Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Once we had made our escape, Julian smiled. “She must be at least a colonel,” he said. If her mission was to get Julian to defect, she had failed, and as she had never been alone with him, she could not spin a story to her controller about Julian that might get him into trouble.

  We picked up Muriel and went to the Russian Embassy. This was a period when relations between Moscow and Washington were at a low ebb. The Americans had built a new embassy in Moscow only to find that the KGB had installed bugging equipment all over it. In retaliation, they had refused to allow the Russians to move into their new Washington Embassy. They were still in the old one, a mansion that had previously belonged to the Pullman family, who built and owned the overnight sleeper carriages for American railroads.

  We were admitted to what on the outside seemed a gloomy building, passed armed and uniformed Russian soldiers in the entrance hall, and were ushered into a cheerful large room with vodka, caviar, canapés and wine on offer. The ambassador and his wife were very welcoming and made much of my author. We later learnt that while the reception was going on, the Russian Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had arrived at Dulles airport to be met by the First Secretary, not the ambassador. Julian was honoured indeed.

  The next stop was Miami, where we arrived in hot, sticky heat. “Singapore,” said Julian, fanning himself as we emerged from the plane. We had a meeting with some of the press at our motel, but Julian, after talking on the phone in Spanish to the radio station where we were expected that evening, suddenly became very nervous and did not want to go. I realized a little later that he was afraid of being assassinated by the Miami Cubans, who probably knew his name well, as Tass had been filmed in the country under the Castro regime. He seemed very relieved when we left Miami for Philadelphia the next morning.

  Our main arrangement there was for Julian to appear at a phone-in radio station. Our interviewer (I say “our” because on this occasion I also sat in the studio and took part) was a black man who told us that the station’s signal could be heard as far away as Chicago.

  He and Julian got on well, although Julian was dismayed when told that the programme would be on the air for over two hours. Once he got going, however, he lost count of time, and it was nearly three hours when we wound down at two in the morning. He could easily have gone on much longer. One listener asked Julian his views on race and colour prejudice. He said that his daughter’s boyfriend was an African: he liked him and had no objection to the relationship. He gave much credit to his country for the recent reforms, praised Gorbachev and condemned American racism. He ended up by inviting his interviewer to visit him in Moscow. This had been an invitation that he had extended to many others who had interviewed him. In Britain, one of his engagements had been at a school – a visit organized by Laurence Staig, then still literature officer of Eastern Arts – and on that occasion he had invited the whole school, saying that he would organize a Russian one to pay a return visit.

  Back in New York, we were contacted by a young Russian who was working on Wall Street for a New York financial house. He obviously saw Julian as a way to open doors into the new Russia. He wanted Julian to lengthen his visit and arranged a lecture for him at Yale, after my own departure. Julian did stay longer, but the lecture somehow went wrong, and the man became a general nuisance, because he had no real authority to organize anything in particular and did everything badly. It was obvious that his employers, whom he was trying to impress, did not trust him very far. Muriel Leyner gave a dinner party in Hoboken and invited this young man to it, but he was not a success. He wanted to know who was Jewish (about half of those present) and asked everyone personal questions in a tactless way. I might have thought him a CIA operative, had he been brighter. He had no interest in Semyonov as a writer. Several other Russians got in touch in New York, some knowing him slightly, but they all wanted favours. I realized that the city had a large number of Russian immigrants who were not doing well, some of them in touch with the Russian black market, always trying to pull off shady deals.

  Some months later, Muriel and I went to Moscow to visit Julian. He was in Yalta, but made arrangements for us to get there by train from Moscow. The train took more than a day and a half to reach its destination, and all I had brought with me were liqueur chocolates and a bottle of whisky. One had to jump over a dangerous gap between wagons to get to the restaurant car. There was little there to eat, and nothing I liked. I asked for bread and cheese, but that was reserved for breakfast, not a time I felt like eating cheese. An old woman constantly came by the compartment with tea, but nothing else. There was neither wine nor vodka available, perhaps because Gorbachev was putting severe restrictions on alcoholic drinks and drinking hours. In Moscow people were going to lunch at three o’clock to circumvent the alcoholic ban that he had imposed on lunchtimes, which lasted until that hour.

  At some stations there were peasants selling fruit, but I did not dare get off the train, in case it moved off. The countryside was obviously not prospering, and we had occasional views of the roads that had to carry goods between towns. They were broken, narrow, often just a mud track, and I had no difficulty in understanding why there were shortages in a country that could produce so much: the inadequate infrastructure and the deadening bureaucracy could not distribute in any way efficiently. Food arrived in the warehouses of Moscow already stale, and mouldered away after sitting there for weeks. I was no admirer of capitalism – which works through fear, coercion and greed – but at least with more motivation there was less waste of the essentials of life.

  In Yalta Julian put us up in the best hotel, which was quite comfortable, but with no visible service and crawling with cockroaches. Nobody cared. I went to see Julian on my own in his little house. A large Alsatian dog obviously wanted to kill me. Julian held him back, swearing at him, and let me in. He was in a bad mood. He had brought a word processor back from America, bought with the paperback advance, and he had just pressed the wrong buttons and wiped out a weekend’s work. The dog sensed the anger and eyed me as the cause of it.

  I then got down to work with Julian. I had brought with me the translation of the second novel we were to publish, Seventeen Moments of Spring. “Go by the French edition,” he said. “That translation is perfect.”

  I had it with me, and it was far from perfect. But it was not mistakes in the translation that worried me: it was the plot, which involved cars racing around Berlin during an air raid in the last month of the war in 1945. Some of the simultaneous events he described were just not possible, given the geography and the timing. When I pointed this out in specific detail, he became angry and growled. So did the dog, jumping to its feet and looking at me with bared teeth.

  “Please, Julian. Put the dog in another room until we’ve finished,” I pleaded nervously, and then we began to rewrite what was necessary.

  The two days in Yalta included a visit to Chekhov’s house. It was closed, but Julian arranged for us to be shown around by the caretaker. We also went to the historic spot where the wartime meeting of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin had taken place, and where in 1944 the future of Europe was decided. Then we were on an Aeroflot plane back to Moscow with overbooked passengers standing in the aisles, everyone bringing flowers back with them. And of course there were no seat belts.

  I went to the TV station, which at that moment was getting ready for the arrival of the Reagans coming in from Washington. In the lobby we saw the familiar faces of BBC presenters, with Peter Snow on the staircase, waiting to see the officials who could give them facilities. The purpose of my visit was to get the western rights to Semyonov’s television series and to arrange for the cassettes to be sent to me. There were also visits to the opera and to a concert of new music. I saw Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride for the first time. I had by now learnt to go to the box office and pay in roubles, and not to book at five times the price through Intourist. And the waiters at the National Hotel’s restaurant w
ere so unpleasant that most of the time I went to the small hard-currency snack bar, which had reasonable snacks and fast service.

  Before going to Russia, I had met with Julian in Paris a Russian crime-writer called Georgy Weiner, who now entertained us at his flat in Moscow. There I met three generations of his family, including two very street-smart boys, speaking good American English, his father-in-law, a retired Professor, and various friends. It was the only evening I spent with a Russian family in intimate surroundings. I had earlier helped Weiner in Paris to buy some computer equipment, having met him there with Julian. In Moscow, Weiner used his celebrity to enable us to jump the queue to visit Lenin’s tomb. A long line stretched back for miles, because it was an anniversary of the end of the war, and tens of thousands of ex-soldiers were in Moscow to seek out old comrades. Weiner had a word with those at the head of the queue, and they graciously let the foreign visitors pass ahead of them. The tomb was closed to the public four months later.

  I was to see Julian frequently during the next year, once at a crime writers’ party at a Russian restaurant in New York and several times in Paris, where on occasion he had one of his daughters with him. We published Seventeen Moments of Spring and were preparing to publish a third novel when I heard that he had been taken ill. I was having trouble selling him in Britain just then, because the end of the Cold War, and more cordial relations between the Soviet Union and the West had made it much more difficult to sell spy fiction. Loss of contact with the author, combined with other problems that were about to overwhelm me, conspired to prevent further publications going ahead, and we only produced two Semyonov novels.

  Julian had gone to a party and had given in to his weakness and drunk too much. In a taxi, being taken home, he had a heart attack, and this was followed shortly after by a massive stroke that totally incapacitated him at the age of fifty-nine. He was moved a little while later to a clinic in Switzerland, then he was back at his dacha outside Moscow in the care of his estranged wife, who no doubt hated him as much as he disliked her. At that point he could still neither move nor talk. Then I heard that he had died. My obituary appeared in the Independent in London.

  * * *

  I had for some years been organizing theatrical readings to promote books that some people considered difficult, especially if the author’s name was well enough known for there to be an interest. I had a group of half a dozen actors whom I knew well and recruited them to read programmes of extracts, usually with introductory and explanatory material which I wrote for them. I called this activity “The Theatre of Literature”, and under that name we appeared in many places, especially at festival and arts events. I offered these programmes to the organizers at a flat fee, which depended on the number of actors involved. We had several engagements at the Edinburgh Festival – even more at the Cheltenham Literature Festival – and we appeared at major events all over Britain. This helped to sell books, and we featured several authors, but pre-eminently Beckett, who was ideal for public presentation, as so much of his work is in monologue form.

  After Company, Beckett produced another short work, Ill Seen Ill Said. Both works were successfully read on the BBC’s Radio 3, and I found them ideal for my own group at arts centres, as they lasted about an hour. The second text was written in French and subsequently translated by the author, so I did not have the foreign rights to exploit as I had with Company, but I loved the language and the cadence. It is one of the author’s most enigmatic novellas, and over a period of time I have finally puzzled out the meaning. It was very effective when read aloud. Three actors – Angela Pleasance, Leonard Fenton and Sean Barratt – usually shared the text between them. The Theatre of Literature functioned in an irregular fashion, doing at times two or three and at others twenty or thirty performances a year. Laurence Staig of Eastern Arts, one of the regional arts boards that supplemented the work of the Arts Council on a more local basis, regularly found us engagements to perform in the eastern counties of England.

  One day he also invited me to mount a two-week promotion of my writers, who were to appear, in groups of three or four, in about a dozen venues. I sent out an invitation to my authors. Two of them, Robbe-Grillet and Sarraute, were willing to take part, but not in the same panel. Our venues went from Bedford to Cromer in the north-eastern corner of Norfolk, where the novelist Trevor Hoyle and the playwrights Howard Barker and Simone Benmussa gave the audience a fascinating glimpse into what it means to be a writer. The audiences varied enormously: some of the best attendances were at the smaller venues, while the lowest of all was for Nathalie Sarraute in Cambridge. The most successful, in terms of interest as well as size, was in my view the one in Colchester.

  I drove there with Alain Robbe-Grillet, whom I had picked up at the airport in London together with Brion Gysin from Paris, who was only marginally my author (he had co-written The Third Mind with William Burroughs). William Burroughs had agreed to come and later cancelled, but Brion was, as it turned out, a more than adequate substitute. He was a large, affable man, nearing seventy. He was one of the early surrealists, and had once exhibited his work on the street when it was refused by a salon. He had been expelled from the surrealist group by André Breton because he was homosexual and had had a mixed career as painter, writer, restaurateur, theorist and latterly as a rock musician, singing with a group of younger people. He was in fact extremely ill with emphysema at the time he came to Britain, but he gave an interesting talk, explaining Burroughs’s work much better than Burroughs himself would have done.

  Alain Robbe-Grillet was, as always, clear, fluent and precise: once again I translated for him, but it hardly seemed necessary at the university where our session was held. He did however take umbrage at being put, as we all were, in university accommodation. He had insisted, before coming, that he would only stay in the best hotels and travel first-class. His air ticket was not first-class, and for some months afterwards he was still trying to get me to pay him the difference on what the other would have cost. In Ipswich, his other venue, he put up with the old-fashioned hotel we were in, because Dickens had stayed there.

  Also on the platform in Colchester was Alan Burns, back from his years in America teaching in Minneapolis. He was now being published by Marion Boyars, but had a new contract with me for a book on accident in art. The whole tour – the authors changing as those who had come and left were replaced by others – was a considerable success. Staig had even organized a travelling bookshop to follow us around, selling the books of the featured authors wherever they appeared.

  The only sour moment was caused by Marghanita Laski, who had been put on the Arts Council panel as chairperson of the Literature Committee by William Rees-Mogg and would soon do much damage to the previously liberal policy of the Arts Council. Our last session was in the public library in Bedford, where Christopher Small, author of Music-Society-Education, a radical revaluation of the purpose of music in the community, spoke together with others. He had a Jamaican boyfriend called Neville with him, a dancer then working for Lambeth Borough Council. They were both offered a lift back to London by Marghanita Laski. This gave her an opportunity to quiz him. Whatever he told her – and he apparently expressed much gratitude to me for understanding his unconventional ideas and publishing him – did not impress her. She later told Staig that she had found him rather silly. And she certainly had no sympathy with the flavour of my list. Not long after that, I had official notification that my Arts Council grant was to be discontinued.

  The whole East Anglian promotion was a success from everyone’s point of view, in spite of the poor turnout of the Nathalie Sarraute event, and everyone had enjoyed it. Simone Benmussa, a great animal lover, was much taken by Laurence’s old English sheepdog, Nana, which knew me and was always all over me. “Elle t’adore,” she said enviously. Laurence tried to repeat the experiment the following year with Jonathan Cape, but it didn’t work out.

  The Arts Council was now becoming a ve
ry different body. Jenny Lee had made it a fairy godmother for all the arts, not questioning the viability of arts activities in commercial terms or the validity of what artists of all kinds wanted to do. There were a few charlatans who took advantage of the open-handedness of that golden age, but not that many, and statistically they were insignificant. The arts all flourished under Wilson, Callaghan and even Heath, because the Tories were not necessarily philistines, and did not want to appear as such, until Margaret Thatcher arrived in power in 1979. Then the “milk-snatcher”, as she had been known when Minister of Education, became the scourge of the trade unions and a subsidy-snatcher from the arts. Sir William Rees-Mogg, ex-editor of The Times, who had editorialized against me for years, had become chairman of the Arts Council, and he set about firing such civilized officers as Charles Osborne, who could be criticized for the time off that went into writing his many books and visiting Australia and the United States on journeys that had nothing to do with the Arts Council, but nevertheless did his job with efficiency and competence.

  I asked for a meeting with the Literature panel and brought Barbara Wright with me. She was not allowed to open her mouth. Marghanita Laski cut me off very quickly as I put my case, and it was obvious that this panel, then consisting largely of popular-thriller and children’s-book writers, would not have much sympathy with the kind of serious literature in which I specialized. My £35,000 a year was reduced to a one-year cut-off grant of £10,000, and after that there was nothing.