Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  One night, when I was still with Bettina at Wimpole Street, I gave a dinner party at which John Stonehouse and Alan Sainsbury were both guests. Alan was a Labour peer and chairman of Sainsbury’s Stores. I had first met him in 1951 when I was a very new publisher at a dinner party given by Mark Marvin, a not very successful theatre impresario. At that first encounter Alan Sainsbury had described himself as a grocer – which he was, but perhaps the biggest in Britain. I had known him through my two marriages: he certainly had an attraction towards Christya, much resented by his wife, who however I discovered would have her own lunchtime trysts with other gentlemen at the Royal Festival Hall, not a place at which she was likely to run into anyone who knew her at that time of day. But I certainly kept my mouth shut. I never saw her again after that, and usually Alan came on his own when I was married to Bettina.

  Both Stonehouse and Sainsbury were prominent members of the Labour party, but it had not occurred to me that they were also both involved in big stores until I brought them together at that dinner. They were inseparable, and spoke to each other all evening, both being involved then in combating the new craze for green or blue stamps to encourage customer loyalty. I was rather surprised to be invited to the annual dinner of the London Co-Op, but not when I saw that the guest of honour was Lord Sainsbury. But from that time onwards, it was all downhill for poor John Stonehouse. He became involved in setting up a Bangladeshi Bank and in import-export deals with Nigeria, counting on his old contacts from the days when he knew these countries and their rulers as Colonial Secretary in Labour governments, or Shadow Secretary in opposition. He saw himself as a new tycoon with a social conscience, bringing benefits to black minorities and at the same time making himself a fortune, but John was naive in commercial dealings, too trustful of others, and he put his money and credit into schemes where he could easily be cheated – and he was. At the same time, he was a ladies’ man. His wife knew of his affairs, but tolerated them as they never lasted long, but then he became involved with his secretary Sheila Buckley, who was also a part of his business dealings. When he saw that everything was collapsing around him, he tried to rescue as much of his money as possible, while at the same time disappearing to make a new life with Sheila.

  The way he did this was to remove money from the Bangladeshi Bank in which he was involved – which was quite illegal, even if it had originally been his own money – and send it to Australia through his secretary. He then faked his suicide in Florida: his clothes were found on the shore, and it was assumed he had drowned. He flew to Australia under an assumed name with a fake passport, receiving communications and money there from Sheila Buckley, who intended to join him when the time was ripe. But this tall Englishman who paid regular visits to a bank and post office attracted attention, and he was arrested on suspicion of being Lord Lucan, who had killed his children’s nanny thinking it was his wife and had also disappeared.

  Stonehouse was soon identified and returned to England, where he was formally charged. While he awaited trial, I saw him frequently for lunch, and agreed to publish his novel The Ultimate, but under the name James Lund (echoes of James Bond), which he was convinced would become a best-seller. I hoped the same, but saw it at least as an interesting political thriller. John could write factually quite well, but he was not a fiction writer, his style being too close to the boy’s adventure stories he had read as a child. As he was now a pariah in Labour circles, he started a new party, the English National Party, in order to have a label, as he was still an MP. He was tried and convicted a few days after our last lunch, and was then evicted from parliament. He wanted his royalties to be saved and passed to Sheila. The counts against him were many, ranging from trying to obtain £125,000 life insurance to help his family to illegally withdrawing money from the businesses in which he was involved, thereby causing their earlier insolvency. Some of the charges were very minor, such as using an American Express card under the name J.A. Markham and the name he adopted in Australia, D.C. Mildoon, to obtain credit. But he was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, and Sheila Buckley to two years, the latter suspended because the judge remarked that she had no doubt been overwhelmed by Stonehouse’s strong personality. In the short time before he was sentenced, he finished two other books, Death of an Idealist,30 an account of his career and disgrace, and My Trial,31 which he wrote day by day while the trial was going on, and which appeared only days after the sentence. He was our second MP author to go to prison, the first having been Peter Baker.

  Sydney Goodsir Smith died while his Collected Poems were still in proof. He had made many changes, above all simplifying his Scots dialect poems to make many of them easier to read by non-Scottish readers. I asked Hazel, his widow, to recommend someone who was sufficiently familiar with his work to finish the proofreading, and she named Tom Scott. As I mentioned before, this made Alexander Scott a bitter enemy. He attacked the edition when it was published as corrupt, blamed me for changing the spelling and anglicizing many of the poems, and would not accept that this had been done by Sydney himself. One result was losing Scottish Arts Council support, especially in the case of Elspeth Davie, as has been told. Alex Scott continued sniping at me up to his death.

  I was taking on other French authors, as I had always done, outside the nouveau roman group, and Yves Navarre, mentioned above in connection with Bayreuth, was one. He was a friend of Jean-Pierre Angremy (who published under the name Pierre-Jean Remy), and they were quite similar except in their sexual orientation, Navarre being gay, as were his novels, while Angremy was always seen with very attractive girls. I could not take on both, and instead of Angremy (who under his real name was also French cultural attaché in London) chose Navarre, partly because he was warmly recommended by Donald Watson, who had translated Ionesco and Obaldia for me, and now wanted to translate him as well. I came to know Yves well, because he was often in London, and I gave a party for him at Dalmeny House to mark the publication of Sweet Tooth, introducing him, perhaps rashly, as possibly the new Proust. He was also the first author I came to publish under a new imprint I was about to start in New York.

  I had been approached at the Frankfurt Book Fair, probably in 1976, by a man called Bob Speer, who wanted to set up a distribution service in the US and was looking for British publishers who had books to sell there which were not committed to American publishing houses. I showed enough interest to receive a call a month or two later in London from a colleague of his called Hank Coleman. They were both Texans, based in Dallas. Hank, however, had some knowledge of Britain, having been for a time at Durham University. If he did not quite have the charisma of Bob, who had been the fast-talking star salesman for Viking Press in New York, he was a lot brainier. I was impressed by him and decided to pay a visit to Dallas on my next American trip and meet the group that had just started South-West Book Services. They put me up in a hotel, entertained me royally and showed me their offices and warehouse, where not much was happening yet. But the potential seemed good. It was only later that I learnt how the company had started, and it was like this: a local lady, who had made a considerable amount of money in nuclear medicine, had approached Bob Speer, asking if he could help her to get her father’s memoirs published; her father had been a local country lawyer who had recently died, and she felt a duty to carry out this last wish of his. Bob published it with her money, asking her at the same time to capitalize a distribution company which would sell the book. Then they had taken on small local publishers, and they were looking for more. Bob Speer saw a big potential for British books if the publishers had American rights. Several people in London had been approached other than myself, but they were all holding back. I was the first to go to Dallas.

  Back in London I spoke to others who had been approached, including Clive Allison of Allison and Busby, a fairly new publisher, and Colin Haycraft of Duckworth. I said that there was no doubt that they had exaggerated what they were, but I liked the people and felt that the potential was t
here. Several of us then decided to try out South-West and sent them books to distribute. The first results were promising, and we sent more.

  I was making several trips to New York around this time. I had started to see Sigmund and Phyllis Miller again, and I was invited to stay with them. Phyllis was an inveterate match-maker, and she introduced me to a number of ladies. I did have a few brief relationships, but never let her know about them. I also met an old flame from London, who had worked for the BBC for some years and came from a well-known British Jewish family. She was now doing publicity work in New York and was happy to see me, finding many of her American clients distasteful. Because of family connections – her brother had for some years been a prominent personality in Israeli politics and was well known in the US – she was asked to promote many Jewish causes, but found the pushing-for-recognition side of many New York Jews not to her taste. She took me to some big fund-raising banquets and apologized for the vulgarity that characterized them, but it gave her a good income, even though she was dismissive of her employers. I shall call her Miriam for the purpose of this book.

  When I introduced her to the Millers, she was lionized by them too. She found them amusing and intelligent. Sigi at this time was trying to write popular crime novels, with limited success, and Phyllis was working for the Village Voice in their book-advertising department.

  I did meet one lady through the Millers called Martha. She was cultured, interesting and open to interesting experiences, and took to me, so we started an affair, where the intellectual side was more important than the physical. The Millers suspected something was up, but could not be sure, and we never told them. I introduced her to opera, which like many Americans of her background she thought of as the preserve of a social elite and of no particular intellectual interest. A Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera, produced and sung with great conviction, convinced her that she should think again. After a while, I was staying with her rather than with the Millers.

  I decided to go to the American Booksellers Association in Atlanta. To create some effect there and get my imprint better known, I brought over Jeff Nuttall, who planned a “happening” at the convention. I took him around New York, introduced him to my favourite booksellers, in particular to Arthur and Rozanne Seelen, friends from years back, who ran a specialized drama bookstore, and we planned the happening.

  I had started a new imprint as an American trading name. If things went wrong, I did not want the odium or smell of failure to follow me back across the Atlantic. The name was Riverrun Press. Riverrun is the first word and the unprinted last one of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. I assumed that it would strike a chord among those I most wanted to reach, the teachers of literature, who would with luck soon be setting some of my books for their students to read.

  I printed a handsome four-page brochure, explaining the name and my policy for introducing my catalogue into the American market. Jeff then wrote letters to some fifty booksellers, whose names we found in the standard reference book, promising events and surprises at the Atlanta convention. The idea was that a certain lady would be there who had to be recognized and found, or there would be trouble. We both stayed with Martha, who decided to come to the convention with us. She took a big shine to Jeff, one of the world’s great characters – open, bluff and unconventional, a good writer and a good artist with a passion to educate the world and help it to discover the force and the meaning of art as a life-enhancer. In New York he would sit for hours in subway stations watching the graffiti on passing trains, elaborate designs that New Yorkers hated and he loved. We had pleasant dinners in Greenwich Village, where Martha lived, discussing art, literature, the world and the forthcoming conference.

  Jeff went a day ahead of me to prepare. At the airport, he asked a policeman the way to the Booksellers’ conference. The man looked at him. “Bookmaker, bookseller, whatever the hell y’are,” he said in a voice that Jeff loved to imitate. “If ya go down them stairs, I guess yo’ll find what you’s lookin’ for.” By the time I arrived, he knew the town quite well and was dismayed by the way whole living districts had been torn down to make way for big shiny hotels and department stores. He loved the southern accent, very pronounced in Atlanta, laughed at the waitress called “Pame” (Pam) who brought us drinks, and prepared his happening, which went wrong because a lot of our letters had not arrived. Jeff had thought the zip codes were telephone numbers. So halfway through the convention, a large fat man came walking among the publishers’ booths – naked except for briefs, his face and body twisted out of recognition by Sellotape wound tightly like ropes around him – wearing a poster saying: “This is what Mary Thompson does to a man.” It was Jeff himself, and certainly he attracted attention. In fact the police were called, so we rushed him out of sight and did not associate the event with our books, which were displayed on a joint stand with the other books being offered by South-West Book Services. Bob Speer was in his element, no longer an employee of a big company, but President of his own new one. Hank Coleman was Vice-President.

  In Britain I had published Yves Navarre’s Sweet Tooth, a macabre novel about the raunchy and very rough New York gay scene of the Sixties, which Yves had witnessed and no doubt been part of. I printed a new cover, using a drawing of the author by David Hockney, and issued it in New York under the new imprint and with the Dallas address. Yves came over, and I employed Miriam to promote it, but she was not keen on gay books, so found a friend, also English, to take it on, who managed to get it reviewed. I offered it to Hollywood, who were interested, but they were still nervous about gay subjects, and this book was a very strong one. However, Yves enjoyed New York, looked up old friends, took me to some gay restaurants and accompanied me to the Metropolitan Opera to hear Carmen with Régine Crespin. This was in November 1978. When Yves heard that I finally was going to pay his hotel bill – we were both staying at the Algonquin – a big smile came over his face. “Now I really will enjoy the opera,” he said.

  I brought another gay author to New York a year later, and had the same problem with Miriam. This time it was David Galloway, who had been a witness for me in the Last Exit case. I had published his very effective novella, Melody Jones, about an affair between a gay nightclub entertainer and a married man in 1976. The affair goes wrong and ends in tragedy because of their class difference; what spells glamour to one is seen as tacky by the other. It is a little gem, and in my opinion the best thing David Galloway, whose several novels tend to depend on a clever idea or a gimmick, has written. It appeared in New Writers 12 in 1976 and on its own in a new series, Riverrun Writers, that I issued in the early Eighties. But the publicity we were looking for on that occasion was for Lamaar Ransom: Private Eye, a witty parody of Raymond Chandler in which the tough detective is a blonde lesbian with a gay black assistant.

  A conference of publishers was organized in Dallas. There were ten British publishers, all staying in the hotel where the conference took place, and about seven or eight Americans. The first session, all sitting around a long table, was amusing. We each made a statement about who we were and what our books were like. The left-wing British publisher Pluto Press, represented by Michael Kidron, was followed a few minutes later by a right-wing American fundamentalist one. Each wanted to change the world. But it was civilized enough, and went on for several days.

  We had all had our books there with South-West for some months, and although sales were reasonably satisfactory, doubts had risen about the financial stability of the company, especially when we realized that one lady had provided all the money and was not going to provide any more. South-West was run by a group of sales people who had little business sense, however good they were at selling, and they had no idea of budgets: they spent money whether it was there or not, and much of the expenditure was wasteful or too inappropriate for their size and means. They had brought out a large printing of a catalogue describing everyone’s book: it was handsome, heavily illustrated, looked rather like a lit
erary magazine of the Village Voice variety, and it ran to over six hundred pages. It was a considerable feat to produce it, but the cost was high, and they never thought of asking the publishers to contribute to the cost of what was an effective selling tool. There was a resident salaried artist on the staff who spent much of his time drawing cartoons of Bob Speer and others around the office, but no management system was visible. At our last session, we wanted to hold a private meeting first, which was chaired by Colin Hayward, with Kidron taking notes of what we wanted to know, and then we confronted Speer and the senior half-dozen of his selling people. He had much rhetoric, but little in the way of satisfactory assurances, and we all left unhappier than we had arrived. I am not sure what caused the good feeling and confidence of our first meeting to deteriorate during the next three days, but we gradually sniffed out the real situation, and in fact the company was not far from collapse.

  I had one pleasant experience. A lady journalist, who came from the local Dallas paper to report on our presence, picked me out to interview personally, probably at the instigation of Hank Coleman, and we became good friends. Some time later she came to join me at Albuquerque, because I wanted to go to the Opera Festival at Santa Fé, as I will relate in the next chapter. Her name was Julia Sweeney.

  I had to make several trips to Dallas in the late Seventies, and paid for most of them with a deal I made with Pan Am, whereby they gave me free transatlantic travel in return for an advertisement in a number of our books.

  During this time I was crossing the Atlantic frequently and spending time in New York, calling on booksellers to help the reps of South-West Book Services. They finally collapsed early in 1979, just after Harold Hobson’s French Theatre since 1830, which had had few British reviews, received a long and very positive one in the American Library Journal. The warehouse in Dallas had closed after a last-ditch attempt to sell the company had failed, and I was unable to get my books out. None of the orders could be serviced, and that review, which would have sold probably two thousand copies to American libraries, as well as other reviews that appeared at about that time, were wasted. Sigi Miller then introduced me to a man who was interested in investing. Jack Berger talked to a lot of people, including Bob Speer, before the collapse happened and was impressed by him, more than by me. He was willing to invest, but made it clear he would be tough if things went wrong. He wanted me to put Ledlanet up as security, and I had a number of meetings with him to work out details of an investment in Riverrun Press. On occasion he let me use his office. In retrospect, with the problems that would come later, I was very pleased that no deal ever went through. I cannot remember why it went wrong.