by John Calder
Said Ernest Newman,
Next week Schumann.
But when next week came
It was Wagner just the same.
Aprahamian spent much time in the Sunday Times archives, and in 1956 we were able to publish the fruit of his labours, a collection entitled From the World of Music, with a large number of short articles grouped in four sections: Critics and Criticism; Opera and Opera Singers; Composers and Their Works; and General Articles. Published as a hardcover at fifteen shillings, it did very well, and we followed it with a second volume, More Essays from the World of Music, in 1958. This included some very funny spoof articles. Felix Aprahamian was a good amateur photographer, and his photos of the old man, which graced the dust jackets of his two books, are striking. I had plans to republish some of Newman’s out-of-print books, but somehow this never happened. I well remember those visits to Polperro, his Sussex house, and his ever scintillating conversation, sometimes cut short to Felix’s annoyance by Vera making us listen to recordings of Orff. We often narrowly missed Elizabeth Schwartzkopf and Walter Legge, who treated Newman as their guru and a source of information about music and composers that were not very well known at the time, such as Hugo Wolf. Newman died in July 1959. I saw Vera once or twice after that, but gradually fell out of touch as one inevitably does.
I knew most of the music critics fairly well in those days, and sometimes joined them for a drink or a meal after a performance, particularly out of London. But it was still Edward Lockspeiser whom I saw most often: he loved women, but being portly and far from young he did not have much success with them. He never stopped trying, though. He introduced me to another specialist in French music, Rollo Myers, who edited for me the fascinating correspondence between Richard Strauss and the French novelist and musical writer Romain Rolland, an exchange of musical views that brought out all the differences between the aesthetic outlooks and prejudices of their respective nationalities. Myers also compiled for me an anthology entitled Twentieth Century Music, in which he explained the different schools of modern music at a time when the repertoire was expanding and interest growing. This sold well and was reprinted, and because such books go quickly out of date, I had intended to periodically update it with new articles and revisions. But with other and more urgent commitments this never happened.
As well as seeing many plays and operas, I was a very frequent concert-goer. This was also a period when I was much on my own. I came to know many of Lockspeiser’s friends, mainly Hampstead-based, and spent evenings with musicians and others professionally engaged in the arts – film editors, actors and singers, pianists, many of them of German origin – who would discuss the technical difficulties of Beethoven sonatas, the orchestration of Richard Strauss operas or the nuances of Proust’s novels. Years later I remember the faces, the voices, the gestures, the drift of the conversations, but very few of the names. One falls into a circle of people whose interests one shares and is happy there, but in my case I was always being drawn somewhere else as well, meeting other people, falling into other milieux that also interested me. And so, gradually, I was always moving, without consciously realizing it, out of one group and into another or several others. There comes the day when one sees, perhaps in a theatre audience, someone who one once thought one knew well and realizes that the other person does not recognize you. It happens also, of course, the other way round. One is greeted, as a long-lost brother, by someone who has disappeared entirely from the memory.
So that Hampstead circle of pianists with small careers and reputations, but much serious and scholarly knowledge, that other group who were friends and admirers of Sylvia Fisher, a wonderful Wagnerian soprano, whose stage presence was so unfortunate that she never became much of a star outside London – a circle that consisted largely of amateur singers all going to the same singing teacher – and various literary gatherings where I found myself discussing Thomas Mann or Rilke, or others again with an interest in new trends in contemporary music, where are they all now? Mainly in pockets of pleasant memory, where I cannot recall the names. Life has been rich in acquaintanceship, but so many one-time friends have dropped away because of the changing patterns of my life. An unavoidable pity.
One day Felix Aprahamian rang me up. “You have a car, and I have two tickets to a new festival,” he said to me. I can date the month, May 1957, because of my ever invaluable opera record book, where it is listed as Performance 268. We drove to the palatial home of the Earl of Shrewsbury, Ingestre, in the West Country. The Countess had ambitions to become a professional singer and had studied with Maggie Teyte. The new festival at her house was to be her launching pad. Alas, for her, John Pritchard, the conductor, would not accept her to sing Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, so she saved face by reciting an introductory poem written for the occasion, while Magda László sang the part with a splendid cast that included Adele Leigh, Monica Sinclair, Bernhard Sonnerstedt and Alexander Young. It was produced by Anthony Besch with decor by Peter Rice, so there was nothing lacking in the standard. Dido and Aeneas was followed by Master Peter’s Puppet Show, Manuel de Falla’s mini-opera, which I was seeing for the first time and have recorded as Opera No. 121, performance 269.
As part of the press, we were lavishly entertained, and I returned to London with a car full of music critics, all discussing the blighted ambitions of Nadine, Countess of Shrewsbury, which Maggie Teyte was encouraging for her own reasons. There was never, as far as I am aware, a second Ingestre Festival.
I have mentioned Sylvia Fisher, who sang Turandot at Covent Garden the same month I went to Ingestre. It was a good year for opera. In New York I went to Cyril Ritchard’s famous and successful production of Offenbach’s La Périchole, saw a wonderful Götterdämmerung there with Martha Mödl, Ramon Vinay, Marianne Schech, Hermann Uhde, Kurt Böhme and Blanche Thebom (singing Waltraute), magical names under the baton of Fritz Stiedry and produced by Herbert Graf. The next night I heard Mary Curtis, Jean Madeira and Leonard Warren in Il trovatore. At Covent Garden there was The Trojans in June, following my trip to Zurich for Moses and Aaron. Glyndebourne was now reviving Rossini under Vittorio Gui, Sadler’s Wells gave me my first complete Puccini Trittico, and the Handel Opera Society, of which I was an enthusiastic member, performed Alcina with Joan Sutherland and Monica Sinclair among a fine cast. The company, doing one or two Handel operas a year, had opened two years previously with Deidamia (with Marion Studholme and Iris Kells in the cast) and was kept going by the dogged persistence of Charles Farncombe, who conducted the operas, and by a splendid hard-working lady, a civil servant, who organized the Society, Gwen MacLeary. How many such individuals have given years of their unpaid time to keep such organizations alive without recognition or thanks, except in a few grateful memories like mine? I cannot help contrasting them to others who are given a variety of public honours and who better deserve to be behind bars. My own involvement with Handel operas was to come later.
* * *
While I was still working for Calders Ltd at Eros House, I received, at home at Wilton Terrace, a letter asking me to advertise my books in a literary magazine called Mandrake. The editor, Arthur Boyars, was very insistent on meeting me, and after a telephone call or two I reluctantly gave him an early appointment at my home at eight o’clock in the morning. He was there on time, and I discovered to my surprise that during the day he worked over my head on the top floor of Eros House for a small publishing company producing popular biographies of football stars and the like in little paperback editions. He was a poet and had been at Oxford together with a group that included John Wain (later to edit my International Literary Annual at his suggestion), Kenneth Tynan, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and others who just then were beginning to build a literary reputation. He had published them all in the university magazine he was then editing, and was now doing this strange editorial job, while putting out Mandrake on his own and doing some reviewing for the Daily Telegraph, often of European literature,
inevitably receiving many of my own publications.
I came to like Arthur, whose didactic approach to literature I found rather appealing. He was also a great party-goer, and through him I extended further my involvement in the many groups that made up London’s artistic subculture. There were bottle parties (you brought your own) at people’s flats in Chelsea, Kensington, Soho and elsewhere. I met many more poets, painters, literary agents, critics and reviewers. A few names come back to me at random: Arthur Waley, Victor Pasmore, Gwenda David, David Sylvester, Michael Horowitz, William Empson, but there were dozens of figures in the arts, all striving to get known.
Arthur Boyars had a girlfriend called Valerie Desmore. She was a painter who had studied with Oskar Kokoschka; she had an English father and a Cape-coloured mother. Both she and her sister had been born in South Africa, but because of the Apartheid system had been brought to Britain. Valerie was now living in the World’s End section of the King’s Road in Chelsea. I went to many parties with Arthur and Valerie, who was sexy, talented, interested in everything and very uninhibited.
During the long winter of 1958–59, I was living alone at Wimpole Street, working during the day at 17 Sackville Street in Mayfair, publishing books that on the whole were doing well, although there were many disappointments like the Alger Hiss book. I was working hard, had no permanent involvement among the different ladies I saw occasionally, and many of my evenings were free, so that I spent some of them with Arthur and Valerie, eating, drinking and talking. Arthur and I would arrive with food, Valerie would cook it, and we would sit, drinking and talking, often listening to music on the radio, for we all liked serious music. Then I would leave so that they could have their privacy, after which Arthur would find his way home to Hampstead. Or sometimes I would give him a lift. He was still living with his parents, and it was a long way home. Sometimes I just took him to a convenient bus stop. Valerie did a painting of me that winter, showing me keeping warm at her round stove. I am in blackface, and she had Don Juan in mind.
Arthur Boyars plays rather a large part in this book, and this is the best place to describe him. His father was the very orthodox cantor of a big Hampstead synagogue, and his mother, equally orthodox, had started to have a life as a concert singer, but had abandoned it because of the immorality associated with the life, as Arthur put it. His father had made a great effort and some sacrifice to give him a good English education, and when he was admitted to Oxford it was with the expectation that this studious young man, interested in literature and serious music, would take a good degree and become an academic, someone like Isaiah Berlin perhaps. He seemed to have the right qualities, and in my opinion, being also very kind and cheerful by nature, he would have made an excellent university don. But such were the many extracurricular activities in which he engaged himself at Oxford, he only received a second-class Honours degree. His father was devastated. He rent his garments and made Arthur feel he was a total failure. There was no good reason why with effort and a second-class Honours degree he could not have pursued an academic career, but he had, by the time I knew him, effectively given up. Life was now to be lived without ambition: pleasure and survival became his only motivations. As a poet he had written little and was not to write much more. He did have a few poems published in a Penguin anthology of modern British poetry (The New Poetry) that came out in 1962, edited by Al Alvarez, but there was no career ahead of him as a poet.
One day I heard that the building in Upper Wimpole Street where I lived needed a janitor; a basement flat went with the job, which was the only inducement, as the salary was small or non-existent. I mentioned it to Arthur, who was anxious to get away from the parental home, and he applied for the job. He was willing to sweep and clean, which was all the job demanded, in return for the flat, and so he became the janitor. From then on he frequently came up to my second-floor flat to chat and have a drink. At one literary party in Chelsea, shortly afterwards, I was chatting to Gwenda David, and she said to me, pointing to Arthur, “You see that man over there? He calls himself a poet, but he’s really a janitor. If you’re over thirty and you want to get anywhere, you have to give up janitoring and that sort of thing.”
Barney Rosset came to London fairly frequently in those days. We were selling his Evergreen Books, achieving good sales, but making too little on them as I had set the prices too low, perhaps in order to get the sales. This meant that we often had cash problems and our payments to him were becoming slower. Not surprisingly he was interested in examining other offers, and they were there, especially from George Weidenfeld, who at one point put together a deal whereby a new company would take over my sales, those of Barney, his own Weidenfeld & Nicolson books and the list of Sweet & Maxwell, law-book publishers who were now thinking of branching out into trade publishing and had started a new imprint to do so. The latter was run by a man called Stevens, and it was his new venture that triggered the whole plan, because the only one of us who had serious money was Sweet & Maxwell. I did not like the prospect of being buried under so many other publishers, but I had to go along or lose my important connection with Rosset. There were many meetings, which involved discussion of warehousing, parking space in the Sweet & Maxwell building (mine had already been allocated) in Fetter Lane and how what would surely end up in a merger of all parties would work. But it all broke down in the end, with Weidenfeld taking the Grove Press distribution away from me. Whereas I had sold at least several hundred copies of a title, and in some cases thousands, the sales within a year had become so small that Barney changed again to distributors in Holland and thereafter Evergreen Books were rarely seen in Britain.
During all this I would take Barney out in the evenings to nightclubs, which he usually left with one of the hostesses. He was never interested in the theatre or other ways of spending the evening. On one particular Sunday, I had my daughter Jamie with me for the day, and he came along with us to lunch, followed by an afternoon spent at the London Planetarium. Afterwards we returned to my flat, not far off. Valerie Desmore was standing on the doorstep, about to ring the bell for Arthur down in the basement.
Barney took an immediate interest when I introduced them, and had time for a brief chat before Arthur came to the door. Having a drink with me, Barney asked who she was, how free she was, and managed to get her telephone number from me. Then things happened very quickly. Barney telephoned her the next day from his hotel, went to see her flat and her paintings, took her out to dinner and asked her to come to New York, saying he would organize an exhibition for her.
Valerie was a good painter, an expressionist much like her teacher Kokoschka, but she painted for pleasure and had little ambition for celebrity or recognition. She earned her living by designing clothes for Marks & Spencer, mainly for children. But she was impulsive and had a temper. She had no inhibitions about making a scene in public or at a party, and she always spoke her mind. Her appearance could be seen by different people in different ways. Her skin was dark, but not exceptionally so, and her features were more African than Indian, whereas her sister, whom I met a few times with her, was exquisitely Indian-looking, like a temple icon, and dressed as an Indian, usually in a sari.
Valerie Desmore was warm-hearted and generous, talented and intelligent, but she could turn into a tiger when crossed, and I could pity any racist who provoked her. She had been Arthur’s long-term girlfriend, and although I am sure she had other sexual flings, she certainly loved and respected him. But Arthur was a member of a strictly orthodox Jewish family, who would have looked with horror on him marrying a totally secular half-Cape-Coloured English girl. Had his parents been dead, Arthur would have married Valerie without hesitation, but he did not even dare admit to them that he was, to all intents and purposes, living with someone who was not even Jewish. And the resentment had been building up in Valerie for some time.
One night, quite late, Arthur rang me and asked if he could come up. He was quite shaken, walked up and down my carp
et, and told me that Valerie wanted to accept Barney Rosset’s invitation, and he didn’t know what to say or do. Barney had arranged the ticket on a flight to New York. Arthur discussed his dilemma, his parents’ attitude and his worry about what would happen if Valerie left the country. Two nights later he came up again and spent the whole night pacing up and down, because Valerie was leaving the next morning. She had told him that if he promised to marry her within a month she would tear up the ticket to New York. If he did, he would be disowned by his father and thrown out of their particular Jewish community. Maybe Valerie could convert to Judaism, I suggested. Yes, she could, he said, and possibly be accepted by some Jewish community, but not his, which was far too strict. Anyhow, Valerie was not the kind of girl who would put herself out hypocritically to satisfy someone else’s prejudice.
Neither of us went to bed. Arthur could not make up his mind, but had promised to go to the airport with Valerie. In the end I drove them there and we saw Valerie off. Three weeks or so later she came back, and Arthur and I were there at Heathrow to meet her. She breezed out of the plane early in the morning and said she wanted breakfast. Arthur blanched and suggested we might wait until we were back in town. “Oh, you’re worried about the cost,” she said. “Well don’t. I’ll pay for it.” Barney had filled her purse with dollars, and she also had a suitcase full of oil paints, a luxury which usually took up most of her British income.
Late that night Arthur came up again to see me. Valerie had told him everything. John Pizey, who was Barney’s sales manager at the time, had been in London, and we had speculated as to how Barney was going to import Valerie, given that he was living with Link. What happened was this: Barney met Valerie at the airport and immediately took her onto another plane leaving for Los Angeles. They spent a week there, then went to San Francisco for a second week and then back to New York. She had resisted his advances up to San Francisco, then succumbed. He had taken her around all the bars and other places associated with the Beat poets, who were then becoming known but were not yet legendary, and she had enjoyed all that because their lifestyle was natural to her. In New York he put her in a hotel, but took her to a number of parties where she was not a success. New York political correctness was hardly her scene: words like Jewess and Negress were not used, but they were by Valerie, and not appreciated. Barney was especially sensitive on political correctness, although he was in every other way a natural rebel, and she constantly embarrassed him. I think that at one point he may have felt that Valerie was his ideal spouse (he had already been married and divorced twice), but he quickly changed his mind when he had to cope with her in New York, and was only too happy to send her back to Arthur and London with enough pocket money to see her through a few weeks, and enough paint for several months. Once again Arthur paced up and down my sitting room. He would never touch Valerie again: she was soiled. But he would always look after her. I told him he was a fool, but he had taken a position and meant to stick to it. Time passed. Valerie and Arthur were to all appearances a couple, but I knew better. They were friends, but began drifting apart.
