Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Talking of Harry, my relations with him became strained. I was asked to go to Amsterdam to sign a contract for his new novel The Attack. I spent a pleasant day there with him and the Dutch Literary Agency, whose director was a good friend, and ate a rijsttafel with Harry, who was recovering from a stomach operation: he could only eat very little several times a day. An American publisher, Pantheon, run by André Schiffrin, was also interested, but not committed. Schiffrin was a man with whom I had several quarrels. Running a subsidiary of Random House, he had the benefit of their unlimited cheque book to make the highest offer for a book. But he did not have to take the personal responsibility for its success. His speciality was to go after authors that had been established by smaller publishers, which meant he was buying an existing reputation, not making his own discoveries. Harry did not want to lose the chance of having a big American publisher, but I told him that these days, with a shrinking British market and copyright restrictions being largely ignored by the Americans, I had to have the World English market or nothing. Harry finally agreed, and the contract was meant to follow. It never did, and eventually he signed with Schiffrin, so I backed out. He had asked me why the book could not appear under a joint imprint in both countries. I told him that publishers did not work that way. I had published Two Women and three of Harry’s novellas in my New Writing and Writers series – wonderful stories, which I had intended to put together later in a single volume, but never did after that. The Attack, a wartime novel, was badly translated by Pantheon: it was said that the SD (the Nazi intelligence agency) had become the Social Democrats in their version. I should mention that in the Fifties I had known the founder of Pantheon, Kurt Wolff, one of the original German expressionist publishers and a contemporary of Ernst Rowohlt, Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt’s father. Wolff was a gentle man, who had encouraged me as a young publisher on my early visits to New York, where as a refugee from the Nazis he was much frustrated by American unwillingness to publish quality authors just for their own sake. His article in a book I published in English, translated from German, Paul Raabe’s anthology of The Era of German Expressionism, is a little masterpiece. Entitled “How Do Publishers and Authors Meet?”, it is a practical guide to what a publisher has to do to get started, told with insight and much humour. He was a man I always wished I could have known better. He was tragically run over by a lorry in Ludwigsburg in 1963.

  * * *

  At the Frankfurt Book Fair in the mid Eighties, talking to Russian publishers, I heard about an author who was then having a great success in their country. He had written a John le Carré-type spy novel called Tass Is Authorised to Announce… where the hero is a KGB man in constant conflict with the CIA. It had been made into a television series which was so successful that on the nights it was shown the streets of Moscow and Leningrad – and no doubt other towns as well – were empty as people were glued to their television sets. I made enquiries, traced the author, contracted English-language rights to the novel through the official Soviet literary agency and found a young Englishman who had lived in Moscow called Charles Buxton to translate it for me. The author was Julian Semyonov, and I invited him to come to London and New York to help promote the English translation, which appeared in late 1987, first in England and a month later in the States.

  Julian arrived in London, and I put him up at the Imperial Hotel in Russell Square, where in earlier years I would go to sweat in their Turkish steam and sauna baths – a magnificent series of tiled caverns, now gone. There was a signing party in Collet’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road, which was well attended. During the event, Julian constantly referred to me as his “owner”. I then held a press conference at the Caledonian Club, followed by a lunch. At the signing, Semyonov, Charles Buxton and I fielded many questions about the Cold War, which was about to end, the situation of spy fiction and the current politics of the Soviet Union. This was the period of Glasnost: Gorbachev was carrying out major liberal reforms without trying to break up the Soviet system, encountering much opposition from old-line Communist officials and Party members, who were afraid of losing their privileges. Semyonov was a good friend of Gorbachev, and had appeared on platforms with him. Once, when Gorbachev was talking of economic co-operation with the West and Semyonov had asked “What about cultural co-operation?”, the Soviet premier had told him publicly that that was his job. Certainly Julian Semyonov was the most popular and biggest-selling author in the Soviet Union at the time he came to me.

  Andropov, Gorbachev’s predecessor, only a short time in office before he died of cancer, was the man behind Tass Is Authorised. He had telephoned Julian one day and asked him to come to his office. He was head of the KGB, not yet of the government. The author had gone with considerable nervousness to the meeting, wondering what he had done wrong. He was, at the time, a successful crime writer who had been on many journalistic assignments for the official news agency Tass. These had included polar expeditions, journeys to Cuba and South America and interviews with Che Guevara. He had also covered the Vietnam War from the Viet Cong side, having walked the whole Ho Chi Minh trail. He was told by Andropov that what was needed was a Russian fictional hero, an equivalent of James Bond or Le Carré’s George Smiley, to interest the Russian reading public, which was becoming familiar with western political thrillers. These always depicted MI5 and MI6 – and CIA operatives – in a favourable light, and the KGB as villains. Could he write such pro-Soviet political equivalents? He was willing to give Semyonov access to KGB files to help him.

  Julian said yes, he would do it, but he did not want to know anything too secret, in case something leaked out that might get him into trouble. The result was Tass Is Authorised. It had become a monumental success, and the TV series, which is meant to take place in an African republic, where a popular socialist regime is being undermined by the CIA, was filmed in Cuba. Semyonov’s face was recognizable at home from many television appearances, and he was a household name. Politically he was loyal to his country, but like Gorbachev he was a liberal and a reformer. I was to spend the next month with him, and we became good friends.

  The lunch at the Caledonian Club was a great success. At the last minute I invited the Observer reporter, who had been at the press conference, to stay on, and he gave us a main article on the back page of the Arts section. The twenty people present included Orlov, a cultural attaché from the Russian Embassy, Bill Webb from the Guardian, at that time especially interested in the politics of Eastern Europe, various literary editors, political-leader writers and potential reviewers. There was much discussion of the Gorbachev reforms and speculations as to which of Stalin’s victims might have their reputations rehabilitated in the current thaw. In particular, there was discussion about Nikolai Bukharin. Julian had a personal interest here. His father had been Bukharin’s secretary, and this had made him suspect, even as a child, so much so that the only university course that he had been allowed to take was at the School of Oriental Studies. As a result, he had a working knowledge of Japanese, Chinese and Vietnamese. He also spoke Spanish, German and French, and his English was extremely fluent.

  Personal appearances on radio and television took us to Glasgow, where he was on BBC radio. There were also press interviews in many London newspapers. We visited a number of bookshops, where he signed copies.

  The North American tour included a visit to Canada, and for this he needed a separate visa. My friend at the Canadian High Commission, Diana Jervis-Read, then cultural attaché at Ontario House, helped to speed this up. The consular official did in a day what would normally take a week and gratefully accepted a signed copy of the book. Jane Bown, asked to photograph Julian for the Observer article, met us at the Canadian passport-and-visa office and took him into Grosvenor Square. She eyed him carefully: he nearly always wore a form of combat fatigues when travelling. “Outdoor man,” she commented.

  “I like her,” he said to me afterward. “Did you see her eyes? She’s an artist.”

&n
bsp; Then we set off for America together. I lent Julian my copy of Darkness at Noon, which he read on the way over. We were not sitting together, because he was a chain-smoker. Su Herbert came over with us to help man the New York office during our American tour. Claudia Menza and I had spent a considerable time on the telephone in the previous months getting Julian press, radio and television interviews. Kampmann had a man whose job was to sell by telephone and organize such promotions, but he did nothing at all. Claudia delighted in ringing to tell him each time she completed another engagement. By the time we arrived, she had set up interviews with newspaper journalists, as well as TV and radio stations all over the US, enough to keep us busy every moment for the next fortnight and a half.

  We arrived at Newark and went in Muriel’s car and a taxi into Manhattan. We lost the taxi at one point, and I had a sudden fear that the CIA might have kidnapped Julian. We found him eventually and installed him in the Chelsea Hotel. Then we all had dinner at El Quixote in a group that included Claudia Menza and Barney Rosset – because Barney had agreed to let us hold a party in his large loft the following night. Su went off to stay with Claudia in her Greenwich Village apartment, and I to stay with Muriel.

  The next morning, Julian was interviewed in our office by the New York Times for the first of two long articles. One of them appeared later that week and another the week after. Su took over one of the office desks, and she and Claudia did the office work while monitoring the tour and feeding out additional information to the press.

  The party at Barney’s loft was a big success, with many important American authors, critics and journalists present, in addition to some booksellers and many friends. Sue Marvin, as she now was, came with John, her husband, who commented: “Not one token black, but five.” One of them, Jerry Williams, now with Time magazine, had once edited Maurice Girodias’s short-lived Olympia Review in Paris. Barney at the time had a Korean girlfriend called Kim, who worked as a chemist: she was very beautiful, but very perverse. I had seen her scandalize restaurants more than once with her antics, such as pulling other women’s breasts out of their décolletés to fondle and admire them. Now she set out to seduce Julian, who rather naively went into a large cupboard with her. As soon as he had lowered his trousers, she left him there and returned to the party. “But she promised me…” he complained as I went to rescue him.

  During his week in Britain, Julian Semyonov had refused all alcoholic drinks, but at Barney’s he started to drink wine. When we left, he was quite drunk, but had no intention of going to bed. We had the greatest difficulty in getting him into his hotel room, because he wanted to go out on the town and drink more. This was when I realized that he was an arrested alcoholic. He was back to normal the next day, fortunately, because he had several more interviews just booked. The New York Times article in particular greatly increased the interest. Orders now began to flow in from bookshops. The first reviews were all good, as had been the prepublication notices that had appeared in book-trade and library journals. Comparisons were made with British and American spy writers, usually to Semyonov’s advantage.

  Now several mass-market paperback companies who had read the reviews got in touch, and I was able to get them bargaining against each other. I said that I wanted an advance of $100,000 and would accept the first offer for that amount, but no less. From New York we went to Boston, where Julian made a television appearance and had a long interview over lunch with the Christian Science Monitor, an influential paper, as well as a shorter one with the Boston Globe. The reporter from the first was convinced that Julian was a KGB operative and said so in his piece – a long one which started on the front page and spilled over two internal ones. When Julian read that he was accused of being a KGB colonel, he laughed. “If I were in the KGB, I would be at least a general,” he exploded. From Boston I put him on a plane to Toronto.

  I had arranged for Howard Aster, who had invited me to join his group on the China trip, to get him some Canadian interviews, and had sent him a small part of the edition to sell in Canada. Julian made a television interview and was featured in the local press. He also met the Russian parents of Howard and his wife, who ran an antique shop, so part of the time he was talking his own language. I was to pick him up again in Chicago, where I went around the bookshops for two days, receiving the night before he arrived an offer from Avon Books, agreeing to my $100,000 advance. Half was to come immediately on signature of the agreement, the balance on paperback publication. It could not have arrived at a better moment. Kampmann was not selling our list very well, and we badly needed a cash injection.

  I met Julian off his plane. He was interviewed by the Chicago Tribune, who printed a big piece on him, and he appeared on television. Then we went on to the West Coast, first to San Francisco. Would I pay for a haircut and beard trim? Of course I would. Then the press interviews started. The most interesting broadcast was on a left-wing independent radio station, Radio Pacifica, funded by supporters and run on a shoestring, but nevertheless with a network of channels in several American cities. My friend Victor Herbert – whom I knew from Paris days (Beckett’s Endgame) and who on one of my earlier California sales trips had bailed me out when my principal British credit card was cut up by a bank in Los Angeles for exceeding the limit (American banks do this with pleasure, because apparently they get $50 each time they do it) – had volunteered to give a party for Julian in the hills above Berkeley, where he now lived with his girlfriend Susan Goldstein, who taught women’s studies at the university.

  Muriel had flown in the day before, and we drove up to his house, bringing Paul from City Lights Bookshop with us, purely as a friend, because political thrillers was not what the shop sold. There was a surprise: a prominent member of the Hollywood Crime Writers’ Guild, a friend of Julian, who himself ranked as a kind of honorary member, had come up from Los Angeles for the party. There were warm embraces, and we were to see him again in a few days.

  From San Francisco we flew to LA, but as Jeannie Adams had arranged the tour to take advantage of the best travel deals on offer, our flight was not a direct one and involved a stopover in Las Vegas, where for an hour, late at night, we watched other passengers feeding the one-armed bandits – the slot machines placed all around the waiting room – until we could fly on. When we arrived, our luggage was still in Las Vegas and would not arrive until later. We booked into an airport hotel, Julian grumbling that he had to take medicines that were in his bag. I promised to collect the luggage in the early hours. I slept for three hours and returned to the terminal, where the floors were being swabbed down. I slipped and fell backward. At first I thought I might have fractured my skull, but was able to get up, collect the bags and return to the hotel. I then woke Julian, who had an early television appearance on the Sonia Friedman show. My head was hurting, and so was my wrist.

  Julian had become accustomed to starting every day with a bacon sandwich, and demanded one, but I told him that such was Los Angeles traffic in the morning, he would have to wait until we were near to the studio in downtown LA. By now I could not bend my wrist and had trouble in driving, but managed it somehow. Julian got his bacon sandwich and then noticed there was something wrong with me: both my head and wrist were throbbing. I tried to hide the pain, and we arrived at the studio, sitting in the waiting room while he was interviewed. It went badly, because Sonia Friedman had been driven by a Russian taxi driver that morning. He had told her not to trust anyone from Russia who was acceptable there and who was in the US on any kind of mission. She had given him a very hard time. But now he was concerned for me and insisted on driving us back to the hotel. He went to get more sleep while I went to the airport clinic.

  This was very interesting. While waiting to be seen, I observed the airline staff who were there, obviously with many symptoms of tiredness, stress and ailments stemming from their jobs. There were more pilots, stewards and stewardesses than members of the public. It made me think seriously about the h
azards of air travel. My wrist was X-rayed, and they told me it was broken. They could bind it up, but I should have it properly seen to as soon as possible, otherwise it would probably set badly and need to be broken again so that it could set properly.

  We had dinner that night in Hollywood with Julian’s crime-writer friend, who was working on a film. Julian was now doing all the driving. He had a good interview with the Los Angeles Times that afternoon, and the next morning we flew on to Washington, DC. There Muriel joined us again from New York.

  By now I was having great trouble in dressing, shaving, doing even the simplest everyday things, because I am right-handed, and it was my right wrist that was broken. But the schedule was tight, and every day Julian had many engagements, so there was no stopping.

  In Washington he made a recording for the PBS main evening news programme – called, I think, All Things Considered. It went out nationally in the afternoon. Then he was meant to talk to the Voice of America. This involved us finding an address in the suburbs. A Russian lady let us in, not best pleased to see me with Julian, who she had thought was coming alone. There was no evidence of any broadcasting equipment in her house. She certainly wanted to talk to Julian, but alone. When she went out of the room to get a drink, I think some tea for us, Julian whispered: “Don’t leave me alone with her” – and I didn’t, although she suggested several times that I might be less bored reading the newspaper in the next room, as they were talking in Russian. At one point she produced a microphone, but soon gave up the pretence. She had a copy of the book and disliked the translation, which she said was “not American”. “Why should it be?” I replied. “It’s in good English.” I suggested at length that we had to be going. We were expected at the Russian Embassy, which was giving a reception that night for Julian. “Oh,” she said. “They didn’t invite me.”