The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  No time this trip, Barney said. Was there anyone else on the Paris scene he should look out for? Ionesco, I said, Eugène Ionesco. He’s Romanian, but has been living here for years and, like Beckett, now writes in French. Trocchi and I had met with him a few months earlier and would be publishing a play of his. No, he wasn’t as good as Beckett—but then, Beckett was in a class by himself.

  The next day Barney, Alex, and I met at the Old Navy to discuss how Grove and Merlin might work together, specifically whether Grove might distribute Watt in America, for of our original printing we still had well over four hundred copies unsold. A distinct possibility, Barney said. He had hoped to publish Molloy first, but now that had apparently been put on hold, he had heard, until the translation, which was slow going, was finished.

  Later, when I asked Trocchi what he thought of Barney, “strange” was his one-word response. For the usually eloquent Alex, this struck me as both vague and ambiguous, so I pressed him. “The man squirms, didn’t you notice?” Alex said. “He can’t seem to sit still.” Conversely, before he left Paris, I asked Barney what he thought of Alex. “Impressive. But he scares me. I don’t know why, but I find him intimidating.” What did I think of Barney? True, as Alex had noted, the man seemed incapable of repose. I liked the way he acted on his impulses and made a mental note to look him up when we went to New York. Correction: if we went to New York.

  24

  Beckett’s Back in Town

  BECKETT WAS NOW BACK IN PARIS, having gone in early September to Berlin to see the German production of Godot, which displeased him mightily. Although it was well received, he found it “badly directed,” and when I saw him a few days later, he added with his usual wry humor: “I would have preferred the contrary.” Shortly after his return he sent me a postcard: Could we pick up the translation of “La fin” where we had left off? Where we had left off, very simply: my draft sent to him before the summer, which had lain dormant, had been gathering dust but surely not quality for three months now. Beckett’s initial response, which had cheered me momentarily, was that the translation was fine, though it perhaps needed “a little tinkering,” a phrase that did not alert me as much as it doubtless should have. Meanwhile, Trocchi kept pressing me for it, and once again I reminded him that I needed Beckett’s approval. A day or two later another postcard arrived, addressed as usual to “Dear Seaver.” (First names were still far-off, for I addressed him, then and for many years thereafter, as “Mr. Beckett,” until one night, dining at his favorite restaurant in Montparnasse, Aux Îles Marquises, he said, “Oh, for God’s sake, call me Sam!” Even then, so imposing was he to me, my brain had constantly to send a special-delivery message to my tongue to avoid the habitual “Mr. Beckett.”)

  We met on the appointed day at the Dôme, at four in the afternoon, when the place was almost empty, at a table in the back, each with his copy of the English manuscript and the French text. Over the summer I had made a number of changes, which I first passed along, Beckett nodding approval of most, reserving judgment on others. Regarding the latter he would inevitably say: “You’re doubtless right, Dick, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what I was trying to say in the French.” Then we went back to line one. In other words, instead of finding fault with the translation, he would gallantly blame the original—himself—for the problem. Such was the nature of the man.

  After an hour or so we would pause, order another glass of red wine, and talk of anything but the text at hand. Beckett had just bought a plot of land, he told me, exactly one hectare square, in the tiny village of Ussy-sur-Marne, about fifty kilometers east of Paris, on which he had constructed a small, austere house consisting of two rooms. Why he had chosen Ussy, a nondescript hamlet, he never told me. But then, in all fairness, I never asked. Perhaps it was familiarity, for he and Suzanne had for several years, to get away from Paris, rented a house there for virtually nothing, and Beckett had done a fair amount of his early postwar writing there. The house’s furnishings, as he described them with pride, as if he had just inherited a grandly furnished château or manor house, reminded me of the contents of the mandated passage from Watt that had graced issue number 3. Utterly spare and utilitarian: two single beds, a desk, some bookcases for his dictionaries, a round dining room table, a battered upright piano, and two cushioned wicker chairs. He had also indulged himself, he admitted almost sheepishly one afternoon between paragraphs, in a slightly used radio, apparently to keep himself company in that solitary setting but also, he further admitted, to follow crucial rugby matches involving Ireland, and important boxing matches as well. To me, for whom sports had always been an essential ingredient in my young life, it was reassuring to hear Beckett’s quiet, almost matter-of-fact “confession” that for him, too, sports had always been important. In school he had played cricket and rugby, and later golf and tennis, at both of which he excelled.

  With my Merlin friends, and my Parisian cohorts who were nonathletic, I rarely spoke of sports, for in their calcified minds “jocks” and intellectuals were incompatible. Even Lindon, who already revered his new author, apparently had no notion of his athletic leanings until one weekend he invited Beckett and Suzanne to join him in the country, warning them, however, that he planned to play a round or two of golf. Beckett said that would be no problem, in fact he wouldn’t mind joining Lindon’s group. Though a bit rusty, Beckett not only kept up with the foursome but, Lindon later reported, at least in one round came in with the lowest score.

  Still on the subject of Ussy, he had bought the place, he said, with a small bequest from his mother, who had died three years before, plus the unanticipated earnings from Godot, which from its fragile, precarious opening in January had, by late spring, become the talk of Paris, which suddenly everyone—I assure you, my dear, you mustn’t miss it, you simply mustn’t!—was clamoring to see. What’s more, the usually quiet, monastic office of Jérôme Lindon was suddenly deluged with phone calls from the four corners of the world requesting rights, both publication and dramatic. At age forty-seven, still largely unknown, Beckett had no inkling that the world was about to discover him and do him long overdue obeisance.

  During this break from our line-by-line scrutiny of “La fin”—an inching progress—Beckett would always question the sense or validity of the original rather than that of the translation. He would sit back, push his glasses up into his thick shock of graying hair, take a sip of red wine, and say, “Now, what in the world did I mean by that?” Or: “That passage makes no sense. No sense at all.” Then, having established that the shortcoming was his, not mine, we’d go back to work.

  Ussy was a blessing, he said, an isle of tranquillity, especially now with the Godot nonsense. A place to work and rest. And, yes, listen to music, which was vital to him. The radio of course: it wasn’t wholly for sports. So it was paradise, I suggested. He cocked his head. Not quite, he said. There was one problem he had not foreseen. The house was on a rise, roughly in the center of the property, which had the virtue of allowing him a lovely view of the Marne valley. But the other side of that coin was that passersby, who were becoming more frequent, could see him. An unwanted invasion of privacy. “There were even times,” he said, repressing a smile because he could doubtless envision the absurdity of it, “when seeing people down at the perimeter staring up, I had to get down on all fours and crawl from one room to the other!” The imagined scene made me want to burst out laughing, but I refrained, for I knew it was a serious matter to him. Then he eased the air by laughing first. “But the sad fact is,” he said, “I’ll have no choice but to build a wall round the property. Those ugly cement building blocks, but nothing less will do the job. The pity is, they also cut off the lovely view I once had.”

  During another break about an hour later, I asked about the German production, and he lowered his head. “I wish I hadn’t gone,” he said. “It was a misery.” I told him I heard the reviews were good and the public responsive. He nodded. “But the direction was wrong,” he said,
“all wrong.” I asked, was there nothing he could have done to set it right? Again he shook his head. “First of all,” he said, “I know nothing about the theater. And further, I did not go there to involve myself, simply to see.” His response reminded me of the note he had sent to the French radio when the first fragment of Godot had been recorded a year and a half before, excusing himself for not appearing as promised—shades of his antihero?—and adding that his presence would have contributed nothing, since he was totally ignorant of what makes “good directing,” or “good theater” for that matter. “If the Germans had listened to me,” he said, “they’d have emptied the theater far faster, I assure you.” This from a man who, a few short years later, would become deeply engaged in the details of each production, attend the rehearsals of virtually all his plays, often in essence becoming the director, and who in subsequently printed editions would indicate in minute detail the stage directions to be followed meticulously.

  At the end of most sessions, Jeannette would join us, and for a moment Beckett seemed to put aside his anguish and derogatory feelings about his work, and we three would enjoy a wonderful, lively evening. Beckett would thank me profusely for my good work, which made me cringe, for all the afternoon had revealed, I felt, was my inadequacy. How had I ever let myself get roped into this? I kept asking, and I had constantly to remind myself that Beckett had professed his desire not to translate his own work, presumably to save his creative energies for original work. Indeed, over the five-year period following his return in 1945 to Paris from Dublin, where he had gone to see his mother at the end of the war, Beckett, having made the decision to write henceforth in French, threw himself into his work with renewed energy and purpose. After the relative paucity of writing and the constant rejections of the 1930s, followed by the war, when to focus on literature or writing itself was almost immoral, he engaged, as he put it to me one afternoon at the Coupole, “in a veritable frenzy of writing.” He didn’t know whether to ascribe this frenzy to his decision to shift languages or to the pent-up waters of his riotous imagination finally spilling over the dam of his own self-doubt. During that period he had produced no fewer than a dozen major works, including the masterpieces Waiting for Godot and the prose trilogy Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, which had smitten me like three tons of bricks. He had in addition penned another novel, Mercier and Camier; the play Eleuthéria, which preceded Godot; five longish stories and a baker’s dozen of short shorts; and a perceptive work of art criticism, Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit. Few of these works—only a couple of short stories in Sartre’s Les temps moderne and another in Fontaine—had seen the light of publication, and as for the plays, despite some “nibbles of interest” from three or four French directors, by the end of this extraordinarily productive period neither was even close to being staged. That relative lack of success on any front would doubtless have made any lesser man, especially one pushing fifty, give up and say, “I can’t go on.” But like so many of the misfits and downtrodden in his creations, Beckett knew that he had no choice: “I must go on,” even if no one ever recognized the journey. Of the novels, only that “old chestnut” Murphy, which he and his friend Paul Léon had translated from the English, had been published in France, and that, as we know, to a disturbing lack of success.

  But Beckett’s luck was about to change, and change radically, with Suzanne’s timely submission in 1951 of Molloy and Malone Dies to Jérôme Lindon’s Éditions de Minuit. Beckett said later that if Minuit had turned him down, he would have given up, for there are only so many rejections a writer can bear.

  * * *

  Finally, after five or six sessions, Beckett pushed the English version of “La fin” across the table and said, “Well, that about does it. Thank you.” ’Tis I should be thanking you, I thought, my mind filled with the wonderful Irish lilt. “I’m sorry I took so much of your time,” he went on, making me feel worse, for it was to relieve him that I had accepted the task, to save him time. I said as much, but he shook his head. “I couldn’t have done it, wouldn’t have. So you’ve done me a service. You’ll make sure I see proofs?” I assured him I would. “I’m sure this isn’t the proper time to ask,” he said, “but I hear Merlin’s bought the English rights to Molloy.” “We had indeed,” I said, “though only for the Continent, not England or America,” and was tempted to tell the story of the two checks, ours and Minuit’s, but opted for discretion once again, for I wasn’t sure what Lindon might have told him. “There’s interest from England and America, too,” he went on, “so the work will have to be translated.” Could I take it on? Did I have time for it? He would help, be available for consultation, but, again, he simply did not have the time, or energy, or will, to face earlier works, much less translate them. He would be immensely grateful. I reread Molloy, my favorite of all his works to date, loved it as much as before, even gained a few new insights overlooked in the original readings, actually translated half a dozen pages, which came more easily than those of “La fin,” for the work sessions with Beckett had taught me to some extent how his mind worked, his choice of words, his special turns of phrase, but still I was concerned, for Beckett had mentioned a deadline of six months. Still, by asking me, the Great Man had given me a vote of confidence for the translation of “La fin,” slightly easing my guilt. On the other hand, having procrastinated for five years, I had finally decided, perhaps again out of guilt for having accepted two Fulbrights ostensibly for that purpose, to finish my Sorbonne thesis on Joyce, with the oral defense scheduled for the following June. He understood. Did I know of anyone who might take on the task? One of the Merlinites perhaps? The only one I could think of whose French was solid enough was Patrick. I mentioned the idea to Patrick, who warmed to it immediately. Had he read the novel? Only parts of it, but what he had read he found splendid. Read the rest, I cautioned, before you commit. It will be a challenge. And a privilege, Patrick stated. During that week he read Molloy and the following Friday greeted me at the rue du Sabot with a broad smile: he would love to do it. I told Beckett and suggested that he and Patrick meet. Beckett suggested I come along, as my experience with the story might help steer Patrick, “warn of the shoals,” as he put it, which we did the following weekend at the Coupole. Now, months later, Patrick was valiantly struggling with the diabolically difficult text. Beckett, he said, had been a prince, responsive to every query, grateful for whatever progress, which he confessed was inching.

  When, after their first month or two of working together, I asked Beckett how Molloy was progressing, he, the kindest of men, winced. “Patrick’s very good,” he said, “and I’ve become fond of him personally. But he has a very slow metabolism.” It was less a reproach than a statement of a character trait. “Could you have a word with him, Dick”—he was now alternating between first name and last when we talked, a considerable breakthrough—“I’d be grateful.” When I saw Patrick, I went straight to the point: How was Molloy going? “Well, I’ve done the first twenty or so pages, fully approved, and as you know they’re appearing in the next issue of the magazine. But after that, piss poorly if you want to know. I’m not sure I’ll ever finish. Beckett’s been wonderful, but I feel he’s becoming irritated with my snail’s progress.” He looked almost despondent. Publishers in America and England were champing at the bit. Not to mention Merlin. “Anyway, if there’s anything I can do, let me know.” He assured me he would.

  As the weeks wore on, Patrick continued to struggle, as I had before him, and for much the same reason. However the pages came out, he would constantly ask himself: Is that the way Beckett would say it? Finally, in a desperate act of self-preservation, Patrick turned his back on the project and reimmersed himself in his own work, the long-planned novel he had, two years before, sketched out in his mind from start to finish, three volumes that, he announced, he would submit only to Jonathan Cape in London, whose list he found compatible with his taste. Now, with Pat gone silent, Beckett found himself obliged to reverse their roles:
while it had been agreed that whenever Patrick had a dozen or so pages translated, he would contact Beckett either directly or via Lindon, now, when two or three of his pneumatiques had gone unanswered, Beckett became the stalker. More than once over the next several weeks he climbed unannounced the six steep flights to Patrick’s garret room at the Cité Vaneau, knocked discreetly, never before eleven, to make sure his prey was up and about, and suggested they repair together downstairs to a nearby café to glance at whatever pages were ready. “It was as if I’d been thrust onstage before I’d even begun to learn my lines,” Pat lamented to me after one of Beckett’s visits. “True, I’d been avoiding him,” he confessed, “because I was close to giving up. Yet after our session he made me feel so much better I will get on with it, I really will.” I suggested again, having the experience of “La fin,” that Pat force himself on a schedule of twelve to fifteen pages a week and show me them before they were sent to Beckett. For the next three weeks he did, and I found them strong and faithful, returning them with a few emendations and suggestions, which he said helped greatly. Again, I never told Beckett of my peripheral involvement. But Patrick, a true gentleman, admitted one day as, finally, fifteen months after it had begun, the translation was winding up, or down, to Patrick’s great relief, and certainly Beckett’s, that he had told the Master at one of their final sessions that at one low point in the endeavor “Seaver stuck a rocket up my arse and put a match to it, or this damn translation might never have been finished.”