Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  One bit of business came from the Panda series of English-language paperbacks, looking rather like Penguin books, which we imported after the visit and which I sold for Mosaic Press in Britain. The series contained a mixture of classics and new writing. I soon found that Chinese importers in London were doing exactly the same thing, so it was not a success. We also developed a plan to produce a big History of China as an international project, but there were too many not very serious people involved, and it never got off the ground.

  * * *

  Ledlanet was gone, the shooting parties were over, and I could no longer ski. Some months after my skiing accident, I had had the cartilage removed from my left knee, so it no longer seized up on me, but I had difficulty in walking any distance without discomfort and attempted no other exercise. Then Jacques Chaix fell ill. He had a form of leukaemia, and had to have ever more frequent blood transfusions. He made every effort to continue normally. Once, he swam out to sea at Cap Ferrat and forbade anyone to follow him, coming back totally exhausted an hour later. Every time I saw him, he looked worse: he was short of breath and moved with difficulty, but still tried to lead the life to which he was accustomed. I had lunch with him one day in his flat in the Boulevard Maillot, after which he had to go to the American Hospital, where he was being treated, to receive his blood transfusions and see the doctor. I stayed on in his flat, because I wanted to see Alain Robbe-Grillet, who lived on the Boulevard only a hundred yards away and was returning from the country but had not yet arrived. I was still there when Jacques returned. He could hardly stand: his face was the colour of old oak, and he collapsed onto a chair.

  “Merde,” he said. “Now I have jaundice as well.” Ulla Wagner, a German girl in Paris who for years had been one of Jacques’s many girlfriends but was now living with another man, was also there. They had waited for Jacques to return so that they could take him off to the country for the weekend. I gave Lucienne, his housekeeper, my whereabouts for the next fortnight with telephone numbers in case anything happened and urged her not to forget to telephone me. But she never did.

  I had to go to New York the following week, and during this visit Muriel Leyner’s father died, after many days of fighting for his life. He had emigrated from Russia as a young man – first to Britain, which had made him an Anglophile. He dressed very correctly and was careful, even pedantic, in his use of English. Then he had moved on to the States, where, as a lawyer, he had fought many civil-rights cases and been a thorn in the side of Boss Hague, the Tammany Hall-type corrupt Irish-American political head of Hudson County in New Jersey, who had run his Democratic Party machine like a personal kingdom. I attended the funeral, a Jewish one, and then heard from my office in London that Jacques Chaix had died. It was not Lucienne who had passed me the news but Germaine Fougier, whom I had first met with Jacques in 1948, then a young singer, now Professor of Singing at the Conservatoire. I flew back to Paris, met Germaine and had dinner with her that night.

  The next morning was Jacques’s funeral. I went first to the hospital and saw my old friend’s body before the coffin was closed. There I met his sister, whom I had known for years, but who now hardly recognized me. A church service had been arranged by Germaine in a catholic church, although Jacques, brought up like me as a catholic, was totally lapsed, while Germaine herself was a practising protestant. These things do not matter after death, when only formalities count.

  On one side of the church was Jacques’s sister with her family and the employees of the factory, who had been given the day off to attend. On the other were Jacques’s many friends, many of them past girlfriends. I saw people I knew from Cap Ferrat and Val d’Isère or at dinners that Jacques had given in Paris. The priest circled the coffin in what was certainly not an orthodox service, spraying it with holy water and saying that now Jacques understood the mind of God. Then we were in the open air, remembering faces and names. None of Jacques’s friends were invited back to the wake that his sister had organized in his apartment.

  Instead, a small group of us – including a sweet little girl who had always been very fond of him, Germaine and I, Ulla and her boyfriend – all went to La Grande Cascade in the Bois de Boulogne, an expensive restaurant.

  The next day I had to go to another funeral. This time it was John Stonehouse and a Church of England ceremony in Southampton. He had moved there with Sheila, his second wife, whom he had married after his release from prison and with whom he had had a small son. His first wife, Barbara, had divorced him while he was inside and married again, and she did not come to the funeral. Bruce Douglas-Mann was there, and he gave the address, which was affectionate and honest, pointing out John’s many abilities and his early promise, but admitting that as a man he had become flawed. Bruce was no longer an MP, having lost his seat when he had switched to the Social Democrats in the post-Falklands election – losing it not to the official Labour candidate, but to the Tories in the wake of Thatcher’s triumphal military victory.

  There was another funeral that year. Erich Fried had had a long battle with cancer. On one occasion, I wanted to go to visit him in hospital, but was told that he would be out in a few days. When I telephoned again the following week, he had just left to do some readings in Germany. However weak he was, he kept on, translating Shakespeare into German, turning out a constant stream of new poems and doing readings and lectures wherever and whenever possible. His funeral was in a graveyard in West London, one of the largest I have ever attended. A planeload of young Germans had come for the occasion, and I saw many friends, most of them old lefties like Bill Webb and Stuart Hood.

  The ceremony was secular, although presided over by the Reverend Paul Oestreicher, who had followed Erich at the German department of the BBC. “If Erich is wrong and there really is a heaven,” he said at the end of his fluent address, “I know what he is trying to do now. Get us all in.”

  At the graveside all the mourners picked up a clod of earth to throw it onto the coffin. There were so many of us that there was nothing left for the gravediggers to do: the hole was completely filled. The night before, I had translated a few of his last poems – very moving but in no way self-pitying or sentimental farewells to the world – and I gave them to Catherine, his widow, at the wake. Three years later, I published a second volume of Fried’s poetry, Love Poems. Both collections were to have several reprints, and more volumes were planned a decade later.

  * * *

  The late Eighties were full of problems, the largest being the difficulty of achieving sales that would cover the overheads and our obligations to printers and authors. We now had to pay the rent on the whole building, from which Marion Boyars had unexpectedly moved out. It was certainly too big for us and too expensive. Our American sales were quite good, thanks to the time I had spent selling there, but the overheads ate up all the incoming revenue and collecting money from slow payers was agonizing.

  After Su Herbert had replaced Chris Davidson, the London office was more economically run, but Thatcherism was taking its toll in a xenophobic dumbing-down of international culture, while review space was going to the big advertisers, so it was much harder to create awareness of what we were publishing. In America we no longer sold other publishers’ books, and this helped with American sales, because I knew by now that a buyer will always buy approximately the same number of books whether he is offered a hundred or a thousand. And I was still paying for the inefficient Kampmann sales and fulfilment, even though they were responsible for few of the sales. I spent much of my time in warehouses – Kampmann changed them fairly frequently – usually going from bad to worse. I made many trips to their warehouse in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where I knew the first names of all the packers – none of whom had ever seen anyone from Kampmann. They would refer to “suits” who were sometimes seen on the top floor. At one point in Bridgeport I saw all the returns, even in the original binders’ parcels, being dumped into skips to be thrown away. I stopped it, bu
t it must have been going on for at least a month. Nobody cared, because no one from Kampmann knew what was happening, and it was easier to throw books away than to return them to stock. I spent two days rescuing books and re-shelving them.

  Then Kampmann went bankrupt, and I found another warehouse in New York State, more than an hour’s drive from New York City. I checked it out carefully, and it seemed solid, as it belonged to a public company. What I did not know was that just as I joined it, it was being sold to an individual, who was soon himself in trouble.

  In Paris I saw Maurice Girodias when I could. He was in a bad way, living off charity, mainly from his brother Éric Kahane and his sister, and writing the second volume of his memoirs. Our lunches were usually in a cheap Chinese restaurant, because he was a vegetarian now. He was living in an almost empty apartment near Alésia, not far from where Jim Haynes had his studio. He had picked up new passions – Breton nationalism, the persecution of the Cathars (he was convinced he was reincarnated from one), support for one of the socialist leaders, Michel Rocard, who was trying to change his party’s policies, and other matters. On his return to France he had undergone an operation to save his sight, and some time after that had developed intestinal cancer, which had led to another major operation. This had much weakened him, but he still had his sense of humour and had kept his looks and his charm. Maurice was much hurt by the things that were being said and written about him and his years in publishing in articles and books that were then coming out, mainly by writers whose literary careers he had started. They described him as a bandit who had cheated them. As I knew well, he had in those days been totally careless, never expecting a book to last beyond one printing and paying a fair price for that in cash, keeping no records. He had simply bought manuscripts on which he hoped to make a profit with no thought of continuing copyright going through his mind. It took him by surprise when interest in his titles was shown in other countries, and he was never at ease in the world of contracts and royalty agreements.

  I introduced him to Odile Hellier, whose Village Voice bookshop was now the best outlet for English-language books in Paris. Maurice gave a talk there about the Paris of the Fifties and Sixties. His old Olympia editions were continuing to sell there, although I have no idea where they came from.

  On one occasion, he heard that I had been in Paris and had not contacted him, and he was very annoyed. I offered to read his manuscript to help make corrections and find errors, and he promised he would show it to me, but never let me see it until it was published in 1990.

  He had developed a bitter grudge against Barney Rosset and a strong hatred for Dick Seaver. He considered them – especially the latter – to be responsible for estranging authors such as William Burroughs from him. He had certainly been cheated in America over Candy, but by Walter Zacharius of Lancer Books, who used one of his employees, an attractive girl, to bamboozle him when he travelled to America to try and find out what had happened. That story, very funnily told, is in Maurice’s second autobiography.34

  Maurice wrote an open letter to Samuel Beckett, which was published in some newspapers, attacking Seaver and Rosset for his woes. Other articles on various subjects appeared in Le Monde and elsewhere. His book was finally published by Éditions de la Différence and had good reviews. I found it a delightful read, very funny, but his sequence of events was chaotic, and he never failed to exaggerate situations to make a better story. A little before publication, I was in Paris with John Minihan and took him along to lunch with Maurice at Zeyer on Place Alésia, where we sat outside in lovely early summer weather and John was able to get some good photographs. It was to be our last meeting.

  * * *

  Our office lease was coming to an end, and we were told we would have to leave the building in which we had been working since 1963. I was still living in the next-door house, where I had been since 1982, and still had some years to go. I was given a schedule of dilapidations and began to realize what was in the small print that no one had ever read. We were obliged to repaint the building on the outside, repair the roof and redecorate the inside. Negotiations fell on deaf ears, and we were taken to court, where we appeared but got nowhere. I had to stop production of all books and payment of royalties, and found an Indian contractor called Sabu, who undertook to do the building works as cheaply as possible. He found an old deer rifle in my flat which had come from Ledlanet, so antiquated that a bullet could no longer be found for it. He wanted it so much that he gave me a considerable discount on his work. But the final bill was still £84,000, which we had somehow to pay and then leave the building.

  The overdraft went right up, and I was asked by a new bank manager to repay it. Then it became clear that Mr Fine also wanted my house. As things kept going from bad to worse, I became paranoid. I feared that old enemies were in league against me. During Beckett’s last visits to London, Bettina had always tried to contact him, and out of old friendship he would see her when possible, always telling me about it. Her animosity towards me had in no way diminished. Now I began to suspect that she was trying to help Marion to get Beckett’s books for her list if I were to go under, because my difficulties were certainly no secret.

  Suzanne Beckett died in June 1989, and Sam was able to attend the burial in the Montparnasse cemetery. I was not there, but I heard that looking at the grave he had commented: “Enough room there for two.” Then, in early December, he collapsed in his bath. On being told, I went immediately to Paris. So did Barney Rosset, bringing with him a Time Life photographer. For several days we waited for news, but all we knew was that he was in hospital in a coma and that the end must be near. I spoke to Lindon, but he would tell me nothing further. Barney wanted to see the retirement home, and I reluctantly drove him there with the photographer, making the further mistake of taking them in and indicating where Sam’s room was, without going in myself. The photographer wanted to take pictures, and Barney did not try to dissuade him. A minute later, a nurse shooed them out. I felt ashamed at being with them.

  It was now only a few days before Christmas, and I had to move offices, so I returned to London, where we moved into a small suite of rooms on Neal Street in Covent Garden. We gave a small office party there, as we always did for authors and staff on the 20th, and the conversation was all about Sam. The newspapers had reported that he was in a coma. One reporter, from the Irish Times apparently, found out that he was in the Hôpital Sainte-Anne and managed to get into his room for a minute, where he caught his eye, but was then chased out. I kept in touch with Edward Beckett in Paris, because this was one funeral I wanted to attend at all costs, and asked him to keep in touch.

  We settled into our new offices, which seemed very cramped compared to Soho. IMEC in Paris, which collects publishers’ archives, helpfully agreed to take everything that wasn’t current for storage. Several large filing cases went by lorry. Su Herbert had the best room in the new offices, with the library of our past publications around her, while I took a small office that communicated with the corridor as well as the central general office. We were now reduced to three people, the other being Margaret Jacquess, who had been with us since our early days in Brewer Street as receptionist. We all missed Soho. The restaurants had neither the same quality nor the same variety, but it was handy to be so close to the two opera houses and so many theatres.

  During that week, I had a phone call from John Minihan, who told me that his framed photograph of Beckett had just fallen off the wall. Could this be an omen? I tried to phone Edward Beckett, but did not reach him until after ten on Christmas Eve. He told me that Sam had died the previous night. Why had he not phoned me? There was so much to do, and he had simply forgotten. The funeral was to be a simple burial at eight o’clock on the 26th, Boxing Day, and no announcement would be made until it was over, because they did not want a large crowd of Parisians to descend on the cemetery. There was no transport to Paris on Christmas Day, and no ferries were crossing the channel. It w
ould be impossible to get there, even if I could swim twenty-two miles in winter and walk two hundred more. I was devastated.

  My obituary appeared in the Independent on the 27th. The Scotsman tailored a piece I had written about Beckett for them earlier into another. James Knowlson wrote a few more paragraphs to follow my London one.

  Then I had to go to Washington, DC, to the MLA. There was a wake for Sam there, in a pub suitably called Murphy’s. I particularly remember talking to Mary Foliet, a New York academic who was to become a close friend. I had phoned Barney on Christmas Day to tell him about Sam’s death and asked him to keep it to himself until the next day. But he immediately phoned around New York and managed to reach Mel Gussow of the New York Times, who tried to get his obituary in for the following day, but the news was not believed by the duty editor in charge. He probably thought that Beckett was unimportant anyway – so it appeared on the 27th, when it was largely overshadowed by the death of Ceaușescu, who had been executed in Bucharest following the popular rising there.