The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  Here I had come out of my second viewing armed with all sorts of literary theories and enlightened precisions—for since that first performance I had given the play much thought—with which to answer her questions, which I assumed would be plentiful, and in a handful of sentences she had left me at the gate. “You didn’t live through the war here,” she went on, “but you tell me Mr. Beckett did. I doubt he could have written this play if he had not suffered the German occupation.” Why? I asked. “Well, one reading might be—and I’m obviously wrong—that Pozzo is the Germans and Lucky is us French, don’t you think? They too had a leash around our neck, they beat us and killed us for no reason at all, they made us sing and dance to their tune, were as cruel and senseless as Pozzo is. Then, in the second act, Pozzo is laid low, blinded, just as the Germans were in 1945 and later. Just a thought. I’m being far too literal, I know, for this play’s universal. I’d like to know what you think.”

  I looked at this budding musician, this lass who had read perhaps a tenth of the books I had, and said: “I think we should go have dinner.”

  18

  Bigger Decision, No Hesitation

  I HAD MENTIONED to Alex the two Beckett stories I had uncovered from Les temps modernes and Fontaine, namely “Suite” and “L’expulsé,” extolling their virtues and saying we must publish one or the other, perhaps in due course both.

  “Sure,” Trocchi said, “but we need them in English.”

  “Only Beckett can do them,” I said. “I’m sure he’ll oblige.”

  I was wrong. “No, no.” Beckett shook his head emphatically, over a drink one afternoon at the Coupole in Montparnasse. “I couldn’t face those old chestnuts again. All I see is their shortcomings.”

  I must have looked disappointed—I had told him we ardently desired one of the stories for our next issue—for he suddenly brightened and said, “Why don’t you try your hand at them, Seaver? I’d be happy to look over your translations once they’re done.”

  I knew both stories well, having read them three or four times at least, and nodded. Why not? “If it would save you time for your own work,” I said. “It would that,” he said. “It would that … I have an indigestion from old work.”

  Now, two weeks later, back in my rue du Sabot emporium, I was having second thoughts. I had reread “La fin”—the title of the second part of the work called “Suite”—slowly and quietly. Better even than the first reading. In fact, one of the most moving stories I had ever read. Some references obscure, the prose daunting but not impossible, I concluded. Such is the cockiness of youth. The seeming obscurities Beckett would elucidate, I was sure. I figured at worst I could come up with a draft of the story’s twenty-five pages in two to three weeks. That schedule was set back a trifle when, after the three weeks were up and I had indeed done a full draft, I read it through the next day and decided it needed to marinate, if that’s the term, so I set it aside and went back to my own writing. The only problem was, the words I managed to put on a page were constantly haunted by my memory of “La fin.” My own sentences so mundane and one-dimensional next to Beckett’s. As I came to realize just how dense, how simple yet fraught with meaning his story was, I found myself writing less each day until I came to a complete halt. Frozen. Blocked. Hopeless. Finally, feeling very near the end myself, I went back to my Beckettus interruptus. Four hours later, I had fashioned two full paragraphs of what I considered “ready-to-show” material. A triumph or a disaster? At least something, which I had learned was generally—not always—better than nothing. I went to bed at some wee hour feeling utterly depressed, convinced I was letting Alex down, and Beckett too, for he had told me more than once how relieved he was, not having to face that “old muck” again. I awoke with a major hangover and realized, too late, where the time had gone: a bottle and a half of gros rouge followed by several cognacs. I quickly dressed and hurried off to St. Germain des Prés. “Coffee,” I said, “black. Double. No, triple.”

  “So,” the silhouette of Alex boomed when he found me at my corner table at the Royal, “you look as though you’ve just been interrogated by the CI of A.”

  “CIA,” I corrected mechanically. “It’s simply that…” I started to explain, then thought better of it. “Nothing. Chalk it up to a bad night.”

  “And the Beckett story,” he said, “will it make the next issue?”

  “No,” I said. “I misjudged the damn thing. I’ve done a first draft, but it’s not easy. I mean, for Chrissake, you’ve read the man’s prose. And the stories are even more complex and difficult than Watt. I reread my draft the other night and kept thinking Beckett was looking over my shoulder.”

  “You’re too harsh on yourself. He’s grateful you’re doing the job. Can’t you just polish it up and give it in?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll work on it for the next couple of weeks and send it off to him.”

  “He has to see it beforehand? I thought he gave you carte blanche.”

  “He did. Still, I can’t imagine him not seeing it before we go to press.”

  “Then we’ll run the Genet,” he said. “And I have a couple of poems to fill out the pages we’d reserved for Beckett.”

  Over the next two or three weeks, I heavily edited the draft and again set it aside. Finally, a month to the day after I had translated the opening lines—

  They dressed me and gave me money. I knew what the money was for, it was for my traveling expenses. When it was gone, they said, I would have to get some more, if I wanted to go on traveling. The same for my shoes, when they were worn out I would have to have them repaired, or get myself another pair, or go on my way barefoot, if I wanted to go on …

  —I produced a fair copy I thought worthy of submitting to the author. Meanwhile, though, Trocchi begged me one last time, just before the printing deadline, to give it one more shot to make the issue for which it had been intended, Spring–Summer 1953. I still felt guilty, because I knew “La fin” was to open the magazine. But I also felt strongly that I had been right to spend as much time translating it as I had, for when I sent it off, at least it read smoothly and struck me as faithful to the original as I could make it.

  Ah! The cockiness of youth.

  * * *

  I paid largely for the fourth number of Merlin out of my earnings as the official translator-interpreter for an American construction company under contract with the U.S. Air Force to build a base in eastern France, just outside the village of Chaumont.

  Let me explain. One breathtaking icy morning in January, having biked to the embassy on the Place de la Concorde to have my passport stamped, I had seen on the bulletin board an announcement seeking applications for the job and indicating a salary that struck me as astronomical, compared with my then-current income, derived mainly from the occasional article in a New York paper on French theater and cinema. The job would last from three to six months; payment was in dollars. On a whim, I filled out the form and left it with the embassy clerk.

  I had almost forgotten, when two or three weeks later a letter arrived at the rue du Sabot summoning me to the embassy for an interview. Did I really want to leave Paris? The city had become not only home but a cherished place, where each day when I woke up I felt good, challenged but comfortable. And what about my budding relationship with Jeannette, whom I had not seen nearly enough since New Year’s Eve? And would my absence mean lessening my involvement with the magazine, just as it was finding its stride? On the other hand, there was the lure of much-needed money: even three or four months at Chaumont would pay for one issue and leave me enough to live on for another six months, maybe longer, without worry.

  That night I mentioned casually to Jeannette that I might be leaving Paris—not permanently, I assured her, but for a few months. I would be back in Paris every weekend. She understood, she said, and even encouraged me to take the job. For a moment I felt panic. Her cavalier reaction was a clear, and obviously negative, comment on our new relationship. Oh, well, easy come, easy go—ne
xt! But I was dead wrong. “Work, the coming two or three months will be so intense for me at the conservatory,” she explained, “I won’t have much free time anyway. So we—that is, if you want to—can see each other every other weekend.” I now felt a sudden stone settle in my stomach. Every other weekend! I realized that if indeed I were to commit this folly of leaving Paris, I had hoped and planned to see the young lady every weekend. “And maybe,” she continued, “at Easter break I could come out and see you.” Easter! That was fucking months away! For several days I argued ardently with myself, until I was so confused I decided to toss a coin: heads I go, tails I stay. It was heads.

  Before the interview, I borrowed a French technical dictionary and brushed up on engineering terms. At the embassy I was greeted by a trim, blue-clad air force colonel, who was shortly joined by a short, squinty, mustachioed French employee of the Ponts et Chaussées—the French government department in charge of building and maintaining roads and bridges and, I assumed in the instance, airstrips—who fired questions at me thick and fast, in a Burgundian accent that at first threw me off but to which I adapted sufficiently to see him finally nodding in approval as I responded. After fifteen minutes or so, the two men withdrew to confer. I sat there wondering what the hell I was doing there, dreading a positive result. When the colonel reentered, thanked me, and said I’d be hearing from him, I was almost relieved. I figured it was a polite kiss-off.

  Safely back on the Left Bank, I told Alex and Jane that if I took the job, I could pay for a good part of the next issue. They exchanged glances that betrayed relief, if not delight. As for Austryn: “paranoid” was the word that came to mind.

  “Mark my words, Dick, this is not defense: America’s preparing for World War III. Do you really want to be part of that?”

  I was beginning to be allergic to him.

  “It will pay for the magazine, Austryn, which means a great deal to us,” Alex said. Jane nodded her pretty bangs in agreement.

  “Turn it down,” Austryn said.

  “They haven’t offered it to me yet.”

  In any case, four or five months wasn’t long, I told myself. Still, it was with a very heavy heart that I boarded the train one Sunday morning in early February at the Gare de l’Est, battered suitcase containing engineering dictionary in tow, for this unromantic town in the Haute-Marne called Chaumont, population 18,452. Exactly 265 kilometers from Paris. Infinity. What in the world was I doing?

  I had spent the evening before with Jeannette, both of us trying to make light of the “adventure,” as she called it. Only when, late in the evening, a silent tear rolled down her pretty cheek did I know how she truly felt. I was hopelessly in love with this young lady, and the first thing I was doing was pulling up stakes and moving away. Smart fellow, Richard: straight to the head of the class!

  19

  A Bigger Decision

  CHAUMONT was a nothing place, one of those bleak French towns that either had seen better days or, more likely, had never known any, but had played its dismal role in World War I, battered by both sides, occupied by the advancing Germans, retaken by the stalwart French, as if its possession were key to victory, whereas if the successive occupiers had taken a closer look upon arrival, they would probably have skedaddled without a backward glance. Which was more or less how I felt after a cursory stroll through town, replete with its echoes of that earlier war: avenue du Maréchal Foch, rue de Verdun, rue Victoire de la Marne …

  The only half-decent hotel in town was L’Étoile d’Or, whose rooms were pseudo-sumptuously furnished in faded velvet and imitation Louis XV furniture. The baldachin bed was so tall you had to high-jump into it, and so soft you sank into its generous center as if enveloped in Leda’s Spartan arms.

  The deal, air force arranged, was that you took your breakfast and dinner there, lunch at the base itself, where there was an American canteen. The raw terrain, soon to be an air base, was several kilometers out of town, on a slight plateau with magnificent views in all directions. At present, the only man-made edifice among the fields and trees was a wooden prefab that served as the engineering office. My first day on the job was a shock, both culture and work. After four and a half years in Paris, it was as though I had been suddenly transported back to the States without passing Go, despite the presence of the French engineers, one of whom was the Burgundian who had interviewed me rapid-fire at the embassy. The room was filled with long tables, on which were unrolled vast blueprints. After introductions—in addition to the colonel, who was in charge, there were half a dozen American engineers from the civilian construction company under contract with the government, and two French civil service employees of Ponts et Chaussées—and before I had even finished my first morning coffee, I was urgently pressed into service, for none of the Americans spoke a word of French, and vice versa. I wouldn’t say I won the immediate respect of both sides, but given that they were equally cross-language-crippled, the fact I was fluent, even though technically challenged, gave me an advantage, and I scored extra points with the French by having little or no accent—certainly not the heavy American accent they especially mocked and detested, for reasons known only to them, for other countries’ citizens, notably the Spanish, massacred their beloved French without incurring a trace of reproach from the Gauls.

  The day started frostily and ended warily, as both sides, like two boxers feeling each other out in the first round, were clearly sizing each other up. One must remember that although the Americans, just eight years before, had been received gratefully and warmly, indeed unreservedly, as liberators by the French, political schisms had quickly intruded as America’s growing obsession with the dangers presumably posed by the Soviet Union collided with France’s—and indeed most of Europe’s—more subtle and complex views wherein the Soviet Union posed not nearly the threat that Germany did, even a Germany on its knees. The French had seen it all before: defeated and humiliated in 1918—“never to rise again,” many political pundits had predicted at the time—Germany in less than a generation had not only been resurrected but set out once again to conquer France, if not the world. In 1939, France was still war weary and blood thin, its potential military ranks depleted by the devastating human toll of World War I, its politicians’ attitudes tempered by their firsthand knowledge of the horrors of war, not pacifists per se but, in their own eyes, realists who would do their damnedest to avoid armed conflict.

  The American building of military bases on French soil, a ring to act as a second tier of defense, was looked upon dubiously in many quarters, fed and nurtured by the influential French Communist press. If Americans simply did not understand how the Europeans, and especially the French, could be blind to the clear and present danger posed by the Soviets, the French simply did not understand what they termed American paranoia on the subject. So my job, I quickly realized, was not only to translate but, wherever possible, to interpret and explain, hopefully without bias. So when Monsieur Ponts et Chaussées would corner me and ask, “What did le colonel mean when he said this or that?” or, from the Americans, “Why does Monsieur Grenouille have a hair up his ass this morning?” I would placate or smooth ruffled feathers as best I could. Each side had a job to do, but suspicion was rife, and I had to show, especially to the French, that I not only was impartial but understood and respected their reservations and concerns.

  By the end of the second week the frost was thawing, and a month into the job the early wan smiles had evolved into guttural laughter, and even a jovial slap or two on transatlantic backs, as both sides became aware that they were dealing with fellow professionals with no hidden agenda.

  The colonel, a gruff man of few words, hovered, responding only when a technical question was posed or a decision had to be made. To his credit, for this was an American project, bought and paid for by Washington, the colonel by now most often conferred with his French counterpart before lowering the gavel. Much of that early time was spent discussing the orientation of the runways and the placement
of the buildings, centering on the control tower. If I understood, this was to be a fairly large base, accommodating the largest heavy bombers. In spite of the various cultural bumps, a camaraderie set in, and we all, ultimately and improbably, worked well together for four months, building the base. Soon after my stint in Chaumont, American fliers arrived and encamped at the airbase as if it had been there for years. Little did I know or could possibly foresee, one of those flyers would be James Salter. Our paths did not cross until years later in Paris and New York, when we became close friends. In fact, I always regretted not being his publisher, but his work was spoken for elsewhere.

  Those first days passed inchingly for me. My colleagues, both American and French, were housed together at the other end of town, in private houses rented by the government, and though they were perfectly affable at work, none made any move to integrate me into their evenings. Nor, in all fairness, did I exert any visible effort to ingratiate myself, quite content to spend my evenings reading and, with the resources remaining, writing. Billy Mack, a man from upstate New York who had graduated from Cornell only three or four years before, offered, “But, fuck, man! I spent a week in Paris before coming out here, and as far as I could tell, all they do is sit on the goddamn café terraces and drink wine from breakfast on. How can you call them industrious?”

  “They do drink coffee in the morning,” I assured him.

  “Hell, man, maybe some do,” he conceded, “but I saw a bunch of them at eight in the morning, right there on the Champs-Élysées”—he pronounced the first word as if it were what a horse does to its bit, and mangled the second beyond recognition, but no matter—“at the counter downing a glass of red wine! And not just one. Anyway, maybe it’s because their goddamn coffee is so bitter. I tried it one day and couldn’t get the first sip down.”