by John Calder
This had to do with a man called Eoin O’Brien. He had written a book about Beckett’s early life in Ireland, The Beckett Country, illustrated with evocative period photographs. Dolmen Press had originally intended to publish this, but Liam Miller’s too heavy indulgence in drink and his ill-health had frustrated our plans – I originally intended to publish the British edition at the same time as his – and in the end it was published by the author and distributed by Faber, but apparently with little enthusiasm, because at one point I was asked to take it over.
O’Brien had formed his own imprint, Black Cat Press, to publish it. It was a good book, showing a detailed knowledge of Beckett’s work and its sources in his early experiences in Ireland. The many autobiographical and family references had been put into the context of actual places and people, and O’Brien had been industrious in finding photographs of the postman of Beckett’s boyhood, the schools he had attended, the teachers who had taught him and the like. I came to know O’Brien, saw him in London and Dublin, and attended splendid dinners in his house that seemed to go on all night – which did not prevent him, a practising surgeon, from getting off early in the morning to his hospital.
I was in the New York office one day, when I received a telephone call from Jérôme Lindon to tell me that he had decided that Beckett’s first unpublished novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women could now be published. This astonished me, because I knew of Sam’s aversion to this early work – basically the first novel of a clever student experimenting with words and imaginatively writing of his amours in a high-flown manner that showed off his considerable erudition and knowledge of languages. It was undergraduate stuff, and Sam had resisted the clamour, after winning the Nobel Prize, to get all his unpublished work into print with more determination where Dream was concerned than any of his other work. It was Eoin O’Brien who had brought about Lindon’s decision. He had told him that Sam had said, during a visit after one of the falls that had brought him to hospital, that he was willing to see the work published some little time after his death. He had never said anything like that to me or to Lindon, or to Edward or anyone else. Did I want to publish it? No, I didn’t really, but I knew perfectly well that, if I didn’t, Faber and Faber would. What I did not realize at the time was that Eoin O’Brien wanted to be the publisher himself through his own Black Cat Press in Dublin. Since Lindon had said that as the publisher of all the other Beckett novels it had to be me, O’Brien came up with a proposal. He declared his willingness to edit a manuscript that existed in two versions, one of them in the archives of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire – where it had been deposited along with other Beckett unpublished manuscripts by Lawrence E. Harvey, an American scholar and author of a book on Beckett’s early poetry, almost certainly without Beckett’s knowledge at the time – and the other a typed copy which was owned by the Beckett Archive at Reading University. I could see no objection to this offer, and O’Brien edited it, with Edith Fournier’s name added as co-editor.
Then the difficulties began – delays in finalizing the manuscript being only one of them – and I was asked to allow O’Brien to publish a small limited edition at the same time as my trade edition. There were meetings in Dublin and Paris, constant changes of publication dates and difficulties in seeing the final editing. I had a contract to publish, and Eoin O’Brien asked to be included in the contract not just as editor but as a publisher as well. He knew of my financial difficulties, and while overtly sympathetic, he spotted an opportunity for himself, expecting that I would collapse at any moment. I had already had some flak thrown at me for the many errors in the first posthumous Beckett publication of unpublished work that I had brought out, As the Story Was Told. This contained his final text, What Is the Word, and other writings, some of which had appeared in other collections, but I had not proofread it myself, and there were some ghastly mistakes which had been overlooked by the proofreader. This was of course just at the time when I was undergoing the most difficult trials of my entire publishing career and giving all my attention to survival.
There was a meeting in Dublin just before Christmas at the end of 1992. O’Brien had already brought out his own Black Cat Press edition of Dream of Fair to Middling Women, and it had been reviewed in the whole British and Irish press. The meeting, in a solicitor’s office, was to try to make a deal of some kind. O’Brien had signed no contract to publish, only one with me to edit the manuscript. The meeting broke up without any agreement. He continued to sell his edition in all my markets. Although Lindon knew this was an unauthorized edition, he would take no action himself, but urged me to sue. I knew only too well that there could be no greater folly than for a British publisher to sue an Irish one in Ireland. So I let it pass and brought out my own edition the following year, trying to displace, little by little, the Irish edition with my own in the bookshops.
In New York Richard Seaver had been keen to publish Dream under his own imprint Arcade Books, and he pursued me to obtain American rights, even coming to Applause Bookshop, where Claudia Menza, Glenn Young and I were doing a reading of Erich Fried’s poetry, to catch me when I was likely to be in a receptive mood. But money was still a major concern, and as his distribution through Little, Brown would certainly be superior to my own – at least where a hardback was concerned – I finally made a deal whereby he acquired hardback rights from me and I retained the paperback. This turned out to be a wise move. The hardcover sold quickly in America and was reprinted, but the returns, large ones, came back from the chains just as the new printing arrived. Seaver paid for the hardcover edition, the cost to be set off against royalties, while I was left with the continuing paperback sale, which does not dry up with an author such as Beckett as hardcovers usually do. In the end, I did fairly well out of the publication, but my reservations about publishing it at all were still there. O’Brien remaindered his edition soon after mine appeared. I had a stock of The Beckett Country at my British warehouse, which I should have retained against my considerable claim against O’Brien. Unfortunately, when he asked for them to be returned, Su Herbert, without a thought and without consulting me, sent them back to him. O’Brien was on close terms with Cahill in New York, which is why I stopped going to the Irish-American Center.
Edgar Aronson, whom I saw fairly frequently during the next year both in New York and in London, had prevented me losing Beckett. But I was losing many of my other better-known authors. Georges Hoffman, son of the agent with whom I had concluded the Henry Miller contracts, cancelled them all because of late royalties. I was soon to lose more books, partly because I could not afford to reprint them, partly because the authors were persuaded by their publishers in their own countries to leave me. But there was still a considerable backlist, and I continued to give the majority of my time to selling it. I had left the London representation to Darryl Richards, but now I began to sell in London as well.
After a few months in Meard Street, I made an arrangement with Marese Murphy, who was now married to a retired banker and living most of the time in Dorset, to occupy a room in her flat in Bloomsbury with the use of the rest of it. When she was there, she would sleep on the sofa, or in the bedroom if I was away. I still did not have my own furniture, which was in storage, but I was now planning to find a place in France, possibly in Paris. I liked Marese, whom I had known for a long time, but I found it difficult to get used to the smoke that went everywhere with her. It was only in an opera performance that she did not have a cigarette in her hand. Her views were far to the right and she was intolerant, but we both liked the same kind of music and books, and enjoyed good food and drink. And she was good company. At one of her parties I met Penelope Turing, also a critic, who had written a book about Hans Hotter. He was obviously her hero, and her admiration for him made her book – which I agreed to publish – go over the top, but Hotter helped her with it. The most interesting chapters were his comments on interpreting roles and how to act in opera. I sold the book to a German publi
sher with Hotter’s help. He was an amazing man, and even after his official retirement he went on doing speaking parts and giving masterclasses.
I had known David Applefield for some time. He had approached me years earlier in Paris to contribute to his magazine, Frank, which was published in English. I had also given him short works by Beckett and others. He was an American who had gone first to Canada then to France to avoid the Vietnam War, and he had a family in Montreuil on the east of Paris, where he suggested I might look for a place to live. I had found something that seemed just right in Clamart, south of Paris, but unfortunately the deal fell through.
One day, when I was selling books in Boston, I received a message from David Applefield. There was a house going just across the street from him, and he thought it would suit my needs. So, on the telephone from Boston, between the Grolier and the Harvard Bookshops, I told him to take it. When I saw it a month later, I was not impressed: two tiny rooms, a kitchen and bathroom, all in bad repair over a garage which I thought I could possibly later turn into a library. When the lorry arrived from Dunfermline with all the Ledlanet furniture that I had retained and several large cases full of books, it occupied the whole of the garage and the basement underneath it.
There was an old foundry that consisted of a number of useable spaces around a courtyard on the Rue Édouard Vaillant in Montreuil. Here, together with others looking for space for their professional activities, we started an office. David Applefield was by now doing some publishing of his own and producing reference books, mainly about Paris for tourists. We shared a large open space on the first floor of our building, having a hangar next door and more space underneath. Gradually, I conceived the idea of creating a theatre. Montreuil was no farther away from Paris than other theatrical complexes such as La Cartoucherie in the Bois de Vincennes. David introduced me to the Director of Culture for Montreuil, Jean-Marie Morel, an enthusiast whose eyes glowed when I said that Montparnasse was finished and the next centre of Parisian culture might well be Montreuil. Obviously, all these years after the demise of Ledlanet Nights, I was still suffering from withdrawal symptoms and looking for an opportunity to get back into the swing of theatrical and musical productions. I also knew it was my last chance, because the years were now beginning to drain my energies.
* * *
New calamities hit me in New York. The warehouse to which I had moved after Kampmann was having its own financial troubles. It had been bought by an individual without the manager giving me any inkling of this. The staff was so reduced that there were no packers, so that I was unable to get books out in December, and in the new year I was given short notice that the warehouse had been seized by the Revenue. If I did not remove all my books in three days, I would lose them. Claudia Menza recruited a friend of hers, Richard Derus, to help, and for three days we packed up books for about ten hours a day and managed to get them removed by several trucks – tens of thousands of volumes. I had little time to find somewhere else and chose the American Book Center in Brooklyn, owned by Manny Gomez, with whom I had one brief meeting. My negotiation was mainly with his son-in-law, who seemed pleasant enough, and it was he who ran the day-to-day operation. But I soon discovered that all the past problems I had had with warehouses were nothing compared with what was to come. There was a proviso in the contract for extra charges if the monthly turnover fell below a certain figure. Then extra charges were added for storage, which had not been stipulated in advance. The warehouse was on a high storey near the Brooklyn docks, reachable by an industrial elevator to which only ABC had access. They had me by the short hairs.
Things went from bad to worse. I was desperate to get my books away, but it proved impossible. I went to Leon Friedman, who was not encouraging. “Give me $30,000 and I’ll sue,” he said, “but I advise you to save your money and write it all off. You would have to sue in Brooklyn. It would probably take years anyway.” I was able to find another warehouse in New Jersey, not the first I had known there. They seemed decent people, and were able to tell me many horror stories about Manny Gomez, who threatened to sue them every time a client managed to escape from ABC and go to them. I sent more books out from Britain, including new titles, to Whitehurst & Clark, the fulfilment warehouse in Edison, but was unable to negotiate with Gomez and his son-in-law. They then sent out a list of all my titles they were holding and claimed that they had seized them against unpaid charges. And they announced an auction. I decided it would be wiser not to go to it myself, and sent a lawyer who had been found for me by Edward de Grazia, who had fought some of Grove Press’s past obscenity cases and was a friend. Claudia went with him, and we fixed an amount which he would bid for my books. I waited in a nearby café until they came back with long faces: Manny Gomez was in Florida on the telephone the whole time, and he had raised every bid. I rang Leon Friedman. “That means he now owns the books,” he told me. All the cream of the list – books by our best authors, the opera guides which had been doing well in America and, of course, the slower-selling titles as well – were lost. I could sue, but I had already been told what the probable result of that would be. A month later the whole stock of books was sold – probably at a few cents each to Daedalus, remainder dealers in Washington, DC.
In the meantime, Claudia had married her long-term boyfriend. Charles Frye was a university teacher of black history and philosophy, black himself, whose university appointments were always in the southern states – Washington, DC, then Texas, then Louisiana. Claudia was much away to visit him, while he only occasionally turned up in New York. I liked him immensely, with his quiet wit and unusual fields of knowledge. One year the MLA conference was held in New Orleans at Mardi Gras time, and it was fun to discover the city of so much history and the home of traditional jazz – the only jazz that really appealed to me. I also discovered a very addictive local drink, the Cajun Dry Martini. From the time that Charles Frye began to teach at the University of New Orleans, Claudia never missed a Mardi Gras, and she went to New Orleans for many weekends during the year. Charles was also a writer, of poetry and fiction as well as of books and articles connected with his academic studies, and Claudia, as a literary agent, was tireless in her efforts to find him the right outlets for his writing. She was also full of stories about their experiences, some of them very threatening, whenever they had travelled as a mixed-race couple in America, especially in the south.
This gave me an idea. Claudia was herself a poet, and I knew from attending her readings in New York that she was a good performer. She was also very worried about her husband, who had been diagnosed with cancer, and she wanted to keep him occupied as much as possible to take his mind off his health. I had for years been devising performance scripts to promote the authors I published. Why not a “Claudia and Charles Show”? It did not take me long to put the script together. It took the form of a light-hearted dialogue between them, bringing in anecdotes from their life together, including the menacing ones, sprinkled with readings from their works.
I then organized a British tour for them. If space allowed, I would reprint here Claudia’s very funny account of that tour. It appears in a Festschrift that was published in 1998 by Mosaic Press to celebrate my fifty years of publishing,35 which came in fact a year later.
They both came to Britain, rehearsed in my office under my direction, changing and improving the script as we went along, and we then drove to the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where they gave a brilliant performance. Unfortunately, the audience was not as big as it would have been, had General de la Billière, the British commander of the Gulf War campaign, not been simultaneously giving a talk in the next room. Charles, a seasoned lecturer with no acting experience, had worried me a little with his low-keyed delivery in rehearsal, but suddenly expanded in front of an audience, discovering a deep resonant voice that perfectly matched Claudia’s quick delivery and floating soprano tones, which could produce a wide variety of inflections. They were a good team.
From Cheltenham we made a little tour before their next engagement. Claudia was anxious to show Stonehenge to Charles, and we went there, to Bristol and other towns before the next “Claudia and Charles Show”, which was at Kingston University, just outside London. Then I sent them off to Newcastle upon Tyne, where I had been able to secure them an invitation to a conference on interracial relations, where their show turned out to be the highlight except for one mishap: Claudia passed out in the middle of it. She then recovered, however, and went on to the end. Not long afterwards, Charles Frye died, but that trip certainly did much to raise his morale at the time.
The death of her husband was very painful to Claudia, although she hid her grief well and carried on normally. But in the meantime, the problems with our American office were spinning out of control. I wrote a letter to our principal trade creditors, office suppliers and the like, sending them ten per cent of what was owed and promising to send the balance in monthly instalments over three years, which I did. I told Claudia that I had to close the office and that she would have to work from home. She was not willing to do that, so I let her have the office on her own and closed up, still selling my books from the warehouse, but now doing everything from London.
I was always on the lookout for ways of getting a substantial sum into the company in London. Attempts to find a buyer for the archives that had accumulated since 1975 got nowhere. I had talks with Sotheby’s, who were interested in Beckett manuscripts, and I put together a collection of letters from him, first editions and rare books I had collected over the years, including the signed copies of Beckett’s novels and other works in special editions. I also put in what I valued most: Sam’s own original prompt copy of Waiting for Godot. This was the first French edition, which he had used during the rehearsals of Blin’s first production at the Théâtre de Babylone. It included all his cuts and much new material that he had added in his own handwriting. In the little volume there were changes and notes on every page. It also had the author’s appointments written into the back pages and other personal notes. Sam had given it to me, and I treasured it. At the time he had made this wonderful gift he had written on the flyleaf “for John and Bettina”, because he was staying with us in Wimpole Street at the time. Bettina, during the Eighties, sued me to get it for herself because of the signature. When I asked Sam what to do, he evoked the judgement of Solomon. “Burn it and give her half the ashes,” he suggested. But I could not do this, and the courts eventually ruled that it was mine. Now I had to part with it to save the firm.