Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  My relations with Bettina were particularly poisonous at this time. The two women, she and Marion, had never liked each other, but now that I was a common target, they became friendly on the surface. Bettina suggested that she might be able to talk Beckett into leaving me and moving to Marion, but she was soon disabused. Sam, whenever I saw him, would tell me that Bettina was out to hurt me in every possible way, “to put it mildly”, as he said more than once. He met Tanja with me on one occasion in Paris, and got on well with her, and once I drove to see him in Ussy with Melissa, coming back from the south of France, which was a mistake, because my philandering with different women, as he saw it, did not appeal to him. Later on there were other ladies who begged to meet him, but I always refused.

  * * *

  My financial troubles were now getting worse. I had used Ledlanet as collateral to raise the money to pay the ever-increasing court costs and maintenance for Bettina and Anastasia, and it was now used hardly at all. I would go there on my own and spend two or three days alone in the house, receiving visits from the Formans, Joan Clark, Jim Fraser and others. I would occasionally see Nicholas Fairbairn, but he had changed in character. From being a radical and liberal personality, he was now a High Tory, and not a pleasant one. Having failed to get elected in an Edinburgh constituency, he was very surprisingly adopted for my own constituency of Kinross and West Perthshire at a meeting of the local Conservative Committee that was held during the summer holiday period, and very badly attended. The local conservatives, and Joan Clark was one, were appalled. They saw him as eccentric, too clever and effeminate. He had ceased to be friendly to me, because he wanted to replace Jim Fraser as chairman of Ledlanet, and I could not allow this. Jim had many failings, the biggest of which was his increasing alcoholism, but he had been extremely generous over the years, and in any case he was my nearest neighbour at Huntley Hall. I soon realized that the eccentric Fairbairn saw everyone as either willing to feed his ego and prospects or as an enemy. He did us damage at the Arts Council, where it was important to stay on their books.

  I could not face any possibility that Ledlanet would not overcome its difficulties. We had been through many crises and had always come through them. In 1973 we had finally managed, from all our different sources of revenue, to show a small surplus. Because the house was so little used now, and especially because it was not heated during most of the long cold and damp winters, the next blow to come to me was dry rot. It spread rapidly. I brought in Rentokill to get rid of it. They removed timbers, tore down walls, treated many parts of the house, but under the lead tiles and in invisible places, the rot grew – not only dry rot, but rising damp as well. More money had to be borrowed from the bank, and the overdraft grew, with unpaid interest inflating it further.

  Better Books Scotland was quickly run into the ground, the shelves becoming emptier, and it was finally sold off. The same happened in London. From my Soho office, where I continued to bring out what books I could, and from Ledlanet, where I only used my bedroom and the morning-room now, I watched my little world collapse. Bila, the poodle, had died; Shuna, the Labrador, was my constant companion. In London I walked her across Hyde Park in the morning and back again in the evening. At lunchtime I took her to St Anne’s churchyard on Wardour Street, and she did her business near the tombs of William Hazlitt and Jonathan Williams, founder of the Royal Literary Fund, and of the one-time King of Corsica, who had died in London after mortgaging his kingdom to some gullible speculators. It was a spot frequented by Soho’s down-and-outs, because it had benches.

  Through this difficult time two things kept me going: good friends, both male and female, and my love of music and theatre. In 1971 I had made a musical tour in Europe with Jim Fraser, and there were to be others. The shadow had not yet fallen on Ledlanet, and after that year’s successful summer season I went south, saw Cavalli’s La Calisto at Glyndebourne with Janet Baker, caught up with office work and then drove to Frankfurt, where Jim Fraser flew to join me. His doctor had put a real fright into him, and he was determined to give up drink. That meant that I must do nothing to encourage him.

  From the airport we drove as far as Würzburg, because we were on our way to hear some Wagner in Bayreuth. There I introduced Jim at dinner to German apple juice, which can be quite delicious and with a little imagination you could think you are drinking a kind of wine. After he had gone to bed in his own room, I sneaked down from mine to have a brandy, but the next day stuck to apple juice. It was the beginning of August, and we went to Die Walküre and Siegfried, two days apart, seeing the sights and staying at an old Schloss that was now a very atmospheric hotel. The Lohengrin on the day after was reserved for trade unions, not Jim Fraser’s favourite people, but I managed with some string-pulling to get in. Jim enjoyed Bayreuth and always felt comfortable anywhere where stout men were seen everywhere, and many were stouter than he. But on our second night in Bayreuth, when there was no opera, the strain of not drinking was getting to be too much. We had visited the swimming pool, which I had used, but not he – and he was sweating, as it was a very hot day. We went into another hotel in the town and he said, “I just have to have a beer,” and had one. Then Harold Rosenthal, editor of Opera magazine and an author of mine, walked by, and we invited him to dinner. Jim drank much wine at the meal, and the good resolutions were gone for good.

  From Bayreuth we drove south through Austria to Vienna, where Jim had never been, found a hotel on the Kärntner Strasse and then had a strange experience. I had wanted to stop in Salzburg to go to Mozart’s Mitridate, but Jim’s mind was set on Vienna, so we drove on. He led me into a bar, where, before we could order a drink, two girls came and sat next to us. I wanted to tell them we preferred to be alone, but Jim immediately invited them to a drink and insisted on ordering more. Each time they ordered a “cocktail”, which I knew to be just fruit juice. Jim was very innocent in many ways, and I could not make him understand that we were lending ourselves to being cheated. The girls then wanted us to move to a private room, but I said no, although I could see Jim was tempted. Finally I called for the bill, and it was massive. Jim had drunk half a dozen large brandies, I had probably had wine, but the “cocktails” – and I knew they were only watered fruit juice, because I had tasted one – were the price of champagne. I refused to pay and worked out a sum that was large enough, but much less than was demanded. The proprietor came dancing out. “Lock the doors. Call the police,” he shouted to the barman.

  Jim Fraser was now very nervous. “Let me pay, and we’ll get out of here,” he pleaded, but I saw no reason why we should. I told the man that I was very happy to see the police called, and I hoped that they would make trouble for him. The police duly arrived, and it was clear that they were all in league together. “Give me your names and addresses,” said a policeman, and then added: “Are you married?” The implication was clear.

  “My friend and I are here to see the Minister for Culture,” I said. “He has never been in Vienna, speaks no German, and he is chairman of an opera company in Scotland. We came in to have a drink and these girls joined us. Out of politeness my friend offered them a drink. Nothing more than that. I want to make a formal complaint against this place and I shall speak to the Minister.”

  My bluff worked. The police looked uncomfortable and went away. The proprietor said: “All right. You’re very clever. But in Germany, they’ll do worse to you. Now get out.” Jim was sweating, and not having been able to follow the conversation in German was not sure how I had managed to get the doors unlocked and the police sent away. He was very quiet that evening. We ate in our hotel, had a nightcap and went to bed.

  We went to Paisiello’s Barber of Seville at the little court theatre at Schönbrunn and a very bad Merry Widow at the Theater an der Wien before driving on to Verona, where we bought tickets to Verdi’s Macbeth for that night. We were sitting in the restaurant next to the arena where the opera was playing, when I said, “That’s funny, the radi
o is playing the overture to the opera we’re about to hear.” Then I realized that it was not the radio: the opera had started. We had not adjusted our watches on coming into Italy and it was an hour later than I had thought. We hastily finished, paid and climbed the stairs to our seats on the stones at the top of the arena. They were not the most comfortable, but they gave a magnificent view of the giant spectacle below and at the same time of the moon and stars. At the interval, I could see Charles Osborne and Ken Thompson in white dinner jackets in the expensive seats down below, but we never met them. Then we drove to Monte Carlo, where my mother had a spare flat with two bedrooms, recently used by my brother. We went to Carmen in the outdoor theatre in Nice, the Arènes des Cimiez, had dinner with Jacques Chaix at Cap Ferrat and lunch on the beach with my mother and John Barnard, and some American friend of theirs, fatter than Jim, very ignorant about everything cultural and dismissive of English music. “There are no English composers,” he said, “only Handel, a ‘Joyman’.” I let it pass. Jim was happy there. We also called on Rosita Bootz at Cap d’Ail. I had had a little fling with her in Amsterdam some time previously and after Jim retired went out with her to continue it. It was a working holiday, because Jim was a heavy companion in more ways than one.

  * * *

  I went to Bayreuth with Jim again, but this time with a group of friends who had signed up for a package visit for the famous (or infamous) Boulez-Chéreau centenary Ring in 1976. In the party were Sheila Colvin, Eleanor Kay, Jim’s then new girlfriend, Joan Clark’s sister, recently divorced from a local small factory owner (a Ledlanet regular whose father had once been the blacksmith who had shoed the Ledlanet horses some decades earlier), an architect friend, Jack Notman, who had also been involved in another enterprise of mine that I have not yet related, Duncan Black, a senior civil servant from Edinburgh, and Jim’s two elder sons. There I ran into a French author of mine, Yves Navarre, about whom I shall have more to say, and Tom Walsh from Wexford, so we ended up as quite a big group.

  That Bayreuth visit was very memorable. There were quite a few of us, and we flew to Nuremberg, from which a bus took us to the same Schloss hotel where Jim and I had stayed in 1971. Our first performance was a remarkable Parsifal, only my sixth performance of this great work, in Wolfgang Wagner’s production (his more admired brother Wieland was now dead), with Horst Stein conducting and René Kollo singing Parsifal. We particularly admired the smooth transformation scenes; the orchestra was wonderful and all the singers good. The next night was the controversial Rheingold. One member of the tour party was Lord Halsbury, to whom our tour guide had given the best seat for every performance. Halsbury hated the production of Das Rheingold so much that he sold his tickets for all his other performances at double the price to someone outside our group. My brief discussions with him made it clear he was not someone I would get on with anyway, and we hardly saw him after that. The modern staging of Chéreau’s Ring was a harbinger of horrors to come as produceritis gradually invaded the opera world: productions and decors that had little to do with the composer’s intentions, but much with the desire of the producer to make his mark. So much has been written about this version of the Ring that I will not weary the reader with more, but it was much hated by the bulk of the audience, who booed for up to half an hour after each of the four operas, while the sizeable French minority who had come to support Boulez and Chéreau cheered as loudly as they could. It was like the Franco-Prussian war all over again.

  Yves Navarre managed to get into performances for which there were no tickets through Chéreau, and he attached himself to us. On non-performance days we went out to look at nearby Bavarian towns, most of them very picturesque. Tom Walsh found only one good thing about Rheingold: the moment when Wotan cuts off Alberich’s finger to get the ring, rather than pulling it off. That has been copied since: in a recent production, I saw the whole hand cut off. But otherwise a Ring in which everything clashed with tradition was not liked. Local German Bayreuthians to whom I spoke told us that the orchestra had decided to play as sloppily for Boulez as they could, and the critical comments of many of the singers about what they had been told to wear and do was the common gossip of the town. Ian Judge, an English producer who was all in favour of the innovations, boiled over in rage at the criticisms that came from some of our group, especially from me. It made the week, that included a conventional Tristan and Isolde, more than memorable. Jim, who was now a little heavier every year, had great trouble walking up the incline from the town to the “green hill” on which the famous Festspielhaus is built, and I think he was pleased when the Wagner week was over.

  During our week there, I called on the executive offices, introduced myself as director of Ledlanet Nights, a Scottish Opera Festival, and as a result we were given a tour of the building and of the technical facilities, with Jack Notman being considered our “Techniker”. We were shown how the stage functioned and the various electronic gadgets. I found it fascinating, but I think Jim was a little bored. Four days later, we were seeing more opera at the Edinburgh Festival – Verdi, Mozart, Schoenberg and another Parsifal, this time from the Deutsche Oper am Rhein.

  The other big operatic experience that year came a month earlier in July. Edward Bond and Hans Werner Henze had collaborated on We Come to the River, a pacifist opera that caused a minor scandal when performed at Covent Garden. The Guards Band, which marched and played on the stage while the orchestra performed in the pit, had apparently not been told that they were being borrowed to play in an anti-war opera, and the press made much of that. There was an enormous cast, and the production was lavish, but highly effective, and in many ways provocative, conducted by David Atherton, who was now making a reputation for modern works. It was produced by the composer himself, with more than eighty individual parts for the singers. The press was generally negative on purely political grounds, and Hans Keller in Opera magazine was almost hysterical in his condemnation of this overtly “Communist” work. Norman Lebrecht, in a later reference book,29 called it “an agitprop disaster”. I could in no way agree. I thought it incredibly exciting and relevant – agitprop perhaps, but so is most of Brecht, who was by then acceptable enough in Britain and throughout Europe. I went to see it again, and liked it even more, and was bowled over by the music.

  Shortly afterwards I was in Berlin and had lunch with my friend, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, author of the most important Schoenberg biography (I had published a short early version of it in 1959 and some twenty years later a complete edition). He was just as opposed to the opera, which I had seen the night before in the Staatsoper in a very insipid and watered-down version, as was Hans Keller. I am an admirer of Henze, have seen many of his operas and know his music fairly well, but still think that We Come to the River may well be his masterpiece. I live in hope that I shall see it again, but it is unlikely.

  I think it was on another occasion in Berlin that I met Luigi Nono at a lunch given by Stuckenschmidt, who was Professor of Composition at the university. It was a very convivial lunch, and I enjoyed the company of the distinguished guests that our host had brought together during the Berlin Festival, particularly that of Nono and his wife Nuria, who was also Schoenberg’s daughter, born late in the composer’s life. Afterwards, Nono and I walked through the streets of Berlin talking. “What are you doing tonight?” asked Nono.

  “I’m going to hear Karajan and the Philharmonic,” I replied. “Beethoven and Brahms, I think.”

  “Can you still listen to all that?” asked Nono. “I’d rather stand here in the street and listen to the traffic. It’s much more interesting.”

  * * *

  My new list under my old imprint came out during the autumn of 1975. It was too late for some books already in production not to bear the Calder and Boyars imprint, but I published Ian Wallace’s autobiography, a novel by John Stonehouse, Sydney Goodsir Smith’s Collected Poems and many other titles under my own name. During the late Seventies I produced about
twenty-five titles a year, including reprints. Calder and Boyars had been doing about twice that, but it was some years since we had on occasion put out two to three hundred titles a year, including our American imports.

  The Wallace autobiography went well and was reprinted. The reason that Stonehouse’s novel – a political thriller in which the IRA, largely under the direction of a dissident CIA man of Irish origin, succeeds in blowing up the entire British Cabinet – had to appear under a pen name was that he was about to be sent to prison. Here a little digression is necessary.

  Stonehouse and I had collaborated over Gangrene, and he had found me a not very successful barrister for the first Last Exit trial, but we had since kept in touch. I attended a large and very politically glamorous party at his house in Potters Bar, north of London, where his wife Barbara, a very attractive woman and an accomplished hostess, entertained the entire Labour hierarchy of the Sixties – or so it seemed – including Harold Wilson, then Prime Minister, with whom I traded memories of Bordeaux back in the early Fifties. Then Wilson suddenly dropped him from the cabinet, and the always hyperactive Stonehouse got more involved in the London Co-operative Society, to which he was elected chairman. When the “stamp wars” started between different retailing chains to try and attract more customers by issuing stamps with purchases, Stonehouse, preferring competitive pricing, fought against the stamps. He also succeeded in fighting off a Communist challenge to his Chairmanship.