by John Calder
My first visit to the Wexford Festival had been in 1968 with Sheila Colvin, who only stayed two days. On the first, after hearing La clemenza di Tito, we were eating at the Talbot Hotel, where we joined another couple we had just met, Tony Quigley and his wife. Tony was a civil servant, born in Ulster but working in Dublin. We were enjoying ourselves, when Tony said, “Here’s a man you must meet,” and caught the arm of a man leaving the room. It was Ulick O’Connor, a well-known writer, but with a reputation for impulsive behaviour. Surely enough, O’Connor refused to be stopped, and an unpleasant confrontation ensued.
All the same, it was an enjoyable weekend, and on my last night, when Sheila had gone, I sat up late talking to Marie Kean, the wonderful Irish actress who not long before I had seen perform Beckett’s Happy Days in Joan Littlewood’s Stratford East Theatre, probably the best performance of the play I have ever seen, with Alan Simpson as Willie. Wexford was the last time I ever saw her.
We gave three balls at Ledlanet in 1974, which helped to keep our membership together. I went to Wexford in October, but before that, in September, I was suddenly brought back into politics. I was asked at short notice if I would be willing to stand in Hamilton, where there had not been a Liberal candidate for some years. Hamilton was not a safe seat for anyone, Winnie Ewing having won it for the Scottish Nationalists in 1967. It had see-sawed ever since between the SNP and Labour. I agreed and took the night train to Glasgow, because the election had already been called. I telephoned my office from the station and was told that Roy and Lucy Jones had committed a joint suicide during the night. Lucy had been diagnosed with terminal cancer with only a few weeks to live, and Roy had felt that to struggle on with all his disabilities was not worth the effort. They had taken powerful pills, listened to their favourite music on the record player and drifted off. With a sombre heart, I took the train to Hamilton to meet the committee, be adopted and start my campaign. I had to do nearly everything on foot, because I was still not allowed to drive.
I took a room in a local hotel for the duration. There were certain difficulties, the most immediate being a disgruntled member of the committee who had a list of the membership of the Liberal Party in the constituency and the electoral rolls. He did not want to do anything, nor to hand over what he had. I telephoned him, only to be told that he had no time to be bothered and as the election was more than two weeks away, there was no hurry. When I told him that envelopes had to be addressed by hand to all the voters, and there were not many volunteers to do this work, he answered, “Next week is soon enough.”
“I am going from here to the court to get an injunction,” I said, “and you will have to pay the cost of it.” That did it, and I had the whole file that evening. By now I knew what I was doing. I went to the public library, to see the County Clerk and other officials to get the important statistics that covered health, education and employment. Armed with these, I prepared a manifesto and my election leaflet, which was a two-sided printed page, in pads of a hundred, which could be torn off, put through letter-boxes or handed to people, small enough to go into a side-pocket. On one side was my picture and a brief biography. The other side was a series of one-liners, my policies. It was economical, easy to digest, cheap and convenient. Then I went to Labour headquarters and asked to see Mr Alex Wilson, the Labour MP. He received me with surprise.
“I thought I would call on you, Mr Wilson,” I said, to tell you that I intend to run an honest and honourable campaign purely on the issues. There will be no personal attack or abuse from me. There is no reason not to be friendly, and I am sure we will be on good terms when it comes to the count.” I thought that this might reduce any temptation to try dirty attacks or rake up any scandals in my past.
The next day, I had a letter back from him, thanking me for my visit and wishing me good luck in taking as many votes as I could away from the Scottish Nationalists, who he knew were his biggest threat. My intervention would reduce that threat enormously.
We found a butcher’s shop that was to let for a short rental, which still smelled of raw meat, and I went canvassing. Hamilton – not far from Glasgow – was a strange place: a county town with a number of factories and a mixed middle-class and working-class population. There was no culture of any kind – no theatre, concert hall or museum. The only public entertainment available during the whole year was the Salvation Army’s Christmas carol concert.
The usual two issues came up frequently: capital punishment and abortion, and I gave my stock answers. Almost the entire population lived in Hamilton itself or the smaller town of Larkhill, only a few minutes away. The campaign was a dull one. I found volunteers to drive my car, which I fitted up with public-address equipment, from which I would deliver slogans and play tapes, either the triumphal march from Aida or The Blue Bonnets, played by a military band. This brought people out on the street from the housing estates that I drove through. Joan Clark came over at times to help and keep me company; so did my daughter Jamie, who canvassed with me. Sheila Colvin came over once or twice, and I was frequently accompanied by my dog Shuna. A local couple, the Woodwards, were the backbone of the organization. It was they who had asked the Party to find them a candidate. Gradually, more and more people came forward to help. I found myself often trudging along wet streets with my bad leg wondering why I was doing this. There were a few public meetings, but not many people came to them.
The count on election day went on until the early hours of the morning, and Alex Wilson won. The SNP had a much smaller vote because of my intervention, and I was much taunted by their young supporters for speaking proper English. No outside prominent Liberals came to help, because it was far from being a target seat. As always, I met some interesting people and became involved in a few issues, some of which I followed up after the election, mainly to do with individuals who had been badly treated by the social services. My main impression was that the local Labour Party was extremely corrupt. As soon as a man became a councillor, he registered himself as a contractor. I brought Jim Fraser down one day to give me an idea of what the new housing – and repairs on the old one – should be costing, and it was clear that everyone was overcharging massively for very shoddy work. This was the period when corruption had become very widespread in Labour councils, and scandals would soon be emerging. As a publisher, I would be involved in the exposure.
My diary for 1974 had the contemplated dates for the Ledlanet autumn season. The two operatic productions were to be Handel’s Hercules and Carl Orff’s The Moon, which I had started translating into Scottish dialect. The previous year, after Frankfurt, I had gone to see Orff, then an old man, and had received his permission to perform it as a chamber opera with a reduced scoring. I had spoken to Ian Wallace, who I wanted to sing St Peter, a part made for him, and had cast the whole work in my head. It was a perfect work for Ledlanet, and I could give it local references for my two local towns, Milnathort and Kinross. But it was not to be.
* * *
I went as usual to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1974, and found to my surprise that many people thought that I had retired from publishing and that Marion was now running the publishing company. Going to New York the following January, I heard the same thing, but much more specifically. Marion was making frequent visits there and had told everyone she saw that I was now a sleeping partner doing other things. I returned to have matters out.
On my first morning in the office, I received a telephone call from Marion, saying that she would not be coming in that day, but wanted to invite me to dinner that night, on my own, and she named the restaurant where we had first met. She knew of course what I must have heard in New York. I arrived first, and when Marion came in, she sat down and her first words were: “I want to break up the partnership.”
I was too dazed to say anything, while the consequences flashed through my mind. This was her way of cutting short any recriminations and avoiding explaining herself. When I did open my mouth, I was as
direct as she had been. “All right,” I said.
It took several months to work out how to divide the company and split the assets into two new companies without incurring a tax liability. We took legal advice and then asked the Publishers Association to recommend someone who could act as adjudicator for the split. Marion started a new company in her own name, and I went back to the original one, registered in 1950, John Calder (Publishers) Ltd. We found a dealer in archives and antiquarian books, who looked around in America and finally found the Lilly Library in Bloomington, at the University of Indiana, who were willing to buy the company’s correspondence, documents and everything not needed for day-to-day business. Breon Mitchell, who was Chairman of the Library and Professor of German at the university, came over and spent days looking through cupboards and climbing up to top shelves, where piles of musty old correspondence, invoices and miscellaneous papers were stored – everything that had accumulated since we had moved to Brewer Street from Sackville Street. When we had made that last move, we had to leave our old papers behind, and Alex Trocchi and friends had spent a day sifting through them, finding much interesting material that he then sold to the University of Texas, just before the building was demolished. Now we were able to negotiate £100,000 for the archive, less a commission to the broker. That should have been enough to finance the split.
Now that the break-up was imminent, Marion was in a much better mood. No announcement had yet been made to our staff, to the press or to the trade. Her motives were transparent enough. She resented it every time an article appeared in either the trade or the public press that singled out someone like Nora Smallwood as a prominent woman in publishing, and she would write in to say that she was also a woman in publishing with authority. She hated the greater attention given to me by other publishers, particularly at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where reputations rose and fell and gossip was almost as important as business. She wanted to be famous and admired. Now she had a stable of authors of her own, who looked to her and not to me; it was headed by Ivan Illich, the guru for radical chic dissent from the traditional common wisdom, and now she also commissioned books from prominent political figures whom we knew largely through our involvement in censorship issues and the DLAS – rather in decline just then.
Marion took over two political series, Open Forum and its sub-series Ideas in Progress, and I started a new one, very similar: Platform Books. Among the titles which were to appear in Marion’s new list were books by Hugh Jenkins, Labour Minister for the Arts (1974 –76), Enid Wistrich, prominent as a labour member of the General London Council, who was involved in particular in film censorship, Julia Kristeva, author of a book on Chinese women, and a wide variety of titles on social, technological and sociological issues. Platform Books tended to be more directly political, and certainly more controversial.
The adjudicator, or arbitrator, who the Publishers Association finally chose for us, was Peter du Sautoy, who had recently retired as chairman of Faber and Faber. His task was not an easy one, as he soon found out, and he must have regretted taking it on. First, he had to find a balance. Living authors with whom we had personal contacts were asked to choose their publisher. Beckett, Robbe-Grillet and virtually all the French authors chose me. The German ones had mainly been contracted by me, but knew us both and were not much concerned who it was. Where there was no preference or an indecision, Peter could decide, and as things had to be weighted and past, present and probable future sales were the easiest factor to quantify, it meant that having Beckett, with many titles selling well, and the incoming royalties from Henry Miller and William Burroughs continuing, I had to cede many authors I would have liked to have kept. Although neither of us had met Hubert Selby, whose Last Exit had caused the most important national prosecution after Lady Chatterley, Marion went to see him to get him and his future novels into her stable. I did the same with Henry Miller, making a special trip to California to explain what was happening, and get his assent to staying with me.
I had only seen him infrequently since the Edinburgh Writers’ Conference, and the publication of Tropic of Cancer had been negotiated solely with Dr Hoffmann. He had paid one visit to London in the early 1970s, and we had given a lunch and reception for him at the Savoy hotel in a private dining room, which started with a press conference and enabled him to meet old friends like Lawrence Durrell and others in the literary world who admired him. Afterwards, he had asked if I would drive him around London to look at places he remembered, and we did a tour. The most interesting part of it was the five minutes we spent on the northbound carriageway of Hyde Park, opposite the Dorchester Hotel.
It might have been a month before that when he had written to me that his young wife, whom he had recently married in his old age, was coming to London. Would I look after her? Marion and I took her to lunch in Soho – she was staying at the Dorchester. Now Henry wanted to look at the Dorchester hotel, not to go in, but just to look at the building from the street. It is not difficult to imagine what voyeuristic fantasies were going through his head as he gazed at the Dorchester.
When I went to see him at Pacific Palisades in 1975, it was my first visit to Los Angeles, and I had no idea of the geography of the city. I had booked into a hotel in Century City and took a taxi from the airport. On the evening of my arrival, I tried to take a walk around the neighbourhood, but desisted after being stopped twice by suspicious police cars. In the hotel restaurant I overheard a conversation from some film people at the next table, who were looking for properties, and on my way out left a note with them saying I was a British publisher visiting and had a book that might be of interest to them. It may have been George Foa’s The Blood Rushed to My Pockets, which I thought of as a vehicle for Danny Kaye, or it may have been another book – perhaps Stonehouse’s The Ultimate, which I had just published. I left my room number on the note, and sure enough Garson Kanin (or was it his brother, Michael, also a screenwriter?) telephoned me an hour later, so that for some months there was correspondence over the book in question. The initial interest fizzled out eventually.
The next day, I drove in a hired car to see Henry Miller, who was expecting me. But when I arrived at about twelve o’clock, I was told that he was still in bed: could I come back later at three? I drove along the sea to pass the time, saw a museum advertised and drove in. It was the Getty Museum, for which one normally had to have a reservation, because it would only take the same number of visitors for which there were parking spaces, but I was lucky. I did a quick tour of the antiquities and paintings, at one point getting close to a very small Leonardo to see it better. A voice behind me said, “Put your hands slowly in the air and take two steps back.” I could feel something hard in the middle of my back: it was a gun. The security guards do not let you get too close to pictures. I lunched in the snack bar and went to see Henry.
He had recently had a hip operation, was very uncomfortable because of it and could not use his swimming pool behind the house. He was in a dressing gown, and opened letters while we spoke, one from Durrell. We touched on a great deal of subjects, and he said many positive things about Maurice Girodias, who he had finally decided was a good man after all and on the side of the angels. He also told me he was in love again, but he did not tell me with whom. As he had a very beautiful secretary, who had admitted me and passed occasionally through the room, I made the obvious guess. When I asked to go to the lavatory, I found myself in a luxurious bathroom, where the sponge-rubber mat underfoot was shaped like dozens of female breasts and nipples. Old age had not changed Henry’s preoccupation with sex. He signed the agreement I had brought with me, and I left, driving back to my hotel down Sunset Boulevard. I enjoyed a bottle of local Burgundy that night at dinner, and went back to New York, and then a few days later to London. I had kept Miller as an author.
Burroughs also agreed that I was his publisher when I saw him in New York on the way back. He was living in a loft in what seemed a dangerous part of town, in
or near Little Italy. He had a kind of sword-stick with a coiled metal wire inside it for protection, and told me he could still run fast enough to escape muggers. I met one or two rather dubious-looking people during the evening I spent with him, one of them a strange character called Herbert Huncke, who has since become celebrated as a kind of American Genet. I did not take to him much.
Peter du Sautoy had many meetings with us, including two or three lunches. We had agreed to accept his arbitration – he was known to be fair – but Marion constantly appealed against his judgements. Once the authors themselves had decided on which side they wanted to go, I still had too much weight on my side, so writers like Peter Weiss, who was selling well and whom I knew far better than Marion, and had recently died, were given to her. In fact, Marion being originally German, Peter du Sautoy took the easy course of giving nearly everyone from Germany eastward to Marion, which meant all the Russian authors like Yevtushenko, as well as the Dutch and Scandinavians, and such North Americans as Robert Creeley. Peter du Sautoy often became exasperated, to the point on one occasion of walking out in the middle of lunch at Braganza, a fish restaurant in Soho. A few out-of-print books were forgotten in the division, such as Jules and Jim, made famous by the film with Jeanne Moreau, and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which Marion hastily reprinted without consulting du Sautoy once the final settlement had been made.