Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  There were some lighter moments. When teaching Henry V, I realized that the following week was the anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. I had my class memorize some key speeches, wrote some more lines and on the weekend bought some toy swords, helmets and a crown at Hamleys in London. Then at lunchtime on the day, my class swooped on the common room and the Principal’s office, arrested everyone in the name of the King, quoting Harry’s love of France, so great that he would not give up a single village of it. It caused a small turmoil and much amusement.

  A year later I was asked to be the principal speaker on the graduation day in 1998. I tried to make my address as inspiring as possible, aware that I was talking to young people who would have the task and the responsibility of making a better world than the one they had come into. I was afterwards much congratulated by parents and staff.

  * * *

  I was given another decoration by the French Embassy, and for the first time was able to attend the ceremony, which was held in the library of the French Institute in South Kensington. I was allowed to invite about a dozen people to watch me being handed the medal and rosette of the National Order of Merit. This was in fact a promotion to Officier, as I was already a Chevalier of the same order and also of the order of Arts and Letters.

  David Applefield came over from France with me, and we stayed at the Caledonian Club. His mobile telephone disconcertingly went off in the middle of the ceremony, but he managed to get the Ambassador, M. Guéguinou, to give him a copy of the over-flattering address, which later appeared in the previously mentioned Festschrift. Afterwards, some of those I had invited, including my daughter Jamie and her husband, who had arrived after the ceremony was over, were all looking for a place to eat, and I brought them all back to the Caledonian Club, where we had a pleasant dinner.

  One of those present was Sir Harold Atcherley and his wife Elke, with whom I was now becoming increasingly friendly. He had been chairman of the Aldeburgh Festival and had included me in some of their festive occasions. On one occasion, he and his brother-in-law, Julian Grenfell, a Labour peer, invited me to join them and their wives at a special dinner in Chagny, a village that held romantic memories for them. On another I was invited to his house in East Anglia on his eightieth birthday, and later to a weekend where the group of friends, which were nearly all involved in the arts, included John Drummond, now knighted, and Sheila Colvin, who was herself picking up honours which included honorary doctorates, the OBE and a French Chevaliership. We formed rather a large group that began to meet regularly. One of us was the delightful Diana Jervis-Read, who having been at Ontario House was now the Canadian Cultural Attaché. Diana was exceptionally attractive, full of energy and good humour, and did her job extremely well at a time when Canada was cutting back drastically on arts expenditure. She radiated an enjoyment that was very contagious.

  I still went regularly to Wexford to see rare operas every autumn, but Elaine Padmore had now left to take over as Intendant in Copenhagen, where I visited her twice, once to see some opera, another time for an IMEC conference of “Little Magazines”. She had learnt Danish and was getting on well there. She had become chummy with the opera-loving Queen and was a central figure in the cultural life of the city. Seats were very cheap, because heavily subsidized, and I was particularly impressed with the words written over the theatre’s proscenium: “NOT FOR PLEASURE ALONE”. Elaine’s next move was to be to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

  During the last of David Edgar’s annual theatre conferences – most of which I had attended over the previous several years – held in 1998, Howard Brenton made a furious denunciation of New Labour policies. A new philistinism was emerging, doing more damage than even the deliberate cuts to the arts the Tories had instigated since 1979 to reduce them, depoliticize them and remove their availability from those who lived outside big cities or were not affluent. Now Tony Blair’s New Labour was dividing the arts into two categories: “elitist”, which were only for a small educated minority of “snobs”, and “popular”, i.e. without intellectual content or need of special concentration on the part of audiences. I suggested that we should organize a march or rally, perhaps trying to get hundreds of thousands of people into Hyde Park in support of the real arts. Tariq Ali thought that this would take a million pounds to organize, but it seemed to me that, at a time when arts lovers and those professionally involved with them all over the country were thinking the same way, such a rally was possible and would attract mass support. At a vote, there was unanimous agreement from the hundred or so people present to support such an initiative, and I went away with my mind busy with thoughts of how to do it.

  A week later, I went to a birthday party given to celebrate John Carewe’s seventieth birthday. I had seen little of Carewe since we had worked together for Music Today, but knew that he had been Simon Rattle’s teacher. He was now also a gifted photographer. The room, in the crypt of a church, was filled with well-known musicians, many of whom I knew. I circulated among them with my plan for a massive rally the following year in London, to show the government that the arts did matter. Nearly everyone I spoke to – including Simon Rattle, Carewe himself, players, singers, conductors, composers and agents – were willing to give their names as sponsors. After that, I lobbied everyone I met who was involved in the arts, made telephone calls and wrote letters. I persuaded Lord Harewood, whom I invited to lunch at the next Edinburgh Festival, to become chairman of what was now named the National Arts Rally. A little later, John Tusa, the veteran BBC broadcaster, previously Head of the World Service and now managing director of the Barbican Arts Centre, and Norman Rosenthal, Exhibition Secretary of the Royal Academy of Art, agreed to be our Vice-Chairmen.

  Our first meeting of about fifty people from among those whom I had recruited was held in a committee room of the Royal Academy. We had a few more meetings there, until it became clear that some of Rosenthal’s Royal Academy colleagues were not really with us, and had not carried out simple tasks they had been asked to do, such as opening a bank account. My office suddenly had much extra correspondence to deal with, as well as photocopies of leaflets and the updating of the growing list of sponsors. Although we now had opened a bank account for the NAR and we had many donations, I used none of this and paid for the additional expenses out of our general publishing income.

  Harewood then decided that he was now too old to be an active chairman, and became President instead. We decided to replace him with Peter Hall. Increasingly our meetings became bogged down with disagreements. We moved away from the Royal Academy and held a large meeting at the National Liberal Club, which John Elsom, one of our active sponsors, organized. Then we had a meeting in the Cabinet War Rooms. It was here that Sir Peter Hall was formally elected chairman. He immediately said: “Thank you. I now propose that we change our name to the Shadow Arts Council.” No one demurred, and it went through on the nod. Present at the meeting was Amanda Todd of the National Campaign for the Arts, which had been started at about the time I lost my Arts Council Grant. She complained that we were “reinventing the wheel”. Why were we competing with them? She was dead against the whole idea. But it was a good meeting, and a number of persons present, including Clive Bradley, CEO of the Publishers Association, volunteered to give time to further our activities.

  Immediately afterwards, on the same day, Peter Hall went to another public event, where he received an award for his theatrical achievements and announced that he had just been elected Chairman of the Shadow Arts Council. The press knew something of us under our previous name, but this was a surprise, and they began ringing sponsors who had not been at the meeting to ask them about their allegiance. These included Tom Stoppard, contacted in California, Harold Pinter, Sir Simon Rattle and others, who of course knew nothing of the change of name and were not pleased.

  This led to a weekend of telephone calls on my part to these same personages, whom I had lobbied so hard during the previous year, i
n order to explain what had happened at the meeting. The change of name was not very popular, and we lost some of our sponsors. Clive Bradley and Michael Kennedy, the latter working at the Richmond Theatre, gradually took over the executive functions of the Shadow Arts Council from me, and I was able to concentrate on those many other activities for which I could find the time.

  * * *

  I had paid a visit to my mother in Greece in the spring of 1994. She was very bored, constantly complaining, being looked after by a Greek nurse and my sister, who had even more reason to be bored. I stayed three days and returned to Paris. The following February she died, after catching a cold. I was still teaching in Paris then, but her body was flown to Montreal for cremation, and the funeral was during the following week, when there was a school holiday. I went over for it.

  Bettina knew about the death as quickly as I did. There was an old court order that I had to give her a lump sum on my mother’s death. The death would not in the circumstances give me any new capital, because my mother had been the recipient of an income from her father’s trust, and this would not be broken up until the last of the six Wilson sisters died. The judge had either been unaware of this or had assumed that my mother would be the last to go. In the event, her elder sister, Gertrude Raymond, was still alive in Montreal.

  Shortly after my return to London, a tipstaff came to arrest me in my London office, and I was told that I would not be released until I had paid the entire amount. I spent a day in custody, until I found a barrister who brought me in front of a judge just before the courts closed. There was no time to explain there that I could not pay now an amount that I might receive at some future date when my aunt departed, but I was given a temporary release on handing over my passport, which I had to get back to return to France to teach. Lawyers finally settled the matter, but in the meantime Bettina attacked me legally in Montreal, and I had to get another lawyer there to defend me. I had to go to Montreal twice in the next few months, and finally the matter was settled with a final payment, while she signed an agreement to sue no more.

  * * *

  I had finished my book about the Girodias circle of expatriates some time earlier and had delivered the large manuscript to Simon & Schuster. Ann Patty gave it to her husband to edit, and he was critical, because what I had written was partly literary history and partly sketches of all the personalities who had started literary magazines and publishing activities in post-war Paris. He thought it should be a much smaller book about only a few people, the best-known names. While we were arguing, Simon & Schuster was bought up by Paramount Pictures and many employees were made redundant, including Ann Patty, while the Poseidon imprint under which my book was to appear was shut down. Several months later, a new team of editors found the manuscript and called me in. They liked the book, but it was too long, too full of names they did not recognize – and big books did not sell, they told me. They had just published a long book on Dreiser and it had sold badly. “A small book on Dreiser would probably sell no better,” I commented, but they did not see the point. I set about cutting it, but just then another book about Olympia Press appeared, although not with first-hand material like mine and full of errors. They felt there would no longer be any interest. So I took the manuscript away, and Glenn Young – who ran the Applause Theatre Bookshop and Applause Publishing Company – said that he wanted to publish it.

  I was also having another negotiation with Glenn at the time, about renting a little space in his office so that I could work from there when in New York. Finances were still bad, and I had to keep my overhead to a minimum while trying to bring the most necessary books back into print after the ABC warehouse disaster, the closure of the New York office and the difficulties I had had in Britain. Glenn agreed to give me a small room, and during the one week I was in New York I moved in, installed a telephone line, went around my bookselling visits and saw those I had to see.

  Glenn had the manuscript of The Garden of Eros. He had asked me for names of people who might give quotable comment, and I suggested Frank Kermode, then teaching at Columbia. Now he told me that he had the quote, and it was good. But he had sent out several large chunks of the manuscript without keeping a copy, assuming I had one. I did not have any complete copy, as it had been altered so much. Realizing that he had made a careless mistake, he became angry, although I did not realize this until returning to the office on the Friday to pick up my suitcase before leaving for the airport. I found a letter addressed to me by Glenn. It said that he had changed his mind and did not want me in his office. While I was reading this, Glenn walked in and was discomfited to see that I had not already left. He did not want to publish the book either, now, and obviously had such a bad conscience about losing a quarter of the manuscript that he did not want to face me again either. I then decided that it would be easier in the end to publish the book myself.

  * * *

  In early 1996 I received a letter from the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) to tell me that it intended to take action to bring the Net Book Agreement to an end. The book trade was undergoing a transformation, one that had started many years earlier. I had once tried to make Better Books the centre of a chain of good literary bookshops. Having started the Edinburgh shop after buying the London one from Collins, I had intended to make Newcastle upon Tyne the next target. I have already related how the plan went wrong. But shortly after I left bookselling, Tim Waterstone, who had previously been with W.H. Smith, succeeded where I had failed. The growth of the Waterstone chain had been the best thing that had happened to the book trade throughout my career. Tim had created a number of large bookshops throughout the main cities of Great Britain, all run by enthusiastic young graduates who knew about and liked books. With an emphasis on literature, they also managed to cover all other subjects. The stores were usually located on main streets and attracted people who had never walked into a bookshop before.

  Increasingly my books were being bought from Waterstone’s, whose secret formula was good staff and wide stock-holding. Once, at a Cheltenham Literature Festival, I had found myself on a platform beside Tim Waterstone and was able to pay a quite sincere tribute to the transformation that he had brought about. He was very pleased and became a friend. But another chain, called Dillons, had grown in the meantime, not so much in imitation, but as commercial competition, anxious to find ways of increasing their market share by cornering the best-seller market and less interested in the quality of what they stocked. Terry Maher, an accountant who had raised to a position of authority at a firm which had originally been an academic chain, was anxious to discount books in order to increase sales. His petitions against the Net Book Agreement were placed next to the tills in Dillons shops for customers to sign, while he lobbied members of parliament and the press.

  The Net Book Agreement had been the crutch of the trade since early in the century. A hundred years ago, the growth of department stores had depended on finding loss-leaders, objects on which the stores were willing to lose money in order to bring in customers to buy other expensive items such as furniture and clothes. Books proved to be perfect for this: customers would come in to get whatever book was popular at the time for half the price, and this put many booksellers out of business, because it was the best-sellers that enabled them to carry stocks of good books that sold more slowly to discriminating customers. The Net Book Agreement had taken years of negotiation before booksellers and publishers agreed to bring discipline and order into their trade rather than a cut-throat competition that could only lead to great cultural damage. Over the years, the Publishers Association had been many times to court to defend price regulation, the last time in 1962. Now the OFT was attacking again, one of the last acts of vandalism of an outgoing and discredited Tory government that would be heavily defeated the following year.

  I took up the challenge hoping that most publishers would do the same. But no, British publishing had now become so Americanized that the big publisher
s in particular seemed happy to go along with a destruction that they hoped would damage others more than themselves. Some of the independent publishers felt as I did, and so did Clive Bradley, the CEO of the Publishers Association, who had been a rigorous defender of the NBA for years. He agreed, when I contacted him, to give me what help he could, but warned that his current chairman of the PA was on the other side, and so were most of the big guns of the trade.

  Clive provided me with copies of the most important book on the subject, Books Are Different,37 which not only gave a full report of the last time in the Sixties the Publisher Association had gone to court to defend the Net Book Agreement, but it also provided a history of the circumstances that had brought the NBA into being. Although a number of other publishers came to meetings and were willing to appear as witnesses, I found that it was up to me alone to go to court and make the necessary preparation.

  To employ lawyers would have incurred costs we could not possible afford, so I had to do it on my own. Not entirely on my own, however, because John de Falbe, one of the owners of John Sandoe, a lively and adventurous bookshop in Chelsea from which Sandoe, the founder, had now retired, joined me in the fight, and so did two librarians, Jenny Glayzier and Sherry Jesperson. We all appeared together as objectors to the demand of the OFT to make the Net Book Agreement illegal because it limited free competition. Whereas in 1962 publishers and booksellers had been solid in their determination to defend the NBA, and there were then many more publishers and independent booksellers, now the power lay with the big groups, mainly American-controlled, and very few people realized what the issues were and what the consequences would be.

  Our hearing began on 20th January 1997. From the start it was obvious that the judge, Sir Francis Ferris, who was always addressed as “My Lord”, was against us. This was hardly surprising, as he had previously been the leading counsel to the OFT. Against us we had nearly a dozen lawyers and lawyers’ clerks, and they needed several wheeled trolleys to bring into the court all the dozens of files that they had collected to support their case. This consisted of evidence they had acquired from all over the world – not just about the book trades of every country from Albania to Zululand – but much quite irrelevant material from other trades that had nothing in common with books. The cost of sending out all their queries and employing people to compile, analyse and draw the conclusions they wanted must have been staggering, especially as many of them were highly paid lawyers. Against all that were four individuals with no legal representation, who nevertheless knew more about the British book industry than those who thoughtlessly wanted to abolish the NBA.