Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  It must have been that summer, in 1980, that I made another sales trip to the American West Coast, but this time I explored the two states north of California. Eleanor came out to join me, and we travelled from San Francisco up through the Napa Valley. I had taken some good orders in the Bay area, where my best customer was Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookshop, famed for having championed and published the Beat poets and having the best range of poetry and books on surrealism in the US. This was were Barney Rosset had done much of his prospecting for new authors such as Jack Kerouac twenty-five years earlier.

  Our first stop was in Eugene, where I found two bookshops. One of them recommended that when I got to Portland, my next stop, I should go to Powell’s. It was not listed in the directory of the American Booksellers Association that I was carrying with me – an immensely heavy volume, weighing over ten pounds. In Portland I found most of the bookshops conventional and not very interested in books other than best-sellers, but I was well received by Blackwells, which wholesaled books from Britain in the US and supplied libraries. They gave me lunch and promised to promote my books. But the most interesting shop turned out to be the one recommended to me, Powell’s. It was to become even more interesting in the years to come. To quote what the Michelin Guide says about three-star restaurants, it was “worth the journey”.

  What I learnt from Mr Powell on that occasion was supplemented by the things he told me on later visits. His shop was on Burnside – not the most salubrious street in Portland – but as it ran east and west through the centre of the town from the main interstate highway to the wealthier suburbs in the hills, it was a main thoroughfare. Powell had owned a small shop that sold general goods, and one day he was offered what he called “a mountain of used books” for $500. He knew nothing about books but, having viewed them, the mountain seemed immense, and he bought them. He then put up some shelves and filled them with his new purchases, in no particular order, the bulk still sitting in the warehouse. Many were pre-war, and they all had the original prices, which is what he demanded from customers, refusing to sell for any less. Soon he had taken thousands of dollars, and was constantly refilling his shelves from the mountain that never seemed to diminish. Then he rented the shop next door, and then the one next to that. He had to employ someone who knew something about books, who organized them by author, increasing the sales but not lowering the prices. Soon Mr Powell was selling only books, now arranged into categories.

  Then he rented a large warehouse behind his shops, filled it with bookshelves ten or twelve high, built of the cheapest pine that can be found in Oregon, and the “mountain” went into it. By then, not long before my first visit, the fame of Powell’s had spread: phone calls were coming in from near and far looking for particular books, and new-book salesmen had begun to call. His manager started buying new titles, but also second-hand ones from people queuing up with boxfuls of books. Although he now had a large and growing turnover, Mr Powell much resented receiving invoices from publishers, and he complained to me about it. He was already a prisoner of his own success, however, and the momentum could not be stopped.

  On each return visit to Portland, I found that more building had taken place, and by the end of the century Powell’s occupied several city blocks, had one whole building for customer parking and probably the largest bookshop in the world, despite no money had been spent on prettifying the space. Its completeness was astonishing, covering every category of book, also in different languages. Much of the firm’s business was to other bookshops: phones were ringing all day long, with customers and dealers looking for particular titles. When old Mr Powell died, his son Michael took over, but by then there were Powell bookshops in other cities and in Portland’s suburbs.

  I took my biggest order of the whole trip from Powell’s on that first visit, and Eleanor Riger and I then drove to Seattle, staying in a hotel in mid-town. I discovered many more bookstores there, but since that first visit all but a handful have disappeared. I did sell many thousands of books in the north-west area, and we visited a local winery, Saint-Michelle. We also saw some of the sights, including the turning restaurant in the middle of the Seattle centre.

  Next, we went on to Vancouver. I visited the shops there, then we took the ferry to Victoria, on Vancouver Island, where I looked up the poet Robin Skelton, who had emigrated to Canada some time earlier and was living there. He filled me in on the local literary scene and the politics of British Columbia, in which at that time culture and civil liberties were under threat, as well as academic freedom, because of the stance of the ruling Social Credit Party. All my Canadian orders I sent to Brian Donat in Toronto, who was selling my books in Canada.

  Back in New York, I plodded around the bookshops, all of which knew me well by now. I ran into Allen Ginsberg in one of them, New Morning, which had the distinction of having sold more than a hundred copies of my edition of Tzara’s Seven Dada Manifestos within a week, after it had received a favourable review in The Village Voice. I remember walking all over the West Village in melting snow with Ginsberg, feet cold and wet, talking and avoiding other pedestrians on narrow footpaths. I got to know him well for the first time. We discussed world politics, literature, mutual friends, authors we both knew, like William Burroughs, and civil rights, his great interest at the time. He was on the committee of PEN and was active in trying to free imprisoned writers. Ginsberg was a lovely man – unconventional, natural, easy to get on with. We met infrequently after that, but always with warmth and much to say.

  There were about fifty New York bookshops that took my books, and I made field trips that took me for one or two nights away to upper New York State, New Jersey and New England, so that my list was selling in many places. I sold books in the early days from Lorenzo’s office, but his company slumped and he died soon after. Most of my American selling came later.

  * * *

  In August 1979, which is before many of the events I have recorded above, I was driving north from London to Ledlanet during the late evening and early night. The Edinburgh Festival was just starting, and Sheila Colvin had realized her ambition of becoming one of the two deputy directors under John Drummond, who had succeeded Peter Diamand. She shared a birthday with her boss, which may have been one of the reasons he did not accept her when she first applied. She was in despair then, because she felt it was the one job for which she was uniquely qualified. Luckily, Drummond soon changed his mind and took her on. Her co-deputy was Richard Jarman, whose background was mainly in ballet management. On the car radio I listened to news about the festival, and then heard an announcement that David Mercer was dead. He had been visiting Israel, either because a play was being performed or for some film project, and had died of a heart attack. His had been a strange career and a difficult life. His later reputation gradually faded, but hopefully it may still be revived one day.

  John Drummond’s first festival was not too much of a signal of what was to come in later years. Diamand had put on glamorous productions of popular operas like Carmen with starry casts, as part of a deal with recording companies, whereas Drummond at first used smaller British companies to put on a less popular repertoire and spent the major money on concert artists and orchestras. However, he brought enthusiasm and thought to the festival: he tried to lead taste rather than follow it, and he was more in the Harewood mould, wanting both to promote new ideas and educate the public. Through Sheila, I was invited to several of Drummond’s late-night parties.

  Then came the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Marion and I now had separate stands. We had shared one for the previous four years, but that had not worked out too well. I remember David Galloway, teaching in Germany but writing novels for me in English, being much on my stand during the previous year and helping me to translate press releases about my new series of opera guides, while the curious Marion was eavesdropping with annoyance at what she thought was a coup I had pulled off in planning a series with the English National
Opera as partners.

  In 1979 I had Alice Watson, our new sales manager, with me. We had driven from London and stopped at Brussels overnight, where I had an appointment to meet the Dutch writer Harry Mulisch. Unfortunately we went to the wrong station and missed Harry. I telephoned his wife in Amsterdam, who told me he was much annoyed. He had gone off to eat a lobster and would then take the last train back. I asked the hotel concierge where he might be found eating lobster, and was guided to a restaurant street off the Grand Place. I described Harry to Alice, and we went down all the restaurants on the street, taking different sides. At about the eighth, I found Harry just finishing his meal.

  We joined him, and he was so amused at the way we had found him that he got over his upset and stayed the night. The next morning, we settled the contract for his novel Two Women and for a number of his short stories to appear in our New Writing and Writers series, as it had been renamed from Number 13, to enable us to publish short work by established writers together with our new discoveries. Then we drove on to Frankfurt. Sheila Colvin came for the last two days, not having been there before. There were some pleasant dinner parties that year, one with Alex Stefanović – now working for an Italian publishing company, having left Yugoslavia – and Bill Webb, reporting the fair for the Guardian. Bill was by now a good friend. But the fair was changing, and literary publishers were few now and not very visible. A best-seller culture had taken over, and money had become more important than talent and quality.

  Old friends still met and shared views, reminiscences and gossip. There was one nice evening when a group of us that included Helmut Kossodo, Robert Jungk and his wife, Sheila and Jim Haynes – all having met more or less by accident – had dinner and played such literary games as describing the best book we had read during the past year – a kind of competitive sport for people like us. Literary publishers went to Frankfurt now as much to amuse themselves and see friends as to do business. These days, I sold few rights and bought only what would anyway have been sent to me in London, because by now I had little competition as far as European authors were concerned.

  The great age of translation that had characterized the Sixties was over. Then publishers would snap up young hopefuls from Eastern Europe or those who had created some noise in the literary press of Italy or Sweden. Too much money had been lost on books that were hardly reviewed, if at all, and had had very small sales. This applied more to Britain than elsewhere, but it was true generally. Now the well-heeled commercial publishers had taken over from the Feltrinellis, Barrals and Einaudis, individualists who wanted the prestige of literary giants in their catalogues, even if the sales were mainly to university professors and a few intellectual readers. Literary agents now held auctions at the Fair to get the highest bids, and any publisher was appropriate for any book if the money was right.

  Girodias was of course no longer around. The last book he had sold successfully was Candy, first issued in Paris in 1958. He had sold it to all the publishers who had published Lolita at a dinner given for him at the Fair that year. Then had come the years of penury, and now he was bankrupt, brought down by his biggest folly, La Grande Séverine. In fact, the second volume of his memoirs only goes up to that time, and he never wrote a third. The volume ends with Rosemary Ridgewell, who had found a US publisher for Nabokov’s Lolita, making a return visit to Paris and cornering him at an awkward moment in his restaurant. She had come back to move in with him. I shall quote the last lines of the book (in my own translation).32

  Her problem seemed to be insoluble. This woman – young, beautiful and, it must be said, strangely intelligent – seemed to be condemned to the sad destiny of all the women who have to bare their bodies for the public gaze: why, how, and by what perverse logic had she come to this? And how and why had she come to intervene in my life in such an intense manner?

  I ordered another bottle of champagne.

  “Listen, Rosemary, I want to be your friend…”

  “Who cares! You can keep your friendship, I want you to fuck me, you understand? Fuck and fuck and fuck.”

  La Grande Séverine was a running sore for Girodias from the beginning, and it lost him all the fortunes that came his way from selling the rights of his most successful books. Girodias went to the receiver’s sale of his company’s assets with enough money to make a modest bid, not expecting that anyone else would be interested in a few unsold books and contracts that become void in a bankruptcy, but J.P. Donleavy, who had wrestled with him over The Ginger Man, sent his wife to the sale, and she outbid him. Now Donleavy owned even the name of Olympia Press.

  Girodias had earlier started an English Olympia Press with the finance of New English Library, then still run by Christopher Shaw, but it had not lasted long. I had helped it at the beginning, mainly with advice which was seldom taken. The most amusing episode was a Foyle’s literary lunch, which Christina Foyle was persuaded to give for the “Traveller’s Companion” series, the label under which Olympia UK issued its list. Most of the people who had paid to attend the lunch thought that it was given for travel books, not for an erotic series. One of the guests at the top table was the Attorney General, Griffiths-Jones, who left immediately after Maurice Girodias, the guest of honour, had made his speech, which left those present in no doubt about the subject matter of the series. It had fallen on me, also at the top table, to give a little address introducing him, without giving away much about the books themselves. There were many mutterings among the staid regular attendees of Foyle’s literary lunches as they left. One of the celebrity authors who had been invited to give glamour to the proceedings, had much enjoyed the atmosphere of scandal that had circulated around the room after Maurice’s speech, and having drunk rather a lot, said on the way out, to no one in particular: “Won’t someone take me somewhere and fuck me?” Having an appointment, I couldn’t take her up on it.

  During the publicity visit organized by NEL’s PR firm, Maurice debated against censorship at the Oxford Union. He had been overconfident and took too much advantage of the students’ hospitality before the debate started. When his turn came to speak, he was already slightly drunk, so the whole evening was a shambles. He had not understood that Union debates are very formal affairs, and that he was up against skilled debaters.

  Maurice had by now become largely out of touch with reality. He had lost his Paris company, and the new British partnership did not last long. He went to America hoping to recover his fortunes there.

  Going back five years, I had once agreed to house his daughter at Ledlanet for the summer. Valerie was about seventeen at the time. She wanted to improve her English and see something of Britain. Before she was to fly with me, initially to London, her father took me to lunch and was unusually reticent. Finally he came out with: “I think she’s a virgin. Please look after her.”

  “If she loses it, it won’t be with me,” I replied laughing. “But I’m not going to be a policeman either. She’s old enough to look after herself.”

  We flew to London and, after a day or two, drove to Scotland. She met another French girl of her own age, and for part of her stay they hiked through the Highlands for a fortnight. My only concern was that she was epileptic with “grand mal”, which I only learnt about after her mother telephoned Bettina the day after her arrival. But there was no mishap.

  * * *

  Sean Connery, perhaps the most successful of all the actors who have played James Bond, had never lost his attachment to his native Scotland, and he has occasionally been willing to fund the arts in Scotland out of his substantial income. In the late Sixties, he set up a foundation, the Scottish International Educational Trust, to support them, and he put Richard Demarco in charge. This was not a very wise move, because, while Ricky certainly did a great deal to further the arts, he spent most of the money at his disposal in ways that were important to him. In addition to making Ricky director of his foundation, Connery also put a tough lady into the offic
e to do the main administration and secretarial work. She was Anne Taute, who very soon was fighting Demarco’s attempts to use Connery’s money for his own ends and activities. Demarco was eventually pushed out, but the Foundation continued under new management, and Anne Taute came to work for me. Having been brought up to look at the world in commercial terms, she had some trouble in adjusting to the peculiar atmosphere of my office, where we tried to promote literary authors and values, with considerations of profit being very secondary, but she was an enthusiastic person and no doubt found my lack of deviousness refreshing.

  Several things happened, all at about the same time after my European electoral campaign, but I cannot put a strict sequence to them. Ledlanet was sold – I am not quite sure when, but it must have been in 1980 or soon after, as I was still there in June 1979 during the election, and there was probably another shooting season to bring in some money later in the year. I do have my diary – parts of it, and in a very tattered condition – for 1980, and it shows many activities, including transatlantic trips, visits to Paris and dinners with Sam Beckett. At that time we were meeting at La Palette on the Boulevard Montparnasse, where he always had grilled sole and pommes frites. He had abandoned his old haunts on the Rue de la Gaîté, as well as the Coupole, the Closerie and the Falstaff, preferring a place that was always quiet, where he could walk to and from home or take a direct metro.