Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  The marriage was working better than I had expected, because Bettina was a good housekeeper and we both had busy professional lives. Perhaps for the first time in my life I was living a life of routine and habit, having problems at work to deal with that were within my competence and not the kind of shocks out of the blue that Christya had always caused me.

  Bettina was getting odd concerts, but it was becoming obvious that she was not going to be employed much more by Sadler’s Wells. Smaller opera companies began giving her parts. She sang at St Pancras Town Hall in Verdi’s early comic opera Un giorno di regno in March 1961, where the producer was Michael Geliot. It was my first meeting with him. He was again the producer in her next opera, a production of a new work, Volpone, by Francis Burt, which was given by the New Opera Company at Sadler’s Wells the following month as part of a short season that included Il prigioniero, a revival of the production I had previously seen two years earlier, when I had met the composer, Luigi Dallapiccola, with Emily Hooke, one of the few singers who in the Fifties was interested in and capable of singing difficult modern scores. A previous girlfriend of Lockspeiser’s, she was now only a friend (but Edward maintained a nostalgic jealousy towards the diminutive Italian composer, whose reputation Emily had done much to establish in Britain). She was a good friend to us both in those days; between my marriages she had often invited me and Edward around to eat, talk and discuss music in the evenings.

  There were several small opera companies performing both in London and the provinces then, which enabled me to increase the repertoire of operas I could see. I went to the opera forty-six times in 1961, rather less than my normal score, but I was going much to the theatre, much to concerts and spent many evenings at literary events or entertaining or being entertained. The Welsh National Opera was coming into prominence, started by an enthusiastic garage owner and based on the vocal power of a Welsh choral society. They produced several operas in Wales, which they then brought to London, mainly lesser-known early Verdi works and rarities such as Boito’s Mefistofele, which I saw in a production by George Foa. Foa had talked me, back in 1957, into publishing an operatic novel of his, The Blood Rushed to My Pockets, a comic work in which a tenor meets the real Lucia di Lammermoor, who appears on stage alongside the soprano who is singing her role. My edition was illustrated by Michael Ayrton. It seemed to me to be perfect for Danny Kaye as a film, and I had made every attempt to bring the novel to his attention. Perhaps he actually read it, but he never came back to me. Now at the end of his career as a producer, Foa was still doing good work, but dying of a wasting illness that made it almost impossible for him to talk, although he still somehow mounted operas on stage.

  Beckett had himself worked at an opera about that time. He had allowed Marcel Mihailovici, a friend, to set the French text of Krapp’s Last Tape (La Dernière Bande), as an opera lasting a little over an hour. The composer, whom I later asked to contribute to a Festschrift for Beckett, told me that Sam had spent many hours with him looking over the score as he worked on it and had made suggestions for the music itself. He could just as easily have been a composer as a writer, said Mihailovici. I saw it after its premiere in Bielefeld when the German company came to Paris in July 1961, where it was paired with another short work by Winfried Zillig. Barrault enthusiastically gave his theatre, the Marigny, for the occasion, where he was mounting an international season for which the theatre was temporarily renamed the Théâtre des Nations. The American baritone William Dooley sang the part of Krapp.

  I was travelling back and forth between London and Paris, sometimes going to German cities for a publishing event or an operatic or theatrical one, and moving between the worlds of publishing, theatre and music. My living room became something of a salon, with many politicians also coming in and out. Bettina had begun to cultivate women politicians in the Labour Party, especially those who were militant about women’s rights.

  In those days I was often asked to lecture, usually as a result of the more controversial books I had published, and radio and television appearances, as well as much press publicity, were the usual result. One Sunday night, not too long after I had moved into the new flat, I was rung up by the ICA Gallery, then on Dover Street. A lecture on Beckett was to take place at 7.30, but the lecturer was ill, and could I possibly replace him? I did, at a few minutes’ notice, and while I was talking, my eye was constantly attracted to the very large, colourful and abstract paintings that were hanging on the walls of the room. When, afterwards, they enquired what I would expect for a fee, I asked how much the paintings were. They started at £500, but none had been sold. All were by an Austrian painter called Hollegha. In the end I acquired one for £100 in lieu of fee and hung it on the very large wall of my living room (or salon, as we called it), opposite large windows, where it became a talking point among all my visitors. There was to be another acquisition to the flat.

  Jamie would come to me sometimes on Saturdays and Sundays. She was still living with her mother at 2 Wilton Terrace, and I think that by now Victor Churchill, her new boyfriend, had moved in as well. A man came to see me with a white poodle puppy. Jamie, so I was told, wanted it for Christmas. Reluctantly I agreed to buy it, but within two days (on Christmas Day itself, I think) I was asked to look after it myself: it was of course not house-trained, and Christya had wanted to put it out onto a balcony in cold mid-winter weather all night. So I kept the dog, to which Bettina gave the name Bila (“white” in Serbo-Croat), and of course a bond developed quickly. Jamie would come on weekends and we would take Bila to Regent’s Park, where she ran in circles at speed until exhausted. Two years later Bila was mated with the male poodle of Yvonne Ball, who was understudying Bettina, and had five puppies, two of whom where called Didi and Gogo. When Didi died we did not dare tell Sam for some months.

  * * *

  Easter 1959 was the second – but the first really big – Aldermaston March. The previous year I had gone to Cornwall with Bettina for the weekend, and back on the Easter Monday had spent the evening with Al Alvarez and his wife, a very attractive young girl whose name I cannot remember – though I recall she was a granddaughter of Frieda Lawrence. Alvarez in his autobiography pointedly never gives her name, the reason being that the marriage, although there was no way I could have known it at the time, was an unhappy one. They had both just finished the first Aldermaston March, had very sore feet and were tired. I felt very guilty with my anti-nuclear convictions not to have spent that Easter weekend marching with them. We discussed the political situation, and talked about Barney Rosset, who had published Lady Chatterley’s Lover in America without a contract and without paying royalties (Alvarez’s wife considered him a simple crook who took advantage of the ambiguous American copyright laws to rob her and other Lawrence heirs of the royalties). I believe he did pay something in the end. There and then I resolved to march the next year.

  I kept that resolve, and did the whole thing. I remember the assembly on Friday morning outside the Aldermaston weapons establishment, and then perhaps a thousand of us, marching the whole day to Reading, where the local vicar would not allow anyone to use or even enter his church for shelter; then taking the train back to London for the night, and reassembling early the next morning for the long march on the Saturday. By now we were several thousand strong, people of every age and background, accompanied by jazz bands and steel bands, and we were kept in a column about ten across by marshals. Onlookers lined the route, some friendly, some not, many just curious. The atmosphere was extraordinary. People had come from all over the country, some from abroad, bringing banners to identify themselves. Most were dressed casually, suitable for mixed and often cold and rainy weather, but some, like myself, dressed as if we were going to a reception in the city, quite deliberately in order not to give the impression that we were bohemians or drop-outs. “Some of them may be sincere, but most of them are just commies,” I overheard.

  In some places we were clapped and cheered on,
with many falling in to swell our ranks, but there was hostility too. The good humour of the marchers and their songs (‘We Shall Overcome’ was a popular one) did however leave a favourable impression and our numbers grew as we neared London. Every newspaper was grabbed up by the marchers to see how the march was being reported and how many we were estimated to be.

  Bettina was there at the beginning, but as I remember it not all the time. By Sunday we were all getting tired, and that day she stayed home. I remember late that Sunday, on the outskirts of London, walking with Alvarez, who needed a stick as he had a lame leg, when we were stopped by a marshal at a junction to let the traffic pass. “Come on, hurry up, catch up with the others,” he urged us after three minutes of letting the cars go by. We were exhausted by stopping and then rushing to catch up as we moved through outer London towards Hammersmith. At one junction a marshal shouted at us to hurry up and then, seeing our distress, relented: “All right, I can see you’re doing your best.” I suddenly felt old as the younger marchers ran past us to catch the rear of the column ahead.

  At the end of that day I found myself in a pub with a number of Scots, some of whom I knew slightly. Among them was the publisher James MacGibbon, founder of MacGibbon and Kee, which produced a wonderful literary list then and for a few more years before it was taken over by Granada, and Colin Bell, a young journalist with whom I was to cross swords in the years ahead. The Aldermaston marches attracted a wide range of left-of-centre or concerned intellectuals from all over Britain, as well as seasoned campaigners. Many friendships were made on the move or during the stops.

  And finally on the Monday we all packed into Trafalgar Square, tens of thousands of us. On that day the march had been led by Michael Foot, Ritchie Calder, Canon Collins, Victor Gollancz and others who had lent their names, and perhaps marched part of the way, but were there to be photographed by the press for the last few hundred yards to the platform on the square. The four days ended with the usual speeches and rituals on the plinth and then we scattered to eat, sleep, take trains or buses home, all elated by the press reports that more than 200,000 people had either marched or filled Trafalgar Square.

  I had taken part in other demonstrations before Aldermaston, some in Trafalgar Square, once in Grosvenor Square and in Whitehall, and on one occasion had been painfully kicked by a police horse. There was a growing militancy in the late Fifties against the Conservative governments of Churchill, Eden and Macmillan (the latter the best of the three) and against a Labour hierarchy that favoured a confrontational arms race and the nuclear deterrent. There were several incidents in the Fifties that might have detonated a nuclear war, but fortunately sanity, or restraint – or perhaps just luck – prevailed. Those of my generation, and of the one that followed it, if politically conscious at all, were convinced that all life and civilization were at great risk. The strength of the protest movements did much to restrain the government, whichever party was in power, which was more aware of our opposition than we perhaps realized. This was shown by the effect that Gangrene had had in ending the so called Mau Mau emergency.

  In fact those protests ushered in and fuelled the Sixties. As a publisher, but also as an individual, I was in touch with the new young university-educated intellectuals from non-middle-class backgrounds.

  One of my new authors was David Mercer, whose father had been an engine driver and an ardent socialist. David had succeeded in passing exams so that he could be educated at the expense of the state, and he became an articulate, politically aware artist. First he was a painter who went to Paris to make his career, but he then switched to writing. He sent me a number of his short stories, one of which I published in my New Writers series. Before that I had published three of his television plays, and more were to follow. Mercer was typical of the new working-class writers who were then finding their voice, some of them clustered around George Devine at the Royal Court Theatre. I knew many of them, but my means were too limited to be able to contract more than one or two.

  In the meantime, Marion had established herself in the office and began to assert her authority. Patrick Bowles, the translator of Molloy, was in London now. He was a very macho and handsome South African with a good classical education and much self-confidence, which always fell just short of arrogance. He was also a poet and seemed to have the ability to turn his hand to any literary activity: he did several translations for us, a bit rather carelessly. But above all he was a ladies’ man, and Marion was one of his conquests – or perhaps it was the other way round. Roy Jones and Marion remained close in their business tie, but each had gone on to other sexual partners: Valerie Desmore was for a time with Roy and Marion had the pick of male authors and translators.

  Roy had come to the conclusion that I was one of the great London eccentrics and cultivated my company: there were many lunches in Soho restaurants, visits to the theatre as a group and meetings at parties. I had imitated Barney Rosset in buying myself a bubble car, a little two-seater Heinkel, which on one occasion took five people to a party in Hampstead, all writers: Colin Wilson, Arnold Wesker and two other literary luminaries of the time. The diminutive car, only about four feet high, could get through any traffic and be easily parked anywhere. On one occasion I had to meet Roy, his wife Lucy, Bettina, and I think Marion as well, at a cinema near Marble Arch, and I was late because of a traffic jam. But Bettina could hear the approaching Henkel with its recognizable two-stroke engine beat. Roy laughed and laughed when he saw me driving up the pavement past the immobile deadlocked traffic. He now enthusiastically chaired board meetings and seldom disagreed with what I wanted to publish. He also imitated me in becoming a political radical and going to rallies in his wheelchair.

  Marion now wanted to edit manuscripts and translations, but I could hardly fail to notice that her interest was often as much in the man as his work. I cannot remember her often wanting to spend time with a female author, although she would take credit when such a book was well reviewed. She brought in one author whom she had known since her pre-war Berlin days, Eva Tucker, at a time when we were publishing many more young British authors, not all from British backgrounds. In time she was to find new authors herself, often from the American publishers she went to visit in New York.

  I had to find a way of increasing the sales of the French authors we were translating and publishing. We now had a growing stable of writers to which several labels had been attached. First the new style was called the aroman (“anovel” as in atonal), then the antinovel, finally the nouveau roman or “new novel”. There were obvious links with the antitheatre, as the plays of Ionesco and Beckett were sometimes described, with the new French and Italian cinema or Japanese films like Rashomon. A new subjectivity was abroad, where truth became what the individual mind saw as truth, not the perception of society as a whole or as a collective unity. New “isms” had chased each other in the plastic arts, and now it was the turn of literature to find new paths. Antonioni in the cinema was depicting a world where the old certainties, both in human relationships and in social forms, had disintegrated or changed beyond recognition. A new generation, where the educated middle class had been invaded by working-class intellectuals, needed new forms and a new way of looking at the world.

  The nouveau roman (the French label stuck where its English equivalent did not) needed to find a bigger British readership, and the time was ripe. In France, Alain Robbe-Grillet, a brilliant theorist with that ability which is the hallmark of a great teacher to make complex ideas clear and simple to listeners, had convinced the press and all who came to hear him speak that a new literature had arrived. He pointed out that he had given the reader a chance to become part of the creative process, to take on some of the responsibility of the author, who no longer acted like God imposing his reality on the world, but gave the reader scope to interpret what he read in different ways according to his or her own inclination. In a sense this was bringing agnosticism into literature, where before the novelist
had demanded faith and where the reader had been expected to accept the picture of the world that the novelist described.

  In order to explain all this, we needed the presence of the authors themselves. I approached the French Embassy and a number of universities where we knew members of the faculty – some were doing translations for us – and arranged a three-author tour. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute all agreed to come for a fortnight to Britain, to tour university cities and explain their ideas and their work. I worked out a complex budget whereby the expense would be covered partly by the universities and partly by ourselves, with the French Embassy giving receptions that would involve the press and the British literary world in London, Oxford and Edinburgh contributing indirectly to other expenses, including publicity.

  The tour started late in 1960. Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute arrived by plane, but Robbe-Grillet, who in those days had never flown and refused to do so, came by boat and train. As I remember it, they were all housed in a hotel by the French Embassy, but we may have arranged that ourselves, because just before their arrival a problem arose. The Ambassador, M. Chauvel, had agreed to give a large reception at the end of the first week. But all three writers had recently signed a manifesto (in September 1960), which had been much publicized, against the French government’s attitude towards the Algerian war. This was known as the “Declaration of the 121”, because a hundred and twenty-one well-known figures in the arts had signed it. The Quai d’Orsay, where the French Foreign Ministry is housed, had suddenly forbidden the Embassy to do anything to help my three writers. Poor M. Chauvel was in a dilemma. Not only had he enthusiastically given his support to the visit, but he was particularly anxious to talk to Marguerite Duras, who was a close friend of the editor of a review which he hoped would publish some of his poems.