Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  I broke off my financial discussions with Jack Berger, with whom I was negotiating for an investment, in order to fight the European elections of 1979. This, I told him, was to be my political swansong. In New York, at a party on my last night, I met a man called Hume. When he heard that I was returning to London the next day, he asked me as a matter of urgency to phone his daughter, about whom he was very worried. She was very wild, he said. She had been brought up conventionally in a comfortable home that he had created for his family in the middle-class part of the Bronx, but she had revolted against his lifestyle and become a total hippie, travelling to many countries and marrying an Englishman, whom she had already left. I rang up Lesley, his daughter, on arrival, and she came to have dinner with me. I found her to be very unlike her father’s description. She was Lesley Cunliffe, and had been married to Marcus Cunliffe, Professor of American Literature at the University of Sussex, whom I had met on occasion. I found her charming, attractive, intelligent – a free spirit perhaps, but hardly the wild woman her father had described. When I told her I was about to start my campaign for the European parliament, she volunteered to be my political secretary, and I engaged her. I forget if she was paid or not, but she was to do the job extremely well.

  But before the European election there came the General Election. Edward Heath had been deposed by Margaret Thatcher as Leader of the Conservative Party. Callaghan was the Prime Minister, and everyone knew the election would be close. I had decided to help Eddie Milne, and I went up for the last week of the General Election, taking Sheila Colvin with me. We stayed in Whitley, where at breakfast the first morning another guest, returning from some other part of the country, complained about all the “Commonwealth citizens ruining the country”. What he liked about Yorkshire, he said, was that “people were English” not “Commonwealth citizens”. With this bit of English prejudice ringing uncomfortably in our ears, we went to help Eddie.

  My previous soundings in the area, when I was preparing and then publishing No Shining Armour, had seemed to indicate that Eddie had a good chance of winning his old seat back. Metro Radio, the local independent radio station in Newcastle, had backed him and his anti-corruption campaign. They had been helpful to me and the book, and they had an active investigative reporter who had dug up much of the dirt on the official Labour candidate, a fox-hunting, high-living barrister who looked more like a Tory than a Labour MP. But when I began going around the council houses, I realized that Eddie had a difficult fight. Everyone loved him, but the constituency had been flooded by big names in the Labour party, even cabinet ministers, and the message they were giving out was that this election was crucial for Labour, the alternative being a Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher, whose hard-line right-wing views on unions and social issues were well known.

  On doorstep after doorstep, people who liked Eddie and had voted for him in the past told me that they had to follow the official line this time, even if they disliked the official candidate, who as an MP had hardly been visible since 1974. There was not a door in the constituency that had not been canvassed. I knew that Eddie would pick up votes from some Liberal and even soft Conservative tactical voters who admired his courage and honesty, but there were not many of those in a constituency that had always been a safe Labour seat in the past. Ron Rosen had been up to help Eddie the week before, but I thought that his London manner and obvious Jewishness in that heartland of Englishness would hardly have helped. I left just before the last day and went to Scotland to start my own battle. Eddie lost. When I rang early the next morning to hear the result, Eddie’s wife Em, said to me: “Oh John, he lost! It’s terrible, and by a big majority. This is the end.” It was. Eddie died not long after of despair and a broken heart. Em left Blyth and went to live with her daughter in Edinburgh.

  Lesley Cunliffe moved up to Ledlanet. There was a big anti-nuclear demonstration going on at Torness, where they were building a nuclear station. The protest involved local people who were afraid of living close to such a dangerous installation. Even Edinburgh residents, not that far away, were nervous about it. The anti-nuclear movement was strong then, and I had a book near publication, Robert Jungk’s The Nuclear State, translated from German, which had already had a large influence on the anti-nuclear movement in Germany and Austria. It came out in March 1979. The argument of the book was that no nuclear station could ever be totally safe, that a contamination of the environment always followed, and that the security necessary to guard against sabotage, terrorism or incompetent management justified the imposition of secrecy and authoritarian measures. A nuclear state could never be open, democratic or liberal. Naturally I joined the protest, but principally as an observer and a political candidate in order to show my solidarity. Duncan Campbell of the New Statesman, who had contributed to one of my Platform Books symposiums, came up to ask what I was doing there. “I’m the Scottish Liberal candidate for Central Scotland,” I answered.

  “Are you, bedad,” he commented, and moved away. We saw a whole hillside with camping-out couples, hundreds of them. “Idealism and free love,” commented Lesley, approvingly. The next day a sympathetic farmer dumped large bales of hay early in the morning against the perimeter barbed-wire fence, which made it easy for hundreds of protesters to scramble over the wire, eventually being evicted by large numbers of police. Torness went ahead, but at least the protest made more people aware of the issue.

  I attended a meeting where all the trade-union leaders present were in favour of nuclear power because it created jobs; they sat together with the directors and promoters of British Nuclear Fuels. I asked one of them if he would send people to a certain death just to create jobs or prosperity, but he did not understand the relevance of my question. Campaigning in an area as large as Central Scotland was near impossible. I went to the big malls and marketplaces, to the high streets in the town centres and wherever I saw people gathered. Everyone was fed up with politics, with the General Election only a month before. There were no meetings, because people did not come to them any more. They got their politics from television, but most simply turned off political broadcasts and debates. It was obvious there would be a low poll.

  I added up the General Election vote of the five constituencies. If everyone voted the same way, Labour would win, but the Labour candidate, a woman, was unenthusiastic about Europe, and as usual the Tories had the money, organization and determination to make their presence felt. I stood with my loudhailer shouting out the same messages over and over. No one stopped to listen, but most would hear the short messages to the end, before they were out of earshot. It was unsatisfactory, but I found no better way of making my presence known and getting some kind of message across. I met my SNP opponent, Dr Robert McIntyre, a previous Provost of Stirling, and got on well with him. In particular, we were both against nuclear power. The Tory candidate was seldom seen, but his workers managed to be everywhere, with their posters and banners on every high street.

  Lesley Cunliffe brought her boyfriend up. He was Stanley Gebler Davies, a journalist, who at the time worked mainly for the Londoner’s Diary of the Evening Standard and frequently contributed light frothy articles to Punch. He settled in to become my press secretary and wanted to write all my speeches, but I did not have the opportunity of making many, apart from those to specialized groups like farmers and others with a special interest in Europe and the Common Market. “Just give me some jokes,” I told him. He gave me one, about how well the Irish were doing out of the Common Market compared to the English, who on the whole pretended it didn’t exist. As there was a plethora of Irish jokes about at the time, the idea was to show that everyone joked about the Irish, when in fact they should be joking about us. I told it to a large group of farmers. One burly man got up and said, “I’m Irish and I didn’t like that.” Thereafter I told my own jokes or none.

  These were the last days of Ledlanet, a ghost house now, but our bedrooms were still there, and the morning room was t
he only room that was still used. I advertised my telephone number on my election leaflet, saying that I could be rung by any constituent between eleven at night and one in the morning. I had two open lines for the election, and after I had returned every evening the three of us would sit in the morning room, eating what Attewell had left out for us, drinking wine, and then malt whisky while the telephone calls came in. Stan or Lesley would keep one caller on the line talking, while I spoke to the previous one. In between we managed to eat. Lesley would go off to bed around midnight, leaving the two of us to answer late calls and listen to records. This life suited me well enough for the weeks of the campaign. I would sleep until seven or seven thirty and be up preparing for the day with Lesley. Stan did not come down until after nine usually, and as Lesley put it, “Stan in the morning is not a very appetizing sight.”

  He was really only there because of Lesley, but he managed to get a few items about me into the newspapers and went around with me for part of the day, often visiting the pubs in the larger towns like Perth or Stirling, talking to the locals and picking up the gossip. But by nature he was an anarchist of the right, much more in sympathy with the Conservative Party than the one for which I was running. He was very Irish, rather slovenly, witty and generally unconventional, but he got on well with those he met. He didn’t necessarily ask people to vote for me, but at least told them I was running. We shared a love of music and of certain writers like Joyce and Beckett.

  Fife was part of the European constituency, and I trod my old ground in Dunfermline, where I went down a coal mine, an interesting experience, but not one I was anxious to repeat. During my visit, one man was caught smoking behind a buttress, a serious offence that endangered the lives of everyone down the mine, and he was reprimanded. If fired, he could never have worked in a mine again. It was very hot, and the mine extended several miles under the sea. The men would only be working for less than an hour every day. The rest of the eight-hour day was spent travelling on small railway cars to the coal face and back, with forty-five minutes allowed for washing up. There can have been few worse jobs, however well paid.

  In St Andrews I saw fishermen throwing lobsters back into the sea. I wanted to buy a few, but they refused. The price was too low, and as they could not get enough for them in the market, they would not sell to me either. While I was talking to them, the landlord of the Cross Keys Inn, who knew me, came up. “What are you wasting your time for here?” he shouted at me. “Get back to your books.” I could not help but feel he was right.

  On election day, I cast my vote early in the morning at the school in Milnathort and toured the constituency, driving down the Forth along the Fife Coast, saying hello to a few old friends, coming to the border of Glasgow and then heading north. I must have called on about a hundred polling stations. Then, dead-tired, I drove to Ledlanet. For three weeks I had lived on fish and chips and the odd Chinese takeaway, a few meals with Liberal supporters and Attewell’s cold collations. Stan had enjoyed it all and said that the Conservative candidate’s election agent had told him that I deserved to win, as I had worked hardest, and would have been the best representative for the constituency in Europe. Lesley went to many teas given by Liberals that I could not attend. She was well liked by the ladies who invited her; they saw her as a girl with good manners and a Scottish name who happened to have an American accent. Her father would have been pleased. She thought of moving to Scotland, but never did.

  There were two days to wait before the count in Perth Town Hall. I had a respectable vote, but the Tory won, Labour doing especially badly. Although I dabbled in politics many times after that, I never ran again.

  Chapter 7

  Odyssey

  I returned to New York to try to put pressure on Lorenzo to promote my books more effectively, and then went on a selling trip to California, where I met the reps who had been selling for South-West Book Services before its collapse. One of them, Steve Mandel, made an appointment to meet me at a restaurant on the bay near Berkeley. When I arrived there at twelve noon, the restaurant was shut, and I waited in the boiling sun inside my car – there was no shade anywhere else – until he turned up an hour and a half late. “Did you have a breakdown?” I asked.

  “No. I went for a swim,” he answered, without concern or apology. I was learning something about California. I had done some selling myself in the past, going around with the reps, and I must have had a reputation, because Dosier Hammond, who had been selling our books in Los Angeles, refused to spend a day with me in the bookshops, which was the best way for him to familiarize with my list. “I’ve heard about you,” he said. “You drive everyone into the ground.” A normal day calling on seven or eight bookshops was apparently too much like work for most Californians. There was one very personable man, Jon Levine – tall, dark and handsome – who had not minded a full day with me in Los Angeles. He was a good salesman who did particularly well with female buyers. He taught me where the bookshops were. Gradually I came to know my customers and found that, properly presented, my books usually had a ready market. There were many literary bookshops on the West Coast then, and many of the university shops were also open to take those titles that might appeal to students and lecturers. Some of my European authors were taught at the universities and did better than in British towns. I was often selling upward of five hundred books in a day and sending the orders to Brooklyn to be sent out.

  In July I went to Santa Fé, both to attend the Festival and to sell books there and in in nearby Albuquerque. I had stayed in touch with Julia Sweeney after our meetings in Dallas, and she decided to come to meet me. We spent one night in a hotel in Albuquerque in their only free room, which turned out to be the bridal suite. Since it ended up being a chaste night, she remarked with a smile the next morning that it was a terrible waste of the bridal suite. We saw two operas at the Festival, The Magic Flute and Berg’s Lulu in Arthur Jacob’s first English translation, and enjoyed exploring the town together. I was to see her periodically in the next few years, staying with her on subsequent visits to Dallas. She also met me in New York and London. She soon left journalism and started her own public-relations business, which was thriving when I last heard from her.

  I had known a French lady in London who had a small art gallery and entertained very lavishly, mainly in her flat near Oxford Street, ostensibly because it was good for selling paintings, but really because she enjoyed entertaining. She seemed to drink only champagne, and it flowed freely at her parties, where the guests were a mixture of artists, diplomats and the current glitterati. We became very friendly, but nothing more, and she seemed to think of me as a literary lion. Frequently, on Sundays, I would go with her to the afternoon parties given by the retired gallerist Jean Gimpel. They were pleasant occasions, held in his large garden in Chelsea, and I met many interesting people.

  Gimpel was the author of The Cathedral Builders, which Barney Rosset and I had once published as Profile Books together, and on that account he treated me as his publisher. He was a generous and witty host, very knowledgeable, and he obviously loved women. He had a way of asking an artist’s wife if her husband was a good artist. If she replied in the affirmative, he would tell her that all good artists treat their women abominably, and therefore she should rush into his arms. If she was not sure of his merits, he would ask, “Why do you want to stay with a bad artist? Come to me.” His wife would keep a watchful, slightly amused eye on him through all this.

  The French lady in question was called Suzel de Maisonneuve, and she was as grand as her name. She was large, effusive, with flowing blonde long hair, had a steady flow of conversation, mixing English and French, and easy laughter that was infectious, if a little artificial. She had been married to an American general and had two teenage sons who lived with their father.

  She came to the Frankfurt Book Fair one year, bringing a Swiss banker friend with her, and I introduced her around. Then she moved to Washington, DC, where she
rented a house in a central area off Pennsylvania Avenue and near the Hilton where Ronald Reagan was later nearly assassinated. She invited me to stay with her when in the capital. When I did, I visited all the bookshops and discovered the Book Annex in Georgetown to be the best outlet for my list. It was part of the Olsson chain, and I became friendly with Jim Tenny and Robin Dina, two book lovers on the staff. Suzel’s house had numerous visitors coming and going, many of them prominent politicians. Her walls were covered by the work of painters she was trying to sell, and there were more champagne parties. She was very much into Republican Party politics, probably because of her former husband, but I met authors there too, and her artistic friends must have been mainly on the left. The politicians were certainly not. It was the early days of the new Ronald Reagan presidency, January 1981.

  I stayed with her on three occasions, and on each there was a party to sell paintings, although I doubt if she ever sold many, other than those she bought for herself. Her background was aristocratic, and she lived like a rich woman, but I detected that all was not quite what it seemed, and felt an underlying financial anxiety – but above all a need to be in the swim of things, as if hanging on to a past celebrity.

  On one occasion, she had another house guest, Eleanor Riger, a sports producer for ABC television. She was without question a Democrat, and her views being not dissimilar from my own, we got on well. After one of her six o’clock parties, Suzel had to go to a fund-raising Republican dinner and said that we could both come if we behaved ourselves and avoided political argument. The guest of honour and principal speaker was William Casey, head of the CIA, who, on our arrival, was all over Suzel, kissing her hand and using his few words of French as gallantly as he could.

  At the dinner we were all at tables of six or seven, and most people were only drinking water. I caught the waiter’s eye and managed to order a bottle of wine for Eleanor and myself to help make a dull evening less so, but we could not help giggling at some of the speeches. After dinner, Suzel said she had to go to some meeting in one of the upstairs bedrooms of the hotel, and we waited for her for an hour, speculating about what she could be doing. “We were just about to get a room ourselves,” said Eleanor when Suzel returned. She laughed but gave us no explanation, and took us home. Eleanor and I met again in New York, where she lived, and an affair inevitably started. I introduced her to Barney Rosset, whose interest in sport was as great as hers, whereas mine was nil. I spent a weekend with her at her house on Martha’s Vineyard, a playground for the cultured rich, and even sold books there in the local shop.