“Do you have an appointment?” she rightly wanted to know.
“Not really,” I said, realizing immediately how asinine my response was. Either one had an appointment or one had not. “But,” I added, trying to save the situation, “perhaps you might tell him it’s about Monsieur Beckett.”
Reluctantly, it seemed to me, she picked up the phone and dialed upstairs, explaining that there was a young man who had walked in off the street without an appointment, not very well dressed—no, in all honesty, she did not say that, I imagined that was what she was thinking and would have liked to report—who wanted to see him about Monsieur Beckett. Much to her surprise, and I must admit to mine, he apparently told her to send me right up.
The next flight was narrow and much steeper than the downstairs, what the French call escalier en colimaçon, a “spiral staircase,” the kind of corkscrew staircase I associated with dungeons and keeps.
Tentatively, I knocked, a voice from inside cried, “Entrez,” and there I was face-to-face with Beckett’s publisher. Tall, thin as a Gallic rail, his dark hair thinning both left and right, his dark eyes piercing, he sat stiffly behind an obscenely clean desk. In disturbing contrast to my war-surplus khakis, he wore a neatly tailored dark suit, a starched white shirt, and a somber tie. I judged him to be ten, maybe fifteen, years older than I. He rose to shake hands, then sat back down and gestured toward a chair in front of him. I began to stammer out the purpose of my visit, my French having suddenly deserted me. I pushed a copy of the magazine across the desk and, my language creeping back like a chastened hound, spent two or three reasonably eloquent minutes describing how much I, and the magazine, admired Monsieur Beckett’s work, and how grateful I was personally to him, Lindon, for having discovered and published him. There is, I added, an essay in the issue expressing my strong opinion that Beckett’s work is major, even seminal.
If I was hoping my words would generate a response, verbal or facial, I was disappointed. Lindon was as impassive as Buddha himself. But I later learned that my impassioned peroration about the author he, Lindon, admired above all others, a writer about whom he would one day say that publishing him alone justified his vocation, created an immediate bond between us that would last forever.
He promised to send the magazine and my note to Beckett. I was even more grateful when, having told him we’d like to publish something by Beckett in the next issue, he averred that Beckett had written a novel in English during the war called Watt. No, he had not read it. He did not read English. But as far as he knew, it had not been published.
Could we see it?
“I’ll mention it in my covering note,” he said. “The rest is up to him.”
I thanked him warmly, and as I got up to leave, he stood and extended his hand. I had almost made the unpardonable error of not proffering my own hand, a gaffe in France almost as egregious as beginning a conversation with anyone—friend, foe, stranger—without first saying “bonjour” or “bonsoir,” depending on the time of day. As we shook hands, he said: “C’est bien que vous aimez Beckett. C’est un grand écrivain. Très grand.”
* * *
By September, Merlin had moved its editorial office into the rue du Sabot ex-warehouse. My patron—now friend—Oscar had announced in late summer that he was going “for a few months to the States.” My heart skipped the proverbial beat: after all that toting and lifting, all that cleaning and sweeping, was I to be kicked out as meanly and summarily as Beckett’s beleaguered hero in the story I had tracked down “The Expelled”? I envisioned myself back at Madame Germaine’s doorstep, begging for reinstatement. No, there would have to be another solution. Or—my mind was racing, at least moving at an unaccustomed pace—was he expecting me to run the shop full-time? I had neither the time nor the inclination, not to mention the antiquarian knowledge. Fearing the former, expulsion, I alluded to the latter.
“No, no,” he assured me, “the shop will be closed. But there are a few clients who may call, like Monsieur de Mereille from the Musée de l’Homme, whom you know, and you should open up for them. I’ll give you the full list. I’ve paid the rent for the next four months, and I’ll leave you money for the phone and electricity.”
Quickly pushing my luck, I asked nonchalantly: “What about the room upstairs?”
In front of the aforementioned rabbit warrens in the old mill itself, directly above and in front of my warehouse, one flight up, was Oscar’s apartment. All right, room. It was no more than twenty-five square meters, but the bedroom itself was of decent size with a floor-to-ceiling window facing east, so that on fair summer days, though in the shadow of the old mill most of the time, it let in welcome light for several hours a day. It came with a generous double bed, a desk and chair, an overstuffed armchair of fading red velvet, and a floor lamp to read by. What’s more, to the right of the entrance was a tiny kitchen with a sink and a two-burner gas—not alcohol—stove. In other words, pauper’s heaven.
“Yours if you want it,” he said, “till I come back.”
With me upstairs, we could use the ground floor exclusively for the Merlin office, where we were preparing issue number 3.
Proof that copies had reached the far-distant shores of Maine and the Isle of Man came in the form of submissions from both the United States and England. Plus a trickle of subscriptions. More of the former than the latter, from which we surmised that there were more writers in the world than readers. The editorial premise in Merlin 2 was that “good writing was being written” and that the magazine intended to look for and publish it. From the early submissions received, however, we began seriously to question that premise.
* * *
For weeks we waited for some word from Beckett, either directly or through Lindon, but nothing came, to the point where I began to doubt that Lindon had ever sent the magazine on.
It was Delphine who again came to the rescue. Of course she knew where Beckett lived; Blin had sent her more than once to pick up corrected pages of Godot, which was going into rehearsal: 6, rue des Favorites in the fifteenth arrondissement, a working-class building off the rue de Vaugirard. I pedaled at top speed to the precious address, slaloming my way through traffic as if I were competing in the Winter Olympics. I was armed with a modest package containing issue number 2 and a covering note that said that if it were true that Watt was available, we’d be interested in publishing an extract in Merlin. I added that I was aware Monsieur Lindon had sent an earlier copy of the magazine, but I wanted to make sure it had not gone astray in the post.
What struck me most as I parked Big Blue was the impressive herd of bicycles huddled back behind the stairs. With Molloy still fresh in my mind, I tried to determine which might be his: I searched for one with crutches attached to the handlebars, but saw none.
I tapped on the glass window of the concierge’s door—once, twice, discreet but insistent—and in due course a face peered through the partially frosted glass, which gave her the distinct advantage of seeing me clearly while shielding half her face. By the half look she gave me, she doubtless took me for the neighborhood rapist. I had never figured out what kept the Paris concierges so busy behind their closed doors, and why, when they reluctantly responded, they automatically assumed the worst of their callers. Especially a caller as clearly benign as me, dressed impeccably in cast-off army fatigues a size too big and sporting a two-day beard. I refer to male visitors of course. They—concierges—are slightly more indulgent to the distaff side, I had noted. Perhaps a holdover from the war, when they could, and often did, hold the life—or death—of their tenants in their hands. Many had thwarted the Germans and their local henchmen from laying hands on the suspected or wanted; others, though—I had heard the stories, and they were harrowing—had collaborated, out of weakness, out of fear for their own safety, or as an act of retribution against someone they felt had wronged or slighted them. Greed as well: I knew of cases where, having denounced a lodger, the concierge would quickly pillage the apartment of all its valuab
les before the seals were placed by the authorities. And if the unlucky lodger happened to be cleared, which did happen, and returned to his or her lodgings, no one could trace the theft to the putative guardian of the gate. And even if the victim did, through visual evidence (isn’t that my polka-dot dress she’s wearing?), to whom could you report the problem? That same authority under whose suspicion you still lived?
“Monsieur Beckett,” I said through the glass. “I have a package for him.”
She continued to stare at me.
“Shall I take it up to him?” I said in the gentlest tone I could muster, waving the thin packet across the dim horizon of her stare.
Slowly the door opened a crack, and a bony hand, followed by an equally bony wrist, snaked through. “Septième étage,” she croaked. Seventh floor. “Merci.” I smiled and made for the stairway. “Il n’est pas là,” she croaked again, her vocal cords having somehow returned. He isn’t here. “Revenez plus tard.” Come back later.
“At what time?” I asked, plaintively, I’m sure. “What time will he be home?”
“Je ne sais pas, monsieur.”
“Then how will I know when I should come back?”
She shrugged. Clearly that was my problem, not hers.
“A quelle heure rentre-t-il normalement?” I ventured before giving up and declaring her the winner of this battle of wits. Or nonwits. What time does he usually come home?
Again she shrugged. “Je ne sais pas, monsieur,” she said. “Il n’a pas d’heures précises,” she allowed. I don’t know. His schedule is erratic. She looked increasingly fatigued by all this pointless banter, but still managed to add: “Parfois il ne sort pas du tout pendant des jours. Sa femme fait toutes les courses.” Sometimes he doesn’t go out for days at a time. His wife does all the errands.
Ah, a wife. I was making progress. A few more pointed questions and I might know the intimacies of their daily life.
“Then,” I said, “is it possible he’s up there now? Or she?”
The concierge shook her head, a long-accustomed gesture, I assumed. “Absolument pas!” No, absolutely not. “A vrai dire, ils sont partis depuis des semaines,” she added, as though the realization had just dawned. Actually, they’ve been away for several weeks.
The news reassured me. And exonerated Monsieur Lindon, who, I was now sure, had indeed sent my letter. “In that case,” I said, producing a hundred-franc note, “can you give the package to him when he returns to Paris?”
She nodded, as if to say that that might be arranged.
* * *
It was October when I delivered the package, and as the days and weeks sped by without a response, we went about preparing the next issue sans an extract from Watt. As a quarterly, the next number should have appeared on December 15, a dubious date given the year-end holidays. More important, we did not have the down-payment money for Monsieur Leconte. Even pooling our latest resources, we were still sixty thousand francs short. At a high-level meeting—Alex, Jane, Christopher, Patrick, me, and a newcomer to the group, Austryn Wainhouse—we made the decision to push the next issue off a month or two.
By now I had become deeply involved with the venture, and Trocchi, to seal my commitment, conjured up the slightly bizarre title of advisory editor and director. My job, among other things, was to broaden the scope of the magazine into issues both social and political. Merlin 2 had provoked a fair amount of reaction for so limited a circulation. The praise we could savor and ignore; the attacks needed comment. The accusation that we had “a ludicrous faith in the very science that will destroy us” especially demanded a response. The next issue’s editorial reiterated our commitment to hit at rigid or outdated categories, trying to separate the scientific from the metaphysical.
This new orientation of the magazine, dealing head-on with the issues of the day, had evolved from our discussions over the past several weeks, together with the growing awareness on all our parts, especially mine and Austryn’s, that to ignore the pressing ideological and political pressures of the day was tantamount to moral suicide. Merlin would remain primarily literary, its focus on poetry and fiction, but in each succeeding issue we would address, or try to address, some aspect of the precarious—or, in Trocchi’s word, “parlous”—world we had inherited.
When I had first come to Paris four years before, I felt that with the end of World War II we had entered a new, at last enlightened era in which we would all create, experiment, live in a climate free from hate and distrust. The loathsome Nazis and their fascist allies were disgraced and dishonored in the eyes of all mankind. The victorious Americans, British, and Russians, arm in arm, would march proudly and collectively into the brave new world. But now, only seven years after the brief idyll, armies embracing fraternally on the Elbe, the specter of apocalyptic war loomed large in all our minds. The West, and especially the Americans, had a new obsession: Communism, a disease as feared and dreaded as the Nazis had so recently been. It was Orwellian. And it could not be ignored. Back home, Joe McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin, was still on a rampage, rooting out homegrown subversives—read Commies—in government, business, and entertainment, wherever they did or did not exist, it mattered little. Austryn had recently arrived in town, after spending the better part of a year touring Europe on a motor scooter with his charming young wife, Muffie. A Harvard graduate, Austryn had come to Paris to stretch his literary wings, write novels, translate—his French was good before he arrived—and presumably live the Left Bank life. Wainhouse père, we learned, was in the State Department, so when Austryn spoke out on American politics, we listened.
Austryn did not quite fit the heretofore slightly scruffy Merlin mold. He dressed smartly, was well-groomed, spoke in flowing sentences that never, as far as I can remember, revealed a grammatical error. And he carried, wherever he went, a handsome briefcase. Now, in my time I have seen briefcases put to a variety of uses. I have seen the homeless with such an appurtenance, inside which lay their every possession. In France, the briefcase is, I discovered, often used as a baise-en-ville, a polite translation of which would be “overnight bag”; a more accurate and literal rendering, “quick-fuck equipment kit.” In Italy, at least in the 1950s, well-dressed “businessmen” would clutch them to their breasts as they hurried on their appointed rounds, but instead of holding state papers or business analyses for pending deals, they were often revealed to contain a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a flask of red wine. But Austryn’s briefcase was a disconcertingly orderly file of his life, his writing, his appointments, his plans for today, tomorrow, next week, God knows when. I was suspicious. My father, only half-joking, had always said that an orderly desk was the sign of a disorderly mind. I assumed the same applied to briefcases.
In any event, meet we did, at Gaït’s English Bookshop on the rue de Seine, together with Christopher and Alex. With George Whitman’s Librairie Mistral, Gaït’s was one of the two meaningful bookshops on the Left Bank that catered to an English-reading public, with an excellent selection of the classics and all the latest British and American fiction and nonfiction worth mentioning. Gaït Frogé was a tall, handsome woman in her mid-thirties, her pale skin in sharp contrast to her striking auburn hair. Always impeccably dressed, she ran the bookshop by herself, and whenever she had to step out for an errand or rendezvous, she invariably entrusted the shop to whichever of her clients happened to be there at the time. “You won’t mind tending the shop for half an hour or so, will you, dear?” she’d say. “I won’t be long. And if you need to make change, the money’s in the middle drawer.” Pause. “And, love, would you make note of anything you sell so I can reorder.” Sometimes she wouldn’t be back for an hour or two, but there was plenty to read or, if the muse descended, you could always use her desk to pen your masterpiece. If she was gone overly long—three or four hours on occasion—you could snare some other client you knew she trusted and pass on the job.
From the beginning, Gaït had been a friend of Merlin and the Merlinites, an
d there were always stacks of the magazine—current and back copies—on her counter. She also allowed us, if we wished, to use the shop as our mail drop. I have known personal bookshops in my time, but none on any continent quite equaled the happy informality of Gaït’s, or the opera-learning-center, pay-as-you-can philosophy of George Whitman’s a few blocks away.
Austryn had of course been quick to discover the rue de Seine emporium, and it was doubtless inevitable we meet. He had written a novel, entitled, Gaït informed us, Hedyphagetica.
“Any idea what the title means?” I asked Alex.
He looked irritated, as if he considered the very question unworthy of a response. I felt humbled. I wished I had taken Greek instead of Latin, for it sure as hell sounded Greek to me.
“How the fuck should I know?” Alex shook his head. “I’m Scots-Italian, not Greek, for Chrissake! Anyway, that’s beside the point. Gaït hears that the man’s translated the entire Philosophy in the Bedroom.”
“The marquis de Sade?”
“None other … Don’t you see, mon, what that could mean for us? Put two and two together.”
“The marquis and who? The marquis and…”
“Merlin!”
“I’m missing a beat.”
“We’ll publish the Sade as the first volume of our Collection Merlin line. We’ve been talking about starting a book-publishing line: Christopher’s Wand and Quadrant, Beckett’s Watt, my Young Adam … But we always run up against the same damn problem: money. Won’t Sade sell like hotcakes? And with the money we make from that, we finance the magazine. And the books. It’s that simple. All this time we’ve been pinching pennies and worrying about a few thousand francs here, a few thousand francs there. Sade will bring in hundreds of thousands. It’s a godsend, old man, a veritable godsend.”
The Tender Hour of Twilight Page 8