Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  In Paris I suggested to Bettina that she might like to come with me to the Edinburgh Festival, where Callas was expected to be the big sensation. She accepted with alacrity. All this time my affair with Lisel was continuing, and the problem was that she was in love and expected it to be a permanent relationship, while I, liking her and enjoying her company, did not want to get emotionally involved. Lisel was still working for Macmillan and spent most weeks travelling around provincial towns. She also hoped to visit Edinburgh during the festival, because that summer she was working through northern towns. I had to keep my movements as secret as possible, not just because of Lisel, but because Christya too wanted to know what I was up to.

  During the week in August Bettina and I seduced each other and found we were sexually compatible. We heard Maria Callas in La sonnambula and Eugenia Ratti in Il turco in Italia, the latter replacing Callas, who had been announced for both operas. The company was the Piccola Scala, which also performed L’elisir d’amore with a marvellous cast that included Rosanna Carteri, Giuseppe di Stefano, Giulio Fioravanti and Fernando Corena, conducted by Nino Sanzogno. Bettina had brought three very glamorous evening dresses, all given to her as cast-offs by a rich Parisian lady. We were staying discreetly at a small hotel on Clarendon Place, and I was able with some difficulty to reach Lisel by telephone and put her off from coming to Edinburgh. Shortly afterwards I went to Paris again, stayed with my mother and John Barnard at the very grand apartment they had taken on Avenue Foch, where the walls had all been decorated with a special Chinese lacquer, but sneaked out at night to meet Bettina in a hotel room on the Avenue des Ternes. She was staying with a family called Fliegelman just around the corner.

  My visits to Paris became more frequent. Bettina was taking regular singing lessons, did series of concerts in and outside Paris for the Jeunesses musicales and had become a protégé of Gabriel Dussurget, director of the Festival of Aix-en-Provence, which specialized largely in Mozart operas under its principal conductor, Hans Rosbaud, who was also a foremost exponent of contemporary music. While Bettina was rehearsing or working with her teachers, I would go around the French publishers – Minuit, Gallimard, Seuil, Plon and Grasset in the main – and acquired authors and books for translation. I spent many whole nights drinking with Beckett, and had lunch with Ionesco, who by now was being translated by Donald Watson for British publication and performance. I took on, among others, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Robert Pinget, Roland Dubillard, René de Obaldia, Raymond Queneau and Fernando Arrabal, although not all at once. The lady at Gallimard who handled foreign rights was Monique Lange, herself a novelist and living with Juan Goytisolo, the Spanish writer. I bought the rights to her novel Les Platanes and eventually published it in 1960 as The Plane Trees.

  My mother and John Barnard at this point had rented both a large flat on Avenue Foch and a series of houses or flats in Monte Carlo, where my stepfather spent much time gambling away my mother’s income. I had met the daughter of a friend of hers in Paris, whom I will mention only by her first name, which was Jeanne. Her mother and mine had known each other in Montreal during the war. After a dinner party, I took her out for another drink and we ended up in bed together. This pleasant affair was contemporaneous with the one with Lisel and pre-dated the one with Bettina. Jeanne’s other lover was her boss, an American who was the French head of a large American-owned enterprise, a much older man. When our affair ended, perhaps two years after it began, she inherited his considerable wealth on his death, and also his job. She will come back into this narrative a little later.

  The office now consisted of Lesley MacDonald, who had become a director and was our production manager, Pamela Lyon, who shared the editorial work with me, Berry Bloomfield, my secretary – whose married name (it was years before she told me she was married) was Meredith – a sales manager and a telephonist who also did a variety of small jobs, from typing to pasting up review cuttings. The sales manager sometimes wrote up the accounts as well, although the bookkeeping was mainly in the hands of Francis King and his son Peter, who was frequently in the office. When Lisel joined us, it was as sales manager. She was superbly well qualified for the job, having just left Macmillan. We needed someone of her experience, but the problem was the obvious one: I had told her that, fond of her as I was, it was not possible to continue a physical relationship.

  The previous year, 1958, I had attended the Frankfurt Book Fair for the first time. Lisel was there – she had indeed stressed how important Frankfurt was and the advantages I would derive by going – and was still working for her old firm. She had assumed that we would sleep together. But I had brought Bettina, and I stayed not in Frankfurt, but in Bad Homburg, a pleasant spa town half an hour away by train and a little longer by car. I would leave in my car early each morning, while Bettina followed by train later in the day. Although Lisel took every opportunity to come to my stand, the two ladies never actually met.

  By 1958 the Frankfurt Book Fair had been going for twelve years and was well established. The Adenauer government had put an enormous effort into making it the symbol of a new, reawakened German culture that would show the horrors of the Nazi period to be a thing of the past. It was gradually establishing the new democratic Germany as the publishing centre of the world. It had been impossible for me to go during my time at Calders Ltd, and in any case I had seen no great necessity. I had no trouble in finding books to publish, and I had few rights to sell: those I did I sold mainly to American publishers, from whom I also bought rights to American books. My translations, other than the French authors I had discovered in Paris, were nearly all out-of-copyright classics. But now I was meeting my European peers.

  There were Italian publishers like Giulio Einaudi and Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, almost all of them heavily involved in politics. Einaudi’s socialist father had been the first post-war President of Italy and Feltrinelli, who had inherited both an industrial empire and great landed estates, was now an ardent and active Communist. Other Italian publishers were mainly trying to live down Fascist pasts, and the same was true of most German publishers, although many, like Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt, the colourful illegitimate son of one of the great avant-garde publishers of the Expressionist era (1908 onward), were now firmly wedded to the new democratic Europe.

  I was doing some printing in Holland, and I now met and became friendly with the Dutch publishers of the day, the co-operative firm Bezige Bij, Nijgh & van Ditmar and the individualist Rob van Gennep. I met other radical publishers like Klaus Wagenbach, who having been conscripted as a boy soldier into the German army during the last months of the war, ran into the woods as the Americans advanced and surrendered to the first tank he saw. Klaus was taking advantage of the German government’s anxiety to keep Berlin alive under four-power Allied rule by giving tax and fiscal advantages to those who lived and worked there.

  I made many new friends, acquired rights to books and sold them. From the British point of view, although all the larger publishers were there, Frankfurt was just a showcase for German publishers to sell their publications. They were not really Europeans, except perhaps for the refugees who had come to Britain before the war: André Deutsch, George Weidenfeld, Walter Neurath, Paul Elek, Max Reinhardt and a few others, who had little difficulty in making deals to acquire European literature and important political memoirs for their lists. Others, like Tom Maschler and Peter Owen, who had grown up in Britain and were now very English, tended to be less interested in Europe as such.

  Frankfurt was still quite small then compared to later years, and it was easy to meet and know everyone in one’s own field of interest. The art publishers all knew each other wherever they came from, so did the technical publishers and children’s publishers. Literature was a fairly small group, where roughly a dozen publishers from each country met, lunched and dined, exchanging information about books and authors and gossip.

  What followed, from about the time that I began to attend the ann
ual Book Fair, was a great wave of translation. Names were traded: authors from Western Europe and Eastern Europe were invited or came on their own, the latter sometimes having difficulty in leaving their countries. Some of them managed to get contracts for international publication. This did not often result in a profit to the publisher, because foreign literature is always difficult to sell. But in spite of the future disappointments that would greet the publication of new authors from Germany, Poland or Yugoslavia, the atmosphere of excitement at making new discoveries was catching. One young Edinburgh bookseller, Jimmy Thin, sent just to see the Fair, caught the fever and acquired British rights to foreign books. When he returned home, his father paid the advances and cancelled the contracts.

  In that first year, 1958, I learnt my way around, took orders for my books on display from booksellers, optioned European authors I would later read and offered my British ones to their most likely foreign publishers. I went to the opera and the theatre, took part in lunches and dinners, usually half a dozen people at the table, but never more than one from the same country. Publishers found others who were compatible with their taste and outlook.

  It was some time after that that Lisel came to work for me, and the office atmosphere quickly became difficult. She was of course very good at what she did, but always wanted to be alone with me, and of course the others noticed. Then tragedy struck.

  I had been to see Poulenc’s opera, Dialogues of the Carmelites. Edward Lockspeiser had warned me that it would have an important impact on the musical scene, and it was one of the factors that persuaded me to take on Henri Hell’s book on the composer, just published in France. Lisel also wanted to see it, and I agreed to take her, buying tickets for a second performance. But I had a cello lesson that night, and when I tried to cancel it my teacher blew up, saying that he would not tolerate any further cancellations. So I agreed to keep the appointment and gave the tickets to Lisel, telling her to take a friend. But no, she wanted to go with me. To solve the problem I agreed to meet Lisel and her friend later that night at the Cheese and Grill on Leicester Square. When, after my lesson, I turned up, only Lisel was there. She had sent her friend home.

  We had a quiet late dinner, she with little to say about an opera that must have impressed and moved her intensely. This overwhelmingly tragic opera, where the individual characters have to work out their own dilemmas and face their fears, must have had a devastating effect on someone as sensitive and unhappy, even desperate, as Lisel was then. We left the restaurant and took the same Tube train north. She wanted me to come home with her. I said it was impossible and got out at Regent’s Park. She went on to her own station near Maida Vale.

  Back at home I worried about her. Should I call? I knew that if I did she would try to persuade me to take a taxi to her place or let her come to mine. I did nothing and went to bed.

  The next morning I worried again, but it was a busy day. We had a publisher’s party that evening; it may have been in the office or a restaurant or the Caledonian Club, where we occasionally entertained in a private room. I only remember noticing her absence – she had not come to the office at all that day – but I was too busy talking to people to do anything until late that night, when I telephoned her. There was no answer. I went to sleep with troubled dreams about her: she appeared to me with a white light behind her, looking pale and demented. At eight o’clock I telephoned again and there was still no answer. I remembered the name of her neighbour and looked her up in the telephone book, asking her then to ring the doorbell. She came back and said, “There are three milk bottles outside the door and the dog is barking, but she doesn’t answer.”

  I asked her to ring the police at once and said I would be right over. I took a taxi and arrived a few minutes after the police had broken in the door. It was not unlike my dream. Lisel was lying on the bed, a white pallor on her face and dead. She had done it with sleeping pills and whisky, and I think aspirin as well. The dog was taken out and fed by the neighbour. I told the police that she had not come to work the previous day, which is why I was worried and had phoned the neighbour. They asked very few questions, traced the husband, who together with his sister turned up within two days.

  In the meantime, I had arranged the funeral and cremation, choosing Mozart’s Requiem as music, to be played by the organist. The husband, a totally nondescript man in his fifties, attended the funeral, which was not religious, while his sister went through the belongings in the flat, deciding what to keep and what to sell. All the books and papers, including the partial translation of Paumgartner’s book on Schubert, which at one point we had worked on together, were thrown out.

  The funeral was ghastly. Berry Bloomfield came with me. “I’m sorry, John, I know she was a friend of yours,” she said sympathetically. The three excerpts from the Requiem were played badly and extremely slowly, the Lachrymose in particular being excruciating. There was no service, no speeches, just music. Afterwards I went with the husband back to the flat, where the sister, a character straight out of Céline – suspicious, shrewish and hatchet-faced – had worked out what she could get for the flat and the contents. I never saw them again, although I wrote a letter to Mr Field, no doubt expressing sympathy, but asking after some of her papers. He never replied. I have no idea what happened to her dog. Somewhere I heard, I am not sure from whom, that there was scandal in the air, but any anxiety I have had about unpleasant publicity was nothing to my sense of immense guilt.

  The only other people at the funeral were a Russian couple, the Fenns, Lisel’s only close friends, and they asked me to tea the next day. They were elderly Russians, retired and living quietly near Lisel’s flat in Maida Vale. They knew all about our affair and about her previous ones. They told me that at one point she had been extremely happy because of me and did not suggest that what had happened would not have happened later. She had been let down by all the men in her life, and I had at least tried to convert the affair into a friendship rather than running away.

  The Fenns gave Russian lessons, and when I said that I had always wanted to learn it, they offered to teach me. I went to buy Bondar’s Russian Primer, and for two years had two lessons a week. She found it easier (it was the wife who taught me) to teach me Russian through German, the two languages having more similarity with each other than with English. Although the wife taught me, I frequently saw the husband as well, and my Russian conversation began to develop. After a year he fell ill, dying not long after, and with my life becoming busier than ever, I eventually dropped the lessons and fell out of touch. He had started to translate a selection of Furtwängler’s writings for me, but died soon after starting.

  On the day of the funeral, I returned to my Sackville Street office late in the afternoon. I could do no work and sat looking at my desk. On an impulse, and with a dread of remaining alone with my thoughts, I rang up Sonia Orwell, whom I knew slightly. I asked if she was free and invited her to dinner. I then unburdened myself of the whole story. She was sympathetic, invited me back to her flat in Percy Street and we got quite drunk. We played the old long-playing records of the pre-war Glyndebourne Don Giovanni, the famous Mildmay-Souez-Helletsgruber-Brownlee-Baccaloni recording under Busch, until the early hours. Then she invited me to stay the night. I was too drunk to either leave or perform and too unhappy to want to, so the night was a deserved fiasco. Sonia was extremely attractive and had the kind of body that had always appealed to me, and normally, even with a lot of drink, I would have been capable of making love, but not then. I left early the next morning. A few days later I heard that she had put it about that I was homosexual.

  This was in February 1959, which I can date by the performances of The Carmelites. I first went to see it in late January, and it must have been in the following fortnight that Lisel Field took her own life. Shortly afterwards I discontinued my cello lessons, although I continued to practise on my own for a while. I never really liked the cello that Lisel had given me, and its associ
ation with her memory must have played a part.

  * * *

  It is remembering the earlier year 1956 that has given me the greatest difficulty. I had made new friends, was moving increasingly in both literary and musical circles, and as a reader was consuming books by critics of both disciplines to expand my knowledge, which made me more open to take on or commission books that linked up with my interests. I became friendly with Felix Aprahamian, second music critic of the Sunday Times, of which the major reviewer was Ernest Newman, now nearly ninety. His best-selling Wagner Nights and Opera Nights were reference books I almost knew by heart. Aprahamian and I had the idea of making a collection of Newman’s Sunday Times weekly pieces on music, and together we visited him at his home in Surrey, where he agreed to the project. There were many more visits, usually on Sundays, to see him and his much younger wife, Vera, but more to sit at his feet and hear him talk than to consult him about the book. Ernest Newman was a pen name, he told us. His real name was Eric Roberts, but in his younger days, when he had landed a job with the Liverpool Echo, the editor said of him, “Who is that earnest new man?” – and he adopted a name that he felt was right for him.

  Newman had a wide and eclectic musical knowledge, but he also had blind spots. He did not like Stravinsky or Schoenberg, perhaps the two greatest innovators of the century, but he liked Carl Orff, who tended to be treated as very minor by other critics. Wagner was still his greatest love. There was a telling clerihew: