Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  We called ourselves Music Today. Our first concert, on 8th February 1960, at the small recital room of the Royal Festival Hall, had a formula which worked very well: two new or modern compositions, one of them a major work unknown to the British public, would be played before the interval, after which it would be discussed and played again. Then there would be a literary spot and a serious classic piece played to end the programme. The evening consisted of Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, the British premiere of Boulez’s Marteau sans maître, which was played twice, discussed by Iain Hamilton (then our Chairman), Martin Cooper of the Daily Telegraph and Howard Hartog, while a Brahms trio ended the evening. The literary spot was Patrick Magee reading an extract of Beckett that I had chosen for him. The Morley Quartet and New Music Ensemble played the music. We sold out because we had the mailing list of the Festival Hall at our disposal, but my own efforts to publicize the Beckett reading certainly brought in a few more people. Listeners learnt something about literature and readers learnt something about music. We were happy with our formula, and at the second concert, on 14th March, which also sold out, I had a reading of a short Ionesco play as the literary spot. The discussion on this occasion was chaired by Hamilton with Peter Maxwell Davies and Peter Heyworth. At the third I put in a reading of Genet. Funding for the concerts came largely from Robert Mayer and Harewood, but we did not need much.

  Then we made a mistake. Because the audience was bigger than the recital room, which took less than two hundred, we moved our concerts to the Royal Court Theatre on a Sunday night. Having only our own mailing list and with some limited advertising in the press, we could not reach enough people, and the audience dropped in numbers. After two more concerts, we decided not to continue. But in the meantime the musical situation had changed, which was one factor in our decision to disband. The distinguished musicologist William Glock, who had been a part-time musical advisor to my firm for a short time – and among other occasional jobs had been secretary of the International Music Club in Mayfair during its brief heyday11 – was appointed Head of Music at the BBC by Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, the new, reforming Director General. Suddenly the Third Programme, the cultural channel, was open to atonalism and dodecaphonic music, and to playing the works of British composers such as Humphrey Searle, who had been struggling in the wilderness for years. And at about the same time, the Third Programme began to be more interested in intellectual drama and the authors I was publishing, when P.H. Newby, Donald McWhinnie, Barbara Bray and later Martin Esslin were allowed to become more adventurous and international.

  I have mentioned that we had growing financial problems. The money that I had made on leaving Calders Ltd had gone largely into publishing, and that was where I was spending my time. I had a little flirtation, if that is the appropriate word, with working for Wolfson; he seemed anxious to add me to his team, but I think he was hardly serious. He invited me to come round to his flat early one morning, and I waited while he read the financial columns of the daily papers and checked his stock exchange prices, after which we were driven to Dagenham, and to the Collaro factory, which he had bought the previous year. We were met by Major Collaro, the managing director, a jovial man. He conducted us around the factory, which made radiograms and record players. Afterwards I sat through an embarrassing session in Collaro’s office, where this big, hearty man was turned within minutes into a wet rag of a grovelling employee who did not earn enough money for the group. An earlier Collaro joke about an amateur group doing the Merchant of Venice, but having trouble finding someone to play Shylock, went right over Wolfson’s head.

  When he discussed finding a position for me, I was not forthcoming: what I had seen did not make me want to work for him, and in any case I had my own publishing company. But I could no longer finance it out of commissions earned elsewhere, and the sales were inadequate.

  At one point Wolfson, perhaps to test me, had suggested that I find ways of exploiting a cordless vacuum cleaner that one of his companies had developed. This was a time when, on visits to Montreal, I had discussed setting up with one of my Ostiguy cousins a company to sell my books in Canada and other things as well, because Canada is not a big market for books, especially not for intellectual ones. We took on the cleaners, and I came across a series of convincing reproductions of well-known old-master paintings produced in London by Mrs Fiehl. They were framed prints that had been painted over with glaze to give the impression of oils. A company was set up in Montreal called Stratford Sales, and it was developing quite well, because my cousin was an enthusiast and gave it much effort, but his least interest was in the books, and I soon realized that I was involving my time and money in another business in which I had no real interest. I sold out to my cousin, Claude Ostiguy, and he carried it on until he retired.

  I was also invited to take an interest in The Montrealer, a monthly magazine that set out to imitate The New Yorker, and I joined the board with an investment, intending to take an editorial part in its development. But soon I was too busy in the UK to keep in touch. Then one day I received two phone calls within an hour from other Montrealer directors. They were fighting for control and made me an offer for my shares. I sold to one of them and came out with a profit. I have no idea how it fared after that. It disappeared after another year or two.

  I had other serious expenses as well, including what was to become a long-running legal battle to get divorced from Christya. I was paying considerable maintenance for her and our daughter. The money was running out, and I had to start to look for new capital. The obvious way to do this was to take an advertisement in the trade magazine The Bookseller. I received a few replies, one of them from a Marion Lobbenberg. I invited her to lunch in a small intimate restaurant near Sloane Square. She was a petite dark woman, near my own age – although I never discovered what it was until her death in 1999 – enthusiastic and self-assured. Her marriage was dull, and to relieve her boredom she had recently taken a two-year course at the new and still experimental University of Keele. She wanted a career. She had money enough, but had no intention of taking too much risk. She had heard of some of my authors and was impressed by their names, but everything had to be looked at by her accountant.

  I soon met him. His name was Roy Jones, a wheelchair-bound victim of multiple sclerosis with a beady eye, a sense of humour and an iron will that made light of his affliction. He also had a formidable German wife, and was the current lover of Marion Lobbenberg, although by no means the only one. Having looked at my balance sheet and sent his partner Montague White to inspect my offices in Sackville Street, he told her that she was mad and that she should not even consider an investment in a firm where profit had such a low priority. But she was already interested. She knew that some of my current authors, Eugène Ionesco in particular, were in intellectual fashion, and to be in the fashionable swim was her immediate aim. Her husband, George Lobbenberg, had a successful manufacturing business in Shrewsbury that made women’s undergarments, and she wanted to get away from that quiet and socially snobbish county town, where she had felt cramped and intellectually starved while raising her two small girls. She took a flat near Paddington and, torn between her desire to join me and Roy Jones’s caveat, tried to make up her mind.

  I suggested that she should come to work without pay to see for herself what we did and how the firm operated. She could take a few months to make up her mind and nothing in the office would be closed to her. Our need was getting greater, but I saw no other way, and she accepted.

  Marion took on some of the editorial work, but she mainly wanted to meet the authors and to entertain them. I took her to Paris with me, hoping that a tour of French publishing houses and meetings with Beckett, Ionesco and Robbe-Grillet would finally convince her. The investment under discussion was £10,000, and I was sure at that point that subject to the inevitable conditions that Roy Jones would impose, she had really made up her mind to join me. She spoke reasonable French, good German – because
her father was German – and she enjoyed the Paris trip. We stayed at my usual hotel, the Michelet Odéon, and on different floors. We went to a concert at the Théâtre de l’Odéon one night, right next to the hotel; it was the world premiere of Boulez’s Pli selon pli. Afterwards we went to the Coupole in Montparnasse, the most popular meeting place in those days for artists, intellectuals and those who wanted to be around them. I suggested a drink afterwards at a nightclub nearby, and we went to Elle et Lui, which I had often visited with Barney Rosset. The scene was largely lesbian, something which had always fascinated Barney, and I was curious to see Marion’s reactions, but I think she hardly noticed. Afterwards, back at the hotel, I detected an invitation in her eye, but I had no intention of getting involved with someone with whom I expected to have a business relationship. “I’m not feeling well. I think I drank too much,” I mumbled. “I think I’m going to be sick.” And I rushed up to my room on the next floor.

  Arthur Boyars would frequently drop into the office, and he and Marion, both Jewish, took a hearty dislike to each other. “You can’t take that appalling woman into partnership,” he said – while she, once he had left, would ask why I let him waste my time. She was not impressed by a third-string book reviewer who had written a few poems and knew a great deal about the classical-music repertory, not much in vogue among her friends. My love of opera also puzzled her: it was not intellectually fashionable according to her lights.

  It was about this time that I met David Tutaev – I cannot remember how or where. He was a theatre director of Russian background, very agile and light-footed, with long, flowing whitish hair, a long nose, bright eyes, a gesticulating, enthusiastic presence – not tall, but thin and nervous, and always casually dressed. He had been an attaché at the British Embassy during the war, and had managed to get the NKVD girl who shadowed him pregnant. He was unable to get her out of Russia after the war, so he still had a child there. I am not sure how many marriages lay behind him. I was soon to meet his previous wife, an actress called Judith, and his current one, who was Caribbean, a nurse, whom he had met on a boat. She had already had two children by him, although I cannot be sure if they were actually married. He was an accomplished seducer of women and always trying to con something out of men – the financing of a play or some other scheme: his fertile mind always had many projects to pursue.

  Aside from the theatre, he was full of book projects, the most ambitious of which was to publish a library of Russian literary classics, philosophy and thought. Although attracted by the idea, I am glad I did not proceed. It would not have worked without heavy long-term subsidy. In any case, Tutaev’s quicksilver mind would never have allowed him to give it much effort. I met several theatre people through him – he had directed quite a number of plays, but I am not sure I ever saw one – and I especially enjoyed meeting Dorothy Tutin with him, a favourite actress of mine. But there was never any continuity of contact among people he knew. He certainly had talent, but I think he was little trusted, which is probably why he never seemed to have any work. Certainly I lent him small sums of money, which were never returned, but it was much more disturbing when he put a Serbian girlfriend in my living room for a night and she thought she was there for good, making herself very much at home. David would visit her for sex in the afternoons. It took me perhaps a month to get her out, but worse was to follow.

  I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair – it must have been the autumn of 1958 – when I received a telephone call from Berry Bloomfield in my office. “John, I have to warn you, David’s wife and children are in your flat.”

  “What do you mean? How could they get in?”

  “He got the key from me. You know what David’s like.”

  I did indeed. Every hour of his life he had a crisis, and he counted on other people to get him out of it, while he incurred new ones. I did not dare reflect on the means he had used to get my keys. He was hypnotically unrefusable, and Berry had a soft heart. I told her she had to get them out somehow. I phoned my flat and spoke to the unfortunate woman (I forget her name) who had put herself in perpetual insecurity because of David, and I tried to reach him: all to no avail. I returned to London, and after a day or two in a hotel, moved into Voronin’s Boarding House and stayed there two months.

  Voronin’s is worth describing. It was a boarding house for concert artists visiting London. Madame Voronin was an old Russian lady. When she was short of rooms, she would sleep on a camp bed next to the boiler. Every room had a grand piano in it. There were some compensations to my distress: at breakfast I would meet great pianists and singers, there to perform that week. I had serious talks with string quartets and trios that made me late for the office, and conductors would ask me to their rooms to turn the pages while they played through scores they were studying at the piano. I was frequently given tickets by artists to their performances. One South African pianist (male) propositioned me and was very disappointed when I politely declined. I did have a fling with a Canadian pianist (female) who was staying there for several weeks while studying with a particular teacher. I had to change my room frequently depending on who was there, sometimes to a larger room with a Steinway or a Bösendorfer, sometimes to a small unheated one. Eventually I managed to get the Tutaevs to move out and returned to Upper Wimpole Street. During all that time, I not only had to pay the rent and rates, but the telephone bill as well.

  * * *

  The 1959–60 season was the year that Bettina spent at Kiel, on the German north coast. She had earlier studied with Gabriel Dussurget in Paris. Dussurget was the director of the Aix-en-Provence festival, and he gave her the part of Barberina in The Marriage of Figaro when the company was performing at Cannes during an Easter season in 1958. After that, I spent a few days with her on the Côte d’Azur. It was then that I heard my first Pelléas et Mélisande at the Opéra in Nice with Huguette Rivière, Willy Clément and Michel Roux. Bettina knew Christine Gayraud, the Geneviève, quite well. She asked Bettina if she had ever made love with another woman, and when Bettina said no, told her that she would like to be the one to initiate her.

  Bettina was engaged again to sing with the Aix company at the summer festival that year. She was cast as one of the three ladies in The Magic Flute and was understudying Papagena. I drove down to be there and remember stopping the night at Pouilly and sampling their delicious white wine. I stayed for a week, sharing Bettina’s room in university accommodation. Bettina was despondent because Georg Solti, the conductor, had turned up with three female singers who were not under contract, all mistresses of his, and insisted they sing, thereby putting three contracted singers out of a job, including herself.

  During the week I met Francis Poulenc, about whom I was soon to publish the Henri Hell biography. I joined him with his entourage at the Deux Garçons, the main café frequented by the regulars, before lunch, where his group included the composer Henri Rabaud and Pierre Schneider, whose book on Schubert I had published in the Profile series. I was suffering from a gastric condition at the time and had to be careful what I ate, but Poulenc, sitting next to me, ordered as it he were my doctor. We were eight at table at the Casino restaurant, the best in Aix, and everyone other than myself at the table was homosexual, and homosexuality was the subject of most of the conversation. Rabaud had recently stayed at a chateau where La Comtesse had made him share a room “avec une femme! Imaginez, Francis, une femme!” Poulenc laughed and advised him to always do what he did: stay in an hotel. Poulenc was of course a well-recognized figure, and other tables were peering over at us, wondering who this new man sitting next to the great composer was: could it be Poulenc’s new young boyfriend? Every time he slapped my knee the impression was confirmed.

  The student accommodation was adequate if not comfortable, but I spent little time in the room. I came to know Dussurget – whom I had met several times previously – very well and was often asked to drive him up and down the town. He urged me to run down the tourists on the crowd
ed streets: he was the Festival Director and could do what he liked. He was an eccentric who knew a great deal about voices and had impeccable taste in programming and casting. He knew he had made a mistake in hiring Solti, a tyrant whose arrogance was as great as his own. He had raised Aix-en-Provence into the first rank of European summer festivals, and his reign was its golden age.

  It was almost the last season for one of my operatic idols, Teresa Stich-Randall, who other than in Aix sang mostly in Vienna and never had the international career that her voice deserved. I had heard her in previous years and always with the feeling that her voice was the most ravishing imaginable. She was perfect for Mozart. I had heard her in most of his roles for dramatic soprano – Donna Anna, Countess Almaviva, Fiordiligi, Pamina, etc. – as well as in many Masses. It was she who had so thrilled me on my first visit to Aix with Christya some years earlier. In this festival she was singing in Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute, and also Rosina in Rossini’s Barber of Seville, a heavy vocal programme in a short festival. But, with all her success, she had become disillusioned with the tackiness of operatic life and intended to enter a convent. We had several long talks during that week, away from the main cafés, where she did not much like mixing with the other artists whose intrigues and affairs and jealousies she found repulsive. She had great dignity on stage, but off it, without make-up covering a rather pimply face, she looked plain and rather dowdy. She was only thirty-two, but had decided to abandon her career, which was then at its peak, with many offers to sing all over the world. She soon retired, and thereafter any singing she did was in a convent.