Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Two other people I saw much of at this time were Dougald McMillan and Martha Fehsenfeld. They both lived in Chapel Hill, where Dougald was a rather eccentric Professor of Literature, having once been a star pupil of Richard Ellmann when the latter was teaching at Northwestern University in Chicago. As an academic, he was very like Ellmann, infatuated with the world of James Joyce and of Beckett, his natural follower. Once, when I called on Maria Jolas in Paris, she had given me a manuscript, a history of Transition, that she and her husband had edited. I read it and instantly gave the author, who was Dougald McMillan, a contract, and sold it fairly well. I saw Dougald, who I liked immensely – a genuinely enthusiastic scholar – quite frequently both in Paris and London. He loved the theatre, and during a run of Barrault’s superbly imaginative production of Le Livre de Christophe Colomb, had gone back to see it repeatedly, saying it was the best performance he had ever attended in his life.

  Martha was an academic. She wanted to be an actress, and was like Dougald besotted with Beckett. I eventually commissioned the two of them to write an analysis of Beckett’s plays for me, based on historical productions. While this was being written by Dougald, with Martha doing most of the research, I went frequently to Chapel Hill, both to sell books and see the authors. I discovered that Dougald McMillan’s eccentricities consisted chiefly in not allowing anything to divert him from any new enterprise that caught his imagination. He started a restaurant in an old railway wagon that could never have made him a penny and he launched a local publishing company that never published anything in line with his real literary interests. He published some mediocre books about local history, as well as some right-wing diatribes by Southern American crackpots, not because he was personally right-wing, but because he believed that the country was full of right-wing fanatics who would buy them and yield him a big profit. All he ever got back was a series of lawsuits for publishing books that he was paid to bring out. His gifts as a teacher were legendary in Chapel Hill, and as an academic he knew how to research a subject or an author and write interestingly, but he frittered away his talents with schemes that lost him money. I discovered that he had inherited a large amount of forest land and that he was always having great swathes of it cut down to pay for his latest folly. He had a house on the shores of Lake Michigan, where I paid him a visit one summer. Dougald was much overweight, a compulsive fast-food eater, and watching him being pulled through the air by a motorboat attached to a kite-like device was an unforgettably comic sight. I declined to do more than swim myself.

  One afternoon, I was working on the manuscript of Beckett in the Theatre with Dougald in his house in Chapel Hill when there was an electric storm that put all the lights out. We had just finished the chapter on Krapp’s Last Tape, about halfway through a very large manuscript. It was about six o’clock, and I did not feel like continuing by candlelight. Also, it was his co-author Martha’s birthday, and we were invited to her house for dinner. “That’s it,” I declared. “We’ll make it two volumes, and the first ends here.” We went to dinner at Martha’s, where inevitably the conversation was all about Beckett. “If you don’t change the subject, I shall leave,” said Dougald’s wife. “I’ve had enough of Beckett, and I’ll scream if you don’t stop.” She was right of course.

  Unfortunately, soon afterwards he broke up with his wife. Dougald had all his written material, except what I had taken away with me on that last visit, removed and kept by her. The first volume was published in 1988. His wife had all the discs, not only of the second half of Beckett in the Theatre, but of another book I had commissioned from him, a biography of Hugh MacDiarmid. For the latter, he had spent a year in Scotland doing research, sending his daughter to school in Edinburgh (which she liked so much that she returned there as an adult), and completing most of the book in that time. His co-author, who provided much of the material, was Michael Grieve, MacDiarmid’s journalist son, whom I also knew well. There were problems in publishing the book, because MacDiarmid had led a fairly wild life at one point, giving syphilis to many women, as Dougald discovered. He also unearthed much plagiarism: MacDiarmid did not know all the languages that he claimed to read, and made much use of existing translations. There were also other unsavoury facts that would have made trouble for his widow Valda and that his son would wish to suppress. For this reason, I had been in no hurry to publish it, and the entire manuscript remained in Dougald’s wife’s computer.

  Martha Fehsenfeld was engaged to do Beckett’s Happy Days at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in New York. I had had a long relationship with this theatre, run by and subsidized by a successful dress designer called Ellen Stewart, and she was “La Mama”, so named by the company. I had known them in the Sixties in Britain, when I represented her company and contracted them with Michael White to perform Paul Foster’s play Tom Paine, at the Edinburgh Festival and the Gaity Theatre in London.33 Now La MaMa, just off the Bowery, was mainly rented out to others. I do not know who produced Fehsenfeld’s Happy Days. I have seen the play with different actresses, and Martha’s was strange, with some odd line deliveries. She claimed was the way Sam wanted them delivered, but I could not believe this: they sounded too odd.

  After the first night, there was a pleasant gathering of Beckett fans in Pheobe’s, a bar and restaurant that catered to local artists and performers. Martin Esslin, who was present, was trying to detach himself from the various rival Beckett factions, who were more vociferous and antagonistic in the US than in Britain. Martin was now teaching at American universities, mainly at Berkeley, just south of San Francisco. I was occasionally invited to speak there to his theatrical seminar when I was in California. He often, when I met him in New York or elsewhere, had one of his students with him: on this occasion it was an Australian girl. She asked me to look her up when next in Sydney – which was, I think, later that year. Martin remained rather aloof from the quibbling rivalries of Beckett academics and maintained a balanced position. The only subject on which we disagreed was politics: he had swallowed the whole American ideology of success and money. He was comfortable in a world where his status meant receiving free computers and other perks from educational suppliers and listening to diatribes from colleagues against the evils of socialism and welfare governments. This in no way prevented him from teaching the theories of Marx and Freud, Lenin and Lukács, as well as the great writers of the last two centuries. He was an adviser to the Magic Theatre in San Francisco, whose director often came to his seminars to learn, and to other theatres in the Bay area as well. I would meet him frequently at the ABA conferences held in different cities and on my travels around America.

  Jack Garfein treated Esslin as a guru and used him to verify the information he received from others, including Schneider and myself. I came to know all the actors associated with the Clurman Theatre, such as Alvin Epstein, who played several Beckett parts and who performed an evening with a German actress-singer, much like the Brecht-Weill show that Bettina had been performing ever since Happy End. I suggested to Garfein an evening of Molloy, broken up between two actors, and gave him a script I had prepared. He then showed it to Epstein, and I never saw it again; the matter was just dropped without any decision being made.

  Warrilow was much around the theatre, playing some Beckett parts. He was, like many actors, an alcoholic who could control his drinking when he was acting. When I first knew him, I had no inkling of his weakness. When, on one occasion, Garfein gave a late night party in his penthouse apartment, all alcohol had to be out of sight before Warrilow arrived after his performance, a totally misconceived gesture given his self-control. Once, in Paris, I went with Tom Bishop to see him perform in Marat/Sade, where he played Marat. Afterwards, we all went to the Brasserie Lipp, where, asked by Sheila Colvin as to how he had mastered French well enough to perform in the language, he simply replied, “I just worked very hard.” He drank a glass or two of wine on that occasion, but never took too much, and in the next few years, when I often saw hi
m on stage, sometimes in parts that involved great feats of memory, he was always in perfect control. In all the time I knew him, nothing was allowed to get in the way of his determination to be “the best”.

  * * *

  The changes in the New York office had been far too frequent after the departure of Anne Taute and later Gary Pulsifer, and finally I had an idea which turned out well. I had known Claudia Menza for many years. She had worked for fourteen of them for Barney Rosset at Grove Press, and that alone was a unique qualification. I have said much about Barney’s eccentricities, but not about his vagaries as an employer. He changed his mind from day to day, forgot what he had said previously or what instructions he had given even hours earlier, and nothing was ever his fault. His employees had to change direction whichever way the wind blew, and he would shout at them in a fury if they argued with him. Barney really did no work himself: he would sit in a chair with the television set on, reading a pornographic magazine and drinking either wine, beer or rum-and-coke; this would start when he got to the office, by which time he had already had a beer or two to start the day. For Claudia to have survived fourteen years of being shouted at and accused of being always in the wrong, even when carrying out Barney’s exact instructions, was a real feat.

  Claudia had left Grove to start her own literary agency, which she ran from home. At some chance meeting, I asked her if she would be willing to run my office and her agency from there at the same time. I would pay her for two thirds of her time, give her free rent and use of telephone for her agency, which would take up the other third of her time. She agreed to the arrangement, and it worked well for a number of years. She was efficient and gave me the necessary backing, leaving me free to go out and sell. I did all the selling now, all the publicity, editorial work and accounts, with Claudia backing me up in the office.

  I went to an ABA conference in a southern town, where I ran into John Pizey, Grove Press’s one-time sales manager. I had various memories of Pizey. He was English and had worked for the British Book Centre, which had been started by Peter Baker and later taken over by Robert Maxwell after it had gone into bankruptcy. He then became a nationwide salesman for Penguin Books. He was successful in the job, and was poached by Barney Rosset. Pizey knew what Barney liked – which among other things was spending money – and he treated himself to the best hotels and restaurants on expenses. My previous meeting with him had been at the Pump Room of the best hotel in Chicago, perhaps the most expensive restaurant in town, where he had treated me to a sumptuous meal. Now he was out of a job and looking for a new opportunity. He was living in New Hampshire, had married a second time and had two families, three teenagers by the first marriage and a toddler by his new wife. He attached himself to me at the ABA conference and came to see me again in New York. I remember that our British accents had greatly impressed the southern ladies sitting with us at table at the final ABA dinner. “Just like Masterpiece Theatre,” they chorused.

  I had sold a few books, especially opera guides, to Macmillan’s Music Book Club, and was dismayed to hear that it was to be discontinued along with two of their other book clubs. This interested Pizey, who suggested that we might buy the three, the other two being a History Book Club and a “Birding” one, that is a book club devoted to bird lovers. We looked into it and decided to make an offer if we could raise the money. Riverrun Press was banking with the European American Bank, and I had become friendly with one of the officers, Ian Aitken, a Scot like me. We also spoke to Jack Berger, who was interested in investing, but as the bank was willing to give us all we needed we decided to proceed without him. John Pizey then found a warehouse near his home in Dover, New Hampshire, where we could hold the stocks of the bookclubs and where, with considerable relief, I also moved my own stock of books.

  At first everything went well, but John Pizey was in charge, and increasingly I found that his last priority was getting my books out: his only interest was in the book clubs. Every book I had on music went into the club, but getting paid for them was another matter. I negotiated a good deal with the Metropolitan Opera Guild, whereby membership in the Music Book Club was advertised in their big annual gift brochure in exchange for books supplied to them and some services, and I contributed several ideas, but the word started to go round the staff that “we were not going to make it”.

  Little by little, things began to go wrong. In the end, I was forced to agree a long-term repayment schedule with EAB bank. As far as I was concerned, bankruptcy was not an option I was willing to contemplate.

  Jimmy Ball, bringing Yvonne with him, came to New York to help the negotiation with the EAB, a bank that had suddenly turned nasty on me. I had a New York Civil Rights lawyer called Leonard Weinglass who had started the negotiation, but Jimmy was a chess player, and he put up a façade that impressed the other lawyers. He took quick offence in a way that made the other side apologize. This instantly put them at a disadvantage. Once having cooked a deal, Jimmy got Len to telephone to say it was all off, which eventually led to more negotiation and a better deal. This earned me a long delay in payment. As I was expecting some money from Canada when my mother’s generation were to be all gone, that became the long-term security. As part of the tying-up, Jimmy and I had to go to Montreal for a day. This greatly worried Yvonne, who was sure he would get into some mischief with me out of her sight. I had not realized before that Jimmy lost few opportunities to make a pass at any attentive female, and Yvonne was well aware of it.

  As a temporary measure, I moved my books away from Dover to Merrimac, a distributor in Massachusetts that was selling the books of Marion Boyars. I went to see Michael Bessie, a prestigious figure in New York publishing, who had sold Athenaeum Press, founded by him in the Fifties, to Harper and Row. Together with his wife, he was at the time publishing a specialized literary list under their umbrella. Mike was unable to persuade his company to take me on, but he sent me to Eric Kampmann, a former salesman of theirs, who had set up a distribution company to sell for a number of different smaller publishers. Then our series of warehouse disasters began to fall into a pattern.

  * * *

  Bill Colleran had a son, Marcus, whose mother – Bill’s first wife – was Dutch. He was interested in working in the US, so I imported him to go around the whole country and sell my books. Marcus was very tall, very good-looking and personable, and I was sure that he would be an impressive salesman for me. For two weeks we stayed in New York, and he occupied Muriel Leyner’s couch. It was originally intended for him to stay with an old girlfriend of Bill’s, but she asked a large rent which I could not afford. After taking him around New York bookshops, we set off together for Des Moines.

  It was a Sunday, and we had lunch in New York before flying. Unfortunately Marcus opened the car window and never closed it, so everything he had in the car was stolen, including a large manuscript I was editing. This was the Collected Writings of René Magritte, translated from French by Jo Levy. I had spent many months editing the translation of about four hundred pages. It was never found by the police. It would have taken me months, given the pressures on my time just then, to go over all that work again. The French publishers soon withdrew rights altogether because of the delay, as the book was already two years overdue. It would have been a steady backlist seller, and I still remember my despair at the loss occasioned by the open window. I was to have other such losses in the future.

  With some replacement clothes, but without the Walkman and tapes that Marcus had brought to lighten his travels, we sold our way from Des Moines through Iowa City and other towns on our way to Chicago. In New York I had asked Marcus to produce his driving licence when we were hiring a car, but he said he did not have it on him. In Des Moines he admitted that he did not have one and had driven for years in the Netherlands without one. As there was no way he could rent a car without a driving licence, he took a test in Des Moines, but failed the theory. In Chicago the bureaucratic regulations for a non-resi
dent made it impossible for him to get one, so I had to send him back to New York and then Amsterdam, telling him not to come back until he had a valid driving licence, while I finished the trip on my own.

  After that, Marcus Colleran got on quite well, becoming friendly with Stuart Abraham in Chicago, where he eventually made his base, travelling from there all over the country. It was expensive to have a full-time salesman selling only my own list, but by now we had left Kampmann and there were only the two of us to cover the entire United States – while I, of course, also had to spend time in both offices, travel round British towns and keep all my European contacts going as well. Then Marcus fell in love with an American girl called Jackie, and they married. She too was selling books, but she did not want Marcus, with his astonishing good looks, to be constantly meeting new people. And to take him out of the path of temptation, she made him give up his job and stay in her home town, Atlanta, where he found a job at the Oxford Book Company, the biggest bookshop there. On my various travels I met him occasionally in Atlanta.

  Many amusing incidents occurred during my many odysseys around the US. I would encounter many attitudes, the worst often from feminist bookshops. There was one in Los Angeles, which I visited at least once a year, which would take nothing by a man, but ordered most books by female authors. I had a very sensitive novel by Harry Mulisch, Two Women, about a female relationship, which was always turned down because “No man can understand women well enough to write about them”. Tired of hearing this, I chanced my luck one day and told them, in utmost secrecy, that Harry was in fact Harriet. It was very difficult for a woman to get published in Holland, so she had to take a man’s name. This could not have been further from the truth, but they believed me and ordered the book. Within a week of arrival, they had ordered more copies, and in the end the shop sold hundreds. The “secret” they had solemnly promised to keep was of course all over Los Angeles, and I hope they never discovered the truth.