Editorial conferences aren't what they used to be.
In the updated edition of his memoir, Thanks For Coming! Encore! (Polwarth, £20), Jim Haynes recalls the first meeting of the editorial board of the sexual freedom newspaper Suck. Halfway through, one member disappeared with his girlfriend into another room. As Haynes writes, with lingering regret, "I looked back on this meeting as our first mistake. We should all five have made love together."
Revolutionary as Suck was, it soon descended into squabbling, with founder member Germaine Greer lacerating Haynes for running a nude photo of her that she had not given permission to be used except alongside the rest of the unclothed editorial board. "I don't think there's anybody on Earth who can blast as well as Germaine can blast," he recalls, still bruised by the experience, 40 and more years on.
Conflict is the last thing he enjoys. One of the sunniest and most determinedly optimistic figures ever to walk the streets of Edinburgh, American-born Haynes is the original hippy. "Happiness is, for me, an intellectual decision. I decided a long time ago to be happy. And I am succeeding."
Arriving in Edinburgh when he was in the American army, he set up the first British paperback bookshop, in Charles Street, near the university. Alongside a superb range of works, he included some that raised eyebrows, never more so than a large consignment of Lady Chatterley's Lover. The shop's fame was assured when one outraged Edinburgh denizen paid for a copy and then picked it up with a pair of tongs, and burned it outside the shop.
From there, Haynes began a one-man crusade to cheer, enliven, inform and liberate society, helping organise the 1962 writers' conference with John Calder, a lifelong friend, and establishing the Traverse Theatre. A gadfly, he then moved to London where he set up the influential Arts Lab, before taking off for the continent, where among other things he founded the Wet Dreams Film Festival in Amsterdam.
Now over 80, the survivor of two heart attacks and diabetes, his appearance in the city is as sure a sign that the festival is about to start as No Vacancy signs in B&Bs. Tall, moustached and genial, he is as reliable a feature of the August calendar as the military tattoo's guns or the festival fireworks.
The rest of the year he lives in Paris, where his Sunday evening open-house salons have made him as much a part of the Paris scene as the Eiffel Tower.
As he has often said, the most important thing in his life is getting people together who would otherwise never have met. Judging from the famous names that sprinkle gold dust on this work - Mick Jagger, Brian Epstein, Yoko Ono, Norman Mailer, and their like - he was Facebook or match.com for the pre-digital age.
The first edition of his memoir was prefaced by 19 pages of names of the people he wanted to thank - widely believed to be a sure-fire way of selling at least as many books as people he listed, and thereby reaching the bestseller lists.
Accompanying the new edition of his memoir is a slim work of personal philosophy, called Everything Is! (Polwarth, £10). This is a collection of amusing, but not unserious apercus, such as his recipe for "a sure-cure for depression and almost any psychiatric illness". The revolutionary idea? A trip to Italy.
The mood of the 1960s lives in Haynes in such an infectiously invigorating way, he is like an ambassador from a previous age. He is a man determined to like everything and everyone, an outlook rare in any age, but particularly so today, when the world seems drearily cynical and suspicious and fearful.
Though his appetite for life would exhaust those of us without his stamina or lack of inhibition or loathing of routine, his joie de vivre is the epitome of the festival spirit. It is a reminder of an era where fun was, if not obligatory, then easier to be found. See you next year, Jim!
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