Trocchi was first in with Young Adam, which for two years now had made the rounds of the established publishers, roughly a dozen in both England and America, without a taker but many polite turndowns, some full of praise but inevitably ending with “We regret, however, that we are unable to make you an offer for publication at this time,” and the closing cliché “We wish you better luck with another house.” “I’ll let it sit, old man,” he said. “Like a good Bordeaux. Maybe it will age well. Anyway, I’m not sending it out again!”
Now, more than a year later, he showed Young Adam to Girodias. It had a fair amount of strong sex in it, especially between the protagonist, Joe, and Ella the barge woman, but Maurice wanted more. “You’ll have to dirty it up,” he told Trocchi. That won’t be a problem, Trocchi declared. Jane confessed he was disappointed that the novel, into which he had poured his heart and talent, was becoming a mere DB—Dirty Book. While Alex was reworking Young Adam, Austryn, having handed over Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom, took on the task of translating Georges Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil—A Tale of Satisfied Desire—which the distinguished philosopher and novelist had written under the pseudonym of Lord Auch. My assignment was to translate Apollinaire’s Les exploits d’un jeune Don Juan, which we freely retitled Memoirs of a Young Rakehell, a charming work on the eroticism of adolescence the great poet had written a quarter century before.
The first green-covered titles of the Traveller’s Companion series appeared as though overnight. We marveled at the efficiency of Olympia’s printers, for whereas we had waited weeks for each issue of Merlin, Maurice seemed to move from manuscript to finished book in a matter of days. Trocchi, having sullied up Young Adam, turned to the other, more outrageous Apollinaire novel, Les onze mille verges—literally, The Eleven Thousand Rods—which Girodias rebaptized The Debauched Hospodar. How Alex, with his limited French, managed to “translate” Apollinaire remains a mystery. Did he get help from a native? I never knew. Whatever else he was, Girodias was a genius at both titles and pseudonyms. For the Apollinaire, he dubbed Alex “Oscar Mole,” one of his less brilliant choices but one that, once again, stressed the underground nature of the operation he was launching. Having acquitted himself admirably, and in jig time, of both Young Adam and the Apollinaire, Alex next transmogrified himself into a lady of little virtue, Frances Lengel, and dashed off, in a matter of weeks, a novel entitled Helen and Desire, an updated version of Fanny Hill that served as a kind of model for the genre.
Our new connection with Girodias and Olympia did not come without its pound of flesh. None of us was on very solid ground when it came to our legal status with the French authorities. Some had student visas, others short-term papers that left us open to penalties or outright expulsion if the type of literature we were churning out was ever discovered.
As the weeks wore on, we turned in our manuscripts and received the coveted five hundred dollars, with promises of more to come if the book reprinted. As noted, Olympia’s usual printing was five thousand copies, which meant in effect that Girodias was paying us a royalty of ten cents a book. To collect our money—so many pages, so many francs—we repaired to 13, rue Jacob. The front of the place was a bookshop, and Maurice had sublet the back, a tiny space mostly filled by a trestle table, behind which, enthroned on a slightly sagging mattress, sat Maurice, while off to one side, before a small desk littered with letters, invoices, and manuscripts of varying stripes and origins, sat his assistant, Lisa Rosenbaum, a green-eyed, dark-haired beauty. I mention the shop because it had revealed to us beyond the shadow of a doubt that the man who had become our gérant, the impeccably dressed, finely manicured owner of a Citroën traction avant, a person whom we had to a man, and indeed a woman, unquestionably accepted as our financial savior, was almost as poor as we. So poor, in fact, that when we turned in a manuscript, he would usually take out a thinning wad of franc notes and, instead of paying the total sum due, peel off a few to keep us going, he said, until we needed more. Often when we came for more, with further pages in hand of the promised work, he would evince surprise at the speed with which the earlier sum had disappeared, wondering out loud whether we had suddenly changed our façon de vivre, our “lifestyle,” pondering too whether indeed he had not paid us already the entire sum due, he could not recall, and when we assured him he had not, he looked pained, a parent wondering where and how the child had gone wrong, had so disappointed him, until finally, with sincere reluctance, he would reach into his shallow pocket for the storied wad and peel off a few more notes. This happened so often that we decided we should, we really should, put something in writing, both at the time of initial agreement and when sums were doled out, for we too ultimately found it difficult to remember how much we had received and how much remained due.
When a book reprinted, we would receive an additional sum. If it was hard, indeed heroically difficult, to pry out of him the money due for our Olympian labors, eventually he did settle, though the additional sums due for a reprint somehow never materialized.
23
Meeting Barney Rosset
NOW SAFELY BACK IN PARIS, I had to face up to our new challenges. The first of these was a decision to honor my fellowships and complete my Sorbonne doctorate. It was like my break with religion when I was fifteen or sixteen: though I no longer believed, not to break my mother’s heart, I performed the ritual, stopping only at the sacrament, which to indulge I felt unacceptable, hypocritical. To his credit, Professor Dédéyan had finally yielded, admitted Joyce was sufficiently dead to allow for commentary. So upon my return to Paris, I began working to prepare for my soutenance de thèse the following June, pausing only when the urge of a poem or short story of my own, or an afternoon with Beckett, intruded.
Second on the new agenda: Jeannette was preparing for her conservatory final, which would determine whether she left with First Prize in Violin. The lovely apartment that had been a sort of honeymoon spot for us was soon a fond but fading memory.
Meanwhile, back in the States, Bernard DeBoer may not have sold many copies of Merlin into his Eastern Seaboard accounts, but proof that he had landed some came in the form of half a dozen letters to me, including one from Dexter Strong at Pomfret; another from Al Sussman, my classics professor at UNC; a third from my old roommate there Wyc Toole, a man of sharp wit and intelligence with whom I had written a humorous column for The Daily Tar Heel under the byline of Wyc and Dick and who, for reasons I had trouble understanding, had opted to remain in the navy after graduation and was currently a lieutenant commander stationed in Washington.
I paid some attention to a letter I received one day from a gentleman who said he was a New York publisher. His name was Barney Rosset, and he had recently bought a publishing house called Grove Press, after the street in Greenwich Village. He had read and liked my piece on Beckett in Merlin number 2 and the extract from Watt in the following issue, and both the extract and what I said about the Irishman intrigued him greatly. He would be coming to Paris in late summer or early fall and wondered if we could meet, perhaps have lunch. Could I possibly arrange a meeting with Mr. Beckett as well? I wrote back saying I would be pleased to meet him, warning him, however, that the Irishman was fiercely private and difficult to reach, so while I would try to set up an appointment, I could offer no guarantee. With regard to Beckett’s work, I informed him that we—Merlin—would shortly be publishing Watt, and, probably in 1954, a later novel, Molloy, which had been written in French—for that was the language to which Mr. Beckett was now seemingly committed—and was shortly to be translated. I added that if he were interested in Beckett for America, he should get in touch with Monsieur Jérôme Lindon of Les Éditions de Minuit and gave him the address on the rue Bernard Palissy. I would, I added, have a word with Monsieur Lindon, saying he could expect to hear from Mr. Rosset.
Rosset wrote back a few weeks later, thanking me for making him read Beckett, saying he was now in contact with Minuit and had in fact made an offer for Beckett for America, whic
h he hoped would be accepted. He noted that he would be coming with his wife, Loly, a German girl he had recently married. I found his letters lively and enthusiastic and looked forward to meeting the man behind them. I was to pick a restaurant. I chose a nice Chinese restaurant behind the Sorbonne.
Then arrived a few days later an unexpected, and frankly jarring, intrusion into my Parisian life. The intruder was a very official-looking package that lay against my rue du Sabot door one afternoon when I returned from the Bibliothèque Nationale, where I was spending most of my days. I picked up the prim white package, turned it over, pressed it to gauge its bulk under the mistaken notion that heft and importance were proportional, then took it inside. It read OFFICIAL BUSINESS on both front and back. I did not like the look of it, not one bit, and so decided not to open it immediately. Next day it looked slightly less menacing, so screwing my courage to the sticking place, I ripped it open.
Shit!
The U.S. Navy, to which I owed my education and into whose reserve ranks I had automatically signed my life away upon graduation, had decided I was essential to the national defense. Korea? Wasn’t it winding down? Surely they would be mustering out personnel, not mustering them in? My orders were to report to Germany for a physical in the next thirty days. Now, I was as patriotic as the next expatriate—but still … I procrastinated for a week, then hied myself over to the Right Bank, made an appointment with the military attaché, showed him my orders, and asked if this wasn’t all a big mistake. He scrutinized the papers, looked up over his rimless glasses, and assured me it was not. Further, since the thirty days mentioned would be up next Thursday, he suggested I get my ass on a train and head for Mannheim ASAP, or I might be considered AWOL. I was not yet into acronyms, but my RADAR sensed this situation spelled DANGER, and next day found me on a slow train to our former enemy’s now fast-recovering country. No sense rushing. I had led such a wanton, dissolute life the past five years, I half convinced myself, there was a fair chance I might flunk the physical. Then I recalled with dismay all those grueling sessions with the French Olympic wrestlers, tennis matches two or three times a week with Lapicque père et fils, not to mention swimming spring, summer, and fall at the Deligny pool. In short, I was found not only fit but a fine physical specimen. Depressed, I re-entrained for Paris. I would have to tell Jeannette. She knew of the navy’s intrusion but had no idea what it meant or what the timing might be. I had kept her intentionally in the dark because, after all, I wasn’t sure myself. Maybe the admirals would have a change of heart. Maybe they would take a closer look at my noncredentials. It had been six or seven years since I had taken those V-12 navy courses—navigation, seamanship, engineering, whatever—and if any vestiges of that far-off book learning remained, they were embedded deep within my sub-subconscious. Maybe the war would end. Maybe, given my fluency, I would be assigned to the Paris embassy, replacing the jerk I had visited there a week ago, who confessed he had barely learned a phrase of French in his almost year as attaché.
A week later, follow-up orders ended all ambiguity: “On July 31, 1954 you will report to the Boston Naval Base, there to receive further orders and assignment to your ship.” Your ship! You mean I would not be running things in Washington? I must have been a senior ensign by now, for God’s sake!
I broke the news to Jeannette as gently as I could. Taking it in stride as usual, she said, “You know, the timing may be perfect. You’ll have defended your thesis on June 24, and I’ll have finished the conservatory the day before. Maybe it’s time to test new waters. Besides, I’m told that if I do win First Prize, I’ll qualify for a place in the Galician Master Class at the Juilliard School in New York, and I can study with the absolute best violin master in the world, Ivan Galamian.”
I was beginning to discover new sides, new depths, to this young lady that I had not even suspected before. And learning how important positive reactions in life can be.
* * *
Rosset and his wife did appear on schedule and, I noted, on the dot of one o’clock. In my early Paris years, I had tended to arrive ten or fifteen minutes late to most appointments—knowing that most Parisians considered timeliness a show of weakness—until I made the grave mistake one day of being late for an appointment with Mr. Beckett. His only reproach was a raised eyebrow, but it stung me. From then on I arrived almost invariably two or three minutes early to every appointment.
Barney was a slight, intense, wired-up young man, whom I judged to be in his early thirties, although his receding hairline made him look older. He was wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses, and when he laughed—which he did often, though nervously, as if he weren’t quite sure a laugh was appropriate to the remark—he looked strangely equine, baring both gums. His wife, Loly, was taller than he, a lovely, statuesque, blue-eyed blonde, German by birth but with almost perfect English after several years in the States. She was the sales manager of Grove, Barney informed us, and added with the now-familiar laugh that he had married her to keep her from leaving the company. I assumed he was joking, but he assured me he was perfectly serious and told the following tale: As part of her job, Loly had gone to the West Coast, where she happened to run into an old beau, who suddenly proposed marriage. She called Barney to inform him of this development. She was inclined to say yes and he had better look for a new sales manager. Not wasting a minute, Barney cajoled her into meeting him in his native habitat, Chicago, where on bended knee he proposed to her in turn. Thus he not only secured a new bride but kept a tried-and-true sales manager as well. Two birds, as they say …
Barney had recently bought the press for three thousand dollars—a sum he seemed to consider piffling but that struck me as a small fortune when I translated dollars into francs. He was looking for new voices, new talent, not the castoffs of the larger American houses. He thanked me for putting him onto Beckett and introducing him to Lindon. He had already contracted for some of Beckett’s work in America—not directly with Lindon, whom he hadn’t yet met, but through an American agent, Marian Saunders. He was in early correspondence with Beckett, who had warned him he’d not tolerate any changes in his work, though some aspects of it, he said, might be deemed censurable. No, Rosset had not yet met the man, but he and Loly were having a drink with him in a day or two, to which he was looking forward with some trepidation. In agreeing to meet, Beckett had warned he had only forty-five minutes to spare, which seemed a bit off-putting. What did I think of the man? Even better than his work, if that were possible, I responded.
Barney and his first wife, the artist Joan Mitchell, had lived in the south of France for a year. While Joan had profited greatly from the year on the Riviera, maturing in her art, Barney confessed he had spent most of the time staring out the window at the sea, trying to figure out what to do with his life. Then one day, a Chicago friend of Joan’s, Francine Felsenthal, mentioned that two friends of hers had a small publishing house they wanted to sell. Only one of the two, a writer named Robert Phelps, wanted to throw in the towel. Phelps lived in Woodstock, New York, so Barney drove up and paid him fifteen hundred dollars for his half—which, by the way, included the inventory, which Barney piled into several suitcases and drove back to his apartment on Ninth Street in the Village, where he stored them till he could figure out what to do with them. All well and good, but he still owned only half the company. The other partner, a man named John Balcomb, had just one literary interest in life, Ezra Pound. “Any project I proposed he’d turn down. I bought his half as well. Anyway, since I had this publishing house, I figured I better learn something about the business, so I enrolled in some courses at Columbia and the New School. Not for credit, just to learn. At Columbia in the seat next to me was a man named Donald Allen, a freelance editor who struck me as very bright and in the know. So I hired him.”
Who else were we publishing in Merlin? Barney asked.
“We’ve just published an extract from Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal,” I said, “with an introductory note by Jean-Paul Sartre, who thi
nks the man is a genius. It was he who turned us on to him. He’s also a playwright—perhaps primarily a playwright—but I find his novels extraordinary. This said, if you’re interested, you should know you may have a censorship problem with him.” For years, I explained, no mainstream French publisher dared take him on. He was published almost privately by a small provincial publisher, L’Arbalète. But now Sartre had convinced Gaston Gallimard of Genet’s importance, so they were bringing out the novels.
Any censorship problems here in France? Barney wanted to know. “None that I know,” I said. “I think the authorities are afraid of taking on Sartre.”
“And what is it about the novels that makes them censorable?” Barney asked.
“Sex,” I said. “Pretty candid sex. Homosexual sex.”
“Doesn’t scare me,” Barney said, as he took out a pen and began jotting down notes. “Who else are you doing in that issue?”
“A touching piece by Henry Miller, an extract from his novel Plexus,” I replied. This clearly piqued Barney’s interest. At Swarthmore, which Barney had attended briefly before the war, he’d written a paper on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, much to his professor’s chagrin. Tropic of Cancer? I wondered if I should mention that I knew a man here in Paris with a strong connection to Miller, especially the forbidden Tropics, but decided it was premature. Getting back to Genet, I said: “I can put you in touch with his translator if you like, an American GI who’s been living here since the war, if you want to pursue.”
The Tender Hour of Twilight Page 26