Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  In the summer of 1999 I again mounted Damned Publishing to celebrate my fifty years in the trade. This time I made a deal to perform for a whole week at Riverside Studios. I updated the script, and five of us performed it. Once again, I started with my own narration, and then the actors and I played out all the memorable incidents, so many of them having been the subject of this book. Claudia Menza came over from New York to take part, playing in turn Blanche Knopf, various American ladies and finally playing herself – first working for Barney Rosset, then for me, then telling the story of that last trip with her husband Charles, and finally reading some of her own poetry in a special spot I put in for her. The others were Karin Fernald, Leonard Fenton and Sean Barratt. It was a good week and drew reasonable audiences. Among those who turned up were Jack Garfein, who had read about it, coming from Paris on the Eurostar, and Tim Waterstone. Marion had died not long before, so that this time she could not see herself portrayed. In its review, The Bookseller said that I would not have dared to portray her, were she still alive – but except for one sentence, the script concerning her was the same. I did not repeat the exercise in New York this time.

  I was also realizing that in my seventies there were now many things I could no longer do, and that my appearance, except to surviving old friends, was not conducive to persuading others much younger than me when I had an idea to promote or to sell books. When I took Claire Armitstead to lunch in June that year in order to try and persuade her to review more of my books in the Guardian, I could tell from her face that she had been expecting to meet someone much younger and more interesting to someone of her generation. The ever younger buyers of the Waterstone’s branches were obviously wondering what I was doing outside an old people’s home.

  One night Leonard Fenton came to have a drink with me near my office. It was the birthday of his ex-wife and he asked me to join their family party in a restaurant. I had to get up early the next morning, but went for an hour. Among the group of Fentons and their partners was Toby, Len’s son, who had recently come back from South America and was looking for a job. It was some time later that he came to see me and I decided that he was just right to be trained to carry on my firm one day. He joined me in early 2000, doing mainly selling, and he was quick to learn the list and had plenty of energy. Then one day Toby came in rather shamefaced. “There’s something I haven’t told you,” he said. “I applied some time ago for a special journalism course run by the British School of Printing. Only a few are taken, and they’ve just accepted me.” There is no way you can persuade somebody not to do whatever they really want to do, especially if there is a challenge involved, so with many misgivings I told him to go ahead, hoping however that he would come back. Months passed, and it was obvious that a journalistic career attracted him. He was offered entry-level positions as an unpaid apprentice, which he could hardly afford, and so late in the year 2000 he returned to us as a sales manager.

  In 1999 Mosaic published my collection of poems, the last of which had been written on the last day of the previous year. Most of them had come to me when travelling on my own, usually in restaurants, and were the fruits of reflection. Others came from my observation of people around me and overheard conversations. Some, I hope, were funny, and while Beckett in no way influenced their form, as he had once influenced some plays I wrote in the Sixties, his view of the world, which had also become mine, was very present in the sentiments expressed. One in particular was political and based on the disillusionment that I and most people I knew now felt with a Labour government that did not want to reverse any of the destructive changes that had been brought about by Margaret Thatcher and John Major in British society. It harked back to that election night of 1997 and is called ‘Euphoria Lost’.

  Those of us who hated Thatcherism

  the low Toryism of an upward-thrusting

  unpleasant lower middle class,

  philistine readers of the tabloid press

  which has no time for culture

  had our brief wonderful euphoric moment

  as tactical voting put Portillo out

  and Martin Bell, white knight and voice of decency,

  humbled the grease-palmed Hamiltons

  and strident Major became a simple private,

  and we welcomed Tony Blair.

  That euphoria’s gone into the middle way

  which is no way at all:

  clean Toryism, or so it seems,

  but the poor are poorer

  and the rich richer

  and the ill iller

  and education worse. As for culture…

  That’s too depressing!

  I write these lines in France.

  Thank God for France.

  * * *

  As the twentieth century, which had known as many horrors as most of the other centuries of which we have historical knowledge, came to an end, I was finishing this account of a life not yet finished but peopled with much event, many memories, a variety of very different activities and, above all, encounters with many remarkable men and women. Causes are still being fought, and I am still involved in them. The abyss of the late Eighties and early Nineties has largely passed, although many storm clouds are still on the horizon, and I will have to deal with these.

  Many old friends are gone, a few remain, but I have made many new ones, and whereas my friends in the past were usually older than me, now they are younger. I keep up friendly relations with old girlfriends, who are now real friends and companions; the fires have cooled, and I have no regrets about that. My follies are, I hope, ended. I still publish books and intend to write more myself. There is a considerable well of my unpublished recent poetry: it comes naturally now, and I know that those who have read what has already appeared have for the most part enjoyed these péchés de vieillesse. As far as I know, I am now the doyen of active publishers, at least in Britain. The Calder Educational Trust, set up at the instigation of the Arts Council in the days when they favoured our activities, still owns everything we do, and the trustees, at the time of writing, are Bill Webb, Barbara Wright and Stuart Hood, who are charged to keep it going from its existing resources and to monitor its future progress.

  Beckett said to me before his seventieth birthday that in old age work has to be your company. Like him then, I am an old man now, mostly alone outside of the office, but not really lonely: I have some good friends, many books to read, plays I want to see, music I want to hear, but above all much more work to do, and I am always behind with it.

  In Montreuil I have numerous small reasonable restaurants where I can go to escape solitude, reflect, sometimes write a poem. In London, Beoty’s on St Martin’s Lane has become my favourite watering hole, near two opera houses and many theatres where Michael Frangos, Mr Kikes and John Kashimeris look after me well and amuse me with political gossip and culinary party tricks. I am as much their friend as their customer. Tiredness and worry are inevitable in a world getting harder. My energy is declining, and so is my ability to cope with unpleasantness and pressure. I work long hours and only take off the odd day in a year, but what are my depressions and problems compared to the lot of others in a world dominated by cruelty, revenge, poverty and ignorance?

  I mentioned storm clouds. Aside from the state of the world, which in an era that now has George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin confronting each other in a revival of the Cold War across the globe, there have been three problems that have caused some worry. We have lost many authors – and they were not only some of the best-known names, although not necessarily the best writers, but the ones that sold best and helped us to continue making new discoveries. But during the dark years much went out of print and could only be brought back slowly. This has not been helped by authors who would not wait if they saw an alternative, and by foreign publishers from whom I had sub-contracted rights. The biggest problem was with Gallimard, which had become less a literary house
than a commercial one run by non-literary businessmen. They tried to cancel contracts where I could not reprint the books in question in three months, and when I put some books into production to keep those rights I was notified that this would not be accepted. But the excellent Maître Emmanuel Pierrat, prompted by Olivier Corpet, intervened on my behalf, and they stopped persecuting me.

  I also had various problems with the publisher whose courageous activities and superb list had made me admire him above all others, Jérôme Lindon. His one-time friendliness had cooled ever since the death of Sam Beckett, and he was adamantly opposed to readings of Beckett’s work in public, except where a precedent had been established in the author’s lifetime. Increasingly I was walking on eggshells. I had known him for nearly half a century, yet we still said to each other “vous”. He was to die in the week of what would have been Beckett’s ninety-fifth birthday, in April 2001.

  The changes in bookselling also became an ever bigger worry. In America the chains had proved to be unreliable customers, and whenever they had bought my books cheaply from Daedalus and tried to return them to me for full credit they had been downright dishonest. In Britain the growth of Waterstone’s was a disaster once the management fell into the hands of administrators who knew nothing about books or about the needs of the book trade itself. The need to be the biggest and to have the largest slice of the cake led them into policies that could only lose money, and the greatest cause of falling profits was a catastrophic discounting policy. Without making a reasonable profit on best-sellers and books that are in demand, booksellers cannot afford to sell the slower-selling quality books aimed at the most educated of their customers. And this was happening at a time of general dumbing-down, an unadmitted conspiracy between politicians, newspaper proprietors and commerce. People increasingly know less, read less, learn less of import from the media, and trust to a growing general prosperity (which cannot possibly last) to cushion their lives. And all this at a time when the need to be aware, to be able to think independently, to understand what the politicians are doing, rather than just hearing what they are saying, has never been more important. Brave new world indeed!

  In Shakespeare’s Tempest, where that much-used phrase first appears, the “brave new world” has an ironic ring – and it still has to me. Unless mankind can find a way to end all wars, abolish tyranny and nip those with evil ambitions in the bud, there will be no future world, at least not on this planet, which has already been so despoiled and emptied of its resources. Perhaps genetic development will make a safer world possible, but it seems more likely that science will spiral out of control and become another tool of globalizing power-seekers, condemning mankind either to continuing tyranny of one kind or another or to its final destruction.

  I am not filled with much optimism, but desperately want to be wrong. I feel much as Bertrand Russell did about the future of the world, and I share his hope, not a very strong one – which he expressed in what to me is the most inspiring and beautiful single page of prose of the last century, namely the preface to his Autobiography38 – that creative man can overcome destructive, greedy and power-hungry man. Evil has a strong motor that drives ambition outwards to take power over others. Art, which to civilized beings gives life such meaning as there is, has a different motor, which is focused inward, towards power over oneself. Because art satisfies, it has no need to be greedy. Beckett, my other guru, believed that man is imperfectible and, to quote Godot, “There is nothing to be done”. But he too went on trying: his key word is always “On”.

  And now I must bring this chronicle to an end. I have tried to make it an honest one. I have attempted to do good, to increase awareness, to put into the world works of art, mainly but not entirely in the field of literature. I had hoped to educate as many as possible, where I could, through both conventional and unconventional activities, into becoming better than they would otherwise be. I have done much harm to some, and it is admitted and much regretted. One cannot always know the consequences of our passage through the world. I have been both lucky and unlucky at different times, and sometimes good luck has led to disaster and vice versa.

  In my middle seventies I find that there is no religious belief that I can sustain, but never stop thinking about the question and the whys and wherefores of human existence. Meaning is our own creation: we must make it come to life out of our sense of responsibility, out of our thought processes, out of our guilt, sometimes out of our despair. No large group of people can ever agree as to what is important or meaningful or true. That is why tolerance is essential and doubt is good. These are human concepts, and they do not concern other forms of life that live just for survival or comfort or pleasure. And is that not also true of most of humanity? Only a few, among them most of my friends and acquaintances, and certainly most of those I have published, and I myself, are condemned to search, to probe and to puzzle out answers to the conundrum of existence. In my brain I think there can be no meaning; in my bowels I would like there to be. And I know that both brain and bowels can be wrong.

  – Montreuil, 2001 (revised 2016)

  Afterword

  by Alessandro Gallenzi

  My first meeting with John Calder was in early February 2007, in response to an advert in the Bookseller magazine. John was looking for a publisher who would keep the Calder list going and run its bookshop in The Cut, near Waterloo Station. I had been in touch with him a few years before, when I was at Hesperus Press, about sublicensing his translation of Eichendorff’s Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing. Nothing had come of it, but when I phoned him he still remembered me, and said he admired the publishing programme I had developed at Hesperus.

  He asked me to go and see him that coming Sunday, as he was en route to Edinburgh from France, as I recall. I turned up at the appointed time and found the bookshop’s shutters lowered halfway down. I peered through the window into the dark, empty shop, and just as my sense of excitement was giving way to a feeling of disappointment, I saw a figure advancing with small steps towards me. The door opened, and John gave me a puzzled look.

  “I’m Alex Gallenzi,” I said. “I’m here for our meeting.”

  “Oh… oh.” He was even more confused now, and rummaged in his jacket pocket. “Wait a minute,” he said, extracting a chunky diary and leafing through it. “Oh, I think I may have forgotten to write it down. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Let’s go and eat something next door.”

  There we were joined a few minutes later by his partner Sheila, and together we had a most convivial lunch. We talked about books, authors, literature, as well as the recent changes in the trade and the dire outlook for the publishing industry. We found that despite belonging to different generations we shared a similar ethos and vision, and were on the same wavelength about the core values of publishing and books’ power to inform and reform society.

  After our first meeting, Oneworld Classics – one of the two imprints I was running at the time – entered negotiations for the takeover of the Calder list and the bookshop with its little theatre at the back. We were helped along during the process by ex-PA chief Clive Bradley and the suave Alan Williams of DLA Piper. Two months later the deal was completed. The list was passed on to us in its entirety, but it excluded the Beckett titles, which had previously been sold to Faber, and a few books by authors who had gone to other publishers.

  This must have been a very hard decision for John, considering the history of the company, his personal involvement in it and the efforts he put into building it over decades of publishing. Despite my great enthusiasm for the Calder list, it was difficult for me too. Just at that time, I was busy launching our classics list, running Alma Books, commissioning, editing and offering consultancy services to other publishers – not to mention that I had recently become a father for the second time. And the Calder companies did need a lot of work and attention.

  It wasn’t so much that John Calder Publishers was in a state of
disrepair. Although there were no new books being published, the backlist titles were still being distributed and sold, and rights enquiries were being answered by John himself. It was with the admin and the reporting of royalties that he had fallen behind. In the late Nineties, computers began to make their appearance in the workplace, and John – a self-confessed technological dinosaur – found it hard to adapt to the electronic age.

  The basement of the bookshop, where John had his office, was a dispiriting mess. Letters, statements, old books and catalogues were piled everywhere – on the floor, on his desk, on dusty shelves and racks. It took many months to sort and file the papers. Four pallets of documents were shipped over to the Centre National du Livre in France, where they were catalogued and can now be consulted. The archive has since yielded many exciting rediscoveries, including unpublished manuscripts. The Calder stock was being held at different locations, and it took a while to convince John that it needed trimming down and rationalizing.

  Because of old grudges with John and sizeable royalty arrears, Gallimard and Minuit published an advertisement in the TLS – more like an excommunication – saying that they did not recognize the new owners of the list and that all contracts between Calder and them – relating to works by Queneau, Céline, Robbe-Grillet, Duras, Sarraute and many others – were null and void. The story was much publicized in the press, and it took a few trips to Paris, a great deal of diplomacy and brand-new contracts to rectify the situation. Similarly, we had to go through a process of novation with a number of other authors and estates.

  But it was the bookshop that ended up absorbing most of our already stretched resources. At the time of our takeover it was being looked after by an elderly lady of Austrian origin, Margaret Jacquess, who was approaching ninety. Our plans were ambitious, and included new stock from the best independent publishers in the UK, new fittings and a full revamp of the theatre area, where John held literary readings every Thursday night. To run the shop we chose an experienced bookseller who had expressed an interest in buying it from us in due course. Unfortunately things did not work out: this new manager committed to expenditures that had not been agreed with me and that I was not even aware of. Unpaid bills were stuffed in the bottom drawers of the bookshop’s counter, and we found ourselves mired in debt. It was a miracle that we didn’t go under, and for that we have to thank an old friend of John’s, Jerry Kaplan, who believed in our project and helped us out at that awkward time.