The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  To Jeannette, my beloved,

  without whose persistence, encouragement, patience,

  resistance to my resistance,

  and enduring love

  this book would never have been

  and

  To Nathalie, Alexander, and Nicholas,

  the lights of my life

  Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit … The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.

  —James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction by James Salter

  Foreword by Jeannette Seaver

  Preface

  Part One Paris, 1950s

  1. Café Sitting at St. Germain

  2. Meeting Alex Trocchi

  3. Meeting Merlin

  4. Tracking Down the Work

  5. From Dublin to Galway

  6. Financing a Magazine

  7. Waiting for Beckett

  8. Meeting Sartre

  9. American in Paris

  10. To Paris, by Tiger, by Foot, by Bus, by Bicycle

  11. A Room with a View

  12. Patsy of My Youthful Heart

  13. Enter Enrico (Stage Left)

  14. Name-Dropping; or, An Evening with Orson

  15. Brendan Incoming

  16. Thief, Pederast … and Genius

  17. Big Decisions, Taken Hesitantly

  18. Bigger Decision, No Hesitation

  19. A Bigger Decision

  20. Enter Maurice

  21. High Finance and Misdemeanor

  22. Questions of Conscience

  23. Meeting Barney Rosset

  24. Beckett’s Back in Town

  25. The Sun Also Sets

  Part Two New York, 1960s

  26. America the Beautiful

  27. Join the Navy and See the World

  28. A New Life

  29. To the Budding Grove

  30. Lady Chatterley’s Lawyers

  31. Back with Beckett

  32. Reenter Trocchi

  33. Coenties Slip (At Last!)

  34. The (Over)Heated Tropics

  35. Frankfurt bei Nacht

  36. The United States v. Tropic of Cancer : Spring 1960

  37. Exit Trocchi

  38. Naked Lunch

  39. Formentor

  40. City of Night

  41. Film

  42. Plays and Playwrights

  43. Return to Paris, for Jeannette and Genet

  44. Leaving Coenties Slip

  45. Last Exit to Brooklyn

  46. The Grove Method: A Top-Line Approach to Publishing

  47. The Autobiography of Malcolm X

  48. Story of O

  49. Grove Goes Public

  50. Genet Comes to America

  51. The 1968 Convention

  52. And Now for My Fee

  53. Goeth Before a Fall

  54. Fur, Leather, and Machine Workers, Arise

  55. Retreat to Eleventh Street

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  Copyright

  Introduction

  RICHARD SEAVER, EMINENT EDITOR, publisher, and translator, belongs to what is now thought of as a better time in American publishing, a period from, say, 1920 to 1950. Though he followed it by a decade or more, he personally carried on the legacy of a number of houses founded in that earlier time that reflected the tastes and character of individual owners. Writers might find a place to sleep, if necessary, in their publisher’s offices, and some might be given a monthly stipend.

  Seaver had graduated from the University of North Carolina, taught Latin at a prep school in Connecticut, and then gone to Paris to study at the Sorbonne in the years just after the war. There he edited with some friends a literary magazine called Merlin, and on his own, reading him in the original French and being overwhelmed by the simplicity and terror, discovered Samuel Beckett, whom he later met, published, and remained good friends with for the rest of Beckett’s life.

  In 1953, toward the end of the Korean War, he was called into the navy and served a tour as an engineering officer on a cruiser. When I first met him in Paris in 1961, he was a senior editor at Grove but still looked like a naval officer, capable and tough. I asked him once, out of curiosity, what he had known about engineering.

  “Nothing,” he said simply.

  In Paris, he and his wife were glamorous sans effort. They knew everyone in town, it seemed.

  In New York, he started his publishing career working at George Braziller and soon afterward went to Grove Press, where he remained for eleven years, from 1959 to 1970, years of great turbulence and importance. He became editor in chief.

  Grove Press began publishing European avant-garde writers and political thinkers, Beckett among them. American literature, not uniquely, had for a long time been under moral constraints, as exemplified by Theodore Dreiser’s realistic novel Sister Carrie being quickly withdrawn from circulation in 1900 by Doubleday when Mrs. Doubleday found it distasteful—the heroine lived in sin with a man and then repeated the offense. Books considered actually obscene could not be published in or brought into the United States. This included D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, first published in 1928, privately printed in Florence, Italy, and banned in England and the United States. Its theme, that the individual is fully realized only when both body and mind flourish, was not sensational, but its sex scenes, with their candor and the use of the forbidden word “fuck,” kept the book underground.

  There was an invisible fault line growing, however. Six years after Lady Chatterley, in 1934, Henry Miller’s remarkable Tropic of Cancer was published by the Obelisk Press in France. Written in the Paris of the Depression years, when the franc had fallen to almost nothing and a dinner with wine could be bought for a dollar, it was a view from the depths, seething with sex and life, and it gradually acquired a legendary reputation. It had even greater cachet after the war, and college girls returning from France smuggled it in, hidden among their underclothes. Customs would confiscate it or worse; in the case of publishers, far worse: Jacob Brussel, who dared to publish it in New York in 1940, went to prison for three years.

  * * *

  Soon after Seaver arrived, Grove Press boldly published Lady Chatterley, followed by Tropic of Cancer. They were not the first books to challenge, in whatever form, the prevailing laws, but they were the ones, along with Fanny Hill, to spearhead the court battles. The decade of cultural and sexual revolution was at hand, and the verdict of a federal appeals court that Lady Chatterley was not obscene marked a decisive moment.

  With Seaver, a new wave swept in: William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in 1962, Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers in 1963, Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1964, and in 1965 Story of O may be said to have contributed significantly to shaping the modern sensibility toward art and sex. Soon after, Grove published important political writers like Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Régis Debray. Over the years, Seaver himself translated more than fifty books from French into English, including works by Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and the Marquis de Sade. Present-day painting, sculpture, and even dance would not exist without the literature that foretold them.

  A publisher is known by his writers, and at Grove, then at Viking and Holt, Rinehart and Winston, and for the last twenty years of his life at Arcade, which he founded and
ran with his wife, Jeannette, Seaver’s writers were generally distinguished and significant, often foreign and sometimes lesser known, for example Andreï Makine and Ismail Kadare, though they included Harold Pinter, Octavio Paz, and John Berger. There were possible Nobel laureates but modest sales.

  As befits an editor and translator, Seaver had an even temperament and was low-key—although anyone would seem to be, compared to Brendan Behan, who literally barged into Seaver’s life in Paris—and it was better to be low-key at the violent 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, where Seaver and his wife were trying to shepherd an illegal Jean Genet through the police charges and general chaos.

  There has been a lot that has changed dramatically in American culture since 1950, when Lady Chatterley was thought to be a moral danger to society and Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg were lepers. All this and more is in these revealing pages, as well as the character, charm, and New England–bred integrity of Richard Seaver in his long, distinguished literary—and also personal—life.

  JAMES SALTER

  Foreword

  ANYONE WHO KNEW DICK SEAVER will know that he was a man of exceptional modesty, in spite of his stature as a giant of the publishing and literary world. I have to admit that it took relentless hounding from his family to get him to record for literary history his remarkable years in Paris and New York in the 1950s and 1960s. When Dick finally started writing his memoir, he did so in the stolen interstices of a busy life, late at night, or on weekends now and then. He wrote for himself, he insisted, never intending it for publication. My extraordinary husband of many decades devoted his long career to discovering, reading, editing, and nurturing new voices. He loved his work. I noticed, however, that as he got down to the serious business of writing his memoir, each time he emerged from the privacy of his study, he would repeatedly declare how happy and energized he was to be going back to writing. Writing seemed to fulfill him in a way I had not seen before. Early on, back in Paris in the 1950s, Dick had written novels and poetry, not to mention his three-hundred-page thesis on James Joyce and the interior monologue. Discovering Beckett, however, was for Dick an overwhelming event, a kind of intellectual explosion. It stopped him short. From then on, it seemed, Dick felt unable to pursue his own writing. His muse turned silent.

  So, all those years later, when he finally sat typing on his old Royal Standard, the joy triggered by his return to writing were wonderful for me to witness. I had a chance at the time to show Dick my edits, as he passed me page after page that flowed from his memory. He approved, encouraged me to do more. He would polish later, he said.

  A few days before his untimely death, he and I were at a van Gogh exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and Dick happened to come upon a letter from van Gogh to his brother Theo. In that letter, van Gogh quoted Émile Zola’s poetic phrase “the tender hour of twilight” as it pertained to the paintings he was working on. Dick announced he had found his title. In my trauma after losing him, I somehow could not recall those words. I searched high and low and had nearly given up hope when our daughter, Nathalie, discovered Dick’s scribbles in his checkbook, in the jacket he had worn that day at MoMA.

  Meanwhile, on Dick’s desk, I stared at nine hundred manuscript pages he was never given the chance to polish. After reading the precious pages, reliving so many memories, and with my head spinning, I shared the manuscript with a few trusted literary friends who generously took the time to read it and offer constructive ideas. We all agreed: the manuscript needed to be cut. A daunting task. This is where I came in, tiptoeing.

  In the course of the following many months, I set out to honor my husband’s wishes, giving myself permission to perform light editorial surgery on his manuscript. Dick’s voice, with its humor, modesty, and tenderness, led the way and guided me through.

  It was only when Jonathan Galassi, the publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and someone Dick liked and admired greatly, enthusiastically acquired the book for publication that I breathed more easily. That Jonathan liked Dick’s writing and was eager to publish his memoir would have given Dick personal validation and profound joy. As for FSG’s editor Sean McDonald, it was all back in the family. Sean had come to work for our publishing house, Arcade, straight from college. Dick had the highest regard for him, and Sean spent several years as one of Arcade’s star editors. It is with a broad smile today that Dick would welcome Sean as his personal editor. Together we made it all fall into place.

  I hope the reader will be transported back to a magical time of literary discovery, a time when major voices appeared both here and in France. And I hope Dick’s voice, in its tender hour of twilight, can resonate with all of you as it did for me for fifty-five extraordinary years together.

  JEANNETTE SEAVER

  Preface

  THE TERM “MEMOIR” is today of somewhat dubious distinction, a genre tinged with accusations of exaggeration, manipulation, un- or semi-truth, if not downright fraud, especially since the exposure a few years ago of James Frey’s blatantly fictional A Million Little Pieces. Frey’s basic sin, perhaps his only one, was failing to say up front that for the sake of pace, plot, dramatic tension, whatever, he had compressed here, combined there, fabricated in several places, the better to entice and please the reader. Presented as fiction, the book would not have raised an eyebrow, much less a storm. But would it have sold as fiction? A major part of its attraction was the palpable presence of the author, fallen and risen, the sinner redeemed. In all probability, had the book not been such a phenomenal success, the author’s conscious concoctions would never have been brought to light. He was wrong, true, but I wonder if the punishment fit the crime. Still, let the reader not conclude that this tepid defense of Mr. Frey—whom I do not know—is to be taken as an excuse for any failings in my own book. It is simply that his opus, coming when I was well into mine, prompted me to reconsider the whole concept of memoir.

  A memoir is a look back upon one’s life and times through the inevitably refracted lens of the past. These are stories I have told many times over the years, and I warrant the latest versions differ in myriad ways from the original. Even from telling to telling, separated by only a few weeks or months, the tales change, subtly influenced by the reaction of the listeners, if not by one’s own dimming memory.

  I remember in the 1960s going to a play adapted from Joyce’s Ulysses starring Zero Mostel. Having read the piece beforehand, I went to opening night and marveled at how closely, and beautifully, the actor adhered to the text. A few weeks later I went again, and this time noticed that there were a number of deviations, for the most part intriguingly seductive but clearly not Joyce. The audience that night was even more enthusiastic than it had been at the earlier performance. Doubting myself, I went home and reread the Joyce text, which confirmed that Zero was indeed improvising. I saw the play a third time, near its announced closing, and now Joyce had been virtually replaced by Mostel. If confronted, the actor, I’m sure, would have professed ignorance: of course he was still playing Joyce. What had happened, I suspect, was that he was responding to the audience’s reactions night after night, and where they laughed or applauded an impromptu word or phrase, he inserted and embellished it. I understand Zero.

  If all this sounds like an apologia for sins to come, it doubtless is. True, one can verify facts and figures from old records, one can consult colleagues and friends who were there, who can confirm, clarify, or deny your version. But they are as far removed from the event as you, and their memories often as imperfect as yours. Time is not kind to the harried mind, filling it each passing day with the detritus of the moment, like silt at a river’s mouth slowly covering the earlier levels and slyly reconstituting the terrain.

  Let me say, therefore, not by way of excuse but as fair warning, I have tried to tell these tales as they were, accurately and fairly, and if I have erred or memory has betrayed, blame it on those Irish genes my wife has encountered over the years. The reader should know, too, that in some rare i
nstances I have changed the name of a character, either to protect privacy or because neither I nor anyone I knew could remember a person’s name. There are in the book two lengthy episodes that were dreamed, not lived, and I leave it to the reader to detect them. The reasons will, I trust, be self-evident.

  The reader should be forewarned as well that I have throughout resorted to dialogue. Dialogues are approximate, though accurate in tone and tenor, and verified whenever possible with those involved.

  * * *

  I had never intended to make this work public. In fact, I resisted it for a long time, even when, after hearing a fragment, a presumably amusing anecdote surging from the past, an incident revealing an added facet to a person or personage already known, my patient listener would react by saying, “You must really write about that.” When I would protest that my life was ordinary compared with that of so many others, the high livers and high-profile lovers and achievers who daily grace the front pages of the world’s press, the response often was: “But Paris in the fifties was special, and your years at Grove in the sixties changed the world.” Jeannette was the first to agree, but she was clearly biased. When over the years others echoed her insistence, including the man I admired most at the time in British publishing, my friend Matthew Evans, former chairman of Faber and Faber and now Lord Evans of Temple Guiting, a Labour peer, I decided to set forth, give it a shot. It would not, I told myself, be too long a journey. A year perhaps, no more.

  Now, eight years later, I realized how unrealistic I had been. In fairness, I had other concerns, other demands. A dozen years earlier, Jeannette and I had started our own publishing house, a folly in the eyes of most. A daunting venture. Each day had its challenges, often seemingly overwhelming; each its rewards. We made our share of mistakes—more than our share, no doubt—for while we initially focused to a large extent on works abroad, this country was turning increasingly inward, largely oblivious to what the world outside our borders was doing, thinking, and writing. Still, we published dozens of fine writers, many little known at the time, formed friendships around the world, managed against all odds to survive. But the struggle left little time to write: evenings and weekends, the odd morning. When, discouraged, I would flag, Jeannette would quickly cite a dozen instances of people with full-time jobs who wrote and published. Then, like an old dray horse, I would reharness and plow forward. Whenever I did, I found I loved it. Most rewarding was the mind’s response to the constant probes: memories delved for did resurface, often with surprising clarity and color. From the dark inchoate mass of stored material, filed and forgotten, I relived moments, many cherished, that otherwise would have been lost forever.