Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Long before that, in Paris, I had had dinner with Sam Beckett at the PLM Hotel, across the street from his apartment, a week or so before his seventieth birthday, which was on 13th April 1976. I asked him what he was writing. “I’m just finishing a text,” he said. “Seventy is old age, and when you’re old, work has to be your company.” He went on to say that this time it was written in English, so I would have the rights to sell to publishers in other languages. This was very important to me, because the company would keep a quarter of that revenue, the exceptions being Rosset in the States and Lindon in France, with whom Sam dealt directly. I pondered his words about work “becoming his company”. “Is that what you’re going to call it?” I asked, “Company?”

  “Perhaps,” he answered, “I’m still thinking about it.” But Company it was when we published it in 1979, and it became the most successful of all his later prose works.

  Beckett’s reputation was now about as great as Joyce’s, and he was a collectible author. His first editions were treasured, and we took advantage of this to bring out deluxe limited editions of his main new works in special bindings, numbered and signed by the author. Beckett was always amenable to do this boring chore of signing copies. Art publishers were constantly approaching him to let his texts be illustrated by artists who wanted to associate their names with his. Signing hundreds of such volumes took up much of Beckett’s time. He of course received copies for himself, but usually he gave them away to friends. In Endgame, the main character Hamm, once he realizes that the end has finally come, throws away his few possessions, the props that give him some mobility or ability to sleep. “Discard,” he says, and this became Beckett’s motto as he dispossessed himself of the things around him that others wanted. I was only seeing him about four times a year at this time, as I was so much in America, but found there was a market there for Beckett limited editions.

  In Paris I had a regular round of calls to make on publishers, authors, friends and others whose company I enjoyed and whom I wanted to keep up with. One such was Maria Jolas. She was a survivor not just from pre-war Paris, but from the war before that. She and her husband Eugène Jolas had founded the magazine Transition in 1927 – the most influential, and in my opinion the best, of all the English-language literary periodicals that were published in Paris during the twentieth century. Before that, she had studied singing in Paris, and had met her husband in the States when he was a penniless refugee from Alsace. Maria was able to finance his career from her own family money after they married. The patron of Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake appeared in serial form in Transition, and the friend of countless writers and artists, she had been living quietly on the Rue de Rennes ever since her husband died in 1952, translating French writers, and most especially Nathalie Sarraute, into English. A left-wing political activist, she also supported radical causes and translated manifestos, even for students, without ever asking for payment. Sarraute was a close friend, and each had a holiday cottage in a little village not far from Paris. She started translating Sarraute for George Braziller in New York, then for me as well. Whenever I called on her, I heard fascinating anecdotes about Paris between the wars and all the people she and her husband had known. She would launch into a story about Joyce and break off to remark, “I never told Ellmann about that.” Richard Ellmann, Joyce’s biographer, had spent months interviewing her. She remembered Beckett as a young man about Paris in the early Thirties, commenting: “No one had ever heard of him then, and he didn’t like it much.” I learnt much from her, brought her contracts for translations and begged her to write an autobiography. She started it, and I still have about seventy pages about her childhood in Kentucky, her slave-owning grandfather, a Scottish immigrant called McDonald (her maiden name), and her early years in Paris. She put it aside to translate a manifesto, then had a new Sarraute novel to do, and she never returned to it. Once, she told me, her mother had taken her whole family, which was numerous, on a tour of Europe. The children were all in their mother’s room on a fine sunny morning at the Villa d’Este near Como, one of the grandest hotels of Europe, when her mother, having glanced into the gardens, suddenly said: “Call the manager. We’re not staying in a hotel that lets in niggers.” She had just seen the Aga Khan, surrounded by his servants and secretaries, who were opening the letters and parcels that brought him tributary money and jewels from his followers worldwide. That told me something about the right-wing family from which she had come. She was now over eighty, full of laughter and conversation, and always welcoming to every visitor interested in the Paris literary scene. She questioned me about changing tastes, who was in literary fashion and current literary gossip.

  I frequently saw Nathalie Sarraute, who lived in grand-bourgeois comfort in the smart Eighth Arrondissement of Paris with her husband Raymond, a retired judge, a courteous and gentle man who pandered to her every whim and protected her from annoyance, just as during the war he had protected her from the Nazis, because she was Jewish. Nathalie had come to Paris as a little girl when her parents’ marriage had broken up, had studied law at the Sorbonne and at Oxford, and spoke four languages fluently. She was jealous of her reputation and highly critical both of her contemporary rivals and of such figures as Beckett, about whom she had little good to say. She and her husband had hidden Sam for a while when he was on the run in 1940, and their different accounts of that time each showed more irritation towards the thoughtlessness or bad grace of the other than gratitude. Now that Beckett had won the Nobel Prize and was acclaimed everywhere, she was jealous and dismissive. But not Maria Jolas, who had followed his rise with pleasure. After all, Transition had published some of his early work, and he had done translations for it as he had for many other periodicals in Paris during the Thirties. The famous manifesto that appeared in its first issue is highly provocative, and for once I can allow the word “elitist” to be applied to it. Its twelve points end with: “THE PLAIN READER BE DAMNED”.

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  I still went to the various Liberal Party conventions and meetings, both in Scotland and in England, and was now willing to be a candidate again. The Party had been doing better for some years now, had more MPs and more candidates were coming forward, but then came the Jeremy Thorpe scandal. Several senior members of the Party had known that Thorpe was bisexual, but not me. I had approached him once and been surprised when he told me he was not interested in having an authorized biography written about him. Now I knew why. He was given a difficult grilling by Emlyn Hooson, who had been defeated by him for the Party leadership some years earlier, in a private meeting of Liberal MPs, and by the end of it they knew he had to resign. He was tried for attempted murder and acquitted because the jury obviously believed that he might have attempted to frighten his blackmailer, not to kill him, but his career was over. I attended the big meeting that was held in Birmingham in 1976, where the Liberal Party, now temporarily headed by Jo Grimond again, voted to make David Steel the new leader. I had voted for John Pardoe, who I felt had a Churchillian streak in him, more likely to turn the tide in our favour than the cautious Steel. I had also been a member of Pardoe’s policy think-tank, which had only had half a dozen meetings, two of them in my Dalmeny Street flat, and I admired him greatly; he was my kind of left-leaning Liberal. But the dirty tricks of the Tories got him out of his marginal seat in the 1979 General Election, and thereafter he disappeared from politics.

  There were two elections in 1979, a parliamentary one and a European one. Given my many European connections and my knowledge of European politics, because I kept up with more than just literature and the arts, I suggested to the Party that I would be interested in fighting the European election. But I had a serious rival in Menzies Campbell, an Edinburgh barrister, who had once stood against Russell-Johnston for the leadership of the Scottish Liberal Party. I knew I stood no chance in such a contest. But I was lucky, because a General Election was called for May, and Ming Campbell decided that he would fight the possibly winnable
seat of East-Fife. He did eventually take it, but not just then.

  His withdrawal meant that I could contest the very large area of Central Scotland, which comprised five Westminster constituencies. The European election came just after the British one, a month later. While preparing for my own campaign, I decided that this time I would go to help an independent candidate in the first election, Eddie Milne.

  Eddie Milne had been the Labour MP for Blyth, who at a time when corruption was rife all over the Labour constituencies of North-East England, had not only refused to join others at the trough, but had refused to keep his mouth shut about what was going on. Having replaced Alf Robens, a prominent trade-union leader, before becoming first an MP and then a Labour peer, Eddie was quickly approached by the developers who were using public money to build new town centres, housing estates and commercial complexes at great profit to themselves, while filling the pockets of local councillors with bribes and kickbacks. The most notorious figures in the scandals that eventually erupted were T. Dan Smith, Leader of the Newcastle City Council and John Poulson, the Pontefract architect, but there were hundreds of others, including the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, Ted Short, who was under heavy suspicion.

  I knew about Eddie from political friends. I went to see him and commissioned a book. It was one of the first titles to appear in my new Platform series, which had a distinctive look: the blurb started on the front cover and ran over to the back. Entitled No Shining Armour, which I took from a speech that a colleague had made to attack him, this publication soon caused me the greatest trouble since Last Exit a decade earlier.

  Edward Milne went straight to work on his book, and when it was finished I went up to Blyth for four days to edit it with him, staying in his house. Eddie and his wife looked after me well, even bringing in some wine, not part of their normal lifestyle. I had brought a flask of whisky with me in order to have a late night-cap, and I was a little embarrassed one morning when coming back from the bathroom I found that Em (Emily) had made my bed and must have seen the flask in my open suitcase. The book is Eddie’s story, his life in the Labour movement, his fourteen years as MP for Blyth, which ended in the second election of 1974. He had been expelled before the first (February) election of that year from the Labour Party after publicly denouncing the corruption he had uncovered, all of which was later proved to be true. Once expelled, he had gone on to fight the second (October) election as an Independent Labour candidate and had won against Ivor Richards, the official Labour candidate, by a majority of more than 6,000. Then Labour had really set out to destroy him and blacken his name, and they won the next election by a tiny majority of 74, except that everyone believed he had really won, because several hundred postal votes mysteriously disappeared. I published his book to enable him to have his say, and it was selling well all over the Northeast until the Labour Party through their solicitors threatened W.H. Smith. They stopped selling it, and local bookshops did the same. I had spoken to many of Eddie’s supporters. They had promised to testify if there was any court action, but now they were intimidated, threatened with the loss of their jobs, of their trade union membership, party cards and any future prospects. People wanted to buy the book, but it became difficult to obtain. And the writs began against my firm.

  They all came from Lewis Silkin and Partners, Labour solicitors. One by one, starting with Ted Short, and then the MPs, the councillors and others named in the book, they brought actions against me. I took legal advice, and I should not have. I settled with Ted Short and agreed to rip some pages out of the book. Then the next writ came and then another, thirty-six in all. Had I been willing to fight, I think most of them would not have proceeded, and I would have won against those that did. On top of all my other financial problems, I now had this one. But I knew I had been right to publish the book, and that Eddie was telling the truth. That was why, when the next election came, I tried to help get him back into parliament.

  I had previously seen civic corruption in Hamilton and had been involved in fighting it on Tyneside through his book. When I was approached by two journalists, Martin Tomkinson and Michael Gillard, to publish another book on the activities of John Poulson, who by then had been convicted and was in prison, I had it carefully read by lawyers and published it. It was called Nothing to Declare. When two or three writs from minor persons mentioned came in, I told them to go ahead. We would defend. No one proceeded with their threat. I am now convinced I should have done the same with Eddie Milne’s book.

  Many more titles came out as Platform Books, all with relevance to the modern world. An excellent symposium on “Inflation” covered the history of a problem that was serious in the Seventies and suggested what the options were. Peter Hain, whom I had known as the Leader of the Young Liberals, wrote books for me: Community Politics and Policing the Police, the latter in two volumes. Feminism, new approaches to education, ways of dealing with industrial problems, terrorism, and even a right-wing book anticipating Thatcherism, were all represented in the series. I took on the right-wing book because the author had argued his points so lucidly that I felt I should adopt a Voltairean approach and publish views with which I personally disagreed. My letter accepting the book was not answered for three months, and then only by the widow. Her husband had died five minutes after opening my letter, presumably with joy. I published it anyway, but it did badly in spite of the later success of the views expressed.

  Charles Osborne now came to my help. The Arts Council had been giving us grants on some individual literary titles for which I had applied and given a budget, showing the probable loss on each book. I was seldom far out. Now it was suggested, as I was the best-known publisher of avant-garde literature, that it might be possible to give me an annual block grant to cover my whole publishing programme.

  Meetings took place with the senior officials and the literature officers ,who agreed that a plan for regular annual subsidy could be worked out providing I turned the company into a non-profit trust. As we had never paid out a dividend even in our best years, and were unlikely to ever do so, I agreed this, and the Calder Educational Trust was set up. Bill Webb, Stuart Hood and Barbara Wright agreed to be trustees with myself. Our first year’s grant was set at £25,000, and this went gradually up to £35,000 in 1981.

  Before that, probably shortly after the division of Calder and Boyars, I had made an attempt to set up a new company with outside capital, and talked to a few individuals who were interested in coming in. There is not much on paper about those negotiations, as they were all verbal, but one central figure was an American lawyer, closely associated with the Democratic party, called Martin Ackerman. He was already financing a publishing company that did small art books about contemporary American artists. I gave a party at Dalmeny House where several of my long-term authors were present, for him to meet them and to get some new ideas. Not much came out of that directly, but it seemed settled that he would find some substantial money, providing it suited his tax write-off plans. He told me how he bought paintings at one price, and had experts value them for him at many times that figure. He would then donate them to his old university and write a large amount off his taxes. Something like that was in his mind for me.

  It was the summer, and he was going to Cap Ferrat, where he had rented an apartment near the Hotel du Cap. It was just when I also intended to spend a week with Jacques. My friend agreed to invite Ackerman and his wife to lunch to help me impress them. They turned up in a taxi and were surprised to see not a household of English-speakers, as they had assumed, but a cross-section of French actors, people in public relations or business, a doctor and a dentist, Jacques Chaix’s friends. Martin Ackerman spoke not a word of French, his wife did a little, and everyone tried to make them welcome, but the American had only one subject of conversation, and that was the value of everything in dollars. He kept trying to tell Jacques what he could sell his property for, and could not realize that his host did not give a damn what it
was worth, nor did he care to talk about money and business on a lovely July day when about sixteen relaxed people were sitting out of doors on the terrace slowly eating and drinking while idly looking at the yachts sailing by. Jacques told the wife that she should fine her husband a dollar every time he used the word.

  Ackerman invited the whole household to come to have a drink at his apartment a day or two later, and a few went out of politeness, but it was not a success: he only had kir to drink and did not know the right proportions of the syrup to use. I forget now whether I decided then that he was not a suitable investor for my company, or whether it was he who backed out, but nothing further happened.

  It was probably the following year that I tried to interest a rich young American, who had written a novel, to invest in Riverrun Press. There were many meetings in New York with his family’s lawyers, because the money was his father’s, and it was a lawyer I had to convince that the money would not be lost. But that too came to nothing in the end. The investment would in any case have had to go to a separate imprint to publish new books, working together with the trust, because the Calder Educational Trust could not offer any return on investment.

  There was no problem about a separate American imprint, my Riverrun Press Inc. I had however learnt a lesson by now: that any outside investment brings with it individuals whose aims, interests and agendas might be very different from my own, especially where foreign literature was concerned. Being able to read several languages, I did not differentiate between the nationality of the author and what he had to say: only the content and style of the book itself interested me. A translation was of course more expensive to bring out than an English manuscript, but that was the reason the Arts Council were willing to help; very few other publishers were translating good literature at the time, because it simply did not pay.

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