Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  * * *

  I had met Bohdan Drozdowski on a number of occasions during the Seventies, when he was the Polish cultural attaché in London. He was amiable, voluble and enthusiastic – a big bearded shambling man who over lunches would tell me about current Polish writers, especially playwrights. He was one himself. We already had some Polish writers on the list – most notably Gombrowicz and Różewicz – and I knew that the Polish theatre in particular was very lively and full of talent just then. I invited Bohdan to guest-edit a Polish issue of Gambit, and he enthusiastically agreed. I found Cathy Itzin – who was Polish-speaking and living in London – as a freelance editor to help him from the British side. It became a double issue, Gambit No. 32–33, which I also published as a book in hardcover under the title Twentieth-Century Polish Theatre. It was a comprehensive survey and included three modern plays.

  Just then I received a telephone call from Peter Hemmings. Scottish Opera was to give a few performances in Poznan, Łódź and Warsaw, and there were a few extra seats on the chartered plane. Would I like to go with them? I would, of course, and did. At the airport in Warsaw, I was offered a guide who thought I might be interested in striptease, a new innovation on the Polish scene. I said no: it was culture that interested me. I was soon able to lose him after he had tried to sell me some black-market Polish currency.

  I went to the two operas, The Rape of Lucretia and another that Scottish Opera gave in the theatre attached to the Palace of Culture, which was a Stalinist monstrosity. The Poles liked to joke about it, saying that it had the best view in Warsaw, as it was the only building from which you could not see the Palace of Culture. I was horrified that all the seats – and very many were empty – were reserved for senior Communist Party members and the official guests of the government. Hundreds of young people were desperate to see the Britten opera in particular, but were unable to get tickets.

  I went to the Warsaw Opera House, the Theatr Wielki, a magnificent building, where I saw a ballet by Minkus, which particularly impressed me because of its junior corps de ballet, eight- or nine-year-old girls, who danced in and out at intervals as perfectly as their seniors.

  A few days later, I saw Penderecki’s The Devils of Loudun and then a double bill of Master Peter’s Puppet Show with Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi le parole, which had first been given at Schönbrunn together with Mozart’s The Impresario in 1786. I had been considering doing a Salieri at Ledlanet some years earlier, and had looked through all the scores in the National Library in Vienna. There were only fifteen people in the audience in the little studio theatre under the roof of the Teatr Wielki, and I estimated that at least two hundred people must have been involved in the production as singers, orchestra, stage staff and administration: the auditorium was small, but the stage quite big. Heavy subsidy keeps such rare operas on the boards for collectors such as me.

  I visited the museums, saw one of my authors, spent half a day in the offices of Dialog, the theatre magazine, and an evening with Bohdan Drozdowski. He picked me up at my hotel and took me to see a Polish production of King Lear. He was himself a Shakespeare translator, but this was not his translation. At the interval he said: “John, you know King Lear. I know King Lear. This translation is not worth it. Let’s go and eat.” We left with his wife, who did the usual thing as we passed the street where they lived: she pleaded a headache so that the men could go off on their own.

  “John,” said Bohdan, “last night I went out with my son and we drank too much wine. Do you mind if we drink vodka?” I didn’t mind, and he took me to the Writers’ Club where, rejecting the white vodka we know in the West, he ordered a bottle of brown Starka, which we drank with our meal. This was followed by a different vodka, quite unsuitable for decadent western stomachs. We ended up back at my hotel, where in the back-room late-night bar, only open to hotel residents and government officials, we continued drinking. Bohdan insisted I try one vodka after another: we ended up with a slivovitz called Passover vodka, which he told me was sold to Israel, where rabbis drank it. It was so alcoholic that a match applied to it burnt away more than half the contents of my glass. I lifted the burning rim to my lips, scorching them, drank it when it cooled and put it down. “Thank you, Bohdan,” I said. “I’m about to pass out. I hope to just make it to my room before I do.” I only just made it, rushing past the old lady who sits all night in the corridor guarding the morality of the hotel, and just about managed to get into my room. I fell on the bed and woke up to broad sunlight.

  It was a beautiful May morning. I felt fine, walked all over central Warsaw, called in on the Union of Polish Writers and spent an hour with the secretary of the Union, with whom I later kept in correspondence. In the evening I went to a reception at the British Embassy following a string-quartet concert. The reception consisted of a single glass of wine, because the UK press had recently criticized the excessive hospitality of British Embassies, especially in Washington, and they were being very careful. I met two Edinburgh friends there, Duncan Black and Bert Davies, and I had dinner with them, finding myself in bed by eleven o’clock. I woke up at about five with the most blinding headache of my life. The amount of vodka I had drunk with Bohdan had carried me through all the previous day, still in a state of inebriation, although I had not realized it. I had felt quite normal, and nobody had noticed anything strange about me. It only hit me after twenty-seven hours. I spent that next morning wandering about Warsaw in a daze. I looked at bookshops, bought a recording of Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Invisible City of Kitezh and a few second-hand books, and at noon went to Bohdan’s office. He was the editor of a large-circulation magazine, Poezia, and I had been invited to attend an editorial meeting. “How you feel, John?” he asked.

  “Terrible,” I answered.

  “Me too,” he said. “Have a beer.”

  Before leaving, I had another meeting with the editors of Dialog, and thought about acquiring more Polish playwrights for my list. On my final night, I dined in another hotel, and the floor show turned out to include a striptease. I returned on the charter flight with Scottish Opera. Some months later, Drozdowski was in London. I took him to a Sri Lankan restaurant in Earl’s Court and ordered him their hottest curry in revenge for the vodka experience.

  “I am in hell,” he screamed, clutching his throat.

  * * *

  I had left Dalmeny House, and for a time moved into Sheila Colvin’s flat on Allen Street in Kensington. Then an opportunity came up. I would sometimes spend the four days of the Easter holiday alone in the office, catching up on work that needed a sustained period of concentration, and one Easter – it was probably 1981 – I was doing all the royalty statements, of which there were hundreds. On the Monday, the last day of the holiday, as I was arriving I saw our aged landlord, Hyman Fine, carrying furniture down the stairs of 1 Green’s Court, the door of which was immediately adjacent to 18 Brewer Street, our office, and out into the street. “Mr Fine, what are you doing?” I asked.

  “Don’t you worry, Mr Calder,” he said. “I have a court order to expel these terrible prostitutes, and I’m just taking away their furniture.” I could hardly leave a heavy-set, portly old man to do this on his own – although as one of the richest men in Soho I could not imagine why he would want to do this by himself – and I spent two hours helping him, for which he was very grateful.

  That gave me an idea, and the next morning I rang him up. “Mr Fine,” I said to him, “would you be willing to let me that building? I’m looking for a place to live.” He immediately agreed, and Sheila and I moved in. There were three floors, just as in my office next door, a room in each. A metal bar inside the door, from which the stairs led upward, indicated that it had once been a Jewish home. I shelved the large first-floor room to take my books, organizing them by author and subject, although most of the Ledlanet library, including all the books I had published over the years, were still in storage in Dunfermline. This room took a big dining t
able, on which I did much of my work. It had a sitting area that included a sofa bed for occasional visitors. The movers were quite shocked, as they were carrying bedroom furniture right up to the third floor, and they thought that the top was all I had. They could not understand anyone moving from a comfortable basement flat in fashionable Kensington to one room in sordid Soho, until I told them I had the rest of the building, which had to be furnished from what I had put into storage.

  The middle floor was a sitting room and kitchen. I installed a bathroom, kitchen, cupboards and all that was necessary, and spent the Eighties there. Underneath was a café, but I seldom used it. It was very convenient to have the office next door, saving much travelling time, and I could easily walk to most of London’s theatres, opera houses and concert halls from there.

  Sheila became active in the Soho Society, which was run by local residents to protect their interests and combat the vice and sleaze industries. I was away a great deal, making trips to America and Europe, to provincial bookshops and sometimes to Australia and elsewhere. Sheila was also away a great deal, mainly in Edinburgh. One night, we went to the opera and on return found most of Green’s Court on fire. The firemen did not want to let me pass, but I insisted I had to save precious documents and managed to get in. The fire was stopped before it did any real damage to my house, but the walls were singed, the windows cracked, and the whole might have gone up in another few minutes. The fire had started across the alleyway in a house where some Indian families were squatting, several to a room. Much of the night was spent giving tea and comfort to other residents whose homes or workshops were partly destroyed. The next morning the police put Mr Fine, the landlord who had allowed the terrible overcrowding to take place in his properties, under a considerable grilling in our offices and nearly arrested him. I had to redecorate my own place, but fortunately the library and the manuscripts, of which there were many, did not suffer.

  One Saturday night near the end of the Eighties, we heard noise and banging in the office next door. On Sunday morning, we discovered that Marion Boyars had done a moonlit flit, taking all her things, many of mine, all the contracts and even the light bulbs. Many of my files were missing. I managed to get some of them back, little by little, but much time was spent in the next few months trying to retrieve contracts, manuscripts waiting to go into production and important correspondence.

  * * *

  I made a visit to Berlin in the early Eighties, but forget the purpose of the visit. Sam Beckett was there, and I went to see him at the Akademie der Künste – a conference centre financed by the city, which offers accommodation to distinguished visitors in the arts who are spending time in Berlin. We had drinks in the lobby with Theodor Adorno, who was also staying there. Then we had a pleasant dinner, but a short one, because Sam was rehearsing a play and was very preoccupied with it. I was sitting there again the next day when William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg walked by, and I agreed to see them for lunch. When we all met the following day, Fred Jordan from Grove Press and Susan Sontag were in the party. Susan was very preoccupied with her cancer. It was later cured, but that was the main topic of her conversation, and it became the subject of her next book. When I mentioned that I had been seeing Beckett, they wanted to see him too and asked me to arrange it. Knowing that Sam was very busy, and that he would spend the day – a Sunday – memorizing his text and making notes for the next day, I was reluctant to disturb him, but under pressure from my lunch companions I went to the telephone. He agreed to meet the party right away, but asked if we could make the visit short. The others insisted on bringing along a bottle of whisky, and we had a rather stilted conversation, because Sam’s mind was obviously on his work. He always memorized his texts, so that he did not have to consult the book or script with his bad eyes in the dim light of the stage. Berlin had been the first to invite him to direct his own plays, and he would read each part to the actors with exact timing, as if he were conducting a score, but in Berlin it was the German text he was directing, in Elmar Tophoven’s translation and with German actors. Those he was working with now, probably Held, Wigger and other actors who knew him well, gave him few of the difficulties he often had in Britain with old-style traditional actors, who felt they could do things their own way, changing the words and improvising their movements. The precision of Beckett’s direction had brought a new kind of actor into being, just as Wagner’s demands had created a new kind of singer. He was always happy in Berlin, where he could take his time and rehearse as long as he liked.

  This was the second and last time that Burroughs met Beckett, and the previous meeting in Girodias’s restaurant was certainly still in both their minds. Burroughs later complained of Beckett’s remoteness, and no doubt the others, hoping for a relaxed gossipy session about literature and people they knew, were also disappointed. However, Sam when working did not like diversions. When meeting people in cafés, he could time his own exit, but this was not possible when people call on you. I was sorry I had made the phone call.

  When travelling through the Midwest in the States, I had paid several visits to Burroughs. Before moving to Lawrence in Kansas, he had lived for a while in New York in a kind of warehouse space that seemed to operate like a commune. I can only imagine what went on in “the bunker”, as they called it. There seemed to be about a dozen people living on one floor in this strange building on the Bowery. It was a warren of bare rooms and communal central space, with a long table where the inmates ate, talked, drank and no doubt indulged their various habits. James Grauerholz, who having started as Burroughs’s amanuensis now seemed to control him utterly, appeared to be in charge. I disliked more every time I saw him, and it was clear that the feeling was mutual. Here I met Burroughs a few times, but forget what we had to say to each other: he had become a guru to the rock-and-roll fans of the day, although I doubt if they knew much about his work. Grauerholz took him off to Kansas, where Burroughs had his own little house where he shot at dogs with a BB gun, kept about nine cats and worked. Occasionally, he would be picked up by Grauerholz for some gathering at his own apartment or to go to friends of his. All Burroughs needed at that time were a few crusted doughnuts every day – a bottle of vodka, Coca-Cola to mix with it and cat food. He worked in his bedroom, which looked to me exactly the same as his little room in the Beat Hotel on the Rue Gît-le-Cœur in Paris where I had first met him. The other rooms were for cats, files and visitors.

  I put together a William Burroughs Reader for Picador, in 1983, rather like the Samuel Beckett Reader that had appeared the previous year (very different from my previous Beckett Reader for NEL). Burroughs was very pleased with it, but I sensed that Grauerholz wasn’t. He wanted everything to do with Burroughs to go through him. But I had several talks with Burroughs on my visits to Lawrence, and although ageing, he had not changed much, the same obsessive subjects – mind control, guns, rabid dogs, the CIA, world conspiracies – coming up again and again. There were gun collectors’ manuals and magazines about military warfare, the kind of thing hardline young American fascists like to read, scattered all around his house. He was not allowed to keep guns there, except for the BB, but played with a variety of weapons every time he was at Grauerholz’s place, taking pleasure in eviscerating a dog’s stomach with one of his collection of field knives in his fantasies, which he would act out in mime. The writing had not improved, but was purely narrative now, free of experiment, although not of fantasy. He probably could have been certified as mad.

  I had edited a collection of his articles, as had Dick Seaver, now publishing him at Viking, and Grauerholz raised many obstacles in the way of publication, wanting to make changes, not liking my title and insisting on seeing more proofs. I could see exactly what he was up to and went ahead, not letting anyone else see my final editing, but accepting Burroughs’s title, The Adding Machine. This came out in 1985, by which time my relations with Grauerholz had got worse. At that point the American literary agent Andrew Wylie came
into the act to complicate matters even further. He offered three future novels, still unwritten, to the highest bidder, and it seemed unlikely that any of Burroughs’s old publishers could contemplate continuing with him. I kept negotiations open, but knew that sooner or later I would lose an author on whom I had taken great risks.

  Con Leventhal was perhaps Beckett’s oldest friend. He had taken his post at Trinity when Sam decided that he was not going to be an academic, and stayed there until he retired, then moved to Paris to live, with Marion Leigh as his companion. He developed cancer, was in hospital, had an operation and had to return for check-ups in London. I met him and Marion Leigh on the day when he had just been told that the cancer was gone, and he was greatly relieved. I took them both to lunch at Wheeler’s, and Con was very happy with his new lease of life. But then the bad news came: the cancer had returned. Con’s morale collapsed, and he died in terror.

  Sam told me about it in Paris in deep depression. I think he had expected more stoicism from his old friend. But Con’s last years had been happy ones. He was a constant companion to Sam. He was meant to be doing some paid secretarial work for him, but this never consisted of doing more than forwarding Sam’s post when he was out of town. Con received a legacy late in life and spent it with Marion going around the world. He had many friends, and some of them put together a Festschrift for him after his death in 1979. Some time in the late Sixties, I had asked him to make a collection for me of Beckett’s surrealist translations from before the war. This had been one of Sam’s sources of revenue, a meagre one, mainly translating for little magazines such as Alan Titus’s This Quarter and Jolas’s Transition. Con had done a good job, but then Sam decided that he didn’t want this work – translations done in a hurry to earn some money – to appear again in print: it simply wasn’t good enough. I disagreed with this modest appraisal of what was quite unique work, but bowed to his decision and sent the material back to Con. I never saw it again.