Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Times were difficult for me, and the loss of Ledlanet was traumatic. I was undergoing a string of misfortunes, and could no longer trust to luck to find some way out. I had lost most of the self-confidence that had brought me through two decades of a changing society, where I was always on the outside of establishment and too individualistic and classically orientated in my tastes to be a hippie.

  Lorenzo de Grazia had died in New York, and his office was closed. That now seemed the main priority: we had stocks of books sitting in the Mercedes warehouse in Brooklyn, and no one was doing anything to sell them. One day in September 1980, Anne Taute and I took the plane to New York to see what could be done. Anne had trouble at immigration, because the official did not understand the purpose of our mission and she had no money on her, but I sorted it out and got her through.

  A friend of hers had lent us a flat on the East Side, and we arrived there one Sunday evening. The next morning we went early to the Flatiron Building and up to the office. I remembered that Lorenzo had sub-let it from a man in the office next door, and we knocked on it. We could hear him talking on the telephone, and after a while he came to the door. His name was Berny Rosten, and he did indeed have the main lease on Lorenzo’s office, which I had been using during the previous year when in town. He had in fact, just as we knocked, been talking to someone who wanted to rent it. He let us in to the locked-up office, which consisted of one medium-size room and a small outer office. Piles of letters and parcels made it difficult to push open the door: they had been accumulating for two months.

  Anne and I got down to work, opening up everything: there were letters, bills, orders and cheques. There were enough of the latter two to enable me to make up my mind. I went to see Berny next door and asked if he would be willing to let me the office. I explained the whole history: he was sympathetic and finally agreed. We opened a new bank account and banked the cheques, taking careful note of which books had been paid for. We wrote to all the other British publishers who had been involved with Lorenzo – who, as it soon became clear, had been for some time on the point of bankruptcy and had not been particularly honest in his dealings with either booksellers or publishers. There had been a young black girl called Arlene working there. We managed to contact her and got her to come back to work for us for two weeks to help us understand just what had been going on. In the end, we gave her a proper job, because she was very good at all the work that had to be done. I went to Brooklyn to see Mercedes and managed to get the books moving out again.

  After a week, with Anne and Arlene running the office, I went out to sell books, first around all the New York bookshops, then in Boston, Washington and Chicago. The other publishers wrote in gratefully, and soon we were able to give them the money that had come in for their books. After a while, we had nine British publishers willing to let us distribute them. Some were in the group that had previously been with South-West Book Services in Dallas, others had been recruited by Lorenzo’s English partner, who after one more meeting in New York disappeared from the scene. I established a new company, Flatiron Book Distributors. One by one, other British publishers came in to visit us. One of the first was Glenn Thompson, a director of Writers and Readers Co-operative, a company run by a group of enthusiastic young people in London, with money largely put up by John Berger, the art critic and novelist, and Peter Fuller, another art critic, and their friends. Thompson was originally from New York. He was a restless, energetic black man who had found his niche in London. Now came back frequently to New York to help me promote the co-operative’s books and develop new publishing ideas. He had acquired enough of an English accent to impress those New Yorkers he met in our circles, and Anne was quickly attracted to him, so that her loyalties became divided. Writers and Readers were, like my own company, radical – and to some extent literary – publishers, but they were more interested in fashionable trends than I was, and our list was much more serious. The three of us became something of a trio around places like Joe Allen’s and El Quixote, the Spanish restaurant underneath the Chelsea Hotel.

  We had nine British publishers in our distribution group, but I decided that we should broaden our image, and we took on two American houses as well. One was Fiction Collective, which had been started by Michael Braziller, George’s son, as a co-operative where the writers paid to produce their own books. Michael handled the management and distribution: it gave new writers who were outside commercial norms a chance to get reviewed and sell. Michael backed out after his father declined to continue selling the series, and the writers kept the co-operative going. They were looking for effective distribution, which I was able to offer them. The other publisher was a rather esoteric company called Station Hill Press. They had some good books and some indifferent ones, and we did what we could for them for two or three years, but found them so unreasonably demanding, difficult to deal with and ungrateful for the considerable effort that went into selling their books around the country that we eventually dropped them.

  Fiction Collective were quite good at promoting themselves, but were not very systematic in following up their successful public readings in taking the names of attenders and building a mailing list. We collaborated well with them, but their books were hard to sell, and we had many returns. Many of the novelists in the group were also academics. They were literary in a very American way, and I came to know several of them personally, such as Mark Mirsky, who taught at Columbia, Ron Sukenick, a Professor at Boulder in Colorado who edited the American Book Review from his university, and Mark Leyner, who was de facto running the co-operative, together with a young lady who did the administration.

  I was involved in several promotions about this time. I had published a volume of plays by Simone Benmussa. She had been assistant to Jean-Louis Barrault for a number of years, and when, having given tacit support to the student protests of 1968, he was persecuted by De Gaulle – who took the Odéon Theatre away from him and forced him to dismantle most of his team – she took a job with Gallimard. There she handled their performing rights, giving all her spare time to Barrault for nothing. She also started to write plays, which were mainly adaptations of works with a feminist bias, taken from stories by George Moore, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Nathalie Sarraute, Edith Wharton and the like. They were successful in France, then in the UK, and sometimes in New York. They were always directed by herself. She soon had a group of admiring actresses and actors performing her work, which was translated into English by Barbara Wright. Her English groupies included Stephanie Beacham, Julia Foster, Susannah York and Susan Hampshire. I devoted an issue of Gambit to her work (No. 35), which included the text of Appearances, her Henry James play, in which Daniel Massey played Henry James. This was performed in the Mayfair Theatre, where an American lawyer who had a small theatre of his own in New York, Alexander Racolin, backed it, before bringing it to Manhattan. When the Manhattan Theatre Club bought the rights from me to perform The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs, which had done very well in London with Foster and York in the cast at the New End Theatre, I decided to give a party to enhance her reputation.

  Sue Telch had by now married a New York stockbroker called John Marvin. He was wealthy, a fairly cultured WASP (to use American parlance), and she was just the wife he needed, because she had English upper-class charm, entertained well and was able to redecorate his New York apartment with such good taste that he was able to sell it at a very high price and move to another. She did the same for his country home. John Marvin had just divorced his previous wife – with whom, quite coincidentally, I had myself had a fling at about that time, having met her at a party. When Sue found out, she went into peals of laughter and talked about it all over New York, especially as the wife had been rather neurotic and suicidal. She credited me with saving her life.

  The Marvins, who invited me around quite frequently now that I was so often in New York, wanted to help me in any way they could. They were very happy to give a party for Simone Benm
ussa and the cast of the play, including the theatre management and whoever else I wanted to invite: these were the critics and other writers who would enjoy meeting my author. But I reckoned without the lady who ran the theatre, Lynne Meadows, and her committee members, who knocked all the names off the list except their own group, so none of the people I really wanted were there.

  The Marvins also agreed to give a party for Fiction Collective. This followed a reading by a group of three or four writers of the group in the auditorium of the Huntington Hartford Building. The profile of a certain lady caught my eye during the reading, and I saw her again at the party afterwards, which was given at the Marvins’ Fifth Avenue apartment, from which they were soon to move. Sue had a date for me, someone they thought a suitable match, but I never even met her because, playing the barman, the lady I had noticed came to get a drink and I talked to her all evening, while pouring drinks. She was the mother of Mark Leyner, who had been reading earlier and with whom I had had frequent meetings. Her husband was there as well, a lawyer who was not very keen on having a literary son and was rather bemused by the whole party. He had just told his wife that he was tired of the marriage and needed to be alone. Talking to me was both a way of stifling her anger and getting back at him. One of us phoned the other the next day, and we met for lunch the day after that.

  On our first weekend together Muriel and I, confused by the freeway system, unsuccessfully tried to drive out of Manhattan, and ended up coming back and booking into a mid-town hotel. We began to meet regularly there. Her husband, who apparently was having an affair with a Texan lady, was already suspicious about me, having seen his wife talking to me for two hours or so at the party, and had in a few days become unsure of what he really wanted to do. He now would have liked the best of both worlds, but it was too late. Muriel cut the knot, and he moved out of their house in Maplewood, New Jersey, which soon after was sold. Muriel found a place in Hoboken, across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and continued to see me.

  Anne Taute and I were invited for Thanksgiving by Charles Johnson, manager of the Mercedes warehouse in Brooklyn. He was a very nice man, much more so than his boss, whom I found shifty and unreliable. Charles and his wife made us welcome in their New Jersey suburban house, which we reached by train. It was a lovely clear day, crisp with snow on the ground. There we made two new friends, who had also been invited: an Irish painter, Liam Roberts, and his very pretty English girlfriend, who was a secretary to the Secretary-General of the United Nations. Roberts was a very interesting artist. He painted his pictures on the floor of his tiny one-room apartment in central Manhattan, but made his living mainly by designing commercial covers for various magazines. I was to see more of him and would accidentally meet him elsewhere – once on a boat returning from Ireland, once in Paris. His girlfriend obviously loved him, but could not live with him, because as Jean Gimpel had observed, good artists are not good for women. Charles Johnson soon left Mercedes, and I only saw him once after that. He and his wife liked musicals, so I took them both to see Eva, with Eleanor Riger as my companion.

  We were selling many books, but the problem was getting paid, and I found that paying the eleven other publishers as regularly as possible was leaving nothing over to pay for my own list, because some booksellers were slow payers and some never paid.

  We were all working very hard, and Anne constantly complained that I left her no time to see New York. She had not even been able to go to Bloomingdale’s, which had been high on her list of priorities. Much time was spent on the phone trying to extract cheques from booksellers, and I was far from pleased with the sloppy Mercedes service. Anne went back to Britain for Christmas 1980 and returned after three weeks, but did not stay too long after that. I was flying frequently across the Atlantic, spending about equal time on each side, and most of it selling. I left London to my commission man, Darryl Richards, and his wife, who did the smaller accounts and the feminist shops. I went around the provinces myself.

  I was in New York for Christmas that year, spending both Christmas Day and New Year’s with the Marvins, going to the Met on New Year’s Day to see Hansel and Gretel. I also gave an office party just before Christmas, to which authors, booksellers, other publishers and friends all came. On Christmas Eve, I went to have a drink with Bill Colleran, who happened to be in New York, and took along James Bruce, who was there to see publishers on behalf of his Canadian printing company (Hunter, Rose and Company). Then James and I had dinner and ended up in Arthur’s, a jazz bar on Sheridan Square, where we parted at about five in the morning.

  A few days later, Sheila Colvin came to New York, where she met a friend of hers called Deirdre Robinson. I had always been a little suspicious of Deirdre, who had been on remand in Holloway for a smuggling charge, and who was now a nurse companion to an old woman in Florida. She and Sheila did the town together while I worked, going to a matinée of Forty-Second Street on New Year’s Eve. After that, they met me, and together we went to a string of New Year’s Eve parties with Phyllis and Sigi Miller, the first one being rather staid, and the others less so.

  Somewhere around midnight, as we trudged through falling snow from one party to the next, the two girls began singing the theme song from the musical they had seen that day, dancing in the middle of the street, which amused but also alarmed the Millers. Aside from the madness of it all, there was traffic about.

  Sheila and I had dinner with Bill Colleran and his American girlfriend two days later at her Sutton Place apartment, and I think the composer Morton Feldman was also present. I had met him several times, but I think that it was on that night that he first tried to sell me his new Treatise on Orchestration, which in more affluent times I might have seriously considered. Then Sheila returned to London, and I did the same a week later, which must have been when Anne Taute returned to New York to relieve me.

  Among the people I kept up with were Alger Hiss, who was living very simply with his wife in Massachusetts and still trying to get his case reopened. I saw many of the people involved with Civil Liberties – and having Edith Tiger, who ran Emergency Civil Liberties, so close in the office directly under mine, brought me into contact with several others. I met Victor Navasky, a good friend of Hiss, Corliss Lamont, whose book I had published back in the Fifties, and reconnected with many of the old intellectuals whom I had known during the McCarthyist period.

  There was an annual Civil Rights dinner in New York, and I attended several of them, all in the autumn. The chairman of these dinners was Rabbi Bob Goldberg, whom I had first met in London with Tondi Barr. He was the liberal rabbi who had officiated at the wedding of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. He had given her sufficient instructions for her to be admitted into Judaism, and he was now the Jewish chaplain at Yale University, where his synagogue had portraits of six liberal Jewish prophets down one side and such secular Jews as Spinoza, Freud and Einstein down the other. We met several times and had dinner together. He was very concerned about Tondi’s bad financial situation and wanted to help her if he could. He had even proposed to her once, but she had never even considered it. She was fond of him, but knew – as everyone else knew – that he was gay, although he could not face the truth. Bob often chaired these Civil Rights dinners, and he was a witty and good speaker. Of the few who had led the Civil Rights marches through the deep South with Martin Luther King, he was the only prominent Jew. He had been arrested many times and nearly lynched. He was a fine man and a courageous one.

  I had come to know Victor Navasky quite well, mainly by attending Emergency Civil Rights dinners in New York. When he published with Viking a book about the Hollywood witch-hunt, in which I had been indirectly concerned in my early publishing days, I acquired British rights and published it as a large-format paperback in 1982. Victor was the editor of the Nation, an American equivalent to the New Statesman in Britain. There were many liaisons between the two opinion journals, and they shared many writers. This was the time when the
Falklands War broke out, and I was also trying to commission a book from Alexander Cockburn on that.

  Unfortunately, getting Victor over to Britain to publicize his book proved to be a failure, as the newspapers and other media were only interested in the war and not about what he had to say about the McCarthy witch-hunt. I gave a party for him at Green’s Court in my house next to the office, and Vanessa Redgrave came, but only because she wanted to ask Victor to appear in court for her in America, where she had a libel case to do with her political views.

  In New York, Cockburn, although he had signed a contract, suddenly became impossible to reach. I found myself talking to a real or supposed brother who sounded just like Cockburn on the telephone. He never wrote the book, so a great deal of work in getting together material for it was wasted.

  At this point, I was crossing the Atlantic sometimes two or three times in a month, trying to lighten the financial problems of London by spending more time travelling in the States and increasing my sales there.

  * * *

  In October 1980, before some of the events related above, I had been at the Wexford Festival, where I saw three operas – two of which, Puccini’s Edgar and Carlisle Floyd’s Of Mice and Men, were new to me. These brought my opera score to 493 operas and 1789 performances.

  Jim Fraser had decided to come that year, and he brought Eleanor Kay with him. They were not getting on well, but she had burnt her boats and, with two small children by the husband who had divorced her, was now totally dependent on him. We went to the first two operas, but then on the Sunday, our last day in Wexford, he started off in a very bad mood and was at first shouting at Eleanor – I could hear it in the hotel through the wall in the next room – and then telephoning his lawyer to cut her out of his will. She came into my room, where I was not yet dressed, to complain to me. “Please, Eleanor,” I said to her. “Don’t stay here. If Jim comes in, he will make assumptions and think we are having an affair. If you want to talk, go down to the dining room and I’ll meet you there for breakfast in a few minutes. But go now, before Jim comes in.” She did, and I met her downstairs and waited for Jim to arrive.