed to get him a lecturing job.
* * *
The Arts Council’s Working Party on Obscenity drew up two reports, one for reform and one for abolition. At our final joint session, having read the two reports, the whole working party decided to ditch the first and unanimously adopt the second. This had been drafted by Benn Levy, the playwright. I offered to publish the report, but Lord Goodman wanted André Deutsch to be the publisher, and as usual he got his way: it duly appeared as The Obscenity Laws.26 I am sure André made no money out of it, unless the Arts Council gave him a subsidy – which is possible, as the copyright is in their name. But Goodman was not pleased by the report itself, or by its conclusions. “You’re crying for the moon,” he said to us at our last meeting. “No parliament will ever pass a bill such as the suggested one you have drawn up in this report.” He had wanted us to recommend the setting up of a panel of educated and liberal people to decide what could be published and what not, and he ignored the report’s carefully argued case that showed why this would not work. Although published, the report was quietly dropped.
The published report itself had been heavily censored: it only paraphrases what the witnesses who gave evidence actually said, being careful to avoid anything that the press might jump on, such as Shepherd’s early homosexuality. The working party that is listed has only nineteen names on it, whereas we started with many more, and it only gives the names of those associated with an organization, while there were many individuals on the committee, some of them well known. John Montgomerie, who had fought our case, and was Goodman’s partner, chaired the working party and he was perfectly convinced by the final conclusions, but this was not made clear. I am listed as representing the DLAS. Strangely, Benn Levy is not mentioned as the author of the report itself, and his name is not in the book at all. It was the Last Exit case and my call on Arnold Goodman and Antony Grey that led to the whole thing, but in practice censorship did decline from that point. John Mortimer, who had been on the working party, fought some more obscenity prosecutions, for which the DLAS found much of the cash. His successes, and those of other barristers, eventually discouraged the DPP from bringing more actions.
I did have another prosecution involving Better Books in Edinburgh. There was a complaint to the police about Richard Handyside’s publication of The Little Red School Book, which was made to look like the The Little Red Book of the writings of Mao: it was an anarchic book for schoolchildren, telling them how to be rebellious to get a better, more interesting and less authoritarian education. I was not particularly favourable towards it, but Better Books stocked it. Once again, I approached Laurence Dowdell in Glasgow, and once again he picked Nicholas Fairbairn to defend it in court. He accepted, and we won.
It was shortly afterwards that a group of us spent Hogmanay at the George Hotel’s dining room in Edinburgh, and Nicky Fairbairn was in the party. At one point, probably about midnight, he produced two miniature silver pistols out of his waistcoat pocket and fired them in the air. I think they were only loaded with blanks, but possibly not. The noise was as loud as full-sized pistols, and everyone was startled. “I just like shocking people,” said Nicky. At about two in the morning I had to negotiate the long road to Ledlanet through snow and thick fog, and made it. The breathalyzer had not yet arrived on the scene, but it was a foolishness that I would not repeat in later years.
I also became more involved in the literary life of Scotland and found several Scottish authors. The novelists I took on included Elspeth Davie, George Friel, Stuart MacGregor, and John Elliott. The first was a Glasgow schoolteacher, whose novels were cautionary tales about local people, their obsessions and the tragedies to which these usually lead. Elspeth Davie was a beautiful writer, with a fine style, but locked in a kind of ivory tower from which she contemplated people and the things that make them tick with a gentle humour that showed her very accurate powers of observation. She was married to George Davie, who taught Philosophy at the University, and they both appeared on the surface to be shy and retiring, but this was, I think, a good example of still waters going deep.
Once I had Elspeth and George Friel to dinner together at the Doric Tavern, and I was amazed at the ferocity she was capable of when the two writers disagreed about something. She asked me once, “How can I find out what people do in offices?” I am not sure if she ever did, but I suggested that she should try to work in one for a while.
I had a large second collection of her stories, which I had contracted to publish, but short stories always being slow sellers, I had applied to the Scottish Arts Council for a grant to reduce both the price of a large book – it would have been her fourth book with us – and our risk. It was only later that I found out why there was such a long delay to the application, which caused her to take the book away and sell it to Hamish Hamilton. The chairman of the literature panel of the Scottish Arts Council was Alexander Scott, a poet and an academic, who had earlier compiled with Norman MacCaig a large anthology of Contemporary Scottish Verse for my Scottish Library series. Scott was annoyed with us for having picked Tom Scott instead of himself to edit and see through the press the Collected Poems of Sydney Goodsir Smith, which happened in 1975, and he wanted to stop us getting any more grants out of revenge. When Hamish Hamilton applied for a much larger subsidy than we had requested, they received it straight away.
I have not yet talked about Sydney Goodsir Smith. He had taken part in the Scottish day of my first Edinburgh Conference in 1962, and had on that occasion imbibed too much of the whisky that we had put in carafes on the table. I had called on him frequently after that at his hospitable flat in Drummond Place, where only too often I had myself imbibed rather too much, on one occasion sleeping through most of Don Giovanni after spending an afternoon with him. He was great company, with a wonderful sense of humour. He was also a major Scottish poet, and together with Hugh MacDiarmid one of the two major figures on the Edinburgh literary scene. Sydney was Art Critic for the Scotsman, had written plays and much else beside poetry, and many volumes of his verse were in editions published by a variety of different Scottish publishers. For some time I thought about trying to collect his many poems, some of them out of print, into a single volume, and finally through Robin Richardson made an offer, which was accepted. Robin somehow managed to get the agreement of many small Scottish imprints to let me publish a Collected Poems, and this project went ahead, although it did not appear until 1975, after his premature death at only fifty-nine.
He was in every way a good and hospitable friend, loving everything old and comfortable. “Old clothes, old furniture, old wine and old barleycorn”, as he put it. He would come to Ledlanet to review our art exhibitions, stay for performances and get back to Edinburgh driven by a friend or possibly by Hazel, his wife, who taught art at a school. I loved his poems, especially a new collection that was published in 1969 by Southside, an Edinburgh firm, as Fifteen Poems and a Play. The play was Full Circle, which became one of the new operas that Scottish Opera were commissioning from Scottish composers just then. It had music by Robin Orr, chairman at the time of Scottish Opera, having earlier been Professor of Music at Cambridge of many of those who now worked for this burgeoning company, including Peter Hemmings, the general manager. But the poems tha
t appealed to me most in that volume were a short one, ‘Said Eraclitus’, and a long one, to which I shall come. ‘Said Eraclitus’ is about a problem that has largely ruled my life: the fatal attraction of a new lady that you meet when you are still fully involved with another – perhaps more than one other. Heraclitus said that everything is in flux, and as Smith so well describes it, it can apply to love as well, which I have experienced to my cost. Take the second stanza:
Aathin passes, aathing dees,
aathing an end maun hae:
This is the greit in the hairt o’ things,
The rerum lacrimæ.
The poem is bittersweet, pagan, regretful that things are the way they are. Other mortals suffer the pangs of desire and the pain of guilt, but poets understand very well that the tragedy we bring on ourselves is the very stuff of art, and the function of poetry is to express it. Erich Fried was surprised that his very English first wife could not understand his need for other women: “A poet must always be in love,” he told her, “and always with someone new.” Smith says:
But as we twyne, juist as we twyne
Anither tryst draws near.
And so I have found it. Reader, you may by now intensely dislike the author of this book, but I hope it is an honest one. At any rate Sydney tells me that I am not alone in my long inability to resist temptation. His Scottish dialect, although difficult for some readers, adds, in my view, to the poignancy of the poem.
The long poem in the same volume is called ‘The Twa Brigs’ and it was commissioned by the BBC for the opening of the Forth Road Bridge, and first read on the radio in 1964. It is a philosophical poem about the meaning of bridges, which join things, and in lyrical terms it is about the love of the Old Rail Bridge (“Auld Stumpie”) for the new young and “bonny, like a sprite” Road Bridge. It is to me the perfect poem: it has so much humour, and is colloquial in manner, bringing in history, associative thought and tenderness. I would reread it often at Ledlanet and, finally, I decided to find a composer to set it to music. I do not know or remember who suggested William Wordsworth, an English composer based in Scotland, but it was a good suggestion, and when I brought Bill Wordsworth together with Sydney, they got on like a house on fire. The Scottish Arts Council was persuaded to back the project, and I programmed the work for performance in June 1973.
Sydney belonged to that group of Scottish literati who were strong nationalists, but with none of the hardness and nastiness I had come to associate with the SNP during my first election campaign. They were a colourful lot, and I particularly knew MacDiarmid, Smith, Douglas Young and some of the younger figures like Alan Bold and Stuart Conn. Douglas Young, an immensely tall, bearded figure who looked like an Old Testament prophet, was Professor of Greek at St Andrews University. He had stood several times for parliament for the SNP and liked to tell jokes in Greek at election meetings. He was a good poet and also did some remarkable translations from Greek drama into Scots dialect.
The grand old man was of course Hugh MacDiarmid (Chris Grieve) who had translated from many languages into English or Scots, but not without (as I later discovered) the help of earlier translations which he used as cribs. But his own output of poetry was enormous, and his most famous poem, The Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, a long rumination by a thinking man who has fallen into a ditch, is a major classic now. I knew and liked Chris Grieve. In the Kinross by-election in 1963, where I had fielded Rushton, I had myself voted for Chris, who was running as a Communist at the time. After his death in 1978, I wrote a letter of sympathy to his widow, in which I mentioned that I was one of the forty-three persons who had voted for Chris in Kinross. The editor of a women’s magazine (I think it was Ann Barr) wrote to various widows that year offering to print the most interesting letters of sympathy that they had received, and mine was one of those selected. When I went to New York some time later, I was stopped at Immigration by the official looking at my passport and checking it with his files. “You’re a Communist, Mr Calder,” he said to me.
“No, I’m not,” I said, “and I never have been.”
“But you’ve voted Communist.”
“Absolutely not.” Then I remembered the by-election and my letter to Valda, Chris’s widow, and laughed. I explained the situation to the Immigration officer, who was plainly not amused and had never heard of MacDiarmid. But he did let me in, warning me I might be watched.
* * *
After Sam Beckett won the Nobel Prize in 1969, he was pursued by the press. He had difficulty in protecting his privacy and came under much greater pressure from his publishers to let them bring out those earlier works which he had been happy to see out of print. Eventually, he became tired of saying no and agreed in most cases to allow his publishers to do what they wished. I had long wanted to reissue his early book of linked short stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, first published in 1934 by Chatto and Windus, who now claimed that they had the right to reprint. Sam had allowed me to bring out a hundred copies of a mimeographed typescript edition, only to be sold to scholars, in 1966, and another hundred in 1967. His weariness from the pressure – not much of it from me because, if Sam said no I did not ask again, but from his other publishers, and Barnet Rosset in particular – led to his agreeing to a commercial reprint of More Pricks. He wrote me that he had said yes to Barney, so I could proceed too. As Barney and I were not collaborating at this time, I put the book into production on my own. Before it was ready, I went one day to Paris, and had a date to meet Sam for lunch at the Closerie des Lilas. When I arrived, straight from Orly, I could see that there was filming going on outside the restaurant, and going in I saw Sam sitting with Peter O’Toole, who was taking a break from his film. O’Toole already knew him and he had for some time been trying to persuade him to let him appear in a filmed version of Godot. On my arrival, O’Toole returned to the cameras and Sam turned to me with a worried look. “I’d better get it out of the way now,” he said, and opening his briefcase he pulled out the proofs of More Pricks Than Kicks that Barney had sent him. “I can’t let this old shit come out again. I’m sorry, but I’ve already written to Barney, and I’m afraid I have to stop you, too.” I took it with the best grace I could, and we talked of other things. It was probably the threat of a reissue by Chatto, to whom he had earlier written that he did not want it reprinted unless it was published by me, that led to his changing his mind a couple of weeks later and telling me to go ahead after all. It came out in 1970, and has had numerous reprints ever since. What had led to this hiccup was Barney’s misjudgement in sending him proofs. There was no need for the author to check a text again that was already fully proofread.
Sam also translated his post-war novella First Love, which had been suppressed until now, and that came out with us the same year. The only logical reason for the suppression, as with many of his other writings, was that the character of his protagonist was too close to the person that he really was. When writing, he could not help putting himself into situations that paralleled his experience, which retrospectively he found embarrassing.
At this time Beckett was being very productive, but moving towards ever greater economy of language. Many of the prose texts he produced were almost of novel length, but by cutting and pruning he reduced them to a short novella. The same was true of his plays, ever shorter and more concentrated, although Happy Days still makes a whole evening.
I may have been the first to read the typescript of this, because Beckett showed it to me when staying with Bettina and myself at Wimpole Street, and I cannot pretend that I really understood it at the time. But with Beckett instant appreciation of a text is rare: it yields up its secrets with rereading, and one nearly always finds new felicities each time one returns to it. Happy Days was done by Madeleine Renaud in Paris, directed by Jean-Louis Barrault, her husband, who also played Willie. In London it was Brenda Bruce, a very conventional actress. Sam came for the rehearsals and went away unhappy, having with difficu
lty made the director and Brenda Bruce do things his way. Once he was gone, the production slipped into a less stylized format.
Sam followed First Love with an English translation of his post-war novel, Mercier and Camier; after that he wrote short works only. One text, only a few pages long, Imagination Dead Imagine, we published on its own with a photograph of a Giacometti skull on the cover,27 and amazingly it sold well and had to be reprinted. The National Theatre approached me to perform it at their new Cottesloe performance space, and three actors delivered the text wearing black costumes on an empty stage with no decor. Beckett was now a well-known name, and everyone wanted to perform him.
He stayed with me again during the run of Play at the National. He was very struck during rehearsals by Billie Whitelaw, who had been cast in it with Rosemary Harris and Robert Stephens, and he remained devoted to her for the rest of his life, writing many parts for her in his later stage works. I sat through one rehearsal of Not I when Billie was overtired because she had been up all night with her sick son. Sam was making every effort to curb his natural impatience, because usually by the time he attended rehearsals all the actors were word-perfect, and Billie was certainly not. Several “Fucks” proceeded from her mouth as she struggled to master her lines, her situation made more difficult by the fact that her face was hidden and only her mouth showed.
A string of new Beckett publications, all short and very condensed, came out then and during the Seventies, Faber doing the plays and Calder and Boyars – and later John Calder (Publishers) Ltd – the prose and poetry. The latter went through many editions, and we continually added new work, as well as Sam’s untranslated poems. He was now selling much better than Miller and Burroughs, from whom we were getting more benefit from mass-market paperback royalties than from our own editions.