Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Against us we also had one publisher, Richard Charkin, who was then involved in computer publishing. One witness who would not commit himself because of a lack of evidence of the possible effects of abandoning the NBA was a Dr Fishwicke, who compiled statistics for the book trade: he sat solidly on the fence, although we had expected him to be on our side, as he had been in private conversation. There were the usual right-wing economists preaching the virtues of free competition, who obviously had no interest in literary culture at all and probably did not know that such a thing existed. The OFT put up many words, but no real argument: they simply did not understand the whole concept of literary and intellectual culture, and of how a book trade dominated by best-sellers made it impossible for a wide range of important but slow-selling titles to be published and then have a long enough life on booksellers’ shelves.

  Of course, by the time of the court case, the NBA had already been abandoned by a considerable number of publishers, including most of the big ones. What I was fighting for was the right to put a price on my books and ask booksellers to sell at that price, always with the hope that those who had abandoned the NBA would come to their senses and return to it. The French example was the shining one I wanted to bring up in court. Jack Lang, when Minister of Culture in France, after the great wave of bankruptcies of good booksellers that had followed the abandonment of price maintenance in the 1970s, had passed a law in 1981 to prevent discounting at more than five per cent, and the benefits to the French book trade had been enormous. The supermarkets that had used books as loss-leaders decided to continue selling books after the law was passed, and they found that the public were just as willing to pay full price if they saw a book they wanted. That supermarket public seldom went into bookshops anyhow, but those who normally did returned to buy their books where they had previously. The result was that the number of books sold increased overall. I had approached major figures in the French book trade to come to Britain to give evidence of this. The judge, however – although he had accepted written evidence against us from abroad – would not allow any live testimony from Europe to be put before the court, so none of this would count except as oral evidence by me.

  One of my key witnesses was George Liebmann from Baltimore. He was a lawyer who was also attached part-time to a Cambridge College. His father had been an independent bookseller in New York who was forced out of business by ruthless price competition. A quiet, well-organized man, he had fire in his belly on this particular issue, and was only too willing to give evidence. He came from the States two days before he was to appear, and I produced him in the witness box on the sixth day of the case. The judge did not want to hear him and kept cutting him short, but Liebmann talked right through Ferris, making his points until he was told to shut up. None of the witnesses on the other side had been limited in what they had to say or been so discourteously treated. Clive Bradley, who was in court – and he was a qualified barrister himself – was shocked at the partisan prejudice of the judge and also at the way he treated me, stopping me in questioning witnesses and constantly telling me to shut up and sit down. Against us we had a woman barrister, whose wheedling and insinuating manner seemed to please Ferris; he let her go on as long as she liked, whereas I was usually stopped after a question or two.

  Among my other witnesses were a Scottish publisher, Bill Campbell, John de Falbe, Tim Waterstone, the retired publisher Rayner Unwin, John Mitchinson – formerly with Waterstone’s, then with Harvill – the politician Sir David Steel and some others. Ainslie Thin of Thin’s, the Edinburgh University booksellers (not the Ainslie Thin previously mentioned, his uncle) had agreed to come, but now I found I could not reach him by telephone or in any other way: he had obviously become nervous of sticking his neck out. André Deutsch came to court and sat right in front of the witness box, giving the proceedings his full attention. That was the day I had two literary witnesses, Tom Stoppard and Auberon Waugh, who in addition to being a novelist was now also editor of The Literary Review. They were good value in the box and were much photographed at the entrance to the High Court in the Strand, where the case was heard, being newsworthy. It was a building for which I had much dislike, having had so many painful experiences there in the past. This was one occasion on which I needed publicity, but the press took little interest. There was rarely a reporter taking notes other than from The Bookseller and other trade magazines, and only Steel and the two writers were thought worth photographing. After all, the big newspaper proprietors of the time were not interested in cultural matters – neither were their editors.

  Liebmann went back to the States, the case ended and we were given a judgement on 13th March. As I expected, we lost, and the NBA was declared illegal. In my final speech, which I had been warned by the judge must not be too long, I reminded him that the previous counsel for the OFT in 1962 had said afterwards that it was one case he had not much minded losing, because the publishers’ arguments had been so persuasive. But the judge had made up his mind in advance, and that was that. At the next annual general meeting of the Publishers Association, the chairman said some kind but totally insincere words about my defence of the NBA, and I took the occasion to make a strong attack on the cowardice and folly of those who had done nothing, contributed nothing, and obviously did not care.

  * * *

  Between the hearing and the result, I moved houses in Montreuil. I now had an old office, not in too bad repair, but it had been empty for five years and was much in need of decoration. The night before the move, Jim Haynes came over to help me, and we spent half the night putting books into cases and everything else into tea chests or suitcases. The next morning, Muriel Leyner and a friend, Ruth Bonipace, arrived from New York, and they helped once I was in the new place. Jim and I were both exhausted and waiting for the movers. It took the whole day to get everything out and into my new home on Boulevard Henri Barbusse. I moved in bookcases and all the tea chests and other packages, most of them ending up in the middle of the large underground conference room, soon to be a library. A wonderful handyman, M. Michebu, who had done some plumbing and small jobs for me at the old address, now got to work to paint some of the rooms, install a bath and create a kitchen out of one of the offices. I told him it would all take years, but “peu à peu” I would get it right. Over the next year, M. Michebu put up shelves and I acquired more from IKEA near the airport as I gradually settled in. The Channel Tunnel was now finished, and I was able to start travelling to London by train.

  The next General Election was now imminent. I had been active in all the previous ones, either taking part in a tactical-voting campaign or helping my daughter when she had stood for parliament in Stafford. On that occasion, I had given her two weeks, helping her to fight the Thatcherite Bill Cash.

  This time I decided to help in a marginal seat. As I could always stay with Sheila Colvin at the Red Cottage in Aldeburgh (she was still running the Britten-Pears Festival there), I decided on Suffolk Coastal, John Gummer’s constituency. It was a pleasure to try to get him out, and Alexandra Jones, the Liberal Democrat candidate, seemed to have a good chance of winning in an election where the long Conservative hegemony seemed certain to end at last. I volunteered my services and was asked to drive the candidate around the constituency, take part in canvasses and do all the usual things I had done so often before. The constituency borders had however been changed since the last election, and it was now not so clear who was really in second place. In the end, it turned out to be the Labour candidate. Alexandra Jones tried hard, but the press were largely favouring her Labour competition. Gummer was returned, but with a much reduced majority.

  The election was on 1st May. I did not go to the count, preferring to sit in Aldeburgh, watching the results come in until the early hours, sometimes falling asleep. When it was clear that the Tories would lose by a landslide, I opened a bottle of champagne. Then came the exciting results. Portillo was out. Then Martin Bell was elected as an independe
nt member for the safe Tory seat of Tatton in place of the disgraced Neil Hamilton. I recorded the events in a poem that I shall quote later.

  It was on 15th July that year that I received the French decoration and the Ambassador’s commendation. Then I went into the Festschrift that some of my friends had been preparing, with my knowledge but without my knowing the detail. I had suggested some of the people who might contribute, and many of the suggestions were taken up, which resulted in contributions from Lord Harewood, from Richard Beith – who had first lured me into politics in 1970 and had also written about the Ledlanet Nights he had so enjoyed – from Bill Webb, Barbara Wright and others. The whole was edited by Howard Aster, who published it under his Mosaic Press imprint, while Jim Haynes and David Applefield did most of the field work. The cover photograph was a very unflattering one of me in Leipzig on my way to give a lecture, looking very old and bowed. There were also other photos taken by David, John Minihan, Jane Bown, Richard Beith and others. The volume reproduced book jackets and the like. Many friends wrote short tributes.

  There were some embarrassing things in the book too. A Serbian artist whom I had met with Haynes at a New Year’s party and had taken home because she lived a minute away from me in Montreuil – and whom I had met again a few weeks later and invited to dinner – wrote a piece about our quite chaste evening together. We had talked, and as she was interested enough to ask me many questions about my life, I had told her quite a lot over a bottle or two of wine. Jim got her to put it on paper, and of course it was exaggerated enough to make amusing reading, but still very much out-of-kilter with the rest of the volume. George Liebmann wrote a contribution, but unfortunately this was lost by Howard Aster. The volume included old articles of mine or pieces about me from the press, as well as a near-complete bibliography of the books I had published over the years. To do this, Howard Aster and his assistant Amy Land came and spent about two weeks in Montreuil when I was away, taking down the titles from my shelves and listing them. Tributes and letters from Sam Beckett and other authors made up the rest of the volume. I was embarrassed at the amount of work that had gone into a project I would never have encouraged, but of course I appreciated the generous impulse behind it. It was called In Defence of Literature, the same title I had chosen for a collection of my writings on other writers which had not been published because of lack of funds during those late Eighties and early Nineties.

  Howard Aster did more than that. Jim Haynes had a little publishing company that had mostly published his own lifestyle books, such as Hello, I Love You!, which was his greeting to any girl that took his fancy. I had been having a poetic revival, and for two years had produced a number of poems that varied in style and content, some of which had appeared in such periodicals as David Applefield’s Frank magazine. Jim made a deal with Aster, and they appeared under the Mosaic Press imprint. The last poems were written at the end of 1998, one on New Year’s Eve. They came out the following year. Howard Aster then asked if I could sell them in Britain, and I began to do so with reasonable success, although it was embarrassing to go into a shop and propose my own writing and the Festschrift, which must have appeared to the buyers as an act of narcissism. Jim took the title of the poems from two of them: What’s Wrong? What’s Right?

  I had been invited annually for some time to the conferences of Little Magazines organized by Olivier Corpet of IMEC, which housed my archives. These were very capably kept in order by André Derval, who like his director had become a real friend. I no longer published any magazine, but as Corpet said on one occasion, “There is always the magazine of the imagination”. I had come to know and like the participants from many countries at these conferences: Claus Clausen from Denmark, Irina Prokhorova from Russia, Gaby Zipfel from Germany, Jani Virk from Slovenia, Walter Famler from Austria – who had once written a long interview with me for his journal Wespennest (Wasps’ Nest) – and so many others. The conference in Vienna had been sponsored by the Austrian Ministry of Culture; Claus Clausen had found funds from the City of Copenhagen to pay for our meeting there; and in 1997 we went to Moscow, because it was the eightieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution and also eight hundred and fifty years since the establishment of the city.

  A few days before, one Sunday morning in Montreuil, I had heard on the BBC News that Princess Diana had been killed only a few miles away in a car crash with her lover while trying to evade the press. My sister’s comment on the telephone had been, “Oh, the Queen will be pleased.” Now in Moscow on the day of the funeral, an enormous screen had been set up on the Arbat near Red Square, because there was as much interest in the royal funeral among Muscovites as in Western Europe. In the building where our meetings took place, the security guards were all glued to a television screen.

  Olivier Corpet’s “Little Magazine” conferences were about co-operation, problem-sharing and making new friends. But in Moscow, where at least half the people in the room were Russian or from the Baltic States, the Russian presence dominated the conference, and we were given, first in Russian, then in English, a history of Russian literary publishing and of the “thick magazines” in which much of the new work first appears. This was slow, ponderous and of limited interest among those who wanted to discuss their own personal problems to do with government subsidies, censorship and better ways of finding subscribers and selling their publications. We listened to the deep Russian voices, heard about the poverty of Russian poets and about how much Gorbachev, loved in Europe, was hated in Russia – and the matters that most interested the visitors hardly came up at all.

  The Moscow visit had been the idea of the Swedish Cultural Attaché in Moscow, who had attended our Copenhagen conference the previous year. He gave us a lavish reception on the last night, after which many of the others went out on the town, while I went to my room and felt inspired enough to write a poem, ‘Moscow Night’, which appeared the following year in my collection. On this occasion IMEC paid my fare to Moscow as well as my keep, a generous gesture.

  There was another meeting of editors a year later, but this time we met at the Abbaye d’Ardenne near Caen in Normandy, where IMEC were establishing their archives and conference centre. There, a smaller group, with little to distract them, held more practical sessions, only once leaving the building (almost a fortress). We ate excellent food, drank the good Sancerre that Olivier always provided when he entertained and got to know each other much better.

  I had been asked to find a Scottish literary-magazine editor and suggested Joy Hendry. Having inspected her magazine Chapman, Corpet invited her. On the last night, she organized a ceilidh, in which everyone was persuaded to do a party piece. But this was the last of these conferences. There was pressure to go to Algeria, to Slovenia, to Latvia, and Corpet felt that the various nationalistic demands were getting out of hand. There was a meeting the following year, but it was organized from Eastern Europe, where the agenda had more to do with internal politics than the promotion of literature, and the cost now fell on the individuals, who had to pay fares, accommodation and maintenance. Olivier Corpet, David Applefield and I all backed out.

  I still made my American journeys and had little difficulty in selling my books among the few remaining independent booksellers, all of whom knew me well. But the catalogue was much depleted, and it was difficult working in New York without an office from which to make telephone calls and receive messages. However, the overheads were now much lower: any money that came in could go towards paying printing bills and reducing the old debts from the time of the close-down.

  Little by little, I was reprinting the most important books, until all of Beckett was back in print. I kept our best-known authors, such as Borges, Céline, Robbe-Grillet and Trocchi, in stock and on my customers’ shelves, while bringing out new volumes of plays by Howard Barker and others who were still producing new work and whose reputations were growing.

  We had moved to offices near Waterloo on a floor just above the
National Theatre’s training premises, where all day long the noises of rehearsals came up to us. I had let one of our rooms to Black Sparrow Press, which meant that my small staff – which was now Eleanor Goodison, who had replaced Su Herbert, and Margaret Jacquess, now in her eighties – had some company, especially as I was away most of the time selling books.

  I now had a new idea, which was to produce a series of smaller texts, as I had once produced the series of Signature Books. I brought out twelve small volumes of the shorter works of Samuel Beckett, which were available both in individual paperback volumes and as a boxed set, and although the sales were smaller than I had expected, at least they were steady. On reflection, as these were the lesser-known works, I realized that I was probably not doing too badly. They appeared in 1999.

  I was doing much of my printing in Canada now, mainly with Webcom in Toronto. That company had a jovial sales manager called Ron Hearnden. On one occasion when he visited me in Paris, I met him at the airport and took him to a hotel where David Applefield had booked him in, and while getting his luggage out of my car he brought the rear door down on my head. Although I was gushing blood, I managed to get through the evening with the help of a bandage and wine as a pain-killer, and as a result I think I received favourable printing terms and longer credit. He was probably relieved not to have been sued.