The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  To date, the only publisher in France courageous enough to publish Genet, whose books dealt with theft, murder, pimping, and above all homosexuality, vividly if poetically depicted, was L’Arbalète, a small and relatively impecunious house in the south of France. Perhaps geography had something to do with it: with Paris the center of everything in the country, the periphery could get away with things impossible even to envisage in the capital. Daring was in direct proportion to the distance from the Île de la Cité.

  That night again, in our rue du Sabot refuge, our world headquarters, we sat around reading The Thief’s Journal. We knew we were reading an important work. Studded with stunning images, of language almost liturgical and yet of the gutter. Thief and saint at once. Abject and proud. And, in its introspection, as deeply honest as man can be about himself and the netherworld around, a world of pimps and crooks, of racketeers and escaped convicts. For me it did not have the multileveled beauty of Beckett, but, no question, Genet was opening doors into hidden rooms, dark landscapes that had never before been depicted with such candor and candescence. As with Watt, however, very difficult to extract. Finally we picked a section in which the narrator, enamored of the criminal, the “splendid beast” Stilitano, roams the lower depths of Barcelona, thieving, whoring, lying, self-castigating.

  From Sartre, who had written hundreds of thousands of words on Genet, with whom he was obviously fascinated, we picked a scant two pages, which Austryn and I translated:

  Not all who would be are Narcissus. Many who lean over the water see only a vague human figure. Genet sees himself everywhere; the dullest surfaces reflect his image; even in others he perceives himself, thereby bringing to light their deepest secrets. The disturbing theme of the double, the image, the counterpart, the enemy brother, is found in all his works.

  Each of them has the strange property of being both itself and the reflection of itself. Genet brings before us a dense and teeming throng which intrigues us, transports us and changes into Genet beneath Genet’s gaze. Hitler appears, talks, lives; he removes his mask: it was Genet. But the little servant girl with the swollen feet who meanwhile was burying her child—that was Genet too. In The Thief’s Journal the myth of the double has assumed its most reassuring, most common, most natural form. Here Genet speaks of Genet without intermediary. He talks of his life, of his wretchedness and glory, of his loves; he tells the story of his thoughts. One might think that, like Montaigne, he is going to draw a good-humored and familiar self-portrait. But Genet is never familiar, even with himself. He does, to be sure, tell us everything. The whole truth, nothing but the truth, but is it the sacred truth … He reassures us only to disturb us further … Genet the novelist, speaking of Genet the thief, is more of a thief than the thief; the thief and his double are alike sacred. Thus there comes into being that new object: a mythology of the myth (like the blues song that was called The Birth of the Blues); behind the first-degree myths—The Thief, Murder, the Beggar, the Homosexual—we discover the reflective myths: the Poet, the Saint, the Double, Art. Nothing but myths, then; a Genet with a Genet stuffing, like the prunes of Tours. If, however, you are able to see at the seam the thin line separating the enveloping myth from the enveloped myth, you will discover the truth, which is terrifying. That is why I do not fear to call this book, the most beautiful that Genet has written, the Dichtung und Wahrheit of homosexuality.

  17

  Big Decisions, Taken Hesitantly

  SO HERE WE HAD COME AROUND to another Christmas Eve at the Manchons’. Replay of the previous Christmas. Again I arrived to find Frank and Louis in the kitchen opening oysters. Again I shed my jacket, donned an apron, and joined in. I had made enough progress not to seem like an oyster dunce, but still my non-knife hand was encased in a heavy mitt, the better to save the fingers from unwilling amputation. In the living room the other guests—a dozen or so in all—were sipping champagne around a handsome Christmas tree that was adorned not with the ornaments I had grown up with but with golden garlands and real candles, as yet unlit.

  We oyster openers joined the others and shook hands all around, or double bussed the ladies if that degree of intimacy had been reached. For me it had not, except for Jeanne, who a year before had proclaimed me a family member, therefore free to brush my puckered lips across both her cheeks. Her paramour, the count, limited himself to kissing her hand, a practice I knew I would never achieve no matter how many years I lived here: one was born to it, I decided. Hand kissing was a dying custom, but when in its presence, I always felt I was being given a privileged glimpse of an earlier, gentler period.

  Among the guests were Paul, Roszi again, along with young Jeannette in a stunning pale green dress. I had thought about her often. She was even more beautiful than before. I made a point of sitting beside her.

  While I had little memory of the evening’s no doubt scintillating conversation the next day, I remembered virtually every word Jeannette had said. Even by European standards, she was surprisingly mature for her years, which I ascribed in large part to the fact that her adored father was a font of information on all subjects: political, economic, cultural, artistic. At home he was just as likely to ruminate aloud on subjects as he would with his colleagues at the Chambre des Députés or the Quai d’Orsay. He was unquestionably one of Paris’s most respected journalists. What’s more, he was passionate about his work and could never delve doggedly or deeply enough into a given subject in his search for the hidden meaning, the deeper truth. I had been present at enough dinners with him to share that general esteem. He was never pompous, never overbearing: he listened as intently as he spoke, and if he contradicted, he did so with an elegance that made it seem as if he were agreeing, not contending. On more than one night I went home and, even though it was the wee hours and my mind not the clearest, recorded in my journal his thoughts and opinions about European politics and literature.

  Near the end of the evening, Jeannette turned to Frank and said: “I’ve been invited to a dancing party New Year’s Eve. If you’re by chance free, would you be my escort?”

  Frank, the epitome of courtliness, smiled and raised his hands palm out in a gesture of self-deprecating hopelessness. “My dear Jeannette,” he said, “I’d be honored. But the problem is, I don’t dance.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  “I do,” said a voice to her left. Mine. “I’d be happy to escort you.”

  She looked at me as if for the first time. “You would? Thank you. That would be lovely.”

  Then I suddenly had an attack of very cold feet at the idea. “Bear in mind,” I said, “I’m no Fred Astaire.” I was waiting for her to say, “That’s fine. I’m no Ginger Rogers,” but all she said was “I think you’ll have a good time.”

  * * *

  New Year’s Eve. I almost didn’t recognize Jeannette. She slipped off her fur coat to reveal a sleek silver dress that even to my untrained eye was clearly haute couture, her feet shod in Cinderella slippers, also of silver. All of a sudden I felt awkward and rustic in my too-shiny dark blue suit. I also knew the collar of my white shirt was slightly frayed, and as I shook her hand, I hoisted my suit coat a smidgen higher.

  After dinner Jeannette’s parents drove us to the dance, a good half-hour drive across a Paris more brightly lit than I had ever seen it, as the City of Light struggled mightily to regain its prewar glory. The “dance” was in Neuilly. We crossed the Pont Alexandre III, passed the Grand Palais, circled the Rond Point, and headed up the Champs-Élysées toward the Arc de Triomphe. Despite my Left Bank prejudice, I marveled and had to admit this was one of the great avenues of the world. Tonight its pavements were packed with milling throngs, its restaurants and cafés were crowded to overflowing, and the relatively few cars, mostly prewar, passing up and down in slow succession, noisily honked their welcome to the New Year, sounding for all the world like a flock of oversized geese.

  Marie-Claire greeted us at the door and introduced us to the hosts, her sister and brother-in-law, who respo
nded with smiles so perfunctory and artificial I wanted to flee. But a look at Jeannette, all innocence and smiles, quickly reassured me. I spied several of the men appraising Jeannette with lupine eyes. My suit, and especially my frayed collar, I felt, were becoming more and more conspicuous by the minute. Fortunately, the also tuxedoed orchestra—how can you tell the guests from the hired help?—that had been warming up on a platform in the far corner broke into its first number. Taking the Cinderella child in my arms for the first time, I prayed that my wooden feet would not betray me. “Where are you, Miss Cassidy, now that I need you?”

  Jeannette was a natural dancer, and we flowed across the room—yes, yes, at least in the mind of the beholder—like Fred and Ginger. This was the first time I had danced in years. And this beautiful girl in my arms was making it a total pleasure. So Miss Cassidy’s Dancing School of my tender Connecticut youth was not a total waste, after all.

  * * *

  I was eleven or maybe twelve when my mother broke the news. “This fall, you’ll be attending Miss Cassidy’s Dancing School”—and my world suddenly darkened. None of the boys my age knew how to dance nor had any desire to learn. Sports was my life: football in the fall, wrestling in the winter, baseball in the spring and summer. Saturday afternoons from September on, I would sit glued to the radio broadcasts of Cornell’s Big Red football powerhouse, to the exploits of Brud Holland, Cornell’s black running back.

  “Why do I have to go to dancing school?” “Because it’s part of growing up. A social grace you’re going to need. One day you’ll thank me for sending you.” Whenever my mother made me do something I knew was wrong, or useless—like forcing me to take Latin just because she had been a Latin teacher years before—I was sure I would hate it. And Miss Cassidy’s was the pits. Twenty-five or thirty boys and girls all dressed up—they in dark velvet usually, we in white shirt and tie—standing on opposite sides of the room until the piano began and we had to move to the center and take a girl around the waist with one hand, which was bad enough, then grasp her right hand and start to move our feet. Half the time I would walk on her toes and have to say “Sorry,” and she would say, “Oh, that’s all right,” which it wasn’t, so why did she say it? Things got a little better when two of my boy classmates showed up. By the end of the year I had actually mastered the two-step and the waltz, though I could only do that one-two-three so many times before I lost it and had to start counting again.

  * * *

  Jeannette and I felt good in each other’s arms, and my awkwardness, which had returned as the champagne wore off, receded with every new song. Most songs were American and familiar, the French having taken to American music after the war as though they owned it, so much so that many American jazz musicians had pulled up stakes, taken the first available transatlantic, and begun to play in nightclubs throughout Paris. Besides, in France black musicians were not only truly welcomed but celebrated as musical heroes. Here one could mingle freely with whites, marry a white woman. France had its own objects of prejudice, but blacks were not among them.

  We danced, we held hands, we sat, we drank more champagne, we danced again. We were both falling hopelessly in love.

  At midnight we heralded the New Year—1953! Almost timidly, I kissed Jeannette. We danced again. I couldn’t let go of her.

  At dawn, we emerged into the nearly empty streets. It was time to send Cinderella home, but instead of hailing a cab to take her home, I spotted an all-night café on the near corner. We had to greet the gray new day together with warm croissants and steaming coffee. It was after seven when I kissed her good morning and put her in a cab. My head may have been light, but so were my feet. Spurning the idea of taking a taxi myself, I decided to hoof it home—a good hour’s walk. Occasionally, when walking simply wouldn’t do, I’d twist and twirl to some inner rhythm, a silent song on my lips. That morning, Maurice Chevalier had nothing on me. I was in love. My tour back home, first to the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées to the Place de la Concorde, across the now-silent bridge, its pale yellow lights like a necklace to dawn, and onto St. Germain, made me feel that morning as if I owned this city I loved. At least for a couple hours.

  * * *

  A few weeks before that magic night, when I had danced not in the rain but, ebullient if unappreciated and oh so in love, across all of Paris, modest posters on the Left Bank announced that a play by Samuel Beckett, En attendant Godot, the same work of which I had heard intriguing fragments at the French radio almost a year before, was scheduled to open in early January at the Théâtre de Babylone, a stone’s throw from my abode.

  At long last! Ever since that partial performance at the French radio, I had been obsessed with seeing the whole. Or even with reading it. My efforts to cajole a manuscript copy from Monsieur Lindon, by now a fledgling friend, were in vain. He was adamant. Had he read it? Of course! And? Extraordinaire! he would say. As good as the novels? He frowned. As good, but different … His words intrigued but didn’t satisfy. We will publish as soon as the play is on and Monsieur Beckett has approved all changes. Will Blin play Lucky? No, Beckett wrote the play with him in mind for Pozzo. So the intriguing tidbits fell thick and fast, whetting but not satisfying.

  When it was confirmed the play would open on January 5, I suggested to the Merlin group that we all go, but only Patrick spoke French well enough, and he was busy that weekend at his teaching post in the provinces. So I went alone, and when I say alone, I am close to literal, for there could not have been more than a dozen souls in the audience. As the play progressed, I realized I was in the presence of something special, the likes of which I had never read or witnessed. And that included the plays by two other new playwrights fresh on the scene of the Paris theater, the Romanian Eugène Ionesco and a Russian, Arthur Adamov, both of whom, like Beckett, were writing in French. (From my Paris notebook, spring 1953: “Note to self: Why are so many foreigners not only writing in French but, possibly, doing the most interesting work in their adopted language? Investigate.”)

  I came out of the theater that night with one goal: to see the play again, and to read the text, just out from Minuit. I had read the review by Robert Kemp in Le monde, which was generally positive, though in no wise enlightening. He found the Pozzo-Lucky duo, the master-to-slave relationship, “a rather heavy banality,” then redeemed himself slightly by calling it “ultimately poignant.” But he warned potential theatergoers: “This is probably a play devoid of genius … Still, Godot is sympathique.” Sympathique? Devoid of genius? Had Mr. Kemp and I seen the same play? The most damning review merely said: “This is a play where nothing happens. Twice.”

  Two or three weeks later I invited Jeannette to see the play with me. That night the audience had more than doubled, a good sign, but scarcely enough, I figured, to pay the actors, director, and theater, much less the author. Thirty-some, if memory serves. At the curtain, the applause was scattered, hesitant at best. When the lights went up, half the audience had already left, and several of the remaining heads were shaking, either in disbelief or in disappointment.

  Outside, we wandered silently toward the Luxembourg Gardens. It was a damp night, with a biting wind, but both of us apparently felt the need to walk and talk. How did she like it? She was stunned, fascinated. But she professed not to understand much of the play’s deeper meaning. How did she know it had a deeper meaning? Oh, of that she was sure. “Aren’t we all waiting for Godot,” she said, “whoever or whatever that might be? I found it funny and sad at the same time. Isn’t it maybe about how often useless it is to hope? And yet they come back night after night, which means they haven’t entirely given up hope?” I looked at her with admiring eyes. “Didn’t you have the feeling that Vladimir and Estragon had been waiting not just those two days but forever?” she went on.