Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Arthur Boyars’s mother was apparently very distressed by the “shame” of a criminal prosecution being brought against her daughter-in-law, and the relatives of George Lobbenberg, her previous husband, who died about this time, were also apparently very uncomfortable. Although I had certainly not expected things to go so far, I treated it as a crusade, or rather a worthy cause to be defended. But we were in for an expensive experience with an unknown outcome and we had to raise money. To this end I addressed several meetings, often organized by humanist organisations and the National Council for Civil Liberties, whose very active director was Tony Smythe, who, if I remember rightly, had earlier been associated with CND. He invited me to be the keynote speaker at their AGM, an event to which I brought my mother, who happened to be in town that night. She found the occasion uncomfortable.

  Every public meeting brought in more funds and publicized our case. Other people with censorship problems were usually at these meetings, held in small halls in Bloomsbury or Holborn or Soho. A regular was Jean Straker, a photographer constantly raided by the police, and having his negatives taken from his studio. He would speak from the hall when I had finished, state his own grievances, then urge those present to contribute to the appeal.

  I started the Free Art Legal Fund, producing a leaflet that quoted from Zola’s defence of the naturalist novel, a wonderful passage that I had come across in an anthology of international literature at Ledlanet. The leaflet, distributed widely, produced many cheques. Many came forward to help, including several MPs and members of the arts and literary communities. Our meetings became fuller, our speakers more distinguished, and we had to take bigger halls to contain bigger audiences. Other causes of the day were also aired. Joan Littlewood gave us her theatre for a fund-raising concert, for which Jenny Paull recruited a star orchestra that included Alan Civil, the horn player. Bettina sang in that, and so did others, and there were actors doing their bit as well.

  Realizing then that, although our supporters were generous, they did not want to turn out just to hear speakers and give money, I started The Defence of Literature and the Arts Society with our by now substantial mailing list. This became a properly organized society with a committee and members. We made William Hamling, Labour MP for Woolwich West, our Chairman, and the committee included several other MPs, including Ben Whittaker, soon to win Hampstead for Labour, Antony Grey, Tony Smythe and several other activists. Marion and I became joint secretaries, and we ran the DLAS from our Soho offices, using our regular staff. There were frequent committee meetings as well as public meetings, and these were often now held in committee rooms of the House of Commons, courtesy of our MP members. This venue turned out to be a draw, both for supporters and for other MPs who sympathized and could just drop in to a meeting for a few minutes without having to leave the Commons. Some peers attended as well. Jeremy Isaacs came once or twice, and other television and radio broadcasters as well, both out of sympathy and because we were making news. David Hockney had some trouble just then bringing in pictorial magazines that he wanted for his work, and we approached customs and got them released. We made common cause with the theatre world that had its own frequent censorship problems. Actors and producers, as well as authors who had difficulty getting their plays past the Lord Chamberlain until 1968, offered to help. Thousands of pounds were rolling in, and our eminent legal team that now included two juniors, Lord Lloyd of Hampstead and Cyril Salmon, could eventually be paid because the bulk of the costs were met through donations from the public, coming to over £70,000.

  One day, returning from Ledlanet to London, I found myself following Malcolm Muggeridge onto a British Airways aeroplane at Edinburgh airport. He had been elected Rector of Edinburgh University by the students, a largely honorary post that always went to a popular celebrity, and was returning from some meeting that goes with the ritual. I remembered a rumour that had come to my ears. I slipped into the seat beside him, and he looked definitely uncomfortable. After the usual exchanges, I said to him: “Tell me, Malcolm, if there’s any truth in the rumour that you’re going to give evidence for the prosecution in the Last Exit trial.” He wriggled and tried to avoid a straight answer. “Because if you do,” I went on, “there is something that my Counsel will put to you. Do you remember one fine June afternoon in 1962 when you and John Calder were crossing George IV Bridge in Edinburgh and you said to him: ‘If I were a student today, I’d fuck myself to death’?” I paused. “Mind you, the girls in their summer frocks were looking very attractive just then. I am of course prepared to swear on oath that you said that, as of course you did.”

  “Well, of course I was asked,” he said, “but I only thought about it.” And he changed the subject and started to look at his newspaper. As the plane was landing, he turned to me again. “My dear John,” he intoned, “of course I would never dream of giving evidence against you. You’re an old friend. I wouldn’t think of it.” And that was that. I had nobbled him, but fairly enough. At that point in his life he had become a professional puritan, and I knew that it was all a hypocritical pose to stay in the limelight. People like Muggeridge were always needed by the broadcasting media to give a balance at a time when fashion had shifted to the permissive left. My personal nickname for him was Hummug.

  Shortly after the first trial at Marlborough Street Magistrates Court, I had been asked to appear on the David Frost Show with Robert Maxwell. Most of the programme was taken up by David Susskind, talking about some current American issue, and time was short at the end of the programme. Maxwell tried to talk non-stop to prevent me getting a word in at all, but I managed to bang the table and insist on talking. In court he had been asked if he would ban Ulysses and had answered, “No that’s a good book.” Now I asked him, “You said Ulysses was a good book. Have you read it?”

  He hesitated and said, yes he had. “Name one character in Joyce’s Ulysses,” I challenged him, and of course he couldn’t.

  Another encounter with Maxwell took place that year at the Annual General Meeting of the Publishers Association. During “Any Other Business”, he got up and proposed that I should be expelled from the Association as a pornographer. Maxwell had owned for some time the old Edinburgh firm of Chambers, which had recently brought out a new edition of the famous Encyclopaedia. I had bought it and realized that it was a fraud. I stood up after Maxwell with another proposition: that Maxwell should be expelled for bringing dishonour to the publishing profession, pointing out that the latest “updated” Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, published in 1967, still said that Winston Churchill was alive – only one of hundreds of articles that had not been updated at all. There was much laughter, and the chairman, restraining his mirth, said that he though Mr Maxwell and Mr Calder should settle their differences outside the meeting.

  In preparation for the trial, we had many meetings with Patrick Neill and made up a long list of witnesses, which was gradually whittled down to a manageable number. Appearance was important, and many were rejected for odd reasons. Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt, who had already published Last Exit in German, wanted to appear, but Patrick Neill did not want a German on the strange ground that an English jury would think all Germans were homosexual. Neill had great difficulty with the book itself. He was obviously unfamiliar with American writing and could not understand a large number of the expressions used or the events that were described. We had to explain words, colloquialisms, slang and the actions themselves, including the sex scenes. He was certainly quite shocked. But when he talked to some of our witnesses, he began to realize that there was a whole world unfamiliar to him that people who taught literature at universities took in their stride.

  In the trial our witnesses would go first and would be followed by the prosecution’s team. Our judge, Judge Rodgers, seemed reasonable and treated us with courtesy, allowing Marion and me to sit with our lawyers and not in the box as in most criminal cases. He decided on an all-male jury, and I think we made a mistake in not objectin
g. The jury all came from the same part of south London, none were challenged and most of them were middle-aged and carried the Daily Express into court. There was one younger man who carried the Manchester Guardian (as it was then). We had been given permission to bring in a tape recorder, and we recorded the whole trial.

  We had selected Frank Kermode as our first witness. He was Regius Professor at King’s College, Cambridge, an eminent critic, who had only just returned from America with his new American girlfriend, an ex-student of his, whom he was later to marry after his current marriage had been terminated. He spent a day and a half in the witness box, explaining to the jury the function of literature: to describe the world we live in so that we could understand not only our own lives, but those of others, as well as the underlying motivations, often not understood by the characters created by the author, which made them do what they did because it was natural for them. The jury was taken through the book. Kermode, probed by Neill, explained how the trade-union leader, Harry, a central character in the novel, was only able to realize his homosexual nature when the strike empowered him to give expression to his previously unrealized desires. The prosecuting counsel, Mr Mathew, who was good at insinuations, handled the jury with flattery and suggestions that could appeal to their prejudices. They were obviously not regular readers. They had taken a week to get through the book, sitting in an empty courtroom, often complaining the novel was too difficult, and often sending out to ask what words meant. Now they were being taken through it again, first by Frank Kermode, then by Alfred Alvarez, poet and critic, then by Eric Mottram, another academic, who admitted to being a jazz buff, which may or may not have made him more sympathetic to the jury.

  Our two junior counsel, Lord Lloyd of Hampstead and Cyril Salmon, who occasionally took over from Neill, also examined our witnesses and later cross-examined the prosecution ones. Alan Burns, our author, gave evidence for us, and fortunately his new novel Celebrations was well-reviewed in The Times on the day he appeared, enabling Cyril Salmon to draw attention to it. The Maudsley Hospital psychiatrist Dr David Stafford-Clark appeared and gave evidence relative to the characters in the book; Quintin Crewe, a distinguished journalist, gave his evidence from a wheelchair; Robert Baldick, university don and translator, praised the book as literature; and Barbara Hardy from Birkbeck College, one of our few women witnesses, pointed out that the Victorian novel, which she taught, suffered from the prudishness of its time, and that modern writers had a truer sense of reality. There were many more, each only kept a few minutes in the witness box. We had Father Hester, Church of England minister from our local Soho church, St Anne’s, and his prelate the Reverend Kenneth Leach, who compared characters in the book to some of the less fortunate Soho characters who sometimes sought their help. We had two Americans, David Galloway, who taught in Germany and whose novels we were later to publish, giving evidence about the frankness of the current American novel, and Eric Blau, who grew up in exactly the area of Brooklyn where the novel is set. Last Exit, he said, was true to the actual conditions prevailing there, and he had personally seen worse events than those described. I gave evidence myself, my reasons for publishing the book and the merits I saw in it. According to the press, which daily covered the trial, at least the section of it that was sympathetic to us, I came over as sincere and committed. Marion was also in the witness box, but her testimony was mainly about reading the book and thinking it worthwhile to send it to me. We had about twenty witnesses in all, and our testimony took a week.

  Then we had the prosecution witnesses. Mathew and Montgomery Hyde were canny enough not to produce Robert Maxwell again. My team would easily have made mincemeat of him. Their best literary witness was probably David Holloway, deputy literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, and about to take the place of H.D. Ziman, the literary editor. Holloway had not wanted to speak against the book, but Ziman, not having the courage to appear himself, had made him do it. He said little other than that personally he did not like it and thought the explicit sex described was unnecessary. The other witnesses were mainly right-wing literary hacks like Robert Pitman of the Daily Express, a Professor George Catlin, an academic of the right, and a headmaster and a psychiatrist brought to neutralize our own. But there were two witnesses who undoubtedly did us harm. One was David Shepherd, now a Church of England priest, who had previously been an All-England cricketer, who would naturally attract the attention of the jury and the press. He said that he had been deeply troubled by the book, and Neill, anxious to get a popular sporting hero out of the box as quickly as possible, did not ask him how or why, thereby missing an opportunity.

  The other dangerous witness was Sir Basil Blackwell. He had been pushed to give evidence by his son, Richard Blackwell, whom I knew from Booksellers’ conferences. I had always thought him a prig and an oaf, the conceited scion of an old established bookselling family in Oxford. He had not the courage to appear himself, but pushed his aged father to do so instead. Sir Basil, nearly eighty, was a straight-laced old Conservative, unlikely to have much sympathy with modern literature of any kind or with the changes that characterized social life in the Sixties, with its youth culture, its reforms in capital punishment, freedom of expression, sexual permissiveness and greater equality for women. My late uncle Sir James and he would have agreed on all of these matters, my grandfather even more so.

  He was asked if he had read the book and replied that he had to read it as he had agreed to give evidence against it. He went on to say that “my last years have been utterly vitiated by having had to read this filth”. He was not kept long in the witness box by Neill. I would have asked him why he had agreed in advance to give evidence against a book he had not yet read, and why this judgement in advance? And why did he have to read a book he knew he would not like and thereby “vitiate” his old age? But Neill just wanted such witnesses out of the witness box as quickly as possible, relying on the more enlightened evidence of the many professors, critics, authors and others who had appeared for us.

  Mr Mathew against us was smooth and insinuating. He played on the jury as Gardiner had done in the Penguin Lady Chatterley trial, but in reverse. Whereas Gardiner had brought out the class bias in not wanting “your wife or your servants” to read such a book, the prosecution’s own words, Mathew could easily flatter the jury that they were “men of the world” who did not need “Professors” to tell them what was what. Neill missed all that. It was not the kind of case for which he was best suited.

  The judge’s summing up was fair, and as far as we could make out, he seemed to be on our side. He had treated us with courtesy throughout, had explained the law, but not in all its ramifications. We did not much like the look of our jury, especially the foreman, a black-jowled, heavy-set man who probably owned a small shop, and had been heard during the evidence of one witness to mutter, “Fiction, fiction! I thought this was about fact.” He was one of the Daily Express carriers. The court ushers in their black robes were friendly and fairly optimistic about our chances during the long wait while the jury was out.

  The case had gone on a day longer than expected, because the judge had reserved his last few words of the summing-up until the next morning. David Frost had intended to discuss the case and the verdict on his television programme that night, and because of the delay could not do so. He changed the discussion into a general one on pornography and censorship. That may well have influenced some members of the jury, and especially their wives, who had not been in court. At any rate, after a wait of about four hours – and we thought the young man on the jury who read the Guardian might have held them up for that long – we were found guilty. Marion, very upset, looked down at her hands. I tried to show no expression.

  We were given a fine of £500, probably the minimum the judge could give us. The costs ran to over £70,000, but we had been helped by the appeals we had made to the public and the funds raised by the DLAS. I instantly wanted to appeal, but Lord Lloyd in particular was dismis
sive. “There’s no way you can appeal against a jury decision in a case like this,” he said. I protested that other books had been banned in the past and had, if they were good books, always come back, but our team consisted of conventional barristers, and such issues as literary values were of no great importance to them. I told Montgomery Hyde, however, that we did intend to carry the matter further and I would find a way. Lord Goodman also took an interest. In his view the law was unworkable and what was needed was a committee of experts, rather like the witnesses we had produced in court, to decide what was worthy of publication, whatever the contents, and what was not.

  Last Exit was banned, but the company went on normally, and we now had more time to devote to our other publications, which had suffered badly.

  * * *

  Our defeat in the Last Exit trial was always much in my thoughts. Together with Tony Smythe of the NCCL we decided on a large fund-raising scheme, having come to the conclusion that such small events as we had organized in the past in smaller theatres and public halls were too much work for too little result. Why not have a really big event? We jointly booked the Royal Festival Hall for the late autumn of 1968. And in the meantime two other things happened. The first was that Antony Grey and I went along – this must have been early that year – to see Lord Goodman, who was keen on engineering a change in the law. As Jenny Lee had made him Chairman of the Arts Council, he had its facilities at his command, and he organized a big meeting of interested parties, a sort of Grand Committee of ninety individuals of whom twenty-one represented organizations. He then divided the committee into two: one to prepare a case for reform of the law on obscenity, and the other to put together a proposal to totally abolish all censorship laws. Frank Kermode became Chairman of the whole committee, and I think of the first sub-committee as well. I was put onto the second one.