Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  There were dozens of women, mostly his old girlfriends, Maurice’s two wives, his two daughters and a few old employees and publishing colleagues. Jean-Jacques Pauvert’s absence caused comment. Christian Bourgois had apparently arrived late, looked inside and gone away. The four of us who had arrived together found a bistro outside the gates and toasted his memory. I felt the loss most. Fraser, Chaix, Beckett, Girodias – all close friends for so many years, all now gone. Éric, on the steps on the way out, had nervously ventured: “If anyone would like to say something…” But it was too late. There is a shelf at Père Lachaise with Girodias’s ashes, and on the plate is “Une Journée sur la terre”. It was intended to be the title of his three-volume autobiography, but no trace was ever found of the third volume, which he had told me was well advanced.

  By now I was an experienced obituarist, sometimes doing three or four a week, to be held on file, of writers, publishers, politicians, musicians and other people of note. It became a useful supplement to my income, because I could take very little out of the company, and my entire inherited income now went to Bettina. At our last encounter in court, the judge, a Mrs Butler-Sloss, had ruled that my family income must go to the wife – that I could keep what I earned and that after more than two hundred days in court she must now leave me alone. She was to sue again, but that will come later.

  My obituary of Girodias appeared in the Independent, for which I was now writing many such final tributes. A fortnight later, I took copies of it with me to New York, where I organized a gathering of Maurice’s old friends at El Quixote. About twenty of us had dinner in the semi-private back section of the restaurant, and among those present were Iris Owens, Norman Rubington, Lilla Lyon (the second wife), Leon Friedman and one of his American secretaries. Everybody got fairly drunk – no one more than Iris Owens, who set about abusing most of the women present, especially Lilla. I could only take so much of the slanging matches between old rivals and left early, as did Leon Friedman, Maurice’s long-suffering American lawyer, whose advice was never taken, but who still retained an affection for him.

  One of the people at the dinner was Ann Patty, an editor at Simon & Schuster, in charge of their Poseidon imprint, a quality list. “Why don’t you translate Maurice’s book?” she asked me. I was of course the only person present who had read it. It was very long, very inaccurate, but also very funny – 540 pages that ended with Rosemary Ridgewell’s return to Paris to seduce him. First of all, I had no time, but whoever translated it would have to do massive research to get the facts right, put the sequences in order and curb the exaggerations – an almost impossible task. And the result would not be nearly as amusing to read as the original. But I had an idea. I might, I told her, be willing to write another book about the whole crowd of expatriates that made up Maurice’s milieu, centred on him, and using his book as a guide. And that was what I was persuaded to do shortly afterwards: to write a completely different book about Maurice Girodias’s life and what it represented, bringing in all the colourful characters who had written books for him and trying to catch the atmosphere of post-war Paris.

  I eventually signed a contract with Simon & Schuster for normal royalties and an advance of $40,000, of which I received a quarter at the time. I, of course, was much in need of money just then, and the first advance payment went straight into the publishing company. I had meetings with Leon Friedman and Lilla Lyon – and a pleasant evening where several people who had known Maurice all had dinner at Lilla’s flat – to discuss the book. Then I started to write the book, for which I borrowed Maurice’s title The Gardens of Eros.

  At the Edinburgh Festival in August, I presented the much shorter version of To Its Beginning to Its End in the St Cecilia’s Hall, devising new movement with a much shorter text, and it was extremely successful. The cast was Angela Pleasance, Sean Barratt and Leonard Fenton, with me as the narrating voice. I also recreated Damned Publishing – but not in the official Festival, which was still run by Frank Dunlop.

  I was still spending more than half of my time selling books in bookshops, concentrating largely on the backlist. We could afford to publish few new titles, and author pressure forced me to reprint certain books as a priority.

  In September I was calling on booksellers in New York and towns in New England, especially the seats of such universities as Yale and Harvard. Then I was doing the same in British northern towns, and on occasion organizing readings by my actors in art centres and single-actor readings in Waterstone’s bookshops, the result of persuading John Mitchinson, the marketing director, to promote these.

  I ended the year at the MLA in Chicago, where I had to give an early-morning lecture on Beckett to the Samuel Beckett Society of America with a streaming cold. I also made contact there with Bohdan Drozdowski’s son Piotr, who was now teaching in America, and then went on to San Francisco to do more selling, returning to New York late in January and then to London. After that, I was still travelling to sell books in Britain.

  All this time my money problems were getting worse. Pressure from the banks, the difficulty in collecting what was owed by American booksellers and the cancellation of contracts by authors’ agents because royalties were overdue were taking their toll. Su Herbert, running the London office, could not help herself expressing her dissatisfaction to others, including to authors on the telephone. The Beckett royalties were now my major concern, because the estate wanted to be paid, and it became obvious that Faber was approaching the Beckett heirs, Edward and his sister Caroline Murphy, to offer inducements to come over to them. They had the plays and now wanted the novels they had originally rejected. Their editor Robert McCrum had had meetings with me to discuss ways of making a Beckett complete edition, but that was just a method of opening negotiations and feeling me out. There was over £40,000 due in Beckett royalties, and I could see no way out except by an injection from a new investor. I had a meeting in Paris with Jérôme Lindon and Edward Beckett, but the latter cancelled for lunch at the last moment. Although he was sympathetic, Lindon made it clear that the royalties had to be paid and quickly. Sam had given me a letter saying that I had five years to meet arrears, but the five years were now up. In addition to the company’s difficulties, I was being sued by Hyman Fine to do more to the old building. It was obvious that he also wanted to recover the house at 1 Green’s Court, where I was still living, having made a comfortable bijou residence out of a sordid rundown brothel.

  I contacted Ron Rosen, who had now set up his own solicitor practice on Piccadilly, assuming that he might be the best man to deal with Fine. The old man was now over a hundred, but still in sole control of his property empire, with no visible assistance. There were meetings in solicitors’ offices, but the situation was hopeless, and I agreed to leave Green’s Court. Once again, everything had to go into storage, this time near Aldeburgh, because Sheila Colvin, having left the Edinburgh Festival, had now become the manager and chief executive of the Aldeburgh Festival. She was able to house my Bechstein piano and some other things. I still had much of the Ledlanet furniture and library in storage in Dunfermline. Storage charges were also a considerable drain on me. My sister had some of my belongings in Sussex, but now she had sold her house to look after our mother in Greece.

  * * *

  The blow finally fell. The Midland Bank closed the account, and so did the National Westminster. Pressure was mounting from Minuit and Edward Beckett. Through my auditors, Ramsay Brown, I managed to open a new account with Barclay’s in Whetstone, near their office. They must have given the right reassurances, because the bank was not particularly keen to have a publisher. One week I had to pay the salaries of Su Herbert and Margaret Jacquess in cash, because we did not yet have a chequebook.

  I had left Green’s Court and found a room in a nearby building on Meard Street, which was furnished. But money was still being claimed by Fine, and he was in a position to bankrupt the company. I had no option but to put it into liquidation
. I had to appear in front of a firm that wound up companies called Valentine’s, where I swore on oath that my statement of affairs was accurate and John Calder (Publishers) Ltd, the name that I had registered in 1950, after having started in business the previous year – later changed to Calder and Boyars and then changed back in 1975 – was no more. A new company, called Calder Publications Ltd, was set up in Baltimore through our American auditor, Hal Feldman, but it was trading mainly in England. As our debts other than royalties to authors, to Fine and to the banks were minimal at that point, we were able to pay all trade debts, and eventually we caught up with most of the royalties, but I felt no compunction in not paying whatever Fine was still claiming, having given him a totally refurbished office building and the house next to it as well. As for the banks, they had earned a fortune from me over the years, and in a way were directly responsible for the closure. In the end, things settled down and I carried on publishing.

  Robert McCrum still came to see me from time to time to discuss putting all of Beckett’s work into a joint edition, but it was clear that what Faber was really after was to try to get the Beckett novels away from me. It was then suggested, shortly after I had moved the offices from Soho to Covent Garden, that Faber may be interested in a takeover, putting new money into the company and letting me run it. I told them that if they made a proposal in writing I would consider it.

  Then I had to make a quick trip to America, and on my return found their letter waiting for me. “You won’t like it,” Su Herbert had warned me on the phone, and on reading it I certainly didn’t. But it never hurts to talk, so I went to a meeting at Faber’s offices with Matthew Evans, the chairman, Robert McCrum, who by then I thought of as the Faber hatchet man, and their financial director. The offer came down to just this: they would pay a small lump sum to take over all my Beckett copyrights; they would buy all stocks of Beckett’s titles we had in print at our balance-sheet written-down price – about five pence a copy – and they would put me on an advisory board to recommend how Beckett should be edited and published in future. For this I would receive a small stipend. I listened in silence and looked at them. “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why you’re saying all this. Can it be that you really thought I could be interested in such an insulting offer? Can you really think I’m all that stupid?”

  The meeting soon broke up – and that was that. From then on, Matthew Evans – who by the end of the Nineties was making a fool of himself in other ways as one of Tony Blair’s puppets, preaching a philistine populist message from the House of Lords, where Blair had put him – slipped out of my life. He had once published Jim Haynes’s very eccentric autobiography, made up largely of newspaper cuttings of his various exploits, and I had come to the party, where he had commented on meeting me: “Ah, the man who invented Jim Haynes?” and passed on. Once, I had unwisely allowed Kathleen Tynan, then writing her biography of Ken, to borrow two thick cuttings books about the two Edinburgh conferences, and they were never returned. But one of them was eventually sent to Jim from Faber’s, because they found his name in them. How did it get to Faber? I have never been able to trace the other, but was happy at the return of one.

  The biggest current problem was the money owed to Minuit and the Beckett Estate, especially the latter. I had to find an angel of some sort, and all I had to offer was a stake in the Beckett copyrights, which I would retain if royalties were paid. I was given a month to find the money. I phoned Harold Evans in New York, then the head of Random House, and suggested lunch. Without hesitation he gave me an appointment at the Four Seasons Restaurant. I flew to New York at the beginning of January 1993 to meet him. The restaurant was the setting for power lunches – as the phrase was then – and the point was to be seen to be there by as many celebrities as possible, in order to establish that you were one yourself.

  I arrived first and was shown to the table reserved for Harold Evans. I looked around, and noticed that everybody seemed to be drinking nothing but mineral water. The room was square, with all the tables against the four walls and nothing in between except serving tables and bustling waiters. This meant that everyone was staring at each other across the room, because everybody sat side by side and not opposite each other. I was reminded of the boxes in nineteenth-century theatres, which are so arranged that their occupants can see each other much better than the stage. Evans arrived, and I soon started to explain my proposition, whereby I would transfer half of the benefit of Beckett copyrights in consideration for a lump sum to cover what was owed. He never really listened, except to the polite preliminaries about mutual acquaintances and when we had met last. His eyes forever travelled around the room to see who was there, and he would constantly wave to other tables. Every time another publisher passed our table he would stop him. “Have you seen the month’s figures for paperback sales?” he asked each one. “Random House came first.” At one point during our lunch, Henry Kissinger crossed the room to speak to him. I was trying to think of a way to avoid shaking his hand, but I need not have worried: Kissinger was only interested in talking to Evans, and had no desire to meet me. By the end of lunch, he had taken in nothing of my proposition, and was much less friendly. He had thought he was just entertaining a publisher from England who might have a big best-seller to offer him. He told me to ring his young assistant and explain what I wanted to him. And that was that. The young assistant was not helpful.

  I received a phone call from Ken Bullock in California. I had known him as a man with theatrical links. He had worked for a while at Limelight, a film and drama bookshop in San Francisco, and I had met him in places as diverse as Portland, Oregon (Powell’s) and Venice in Italy. It was hard to pin down exactly what he did in life, but he had many connections. Now, when he rang me, I asked – but without any hope – if he happened to know anyone who could help me out of a financial jam. He said he knew somebody who might be interested and gave me the name of Edgar Aronson, who sometimes financed things that appealed to him.

  It was the day before my last in New York. I phoned Edgar Aronson, and he invited me to lunch. We got on well, and I explained my dilemma, but said that I had to return to Europe – I was flying to Paris – and that much as I had enjoyed meeting him, it was obvious that he could not help me in the time available, which was in fact at that point two hours. He heard me out, said that he felt he could trust me, and if I would come to his office after lunch he would be willing to give me a cheque.

  He paid for lunch, saying that the British always tipped too little and he wanted to return to that restaurant, and we went to his office. It was a small and neat suite of rooms, decorated with testimonials to his service in the Marine Corps. We roughed out an agreement, signed it, and he thereby acquired a residual interest in most of the Beckett works that were mine. He then gave me a cheque for $60,000. As a result, I was able to pay £40,000 in royalties just before my month expired.

  That last-minute reprieve is something that I still have difficulty in believing.

  * * *

  There was a Beckett conference in Monte Carlo in May 1991, given in the Princess Grace Library, which organized an Irish literary event each year in memory of Grace Kelly, the wife of the ruling Prince Rainier. There were about fifty people present, largely academics whom I knew from previous Beckett conferences. We were all housed in a luxurious hotel overlooking the sea, while the Library itself was in the old town, very near to the palace, so that we lunched in an open-air café on the main square and dined where we liked in the main part of town. I knew Monte Carlo well, of course, from the many years my mother had spent there; she was now in Greece. I met Georges Belmont for the first time, Beckett’s one-time close friend in the late Twenties, when they had been exchange lecturers in Paris and Dublin. They had later become estranged, due to Belmont’s membership of the Vichy Government during the war as a junior Minister for Education and his general right-wing stance in the period before the war started. His real name was Pel
orson, but he had changed it after the Liberation of Paris because of his disgrace. He and I shared a platform to give personal reminiscences about Sam.

  The conference went on for several days. Both Edward Beckett and his sister Caroline Murphy were there, the latter with her husband, Paddy, who looked a bit mystified by all the proceedings, but could enjoy a holiday at a pleasant time of the year. There was a Beckett theatrical performance in the opera house, Garnier’s heavily ormolu-decorated adjunct to the Casino, where Princess Caroline made a nice welcoming speech.

  What I particularly remember was the opening address at the conference by the Irish Ambassador to France. He told an anecdote about Beckett, who had gone to the Embassy in Paris to renew his passport. While waiting, he fell into conversation with an Irish tourist who had lost his wallet after being mugged and had eaten nothing since the previous day. Sam emptied his pockets to give the man some money to get some food, and then found that he could not pay for his new passport. He even had to walk home, as he had not a penny on him. A typical Sam story!

  Beckett events continued to proliferate, and I was involved in many of them. One I organized myself, and it must have been before I realized the full extent of Barney Rosset’s deviousness in moving my Stirrings Still special edition from Paris to New York. I arranged a reading of the text at the Irish-American Center on Fifth Avenue, of which I had met the President, Dr Kevin Cahill, some time earlier. It was a special occasion with Barry McGovern, who had already had a great success in New York with his one-man show, I’ll Go On. Edward Beckett had come for the reading as well, and I had a long wait for him at the airport, because he arrived without a visa. But the occasion was a triumph, and very good for Barney’s ego and his post-Grove Press reputation. I was added to the club’s invitation list as a result and went to several of their receptions, until a new turn of events made me avoid the place.