Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  The Sotheby auction took place during the Gulf War of 1990. The entire collection was valued at £80,000, and the negotiation was partly engineered by Sacha, the son of Millie Gervasi, at the time Bill Colleran’s girlfriend. As my need was great, they agreed to advance £40,000, out of which Sacha took a substantial commission. Because of the war, the auction, held just before Christmas, was badly attended, and the main interest was in the Godot prompt copy, which had a reserve of £30,000. Trinity College in Dublin offered £29,000. They discovered the next day what the reserve was and paid the extra thousand pounds. So I received no more, and owed money to Sotheby who, obviously embarrassed by the unsuccessful auction, did not press me for a refund. They later suggested that I might work it off by writing copy for Sotheby catalogues, but never followed this up, although I indicated my willingness to do so.

  As the Nineties advanced, it was obvious that more economies had to be made in London as well as in New York. We joined a consortium of small publishers to rent space in a building near King’s Cross, where we only had one small room and two desks, so I could never sit down there on the days when Margaret Jacquess, now nearly eighty, came in. We also had only one telephone line. In the room next door was Peter Day, who had bought Allison & Busby, another publisher not too unlike ourselves, which had been unable to continue.

  There we stayed, operating on a shoestring, uncomfortable but still publishing until, at the end of 1997, we moved once again. Su Herbert, who had been worried for years, especially about what would happen to her pension if we had to close down, and was dissatisfied with her salary, left us. She went to work for Peter Day.

  By now I was living in France, working in London, but most of the time travelling to keep the list alive and supporting myself personally by writing articles, obituaries and reviews for newspapers. I had been through an extraordinary series of disasters, but I always had Sam Beckett’s key injunction before me: “On”.

  Chapter 9

  Montreuil

  I was asked in an interview on a French radio station why I had decided to move to France. The answer that I gave – “Margaret Thatcher” – was only partly true. It had been painful for me to watch, from 1979 onwards, a country that had developed a successful welfare state, a fairly egalitarian educational system and a good National Health Service disintegrate so quickly under Thatcher. The BBC had once been the best broadcasting system in the world, but the Tories hated it, referring to it, during one of their conferences, as the “Bolshevik Broadcasting Service”. A series of destructive ideological wreckers were put in to destroy it, including Marmaduke Hussey and William Rees-Mogg, who has already appeared in this book. His reward was to be knighted and then made a peer by the Iron Lady.

  There is no clearer account of how this destruction was brought about than the one in John Drummond’s excellent autobiography.36 Dolts and incompetents with no idea of what public service should mean, no values and no ideals, were brought in to replace the creative and dedicated men and women who had made the BBC the wonder of the world. And as quality faded out, bureaucracy reigned supreme, so that what had been set up as an independent corporation increasingly became an instrument of government, as broadcasting so sadly is in most other countries. The British had proved since 1945 that they had a talent for the arts – especially drama, painting, sculpture, dance and music, the latter a fairly recent development, to add to Britain’s established reputation in literature. Now under Thatcher that too was coming apart. Yes, Margaret Thatcher was indeed one prime cause of my decision to move to France.

  But there were other reasons. I wanted to get as far away as possible from Bettina and her constant summonses to bring me back to court. The less I was living in London – even though I mainly worked from there – the better. My most important publishing contracts were now with French publishers, and it seemed reasonable to be able to see them more frequently, as well as those authors who were still alive. Strangely enough, the opposite happened. When I visited Paris, usually staying at the Michelet-Odéon, I would go the rounds of Minuit, Gallimard, Grasset and Le Seuil, see authors and visit bookshops. Now it was only the bookshops I visited regularly. My place in Montreuil was some way out of the centre, so that I now went to Paris less frequently. When I did, it was to see the bank, meet visitors and carry out a few necessary functions.

  I went fairly frequently to Jim Haynes’s Sunday nights: he gave buffet dinners every week, open to the first seventy or eighty people to book. These were multicultural gatherings of a wide variety of people from all over the world. A couple of articles about his Sunday evenings in airline magazines increased the numbers who came, so that in addition to actors and film producers, writers and publishers, journalists and painters, you could now meet business people from California or Iowa, looking rather puzzled at the bohemian collection of artists, tourists and people Jim had picked up on the street in Paris or on his various travels. He had been teaching ever since he arrived there – exactly what was always unclear, although Media Studies was the title of his course. He did this for thirty years, until he was reluctantly retired at sixty-five.

  Even Christian Bourgois, who had for years referred to me as his best friend in England, I hardly ever saw. I had, however, become very friendly with Olivier Corpet, the director of IMEC, who when I had to move in London to even smaller offices, he volunteered to take over all my archives other than what was necessary for the day-to-day business and keep them in good order. They were transferred to a hollow mountain near Melun, which was now an enormous warehouse, housing the books of many publishers, where IMEC, a branch of the Ministry of Culture, occupied about a quarter of the space. The warehouse was invisible from the air. It was under a wooded hill alongside one of the tributaries of the Seine, next to some very grand palatial houses, and could only be entered by two large doors a few yards apart. Before the war it had been an enormous mushroom factory, and during the war the Germans had kept munitions there. Now it housed my papers, whatever had been accumulated since 1975, along with those of many French writers, archives of other publishers – some of them extinct – and old literary reviews. A small team worked there, cataloguing, searching out material needed by researchers and bringing in new collections of literary material. IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine) was the brainchild of Olivier Corpet, who now often invited me to lunch and tried to make me at home among his staff and friends. I gave a lecture in the reading room of their Paris headquarters, went to their frequent receptions, and through their recommendations was asked to write articles for French newspapers and take part in radio broadcasts. I also had hopes that they might help me to replace my lost British subsidy with a French one. Corpet was also the publisher and editor of La Revue des revues.

  In Montreuil I pursued my hope of starting up a new Ledlanet in La Fonderie. The loss of Ledlanet was still painful, and there were few nights when I was not back there in my dreams, always with a sense that I was somehow a trespasser, putting on performances under huge handicaps and never sure when I might be told to leave. Old friends like Jacques Chaix and others now dead peopled these dreams. I still met Sam Beckett quite frequently in them and, as in the later plays of Ionesco, the living and the dead mingled together in a landscape that was familiar but no longer part of my waking life.

  My new neighbours, those who had taken the complex of buildings together with David Applefield and me, occupied one half of the courtyard, and we took over the rest. Friends from the Parisian theatre would come to visit me, bringing with them theatre architects and administrators to inspect the buildings. It was agreed that we could have two performing spaces, one of about four hundred seats and the other a studio with a hundred and fifty, together with a bar and restaurant. The nearby marketplace was empty in the evening and could be used for parking. The mayor, who was also a député, came to inspect, and we had a long chat about the “cousinship” of Bretons and Scots, both Celts. Morel – one of the offi
cials – was a frequent visitor. He approved the scheme and started the machinery moving to get us the necessary funds.

  But then things began to go wrong. First our neighbours – one a man who constructed stage sets, one a photographer and others who occupied part of the complex – decided that they did not really want to be part of a new theatrical centre. The work that had to be done to make the whole place functional for more humdrum activities was turning out to be more costly than I had thought, and the bills were mounting.

  We took on a man who had been administering a ballet company to help us to put together a dossier for the cultural department of Montreuil. The town was willing to back us, but neither of us were good at the paperwork requirements of French bureaucracy. He spent months on it, but he never let us see the final shape it was taking. Then he sprang a surprise. He had redesigned the principal theatrical space so that it would suit a ballet company, but not a multi-use theatre that could do drama, opera, concerts and other functions as we had instructed. He also proposed putting on the board of management various friends of his. And David, who had a family, was now being nagged not to get involved in something that would never make money and would involve him in more difficulties.

  In the meantime, we had organized a number of events. There were concerts of different kinds, all of which attracted a public. One was given by Jenny Paull, who brought her accompanist from Lausanne and presented an oboe lecture-recital. She was now living in Switzerland, had married and divorced a Swiss diplomat and had a daughter. Morel was impressed that I published Claude Simon in English and was very keen to have him come to Montreuil. I already had a programme that I had devised around Simon’s novels, which had been given a few times in England. Now I put together the same programme in French, and Pierre Chabert, the veteran actor of Beckett and Pinget, whom I had known for years, agreed to do it, recruiting two other actors, Raymond Segré and Jean-Marc Magellan, to join him. We rigged up a stage, hired the necessary lights and industrial heaters, because it was now winter, to heat the hall we were using.

  I had to get permission from Lindon and Simon to perform the extracts in French, and this was given, but Claude Simon wanted the rehearsals to take place in his apartment. Although he was very difficult at the beginning, he warmed as the days passed to what we were doing, urging more expression where at the beginning he wanted the readings to be as flat as possible. But when, the day before the performance, he came to Montreuil – where the premises were still far from ready and open spaces in the walls had still not been filled – he took fright and wanted to cancel the whole thing, which was impossible at that late date. He then said that he had developed a cold and could not come, so the expectation of M. Brard, the mayor, and Morel of having him there was disappointed. But the event itself was successful. The Mairie provided the seating and other conveniences. We had a packed house, and the actors, who had rehearsed with intensity, paying attention to every small inflection in a way that no British actors would ever allow themselves to do, were more than impressive. Beforehand, we opened a bar in our offices, and afterwards held a reception there, where Chabert was surrounded by admiring ladies from the cultural department and the library of the town. I had asked the local bookseller to make available Simon’s publications, and he sold more copies of Simon on that night than he had ever done in all the past years. The evening gave a considerable boost to my whole theatrical project.

  I was approached by Fanchon Fröhlich, whom I had first met at the Théâtre du Soleil’s four-part production of The Oresteia when it came to an old mill in Bradford, and whom I occasionally saw when I went to Liverpool. She was a kind of action painter and belonged to a woman’s group that worked on large canvasses jointly. As an experiment, I turned one of our proposed performing spaces over to them for a week: half a dozen women painted all day on large canvasses laid on the ground in front of a public, inspired by a pianist who improvised a background music to accompany their work. At the same time, I also put on an exhibition of John Minihan’s Beckett photographs, borrowed from the Centre Pompidou. The painters were British, French and Italian, and they brought considerable life to La Fonderie, but I was not able to do anything for them after that one week.

  But that was before we had taken on our administrator. He passed the dossier onto the Mairie before David and I had seen it. The Mairie had reserved 800,000 francs for our project, expecting to get a similar amount from the DRAC, the main government subsidizing body for the arts. Either we agreed with a project that was a complete distortion of what we had commissioned or it would fall flat. We knew that at the slightest hint of conflict or trouble the town would back out. In addition, David under family pressure had cooled.

  “If you don’t agree to do things my way,” said our snake-in-the grass, “you’ll lose everything and have wasted your time.”

  “So will you,” I said. “I’m not going to be blackmailed.” And that was that. I knew I would never have the will to start all over again with a new theatrical project. I could feel my energy decreasing as I approached seventy. David Applefield and I withdrew from La Fonderie and turned our shares over to the others with the best grace we could muster.

  David had become a director of my publishing company together with others who had agreed to give their names when I had to reorganize. I had hoped that he would take an interest in the list and learn to become a publisher in the same mould. But that was not his character. He switched from one project of his own to another and took no interest in the list that I was struggling to hold together. He had good relations with the town, but after a number of projects had gone wrong these had obviously become weaker. He was writing novels, but did not take enough time to revise them, and his literary magazine, Frank, appeared at ever greater intervals. If I had thought of him as a possible successor, I had been wrong. I liked him immensely, but he was not a businessman, and I wished he would give all his time to being a literary editor, which was his real talent.

  Among David’s different activities, he was teaching at the American University in Paris and at a school called the École Active Bilingue, which taught pupils from a variety of backgrounds and nationalities in English and prepared them for university entrance. He was probably taking on too much, and felt that he could not continue with the two English courses he was teaching for British A-Level. He asked me if I could possibly do them for him. Given that I was still busy travelling to America and Britain to sell books, and that I was running a London office, writing my books and articles for newspapers, it seemed impossible. Yet, I thought about it. I did need to earn some money in France, and shortage of time had never deterred me in the past. It would be an interesting experience, and I certainly had enough knowledge to teach any syllabus dealing with literature – English or otherwise.

  I went to see Mme Conchant who ran the school. She was desperate and would rearrange anything to accommodate me. So, on the understanding that all the courses could be squeezed into the first three days of the week, I agreed to teach there. I would have to return to London every Wednesday night and be back in Paris late on Sunday. It was just possible, and the holidays would give me just enough time to keep up with the US, where I still had sales, but no longer an office. I gave my agreement on 19th September 1994 and taught my first two classes later that day.

  I taught at the École for a year. My calendar was so full that it seemed madness, but either the interest of teaching or vanity at being so much wanted made me accept, and at the end of 1995 there I was back again, teaching the same students for their second A-Level year in English, plus a new group for their first year. In addition, I agreed to take on the philosophy course. Then, for good measure, I suggested another course on the History of Civilization. This became a two-hour weekly course which, although voluntary, was packed out in the biggest assembly room in the school at 3.55 every Wednesday afternoon. At the end of it, I had to catch the metro to Orly airport to get back to London and return to publ
ishing the next morning.

  Despite my manic schedule, I still managed to get to the opera and the theatre, but not as often, of course. I did organize some outings to the theatre for my class, but the logistical problems of block-booking and the uncertainty of the quality of what we were going to see (Britten’s Turn of the Screw for instance, at the time we were reading the Henry James novella, badly done at the Opéra Comique) soon discouraged me from doing this often.

  I kept the school photocopier busy, and it was assumed that I was now a fixture and would continue teaching the same course the following year, but alas, I had to get back to my real work after two years of what had really been an indulgence. What I did realize at this time was that nearly everything I had been doing all my life was a form of teaching: this applied to publishing, politics, the lecturing I had done to every kind of audience and on the media, my Ledlanet performances and my Edinburgh Conferences. I was always trying to raise the level of culture, awareness and the quality of life through whatever activity in which I was engaged.