Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  The committees began to meet regularly, the smaller ones to discuss their arguments, the large one (the separate sub-committees together) to hear witnesses with a point of view. One such witness we called was the same David Shepherd who had given evidence against Calder and Boyars at the Old Bailey. He was asked why and said that at university he had been a practising homosexual, but on taking up religion he had decided that this was wrong. He had tried to overcome his natural impulses to force himself to become a heterosexual, and to this end had married. On reading Last Exit to Brooklyn, he had realized that all the old impulses were still there and the novel had reawakened them. As I listened to his evidence, I thought back to the Old Bailey. If only Neill had asked the proper questions in the High Court that he was being asked now, not only might the jury have reached a different decision, but the national debate on homosexuality – which in spite of a change in the law was still going on – might have been more enlightened. It only needed a cricketing hero to come out frankly to create a greater enlightenment. But in the court he had only been asked his reasons for disliking the book, not the underlying emotional ones.

  The second thing that happened earlier that year was that I had gone to see John Mortimer. I knew him from the Edinburgh Drama Conference and had become friendly with him in various ways. I asked him if he would lead an appeal. He was a barrister and a QC. His courtroom experience up to that point had concentrated largely on divorce cases, but he was also a distinguished playwright and novelist who could understand what literary merit was all about. He agreed with some reluctance to take the case and do his best, but gave me no assurance at all that he expected to succeed. This meeting took place over tea at his house, not in his consulting rooms, for which his clerk would have sent me a weighty invoice.

  * * *

  Many of our plays were being performed by the big national companies during the Sixties, and one of the most notable was Peter Weiss’s unusual play about the post-Napoleonic years, linked to the fate of the Marquis de Sade, who was then writing plays in an asylum. The play had had reasonable success in Germany, and Peter Brook decided to perform it as part of his season at the Aldwych in London. It had a long title, The Persecution and Assassination of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, which became shortened to Marat/Sade. Peter Weiss turned up two days before the opening and he came to have lunch with me after a rehearsal, deeply troubled. He was not happy with all the changes that had been made in Geoffrey Skelton’s translation, which we were due to publish a few days after the opening. Peter Brook had played fast and loose with the text, changed words, sentences and meanings, intruded songs with different words and sentiments from the original songs, and Weiss did not know what to do. He gave me a list of the worst things he had noticed. At the opening the next night, I went backstage with Peter Weiss after the curtain, and we found Peter Brook on stage. I tried to raise the author’s points, but Brook rounded on us both. “I’ve been perfectly faithful to the text,” he said, and he would brook no argument. I wrote him a letter detailing errors and lines that had lost their sense – it was too late to do anything else – and on repeated visits to the theatre tried to persuade Pat Magee, who was playing Sade, to get right a line about the weak tearing at the throats of the mighty (it was the mighty tearing at the throats of the weak), but Pat could not change it without Brook telling him to. Peter Brook ignored all my letters and even kept the offending line, and all the others, in the film he made after the production closed.

  I was to have more to do with Brook, who was very much the producer in fashion just then. Some of my authors like René de Obaldia, whose plays were being successful in the Paris boulevard theatre, often with stars in the main parts, were very keen to have Brook produce them, but others, Beckett in particular, sensed that he would put his own interpretation on their work and ignore their stage directions, putting in his own. Marat/Sade was a good example of this. It was reviewed as an astonishing production of a very mediocre play, saved by the genius of Peter Brook. As he began to take Shakespeare to pieces, and everyone began to talk about Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream or other classics where the author’s name was barely mentioned, I began to wonder.

  Marat/Sade was in 1965. Three years later, I was approached one day by Michael Kustow, an assistant to Brook, who was then about to stage an improvised play about the Vietnam War, which he had entitled US. Basically Brook had assembled his company of actors, poets and musicians on stage to put together jointly an evening that would have all the special elements that had been used in Marat/Sade (and I am not denying that he made it a riveting spectacle). Kustow wanted me to publish not just the text, but also a rehearsal diary and the story of how the production was assembled and developed from that first gathering on stage up to the first performance. We had an attractive female production manager in the office at the time, who, obviously attracted to Mike Kustow, volunteered to give spare time to the book, and it appeared at the same time as the play opened. Its best moments were the simple ones, for instance when Glenda Jackson, playing a Vietnamese woman who has just lost her baby in a bombing, delivers a very moving poem by Ted Hughes about her grief. Attacked by the right-wing press for its very critical attitude to American involvement in that troubled country, it brought more attacks on the Royal Shakespeare Company, one of the bastions of Sixties radicalism, but for me it was one of Peter Brook’s greatest successes. And here no author was having his work distorted. The casualness of death and killing was well caught at the end, when a box of butterflies are released on the stage and flutter all over the theatre. The last one was, in reality or in theatrical parody, set alight by a cigarette lighter. The fate of those that were freed into the auditorium cannot have been much better.

  I had a project to take over a building in Soho and turn it into a theatre, restaurant and bookshop. The building was on Bateman Street. The theatre would have seated about a hundred, just right for the kind of play I had in mind, and Beckett wrote a short play for its opening.22 The ground floor was to be a restaurant in the middle of an area that was otherwise a bookshop, the shelves lining the walls and continuing along an overhead balcony surrounding the restaurant on three sides. We had submitted architects’ plans and made an offer for the building, but then things began to go wrong. I had known that there was a Soho mafia, but I had not realized how powerful it was. It did not want an important building in the centre of Soho being used for an honest and cultural purpose that would probably not be profitable, or at least sufficiently so to be able to pay protection money, and it went to work to queer the whole project. Suddenly the estate agent became uncooperative, and everyone involved was got at in one way or another. Peter Brook had looked at the theatre space, given it modified approval, but warned that I would have great difficulty in getting any support from the press, which loved to attack projects of this kind. It was however the Soho mafia that made the Soho Centre, on which I lavished much time and thought, unworkable, and it never opened.

  Somewhere between Marat/Sade and US, I was asked by Flourish, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s house magazine, for an article on a theatrical subject. I had one I had written for my own theatrical magazine, Gambit, but had missed the deadline, so now I sent it to them. It was an article on Peter Brook, who had so totally changed many plays, and currently was doing bizarre productions of Shakespeare, often to critical and public applause, where it was the production and not the play that received the attention. I cited Marat/Sade as an example, saying that the public were no longer sure if the playwright was good or not, but only if the production was exciting. I went on to say that the day was coming when one would question the value of Shakespeare and other classics and say how lucky we were to have a Peter Brook to interpret them for us.

  At about this time Bettina and I became friendly with an attractive and very vibrant young female stage manager who was living with Peter Brook. She told us that when
Peter Brook was sent proofs of my article, so that Flourish could print a reply, he smashed up all the furniture in the flat and then sat down in a hot rage to write what was really a very weak answer, the gist of which was that the theatre was in such a bad way that no one should criticize anyone else. My relations with Brook, which had been cordial, became frosty after that.

  * * *

  That was in 1968. Some time that summer, and I remember it being a very hot day, we gave a party in our offices in Brewer Street, probably to launch a new book. A literary agent called Tanja Howarth came. I was very attracted to her and invited her to lunch a day or two later. The lunch went on rather too long and made me late for the big inaugural meeting of the Art Council’s Obscenity Committee, which I have already described, and which was so named that afternoon. I arrived just as Frank Kermode was defining its role as he saw it, and I remember one telling phrase, which I paraphrase as follows: “In the arts it is sometimes difficult to define where one stands, but in all matters relating to (high) culture, one always knows if one is near the centre or near the periphery.” I began seeing Tanja, who also had several other suitors at the time, and soon we were having an affair that would have its serious consequences.

  The Royal Festival Hall booking was for the month of December that year, and we began to make preparations for it. Alan Aldridge, one of the top designers of the day, agreed to do the poster for a fraction of his usual fee, and he designed a telling image that showed Adam and Eve in the coils of a serpent that had the winged collar and severe dress of a magistrate. We booked a number of prime sites for it in the London Underground system, delegating Anthony Blond, another publisher who was on the DLAS committee, to prepare a souvenir programme that we hoped would be stuffed with advertising. We started to look for a producer for the evening and a variety of different artists in music and theatre willing to give their time to help Civil Liberties and our Anti-Censorship campaign.

  Our appeal was due to be heard in June, just before the Law Courts closed for the summer recess. We had been nervous about John Mortimer, who had reluctantly agreed to listen to the tape of the most important parts of the trial on the Sunday afternoon before the case came to the Appeal Court. We felt at the time he was more interested in the attractive secretary he had brought with him. But in court itself he was brilliant. We were before three appeal judges, Lord Salmon, Mr Justice Geoffrey Lane and Mr Justice Fisher, whilst against us we had Mr Mathew again. But he could not get away with the same populist tactics that he had used with the jury when he was arguing to three experienced appeal judges. Mortimer had several appeal points, the principal one being that Judge Rodgers had not explained to the jury sufficiently well the meaning of literary value in the Obscene Publications Act. The other points were of less importance, but we were acquitted on three of the seven. Behind me in the court were sitting Peter du Sautoy and Charles Monteith of Faber and Faber, and they leant forward to congratulate me. It was over.

  It was the end of June. Bettina and our daughter, Anastasia, were away in Dugi Otok in Croatia and I took my car and drove to meet them there, leaving London together with my elder daughter Jamie, Jill Mortimer – who worked for the Publishers Association and had recently been involved in a battle against the Selective Employment Tax levied on publishers who did not own their own printing works – and a journalist friend of Bettina’s, called Charles Robinson. It was the longest continuous drive of my life. We stopped outside Munich in a torrential downpour under a bridge for half an hour, had a fairly long dinner somewhere in the Austrian Alps, after which I was lost for about two hours. I remember being on the right road at last with a carload of complaining, overtired people, too squashed to be able to stretch out, anxious because my petrol warning light had been on for some time, when out of the mist ahead I saw a lighted Elf sign and was able to fill up.

  At dawn I stopped the car for a twenty-minute nap, and again an hour later, and finally drove into Zadar in time to park the car and then catch the boat to the island of Dugi Otok. There was already a community there, friends from London, and they included Stuart Hood, previously Controller of BBC Television and a friend for whom I had recently tried to obtain a job as John Trevelyan’s successor as Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors. I was not successful, and it is as well for both him and the Board that I was not. Stuart’s wife, Renée Goddard, a TV casting director, was also there.

  I only stayed a week, possibly less, swimming, talking and reading. Then I had to return to London, and I then spent a week with Jacques Chaix at Cap Ferrat. I remember I had a hair-raising journey to Zagreb in my car. The map showed me what looked like the shortest road, but I did not realize that it was totally unpaved, a road with large stones that peasant carts would have had difficulty in manoeuvring, which was certainly not meant for cars. Once on it, there was no turning back, and I had to drive through the mountains in first gear for about eighty miles, steering from one large stone onto another, while night descended. Down below, beside the road, I could see the wrecks of buses and lorries that had gone over, some of them falling all the way to a river at the bottom of the valley. It was nearly midnight, fortunately with a moon, when I found myself on asphalt again. I drove into Zagreb, found a hotel for a short night, left my car at the airport and flew to London. There I arranged for a reprint of Last Exit to Brooklyn, did the essential office things, including the correspondence, and then went down to Nice, this time taking with me a lady, whom I shall just call Patricia. I had known Pat for some time. She was Irish and an independent jeweller, making pieces for the big shops like Cartier’s. She was adept at working gold, for which she had an almost religious respect as a precious metal, and silver. It was her quite extraordinary bust which had attracted me to her in the first place, and I pursued her successfully, but only for a short time. She was jolly and good company, and although she had little French, I was sure she would fit in at the Villa Soleia, where Jacques invited about twenty friends every August, some staying the whole time, some for a week or two.

  The main adventure during my week at Cap Ferrat was going to Cannes to pick up another boat. This was a square motor-boat, able to seat about a dozen around its padded edges. It was a new model, but it cannot have been very successful, because I have never seen another one. About eight of us embarked on it, including its new owner, to take it back to Cap Ferrat. Out at sea, halfway back, the motor failed, and we drifted. Pat was in her element. We had a bag of spirits and things to mix with them on board, and she raised ours by becoming an efficient barmaid. At about eight o’clock we drifted near enough to the coast to be heard, and another boat came out to tow us in. We were then invited to dinner by our rescuers, and the evening ended well. I had envisaged sinking in a storm or being blown to Algeria.

  From Cap Ferrat I returned with Pat to London. In the pocket of the seat in front of me I found a boarding card in the name of Tanja Howarth; she had obviously flown to Nice on the previous flight from London that day. I put the card in my pocket as a joke. A few days later I returned to Dugi Otok, but this time took the good coast road, picked up my party and prepared to drive back to London. But more adventures were in store.

  Having started to drive north from Zadar on the coast road in a car with two children, Jill, Charles and Bettina, as well as everyone’s luggage, we came across an enormous traffic jam. A great overnight storm had blown away a segment of the road, which is cut out of the vertical rock that descends to the Adriatic, and there was no way forward. Nor could we go back. Part of the same road, further south, had also been blown away. We camped overnight and were told a ferry could eventually pick us up, but we had to wait, because of the number of cars, until the next afternoon. There were my two daughters, aged five and fourteen, and four adults, with only the car for shelter, camped on an embankment beside the sea with only a packet of biscuits. But we found some fresh water, acquired two potatoes from another car and got through the night, most of us sitting beside a fire we
managed to make, while Anastasia, the youngest, slept in the car. When we did get away, we took the less congested of the two roads, the one going south.

  There were many rumours, some coming from the car radio. One was that the Russians, with a Czechoslovak revolt on their hands (Dubček’s Prague Spring was just behind us) and the continuing independence of Tito’s Yugoslavia, had finally decided to take action. The collapse of Yugoslavia’s only international and well-built roadway was not caused by a storm, some said, but by Russian dynamite. Perhaps a war was breaking out. Our journalist friend and Jill were all for the excitement. We drove through Sarajevo, where I would have liked to spend an hour or two, but Bettina just wanted to drive on: any town that was not Croat could hold no interest, in her view. I am not sure by what route we entered Czechoslovakia, but we did – probably via Austria – and stopped in some small town in a hotel that was full, so I spent a night on a billiard table.

  Eventually we arrived in Prague, where we decided to stay a few days, and we were fortunate to find student accommodation near the university. The town was packed and buzzing, full of foreigners, including many journalists. We visited the castle, where new diggings were taking place, saw the vaults and an amazing art collection: it was like going to a French impressionist exhibition, except that all the names were Czech. We went to the Hotel Alcon, where it was possible to make international telephone calls. Among other things, we had to arrange for Jamie to fly to meet her mother two days later. We had tea in the Alcon. I looked out over the sea of identical American young men, all with brush-cuts. “My God,” I exclaimed, “the place is full of CIA.” I was not wrong. In the bar, American men (there were no women) were whispering in huddles, and while waiting for my telephone call to be put through, I overheard an American voice in the next cabin giving instructions for bribes to be sent to Czech officials: a bottle of whisky here, a hundred dollars there, American cigarettes somewhere else. The Russian army had left, the Dubček government was trying to hold the country together within the Russian bloc, but ruling independently, and the CIA was being as provocative as possible. If I, without trying, was seeing and hearing what I did, what were the Russian spies and observers not seeing and hearing? It was just at that time that the American involvement in Vietnam was getting deeper, so I have often thought, since those August days in Prague, that the provocation might have been deliberate to divert the odium of the world away from America and back to the Russians.