Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Publishing had changed considerably during the previous decade and would soon change again. Most novels had only a single hardback edition, which went increasingly to public libraries and which received reviews in the press with fairly small and diminishing bookshop sales; then a paperback contract was negotiated with a mass-market imprint, which then achieved greater sales, so that trade publishers like myself of what would later be called “consumer books” depended more and more, for the bulk of their revenue, on paperback royalties and not from their own sales. Increasingly, authors became less happy about this, and literary agents representing them began to demand the lion’s share of money from the paperback for the author, whereas until then it had been a fifty-fifty split. To keep their authors, publishers began to accept forty-five per cent and then forty and sometimes less. And the next step was that paperback companies, being now in a position to approach authors and agents directly where a big sale was anticipated, would buy all the rights, sometimes bringing out their own hardcover or issuing a book directly in paperback without one. Our period of discovering and publishing best-selling authors was now over, not least because censorship had almost disappeared. Our most profitable days were over, and soon we would have to rely almost entirely on the sales we could get from books that did not interest the mass market.

  Publishing was getting more difficult, and I also had Better Books on my hands, where the sales were good but wiped out by both customer and staff theft, which kept growing. During 1970, the theft came to about £40,000, and I could see major trouble ahead as I looked for new shareholders. I was also still the prospective candidate for my constituency, aware that an election was possible at any time. As a financial crisis was likely to come to a head at exactly the time I might have to go to the hustings, I resigned some time in 1972, in order not to embarrass my mentors and the party. A Glasgow schoolteacher was found to replace me. He was pleasant, but did not have what I would have considered the right sort of personality for this particular constituency. At the next election, which was not until February 1974, he did however get an increased vote. But before my resignation I had done a considerable amount of what was called “community politics”, which meant looking into local parochial issues, ferreting out the various discontents that people gossiped about in their villages and associating myself with a campaign to do something about these issues.

  I cannot say that my various crises blew over, but they became less pressing. Being by now a political animal who was attending both the national conferences at English seaside resorts and the Scottish ones in different northern venues, I had an itch to get another constituency, and I was given Dunfermline. Before that I offered myself to Hove, which I knew well, having canvassed there in a by-election for Des Wilson. I was on the short list of three, but did not get the nomination, and thereafter decided to stick to Scotland. For a year I repeated in Dumfermline what I had done earlier nearer home – found out the local issues, knocked on doors – and my biggest success was in getting a housing group going in an urban area that had the most crime and worst vandalism. A rather eccentric local male nurse became involved, and was soon chairman of the group that put together a watch committee, created playgrounds to keep children out of mischief and organized sports and social events. I felt I was getting somewhere. On one occasion, the candidates for all parties (with no general election imminent) were challenged to swim two lengths of the local Olympic pool. The Labour man begged off; I agreed although I had a bad cold, which the swim might have cured, because I felt better afterwards; but the Tory won, not surprisingly, as he once had been a navy diver. Had I stayed I would have eventually found myself running against Jim Fraser, who was later to become the Tory candidate, but the constituency was normally Labour, and it remained so.

  But then my financial situation took a turn for the worse, the Better Books problem now being augmented by divorce proceedings with Bettina. I had made every effort to be helpful to her, even voluntarily paying the premium on her new duplex at Glengower Mansions in South Kensington, but she constantly brought me to court to demand more maintenance, and involved me in heavy legal expenditure, which made it necessary to resign once again as a candidate. Had I not, I would have fought the General Election of February 1974. I helped the new candidate for Kinross instead.

  Throughout this period, I was keeping in touch with authors, reading manuscripts, signing contracts, correcting proofs, editing, answering letters and attending to as much as possible of the routine work of the publishing company. Marion did most of the commercial work and looked after her own authors, having taken over as well many who used to be mine, because they stayed with her when in London – writers like Robert Creeley, whose early short stories and first novel The Island I had published before Marion came into the firm.

  Michael Hayes was now our sales director. When his predecessor, George Allum, suddenly died, I had thought of Michael, because he had previously been with Peter Owen, whom he did not personally like, and had then gone to Trade Counter, our distributor. I had known Michael for some years. I had met him at Booksellers’ Conventions and other trade events, and had once been on a paid visit to Leipzig with him and Peter Owen. It was a four-day visit to the Leipzig Book Fair, a fair that only East German publishers, party officials and foreigners were allowed to attend: local people, and especially students, desperate to get in, were excluded. It was hoped by those who invited us that we would buy rights to East German books and do some printing there. When Michael joined us, he became an invaluable member of the team and took most of the sales headaches on himself. Unfortunately, the day came when Michael felt that by working for a literary publishing company rather than a larger commercial one he had spoilt his long-term prospects, and he left to work for a firm of mass-market paperback distributors. I had liked him and was sorry that our relationship ended on a sour note.

  * * *

  One of my Scottish authors was the folk singer Matt McGinn. He wrote his own songs, delivered them in a raucous, thick Clydeside accent, unnaccompanied, and he sometimes acted as well. He starred at the Glasgow Citizen’s small theatre space, The Close, in a show called Red Clydeside, which gave the history of the city’s revolutionary past, and he was in the second production of Edinburgh Festival Productions, a very Scottish Macbeth. This was performed at the Festival on the fringe the year after Happy End. The production was packaged by Robin Richardson, managed by his son, and had Leonard Maguire as a splendid Macbeth with Matt McGinn alternating with another actor as the Porter. Although he was a left-wing socialist, Matt came to campaign for me in the various election campaigns in which I was involved after that first baptism of fire in 1970, and he became a good friend in many ways. He wrote an autobiographical novel about his childhood experience, about when, during the war, he had been sent to a Catholic Reform school for stealing a bag of sweets from a stationer. The novel, full of gallows humour, rings true with its sadistic monks, harsh treatment of the small boys incarcerated and pen portraits of Glasgow characters. I published it and sold serial rights to a new evening newspaper that Robert Maxwell had just launched in Scotland, which gave it local publicity. Many Glasgow bookshops did not want to stock the book, because they were politically biased against the author, but customers demanded it, and so they had to. Called Fry the Little Fishes, it did quite well, and Matt started on another book, but never finished it. This was because he split up with his wife, got totally drunk in a room on his own on Hogmanay, knocked over an oil lamp and burned himself to death. I hope he was too drunk to feel it. I went to his funeral one cold snowy day in early January 1977. When the driver of the taxi who had picked me up at the station heard who was being cremated, he parked his taxi and joined the queue with me to get in. Ahead of me on the snowy path was Billy Connolly, another popular Glasgow folk singer and character who had performed at Ledlanet, and we shook our heads together over Matt’s tragic ending. There was no service, but a gathering that was more like a politic
al rally, with Norman Buchan, an MP who was a friend and had supported me in my censorship battles, giving a fiery speech about Matt’s career as a radical and a creator of hundreds of songs. At the end we all sang the ‘Internationale’ and went out, feeling warmer, into the falling snow.

  One day in the early 1970s I was in Better Books in London when my daughter Jamie walked in. “Hello, Daddy,” she said. “I’ve left my mother and here I am. I’ve come back to live with you.” It was unexpected and a shock, but fortunately I had by then left the studio and was now in a flat in Dalmeny House in South Kensington, opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum. I rearranged my life, and Jamie, now a grown-up young lady, moved into my spare room.

  It was quite a nice flat, with two bedrooms, a big sitting room and a study that I hardly ever used, preferring a long oak table in the hall that also had several hundred of my books on the shelves, so that it became more of a place to put up the odd guest. One person who stayed there was Nikolai Bokov.

  April FitzLyon had told me about a Russian samizdat novel that had come to her, written by a Moscow dissident. The principal character in the story was a total drop-out whose brother was a journalist. It was a hilarious satire on the whole bureaucracy of the Soviet regime, basically describing the life of a group of bohemians who would not conform to the system; it also showed evidence of a growing religious revival among the oppressed intellectual classes. April translated it, and I published it in 1975 as Nobody, giving the author’s name as Nikto, which means “nobody” in Russian. It did not do very well, but I sold it to an American religious publisher, and eventually had a visit from the author, who had left Moscow with a visa for Israel, where he never went; nor was he Jewish. Nikolai Bokov stayed with me for several days and gave me more manuscripts, which April translated. They appeared in my New Writing series. He wanted to read every book on my shelves and was fascinated by my art books, poring over them for hours. Then he went to Paris and found a job with La Pensée russe, a revanchist Russian newspaper. I went to visit him once. The office walls were hung with portraits of the late Tsar and his family, and photographs of pre-Revolutionary Russia. Then I lost touch with him.

  One of the authors I began to publish at this time was Naomi May. She came from a similar background to my own, a Scottish industrial family with large estates, and she was married to a Northern Irish accountant, whose father, William May, had once been Education Minister. I came to know Naomi and her husband Nigel quite well and was amused by their total loyalty to the Unionist cause and Nigel’s to the Orange order. All their friends seemed very like themselves, especially, with violence escalating in Ulster, after they moved to London. I published At Home first, a picture of a man surrounded by three women – two sisters and his wife – set in Hampstead and with a surprise ending. Then came The Adventuress, a novel about her own Scottish background, with the heroine a thinly disguised picture of herself. I then published a third novel, about the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement and IRA activity. This was called Troubles, and I went to Belfast to get her interviewed on the BBC, to push the book in local bookshops and give a party for the author. On the day I was there, I could on two occasions hear bombs going off in the distance and, as Naomi was being interviewed by Sean Rafferty, the receptionist at the BBC said to me with resignation, “You just have to learn to live with it.”

  It was impossible to give a party inside Belfast, but Naomi had found a hotel outside the town. This was surrounded by three circles of barbed wire, which one had to negotiate before one could get in. About a hundred people came, among them Sean Rafferty. I saw his cold blue eyes surveying the crowd of upper-class Ulster Protestants and knew instinctively that he was a Catholic. In a day I had developed that Belfast instinct that enabled people there to smell out on which side of the divide the person you are talking to belongs. It was very similar to what I had known from Montreal, but there it was the language that was the give-away. I was to see Sean more in the future. Naomi’s books never did well, for reasons that I could never fathom. They were all social novels in the British tradition, very readable, the characters well drawn and the plots full of surprises. Some of her short writing went into New Writers. But the reviews were not positive, and I never had any success in selling her books to mass-market paperback companies.

  I was invited one night to a big European Community Dinner given for Willy Brandt. Next to me sat Alastair Dunnett of the Scotsman, whom I had known well since my cancelled talk at the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly. I was catching a train that night to Edinburgh, because I had been invited the next morning, a Sunday, to give the sermon in St Mary’s, a well-known Episcopal Church that Sir Walter Scott had attended. When I told Alastair, he shook his head. “Episcopal: no good will come of that.” But I went, intending to read the three short paragraphs that preface Bertrand Russell’s autobiography, entitled Why I Have Lived, which I consider the most perfect and beautifully phrased apologia pro vita sua that I had ever come across. I then intended to expand on those words. I had prepared nothing else, being now so accustomed to public speaking that I had total confidence in myself to come up with something appropriate. This time, however, I couldn’t. I read the Russell aloud with as much expression as I could, drew a deep breath and then found that I had nothing else to say. It was all in those three paragraphs. Haltingly, I explained my inability to follow such a beautiful text with anything that might demean it, and stood down. Mr Veitch, the minister, was very disappointed.

  I had met a lady – I shall call her Melissa, not her real name. She was the girlfriend of Charles Marowitz, and I met her during Peter Brook’s Theatre of Cruelty season at RADA, which was largely staged by Charles. Melissa was selling tickets at the box office which had been set up for the occasion, and I remember being very impressed by her at the time. Then one evening Marowitz and I were both on a large BBC programme as part of an invited group of people in the arts brought together to discuss where the arts were going, or some similar subject. It was chaired by Huw Wheldon, and there were far too many of us for anyone to say very much, but I remember that the inspiration came from my Edinburgh conferences, the atmosphere of which the BBC was trying to recreate. Afterwards, Charles invited me back for a drink and I met Melissa again, who was then living with him. At one point I looked down and saw a white rat with its front paws on my toecap, looking up at me. Disbelieving, I said slowly, wondering if I could have drunk too much: “I think there’s a white rat standing on my shoe.”

  “Usually we get a stronger reaction,” said Charles, and he explained that it was Melissa’s pet rat.

  Charles and Melissa split up and, running into her again, I began taking her out to dinner. I suppose my intentions were quite obvious, but I did not receive any particular encouragement, and when I did propose a more intimate liaison she put me off. But it did finally happen, and she became my regular girlfriend. She kept her flat in Regent’s Park, where I sometimes spent the night (she had by that time surreptitiously buried her dead rat in a nearby churchyard), and she often stayed with me. But my lifestyle did not suit her: too many evenings were spent at the opera, at a restaurant afterwards and then home. She was also very suspicious of all the other ladies in my life, not without good reason, although at that time I was so fascinated by Melissa that as far as I can remember I was seeing no one else, except perhaps socially. Melissa came with me to Cap Ferrat, spent much time at Ledlanet, where she was very popular with everyone, and other than her natural female possessiveness I can think of nothing to say against her. She was extremely pretty, always smiling, had a quick wit, had acted in drama and, at the time I knew her, was working for a film company. She was an important part of my life for perhaps two years or longer. One day she overheard a telephone call that she did not like and walked out. I kept putting off calling her to ask her to come back, thinking quite genuinely that she deserved better than me. In the end I never called her. After that we met infrequently. I will have to bring
Melissa back into this narrative a little later for events that were much earlier than our parting, but if she ever reads this, I hope she will realize that I missed her very much.

  * * *

  At Ledlanet, after a spring season consisting of concerts and miscellaneous events, including the folk-singing duo of Robin Flail and Jimmie MacGregor, familiar to our audience from their nightly appearance on BBC television, we started again in June with Haydn’s Creation, sung by Patricia Hay, John Robertson and John Graham, accompanied by the Scottish Baroque Ensemble and our own chorus. The chorus master was now Gordon Mabbott, and Roderick Brydon conducted. We had seven performances by Opera for All, giving us three popular works, and then mounted our own production of two baroque operas, Pimpinone (Telemann) and Monteverdi’s The Cruel Ladies. This was conducted by Adrian Sunshine, who much favoured the first work, although I preferred the second, in which Patricia Purcell was a dominating Venus, Hazel Wood an effective Cupid and Richard Angas an immensely tall Pluto. Sheila McGrow, a flexible and always pretty and vivacious soprano, sang in both works. The programmes must have been printed before we engaged Lindsay Kemp, because his name is not in it. He led the procession of cruel ladies back into Hades, where they are being tormented for having preferred to remain virgins than say yes to men, after Cupid has brought them to the overworld to persuade the audience not to be like them. It was Monteverdi’s clever operatic joke, written for a wedding in Mantua in 1608. The audience loved it, but not a distinguished diplomat that someone had brought to Ledlanet. He did not like Brian Mahoney’s updating to contemporary Glasgow, where it was set in the wedding dress department of Goldberg’s glitzy department store. The Goldbergs were corporate members of Ledlanet, but I am not sure that they saw it.