John Calder
Publisher and friend of Samuel Beckett who took on the establishment over Last Exit to Brooklyn
JOHN CALDER, who has died aged 91, made his name in the 1960s as a bold and uncompromising publisher of “difficult” modern authors, many of them of Continental origin, and as a dour but energetic proselytiser of the sexual revolution and the end of censorship.
A stocky, mole-like figure with a lugubrious cast of feature (“like Job in a Savile Row suit”, as someone described him) and the kind of hair that, starting low over one ear, is in danger of unravelling in a high wind, he combined the parsimony of an old-fashioned and fiercely independent literary publisher with a liking for good wine, grand opera and expensive restaurants.
Like his contemporary Peter Owen, Calder discovered and nurtured writers who, their reputations established, became vulnerable to the allure of predatory commercial publishers able to afford advances and promotional costs far beyond his reach.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, he resented and despised his more commercial fellow-practitioners; and although his list was widely admired, his often drab, austerelooking books never had the dash or glamour of those emanating from more mainstream houses like Jonathan Cape or Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
His stable of authors included Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Eugene Ionesco, Aidan Higgins and such stalwarts of the French nouveau roman as Alain Robbe-grillet, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute and Claude Simon.
Calder often generated much attention. When he published Burroughs’s novel The Naked Lunch in 1964 it sparked a lengthy correspondence in the Times Literary Supplement, the high point of which was a letter from Dame Edith Sitwell in which she said of Calder: “I do not wish to spend the rest of my life with my nose nailed to other people’s lavatories”, adding: “I prefer Chanel Number 5.”
Nevertheless, he once boasted that “my literary success, as well as my lack of business sense, can be judged by my having published more Nobel Prize-winners than any other publisher in Britain during that time, while making no money doing it.”
John Calder was born in Canada on January 25 1927. There was money on both sides of the family: his maternal grandfather, after starting life as a farm-boy, ended up running a bank in Montreal; the Calders were crofters who had made their fortunes in Perthshire from brewing, whisky-distilling and timber.
Prohibition had brought the two families together, with Calder whisky being funnelled into the States via Canada. After his parents returned to Scotland, young John was sent to school in Yorkshire; he was evacuated to Canada in 1940, where he went on to Mcgill University and Sir George Williams College. He completed his education at Zurich University, where he studied Economics and became fluent in both French and German.
He returned to London in 1949 with his first wife, then went to work with an uncle in the family timber business: he proved an effective salesman and remained a director of the firm until 1957.
But the literary life beckoned; he wrote poems, many of which, he claimed, were destroyed by his wife, and in 1949 he founded the publishing firm that bears his name.
He began by publishing new translations of works by Goethe and Chekhov, and American authors whom he saw as victims of Maccarthyism; a highly political publisher at that stage, he had a surprise bestseller with The Question, by Henri Alleg, which described the brutalities inflicted by French paratroopers in Algeria, and sold 5,000 copies in two days.
Calder’s association with the avant garde was inspired by the Royal Court’s production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. He wrote to Beckett care of his French publisher, but was given the wrong address, and by the time they received his letter Faber had snapped up the rights to the plays; but Faber declined Beckett’s novels as obscene, and Calder became the publisher of the fiction and poems. His friendship with Beckett was a source of particular pride and pleasure.
He got on to Ionesco before the Romanian playwright even had a French publisher, and was soon on the trail of Borges and Heinrich Böll.
A stern opponent of censorship, especially of the sexual variety, Calder defiantly published the raunchier works of Henry Miller, hitherto the preserve of the Olympia Press: Tropic of Cancer was published in
1963, and its companion volume the following year.
In 1967, after the Conservative MP Sir
Cyril Black had taken out a summons against a London bookseller for stocking Hubert Selby
Jr’s Last Exit to
Brooklyn, calling it “pornography incarnate”, and the copies were consigned to the flames, Calder decided to go ahead with British publication. The book was sent to trial at the Old Bailey; the aged publisher and bookseller Sir Basil Blackwell declared in court that he had been irremediably corrupted by his reading of it, but although a guilty verdict was returned, it was quashed after an appeal won by John Mortimer.
By the 1970s, Calder’s star was on the wane. In 1958 he had gone into partnership with Marion Boyars, and when, in 1975, they went their separate ways, he lost half his authors.
Some writers, like Marguerite Duras, defected to larger firms (“I don’t owe anything to anybody, adieu,” she told him); the legal costs of the Last Exit trial had depleted already exiguous funds; and whereas the 1964 Labour Government had been lavish with subsidies, especially for translations, the Arts Council under William Rees-mogg discontinued Calder’s grant in 1983 – a manifestation, in Calder’s eyes, of Thatcherism at its most brutal and philistine.
He had to move his offices from Soho to King’s Cross; although he opened branches in Paris and New York (the River Run Press), each consisted, like his London headquarters, of a tiny room with a filing cabinet and an ancient typewriter on which he pounded out his letters.
He sacked his freelance sales force, preferring to sell his books himself to booksellers, not just in Britain but around the world. In 2007 he sold the business to another independent publisher, though the imprint retained his name.
Nor were his activities restricted to publishing. He stood three times as a Liberal candidate in the 1970s, twice for Westminster, once for the European Parliament, and always unsuccessfully.
In 1962 he inherited Ledlanet, a shooting lodge in Kinross-shire, from his great uncle, Sir James Calder; he ran it for many years as a kind of Scottish Glyndebourne, presiding over proceedings in a kilt, providing early opportunities for singers like Josephine Barstow and Philip Langridge, and staging plays and concerts as well as his beloved operas.
(As a publisher, he was proud of his opera guides, and he claimed to have attended an astronomical number of productions in his lifetime.)
He was actively involved in the Edinburgh Festival in the early 1960s and, though he did not look a trendy figure, was into “happenings”: with Jim Haynes of the Traverse Theatre and Sonia Orwell, he organised the notorious Writers’ Conference of 1962 at which Norman Mailer unleashed a four-letter word, and nudity was on display the following year at the Drama Conference, chaired by Kenneth Tynan.
Calder was active on the anti-nuclear Committee of 100, stoutly defended the Net Book Agreement, supervised the 1969 Harrogate Festival and co-founded the Defence of Literature and the Arts Society. He was a tireless writer of obituaries, many for The Guardian and The Independent, claiming to have notched up a grand total of between 1,500 and 3,000.
He edited the Gambit International Drama Review, and Readers devoted to the works of Beckett, Burroughs, Miller and the nouveau roman; he wrote three studies of Beckett’s work, a sizeable autobiography called Pursuit, an evocative memoir of Paris in the 1950s, and contributed a weekly blog to ONE magazine.
Unhonoured in Britain, he was a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and a Chevalier (later an Officier) de l’ordre nationale de mérite; late in life he took to teaching English and French literature in Paris, so qualifying for French social security. For many years he lived in the eastern suburb of Montreuil.
Of John Calder’s three marriages the first two were unhappy, turbulent affairs, ending in divorce. The first was to Mary Ann Simmonds in 1949; they had one daughter. Then in 1960 he married Bettina Jonic, a Croatian opera singer; they also had a daughter. He married thirdly, in 2011, Sheila Colvin. She survives him with his two daughters.