Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  That morning the three of us went to Tom Walsh’s annual pre-lunch drinks party in his house. Jim Fraser, playing the big man – being a regular donor, he had recently been put on Scottish Opera’s finance committee – began to criticize Peter Ebert, saying that Scottish Opera would not employ him again. This was a terrible thing to do in Wexford, where Peter Ebert, son of Carl, who with Fritz Busch had been artistic founders of Glyndebourne, was very popular, having directed several operas there. I whispered to Jim that this would only make him look a fool and pulled him out, taking him to lunch at Carne, some miles away on the coast, to a seafood restaurant I knew. He was quite unpleasant over lunch, and this went on through the afternoon and evening, when we saw our last opera. Afterwards, back at the hotel, he wanted to make it up and called for champagne. I had to get up very early to drive to Dublin to catch a plane to London and did not want to drink any more. I accepted his apology and said that there were no hard feelings, although I wished he could control his drinking and his words with others, because it hurt him and embarrassed me. Then I went to bed. I never saw him again.

  I was in my New York office early in 1981 when I was told he was dead. I would have liked to have been at his funeral, but it was impossible. Sheila went for me. Eleanor was not allowed to sit anywhere except at the back of the church. She was frozen out by Jim’s wife and sons, and a week later was told to leave Huntley Hall. She found a small cottage in the hills and took to drinking.

  Jim had left some money with a publican in Milnathort for a wake. About a dozen locals and Sheila Colvin went to it. Huntley Hall, which I had given to Jim and on which he spent a fortune, with its music room, swimming pool, sauna and gold taps, was quickly sold off. His business soon folded as well, and his three sons all developed their own different careers. Jim was a difficult man – his mind a maelstrom of resentment, ambition, lust, kindness and generosity. Looking back among those I genuinely miss, I often think of Jim Fraser.

  * * *

  I have briefly mentioned my series of opera guides, about which I was organizing advance publicity at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1979. They were the brainchild of Nicholas John, an enthusiastic young man who worked for the English National Opera. The programmes he put together for them were full of fascinating pictures and articles about sources, related subjects and background material of the opera in question. He was the first employee of a British opera company to be given the title Dramaturge – which means, in effect, literary manager.

  His original idea was to put out a series of booklets about individual operas selling at about a pound, but I thought they would be much more valuable if they also included the libretto. We talked the project through and added other features. The first four English National Opera Guides came out in 1980 and were La Cenerentola, Aida, The Magic Flute and Fidelio, priced at £2.00 (UK) and $4.95 (USA). The ENO, as part of the deal, would buy 2,000 copies of each at half price for sale in the theatre and for their mailing list, which helped us to pay the printer promptly. In addition, they were designed by the ENO, who also provided all the editorial matter, especially commissioned by Nicholas John. We would give royalties to the opera company for this material (which they paid for directly), to the translator (we printed the original libretto facing the English translation) and to the music publisher if the opera was still in copyright. I also agreed a one-per-cent royalty to John himself as editor. This was later questioned by the ENO accountants, who felt that as John was getting an adequate salary from them and was doing this work in their time, any additional royalty should be going to them and not to him.

  The series was a success, and we continued to issue four new volumes at a time until we had more than thirty. It later became necessary to reprint the more popular opera guides, so that by then we often published two new ones with two reprints. The prices gradually went up with inflation, until they reached a price of £6.00 each, with some longer guides costing even more. Sometimes more than one opera was put into a volume, especially if the libretto was English, so Peter Grimes and Gloriana went together, four Tippett operas were published as The Operas of Michael Tippett and three Monteverdis were published together. There were also double volumes of operas by Richard Strauss, Janáček, and Stravinsky.

  We sold the guides in bookshops and music shops, as well as opera companies performing operas that were in our series. They soon became our most profitable publishing activity. I took them all over the US, put them into the San Francisco opera company, into smaller companies that I visited on my travels and into the Metropolitan Opera shop, where they sold in thousands.

  I went to operatic conventions to push them, especially Opera America, which was attended by all the main officers of American and Canadian opera companies. I met such old friends as Peter Hemmings and Thomson Smillie there, whom I knew from their earlier days with Scottish Opera and Wexford. I was occasionally put onto a panel on these occasions, as the organizers realized that I had seen more operas than anyone else who attended these conventions and knew a great deal about the subject.

  When Anne Taute decided to leave the company, we had a succession of office staff in New York, but none of them worked out. Then came Gary Pulsifer, an American who had been a member of the Writers and Readers Cooperative and had been brought back from London by Glenn Thompson. At first he filled in when Anne was with us, and took over all publicity and promotion, writing catalogue copy and press releases and answering our two telephones which rang constantly. Then he became office manager.

  Arlene was still with us, transferring orders to the warehouse by modem and doing other jobs, including much of the typing. Gary found a street Arab (his own word, but it was very apt) called Jason, who had been touting gadgets on the street, and we experimented giving him a job selling our books. I took him round, showed him how, and he was not bad, but very greedy, calculating his commission on each order that he brought in and wanting to be paid instantly. Eventually I got rid of him, but not before he had told Muriel Leyner that she would be better off with a virile young guy like himself than with an old man like me. I was then fifty-three.

  I had to make another West Coast trip and suggested to Muriel that she might like to accompany me. She was nervous about it, and asked advice from friends, who told her that I might well be a serial killer and she could disappear without trace. But she really wanted to go and assented. She flew to meet me in Vancouver and, once I had finished my business there, she drove down the coast with me as I sold the books of our group of publishers in Seattle, Portland, and the Californian towns.

  The reason I had picked that particular time, in July and August 1982, was that the Seattle Opera House were giving a Pacific North-West Festival, which included two Ring Cycles – the first in German, the second in English. We saw the German Götterdämmerung and then the whole series in English, spending two days in Portland in the middle. When I drove into the latter town, I found a hotel by instinct, not taking much notice of its name. We had dinner there, and went first thing the next morning to Powell’s, where I spent the whole day, selling my entire list successfully and even buying books that caught my eye to be sent back to me in New York. But then I could not remember where the hotel was or its name. I drove around looking, and then the car broke down. I found a garage to fix it – it was now early evening – and hunted through the list of hotels in the phone book. My fifth call was lucky. Muriel was frantic by then, not sure if I had decided to vanish or had had an accident.

  We went for a good dinner at Jake’s, a famous fish restaurant near Powell’s, recovered our equanimity with lobster and a good local wine, and the next morning I went around the other bookshops. But when I called for Muriel, she was unwell. She drove northward with me nevertheless, back to Seattle. On the way, we stopped at a small shack that did hamburgers and hot dogs, with a wonderful view of Mount St Helens, a snow-capped volcanic mountain. All she could swallow was tea and dry toast, while I chatted amiably to a large cow
boy type of man for a few minutes, I forget what about. Muriel was amazed that such dissimilar men could find anything to say to each other. That night I went to the opera on my own, because she still had a stomach upset.

  It was a successful sales trip down to San Diego and then across the Painted Desert inland towards Phoenix. At one point I was very worried when fuel ran low, and as far as I knew there was no habitation for many miles ahead. But with my alarm light showing, a shack appeared in the distance, and as I drew near I saw a fuel pump – and it worked!

  From Phoenix, we flew to Amarillo in Texas, where we found a motel that was infested with lice. Washing those off was no easy matter. It was a horrible town, kept alive by defence contractors and the armaments industry, and not good for selling my books. I never returned there. I did fairly well in the other towns of Texas – in Austin, San Antonio, Dallas and Houston – and then flew once again to Albuquerque, where I visited the shops I knew and then drove into the hills to Santa Fé. The rather simple cheap hotel that had not worried Julia Sweeney did worry Muriel, so we went to a better one in the centre.

  We stayed long enough to see five operas, The Marriage of Figaro, Mignon, Die Fledermaus, Die Liebe der Danae (which I was seeing for only the second time) and a new one, The Confidence Man by American composer George Rochberg, which brought my total to 509 (1884 performances). Only a few months earlier I had seen an opera with a very similar theme, Krenek’s What Price Confidence? in Nottingham.

  During the Eighties I travelled all over the US, each trip starting from a central point such as Cleveland or Denver or Austin, where I would arrive by air, hire a car and then either call on all the bookshops within a two-hundred-mile radius, returning at the end to the airport where I had arrived, or else drive more or less in a line and leave the car at the last town on the tour.

  In this way, I drove from Des Moines through Iowa to the main towns of Wisconsin, taking in Chicago and ending in Milwaukee, and on another occasion southward from Chicago through Kansas, Tennessee and Louisville, where I contacted Thomson Smillie, now running the opera there, happy with his standard of living, but not with the philistinism of local audiences.

  In Louisville I came for the first time across the Borders chain of bookshops, which were soon to spread across the United States. Then back to New York and then Britain.

  One regular call was Minneapolis, where the important B. Dalton chain had their headquarters. I would spend a day going from one buyer to another, each with his special subject, and present new titles, which were then ordered to be sent in varying quantities to the B. Dalton shops all over the country. I got to know the buyers well, usually having lunch with two or three of them in the middle of the day.

  Minneapolis also had a cultural life, but other than the Guthrie Theatre, where I saw a few theatrical performances, I had no time to get involved in it. I did particularly well at the university there, but there were several university shops, and they all took time. At one of them, Savron’s, which is now gone, I had great difficulty making a second appointment: the man finally agreed to see me, but for only a few minutes. When I came in, he said: “Oh, Mr Calder. The last time you described every book. It took a long time, and frankly I couldn’t sit through all that again.”

  “How did they sell?” I asked.

  “Oh, very well. But please, not all that again.”

  “Why not let me take the stock, see what you need and give you just what you would order anyway?”

  “Oh, would you do that? And not make me listen to you?”

  I had not realized that I could be such a bore, but to relieve him of it was good for my sales and saved time: from then on, he was friendly and gave me carte blanche, although I never took too much advantage.

  In neighbouring St Paul’s there were also good bookshops. One called The Hungry Horse had a big selection of poetry and was good for literature in general. It was a centre for local writers and had many public readings. There was a Lutheran seminary there with its own bookshop, a most unlikely customer for what I had to offer, but the manager was extremely interested in serious literature and bought surprising quantities. I suspect that he did not sell much, but wanted to support publishers like me, and either kept many of the books for himself or found some way to dispose of what he couldn’t sell. Others who called on him seemed to have the same experience. On each call we had a long talk about politics and the state of the world.

  I had my favourite bookshops all over the country, and by the middle Eighties had visited every state except Oklahoma, Alabama, Montana and Alaska as far as bookselling was concerned. But the trade was changing rapidly, and my best independent customers tended to disappear as the chains became ever more ruthless, and Crown Books was the worst of them. I made many friends by saying I would not sell to Crown. Their policy was to pick an area where a local bookshop had built up a regular clientele and find nearby premises which they would open just before Thanksgiving, offering a range of books, especially those most in demand, at heavy discounts. Even the most loyal customers could not resist: they might still go to the established bookshops for their more esoteric purchases, but the bread-and-butter best-seller sales, which enabled them to carry slower-selling titles, simply disappeared and, sooner or later, they would have to close. Then Crown would probably take over their shop, especially if the premises were attractive. Crown’s other tactic was to buy the lease from the landlord, whenever they could, and force them out that way. Other chains would soon start imitating them. If some of the independents had followed the example of Powell’s in Portland, they might have been able to evade that fate.

  Although in 1980 I had commission reps who were supposed to sell my books in most parts of the US, they really did very little. Yet, they still demanded a ten-per-cent commission on the territory they were meant to be covering, even for customer sales they had not originated themselves. I often had to drop them for lack of results.

  I went to two annual conferences in America every year, the ABA (American Booksellers Association), held in May, and the MLA (Modern Language Association), which was between Christmas and New Year. At each I had a stand to display my books, as in Frankfurt, and I had to be on it all day, sometimes with help, sometimes on my own.

  There was a Samuel Beckett Society at the MLA, and I would occasionally go to their sessions. I was sometimes asked myself to give a twenty-minute talk, but more often I was making points after the talks of others. Barney Rosset often went, but he stood outside the door, as he was afraid to be bored. Most of them were indeed boring, but I came to know the academics who taught Beckett that way.

  I was in Chicago at the ABA when the news came through that Henry Miller had died. Grove Press draped their stand with photographs of the author and with slogans proclaiming their championship of Miller, whom Barney Rosset had first read and admired as a schoolboy. He had fought many court cases to defend his novels at great legal cost to himself. But Henry Miller, along with D.H. Lawrence, had brought him his greatest fame, and no one had ever doubted his courage. Barney still had money, but was losing it fast, unable to put any brake on his expenses. Publishing books was probably the least of them.

  After Chicago I went to Boston and spent a day with Maurice Girodias. Some time previously I had seen him in New York, where, after his French bankruptcy, he had started an American Olympia. He had found a novel way of raising new capital: he had booked several round trips from Paris to New York, hoping to meet someone on the plane who would back him to start again, and on the third flight he was lucky enough to meet a printer whom he was able to convince to give him sufficient credit to start a new list. This became a mixture of books he had first commissioned in Paris and new authors he found in the States.

  On my previous meeting with him there, he had had a small office off Union Square, very untidy and chaotic. He must have had a secretary or assistant, but I never saw anyone other than himself. He was sleeping on a
mattress on the floor. He was then still enthusiastic about the States and his future prospects there. He enjoyed walking around New York and looking at the architecture, which he claimed no American ever noticed, but he did not like American wines: he lost no opportunity to denigrate them. In addition to publishing new erotic authors – Clarence Major was his biggest discovery at the time – he had taken on a number of controversial political titles, as he had always done to his cost in France. He now had similar and catastrophic experiences in New York.

  Maurice had published a scatological novel in which Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, was the principal character, and he was sued for libel. But his downfall came when he was arrested by the FBI for being in possession of drugs. He always claimed they had been planted, although I know some, including his brother, thought otherwise. Personally I had never in any way associated Maurice with drugs. Because of the various charges that were then brought against him, he was ordered to be deported. He managed to get a stay by marrying an American, Lilla Lyon, a member of the well-known Boston Cabot family, who was studying medicine. The publishing company went into bankruptcy, and soon after Maurice moved to Boston, where Lilla was now an intern in the local hospital.

  This was his situation when I met him in Boston. He had spent several months writing his book of memoirs, the same one that he had contracted in Frankfurt several years earlier. He intended to take the bus to New York (the cheapest means of travel in America) the following week to see publishers. He already had a tentative offer from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which he intended to use as a bargaining counter to get a higher offer from someone else. I told him not to be a fool: FSG were good and serious publishers of literature, and he could not do better, but as usual he ignored me. He eventually went to Crown Publishers, who sold it badly and quickly remaindered it.