It sounded too bizarre to be true: the publisher John Calder had been spotted in Cork, then in Dublin, then in Sligo, doing the rounds of the bookshops with his catalogue, taking orders. Rumours about Calder, the publisher of Samuel Beckett among others, abound. Was this yet another embroidery on the myth?
The last I had heard was that his company had gone bankrupt in the UK, and that he himself had emerged, phoenix-like from the ashes, and was living in some splendour in Paris.
This turned out to be only partly true (he denies the splendour), while the original story of the fabled, 70-year old publisher and editor foot-slogging around the country's bookshops is wholly true.
Enormous bookcase
John Calder is a small, tense man, initially suspicious of strangers. I have known him very slightly for 15 years or so. When I lived in Soho, an amiable American ran Calder's oneroom office, and when the boss was away, a gang of us used it as a quiet refuge if the pub got too noisy. There was an enormous floor-to-ceiling bookcase which contained samples of the numerous titles that Calder had in print.
It was both an education and a journey in nostalgia to browse around it. Besides Beckett's prose, including Murphy and the trilogy, there were the French nouvel roman crowd - Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras - diverse modern classics such as Celine's Journey to the End of the Night, Jorge Luis Borges' Fictions, William Burroughs's The Naked Lunch, Aidan Higgins's Langrishe, Go Down, and many many more.
Aidan Higgins (who happens to be my husband) is one of several people to repeat stories of John Calder's legendary generosity as a host, while complaining of his equally legendary tight-fistedness when it comes to paying out royalties. Aidan was recommended to Calder by Beckett, and Calder published both Felo da Se, his first collection of stories in 1959, and then Langrishe, Go Down, which went on to win the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. With Boswell-like brilliance, Calder edited both books line by line, and when Aidan was struggling with the Balcony of Europe, Calder worked with him daily for a year to reduce the massive typescript to a 463-page book, which was eventually shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
When I caught up with Calder during his annual two-week sales trip, in the course of which he visits some 150 bookshops, he revealed that he was still selling the hardback Balcony of Europe, both here and in America.
After a pleasant discussion of the history of Calder Publications, I asked him to supper. He turned up with not one, but three bottles of good wine.
So why, said Aidan, who does not hesitate to mix business with pleasure, have I not had a royalty cheque from you for over 15 years? . . .
Calder's career
This is a simplified version of Calder's story: born into a well-off family in Perth, Scotland, as a young man he was sent to Zurich to study economics. During his stay abroad he also discovered literature, theatre and opera (such is his devotion to the latter that he has recently attended his 800th performance). When he went to London to work in a timber company, he shared a flat with a man who persuaded him to go into publishing. He waived most of his commission as a salesman to become a company director, and when the timber company was taken over in 1957, he was able to go into publishing full-time.
Calder is fluent in French and German and has some Russian. Initially he began doing new editions of European classics such as Chekhov, Goethe and Stendhal. He approached Samuel Beckett on the strength of Waiting for Godot, and made contact one day after Faber had secured the rights to Beckett's plays. Faber thought the prose works were probably obscene, and did not know what to do with them, which is how they fell to Calder.
In those days Beckett was referred to as "Calder's Folly". He printed 3,000 copies of Malone Dies and sold only about 200 in the first year. The Nobel Prize helped, as did academia's discovery of Beckett, but only recently has Calder managed to get Beckett into Eason's, which he considers a significant advance.
The Arts Council in the UK had been helping with subsidies on individual books since the early 1970s. It offered an annual grant if he would make the company into a trust, which he did. Then, in the Thatcher years, Lord Rees-Mogg was made chairman of the Arts Council and simply cut Calder off the list. The best option was to declare the company bankrupt.
Move to Paris
In contrast, the French Ministry of Culture was keen to employ John Calder on an ad-hoc basis; hence the move to Paris. Calder claims that he makes no money at all out of publishing. His personal income comes from journalism, chiefly obituary-writing for the Guardian and the London Independent. He reckons he holds some kind of record, having written to date almost 3,000 obituaries.
The reason he is on the road selling his own books is simply because he is good at it and can find nobody else to do it. He also makes regular sales trips to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. He still has about 500 titles in print, most of which he believes would disappear if Calder Publications ceased to exist.
The company is still a charity, a trust, and Calder is looking at ways of getting it endowed to keep it going after his time. He would like it to go on, but it is proving hard to find someone who (a) has the same sort of editorial talent, and (b) is also a dedicated sales-person, willing to do the hard slog for little or no pay.
Any takers?