by John Calder
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I was driving through the Scottish Highlands in April 1987 on one of my bookselling trips when I saw a telephone box by the side of Loch Ness and stopped to phone my office. They asked me to ring Jim Knowlson immediately, and when I did he told me that Sam Beckett had collapsed in the street in Paris and was in hospital. This had happened before and was to happen again during the next two years. Sam hated having people help him stand up again, and he took to going out less. As his sorties were largely to get food, he was soon undernourished. In addition, he had contracted emphysema. He was trying to give up smoking and found it difficult to overcome the habit of a lifetime. I was very worried, but he recovered enough to be allowed home.
The previous year had seen his eightieth birthday. For this occasion I put together a second Festschrift. The one I had produced twenty years earlier for his sixtieth birthday, Beckett at 60, was long out of print. It contained a long list of contributors, from Arikha and Arrabal to Alan Schneider and Alan Simpson, taking in writers like Pinter, performers like Madeleine Renaud and many old friends and colleagues – a collection of reminiscences and tributes. The new one I called As No Other Dare Fail, a quotation from the last of the Duthuit Dialogues, which I have recorded above in connection with my first reading of Worstward Ho. It contained longer articles about the writings from critics, as well as personal memories. I confined my contribution to an introductory article entitled Embarrassing Mr Beckett. I knew that he really did not want this Festschrift and would be unavoidably embarrassed by it, but we all wanted to do it. Tom Bishop at NYU in New York did much more for the birthday. In Paris and New York, he put together a series of events to celebrate the anniversary, again against the author’s wish – but Sam, hating publicity of a personal kind, nevertheless submitted to the inevitable.
In Paris most of it took place at the Pompidou Centre. There was an exhibition of John Minihan’s Beckett photographs in the downstairs lobby, where the theatre held a number of lectures and discussions. I met Ruby Cohn in the street on the morning of the day when we would both be speaking, but she would not stop to talk, as she had to practise her French. My own talk, on a platform I shared with Colin Duckworth, there from Australia, was entitled Beckett et Saint François d’Assise. In it, I compared Sam’s generosity to that of the saint who gave a beggar his cloak, finding in their mutual love of animals another link between them. The conference went on for a week and was supplemented by David Warrilow giving a recitation of The Lost Ones while moving a collection of miniature marionettes – rather like toy soldiers – around inside a cylinder shown in section, with the audience sitting around him in what was a small arena in Barrault’s Théâtre du Rond-Point. In the same programme was an interesting version of Come and Go, in which the three women were all shown in mirrors placed above their invisible sitting bodies. There were more events at the American Centre and elsewhere. Minihan’s photographs were a great success, and in a generous gesture he allowed the Pompidou Centre to keep them, which he would later regret.
Barney Rosset came from New York. He had now sold Grove Press to George Weidenfeld. He had persuaded Ann Getty to put up the money so that they could run it together, but Grove was really only a stalking horse to enable George to get Getty money into his own company, Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Barney now thought that his financial worries were over and that he could go on running the company as he always had. He had brought with him, all travelling by Concorde, his wife Lissa, his son Peter by an earlier marriage, Ann Getty’s son, then a student at Yale, and a friend of his, another student. The young Getty and his friend were staying at the Ritz, and Barney with the film director Joe Strick, an old friend, on the Rue de Seine. One morning, Barney and Lissa were in a taxi with Minihan and myself when Barney began to abuse his wife, who had taken a letter for him to Getty at the Ritz. He accused her – quite illogically and in a sudden flare-up, which was quite common with him – of wanting to sleep with the young man because of his wealth. That night a large group of us were at the Coupole, and the only one who never contributed to the bill was the young Getty, who apparently took it as his seigniorial right to be entertained by others. I certainly paid much more than my fair share, and Minihan was commenting on it years later.
Although he would take no part in the proceedings, Sam was persuaded by Tom Bishop to meet a small group of friends at the bar of the Coupole late one afternoon. Barney was invited too, with strict instructions to come on his own. Tom’s annoyance when Barney walked in leading Lissa, Peter, Getty and Getty’s friend was intense, but all he could do was fume. Sam only stayed a few minutes and then left.
Throughout the conference, Barney had been staying at Joe Strick’s, just around the corner from my Michelet-Odéon. On the morning that he had to leave with his entourage to fly back by Concorde, he came round to my hotel at nine o’clock. “Can I get a beer here?” he asked, and sounded desperate. The hotel did not cater, but managed on this occasion to find two bottles of beer, which he drank thirstily. Barney could never start the day without some alcohol.
Ruby Cohn lectured me on not seeing Sam often enough, and as this was the period when I was doing much travelling in North America, she was probably right. He had given her permission to put together a collection of his unpublished writings, mostly early critical work, but including a number of letters and the fragments of an early unfinished play about Dr Johnson, Human Wishes, which I had published earlier in 1983.
Less than a month after Paris, Tom Bishop organized a similar series of events in New York. I took part in one of two symposiums and chaired an evening of Beckett’s poetry. There was another exhibition of Minihan’s photographs, and again, flattered by the attention and praise, John said that NYU could keep the large prints. Again he was to regret it. The main reason was that in both cases magazines and the authors of books about Beckett made use of these photographs without any payment to the photographer. It was suspected that in some cases fees were paid, but not to John Minihan.
Tom Bishop had lined up a long list of American and Irish poets to read Beckett’s poems and some prose in a large hall at NYU. Among others were his wife Helen, Susan Sontag and the President of the University, Jay Oliva. I was worried by the number of readers, because it is a mistake to make a Beckett evening too long. Helen Bishop wanted to read Rockaby, which was twenty minutes on its own. I told Tom we would have to have a rehearsal, but he said that it was impossible to ask well-known poets and celebrities to rehearse. The only person who wanted to go over what he had to read was the Vice Chancellor, who had been given Whorescope. I spent two hours with him going over it, and in the event he was the best of them all.
Just before the reading, there came disturbing news, but hardly surprising to me. Barney Rossett had just been fired from Grove. In spite of all my past problems with him, I felt sorry and had the idea of making an announcement at the end of the poetry reading, if Barney could manage to sit through it.
I started the proceedings by reading – or rather reciting, because I had gone to the trouble of memorizing it – the opening page of Worstward Ho and was followed by the poets. In spite of my fears, Helen Bishop got through Rockaby very fast without spoiling the rhythms. Unfortunately, some of the best-known poets were poor readers – I forget whether it was John Ashbery or Richard Howard who was the greatest disappointment – but the biggest problem came near the end of the evening. Susan Sontag, to whom I had given the last three pages of Ill Seen Ill Said to read, decided on her own to read much more: she went far back in the text to give us a quarter of the book. In the meantime Barney, getting ever more impatient, was sitting in the front row waiting for the announcement, and we were considerably over time, with people, including the press, starting to leave. As soon as Susan had finished, I made the announcement, which caused an expression of disbelief and shock and did not please Susan Sontag one bit, because I had cut short her applause. Then I finished with the last paragraphs of Worstward Ho an
d ended the evening.
Tom Bishop had invited all the readers and a few others back to his house in Washington Mews. “You made up for a few sins tonight,” said Barney. “And you had many sins to make up for!”
Barney was now in a difficult situation. He was well known and admired in New York, because Grove had the biggest reputation there for introducing avant-garde literature. He had published many of the Beat writers and taken on my European list, except where Seaver had done this directly. Fred Jordan, a German who had spent some time in England as a refugee before moving to New York, had been responsible for his German-language literature. Now, with Barney gone, he had become editor-in-chief. Barney did not quite know what to do next, but he was not going to give up. About this time Lissa, his fourth wife, left him, and he developed a relationship with Astrid Myers, a lady who had not only charm and good looks, but was able to understand Barney well enough to put up with his tantrums, infidelities and many eccentricities. She was the best thing that had happened to him in years – perhaps ever – and she helped him to reorganize himself.
My mind could not help going back to a lunch with George Weidenfeld at the Caledonian Club at the time of his negotiations with Barney. George was then very afraid of Barney reneging on the deal before it was signed, but the purchase was the key to getting some Getty money into his own concern. He knew exactly what the Getty income was per second and was savouring it as if it were his own. He was feeling me out to see if I would also be willing to sell, because then he would have the world market on many important authors, but I was in no way tempted. Then a short time later, the deal finally sealed, there was a party in San Francisco to celebrate it in the Getty mansion during the ABA. Martin Esslin, with whom I had lunched at Stanford a few days before, was a frequent guest there now as a prestigious intellectual, and had told me of the set-up. Weidenfeld was much around the Getty mansion, acting as host and very much at home there, flattering the local dowagers at lunches and paying great attention to his hostess. Getty himself was never seen. He was a composer who spent his time in his sound-proof music room writing music of a very traditional stamp. By contributing funds to orchestras and occasionally opera houses, he managed to get some of it played. I often ran into Ernest Fleischmann, whom I had known in London, and who was now manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He was a frequent target for Getty, and another was Peter Hemmings, who after Scottish Opera and Australian Opera had been brought by Fleischmann to Los Angeles to start the opera company there. Peter had half-heartedly agreed to give Getty’s short opera Fat Jack on the theme of Falstaff, but I do not believe he ever did it. Ann Getty was obviously a grass widow, and Weidenfeld had become her cavaliere galante. The ABA party was a lavish one, and they gave another for academics in City Lights. One night I saw Ann, George and a group of their friends, looking extremely uncomfortable in a North Beach bar called Tosca, which had become iconic because the Beats had used it during the Fifties. Barney was being made much of then and was naive enough to think that his troubles were over. By the spring of 1986 he knew the truth.
The newspapers carried many stories about Ann Getty and George Weidenfeld, who were seen together in New York, in Frankfurt and many other places. There was much speculation and innuendo about what their real relationship was. Barney cut all those out of newspapers and magazines and sent them to the husband. George set up a translation prize with a conference in Leeds Castle, but it was obvious that only his own translators could win it. He organized another conference in Israel, one purpose of which was to promote Getty’s music, so the composer went. John Rusby-Smith brought his new girlfriend, a singer called Margaret, whom he later married. Getty was all over her, wanting her to sing his songs. “But they’re not right for my voice,” she complained. That’s all right, my dear,” he insisted. “I’ll arrange them any way you like.”
George Weidenfeld had made it his business to know as many important figures in world politics and big business as possible. He took Ann Getty around to introduce her to crowned heads, prime ministers, influential ambassadors and others who might impress her, but the indications were that although flattered, she was extremely bored. George hired some very expensive New York publishing executives and, knowing the Getty income, thought that expenditure would never matter. But he reckoned without the Getty business managers, who stepped in to stop it once they saw the first accounts of Grove-Weidenfeld. Many millions had been lost, and there seemed little likelihood of improvement. I do not know the mechanics of Weidenfeld’s dismissal, but Getty must have been persuaded that he and his wife had been made fools of, and George retreated to Britain. Some time later, he met a very rich American lady, who saved him once again, but thereafter he sold Weidenfeld & Nicolson, while remaining titular chairman. Ann Getty had paid a single visit to the Grove office during all that time, and had been two hours on the telephone ordering clothes for the weekend. As far as I know, she has never given her own account of the whole affair.
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My trips to Paris now tended to be brief, at most three days. They usually included a lunch or dinner with Sam Beckett, more often than not these days at the PLM Hotel across the street from his apartment, where I seldom visited him now. Among the coach parties of Japanese and American tourists at the PLM, he could be anonymous, and to cross the road was only a small risk. He was very distressed about Barney, who had written to ask if there could be some text he could publish on his own. He had already started a new imprint called Blue Moon and was soon to start another, North Star, for specialized short work and poetry. Obviously Astrid’s name had some bearing on this.
Sam was reluctant to let Barney publish old works that he had held back. He considered allowing him to do the untranslated Eleutheria, written before Godot, a rather Pirandellian play that Blin might well have performed, had it not had a larger cast and more complicated stage decor than the latter, which had launched Beckett’s career into worldwide fame. But he decided against it. Then he thought of the unpublished first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but hated this early work, so he started on a new text, a short one, to which he gave the title Stirrings Still. He dedicated it to Barney and sent it to him and to me at the same time. It was a description of an old man, alone in his room, dreaming of getting out into the open air – only a few pages. But then new inspiration came, and he wrote a second section and then a third. But it was still only a few pages. I could publish it on its own, or else hold it until I was able to reprint the Collected Shorter Prose, which I had put together and first published in 1984, at the same time as a complete edition of all the poems that I was allowed to publish in both languages. On its own, Stirrings Still would only make twenty pages.
Many artists had been illustrating special editions of the shorter works, and it occurred to me that that was the best way to go: to do a limited edition with illustrations by a well-known artist. Barney and I could then share the edition. He immediately liked the idea when I suggested it to him, but insisted that his first wife Joan Mitchell should be the artist. She was now living alone with two Alsatian dogs in a village outside Paris, where she had a house and a studio at the bottom of her garden. I went to see her there to discuss it. We had lunch in a restaurant, then I read her the whole text, commenting on it, and with some reluctance she agreed to try to come up with some visual element for a limited edition. She had tremendous admiration for Sam, who had always been attracted to her. Physically she was very much his type – solidly built, of slightly less than medium height, outspoken and uninhibited. Since her relationship with the Canadian artist Jean-Paul Riopelle had ended, she had lived alone and been drinking heavily. During our day together, we got through several bottles of wine. I looked at her recent work, mainly abstract and not far from that of her mentor Willem de Kooning, and as it got dark I left her. She always worked at night, and was ready to start.