The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  Rounding out the hearty crew were Frieda Slappy at the switchboard, a diminutive lady of uncertain age who artfully maneuvered the complex wires in and out of the console with the grace of a ballet mistress; and Laura Martin, a tall, willowy black woman whose task was to receive and record orders, then transmit them to the warehouse. She kept track of the number of orders by means of—Gott im Himmel!—an abacus. When I queried Barney about what struck me as a sorely antiquated method, he said he’d spent most of the war in China and, impressed by the simplicity and accuracy of the ancient tool, brought it back to the States, where it was working like a charm, thank you! Or maybe the daily influx of orders warranted no more than this contraption.

  There couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve employees in all, but they all seemed to be moving simultaneously, without colliding, at roughly the speed of light. Richard Brodney was in and out of Barney’s office a dozen times a day, a half-consumed cigarette inevitably hanging from his lips, bearing designs and cover or jacket mechanicals to be approved, further tinkered with, sent back to the drawing board, or trashed. Most of the covers and jackets were the work of a young freelance designer, Roy Kuhlman, whom Barney had discovered a year or so before and who by now had a virtual monopoly on the Grove list. I asked Barney how he had found Kuhlman. “I didn’t,” he said, “he found me. Literally walked in off the street armed with a portfolio of abstract paintings, which I loved. Remember, I’d been married to Joan Mitchell, and when we lived in the south of France for a year in the late 1940s, I watched her evolve from a realist to an abstractionist, a miraculous evolution. That doubtless affected my reaction to Kuhlman. When I’d finished looking at his portfolio, I said, ‘Okay, Roy, you do our jackets.’ ‘All of them?’ he said. ‘Yes, all of them!’” Barney was not a man of half measures.

  In Paris, I’d been as close to painters as I had to writers, and most, including Kelly and Youngerman but also a number of young French artists, were evolving into abstract if they were not already there. So Kuhlman’s work made an immediate positive impression on me as well. Unlike the jackets of the big, uptown houses, where realism reigned, Grove covers and book jackets announced from the outset, to bookstores and customers alike, that here was a house with a difference: if you like the outside, check the contents. When Barney asked for my opinion of a Kuhlman cover, I could respond with more than a gut reaction. Kuhlman, I soon learned, did not take suggestions for change kindly, and criticisms or rejections set him spinning with rage. Barney, I also quickly saw, was almost as pigheaded as Roy, and before long he delegated me to deal with Kuhlman on a daily basis, to avoid a fatal break. I instinctively liked and admired Roy, and before long we became friends, so much so that he often showed his upcoming cover designs to me before they were shown to Barney. Upon occasion he even went so far as to listen to my opinion about possible design changes, if I thought it wouldn’t pass muster.

  During my first couple of weeks I had a pleasant surprise, a short letter from Beckett welcoming me to Grove and saying how pleased he was that we’d be working together again. The news of my arrival there, he added, had reminded him that he had not yet returned my translation of his short story “La fin,” first published many years before in Merlin but now intended for Evergreen Review. I recalled his indignation—he a man very slow to anger—when Trocchi had not shown him galleys before publishing the 1954 version, so I had carefully gone through that earlier incarnation, made a few emendations, and sent it on to him. I had also, at his behest, translated “L’expulsé”—“The Expelled”—the second of the three stories, but was still tinkering, awaiting the master’s judgment, before I, with considerable trepidation, sent it to him. What for me had started off in Paris as an altruistic act had become a mighty challenge. The more I read the man, the more I was certain that my youthful, dithyrambic 1952 judgment was, if anything, far shy of the mark: Beckett was a genius. Till then, Joyce had been my literary god, but in the last seven years my man Beckett was fast coming up on the outside, ready to forge ahead. The prose, seemingly so simple, was fraught with hidden meanings, allusions, intimations of works known or (to me) unknown—classical, biblical, you name it. He had not frequented Joyce and his circle for years for nothing.

  On March 6, he returned the revised story, with a fair number of emendations, but fewer than I had anticipated.

  Dear Seaver:

  Herewith La fin with my corrections. Your translation is excellent and they are for the most part just fussiness and contrariness and author’s license. If there are any you disagree with let me have a note of them and we’ll find something else or revert to your text. I can’t remember if we worked on the other two together, perhaps only one, L’Expulsé it seems to me. I have just finished [translating] the first Texte pour Rien … “Esquire” wants it, of all improbable ducks.

  I saw Pat Bowles the other day, he seemed in excellent form.

  I wrote back with perhaps half a dozen minor suggestions, all of which he graciously accepted, and acknowledged that I had indeed done a first draft of “L’expulsé,” which I said was to my mind one of the great short stories of the century. Was I exaggerating or simply smitten? Neither, really, for not long ago, to test myself and my memory, I reread all three stories, and if I were in academe, at least one, perhaps all, would be required reading.

  I read, too, the first “Text for Nothing” he had sent: stunning! Of a piece with the stories, though even briefer, tauter, the prose sheer poetry from first line to last. I noted that when he consciously sat down to write poetry, it tended to be formal, even stiff, but when he wrote what was called prose, for want of a better name, it came out pure poetry. Wry poetry, bent and twisted by age (even, perhaps especially, when he was young); dark poetry (but shot through with lines that rend the soul, if one there is, at least the heart): “To think in the valley the sun is blazing all down the ravelled sky”; or, “I hear the curlews, that means close of day, fall of night, for that’s the way with curlews, silent all day, then crying when the darkness gathers, that’s the way with these wild creatures and so short-lived, compared with me.” I could go on …

  * * *

  My first weeks at Grove were both exciting and edifying, convincing me this was a job and a half, if not two. Given which, I was far from sure I could do a proper job within the time frame Beckett was proposing for the third story, “Le calmant”—“The Calmative.” Yes, I would pursue “The Expelled,” go back to it, polish, rework, try to imagine, among the several choices, how Beckett would render it. A dangerous game, for one could guess wrong. But simplicity, always opt for simplicity. Maybe Pat could do the third story, I thought, since he’d already done Molloy and was on the spot, so they could work together. Later that day I mentioned my suggestion to Barney, who burst out laughing. I wasn’t sure where the humor lay, but he got up, crossed the room, opened a file drawer, pulled out a manila file, and read from a Beckett letter from late 1954: “Bowles is hopeless. No acknowledgement of my last corrections and no sign of the concluding pages. I do not even know where he is.”

  “Jesus,” I said, “I knew Pat had been slow, but I never knew Beckett was that down on him. I’m afraid I’m the culprit. I suggested Pat translate Molloy.”

  “I always felt Beckett had to be his own translator,” Barney said, “but he resisted for a long time.”

  “That’s the only reason I volunteered to take on the stories,” I said. “In my wild imagination, I thought I was saving him time to create. I gathered only later the well had apparently gone dry. Still, when we first met, he shuddered at the idea of translating his French into English. ‘I couldn’t face those old chestnuts again,’ he said. ‘All I see is their shortcomings.’

  “Anyway,” I said, “I had a letter from Beckett this morning, returning ‘La fin,’ which we can now include in the next issue if you like. In his last sentence he mentions having seen Patrick recently and found him in excellent form. So whatever problem there was between them seems to be over.”


  That same day I wrote Beckett back, thanking him for his kind words and saying that if he truly felt I was doing him a service that would save him time, I’d be happy to give “Le calmant” a shot. Would we call it “The Sedative”? I wondered. How about “The Calmative,” he wrote back. Closer to the French, and more poetic, no? More poetic, yes … That night I sat down with the French text, which I knew almost by heart, and tried the first lines:

  I don’t remember when I died. It always seemed to me I was old when I died, about ninety years old, and what years, and that my body showed it, from head to foot. But tonight, in my icy bed, I feel I’m going to be older than the day, the night, when the sky with all its lights fell down on me, the same sky I had so often gazed upon since I first drifted on the distant earth.

  The first page took me only three or four evenings. A second round a week later produced:

  I forget when I died. It always seemed to me that I died old, about ninety years old, and what years, and that my body bore it out, from head to toe. But this evening, alone in my icy bed, I have the feeling that I’ll be older than the day, the night, when the sky with all its lights fell on me, the same sky I had so often gazed on since I took my first awkward steps on the distant earth.

  Better? Worse? Translating Beckett was clearly not like translating anyone else. Except Joyce, of course. During my Paris days, I had translated half a dozen books from the French, both fiction and nonfiction, and felt the results were competent and relatively faithful and read largely, if not wholly, as if the work had been written in English. But to try to translate with the Man looking over your shoulder, even an ocean away, was the way to madness.

  Two months later I had a full translation, the fourth or fifth version, and was still dissatisfied. Further procrastination, or one more revision, would lead nowhere, I decided, so I gently slid the pages, some thirty in all, into an envelope, addressed it to 6, rue des Favorites, Paris 15ème, a site still vivid in my mind, and consigned it to the sea. Or, rather, to the air.

  * * *

  From the stroke of nine, it seemed, the phone rang incessantly at Grove, stretching Frieda to her four feet something. Barney grabbed his black instrument as though it were a lifeline, listening and nodding incessantly before barking a response. He had suggested I spend most of my time in his office the first few days, “to get the hang of things.” Despite all the other frenetic activity relating to the upcoming list of books, most of the focus and energy was on Chatterley. In the course of that first week, Brodney had brought in the design for the jacket, pristine white, with simple black lettering. Barney asked me what I thought of the jacket. I thought it perfect. Whether it would deter the would-be censors I had no idea, but it certainly could not be construed as provocative or appealing to “prurient interests,” an expression being bandied about the office those days. Any suggestions for change? “Only one: I note the price is five dollars. I think you could ask more.” Barney said that five was already at the higher end of the price for a hardcover novel that length. But this isn’t a normal book, is it? He’s right. Let’s ask a dollar more. Done. My only contribution to the enterprise, but one that eventually helped pay for the lawsuits, which we knew were almost certainly waiting in the wings. Though Grove was now publishing as many as sixty or seventy books a year, its volume of business, and its profile among publishers, were still fairly modest. If the uptown publishers were even aware of its existence, their attitude was either dismissal or disdain. If that fazed Barney in any way, I never discerned it in our early meetings. I had initially been unsure of his commitment to book publishing, because over that first lunch in Paris in 1953 he had spent far more time discussing the film he had produced, Strange Victory, than he had talking about Grove’s books and authors. But after a few weeks there, I was convinced he had found, however obliquely, his chosen profession.

  If it did nothing else, Lady Chatterley would put Grove squarely, and very visibly, on the publishing map. Viewed as an upstart by some of the older publishers, a maverick by others, Grove and its growing stable of younger Americans—Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Rechy—were catching the attention of other young writers, who urged their agent, if they had one, to send material our way. So what had been a trickle of new material when I arrived swelled to a near flood only months later, when we decamped from the overcrowded 795 Broadway to a spanking-new four-story building a few blocks away at 64 University Place. There was a Daitch Shopwell supermarket on the ground floor, and on the upper floors two other small publishers had just moved in: Fred Praeger, with a list of political books, on three; and Sheed and Ward, a Catholic publisher, on four. As we carted in our boxes of books and manuscripts, Barney gazed at the lobby board and remarked, since we were now labeled, as a result of advance word of Lady Chatterley, sex fiends, that this building had the world covered: food on one, sex on two, politics on three, and religion on four. A comforting thought …

  * * *

  Everyone knew that Barney was rich, but one never knew to what degree, for his banker father had carefully—Barney would say unforgivably, others would say foresightedly—tied his son’s trust fund in so many knots that much of the endowment was not available. In fact, at one point Barney had been so frustrated by his father’s restriction of money that was, as he put it, “rightfully mine” that he threatened his father with a lawsuit. “Go ahead, sue me,” Father said with a shrug. So Barney did, and to the consternation of all, he won. Still, the trust fund thus freed did not make him a millionaire.

  Now, in the dawn of the 1960s, with Grove nearing ten, it was still losing money. Ignoring the Chatterley revenues of 1959 and 1960, our volume was just over a quarter of a million dollars, which in today’s dollars would be between 1.5 and 2 million. At lunch one day not long after we had moved to University Place, Barney, on a slightly used envelope, made some quick penciled calculations until, after one more sip of the ubiquitous martini, he looked up and pronounced: “All we need to break even is to bill $350,000 a year. That will do it!” And he nodded and smiled happily, as though our future had just been assured. Only $100,000, he must have been thinking, not a helluva lot. But even by my calculation, that worked out to an increase of 40 percent over our current volume, no easy task with the normal hardcover book selling at roughly $4.00, sometimes creeping up to $5.00, and the paperbacks between $1.00 and $1.95. Evergreen Review, which was not included in his calculations, made no money and probably never would. Barney had rightly seen it as a vehicle for finding new writers, with the bottom line a secondary, if not inconsequential, consideration.

  Still, the young Grove was decidedly aided by the widespread belief that Barney came from great wealth. Only son of a Chicago banker. Daddy Rosset, who was Jewish, had married Mary Tansey, who was Irish, during the Roaring Twenties, when Chicago was the home to such disparate luminaries as Al Capone and Jake Arvey, a politician who ran much of the city. Arvey was a friend of Barney’s father, who was very much a self-made man. Though he had only a high school education, Barnet senior had taken night courses at Northwestern and become a certified public accountant. By the time he was twenty-five, he was the head of one bank. In those days there were no bank branches in Chicago, so the city was peppered with dozens of small banks, with limited capital. Working for several of these in his capacity of CPA, he knew where the vulnerabilities lay, and when one got into trouble, he knew how and when to bail it out. By 1929, Barnet senior was the head of no fewer than three different banks. During the 1920s, essentially an entrepreneur, he went down to Texas, where he got involved in the oil business, returning to Chicago far wealthier than when he had departed. “My father,” Barney told me at one of our early meetings, “had the unique ability to make money hand over fist during the Depression, when the rest of the country was going broke.” What he didn’t say, or bruit about, was that the Rossets had suffered considerable losses in the early 1930s, to the point that the posh apartment they owned at 2920 Commonwe
alth Avenue was taken from them, though they were allowed to stay on as renters as long as they paid the new owners. During the following two decades, however, Father Rosset regained much of his former fortune. Then, suddenly, he died of a heart attack in 1952, leaving his fortune to his wife and son. Thus printers and paper suppliers vied for the Grove business, never asking for bank references or fiduciary proof, offering generous terms as they sensed here was a growing business, run, like Jay Laughlin’s New Directions, by a cushy millionaire. As further proof of Barney’s untold wealth, he had bought a large tract of land in East Hampton, Long Island, where he already owned a strange and unique house, originally owned by the artist Robert Motherwell, a Quonset hut cleverly converted by the French architect Pierre Chareau into a two-story main house, complete with two guesthouses, a tennis court, and a swimming pool, rare luxuries then, to which Barney repaired most weekends. On the choice tract at almost pristine Three Mile Harbor he was building attractive houses on spec for sale or rental, keeping architects, builders, and designers—most of whom were friends—busy year-round.