Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  My all-night sessions sitting up, drinking and talking with Sam Beckett were now a thing of the past. During the late Seventies and early Eighties, I tended to meet him in the bar of the Coupole for a drink or at La Palette to have dinner rather than at the Closerie des Lilas, the Falstaff or in the Rue de la Gaîté as in the past. La Palette was never full and had good fish, and the waiters knew him.

  On one occasion in 1982, we had arranged to meet there, and Sheila was with me. I asked her if she could leave us alone for half an hour, as I had a delicate subject to discuss, and left her in a bar across the street. The delicate subject was money. We had produced some expensive first editions of the more recent novels and prose texts for the collectors market, using special paper and lavishly bound, and the royalties on these were high. Beckett’s other books were all doing better, especially the novels and poems. On the other hand, we no longer had best-sellers coming along to cover most of the overheads, while the avant-garde fiction list of mainly European writers who had previously been studied in the universities was selling much less. And of course we had lost our main crutch, our Arts Council subsidy. We owed Sam a great deal, and could not pay it. He was extremely sympathetic and told me not to worry: I could pay when things were better or when I could. He also agreed, although that may have been on a different occasion, that should anything happen to him, I could have five years to pay up the arrears, and he later confirmed this in a letter.

  Sheila then joined us, and we had a pleasant dinner. Towards the end of it, I asked if there was anything new in the pipeline. Sam reached under the table and took a plastic-covered manuscript out of his briefcase. “I have this for you,” he said, “but you might not like it, and you certainly don’t have to publish it.”

  He left us right after dinner and began walking home along the Boulevard Montparnasse. Sheila and I went to have another drink at the Falstaff, where we met Marion Leigh and Josette Hayden, two widows consoling each other, and like us having a final drink. We chatted with them until they left, stayed a little longer and then returned to our hotel, my habitual Michelet-Odéon. Once in bed I suddenly remembered: Sam’s manuscript, where was it? I telephoned the Falstaff, but nothing had been found.

  Sheila and I dressed and rushed there in a taxi: the restaurant was closing, and chairs were being put on tables. Where we had been sitting there was nothing to be seen. I went to the garbage cans at the back of the restaurant and began to look through the eggshells, broken glasses and what had been left on plates, and finally found, to my intense relief, the blue plastic folder that I had carried in there four hours earlier. I took it back to the hotel, by now fully awake, and began to read it. It was Worstward Ho, a text of incredible compression, even for an author as economical with words as Samuel Beckett. It begins:

  “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.”

  I came to the fourth paragraph. One of the most significant messages that I had found in Beckett’s writing was the comfort he gave to those who for one reason or another were not successful in life – at least in terms of money made, tribute earned or fame acquired – because for many people, just living in the way they wish and doing satisfactory work is success enough. But for many others, like most of Beckett’s characters – the Molloys, Malones, Vladimirs and Estragons – success is not possible in any sense, except in so far as just surviving a little longer. Beckett says it makes no difference, because we all come to the same end, and in his Duthuit Dialogues he makes it clear that no real artist ever considers himself a success, because he pursues perfection but never believes he can find it.

  “To be an artist is to fail as no other dare fail,” he says there, and goes on: “That failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion, art and craft, good housekeeping, living,” Now, reading Worstward Ho I came across the following:

  “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

  I mightn’t like it, Beckett had said. I did not have to publish it. Oh yes I did! It came out in 1983. Beckett was not to write much more after that: a few short works for stage and television, Stirrings Still and one last poem.

  * * *

  John Drummond had been the director of the Edinburgh Festival since 1979, and his programming became better year by year – culminating in 1983, his last year, in his homage to “Vienna 1900”, the hothouse out of which so much modern art developed at the turn of the century. His festivals had much in common with those of Harewood, who had devoted much of his first year to the music of Schoenberg, starting with the Gurre-Lieder, and Schoenberg again played an important part in Drummond’s Vienna year. Schoenberg’s daughter was invited to come, and Dr Leonard Stein, who ran the Schoenberg Institute in Los Angeles, gave some fascinating lectures, as did Martin Esslin, whose years at Berkeley now induced him to give American pronunciations to such words as “baroque”. But the crowning glory of Drummond’s last year at the Edinburgh Festival was a superb exhibition of Viennese secession and expressionist art from the late 1890s to the beginning of the First World War, which was put together by Peter Vergo.

  It was that summer that Drummond came to Paris to meet Beckett to discuss some matter in connection with setting up a European Art Foundation, and I was along, partly to make the introduction, but also because I was trying to persuade John Drummond to have a large Beckett element in the following year’s Festival. We were to meet at seven o’clock in the Coupole bar and left the question of dinner open, depending on how Sam was feeling. But he was in an affable mood, arrived precisely on time, as usual, chatted for half an hour and agreed to dinner. We all walked (Sheila Colvin was with us) down the Boulevard Montparnasse to the Closerie des Lilas. But it was no longer the meeting place for writers and artists that it had been previously. The old habitués might still use the bar, but not the restaurant, which was now an expensive tourist trap. Once seated and having looked around, Sam was obviously very uncomfortable. Drummond was sensitive enough to pick up the atmosphere and, folding his napkin as the waiter approached, said “One of us is not feeling well” and led us out. We went into a nearby Chinese restaurant. Once seated again, Sam beamed. “That’s better,” he said, and we enjoyed the evening.

  Anecdotes about Sam, and especially his one-liners, are now legion. It must have been about that time that I was walking with him down the Boulevard Saint-Jacques on a very fine morning. “What a beautiful day,” I commented.

  “So far,” said Sam.

  * * *

  Soon after setting up an office in New York, I had contacted Alan Schneider. I had often met him in London, where he had mounted productions of plays by Ionesco and Albee. In New York, Beckett was having a boom now, mainly because of the plays that Schneider directed in the Harold Clurman Theatre on 42nd Street for Jack Garfein. Experience had made Schneider suspicious of Garfein and his motivations, but, as he said on several occasions, at least he was willing to keep the plays running as long as the audience came, and Alan had carte blanche to do them the way Sam wanted.

  I had many lunches and dinners with Garfein, and even sold him an Obaldia play that he never produced. He was unsure of himself, always asking for second and third opinions of the merits of plays he had been persuaded to contract. On several occasions, I had Muriel Leyner with me when I met him, and she was annoyed that he didn’t remember having ever seen her before.

  He changed the name of one of the theatres (he had two side by side in the same building) to the Samuel Beckett Theatre. This involved a gala dedication ceremony with a hefty admission price, so I did not go. On one occasion, I was asked to take part in a reading with some other people, and at the last moment my time was cut to five minutes, as mine was not a name known to the public. Nicol Williamson was to read before me, and was also told to keep his contribution to only a few minutes. At the run-through I met Nick, and we went to have a drink together, where he regaled Muriel
, who was with me, with the story of our trip to Ussy to see Sam. When his turn came to go on stage, he spent twenty minutes telling the same story and another twenty on a Beckett recitation. This totally destroyed Garfein’s plan for the evening and considerably extended it, but the audience was much entertained as a result.

  My last meeting with Alan Schneider was when he came to have a chat at my 16th Street apartment. Elliott Swift came in, recognized Schneider and insisted we listen to him singing Elizabethan songs to his own guitar accompaniment, so that we had no time to talk. It was his way of imposing an audition on Alan. Then Schneider went to London to direct a new play at the Hampstead Theatre Club. I was on the phone to Sheila in London when she told me that the radio had just announced that Alan Schneider had had an accident and was in a hospital on life support. I rang his wife Jean, who was just about to catch the Concorde to London, having already been informed. I rang Garfein’s office, which telephoned the hospital for confirmation. Coming out of the theatre early in the morning to post a letter to Beckett just before rehearsals started, Alan had tried to cross the street as the lights were changing. A motorcyclist accelerated too early and knocked him down. After two days on life support, being irrevocably brain-dead, his wife agreed to shut off the machines. That evening I went to a Pinter triple-bill that Alan Schneider had directed. At the end, the leading actor came on stage to announce Alan’s death that day. “Alan never stopped, never rested,” he said. “Rest well now.”

  I spent a few hours with Jean at her house north of New York on a Sunday to comfort her. She was drinking heavily, but slowly coming to terms with her loss. “For years he promised me a holiday together,” she said, “but he was always too busy. Now it’s too late.”

  Two weeks later I met Sam at the PLM bar in Paris, and we talked about Alan. The letter posted to him in Hampstead had arrived the next day. “I hope it wasn’t the only letter he was posting,” he commented, but it was. Eerily, the doctor who had received Alan’s body in the hospital was also called Beckett.

  During the following year, Garfein built a mythology around Schneider. Alan’s book Entrances came out posthumously, and at later dates Jean published other writings. She also sold his correspondence with Sam for a large amount of money. I sometimes asked myself why Alan’s book had not been offered to me, but I knew the answer. It had been sold through a literary agent, and agents very seldom came to me with a book they considered saleable. I was the last resort, a publisher who paid small advances and kept a book going for many years, however small the sales. What literary agents like is a large advance, from which they get a slice immediately, and they don’t care if the book is remaindered when the initial sales are over, because this gives them the opportunity of selling it again to another publisher. They do not like to receive small annual cheques with the royalty statements: their commission is not worth the time and expense of recording it and paying it over to the author. This is what happened with most of the books I published. Manuscripts most of the time came to me directly from the author, often against the will of a literary agent who had failed to sell it elsewhere – or else I found books on a foreign publisher’s list in another language, or I would approach an author to commission a book from him, usually a non-fiction title.

  Although his contract would have enabled him to continue for some years longer, Drummond resigned after his Vienna year from the Edinburgh Festival, tired of the backbiting and criticism. It is impossible to please all tastes in Edinburgh, and the town councillors, philistines most of them, had become too much for him. He was followed by Frank Dunlop, his complete opposite in personality. Drummond was Olympian, elitist, self-assured and volatile. He was quick-witted and could talk on any subject at the drop of a hat. But he made many people feel uncomfortable, and some thought him arrogant. Edinburgh, and not only the philistines, found him hard to take, in spite of his competence and talent. Dunlop was down to earth, knowledgeable and a professional theatre director, especially of popular musicals, but he was interested in giving the public what it wanted rather than what he wanted. He had had wide experience – his previous job was running the Young Vic, a basically experimental theatre near the Old Vic – and he could talk to people on their own level whatever it was, unlike Drummond. And that is why he got the job.

  During Drummond’s last Festival, I had persuaded him to let me set up a bookstall in the booking office at the foot of the Mound. I employed the son of Stephanie Wolfe Murray, whose publishing company Canongate Books was just around the corner, and local students to man it. On the last day of the Festival, I wrote a letter to the Scotsman praising Drummond for having made the festival less official and stuffy. His own farewell letter, thanking Edinburgh prior to his departure as festival director, followed mine, and he was not pleased. “Good morning, Mr Letter-Writer,” he said waspishly as he walked past my stall, and went upstairs to his office. But Allen Wright, features editor of the Scotsman, for whom I had done some reviewing that year, agreed with me. Drummond, in spite of his Augustan presence and character, had really taken the stuffiness out of the Festival.

  Earlier in his tenure, in 1980, I had suggested to Drummond that he let me revive the Writers’ Conferences. He had liked the idea, but instead asked Frank Delaney, a BBC colleague, to organize a literary event, and this took the shape of readings and lectures in the Assembly Rooms – “not the same animal”, as Sean Hignett, attending one of them, said to me. They received little press attention and attracted no controversy. But I became friendly with Frank and his girlfriend Bridget Roden, and we dined together frequently during the following year, met in Frankfurt and elsewhere and kept in touch.

  Then it was Frank Dunlop with whom I was dealing in Edinburgh, and he was open to suggestion. I had been lobbying for a long time for a big Beckett element in the Edinburgh Festival, and the seed I had tried to put into Drummond’s mind finally germinated in Dunlop’s in 1984. He agreed to take several Beckett plays. It was the Schneider productions from New York that were imported, while I put together a Theatre of Literature programme of excerpts taken from different works in order to demonstrate how Beckett saw life from pre-birth to death. This was entitled “To Its Beginning to Its End”, a line taken from one of the poems. Dunlop accepted the idea, but engaged Peter James to produce it. The cast had Angela Pleasance and my old friend Leonard Fenton in the cast, together with Sylvester McCoy, basically a comic actor who had been playing Dr Who in the science-fiction television series, but who soon became a Beckett addict. Dunlop also consented to have a Beckett Conference as part of the proceedings, and James Knowlson agreed to organize this, a series of lectures and discussions with about a dozen specialists, including Tom Bishop, Martin Esslin, Enoch Brater and a number of academics from Britain, Europe and America.

  I acted as an assistant director for my own production, although I would have preferred to do the whole thing on my own, but Peter James was easy to work with. He put me in charge of the line readings, while he organized the movement. We were in the Church Hill Theatre in Morningside, which seated about five hundred, and we had a good audience, if not a capacity one. The plays that had come from New York were performed in the same theatre, my show running for ten performances and two Beckett programmes of short plays filling the theatre for the other festival dates. Many people I had not seen since Ledlanet days turned up during the season, such as Ian Fraser from Dunblane, who had been behind my cancelled Church of Scotland General Assembly talk, and I renewed old acquaintance. My own show was too long, going on for nearly two and a half hours. When I did it again, I knew I must cut it to half that length. Beckett requires great concentration on the part of audiences, and ninety minutes is about as long as such a programme, taken from plays, novels, poetry and other writings, should last.

  It was good to see David Warrilow again, but he arrived in Edinburgh having not quite recovered from a painful attack of shingles. I found a sympathetic chemist who was able to help him. His ailment
in no way diminished his performance of A Piece of Monologue, which superbly ended one of the two Beckett evenings from New York. He was not very happy when, just after the curtain dropped, and having intended there to be a period of silence to allow the atmosphere of the piece to weigh with the audience, Knowlson stepped blithely onto the stage to make an announcement. He complained bitterly to me about it. I had a complaint myself, but never voiced it. A Piece of Monologue is really one of Beckett’s late prose pieces, which normally would have come to me for publication. When Warrilow went to see Sam to ask if there was a new play he could premiere, Sam looked in the drawer and handed him the just-finished text, which had not been written especially for him, as he later claimed. But because it was then treated as a play, Faber claimed the right to publish it.

  There has been much controversy in recent years about which of Beckett’s plays belong on the stage and which are for reading only. All his work is so inherently dramatic that every first-person work comes over very well when read or presented dramatically – but even those, mainly early, works which were written in the third person are effective if adapted. The problem is the appropriateness of the adaptation. Sam Beckett had a superb sense of how to make things work for an audience. Instinctively he knew that plays like Waiting for Godot would never have the same impact on a television audience as in the theatre, and works he wrote for television were written with a proper sense of the possibilities and restrictions of the medium. The later prose works written in the first person come over well when delivered by actors who understand the work, but the problems usually lie with producers (or directors in the American sense) who either do not understand the work itself and think whatever they dream up will be fine, or those who want to put some perverse interpretation of their own on the text. One of the worst examples of the latter, and perhaps of the former as well, was Deborah Warner’s Nineties production of Footfalls, which the Beckett estate had to stop in mid-run.