by John Calder
We had a long and boozy lunch. I picked him up at Lilla’s apartment, but never saw her. She was working very hard at the hospital and had to spend most of her nights as well as her days there. Although for Maurice it was a marriage of convenience, which enabled him to stay longer in the US, there was real love between them, and they remained very attached to each other through all his coming vicissitudes.
We talked in French for four hours in a little restaurant in the port, scandalizing the waitress by drinking three bottles of wine and following it with brandy. He was tired of America by now, bored by his poverty in Boston and his total reliance on Lilla, but hopeful that his book – he had left the manuscript to be photocopied on our way to the restaurant – would restore his fortunes.
I have never known a more Panglossian optimist than Maurice Girodias, always living in a golden tomorrow about to be brought into being by his latest plan, idea or project. “C’est sûr,” he would say. “Cette fois il n’y a aucune possibilité d’un échec.” He never took my advice – nor did he take the counsel of his very competent American lawyer, Leon Friedman, who liked him and did everything possible to help him, but to no avail. “I have never had any client,” Friedman told me later, “who always, quite deliberately, did the exact opposite of what I told him to do, except Maurice Girodias.”
I found a hotel in Boston and went to bed at seven o’clock. I was in any case tired after the ABA in Chicago, and the liquid drunk at lunch made an early and long night imperative.
Not long after going to New York to try and sell his book, needing an eye operation that he could not afford in America, he returned to France. I was to see him again there throughout the Eighties.
* * *
Some of my sales trips were to Canada. In the days of Calder and Boyars, we had had a series of different Canadian distributors who stocked and sold our books there, varying from the largest Canadian publishing companies to the smallest, but we had always found Canada a poor market. Now I moved my books to Brian Donat, son of the actor Robert Donat, and we became friends. I stayed with him and his family when in Toronto – he lived outside the town – and he often slept on a couch in my Sixteenth Street apartment during his frequent visits to New York.
In Canada he represented mainly university presses, both British and American. At first he had Marion Boyars’s list as well as mine to sell, but in the early Eighties he dropped her. I made several sales trips with him, travelling in his car around the bookshops of Southern Ontario. He found it very boring listening to me doing my sales pitch to booksellers, and would go away to drink coffee while I talked, coming back later to sell his other books. I travelled with him once to the East Coast, stopping in Montreal and Sherbrooke, even passing my old school, but without seeing it, and on to Halifax and other towns in the Maritime Provinces, and then to Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.
In Halifax there was a local book fair. The reps of different publishers set up displays of their books in their hotel rooms, and booksellers went from one to the other giving orders for what was on offer. These trips with Brian were instructive, but I cannot pretend I enjoyed them: I liked Brian, but he was rather heavy-going, and he really did not trust my books to sell in his market. I took good orders, but he cut them down, fearful that the returns would be too high. What he really liked were orders from public and university libraries, because those were always paid for and never returned.
I had one unusual experience when, at the beginning of a trip from London, when I had several destinations on my itinerary, the plane that should have gone to Montreal was diverted to Toronto. The man sitting next to me persuaded me to spend the night in Waterloo, his home town, because it was near to the airport, and he told me I could do good business there. He left me in a motel, picked me up the next morning, showed me around the town and took me to a sandwich lunch at the university restaurant. I have long forgotten his name, but he was a real character, a mythomaniac living an imaginary life. It was only in the afternoon, as things slipped out, that I realized what he really was. He had been an undertaker and was now trying to get some new enterprise off the ground. What it was I cannot remember, but it was soon obvious enough that he had some impossible dream in which he had involved others. They all knew it was a dream, though.
I met a man with him who joined us for lunch. He had worked at some point in the same undertaking business, from which my new friend had apparently been fired, as well as a girl, currently a primary school teacher, who was to be his assistant in his new dream-business. His wife, he told me, thought he was crazy and gave him no encouragement. He constantly produced one-page printed leaflets for me to read, which at first I thought had been written by him, when in fact they were passages that had caught his eye out of self-help or inspirational books he had read.
I had originally intended to go to Toronto after Montreal, but I settled my Montreal business by telephone and then noticed that some short plays by Beckett were opening that night at the University Theatre in Toronto, directed by Alan Schneider. My new friend drove me in and was willing to go to the plays if seats were available. They weren’t, but I found Alan Schneider backstage, and he gave us two house seats.
It was a strange evening with three very short Beckett plays, followed by three very long ones by Francis Warner, an Oxford don, of whom I had heard, as he was one of the many academics who were taking an interest in Beckett’s work at the time. He had a project to build a theatre with Beckett’s name under the quadrangle of St Peter’s College in Oxford, and he had involved Buckminster Fuller as the architect. I learnt from Alan that part of the motivation behind the present production of six plays was to publicize the scheme and raise money for it; the other part was obviously to promote the career of Francis Warner as a playwright. It turned out to be a long evening, with the three Beckett plays over in half an hour and the three by Warner running to something like two and a half. Afterwards, I met him and his very pretty girlfriend, who was also at St Peter’s and writing a thesis on Artaud. We were then taken to a party given by Al Lattner, and this was a very strange experience altogether.
Al Lattner was a Toronto property dealer, obviously very successful. I was told much about him by Alan Schneider and the London art critic John Russell, who was also at the party. Toronto was undergoing a boom, and Lattner was spreading his wings, not just in business, but in cultural matters as well, much in imitation of his mentor, who had recently died, a much-admired builder and philanthropist called Emmanuel Zacks. Lattner’s house was very luxurious and had a large, well-heated indoor swimming pool, basically an extension of the drawing room. Steam was constantly rising from the water. Around the walls of the pool, as around the walls of all the other rooms, valuable paintings were hanging – some modern, some old masters. I met Sorel Etrog at that party, I think for the first time. Sorel was a Romanian-born artist, mainly a sculptor, living in Toronto and just then much in vogue because of the building boom. Many of the new edifices going up – banks, office blocks and civic structures – had large sculptures by Etrog standing outside them to catch the eye or to decorate the lobbies. He knew Beckett and admired him enormously. He attached himself to me for the rest of the party, urging me to be less modest and to blow my horn a little louder. “You have to be seen to be part of what is going on right now,” he said. Just how I was supposed to do this was not clear, except perhaps to be conspicuously seen at every fashionable gathering and to put a price on my presence.
My much overawed friend drove back to Waterloo, and I found a hotel in Toronto. On television the following evening I saw Francis Warner being interviewed about his plans for a Samuel Beckett Theatre in Oxford. Then, the next morning, I continued my trip, selling books, if I remember right, through the towns of Ohio and in Chicago.
At one of Suzel de Maisonneuve’s parties in London, I had met an obviously affluent American lady from Chicago – it was of course on another occasion – and told her I wou
ld be in her city in a few days. She asked me to phone when I arrived. That was my first visit to an MLA conference, so it must have been in the very early Eighties or even earlier. I was to meet Jim Knowlson and John Pilling there, because there was some special Beckett meeting taking place among the academics.
Knowlson was then editing the Journal of Beckett Studies, which I had agreed to publish some time earlier. It appeared two or three times a year, and he and Pilling, both teaching at Reading University, had collaborated on a book about Beckett’s later writings entitled Frescoes of the Skull. On my second day in Chicago, I was invited to a party by the lady I had met in London, which familiarized me with the grander stretch of the city’s lake shore overlooked by her apartment. Later I was to get to know many of the other, to me more interesting, areas of the city.
I had known Jim Knowlson for some time, and had been a speaker at the first of several Beckett conferences that he organized at the university of Reading, which later was to house a large collection of Beckettiana. I had once spent an evening with Jim and Girodias in Paris in Chez Vodka, the Russian nightclub to which Girodias’s old friends from La Grande Séverine had moved. As we had brought Maurice with us, we were made especially welcome, and Jim had one of the best nights of his life, seeing a side of Paris that few academics ever did and ending in the early morning, with half the clientele singing Russian songs. Now in Chicago, not knowing the dangers of people walking around that city alone at night, he went out on his first night to explore the night life and lived through it uneventfully enough to be told the next morning of all the terrible things that might have happened to him.
There was a large meeting in a conference room of about thirty Beckett-minded scholars, mainly American, some British – a very disparate group of men. I do not remember any women. It was chaired by Calvin Israel, who I heard claim an intimacy with Beckett that was highly unlikely, including dinner with him and Suzanne, the latter having made the meal.
The meeting was partly called to hear a young man, who started by admitting his fury at never having met the master or having had the opportunity, as he assumed others had, of being told things about his work by him. (Beckett hated discussing his work, saying he was not a critic, and usually refused to answer any but the most obvious questions put to him.) He wanted the approval of the others to his project, which was to digitize Beckett’s work to find the preponderance of some particular key words. This would help his academic standing, he obviously thought, but amused glances were exchanged. “You can have the happy part,” he pleaded. “Let me do the unhappy side of it.”
Hundreds of academics had by now latched onto Sam and were writing books about him, teaching him, building their reputations on him. They were already splitting into factions, wildly jealous of each other, counting up the number of times they had seen him or he had answered their letters. They all wanted to be seen to be more intimate with him than the others, and they exaggerated wildly. Poor Sam, having already to give much of his time to translating himself from French to English or vice versa, and to work with his German translator, also found himself obliged to answer hundreds of letters and constantly meet visitors to Paris – often people who simply wanted to be able to say that they knew him. He did this with courtesy and a military schedule, always punctual and allowing exactly as much time as he had planned, usually half an hour.
Sam was also unwittingly roped into impressing or at least meeting people in order to further the careers of others. Francis Warner was always on the lookout for people with money to finance his proposed theatre under St Peter’s College.
One American academic who came to Paris to meet Beckett was Stanley Gontarski, probably in 1980. Beckett made an appointment to meet him and his wife Marsha in a café. Gontarski was so nervous about meeting the great man that he hardly closed his eyes all night. When Beckett arrived, promptly on time as usual, Gontarski found he had lost his voice and was unable to get a word out. Sam asked him if he would like a beer, saying he would have one himself, and all the poor man could do was nod his head. Three beers were ordered. When they had drunk them, Gontarski was still speechless. Beckett stood up and said, “Well, I’m sorry you’re not feeling well, Professor Gontarski. Perhaps we’ll talk more another time.” He paid for the drinks and left.
Once back at his university, which was the State University in Columbus, Ohio, Gontarski wrote to Beckett to apologize and to say that he had no idea what had come over him. He went on to say that he was organizing a Beckett conference at his university and asked if there might possibly be some small unpublished text that could be read at it. Sam then did something quite extraordinary: he sent Stanley Gontarski a brand-new play entitled Ohio Impromptu. It was the only time he had ever given a place name to a play, and the “impromptu” had nothing to do with Ohio, nor was anything about it impromptu except probably the impulse to send it to Gontarski for its world premiere. The conference went ahead in May 1981, and I was one of the large number of people who were invited to attend.
We were housed in a big hotel overlooking the campus of one of the largest universities in the United States. Many academics were there to give talks, but the centre of the whole event was the play, which was performed by David Warrilow and Rand Mitchell; Alan Schneider was there to direct it. In my three days in Columbus, I took some good sales from the two university bookshops and some shops in the town, sat through the conference, gave a little lunchtime talk myself where, on an impulse and from memory, I gave a rendering of Vladimir’s speech as dramatically and as well as I could in direct imitation of Nicol Williamson’s delivery. It went down extremely well.
The premiere of Ohio Impromptu, given only one performance, was a special occasion, and everyone felt privileged to be there: it belonged to what I call Sam’s “ghost period”, in which remembered loves and friends come back to haunt his memory. Suggested or imagined ghosts played a large part in Beckett’s writings of the period, both in his stage plays and those he wrote for television. There is a ghost of a sort in Ill Seen Ill Said, which I was publishing around that time. It was a way of symbolically extending the brief span of human life: memories that live on become ghosts of the persons remembered – one more in the chain of theatrical and literary conceits that Beckett had invented during the course of his career.
It was a fascinating play, soon to join the repertoire of short Beckett works that were filling Jack Garfein’s Clurman Theatre in New York. For Gontarski to have been handed such a jewel was to put his name into theatrical history, and Sam, of course, knew that. What a recompense for an embarrassing incident! I reviewed the play for the Guardian in London, telling the story about the Paris meeting. I knew about it from the accounts of the two protagonists, which differed hardly at all, except that twenty years later Stanley told me that he had in the event been able to get out a few words.
A new charter airline had just started to operate that week, and a large group of attendees to the conference had booked to be on the first ever flight of People’s Express. It flew from Newark, in New Jersey. Critics and other theatrical notables had travelled to Columbus for the performance, and on the plane back someone joked that the New York theatre would be immeasurably poorer if we crashed. I think it was on that occasion that I first met Warrilow. He was an English actor who had started Mabou Mines as an experimental New York theatre company. Having also worked in France in several capacities, he was bilingual and also performed in French. He was less known in England, and later more in Paris, where he would be prominent in performing Beckett and Pinget for the next decade. I shared a taxi with the actors into New York from Newark. It was good to renew my friendship with Schneider, and I saw him fairly frequently in New York through the early Eighties.
Jack Garfein, who had been to my 1963 Drama Conference, was now running two adjoining theatres off Broadway, where he had found a growing audience for Beckett’s short late plays, all of which Alan Schneider negotiated with the autho
r and directed for Garfein, who had not been very successful in Hollywood. He was now divorced from Carroll Baker, who had written a biographical book that was far from complimentary about him. Still, he was doing good theatre, thanks to Schneider, who often voiced his doubts to me privately but persevered. Beckett was sympathetic, because he knew that Jack Garfein was an Auschwitz survivor, but when at one point Beckett refused some contract and Garfein threatened to sue him, he too broke off direct contact. Alan told me that on several occasions he had come close to breaking with Garfein, and was always on the point of writing to Beckett to explain his feelings, but never did, because after all there was no one else who would allow him to mount one series of Beckett plays after another as he was then doing. The runs of the plays became longer as the public wanting to see them grew.
I went to the Clurman Theatre frequently. I had lunches and dinners in fashionable restaurants with Garfein, who perhaps thought me a bigger fish than I was, and I sometimes brought Muriel Leyner with me. He liked to meet intellectuals, and there were occasional public discussions in the theatre when Tom Bishop, Martin Esslin, Ruby Cohn and others associated in some way with Beckett would take part, including myself. I came to know people involved in various projects: Everett Frost, for instance, who was re-recording some of the radio plays, and another strange character called John Reilly, who was making a documentary about Beckett with money from the National Foundation for the Arts in Washington. Every year he requested and received more money, but the documentary never seemed to make much progress. I was interviewed for it, but Reilly’s questions were not very apt, and I had to evade them and talk on to say something that might interest the potential viewer. Barney was much in Reilly’s pocket, as he was now very broke and borrowing money where he could. Reilly was able to get valuable introductions through Barney to people who could help him.