Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  I was to witness the pattern of Peter Baker’s career many times over the years. First the euphoria of early success, then the belief that he could never go wrong, and then growth built on borrowing and acquisitions. Along with the tycooning came much entertaining and alcoholism. Reality recedes as profits do not match expectation, and the risk-taking grows until only crime seems to offer a way out. Baker’s empire included the British Book Centre in New York, which bought smaller quantities of British books that did not find an American publisher: it grew quite rapidly, but barely paid its way, and Baker had little time or patience to devote to management. Self-aggrandisement became the pattern of his life until his fall, which came with the discovery that he had forged the signatures of three prominent businessmen on bank guarantees.

  I had not known that much of the material in My Testament, Peter Baker’s apologia pro vita sua had already appeared in another book which recalled his wartime experiences: he had reformulated these in the new volume – a series of justifications for his catastrophic actions, blamed largely on his alcoholism. The book came out in March 1955, just after he had been sent to prison for seven years. It sold fairly well to extensive but not flattering reviews. I went to see him in Wormwood Scrubs, where he was serving his time in the library, and he tried to make a deal whereby I would supply books to the library and give him a commission, which I refused. I do not think that publishing the book did me much good.

  Several books from Cameron Associates came out on my list at this time, including a penetrating history of the American Labour movement, Labor’s Untold Story, by Boyer and Morais and Harvey O’Connor’s The Empire of Oil, an exposé of the international machinations of the big oil companies. William Yates, a Tory MP, brought me Violent Truce by E.H. Hutchinson, who had been a military observer with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization in Israel from 1951 to 1955. The book gave a very different picture of the Palestinian situation from that which the Israelis were trying to disseminate in Britain. I had trouble over this with Henry Jonas, my London travelling salesman, who was Jewish, and with several friends. I was also offered an important book on American civil liberties and the McCarthy witch hunt by Corliss Lamont, a well-known American philosopher and professor. I went to see Bertrand Russell, who was quite approachable, and he instantly agreed to write an introduction.

  My first meeting with Lord Russell was very cordial, and many more were to follow. As with many of the American political books I brought out at about this time, my status as a publisher with a mission was enhanced, but sales were fairly slow. These were all hardback books selling at between fifteen and twenty-five shillings. Paperbacks, other than Penguins and a few other popular series of fiction classics and light novels, were still a thing of the future, especially for serious books of non-fiction.

  In January 1957 I had my thirtieth birthday, and I was on a plane returning from New York on the night of the 25th, seated next to an English journalist working on an American scandal rag, The National Enquirer. He was returning from Hollywood and boasted of three days he had just spent in the Californian desert with a buxom starlet, while I was musing on the beginnings of my thirties. I had known much success, had done many of the things I had always wanted to do, and I wondered what was still missing. I remembered my school days in Canada, when I had wanted to play an instrument, but my request to learn the violin was turned down by my mother, who said I could take piano lessons if I wanted. The piano teacher at BCS had hardly inspired me, and I soon dropped the lessons, but now I wondered what reason there could be against another start: I decided I would learn the cello, an instrument that is less painful to one’s neighbours than the violin. But if I did not take steps to pursue this new hobby immediately, I would soon be overwhelmed by other activities. So the next morning, on arrival, I went to Beare’s music shop in Soho, bought a cello, a bow, a manual and resin, and set about finding a teacher. I ended up with a very military-looking cellist, who also played the string baritone, a practising musician with various chamber groups who had a fair number of pupils, most of them professional. I have forgotten his name.

  I was also having an affair which had begun the previous year. It had started at the annual Booksellers’ Conference, which had taken place in Southport in Lancashire and which was as boring as these things usually are. It is the social contacts that count: the official sessions are almost the same year after year, with the same issues, the same complaints, a few new ideas or old ones, which are never taken up, because no one ever wanted to change anything. I became friendly with an academic bookseller from Manchester called Ernest Hochland, originally from Germany; we spoke German together and, finding we had many common literary tastes, we took long walks over the sands which stretched for an immense distance from our hotel to the sea. There was a lady with us on one occasion, who was called Lisel Field, the academic representative for an American company, Macmillan. She had been in Czechoslovakia when the Germans invaded the Sudetenland and began to arrest Jews, and she, a teenager, having lost her family, had walked all the way across Europe to England, arriving just before the war. She was lively, intellectual and was rather enjoying the conference, which was a holiday to her. We sat together at the final dinner, joking about the solemnity and fatuousness of most of the speeches, had a few drinks, and as the lift stopped at her landing, I saw the signs of a definite invitation in her eye. But I had already pressed the button and I couldn’t have gone down again without attracting attention. I sought her out at breakfast, asked if she would like to drive south with me to London, and she accepted. On the way, after coming out of the Mersey Tunnel, I made a detour to look at my old timber yard, but didn’t go in. On arrival at her flat in Maida Vale, almost opposite the old BBC studios, we went to bed and made love. She was different from the other women in my experience – dark and swarthy, with a heavy body and big breasts – but very passionate and highly sexed.

  I came home to Christya the next morning, saying I had been delayed, but then began having trysts with Lisel frequently, sometimes staying the night. Christya was quite accustomed to my going away on business trips, so I didn’t have to invent too many lies. Lisel loved music, and we played records and went to concerts and operas together; Christya no longer bothered to accompany me to such events, which bored her. My days were still taken up partly with Calders Ltd, but increasingly with publishing; I was enjoying learning to play the cello, and I was enjoying my new affair.

  It was at the beginning of this year, 1957, that Hiss finished his book, In the Court of Public Opinion, and my trip to New York, referred to above, must have been to see him and take delivery of this manuscript, among other business. Doubleday, some time during the previous year, had acquired the American rights, but just as they had killed off the Jowitt book, they decided not to proceed, and Knopf suddenly entered the scene and signed a contract with Alger Hiss. I had just arrived from the airport at the Gotham Hotel when I found a message asking me to ring Blanche Knopf as soon as possible. I did so, and she asked me if I would come around immediately to her office, and not to speak to anyone until I did.

  I was ushered into her room, and she looked at me for a long time as if I were a strange new species. It was obviously going through her mind that here was a young, unknown publisher who somehow had managed to commission a book from a man of the importance of Alger Hiss. She played with me like a cat with a mouse, asked me how I had become involved with Hiss, all the time scratching the leather top of her desk with her long red fingernails. I felt it was my face she was really scratching. She said that she had received the manuscript, that it was being edited, and that she thought it ought to be set in type in America, as Hiss was there. I could print my edition from the American finished pages. I saw nothing wrong with that, provided we published on the same day, because the book would attract major press attention everywhere. We fixed a tentative date later that spring. On the way out of her office I was about to get into the lift when Angus
Cameron came out of it. He was now working for Knopf. Blanche Knopf, seeing me off, gave me a twisted grin. “Oh, so you know Angus? Well, I suppose you would.” I managed to have a quick word with Angus, who had never been told that I was doing the Hiss book in England. “Look out for that lady,” he said. “She’s dangerous.”

  I spent about ten days in New York and returned to London. When I arrived I found a letter, sent by seamail, posted when I was still in New York. It was from Blanche Knopf. The gist of it was that she had decided to publish right away because there had been, so she claimed, a leak in her office, and the press had managed to get hold of a set of the proofs. She was publishing the following week. She could have called me in New York, have wired me in London, but no, she had deliberately engineered it so that hers would be the only edition to appear that spring. I never believed her story about the leak. When the Knopf edition appeared in the US, the whole British press reviewed it on the news pages: Alastair Cooke’s long article was in the Manchester Guardian, the Glasgow Herald and other papers. It took two months to get my edition published, and it was then totally ignored by the press, old hat now. Sales were very small – in fact many of the leading booksellers had brought in the American edition. It was not Alger Hiss’s fault. I still saw him, both in London and New York, and he was apologetic, but not very concerned. The book did not really do much to advance his efforts to prove his innocence: it was a little too general, and he could not bring himself to question the evidence against him, as a lawyer with more objectivity would have done. But he went on striving, nevertheless, to prove his innocence, to the end of his life.

  I was seeing the Miller family, Sigmund and his wife Phyllis, quite often in those days. I had intended to go for Christmas and New Year in 1956 to Madeira, but for some reason to do with my passport, which might have been out of date, I was unable to go with Christya and Jamie, now two years old, so they went without me. I spent Christmas Day, at the Millers’ insistence (I would have been perfectly happy at home with my books and some new records), with Phyllis, Sigi and their two boys. I arrived in Madeira before the New Year and went swimming in the rather chilly sea water on New Year’s Day, mainly out of bravado. I remember being struck by how carefully the militia – Portugal still had a fascist dictatorship then – tried to keep the tourists away from mixing with local people. Our hotel, in warm and sunny weather, was on the coast, the waves lapping its walls, and I had a sense of total isolation.

  The following summer I came home late one night and began practising the cello. Christya had gone to bed, and it may have been around midnight when she came into the large drawing room and said “You and your fucking cello,” picked up a silver cigarette box which had once been a wedding present from Dick Soukup and threw it at me. It smashed the front of the cello, and I went berserk. We hadn’t been getting on for some time and were leading largely separate lives. Everything I did exasperated her, while I was constantly troubled by her frequent attempts to cheat shopkeepers, leave hotels without paying and her string of little frauds. Something snapped in my head, and suddenly I was holding her head on the balcony over the railings, strangling her, on the verge of pushing her over. Suddenly I pulled her back. There was still capital punishment in those days, and a voice in my head said, “It’s not worth swinging for this bitch.” I left her recovering her breath on the floor, threw a few things into a small bag and rang Sigmund. “Sigi, could I spend the night on your sofa?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he replied, “but not yet. Doris Lessing is sitting on it now.” He was giving a party. I took a taxi over to Bayswater, where he lived, sat through till the end of the party and claimed the sofa. I stayed there for three days, and during that time found myself a flat at 11 Upper Wimpole Street and moved in. Christya refused to let me have my clothes or any other possessions. I could of course have moved in with Lisel, but thought it wiser not to. So after eight years of marriage I ended the relationship and my career in timber at the same time. I was still married, but in essence free.

  Chapter 4

  Transition

  It is very possible that I have some of the dates wrong in this narrative. The years from 1949 to 1957 are rather a jumble in my memory. I was doing so many things simultaneously that my recollections tend to be parallel rather than chronological, but the events and the people are as I remember them, and the key associations that guide me are where I was living, what I saw in the theatre and the opera house (the latter could be checked from the record that I started keeping from the time I arrived in London) and from what I published: the dates are, after all, on the copyright pages of the books. Certainly 1957 was a key year, even if my memory tends to stretch it backward as well as forward.

  Straight from university I had tumbled into a stressful marriage and now I had tumbled out of it with the same sense of desperation. My body found its own way to test me. Within a few days of leaving Christya I went one evening on my own to Sadler’s Wells Theatre. The opera was The Pearl Fishers. Suddenly, just before the interval, I felt my nose running and, until the next act started, my sinuses streamed, sometimes with fits of sneezing, sometimes not, and only partially stopped when the music began again. The tension within me found a novel way of breaking through my pose of continuing to act normally. It stopped almost as quickly as it had begun, and I have had recurrences of such sudden nasal flows on a few later occasions, never lasting long, and not always for a detectable emotional reason. I also have fits of sneezing.

  When I walked out on Christya, I no longer had access to my papers at Wilton Terrace, and that included old diaries, which would have been useful to this book, and of course my unpublished poems. T.S. Eliot had earlier told me to go to see Peter du Sautoy, who had replaced him as poetry editor at Faber. I did and left a sizeable bundle with him. When I went back some weeks later – this was probably in 1954, but might have been earlier – he had divided my poems into two groups, a minority of these he liked and a much larger pile of those he didn’t. He explained that his judgement was purely subjective, as all such judgements had to be, but there it was… “Give me more of these,” he said, “and I’ll publish a volume.” Broadly speaking he liked the shorter lyrical poems, mainly to do with love. The longer, rather mystical and often narrative poems, were, he felt, too obscure and difficult. My favourite was a very long poem based loosely on Wagner’s Ring Cycle, entitled Alberich, and in style it was much influenced by Eliot, rich in allusion to everything from world events to associations derived from my reading. I think he found it boring.

  When I left Wilton Terrace, I naturally expected that I would be able to collect my poems. I never saw them again,9 nor did Christya ever say what she had done with them. I presume that she simply threw them out. Except for the occasional serious poem, inspired by an occasion or an emotion, and some comic verse to amuse friends, I was to write no more serious poetry until I was over seventy, when I suddenly found a new voice.

  As I mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, after a few nights on Sigi Miller’s sofa I had found a top-floor flat at 11 Upper Wimpole Street with a bedroom, a sitting room, a bathroom and kitchen. I was to stay there until 1960. I bought some second-hand furniture from a large emporium near Euston. I had of course lost my cello with its smashed front, but one day Lisel sent me another. I never got used to it, and having been dropped by my teacher at this time, I gradually stopped practising. I missed my books. It was only many months later that Christya allowed me to remove a few, and I found that she had written her name in all of them, including one that was quite obviously a school prize. There was some quid pro quo for this, probably paying her bill at Harrods or something like that.

  I was living alone now, and seeing my daughter when I could, but access was limited. She had an English nanny, who came to me one day in horror with a number of stories about how Christya was treating Jamie and about the mother’s behaviour in general. Amazingly I have forgotten what they were, these reported horrors, bu
t they were alarming enough for me to go to my lawyer, who then arranged a hearing at the Court of Chancery to get custody. This I was able to do with the evidence given by the nanny. While Christya launched an appeal, I took Jamie and the nanny to a residential hotel in North London, just beyond the North Circular Road, returning there from the office every evening. Christya went to another judge and managed to get the judgement reversed.

  Eventually the judge asked to see the child, and I was ordered to produce her in court. I told her that a man would ask her some questions and that she should tell him what she really wanted, whatever it was. I think this must have been in 1957, when she was three, but I cannot be sure that it was not a year later. I would not want, now that she is herself a mother in middle age, to awaken that traumatic time for her. The judge came into court after questioning her and said: “The little girl says that she wants to live with her father, and I am not sure what to do. He has probably promised her something and spoilt her in the past.” He then ordered that she should be returned to her mother, but not immediately. A second cousin of mine, Molly Blake, a widow with a grown-up son living with her who had lost an arm in a military accident, had volunteered to foster her for three months. I did not particularly like Molly Blake, who had led the family faction against me at the board meeting after the Wolfson takeover, but I had to put up with the situation, going several times a week to Molly’s house in Onslow Square to read my daughter stories. Christya then took up with a minor fraudster called Victor Churchill, whom she eventually married.