Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  I was kept busy, which fortunately gave me no time to think about the loss of one of my oldest friends at the end of a year in which I had lost so many others. It was the end of an era, and I told my doctor, Martin Scurr – in a year that had been bad in every way – of my depression at seeing nearly all my oldest friends, mostly older than myself, dying one after another.

  “You must make new friendships,” he said.

  So 1989 came to an end and I reflected on the significance of “9” in my life. 1939, 1949, 1959, 1969, 1979 had all been significant years, bringing change into my life. What was to befall me next would not be pleasant.

  Chapter 8

  Abyss

  1990 and 1991 were two of the worst years I can recall, each getting progressively worse. I had returned from the US and started to deal with my mountain of problems. As Shakespeare so well put it, “when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions”. We were still paying for the decoration of the old offices and for the move to the new one, and we owed huge amounts to our normal suppliers and to authors. And this was just the time when the banks, with whom I had always enjoyed a good relationship, were radically changing their policies. All my adult life I had been accustomed to knowing my bank managers personally, and I had always, as a matter of caution, kept two accounts, both for my business and for personal affairs, with different banks. Since 1949 I had banked principally with the Midland Bank in London, and since 1962 with the Clydesdale in Scotland. I also had accounts with the National Westminster. I had started Ledlanet Enterprises to run the Scottish estate, and Ledlanet Nights banked with the same village bank in Milnathort, where I had a private account as well. I would regularly lunch with the London bank managers, who knew how the publishing company was developing and had details of my future plans. Most of the time there was an overdraft, which waxed and waned with need. I could normally count on having the same manager for six or seven years at least, who would introduce me to his successor on retirement. Now all this had changed. Managers were being retired in their forties to make way for a new, tougher breed of young men who had no desire to know you or anything about your business. If there was an overdraft, they only wanted to know what immediately negotiable security lay behind it. These young men were only around for a few months each, and then, just when we were in our greatest difficulties, our account suddenly became the responsibility of a woman manager who wanted the overdraft paid off instantly. This came at the end of 1990. In the meantime I carried on as best I could.

  The National Theatre decided to put on a memorial evening for Samuel Beckett, and I helped them with the arrangements, producing the record that Pat Magee, now dead, had made to promote How It Is. Others wanted to get in on the act, and there was talk of a competing memorial evening at the Royal Court. I was caught in the crossfire, with Michael Kustow, now at Channel 4 Television, trying to get the rights to televise the evening and being especially anxious to obtain my co-operation for what seemed to me to be a distorted and popularized view of Sam’s work. I increasingly passed the problems over to Edward Beckett, Sam’s nephew and heir, who put together a string quartet of his musician friends to play some Schubert at the beginning of the evening in the Olivier auditorium of the National. The event took place on 1st April. A packed house heard some appreciative speeches and a number of leading actors reading extracts from the work. Just before the performance, I had a serious talk with Edward, who agreed to be patient over the royalties that were due.

  Throughout the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, the Theatre of Literature continued to function on an irregular basis. We put on programmes with our usual teams of actors, all of them highly experienced and able to take over from each other at short notice if a theatre, film or television engagement should suddenly come up. Beckett was the author around whom most of the programmes were built, both in the US and in Britain, but we also did Claude Simon, Éluard and nouveau roman readings, among many others. There was also a series of short one-man shows I had devised for a single actor, mainly in the Waterstone’s shops, where they had good reception when the management did some advance promotion and publicity. We were invited to put on a European Evening for the Stockport Festival, and I rehearsed it carefully in London with Ariana Bishop and Stephen Thorne, experienced actors but new to our group. The programme was designed to bring European writers of significance – Simone Benmussa, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet and others – to the attention of a probably not very intellectual local public. It was a disaster: one person turned up. It was the night of a cup final, but the total lack of any effort to publicize the event was the likely cause. The actors were given a good dinner, put up in a good hotel and sent back to London the next day, having done nothing.

  I was doing more travelling around Britain now, because that was where money was most needed. In America, however well the sales went, the overheads kept mounting, so there was never money that could be sent back, and there was endless trouble with the warehouse, which was not competently run.

  The Theatre of Literature did many readings, and I scripted my forty years of publishing into a dramatic show, which I delivered with two actors, first at Riverside Studios in London, then at the Ubu Theatre in New York. We also took it to the Demarco performance space in Edinburgh and to other venues. I told the story of those publishing years, and with the actors played out key moments, such as my early days with Eric Turrell, the Alger Hiss fiasco (various actresses much enjoyed playing Blanche Knopf), the American disaster with my Opera Annual, through to the partnership with and separation from Marion Boyars, who was portrayed as she was, and with as much kindness as I could muster. She came to one Riverside Studios performance, which was also designed to be a fortieth birthday party. First came the show, lasting about two hours with an interval, then drinks with the audience in the bar. Marion obviously did not enjoy seeing herself presented in this way and with her own words, which I remembered very well being used, because I have always had a good aural memory both for music and conversations. She heard them coming back at her from the lips of an actress. Different performances had different casts: Leonard Fenton played most of the men, Karin Fernald and Elaine Padmore most of the women. Elaine, whom I had first met with John Rushby-Smith, was now the most often heard voice on Radio 3, where she read the news and announced the musical choices. She also sang with a small opera company that at one point asked me to be a director, but as there was nothing I could really do for them, I soon resigned. I changed Damned Publishing, as I entitled my publishing piece, to allow her on occasions to sing some songs during the evening.

  Leonard Friedman had kept the Scottish Baroque Ensemble going after Ledlanet Nights ended, and the Scottish Ensemble developed out of that with largely the same players. Now Leonard found some money to launch a kind of festival on the Island of Mull, and he invited me to take part by giving a lecture on Beckett. I had spent the early months of 1990 selling my books in America, Ireland and Britain, and in the year following Beckett’s death I had also been frequently lecturing about him. I ended a trip around Scottish bookshops in Glasgow, where Muriel Leyner joined me, and together we took the West Highland line to Oban, and from there the ferry to Mull, arriving by bus in Tobermory.

  We climbed a steep hill with our bags to reach the Western Isles Hotel, where most of the artists taking part in the Festival were staying. Leonard himself was invisible. Various musical events had been announced at different venues on the island at different times, and nearly all of them had been changed at the last minute, forcing the audiences to go from place to place, usually arriving after a concert had already started and often finding that there was not one at all. It was a typical Leonard Friedman muddle.

  My own lecture also had a change of venue and time, but no one knew quite where. At the hotel I dined with Robin Orr and his new second wife, a Swiss lady, who made every possible difficulty for the hotel staff with her questions of what went into sauces and
dishes and her many complaints about the service. Somewhere in the middle of dinner, the manager came to Robin – a distinguished Scottish composer, ex-Professor of Music at Cambridge and first chairman of Scottish Opera – to say: “You’ve been upsetting my staff. I would like you to move to another hotel first thing tomorrow morning.” Poor Robin! He could not have been more gentle or easy-going, but Doris, his new wife, was another story, and he was putty in her hands.

  The next day, as we came downstairs, Leonard was in the hall, fiddle in hand, playing a musical greeting to all who descended the staircase. We attended a rehearsal of part of the Bach Double Violin Concerto, in which Richard Friedman, Leonard’s son, played together with Marion, a young professional who had also recently formed her own gypsy orchestra. This was followed by a movement of the Mendelssohn Octet. Both works were under the direction of Emanuel Hurwitz, distinguished leader of many London orchestras, now in semi-retirement, who guided the young musicians for a performance that was to take place on the Easter Sunday on the nearby Island of Iona, the cradle of Celtic Christianity and the spiritual home of the Church of Scotland. The fact that so many of the musicians taking part were Jewish seemed irrelevant: it was just another place and another opportunity to play. Mendelssohn after all was Jewish, and Friedman jokingly said that he intended to introduce some Max Bruch into the church ceremony.

  In the afternoon there was a concert in Tobermory, given by local children who had been coached by Kay Hurwitz, Manny’s wife, for about a week. It was an eye-opening occasion, showing how much could be accomplished by experienced teachers in just a few days. Children from about seven up to twenty had been organized into an orchestra able to play a variety of music ranging from ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ with the younger ones to Mozart and Haydn and sophisticated Highland fiddling with the older. The local music teacher, who admitted he had to teach instruments he could not play himself, was given a new energy and enthusiasm. The hall was filled with parents, relatives and friends of those taking part, and all the children expressed their preference for classical music over pop.

  I gave my lecture between two rehearsals in one of the halls to those who happened to be present and fell into the ad-hoc mood of the whole occasion. We all had dinner on the Saturday in a restaurant some miles from anywhere, and afterwards heard the final rehearsal of the Bach, Mendelssohn and some other music played with assurance and love – there is no other word for it – by musicians old and young, with old-timers like Manny Hurwitz and Leonard Friedman giving the principal parts to the youngsters. The sight of the semicircle of totally engrossed musicians playing the Mendelssohn Octet has indelibly etched itself on my memory.

  On the Sunday morning, we all took a very damp open ferry to Iona in the rain, our feet getting wetter as the water sloshed over them in the heavy rolling sea. The service was not too long, with some music in the middle, and then the congregation heard the pieces that had been rehearsed. The players were invited to a lunch given by the church itself (the Iona Community, as the cloistered group calls itself), while the rest of us found a place where we could get snacks, but no drinks other than tea and coffee. After a wait, the others joined us, and we took another wet ferry back to Mull.

  It was my first and only visit to the island, which I knew only from literature. It is crime-free, and nobody ever locks their doors. Fishing, agriculture and tourism keep the place alive. Unfortunately I had no time to visit the Mull Little Theatre, where a husband-and-wife team put on simple productions of small-cast plays. I knew the couple from the Theatre Conference of my Ledlanet days: they provide such culture on Mull as is not home-produced. With the festival over, the remaining participants, waiting for the train in Oban, did a post-mortem with the usual gossip and much criticism of the eccentricities of Leonard Friedman. He had a new girlfriend with him who had on one night made him sleep in the corridor outside their room. The criticism went from the way he held his violin to his messy private life and failings as an organizer. But everyone had enjoyed themselves nonetheless, although we all knew we would have difficulty collecting the expenses and fees that had been promised. I saw some old friends there, like Penny Craig and Conrad Wilson, and made some new ones, like the Hurwitzes and the young musicians.

  After that I went travelling again, both around Britain and in the States, covering cities on the American East and West Coasts and others in between. Gregory Mosher, who was now running the theatres at Lincoln Centre, decided to put on a Beckett evening, and I made suggestions of what should be read. A few of my suggestions were accepted. I read myself, choosing a very powerful section of Arsene’s speech in Watt – which Ronald Pickup had read at the National Theatre evening earlier in the year – and asked if I could start the performance, as the extract made such a good introduction to Beckett’s attitude to the world and to life in general. Barney Rosset was also asked to take part. He wanted to read from his correspondence with Beckett, but in the event it was read, rather boringly, by an actor instead.

  My reading went down extremely well, and John Simon, reviewing the evening in New York Magazine, said that the two best performances came from me and Barry McGovern, who delivered the “stones” episode from Molloy with comic aplomb, which he knew well as part of his one-man show, I’ll Go On. Billie Whitelaw also took part, but she was rehearsing for a film. She had come straight from the studio and was tired and off-form. Simon panned her, very unfairly.

  Some time in the late Eighties, I had met a young man in New York called Ben Schiff. He and his father ran a specialized publishing company. They picked literary texts and commissioned artists to create illustrations for them, sublicensing from the publisher who held the copyright, if there was one, in order to produce small de-luxe editions to sell at a high price to art collectors. The calibre of artist employed and production standards had gone down, but Ben, a trendy young man who had done all the things that the New York jeunesse dorée usually does – from drugs to getting himself into other trouble – had decided to reform himself and give the publishing company a new lease on life. He bought many books from us for his own library, both in London and in New York, but only paid in instalments.

  However, I liked him, because he was intelligent and knowledgeable. He approached me to let him do a Beckett title, having already contracted a Ionesco one from Rosset. We agreed on Ill Seen Ill Said, and he produced a small edition in a slip case, in which the illustrations were only just visible. I also wanted to do a new edition of this text, a favourite of mine, and Schiff had designed a special typography, which I could also use. It turned out not to be very suitable for a trade edition, because the spidery letters did not always show up when offset, but at the time it seemed it would save me the setting cost. I was asked to read the proofs, and did so very carefully. Sam was now in Le Tiers Temps, and I did not want to impose on him to check them, although he did agree to Ben Schiff’s request that he sign the hundred copies of the special edition.

  I already knew the text of Ill Seen Ill Said very well. I had arranged readings, mainly done by Sean Barratt and Leonard Fenton at numerous arts centres, usually preceded by my introductory talk. I had also read it often for my own enjoyment, lingering over the cadences and the images it evoked. But now, suddenly, three words jumped out of the text at me. They were “full of Grace”, the words that follow “Hail Mary” in the prayer that every catholic child has to memorize. There they were, embedded in the text along with all the other partial quotations from Shakespeare, the Bible and, as I was later to discover, from Milton. The text is about an old woman living alone in a house, from which she goes out to tend a grave, observed by twelve ghostly sentinels. Of course she was the Virgin Mary. Everything else in the novella suddenly fell into place.

  The next time I saw Sam – it must have been only a few months before he died – I waited until we were both halfway through our glasses of whisky, then I said: “Sam, I know you don’t like answering questions about your work, and I’ve very se
ldom asked you one, although you’ve often volunteered information. But there’s one question I have to ask you. It’s about Ill Seen Ill Said.”

  “I know you particularly like that text,” he answered. “What’s the question?”

  “The old woman. She is the BVM, isn’t she?”

  Sam had been sitting on a straight-backed chair next to his little round table, looking into his glass. Suddenly he shot up as if he had received an electric shock. His hand went up, and the whisky splashed into the air. He looked at me with the most panic-stricken expression I had ever seen on his face, and then looked down, put his glass on the table and his head in his hands. “I don’t remember, John,” he said. “I don’t remember.” He could not tell a lie, but this was the nearest to one I had encountered.

  * * *

  On 3rd July 1990 Maurice Girodias died. He had received good reviews for his book, and he was talking about it on a Jewish radio station in Paris when he collapsed in the middle of a sentence. He was dead within minutes. Surely it was the perfect way to go! His life had been a roller-coaster ride, up and down, and after years of failure – to which he had resigned himself with irony and humour, but never without some hope – he had finally died on a high. A month later he would have been down again.

  I went to Paris for the funeral, and a group of us – Jim Haynes, Martin Lehberger and Karl Orend, whom I had originally known as a buyer at Waterstone’s in Nottingham – sat in the Père Lachaise crematorium while his body was slowly burnt. Éric Kahane had organized the funeral, but had arranged for no speakers or tributes. The Mozart Clarinet Concerto came over the loudspeakers once we were sitting down. “I won’t be able to hear this again for a long time,” I said to myself. It was followed by one of his flute concertos, then another one, then the Bassoon Concerto. We all sat there in silence, except for the occasional whisper, while recordings of all Mozart’s wind concerti were played on tape, and then we were out in the sunshine.