by John Calder
We corresponded about the illustrations, and then, apparently because she had read something derogatory about me from one of my old girlfriends in a newspaper, she wrote that she had decided not to proceed. There may have been another reason, such as not being able to come up to the challenge of the text. I asked Sam for another suggestion, and he told me to come to his apartment. When I entered, I saw that he had a row of books lined up on the desk between us. They were all illustrated by Louis le Brocquy. “What about Louis?” he suggested.
“Sam, you know perfectly well that I’ll accept any artist you want,” I said. “I’m perfectly happy with Le Brocquy.” I only knew rather vaguely about him, and I already owned several of the books displayed on Sam’s writing table, but I had to convince Barney, who finally, and somewhat reluctantly, accepted that it would not be Joan. I went down to Nice to see Louis, who lived and had his studio in the hills behind the town, spending a pleasant day with him and his wife, Anne Madden. He had recently attended a wine auction, where he had rather overextended himself by buying a large quantity of very good wine, and he was rather rueful about it, but I at least had some of the benefit. He agreed with enthusiasm, but wanted me to print with a local art printer who had worked with Picasso, Matisse and others. We went to visit him and I liked the work he was doing. Terms were agreed all around, and I took the address of Peter Wilbur, whom Louis wanted to design the book. I found a suitable binder in Paris on the Rue du Four and selected orange soft calf for the binding. Unfortunately it was never used, as Wilbur had other ideas and picked an oatmeal linen instead. I had many meetings with Peter Wilbur in London. He designed and typeset the book in London; the sheets were printed in Provence, and the book bound in Paris. I always intended to collect the expensive orange calfskin, but with all the problems of the following months never did. It was all much trouble and expense, but we ended up with a handsome book, quarter-bound in parchment, with natural linen and cotton cloth, printed by Pierre Chave in Vence on French deckle-edged Velin Rives, and signed by Samuel Beckett and Louis le Brocquy. The two hundred and twenty-six copies were numbered one to two hundred, and twenty-six copies were lettered. It had a slip case of the same material as the binding. The Le Brocquy illustrations included an impression of Beckett’s face for the front cover embossed in gold and a complex portrait as a frontispiece in colour, from which, after a few minutes’ study, one could make out Beckett’s face leaning forward as if to sign the book. It also included eight very effective black-and-white lithographs. The plate was broken after printing, and Le Brocquy was promised that we would not try to reproduce the illustrations. Not long after that, Barney would break the promise without telling anyone, and he used miniature reproductions of the lithographs in a small paperback edition.
That, however, was not the worst of his misdeeds. As the binding was very expensive, I only bound initially forty copies, twenty for each of us, plus the lettered copies, which were to go largely to Sam’s list of special friends. I spent much time going around London, Paris and New York delivering these by hand. One went to the doctor who at that point was calling on him every day, and of course Jérôme Lindon got one, as well as Arikha the artist, Tom Bishop and I forget who else from the list Sam gave me. We sold our twenty bound copies at £2,000 each to collectors, and I told the Paris binder to bind twenty more. Then I discovered they were gone. I had paid the binder on account, but not yet his whole bill, and Barney, having gone secretly to Paris, paid off the binder – only for the binding of course – bound up the rest of the edition and took them all to the States. I insisted that he send back immediately the eighty that were mine, but he replied that I would have to pay the remaining binding costs first. As I had not wanted them bound yet, I said no. The wrangling went on, and then, as he owed money to a remainder dealer, Barney gave him all the copies as security. I did at a later date manage to extract one for a special purpose – but that is another story.
In the summer of 1988 Beckett had another fall, this time at home, and after recovering in hospital, Edward, his nephew, found a place for him where he could be looked after. It was a retirement home called Le Tiers Temps. He was the only man there – the other residents were all old women who spent the day in the lounge watching television and dozing. Beckett preferred to stay in his room and had all his meals brought to him there. The food was, like all hospital food, uninteresting and watery. I tried to find a way of having good restaurant meals with things Sam liked brought in occasionally, but he would not hear of it. He would sit there picking the vegetables out of his plate and leaving the meat.
I visited him more often now, and it was in Le Tiers Temps that he signed all the copies of Stirrings Still, completing them in a day. He would read a little, but not much, spending some time doing crossword puzzles, only occasionally trying to write. On one visit, he asked me how to spell “hedgehog”, then said it didn’t matter. He had changed it to “porcupine”. I was less worried by his memory going than by the realization that he did not have a dictionary: he had brought nothing from home. The next day, I bought him the Collins Robert English-French dictionary, so that he would have the two languages, and dropped it round. One day he had a visit from Tom Bishop and said, “I’m sorry about this, and I know perfectly well who you are, but I cannot at this moment think of your name.” Tom was very upset and kept referring to it every time I saw him.
He was very accessible to anyone walking in on him now. There was no concierge that I ever saw, and if you knew where the room was you simply went and knocked. He must have had several unwelcome visits, but he was always happy to see old friends. Most visitors would bring him a bottle of whisky, and he never lacked either wine or spirits to drink, but after the “hedgehog” incident I would bring books. I brought him Ellmann’s biography of Yeats, a new book on Nora Joyce and other volumes in line with his interests, occasionally a novel by a new Irish writer such as John Banville. Several regulars went to see him there, including Peter Lennon, and one day John Montague brought in a group of visiting Irish writers. Once, when I went to see him, I had Sheila Colvin with me. She did not at all mind being left in the lounge, because she understood that he only wanted to see old friends now, but Sam asked after her, and I admitted she was outside. He immediately brightened up. “Oh, bring her in,” he said, and I did. There were only two glasses, so she used his tooth-mug and told me afterwards the whisky tasted of toothpaste. On one occasion, I was there when Suzanne telephoned. He was on the line for some time, humouring her. Obviously some kind of quarrel was going on. He eventually put the instrument down with a sigh, saying he would call the next day.
* * *
In January 1988 I made my second trip to Australia, and this time brought Muriel Leyner with me. We left on New Year’s Eve from Los Angeles and asked for champagne at midnight – which they reluctantly brought, because they were saving it for the Australian New Year a couple of hours later. In Fiji we had a stopover of several hours and then took a different plane, because we were going first of all to New Zealand. There had been a coup just then in Fiji, and the situation was tense, but rather than having to wait eight hours at the airport, I took a taxi to a holiday hotel, where we could sleep, eat and bathe in the pool until departure time, trying not to look directly at the young soldiers – they all seemed to be about fourteen – who were carrying machine guns and seemed prepared to use them.
The other problem, which we only discovered later, was that all our luggage had gone to Australia instead of being transferred to our New Zealand flight. We bought bathing suits and beach clothes at the hotel. This was our only change of clothing when we finally arrived in Auckland. We were met by my New Zealand agents, the Kranses, an American couple who had gone to live there during the McCarthy period to escape the poisonous political atmosphere. They had worked for Oxford University Press for years and now represented a number of publishers, having converted a shed at the bottom of their garden into a small warehouse. They took us to
a hotel that was really a service flat with a wonderful view and left us there. The next day, a Sunday, I spent with them in their house going carefully over my list, and the day after went selling books in Auckland with Krans. His excited face when the two of us returned in the evening was a picture. “Look at this,” he said to his wife. “Some of these orders are three pages!” We had taken orders for several hundred books that day, more than he had ever sold in a year.
My author Christopher Small, who had grown up in Hamilton North, New Zealand, was in Auckland, and we saw him briefly. He had been giving some lectures and was about to return to London. We went next to his home town, as dull a little place as one could imagine, and I easily understood why he had left it. Arriving in the evening, it took a while to find our hotel, and then there seemed to be nowhere to eat. Seeing some girls getting cash at a machine, we followed them and, sure enough, they led us to a Chinese restaurant, which seemed to be the only place still open.
The next day, I did the bookshops, took some orders and continued driving south. Wellington was the next stop, a town that has several mini-earthquakes every day. I sold more books there and then drove back to Auckland. From there, after a week on North Island, we went to Melbourne. I had been advised that South Island was so depopulated that it was not worth the trip, but I probably made a mistake.
New Zealand seemed to be caught in a time warp, and was very like the Scotland of the Thirties. The cars were mostly from that decade: they were constantly repaired and kept on the road, because the tax on imports was so heavy. I met a few local poets and liked the people – all very British – but they seemed to be living half a century earlier. Attitudes were provincial, and as the country is a long strip of land between two coasts, everyone seemed to have a boat, the main leisure activity. The big discovery were the excellent white wines, then unknown in Europe. And the people, with little to worry them, were all exceptionally nice.
In Melbourne I made contact with Detlef Thema, a young German who was selling our books there, and I was at least able to evoke some enthusiasm for them. I knew where the bookshops were from my previous visit and sold the list well, leaving it to Detlef to keep on after I had left. We were well entertained by Mary and Colin Duckworth, and saw My Fair Lady at the opera house, where June Bronhill, who had delighted London in the Fifties at Sadler’s Wells in Mozart soubrette roles and many other parts, was still able to sing a small part. She was obviously a local heroine: born June Gough, she had taken the name of the town that had raised the money to train her voice and send her to Britain. She still had charm and some voice left at fifty-eight. Seeing her brought back memories of her high soprano, perfect diction and bouncy vivacity in so many lighter roles I had seen at the Wells, and of her Lucia at Covent Garden, where she had replaced Joan Sutherland. She had more applause than the stars that evening.
Then we went to Sydney, gripped by Centennial fever. The tall ships were there from all over the world, and a few days of public holiday meant enforced leisure for me. We went to The Magic Flute, the same production as on my earlier visit, but with singers all unknown to me, and to Carmen (for some reason I did not record the cast in my opera record book, probably because I lost the programme). Sydney was very busy – the city full of sailors and tourists who had come for the Centennial celebrations. I looked up a few people I had known from my previous trip. I saw some theatre, found a few new customers and some new restaurants. My books were now in a Melbourne warehouse, and the situation had changed little since my earlier visit. The years when I went to Australia we achieved reasonable sales; in other years, sales were invariably poor.
Muriel returned to America, and I continued westward, spending time again in Adelaide and Perth. Then I flew to Munich, with a change of plane in Bangkok. I was particularly miserable during the second flight, because there were no non-smoking seats available in spite of my reservation and I was surrounded by heavy smokers. In Munich I saw my old doctor, Tibor Csato, now living with a German sculptress whose work I much admired. A good age now, he had written a book, which was a collection of memoirs, observations on his reading and philosophical speculation. I promised to edit it and publish it when I could. That day has not yet arrived. Ute Rothenberg was looking after him well and he was happy. I managed to get to the opera to hear Thomas Allen sing Don Giovanni. Then I was back in London.
* * *
One day in the late Eighties I received a telephone call from Howard Aster of Mosaic Press in Toronto. Howard was an academic with links to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). He ran a publishing company with a mixed list of novels, poetry and cultural books with political resonances, largely focused on Eastern Europe. His books, like mine, were distributed by Kampmann, but there were other publishing connections as well. He and a group of six other Canadians had been invited to visit China as guests of the government, and the only condition was that they would be expected to give a few lectures and talk to Chinese writers. One of their members had dropped out: would I like to replace him? Of course I would, and I cancelled all my engagements for several weeks to join the party.
We flew from Toronto, stopping in Alaska for a few hours – my second visit to Anchorage airport – then to Tokyo, where we also spent a few hours, and eventually, on a different Chinese flight, arrived in Beijing – as Peking had now been renamed. There we met a group of English-speaking writers, most notably a famous translator, Gladys Waugh, an Englishwoman who had married her Chinese husband at Cambridge and returned with him to China. They had had a hard time during the Cultural Revolution: they had been badly treated in jail and were lucky not to have been killed, as so many intellectuals and teachers were.
Everyone in that first writers’ group was very traditional intellectually, and while respecting the Chinese classics, many of which Gladys had translated, the current emphasis was on social realism. Baudelaire was a dirty name, and the very idea of decadence, or l’art pour l’art, was anathema to them. They admitted, however, that there were younger writers who might be influenced by moderns like James Joyce if they had the chance to read him – writers who put the individual, his dreams and private desires at the centre of their writing, despite the state wanting novels that showed everyone striving harder to make a better economic future for all.
My most memorable moments were both concerned with a lady who translated for me on two occasions. The first was a lecture I gave in English at the University, which was meant to last an hour but in fact lasted nearly four. My translator – half English, half Chinese, and brought up in England with an English father – spent some time with me before my lecture to make sure that the terms I would use were clear to her, and apart from admiring her great beauty and charm, I was much impressed with her competence and determination to get things just right. The lecture was given in a large classroom where a big kettle of hot water was always on the boil. The students would periodically go over to it and fill their jam jars containing tea leaves, so that tea was being drunk right through the session. I gathered that the tea leaves often had to last for weeks, so it must have been very weak.
My lecture was on Western Civilization, and I did not know how much the students already knew. I soon discovered that the answer was: nothing at all. They had never heard of what the Greeks had done, or the Romans, and they had only the vaguest idea of anything that had happened since. I was not too surprised when, looking through the public library the following week, I found very few books in any non-Chinese language – and those were mostly more than fifty years old. I threw away my notes and improvised from scratch, going through the basics. When I said that western culture was based on tension, they could not understand me. Life was based on tension, but art should be the opposite: peace and calm, beauty and tranquillity, relaxation against a background of benevolent nature. That of course is just what Chinese painting is, and as far as I knew, most literature as well. I went through the mechanics of explaining that western art is like an a
crobat on a tightrope: when the rope – or rather the wire – breaks, that is the moment when art happens. For four hours we discussed such concepts, fuelled in their case by numerous refills of hot water on their bleached-out tea leaves.
My interpreter was exhausted at the end, but loved it. She then, on her own, arranged for me to spend a day with the Chinese Youth Theatre, which in spite of its name is a well-equipped theatre company of actors, all of whom have to play instruments and perform acrobatics. They were the only company performing western plays. I told them about modern British and American plays, as well as European ones, recounting the plots, the number of characters, scenes and other relevant details. They did the same for me with Chinese plays and showed me videos; what most impressed me was the make-up and the gestures. Western characters were made up to look like what they should be. The actors moved as was right for the period, style and fashion of the play, and the gestures were perfect.
At one point, I talked about a Howard Barker play, one in which the Roundheads invade a church where a sculptor is just finishing the statue of a dead Cavalier, commissioned by the widow. In spite of his protests that it was his masterpiece, they started to smash it, exclaiming: “There is no pity in history.” (The last three words are the title of the play.) They liked that phrase so much, they promised to perform the play the following year – which they did.
We visited the Summer Palace, a day’s train journey away, and the town of Xian, where we saw the underground terracotta army, still being excavated and cleaned with small brushes. We went to a restaurant where the food consisted of dumplings fashioned into dozens of different animal shapes. Howard had brought his small son, Misha, who soon got very tired of looking at temples, but we did all the sights – the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square and the mummified body of Mao, the great Emperors’ Palace with its gardens, the tombs of the Mings and other Emperors, and much else beside. I also visited a print works. This had modern Japanese machinery, and I was surprised to see women folding sheets of paper by hand, when behind them there were machines capable of doing this work a hundred time faster. It was explained to me that there was a shortage of work, and they preferred to keep the women busy the old way rather than send them home while the machines did the work. I asked if they could give me some prices to print books, and I was given astonishing low estimates – but then came outside intervention. They did not want to print for export, because they did not want any responsibility if anything went wrong; in any case, if they did decide to print for me, the prices would be different from those suggested by the manager of the works.