by John Calder
The whole Beckett element in the 1984 Edinburgh Festival was a considerable success, and to encourage audiences in advance I wrote a long explanatory piece for the souvenir programme and another for the Scotsman. I was in a taxi with Garfein when I saw Avital Mossinsohn, the director of the Jerusalem Festival, who was staying with Iain Crawford, the previous publicity officer of the Edinburgh Festival. He was about to enter his flat late at night, and I stopped the taxi to say hello. Avital invited us both in for a drink. Being tired I declined, but Jack Garfein accepted, and as a result his company was invited to perform at the next Jerusalem Festival. Avital also used a television version of my own programme. He took me to lunch at the next Edinburgh Festival, commenting at the end that that was the only payment I could expect to receive, as he had exceeded his budget. The Garfein company also performed in London at the Donmar Theatre a fortnight later.
* * *
At the beginning of 1984 I decided to go to Australia to try and improve my Australian sales, which were far from good. I went first to San Francisco from New York, spent a week selling books there and in the middle of January flew to Sydney with a short stopover in Hawaii. I had a distributor in Sydney who stocked my books, amusingly called Wild and Woolley, named after the two founders, Michael Wilding, a local writer and academic, and Pat Woolley, a radical feminist originally from California.
I arrived in Sydney early in the morning, rented a Mini and drove to the hotel in Kings Cross that Pat Woolley had booked for me: it was called the Texas Tavern, and I slept until the afternoon. Going into the nearby car park where I had left the rented red car, I quickly saw that it was not there. I reported it to the attendant, but just then someone else who worked there came up. He remembered me entering in a blue car. Then I remembered myself: I had been driving a red car in San Francisco, now I had a blue one. When travelling, one often makes a similar mistake with hotel numbers.
I had dinner with Pat that night, and the next morning I went to visit the warehouse. I was flabbergasted to see large quantities of American editions of many of my titles and very few copies of my own, which contractually should have been the only ones to be sold in Australia. Of course this had been going on for years, and she made no apology or attempt to cover up. She just shrugged her shoulders. Being American, she favoured American books, and was fairly certain that I would not go to law over this. In any case, I needed to sell my books in her market somehow.
I set out to show her what could be done. I spent two weeks in Sydney and its environs, calling on every possible bookshop, large and small, including the chains, where I managed to get in more titles than they had ever stocked before. I was well received everywhere, met many old friends whom I had known in London, and I also called on the features and literary editors of newspapers to try to get some publicity. Some shops wanted to receive my books directly from Britain, and I saw no reason not to agree. I met a number of authors, literary agents and publishers, went to the theatre and the opera – and sometimes, after a hard day in the January heat that often topped 100 degrees Fahrenheit, went in the evening to one of the beaches to cool off in the ocean.
Sydney Opera House is an amazing building, which now symbolizes the city just as Big Ben represents London and the Eiffel Tower Paris. But inside, it is a mess. I saw two operas, The Magic Flute and Otello, one in the so-called opera house and the other in the concert hall. Basically they are two auditoria parallel to each other, the acoustics in the second being marginally better than in the opera house. The performances were adequate, and I heard some singers who never came to Britain, most notably Joan Carden, who sang opposite Alberto Remedios in Otello. Yvonne Kenny, later to make her mark in Britain, was Pamina in The Magic Flute, which Richard Bonynge conducted. One of my most memorable Paminas had been Joan Sutherland, before she moved into the bel canto repertoire in the early Fifties. Now Bonynge would not let her sing it any more. I managed to get my opera guides sold in the opera house, but foresaw trouble, because there was no one to really take responsibility for them, and it would have been easy to steal them.
I made many friends in Sydney, and was invited to some pleasant dinners, but much as I intended to keep in contact with people who had been kind to me, I inevitably lost touch. It was just not possible, being as itinerant as I was after losing Ledlanet, to keep up with people other than those I was encountering at the time.
I went to Melbourne next, which had an Irish look and feel to it, and stayed in the Italian quarter. I found several good outlets for my books, which had never been properly presented there, many of them near the university. I looked up the Wild and Woolley rep, who was unaware that they even existed.
I was taken to the Melbourne Club by Colin Duckworth, a Beckettian who was Professor of French at the university, and was invited to his house. He was also much involved in the Australian theatre. I was later to publish his novel Steps to the High Garden. I met several authors, most notably Peter Craven and Gerald Murname and a young poet who slept out of doors because he said that in that climate it was quite unnecessary to pay rent just to have a roof over your head. Gerald Murname, who I liked very much and for a while considered publishing, was a real Melbourne eccentric: he had never been on a train or aeroplane in his life, and had never been out of Melbourne, but wrote novels about places he had never seen such as the Australian outback that were realistic and convincing. “I shall spend my life in the Melbourne suburbs,” he told me, “and never see anywhere else.” He sounded wistful rather than sad. I also went to a Saturday lunch party at Barrett Reid’s house, and afterwards toured a local wood, with him pointing out the local varieties of trees.
Then I moved on to Adelaide, a very geometrical city built of white stone, which somehow reminded me of parts of Cannes and Monte Carlo. Everywhere there were statues of royalty and long-dead generals. There were not many bookshops there for my kind of literature, but I made a useful contact with the Festival Theatre, which sold some books. One evening, I drove down to the sea and went onto an old sailing ship that was now a restaurant. A large group were celebrating at a nearby table. “What are ye, a snob or something?” a large red-faced man shouted at me in his strong Aussie accent. “Why don’t you come and sit here?”
So I joined them. I sat next to a lively lady. Her husband had won a golf tournament that afternoon, and that was the reason for the celebration. But the man was so tired that most of the time his head was on the table. His wife told me how dull he was and how much she disliked golf. At one point, the conversation became bawdy and centred on where a man should kiss a woman first. The waiter was asked his opinion.
“I wouldn’t kiss her anywhere,” he said. “I’m gay.”
“Oh, you’re not, are ye?” said my red-faced friend. “Ye cahnt be. That’s not Austrilian.” This set the table off on a new theme, and the waiter was no doubt pleased when we left. I was invited round to the red-faced man’s house, where the party continued until it was getting light, at which point I left to drive back to my motel in Adelaide.
The next morning I was flying to Perth. First I drove back to the shore and left – it was early still on a Sunday morning – a half bottle of whisky, a bottle of wine and other things I had not consumed in my room on the man’s doorstep, with a thank-you note, and drove on to the airport. That evening I drove around Perth to work out the itinerary for the following day, because I had only two days to make all my calls. On Monday morning I went first to the university, then to Fremantle, the artistic suburb of Perth, and the next day called on the shops in town, none of which I found interesting. Then I had a night flight to Singapore.
Singapore is a strange city. Then it was still under the iron rule of Lee Kuan Yew, an English-educated Chinese lawyer, who enforced such strict laws that you were arrested if you dropped a piece of paper on the pavement. Tailors chased me down the street, fingering my suit and offering to make me a new one in a single day. My local agent was Times, which had
its own bookshops. They placed an order from my new book catalogue. After that, I went to the university to discover that, in a country with no copyright, their practice was to buy just one copy of a book. This was then available to be photocopied cheaply on the spot by students and staff, in part or in full. A long line of photocopiers were in constant use. There was not much else for me to do there.
In the evening, I wanted to have a Malaysian meal and asked a taxi to find me a restaurant. He took me a considerable distance to a cinema and told me there was a restaurant on the first floor. But it turned out to be Chinese, so I left. There were no taxis in that part of town, and I started to walk back towards the centre. And then the monsoon hit the streets.
Within a minute I was drenched through, and as the air was very warm, steam rose from my body. For an hour I tramped along the street in the downpour, until I reached some lighted shops and managed to buy an umbrella – not that it made any difference. I eventually came to a long marketplace, where there was a double row of little kitchens under canvas. Each had a different dish to offer, and alongside – also under canvas – were table and chairs. The idea was to go down the line of kitchens, fill a plate with what attracted your eye and eat at one of the tables. That’s what I did, washing the food down with beer. I was having a Malaysian dinner at last – drenched through, but not cold. Then I walked back to my hotel, took off my clothes and walked gratefully into a hot shower.
The next day I flew to Bombay. This was all part of the round-the-world ticket I had purchased. I did not enjoy my two days in Bombay. The taxi that took me to my hotel nearly bumped into a cow, and if it had touched her I am sure the driver would have been lynched. A crowd gathered round and threatened him with sticks. The hotel was perfectly decent, with separate European and Indian restaurants, but I only ate in the Indian one, except for breakfast. Every time I went out of the hotel, I was surrounded by children with outstretched palms, many of them being guided by seated women on the roadside, and any change I had was quickly dispensed. I took a taxi to see my agent, who had never sold my books well. He was in an office overlooking a dirty and cluttered courtyard in a dilapidated building that might once have been white. He looked through my catalogue. “Why don’t you publish some books on cricket?” was the only comment I remember.
My room was on the top floor, with a great view over the docks and the sea, which was a few hundred yards away. The wide street in front of the hotel was crammed with hundreds of bodies sitting or lying down – some of the millions of homeless who are born, live out their existence and die in the open. Periodically I would see a line of mourners following a dead body on its way to being burned at a large incinerating open space that was just visible in the distance. Long columns of black smoke constantly rose from it. Twice I saw lorries passing slowly while the municipal employees searched among the homeless poor for those who had died in the street. Their bodies were unceremoniously thrown into the open lorries, which were making their way to the funeral pyres in the distance.
I am told that there is much to enjoy in Bombay, but the poverty and misery distressed me so much that after the visit to my agent and one or two brief sorties into the open I stayed in the hotel, either in my room or talking to other Europeans in the hotel bar. At the airport, the bureaucracy to leave the country was frustrating: I had to pay for an exit visa, have my luggage searched and fill out more forms before I could get on my flight. From there I went to Frankfurt, where I spent a night at the airport hotel, and then on to London.
* * *
In 1985, as I was driving towards Paris after the Frankfurt Book Fair, I heard on the car radio that Claude Simon had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, another in the long list of my authors who had won major literary awards. It was a brief announcement at the end of a BBC news bulletin, and it was not repeated an hour later. Back in London, where I was constantly appealing against the loss of my Arts Council subsidy, I spoke to Luke Rittner, then Secretary General of the Arts Council. He was unaware of who had won the Nobel Prize and supremely uninterested. In reply to my letter written at about this time, he said that the Arts Council had decided that my list was no longer considered to be of any interest or importance. As I was publishing the same writers who had been considered worthy of subsidy earlier, this made no sense, but it was ideology, not sense, that mattered now. Two other prizes came our way at the same time, the Prix Italia for Howard Barker’s radio play Scenes from an Execution and the Scott Moncrieff Prize, awarded to Barbara Wright for her translation of Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute. I pointed out in my reply to Luke Rittner that the juries who decided major prizes obviously had a higher opinion of our authors than the Arts Council Literature Committee. He never answered.
I had never been to Stockholm, although I could have gone on any of the previous occasions when an author of mine had won the Nobel Prize. However, now I decided that this was an experience I should not miss. I went at the beginning of December, and it was already dark when the plane landed at 14.30. I went to the hotel, rested and was picked up for dinner by Claude Simon’s Swedish publisher, to be taken to a restaurant where about twenty of us, including Simon’s various publishers from many countries, all had a pleasant evening. Jérôme Lindon was among them, and as few of the others spoke French, I mostly conversed with him. He was an old hand in Stockholm, having been there to collect the prize in 1969 on behalf of Samuel Beckett, who would never go to any such public occasion.
The next day, I visited some bookshops in the morning and in the early afternoon put on my dinner jacket and joined a special bus that took us to the National Theatre for the prize-giving ceremony. A citation was read out for each laureate, which took about two hours, as there were many winners in different disciplines. The prizes were awarded by the King of Sweden, who officiated in his uniform, saying a few words to each before handing over the citation and a cheque. In between, the Stockholm Symphony Orchestra played short pieces of music. Then we were taken in buses to the Town Hall, where a large banquet was waiting for about two thousand people, perhaps more. I sat next to a university bookseller from Uppsala, who wanted my catalogue and filled me in about the proceedings. We had a long drinkless wait until the royal party arrived – the King, his family and the court officials parading along a gallery above the hall – followed by all the Nobel Prize winners. The band accompanied the arriving top tables by playing “Land of Hope and Glory”, much to my surprise. The dinner was a long one, and our wine glasses were not filled more than twice.
At the end of the banquet, some of the Nobel Prize winners consented to say a few words, and the atmosphere was by now much more relaxed. The most amusing came from an American who had won a physics or chemistry prize. “You know,” he began, “I come from California, where Nobel Prize winners are thick on the ground in the universities. One day, recently, I was driving with my wife through the desert, and we had to stop for gas at a little isolated shack with a single pump. The man put the nozzle in the gas tank and then started to kiss my wife, and she kissed him back – a long embrace. ‘Well,’ I said as we drove away, ‘what was that all about?’
“‘Oh. He used to be my boyfriend.’
“‘Well, just think. Now you’re married to a Nobel Prize winner.’
“‘But if I’d married him, he would be a Nobel Prize winner.’”
After the banquet, we were moved to the adjoining hall, where the party went on until dawn. I managed to talk to Claude Simon, who was constantly being pulled away to be interviewed by press and television and photographed. He was unhappy that he had had to bring his wife and not his girlfriend, Eva, who was the sister of his Finnish publisher, Erkki Rempaa, a man I liked very much. It was Erkki who on one occasion at the Frankfurt Book Fair was approached by Swifty Lazar, a Hollywood literary agent. He interrupted our conversation to say, “I understand that you are the biggest publisher in Finland, so I am going to offer you Richard Nixon’s biography,” and
he mentioned the two million dollar advance that was being paid in America.
“Excuse me,” said Erkki, “I am talking to my friend Mr Calder. If you paid me a million dollars I would not publish Richard Nixon. Please go away.”
Claude Simon was always complaining of the slowness with which I brought out his novels in English compared to the speed with which they appeared in Finnish. It was only about this time that I realized that it was Eva Rempaa who was behind the Finnish interest. It was Jérôme Lindon who on this occasion had told Claude he had to bring his wife and this was no occasion to flaunt his mistress.
There was a lunch the next day in the offices of the Swedish publisher with Claude Simon present. “You have made us very happy,” said the publisher in a little speech in English. I then went to a reception to open an exhibition at the French Institute with photographs and memorabilia to do with Simon’s life, especially his involvement in the Spanish Civil War and Second World War, and stayed another day to visit more booksellers, resisting with difficulty the blandishments of Swedish friends to stay longer (“You haven’t even been to the Stockholm Opera! How can you resist that?”) and returning instead to London.
During the following year, I saw Claude Simon with Eva twice in New York. I went with them to see a sculpture by a friend of his which had been erected on Wall Street, took them to El Quixote, which he much enjoyed (“Je suis chez moi”) and on his advice went to see an exhibition of African sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum, which however I failed to find interesting. I also visited him several times at his flat in Paris. But little by little I saw how the Nobel Prize, with all the razzmatazz that went with it, had changed him. The simple man who had the eye, the style and the questing mind of a great writer was now taking his celebrity seriously, and he became aloof and unaccommodating. His two greatest novels, The Flanders Road, published in 1960, and The Georgics, which appeared in 1981, had convinced the Nobel jury. Thereafter, the literary impulse seems weaker. He wrote a short piece about winning the Nobel Prize and what had happened in Stockholm, which has some interest, but I saw no reason to translate a book that could have no English-language sale. He had always been difficult to put over to the reading public, even in France. The problem in my opinion lay in the padding – the quite unnecessary long-winded pages of description that had little to do with his main theme – because in essence he describes actions and the motivations behind them, drawing general conclusions from the events of history. One has to wade through much extraneous matter to get to what is important, and this shows a lack of self-discipline in the writer, which increasingly in the late work becomes self-indulgence. An intelligent and sensitive editor could have helped him to prune his work, but by the time he had won the Nobel Prize it was too late. This is a great pity, because the best of Simon is superb: his images of war and battle are unforgettable, and he can make the reader feel the futility and the horror of human conflict, the corruption that surrounds it and the hunger for profit that so often causes it. His elderly and incompetent generals, his panic-stricken staff clerks and miserable mistreated cannon-fodder soldiers are beautifully drawn and totally believable, but one has to get through much drudge to get there. This is not the case with the earlier novels, masterpieces of a more economical style, which still wait to be rediscovered by a new generation of intelligent readers. The day may come when judicious editing will find him a new readership, because he deserves the sales that go to Bellow, Vidal, Grass and the best South American writers who have achieved both literary recognition and best-seller status. Two years after the Nobel Prize, his sales with me had slumped to a trickle – and he was not doing well in France either. It was a constant effort to keep any of his novels on the shelves of the better bookshops.