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Publishing’s One-man Band Essay, Research Paper

Publishing’s one-man bandIn the shabby back room of John Calder’s bookshop on The Cut in

south London, an intriguing literary event is about to begin. The shop itself is an anachronism,

one of those tiny havens that once populated Charing Cross Road before the arrival of

megamarts such as Waterstone’s and Borders. Where you might normally expect to see Man and

Boy or White Teeth displayed are copies of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the

Night, the collected works of Antonin Artaud and Inside Out and Other Plays by Jan

Quackenbush. The event itself, readings from The Writings of Jean Arp, recently published by

Calder, is equally eccentric. Sparsely attended by a gaggle of well-heeled ladies and a couple of

ragged students, it consists mostly of snippets of Dadaist poetry read in resonant received

pronunciation by actor Peter Marinker interspersed with Calder’s mumbled, fidgety monologues:

“We are here to talk about art, about Dadaism and Surrealism,” Calder begins. “Today’s

conceptual artists are interested in publicity, fame – and money also comes into it. Anything

called art suddenly becomes art and people are afraid to voice an opinion. But the artists at the

beginning of the 20th century were trying to divorce art from the whole commercial world.

Everything was rather different then…” Despite his curmudgeonly and taciturn exterior, Calder

doesn’t take long to win over his audience. He is a publisher like no other in Britain today. The

website for Calder Publications proclaims – “Publishers of the most significant literature of the

20th century”. Over the course of his 50-year career he has squandered fortunes on difficult,

uncommercial writing. He championed freedom of speech and was a scourge of the conservative

literary establishment, and his list has included avant-garde firebrands such Henry Miller and

William Burroughs as well as numerous Nobel laureates, including Samuel Beckett, Heinrich

Böll and Claude Simon. Almost single-handedly, Calder is responsible for introducing the

French writers Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras – moving spirits in the “new novel” –

to Britain. “What is important about John is that he has gone to the wall, both artistically and

financially, for his literary beliefs,” says poet and critic Al Alvarez. “And he continues to publish

experimental work with a strictly minority appeal. I’m sure he will be part of literary history for

what he’s done in terms of getting difficult minority writers a hearing.” Calder has always been

unorthodox in his approach to the business of publishing, to design and typographical blunders.

A 1990 collection of Beckett’s unpublished works, entitled As the Story Was Told, which Calder

freely admits contained “some ghastly mistakes,” led to tensions with the Beckett estate, while

his latest Beckett volume, Poems 1930-1989 , was recently denounced in these pages: “Readers

need to be warned,” cautioned the reviewer, Christopher Ricks, “to take the book with more than

a grain of salt, since the whole thing is peppered with errors.” At times, Calder has been

financially stretched to the point where he has been forced to forego the payment of expenses

and royalties:”He is a very trustworthy person,” says Alain Robbe-Grillet, who has featured on

Calder’s list for almost 50 years, “with the slight exception of money. He would always promise

great things, inviting me to England and offering to pay my fares and fees. But when I arrived,

he would cleverly avoid the topic of remuneration.” But Calder is extremely loyal to his writers,

often publishing entire oeuvres and never letting books go out of print or be remaindered. “I

know of nothing like him in modern publishing,” says the playwright Howard Barker, who has

been published by Calder for over 20 years. “I always like to be with someone who is a one-man

band in an age of corporations.” Now 75, Calder divides his time between a book-lined Paris

apartment and a bed-sit just around the corner from his London bookshop. He is a determined

pessimist and will bend the ear of anyone who cares to listen about the corruption of modern

culture and its imminent collapse: “He has always been a person who has said ‘The sky is

falling,’” says Jim Haynes, co-founder of the Traverse Theatre and a friend since the 1950s. “He

has a pessimistic streak. In some ways he is a romantic gentleman of the old school, and a

complete Luddite – he uses a portable typewriter, not even an electric, with a ribbon and carbons.

He does all of it on two fingers.” Apart from publishing, Calder’s most ardent passion is opera

and he can regularly be seen shambling through the foyers of the world’s great opera houses,

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these days increasingly leaning on a cane because of advancing arthritis. “He very scrupulously

keeps a book in which he lists every opera performance he goes to,” says his old friend, the

musicologist Arthur Boyars, “and if he was in the middle of vastly important negotiations and

you were to say ‘Be in Santa Fe by tomorrow evening, because they are going to perform

Arlecchino by Busoni’, and it wasn’t already in his book, he would leave everything and look

into how to get to Santa Fe.’” The opera book reportedly now contains over 2000 entries. It is

not very difficult to extrapolate from Calder’s gruff personality the frustrating private individual

described by many who have been close to him. Both his marriages appear to have ended

bitterly: “John has this Walter Mitty-Baron Münchausen aspect to him,” says his second wife

Bettina Jonic, referred to in Calder’s autobiography Pursuit as a “Croatian peasant”. “Once you

understand that, you understand a lot of things. I am really not terribly happy that you are writing

this article. I really would like him to just disappear.” A number of his professional relationships

seem to have ended in similar unhappiness: “He used the fact that he was a reputable publisher

as a kind of visiting card,” says Boyars, husband of the late Marion Lobbenberg, who was

Calder’s business partner throughout the 60s. “But publishing really is a lot of work. For John, it

meant an occasional appearance in the office – and that was only possible if you had somebody

like Marion to do all the work.” Calder puts this animosity down to his former partner’s jealousy:

“She hated the greater attention given to me by other publishers,” he says. “She resented it every

time an article appeared in either the trade or the public press.” Calder’s family relations too are

extremely fraught; he was disinherited by his grandfather and no longer speaks to his brother

James. However, it is precisely this same grumpy eccentricity and stubbornness that made him

so attractive to the likes of Beckett and Robbe-Grillet. It also translates into the tenacity that

compels him to persevere in an age when the independent publisher has all but disappeared:

“The publishing boom that people talk about now is just a few titles that are for one reason or

other in vogue,” Calder says. “But overall there has been a massive decline. Waterstone’s are

selling about 10% of their range of 10 years ago. And any book that doesn’t sell after a month

gets returned immediately. The availability of books is so much smaller and nothing is being

translated from other languages. What we have now is exactly what I’d hoped all my life to

prevent.” John Mackenzie Calder was born on January 25 1927, the first son of James Calder

and Lucienne Wilson. His father, the scion of a prominent Scottish brewing clan, had

distinguished himself during the first world war, winning the Military Cross, but had experienced

little business success after demobilisation. “He had various jobs but never amounted to much,”

says Calder. “His moment of glory came in the first world war, and he never equalled that.” The

family’s transcontinental lifestyle was almost wholly financed by Lucienne’s father, a Canadian

industrialist and later senator who had made his fortune during prohibition. His generous

allowance funded extravagant spells in London and frequent trips back to Montreal, until the

family was evacuated to Canada at the outbreak of the second world war. In their early years,

John and his younger siblings James and Betty appear to have lived an artificial existence. “We

didn’t mix with other children,” says Betty. “Until war came I didn’t meet any. For a long time

we were taught at home by tutors. My mother had a horror of germs. She didn’t believe that

children should go on buses or anywhere you would meet other people, because you might catch

germs.” A shy young man, Calder sought refuge in books and was writing poetry and plays

before he entered his teens: “He was a great reader, and he read very early, from about the age of

four,” says Betty. “I don’t know where he got it – certainly not from our parents. It must have

been some kind of genetic aberration. He was always inventive, he would write little plays and

he would get us to act in them. And everybody had to go with his direction.” Despite winning a

place at Oxford to read English, John chose an entirely different path. His father had died of

tuberculosis in 1944 and within weeks of the funeral his mother had begun an affair with a

Canadian soldier named John Barnard. “What interested him,” says Calder, “was my mother’s

considerable income and the life of ease it offered.” It was Barnard who convinced Calder to

take up a place to study economics at Zurich University: “He had read an article in an American

business magazine about how Zurich was the most prominent business university,” Calder says,

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Publishing’s One-man Band Essay, Research Paper Publishing’s one-man bandIn the shabby back room of John Calder’s bookshop on The Cut in south London, an intriguing literary event is about to begin. The shop itself is an anachronism, one of those tiny havens that once populated Charing Cross Road before the arrival of megamarts such as Waterstone’s and Borders. Where you might normally expect to see Man and Boy or White Teeth displayed are copies of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, the collected works of Antonin Artaud and Inside Out and Other Plays by Jan Quackenbush. The event itself, readings from The Writings of Jean Arp, recently published by Calder, is equally eccentric. Sparsely attended by a gaggle of well-heeled ladies and a couple of ragged students, it consists mostly of snippets of Dadaist poetry read in resonant received pronunciation by actor Peter Marinker interspersed with Calder’s mumbled, fidgety monologues: “We are here to talk about art, about Dadaism and Surrealism,” Calder begins. “Today’s conceptual artists are interested in publicity, fame – and money also comes into it. Anything called art suddenly becomes art and people are afraid to voice an opinion. But the artists at the beginning of the 20th century were trying to divorce art from the whole commercial world. Everything was rather different then…” Despite his curmudgeonly and taciturn exterior, Calder doesn’t take long to win over his audience. ...
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