Rarely had I seen Trocchi so enthusiastic, so cheerful and upbeat, and I didn’t want to puncture his euphoria with another dumb question. But swirling through my mind was one: Wasn’t the marquis de Sade still forbidden in France? Banned? In which case, wouldn’t those who published him risk prosecution? Or jail? At the very least, expulsion?
A few days later we walked over to rue de la Boucherie and met Austryn at George Whitman’s bookshop, the Librairie Mistral.
“I understand you have translated Sade,” Alex said, then laid out his villainous scheme.
Yes, Sade would sell, Austryn agreed. But there was one slight problem: Sade was, and almost always had been, banned here. There was a brief period after the Revolution, in 1790 to be exact, when Sade, newly released from the Charenton Asylum for the Insane, to which he had hurriedly been dispatched on the eve of the Revolution after having spent most of seventeen years in the prisons of Their Majesties Louis XIV and XV because of his scandalous life and even more scandalous works, was allowed to publish specifically the novels Justine and Juliette. But that freedom was short-lived, as are most postrevolutionary periods, when those new to power throw open all the once closed doors to prove real change has taken place, then quickly close them again to consolidate their power. In Sade’s case, Austryn went on, in 1793 his works were again banned, and he was remanded to an even worse prison than those he had endured under the ancien régime. His works have been banned to this day. To be sure, some clandestine editions have appeared, privately printed but never sold aboveboard. So without question, Austryn concluded, if Merlin proceeded, it would surely be prosecuted.
“But they’re banned in French,” Alex protested. “We’d be publishing him in English. The French don’t give a fuck about English, don’t you think? They’d probably never even notice.”
Oh, they’d notice all right, Austryn assured him. It might take them a bit longer to find out, but when the first copy hit England, the Foreign Office would be on the back of the French overnight. “What do you think they’d do?” Trocchi asked, clearly not yet ready to throw in the sponge.
“Prison probably,” Christopher said dourly.
“No, not prison. As foreigners you would face immediate expulsion,” Austryn guessed. “Most likely with the proviso that you never return to France. At least for the foreseeable future.”
“Damn!” Alex said. “Another brilliant idea down the fucking drain.”
* * *
We had all but given up hope of ever hearing from Beckett when, one dark and stormy early evening in late November, as we were preparing a spaghetti and meatballs dinner at the rue du Sabot culinary emporium, a knock came at the door. The noise of the rain on the glass roof above was so deafening we barely heard the knock. When finally I answered, there, outlined in the light, was a tall gaunt figure in a raincoat, water streaming down from the brim of the nondescript hat jammed onto the top of his head. From inside the folds of his raincoat he fished a package, not even wrapped against the downpour: a manuscript bound in a black imitation-leather binder.
“You asked me for this,” he said, thrusting the package into my hand. “Here it is.”
At which point I realized this was Watt, and the rain-soaked silhouette Mr. Beckett himself.
“Thank you,” I managed. “You must be drenched. Won’t you come in?”
“Can’t,” he said. “I must be off. Let me know what you think.” He pronounced the last word as though it had no h—“t’ink.” With which he turned and strode off into the night.
I turned back to the others, who had paid scant attention to the business at the door, and held my trophy aloft. “Watt,” I declared. “The long-lost Watt!”
“What?” Patrick asked.
“I said, Watt.”
“We know what you said,” Trocchi mimicked. “We just don’t know what you mean.”
“Sounds to me like ‘Who’s on First,’” Charlie Hatcher murmured. Charlie was a Canadian poet, a rather loose member of the Merlin group, whose wonderfully inventive poem “Quintus Mucius Scaevola: IV” had appeared in the first issue. Obviously the only other member of the clan aware of the classic baseball routine.
Having carried that terrible punning as far as it would go, I cried, “Enough,” opened the black binder, and glanced at the neatly typed first page.
Mr Hackett turned the corner and saw, in the failing light, at some little distance, his seat. It seemed to be occupied. This seat, the property very likely of the municipality, or of the public, was of course not his, but he thought of it as his. This was Mr Hackett’s attitude towards things that pleased him. He knew they were not his, but he thought of them as his. He knew they were not his, because they pleased him.
It was coming up to seven o’clock when I read those lines for the first time, and we quickly decided that the pleasure should be shared. We would read it aloud till we could no more. Eschewing dinner, literally turning our backs on the spaghetti and meatballs, I began to read aloud. Already by page 2 the assembled group—Trocchi, Jane, Patrick, Christopher, Charlie, and I—were smiling despite ourselves:
Mr Hackett decided, after some moments, that if they [the people on the bench] were waiting for a tram they had been doing so for some time. For the lady held the gentleman by the ears, and the gentleman’s hand was on the lady’s thigh, and the lady’s tongue was in the gentleman’s mouth … The lady now removing her tongue from the gentleman’s mouth, he put his into hers. Fair do, said Mr Hackett. Taking a pace forward, to satisfy himself that the gentleman’s other hand was not going to waste, Mr Hackett was shocked to find it limply dangling over the back of the seat, with between its fingers the spent three quarters of a cigarette.
By the time I had got to page 15, well into the shenanigans of Tetty and Goff, we were all guffawing, if that is the proper term, for the laughter was now bordering on the loud and coarse. When my voice gave out about page 22 or 23, I passed the manuscript to Christopher, who, wiping his eyes on the back of his sleeve, took up the task, Mr. and Mrs. Nixon having made their departure into the gloaming, Mr. Hackett having scratched to satisfaction the crest of his hunch—for he was hunchbacked, in case I have failed to note that salient point—on the backboard of his beloved bench, and Watt, known at this point only by his bulbous red nose and the intriguing fact that, seven years before, he was seen in the street with one foot bare, which prompted Mr. Nixon to lend him five shillings with which to buy a boot, or a shoe, that sum now having ballooned to seven shillings—no, six and nine pence, for it is important to be precise—presumably the difference being explained by seven years of interest.
Christopher opened to Watt’s first smile, at least the first known to the reader:
Watt had watched people smile and thought he understood how it was done. And it was true that Watt’s smile, when he smiled, resembled more a smile than a sneer, for example, or a yawn. But there was something wanting to Watt’s smile, some little thing was lacking, and people who saw it for the first time, and most people who saw it saw it for the first time, were sometimes in doubt as to what expression exactly was intended. To many it seemed a simple sucking of the teeth.
Watt used this smile sparingly.
Alternating around the room, we read well into the evening, some readers lasting up to twenty pages before voice or wit gave out, others no more than a round dozen. But as the church bells of St. Germain tolled ten, there was a pause as Patrick, the greatest appreciator of food, paused in mid-sentence and said: “I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry.”
The pasta we had been planning now lay thickly, heavily in its enormous pot. Could it be revived, or were we destined to repair to a restaurant nearby, a certain strain on our collective budget? I lit the burner and stirred. After five minutes, little or no sign of life. But soon the faint odor of basil and Parmesan gave a ray of hope. We poured red wine all around, into our odd mélange of glassware, ranging from two true crystal stem glasses, lifted from God knows where, to lowly yogurt
jars. But the wine, as usual Buci’s best, tasted good and warming in whatever its container. By the end of the second glass, with Jane now in charge at the burner, the pasta, definitely coaxed back to life, as surely as from the place of the skull two thousand years before—the comparison is unfair, but there you are—was dished out in generous proportions. Above, the late autumn rain still thundered. Undeterred, the reading went on. Incredibly, no one fell asleep or even nodded. A testimony to genius.
By the time we had reached the end, the mathematical byplay among Mr. Nolan, Mr. Case, and Mr. Gorman—presaging the sucking-stone sequence of Molloy, which my friends had not yet read—we were exhausted but exhilarated. Then we saw there was, on the page following the end, “Addenda.” Footnoted as follows: “The following precious and illuminating material should be carefully studied. Only fatigue and disgust prevented its incorporation.” The author’s final self-inflicted comment. Consciously erudite, with commentary in four or five languages, not to be taken seriously, unless for some odd reason you cared to. We cared to. Our favorite note of the “Addenda”: “for all the good that frequent departures out of Ireland had done him, he might just as well have stayed there.”
“The author speaking of himself?” Trocchi wondered.
“One would presume,” Charlie Hatcher said. “He seems to have had no recognition at home.”
“You mean in the English language?” I asked.
“Not much more here in France,” Patrick said.
“How does this compare with Molloy and Malone?” Alex wanted to know.
“There’s a lot of Watt in Molloy,” I said. “Same humor, same self-mockery. Watt is more specific: we’re still clearly in Ireland, whereas in Molloy and Malone time and place are on a whole different plane. Anywhere. Cosmic.”
“Big word,” said Christopher.
“Not too big,” I said. “This man’s a genius.”
“I loved it,” Jane said. “I really loved it.”
“How often do you spend eight hours laughing,” Patrick murmured, as if in awe, “over a novel?”
“How do we feel about including a piece in the next issue?” I said, glancing at my watch as if, at 4:00 a.m., we could call the printer.
“We must,” Jane declared.
“The problem is,” Trocchi said slowly, “the full content is almost ready for the printer. We’ve no room. Number 3’s already at sixty-four pages.”
“Let’s make room,” Patrick said.
“Quiet down there, or we’ll call the goddamn flics!” thundered from overhead. Cops were the last thing we wanted, what with our official papers not necessarily in impeccable order. “Do you know what fucking time it is!” Another angry voice from above. Unsure, we glanced collectively at our respective watches. “Five-oh-six,” Hatcher asserted. “I m-make it oh-eight,” Patrick corrected, barely suppressing a hiccup, “coming up to five-oh-nine.” “Your watches are all friggin’ fast,” said Trocchi, laughing with the authority of the true drunken leader. “I make it four fifty-nine!” And, as if to end the argument, the pre-matins bells of St. Germain began to toll the hour. So it was, even though it was not as late as—or earlier than—our upstairs plaintiffs had thought, we shouted up our apologies and resumed debating among ourselves, more quietly now, whether we should, or financially could, interrupt the uncertain flow of the magazine and add an extra eight pages to the issue. The decision, by a unanimous vote, was to do so. The question of how to raise the money for the extra pages was adjourned until the morrow. In our state, to try to calculate the precise sum was beyond our poor power to add or subtract. But to have solved such an important, perhaps even historic, literary problem in less than twelve hours made us feel that the day, the night, had not been in vain.
* * *
Next morning—correction: at one o’clock the following afternoon, it only seemed like morning—we gathered at the Royal for breakfast, to read and ponder Beckett’s choice of text, which I had managed to locate with one bloodshot eye (the other refused to open, even after a warming Bloody Mary).
I rescued the rain-spattered envelope from the detritus and tore it open. A spidery hand, not easy to read. But, indeed, the author made known his wishes:
Mr. Seaver:
Here is the manuscript of Watt which you requested. In the event you wish to extract something from it for the magazine, it should be the passage beginning with the paragraph “Watt had little to say on the subject of the second or closing period of his stay in Mr Knott’s house” and ending with the paragraph beginning
“But he could not bear that we should part, never to meet again…”
Please let me know if this is agreeable to you.
Sincerely,
Samuel Beckett
The chosen passage was the second or closing period of Watt’s stay in Mr. Knott’s house, one of the funniest but also most reader-demanding in the entire novel. Almost two pages described, in endless, excruciating, hilarious, mathematical detail, the various accoutrements with which Mr. Knott clothed—or did not clothe—his feet:
As for his feet, sometimes he wore on each a sock, or on the one a sock and on the other a stocking, or a boot, or a shoe, or a slipper, or a sock and boot, or a sock and shoe, or a sock and slipper,… or a stocking and slipper, or nothing at all.
And so on through every conceivable variant. Later the same passage offers a complete rundown of Mr. Knott’s movements in the privacy of his own room:
Here he stood. Here he sat. Here he knelt. Here he lay. Here he moved, to and fro, from the door to the window, from the window to the door; from the window to the door, from the door to the window; from the fire to the bed, from the bed to the fire; from the bed to the fire, from the fire to the bed; from the door to the fire, from the fire to the door …
And, to top it off, we are given an inventory of the furniture in Mr. Knott’s room—“this solid and tasteful furniture”—which Mr. Knott, on different days of the week, rearranges according to some mysterious but presumably logical plan:
Thus it was not rare to find, on the Sunday, the tallboy on its feet by the fire, and the dressing-table on its head by the bed, and the night-stool on its face by the door, and the washhand-stand on its back by the window; and, on the Monday, the tallboy on its back by the bed, and the dressing-table on its face by the door, and the night-stool on its back by the window, and the washhand-stand on its feet by the fire …
And so on for nineteen days, till “Friday fortnight.” And, the author reminds us, that “inventory” fails to take into account the movement of the chairs in the room, which “were never still,” and the corners of the room, which “were never empty.”
Predating and presaging Molloy’s sucking stones by several years, this same Wattian attention to detail was, in the context of the novel, as provocative as it was innovative. Beckett was turning not only the furniture on its head (or its face) but the modern novel, as Joyce had done before him. And, I realized, though Beckett had often been accused of emulating the master’s erudite style in his early works, here he had taken one of Joyce’s challenging precepts, which was to explore the ultimate possibilities of a given situation, and molded it to his own literary-comedic ends.
Brilliant, I thought, even more so in the light of day. But if the passage were taken out of context, and without the knowledge of the astute Joycean connection, would our readers get it or would they (more likely) consign Merlin to the nearest dustbin or wastebasket in anger or frustration? Christopher was of the latter bent.
“Put more than a few readers off,” he muttered.
“No question,” Charlie said somberly. We were already on our second cup of coffee, so there was still a good way to go before normalcy set in.
Alex shook his head, and I thought he was about to agree when he said, softly but firmly, “The man’s amazing. We’ll not only make room for it in number 3, we’ll open the issue with it.”
And so we did.
8
Meeting Sartre
IN THAT DARK WINTER of 1952, the magazine moved to a new printer, a Monsieur Arrault, whose worthy establishment lay in Tours, some 150 miles southwest of Paris on the Loire. Trocchi had, several weeks before, burst into the rue du Sabot, Jane not far behind, beaming and waving a sheet of paper. “We have a printer who can give us two colors. We’ve just come from Tours. Two colors! My God, d’you know what this means?
“There’s something else,” Trocchi reported, as visibly proud as a marshal of France bringing news to Napoleon that the gates of Moscow were at hand. “No down payment. No advance. Payment only on delivery.”
Suddenly the second color relegated itself to second place.
“How did you work that?” Patrick asked, clearly impressed.
“Charm,” Alex said, modestly. “Charm and Jane. I think the printer’s in love with Jane.”
She laughed. “Tell the truth, Alex.”
“All right.” He smiled. “We heard about this printer, called him, hopped on the train this morning, and by mid-afternoon had a deal. He was dying to get some business, and the sight of our first two issues convinced him we were creditworthy. Down payment of 10 percent, that’s all. And we get two colors…”
“Throughout?” Christopher asked.
“Not quite,” Alex said. “There’s a little nozzle at the end of each sheet coming through that gives a touch of color, a spray, at the end of the run.”
“Hmmm,” Patrick said, obviously less impressed.
“But that’s not the point,” Alex went on. “The point is the payment terms, don’t you see? Gives us more time to raise the money to pay for the issue, more income flowing in from numbers 1 and 2, that sort of thing.”
* * *
By its third issue, Merlin was a changed magazine, and not just because of the second color and a printer in the provinces. Not only had it become the voice of a future immortal; it had also become, by natural evolution, not so much politicized as, in the Sartrean sense, engagé—politically involved—through the inauguration of the Chronicles section. The first such offering was an extract from the work of a Hungarian doctor who had survived Auschwitz. It was the first, or one of the very first, eyewitness accounts of what had gone on in the KZ horror barracks during World War II. After the liberation of the camps, the author had returned to Hungary, where he had been reunited with his wife and daughter, both of whom had miraculously survived as well.
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