The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  A four-poster bed occupied a goodly portion of the room, whose only other furnishings were a bulky armoire separated from the bed by a scant three feet and, in front of the window, which from all appearances had last been washed just before the war, a small wooden table bare except for a vintage typewriter and, parked precariously on the far-left corner, a hot plate. Majestically curled into a near-perfect ball on the center pillow of the bed lay a Siamese cat, its blue eyes taking in our every move.

  “Can I offer you some tea?” Alex said. “Or coffee? Or perhaps a bit of fine Scotch?” He paused. “Or is it too early for that?”

  I found myself mesmerized by the—for me—enchanting Scottish lilt of Trocchi’s speech, at once musical and clipped. His voice was soft as silk, punctuated every sentence or two with a broad smile. I declined, but Patrick said tea would be fine. It seemed like a strange chaser for the morning beer, but who was I to judge? Perhaps beer plus tea was the national drink of South Africa.

  “Pat’s told me a bit about Merlin,” I said. “He assures me it’s the only serious literary magazine in Paris—”

  “The most serious,” Pat corrected. “Points has had some good material—”

  “Maybe ‘serious’ is the wrong word,” Trocchi said. “But we do intend to be good. My feeling is that we can’t just emulate the literary magazines of the twenties and thirties. These are parlous times, mon, what with the Russians on the one hand and the ugly Americans on the other rattling their apocalyptic bomb. It’s frightening, mon, damn frightening.”

  Jane Lougee, Merlin’s benefactor and publisher, just entered. She had silken dark brown hair that she wore with schoolgirl bangs, china white skin, into which were set dark flashing eyes, an easy smile, and, it turned out, a sunny disposition that nothing seemed to faze. Besides, she had the good sense to have a banker for a father. Whether she was truly rich or not I had no idea, but I suspected—despite the dreary room—that she had enough to back Trocchi’s immediate literary ambitions, for in glancing at the magazine the day before at the kiosk, I had noted that her role was listed as “Alice Jane Lougee (Publisher), Limerick, Maine”—the geographical attribution striking me as more than a bit strange for a Paris-based magazine. Maybe it had to do with taxes, I thought. Her father was apparently underwriting Merlin, so he couldn’t be all bad. Alex introduced me to Jane, and when we shook hands, I noticed her grip was as firm as Trocchi’s.

  “Please stay for lunch,” she said. And she pulled from her magic filet—I could never bring myself to say “string bag” or “net bag,” which my dictionary assured me was the proper translation—some pâté and cheese and rillettes, plus a half kilo of butter and two freshly baked baguettes, and, presto, a liter of red wine. No label, but what the hell. Gros rouge: at Buci, as at most wineshops in the area, you could, if you brought your own empty bottle, buy a liter of wine for a hundred francs—roughly twenty-five cents—poured from the vast oaken casks in the back. Mostly Algerian, not smooth by any means, but eminently drinkable, especially for our untutored palates.

  Over lunch Trocchi talked about the magazine he envisioned. Tapping his finger on a copy of issue number 1, which had just appeared, he said with the authority born of true conviction: “No writer today can afford to be non-engagé—uncommitted. No matter how good some of the magazines published here were before the war—and some were very good—art for art’s sake is a thing of the past.”

  “Some extraordinary writing came out of that period, though,” I said. “Start with Joyce. Total self-indulgence. Epitome of literary arrogance. But, by God, look what resulted!”

  “Of course, mon. I’m simply saying that today historical conditions are different. We can’t pretend the world we’ve been handed doesn’t exist.”

  Pat laughed. “You sound like a Scottish Sartre.”

  “To a degree,” Alex said, “to a degree. It’s a question of being aware, that’s all.”

  “So where does that leave poetry?” Pat asked. “Does poetry have to be politically aware? God forbid! One step further and you have the socialist drivel of the Soviets.”

  “Don’t be daft, mon,” Trocchi thundered, pouring another round of wine into the yogurt jars that served as glasses. “But part of an artist’s task today is to address—at least not ignore—the problems we have to face. Picasso was able to be political without compromising his art. Ditto Malraux. And, yes, Sartre.”

  Trocchi turned to the typewriter and, unscrolling a page, added it to a couple of others on the table. “Here’s the editorial I’ve written for issue number two,” he said. “Still needs a bit of fine-tuning, but it expresses what I feel the magazine should be. We want to find new writers. And not just English language. After all, we’re based in Paris. Patrick says you know the French scene better than anyone here—”

  “More important, he speaks French like a Frenchman,” Patrick said.

  “I spent my first couple of years here avoiding my compatriots, I’m afraid. Pretty stupid when I look back, but I really was determined to learn the language, immerse myself in French culture. I’ve come across some pretty interesting French writers. A girl I met my first summer here gave me a list of those I had to read. Barely halfway through it. But you’re not interested in known quantities, I assume. Oddly today, the most original new writers aren’t French, though they’re writing in the language. One or two in particular.”

  The nearby church bells tolled two o’clock, and suddenly I remembered that I had to be at Berlitz at three sharp. My livelihood still depended on it. Earlier in my Paris stay I had taught three, even four times a week, sometimes as many as five lessons a day. The Berlitz book was entirely practical: no room or time for literary or philosophical nonsense. At the end of a one-hour lesson, the student who was doué—“talented”—might even manage to take the train or bus in English, pay the fare, engage in conversation with an amiable neighbor (“What a nice day eet is, non? Are you going far? I am going to Chee-ca-gó, where eet is very windy, is it not? Especially in winter, non?”), and even alight at the proper stop. Not much more. But five stints in my one-on-one cubicle—3:00 p.m. to dinnertime—brought in a cool thousand francs—two and a half dollars—sufficient to keep the wolf from the door for hours on end. To be sure, at the end of four or five such sessions, with ten minutes off for good behavior between classes, we professeurs were so linguistically stupefied that it took a good three glasses of wine to restore us to normalcy, or the semblance thereof. Still, the choices were not many, and we were grateful for small Parisian favors. As time went on, I kept wondering how Joyce had done it without going mad. I suspected that with his powers of concentration, he could teach by subconscious rote while his creative mind, far beyond the cubicle, was forging new words, new combinations, new images that would later surface on the pristine page. Emulating the master, I tried that one day, letting my subconscious take over, and almost immediately found my pupil looking at me as if I had gone mad, for my conscious mind was all of a sudden spouting T. S. Eliot–like poems of my own concoction whereas my subconscious, which should have been rattling its way mechanically through the Berlitz teaching manual, had apparently gone inoperative. I gazed at the little black box in the far corner, which no teacher could ignore, for a microphone implanted there led into the office of Mr. Watson, who ran the school with a kindly hand but could not, would not, tolerate the least deviation from the cherished manual.

  Shaking hands at the door, Trocchi and Patrick and I agreed to meet the following Tuesday. One o’clock on the terrace of the Royal. As we made our way darkly down the four flights, Patrick asked me what I thought of Trocchi. Groping for the third time for the elusive minuterie, I said: “I liked him. Bright as hell, clearly. But I tend to beware of first impressions. At least half the time I’ve been wrong.”

  We were again plunged into darkness, but if I had not lost count, there was only one more flight to go.

  “Read the first issue,” Pat said. “Then let’s talk.”

  A
s we descended the final steps into the sun-splashed lobby, almost blinded by the sudden change, I saw that a concierge, a birdlike woman of indeterminate age dressed all in black, was now perched on a chair before a warren of boxes above which dangled a dozen or so heavy keys to her kingdom. I nodded to her. She nodded back, but her suspicious scowl told me hers was not a friendly greeting. For all she knew, we were interlopers, maybe even foreigners, freeloading off one of her paying guests. I gave her my broadest smile and thanked her profusely—for what she had no idea. But then, neither had I.

  * * *

  The next day I bought and devoured the first issue of Merlin, every last word. I was impressed. The best piece was Trocchi’s, a story called “A Meeting,” but there was another piece of fiction by an American, Eugene Walter, of whom I had never heard, that was almost as good. In both, the writing was crisp and personal. Nobody’s acolyte, they. And it included five poets, also all good, three English, one Canadian, and an American, who to my mind was the best of the lot. How different the American’s aesthetic from that of the others, even from that of our northern neighbor, who was clearly talented but given to a pretentious use of line organization and wrong-legged commas. Still, he was better than I would ever be. My poetry was sorely lacking in obscurity. The best of the English poets in the issue was someone named Christopher Logue. In love with fancy words but not always sure of their use, I noted condescendingly. How could he have so massacred Trebizond? Still, remembering Sylvia Beach and the Paris publication of Ulysses, one had to make allowance for the spelling and punctuation errors introduced by the French printers, most of whom did not speak a word of English. I had no idea how old this Christopher Logue was, but his tone was classical and contemporary at the same time. All I knew was the bio blurb at the end of the issue: “English poet and falconer, lives in Paris. Is writing a book on the idea of the castle in Europe.” That I liked. Pat had spoken highly of Christopher as a person and poet, and I was eager to meet him. I closed the issue with a feeling that if I could, this was a magazine, an environment, I’d like to be part of.

  After digesting the first issue of Merlin, I also read Trocchi’s proposed editorial for the next, which he had handed me as we left his hotel that first day. He had announced Merlin as a “quarterly magazine of literature,” with the prophetic caveat that “the size of the magazine and its continued appearance will be determined by the amount of suitable material received and the response of subscribers.” About the forthcoming editorial I was less sure. Intelligent, yes. Probing, yes. Convoluted, to a large degree. Pretentious, absolutely. I reread some of the lines that both impressed and grated: “It is not enough to deplore the state of modern writing in general. Who is bad, and why? Generalized obloquy is not enough.” If generalized obloquy was not enough, then who specifically was censured, who praised? Tell me who your enemies are and I’ll tell you whether I agree.

  3

  Meeting Merlin

  THE NEXT TUESDAY, Pat came to pick me up at my own humble abode on the rue du Sabot—the Street of the Wooden Shoe—hard behind St. Germain des Prés. I lived on the ground floor, a kind of storage depot behind and contiguous to an antiques store specializing in primitive art. In contrast to my former quarters at 21, rue Jacob, at most a couple hundred square feet, probably less, the depot was more than a thousand. Light came from a generous skylight over the area nearest the street and was sufficient during bright days to obviate the need for electricity. The building, probably fifteenth century, had formerly been the windmill of St. Germain and consisted of two parts: two stories set directly on the rue du Sabot, and then, behind, four stories that had housed the windmill itself. One crossed from the front building to the back over a narrow bridge. Upstairs, beyond that bridge, lay a bevy of rented rooms—squalid, I was sure, judging from the only one I had seen. The occupants, of uncertain number, for one could never tell who was the renter and who the guest or passerby or lady for the night, ascended to their quarters by a stairway we never, or rarely, used.

  But I lived there rent-free, in return for tending the shop for an hour or two a day and, when the owner was absent, sometimes for two or three days running. The shopkeeper was a dapper Swiss, Oscar Mayer—no relation to the American purveyor of meat by the same name—a man in his late thirties or early forties with a true passion for primitive art. He spoke perfect mid-Atlantic English, part American, part British, but clipped with sharp Swiss shears and interspersed with slang that rarely hit the mark. He wore dark, impeccably cut suits and starched white shirts, more often with an ascot than a four-in-hand tie, and in the evening, winter and summer, he sported a flowing black cape. His jet-black hair, neatly swept back into a mini-mane, and his equally impressive mustache made him look more serious than he really was. But the silver-tipped cane he carried, more a personal swagger stick, was dead serious: when triggered, a tiny switch on the cane head turned the tip into a sword. He carried it with him whenever he went out. Was it legal? I asked, the first time I saw him trigger it. “Of course not,” he said. Wasn’t he worried that someone might notice it and tell the cops? As for the cops, he would take his chances. Besides, he added, he had friends in high places. During my years in France, I had heard dozens of people claiming to have “friends in high places.” Given the rapid turnover of French governments during the Third Republic, I wondered if, when those suddenly in dire need called their “friends,” anyone answered. In any event, Oscar’s cane gave me pause, but also new respect.

  I had moved there a year earlier from my crow’s nest room at 21, rue Jacob, a pension de famille (now a chic hotel, Les Marronniers), where I had lived for a couple of years, a former maid’s room that suited me fine, for those who lived on the top floor were not obliged to take meals as were the other lodgers. Though the steep eight-story climb was tough, the legs were young and bicycle-strong, and the view over St. Germain well worth the eleven-dollars-a-month rent. The only inconvenience—unless you counted the tiny Turkish toilet tucked halfway down the stairs to the next floor, which demanded a certain acrobatic prowess to enter, employ, and emerge from unbowed and unscathed—was that the ancient red-tiled floor was roughly twenty degrees off the horizontal. Bricks liberated from a nearby construction site propped up both bed and table, while the armoire was wedged neatly in the lower inside corner, never to be budged. As for the wooden chair that was meant to go with the table, I had solved that minor problem by sawing two inches off the front legs, unbeknownst to my often scowling, never-smiling 250-pound landlady (a guess, to be sure; I had never seen her on a scale, much less scaled her, but I knew I was not far off the mark). Surely, Madame Germaine, for that was her name, would one day thank me for the fine leveling work I had done.

  I had moved for several reasons. First, after almost two years’ lopsided residence I was being increasingly pressured to join the pensioners downstairs for meals and, having once or twice sampled the local fare at dinnertime, decided that survival was in question. Despite all the food shortages, the cook at the pension, whom I had only glimpsed but, I concluded, could not have been French, regularly brought forth to table culinary concoctions as unrecognizable as they were inedible: meat there was, but from its taste and consistency, not to mention its disconcerting toughness, I had come to the conclusion that the unfortunate and unsavory Parisian habit acquired during the war of cooking meat of dubious origin had been perpetuated during these halcyon postwar days. Second, it was rumored that fellow pensioners were complaining that my girlfriend and I made too much noise late at night, which was doubtless true. (In our defense, we were forever fighting a twenty-degree angle in everything we said and did there.) And, finally, I determined that if I stayed on much longer, pacing the floor as I did in search of a cogent thought, I’d end up gimpy, for though my uphill leg, my right on the trip across from east to west, showed signs of shortening, it loosened nicely on the return journey from west to east. But since I inevitably ended up at the skylight, on the western side overlooking the church, that final
trip, multiplied by hundreds if not thousands, would surely have its effects.

  On the last day of October, I announced my impending departure to Madame Germaine. She took it very hard. And here I thought she had never cared!

  “You’re really leaving?” she said, conveniently forgetting my downstairs neighbors’ complaints. “Good tenant. Always pay on time.” Ah, that was it. I actually did, carefully adding a couple hundred francs to each month’s envelope, which I meant as atonement for the presumed noise factor. She took it as a tip for her many kindnesses.

  “You can always come back, you know!”

  I shuddered at the thought. Still, it was heartwarming to know that somewhere in this teeming Gallic city of two and a half million I would always have a home. Sort of.

  * * *

  We met at the Royal under a still-serene pale blue sky when everything in Paris is bathed in magic; the four of us—Alex, Jane, Patrick, and I—were joined by a newcomer, Christopher Logue. A slight young man with a sallow complexion, a nervous smile that revealed a sorry set of teeth, and eyes flashing as one imagines a falconer’s would, he had a deeply resonant voice and perfect diction, as if he were not speaking to us common mortals but reciting, doubtless to the gods. His unusually high forehead was topped by unruly dark tufts that sprouted like weeds from the mass below. I had expected a larger, older man, for the poems had both body and erudition, a maturity ill suited to this too slender soul—the result of a chary diet born not of self-imposed restriction but of constant lack of funds. Only his voice befitted his lines, one of which came back to me: “Close to the sea I live with weather cock to catch all winds.” I shook Logue’s hand and told him how much I had liked his Merlin poems, reciting a couple more lines as if to prove it. Had I waited till later, it might have seemed perfunctory, lip service, but because they were literally my words of greeting, I think I made a friend for life. Christopher was dressed suitably, not for the occasion, which was informal, but for the role he had chosen in life: the Poet. Even on this glorious spring day, he was dressed in black: trousers, a white shirt only slightly the worse for wear, a tie, and a cape of which the Count of Monte Cristo would not have been ashamed. Christopher, I promptly learned, was neither reticent nor retiring. His response to my heartfelt compliment was: “Yes, they’re quite good, aren’t they? It’s part of a long poem I’m writing. Another section will appear in the next issue, right, Alex?”