The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  Meanwhile, on April 2, 1960, after kissing little Nathalie and Jeannette a fond goodbye, I entrained for the office, arriving just at nine in a drizzling rain. As soon as I opened the door, Frieda, hoisting herself three inches from her seat so that she became almost visible, said, “Report to St. Vincent’s. Jeannette is on her way.” Apparently, minutes after I left, her first contractions had occurred and she had ordered a cab. Our office was only minutes from St. Vincent’s, and I ran rather than walked, arriving soaked and excited to see Jeannette’s cab just pulling up to the entrance. The poor driver looked as though he needed a stiff drink, immediately. When he had picked up his passenger, he had no idea of the ordeal in store. According to Jeannette, he spent most of the forty-minute drive looking in the rearview mirror, trying to remember what one had to do when a passenger gave birth in a cab, while Jeannette, between spasms, pleaded with him to please, for God’s sake, look ahead, not behind, for he was apparently missing whizzing cars and trucks by mere inches. It was hard to know which of the two had suffered more from the experience, but only Jeannette was smiling. As for me, I must have looked to the hospital staff grandly Beckettian, a sodden object of sartorial neglect.

  I paid the cabbie handsomely and helped milady into the lobby, whence she was quickly whisked to a room on the delivery floor. With Nathalie we had had classic, old-fashioned childbirth, the father unwelcome and the mother anesthetized. Both exiled from the miracle of birth. In all fairness, with so short a time between Venezuela and the girl child’s birth, we had not had the luxury of exploring other methods. This time we had opted for the method propounded by Dr. Grantly Dick-Read, the English author of Childbirth Without Fear, whose principles had quickly crossed the Atlantic and gained the adherence of a number of American doctors. So there I was, sitting by Jeannette’s bedside, holding her hand with each contraction, breathing deeply as she breathed, suffering as she suffered (no, not quite!), coaching her as I had been coached, until at long last (in reality, only thirty-five or forty minutes, an eternity) I heard her say: “It’s coming!” I corrected: “He’s coming!” And indeed, peeking under the covers, I saw the lad’s head, the crown of his lovely head, pushing its way through. I rang for the doctor, who appeared within endless seconds. One look and he ordered Jeannette wheeled into the delivery room.

  I paced the lonely room, staring out at the gray drizzle, cursing those other parents who unthinkingly had opted to have their babies that same day, when my selfish thoughts were suddenly interrupted by Jeannette’s return, smiling and holding in her arms … a baby boy! She had been awake the whole time, seen him arrive in all his waxy splendor, heard his first sound, a healthy wail, and held him seconds after the umbilical cord was severed. Jeannette had never looked more beautiful. This time we had decided on a name weeks before: Alexander—which again, we figured, worked in both countries—and, as middle name, Medina, after Jeannette’s father. A moniker to live up to. I held the babe in my arms now, that little one so longed for.

  30

  Lady Chatterley’s Lawyers

  MY NEXT SEVERAL DAYS were spent to-ing and fro-ing between Grove and St. Vincent’s, my mind split between Lady Chatterley and Lady Jeannette, for on the former front things were heating up. Everyone at Grove was focused on the book, knowing that it could move us into the big(ger) time, give Grove a new, higher profile. But there was also the distinct possibility it could bring the still-fragile company down. The novel had been living underground for almost three decades, tolerated—only in its native English—in a country or two, but judged obscene in most. In the United States, both the Customs Service and the Post Office Department had banned it, the former from our ports, the latter from the mails. But Grove had carefully assessed the risks and decided the Chatterley War was worth waging. Curiously, although Barney relished the censorship battle and the notoriety that was bound to ensue, he did not really like the book. He found it weighty and often boring. In fact, despite its reputation, he had never read it until he was at Grove. The book he really loved, however, and was intent on publishing come hell or high water, was Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, with Capricorn soon to follow, if indeed the two were not published simultaneously.

  At Swarthmore, in 1940, he wrote his freshman English paper on Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. So his real goal, he confessed, was to publish Miller’s banned works in America. But wiser heads had counseled that if he did, Grove was sure to lose. There had to be a prior test case, one that he had at least a fighting chance to win, and whatever he might think of Lady Chatterley, it was an ideal choice in many ways. First and foremost, Lawrence was an acknowledged master of English literature, widely read and increasingly included in the curricula of major universities. So one knew a goodly number of respected academics would attest to the novel’s worth.

  The only crack in Barney’s wall of stoic calm came when he announced, not long before the novel’s scheduled release, that Ephraim London, on whom he had relied to handle the Chatterley case—or cases—had been fired. Barney had some strong ideas on how the case should be handled, but Ephraim, whom Barney described as imperious—“he thought he was Abraham Lincoln; he wasn’t”—had said it was his way or no way. Period. Replaced by whom? both Fred Jordan and I asked aloud. A man named Charles Rembar, Barney said. I had never heard of him. How had Barney chosen him? Did he have experience, as Ephraim had, fighting censorship? Was he a well-regarded First Amendment lawyer? Barney shrugged and admitted that he had been out in East Hampton for the weekend when the decision to fire London had been taken. He knew two lawyers out there, one reasonably well, the other only from having played tennis with him a number of times. He called the first, and there was no answer. He called the second, his tennis friend Charles Rembar, who had the great good fortune to be home. Barney explained that he had just had to fire his lawyer and asked Rembar if he’d like to take on the case for him. What case? “Lady Chatterley.” Not much time to prepare, but … “Sure, I’d be happy to.”

  I met Rembar the first day he came to the office, and his relative youth—relative to London’s—and seeming self-assurance suddenly made us feel as if this case were already won, whereas this man, who was later to become an expert in censorship, was probably not at all self-assured, having little or no experience in the realm. A crash course was in order, and Rembar began studying in detail all the English and American obscenity cases, starting with the Hicklin case in England in 1868, in which the test of obscenity was defined as “the tendency … to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences,” a decision, one could claim, that strengthened the already disturbingly rigid class system, for one could only assume the lord chief justice—in the instance Lord Cockburn—firmly believed that minds open to immoral influences perforce belonged to the poor and uneducated; on to the famous, or infamous, Anthony Comstock in the 1870s and his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice; and, more important, the more recent cases that would be precedents, either helpful or harmful: the Ulysses decision in 1934 (helpful), those on Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit in the 1940s and Edmund Wilson’s Memoirs of Hecate County (harmful). Despite Rembar’s infectious upbeat attitude, he knew he had a formidable task ahead of him. In fact, in arguing the Chatterley case, he would be creating new law if he won, and new law, especially in areas as sensitive as these, never comes easy.1

  A first printing of twenty-five thousand copies had been decided on—huge for Grove—and the first copies were due off the press in a matter of days. What did Rembar expect would happen once the books hit the mails and, hopefully, the stores? He shrugged but suspected the Post Office would be the first to move. Was he prepared? Not as much as he would have liked, he admitted. Having spent the last several weeks studying in great detail the recent history of censorship in both the U.K. and this country, he could safely say none of those books presented anything like the problem of Lady Chatterley, with its blatant scenes of sexual activity and unparalleled use of “four-letter” Anglo-Saxon wo
rds. In short, Rembar felt he was embarking upon uncharted waters. As I talked with some of my fellow editors at other houses in the days before the book’s release, I was upset to learn that many felt this was an act of madness on our part, that publishing Lawrence could well result in further censorship, for harsh anti-obscenity laws were already very much in force in most states, with the backing of the Supreme Court as recently as two years earlier, when Samuel Roth and David Alberts, both book publishers, were sentenced to jail for publishing obscene works. So the stakes were high, the dangers real. Nonetheless, not once did I detect among the members of the Grove staff the slightest qualm about being involved. On the contrary, a feeling of rare camaraderie and excitement prevailed as C-day approached.

  Then, finally, the first copies arrived at the office, pristine and beautiful, historic and … and, oh my God! so terribly flawed! I don’t remember who in the office, Brodney, I believe, discovered and pointed out the error: Mark Schorer’s name had been misspelled! So the celebration had to be deferred while the correction was made. Fortunately, the error appeared only on the jacket, so the repair was swift, and books began shipping to the stores in early April. First reactions were favorable: a number of reviews cited the importance of the novel and praised it as a major contribution to contemporary literature, long overdue in the form the author intended. A phone check by Nat Sobel—who had replaced Pizey as sales manager—of several dozen stores verified that the book had indeed gone through the mails unobstructed, and sales at stores that had received copies were reported as “brisk,” as a result both of the reviews and of word of mouth. But word of mouth can be a double-edged sword. The third week in April, a deputy police chief in Washington, D.C., hearing a rumor the book was available, called Brentano’s, which verified it was indeed, at which point he seized its copies. The newspapers, sensing a hot story, began to feature it, fanning the fires. On April 28, Grove sued the deputy chief, but before that case could proceed, the postmaster of New York, Robert Christenberry, jumped into the fray and ordered several cartons of Chatterley that were in the mails to be seized, then asked Washington for instructions. At Grove we didn’t learn of the seizure for several days, and by the time we did, a trial date had already been set by Washington: May 14. The case was to be heard at the New York Post Office. It was the first time I knew that postal authorities could act as judiciary, but Rembar explained that while its decisions could be reviewed by the courts, it did have such powers where the mails were concerned. Since Chatterley had already been judged obscene, therefore unmailable, thirty years before, it would remain banned until that ruling was overturned.

  Fortunately, Grove was not alone in its suit. A small but highly regarded literary book club, the Readers’ Subscription, had pointedly chosen the book as a main selection, knowing full well that if Grove got into trouble, so would they. Thus when the Post Office hearing got under way, Rembar, who had never tried a case before, had at his side two lawyers from the large and very prestigious New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison. But it was evident from the first day that the neophyte Rembar would carry most of the legal burden. At the outset, he and Grove had decided that it was not the Post Office’s ambiguous powers of seizure that we wanted to contest but the freedom to publish under the First Amendment, which, if we won, would immediately, in Rembar’s words, “shrink the scope of the anti-obscenity laws.”

  On the day of the trial, most of the morning was spent setting the ground rules, with Rembar and the Post Office’s lead counsel, Saul Mindel—like two boxers—sizing each other up. Rembar and the Readers’ Subscription lawyer, Jay Topkis, began by asking that the ban on the book be lifted temporarily until a decision had been reached, citing the severe financial strains the ban was imposing on both publisher and book club. That motion was not denied but deferred, the judicial officer, Charles Ablard, saying in essence he would sleep on it, but not decide until the trial was well under way.

  In his opening statement, Mindel admitted that Lawrence was a writer “of standing” but that “to the community at large”—not to specialized critics or academics—the dominant effect of Lady Chatterley, taken as a whole, was one that appealed to “prurient interests,” an expression that, strangely, derives from the Latin word for “itching” but has been transformed in English to “lustful.” Over the next several years, I heard the same term in case after case, and whenever I did, I had an irrepressible desire to scratch. In any case, Mindel’s strategy was to undercut Grove’s effort to demonstrate Lawrence’s importance by acknowledging it from the start and then to minimize the importance of the weighty witnesses he knew Grove would call, by stating they represented an “elite,” not the community at large. It was a strong and effective argument. Even though this was the Post Office and not an important court of law, all of us there that day were impressed by the level of the statements and testimony on both sides and the evenhandedness of the Judicial Office.

  Barney was Rembar’s first witness, and he handled himself well, looking and acting like the serious publisher he was. The point to establish here was threefold: that Grove was highly reputable, that it had published in its first decade a number of important writers; that its presentation of the novel itself, and the advertising that accompanied it, was in impeccably good taste; that a number of newspapers and magazines had accepted our advertising without question—until the chilling effect of the Post Office suit had induced one to back down—proving that by current community standards the book was not viewed as objectionable. At lunch around the corner, the lawyers’ assessment was that, whatever the outcome, both Ablard and Mindel were worthy opponents, and we were getting a fair shake.

  The afternoon session was marked by the appearance of two impressive witnesses, Malcolm Cowley and Alfred Kazin. The former, a white-haired, rosy-cheeked, cherubic gentleman of sixty was, in looks and demeanor, a perfect witness. He defined himself as a literary critic and historian, specifying that he had worked in those fields for more than three decades. During his more than hour-long testimony and the cross-examination that followed, he established quite convincingly two key points: the unquestioned position of Lawrence in modern English literature, and the evolving tastes, the change in the range of tolerance in the reading public over the past thirty years.

  Cowley was followed by the younger but no less impressive Alfred Kazin. Rembar led Kazin to focus on the changing literary tastes and trends, “the increasing tolerance and increasing acceptance of wider and wider areas of human experience discussed in literature,” the point being that what one generation may refuse, a new one may accept or embrace.

  Barney’s testimony had been interrupted so that Cowley and Kazin would not have to sit and wait. Once their testimony ended, Barney came back to the stand, gave further background on how and why Grove had decided to publish the work, and ended with: “It occurred to me that it would be incomprehensible if this book were published today that the public would be shocked, offended or would raise any outcry against it; but rather that they would welcome it as the republishing, the bringing back to life, of one of our great masterpieces.”

  It was getting late, and the parties involved looked weary, but to me it had been a fascinating and enlightening day. For a man who had never tried a case before, Rembar, I thought, had done a masterful job. If I had been a betting man, I would have given heavy odds to anyone who thought Grove wouldn’t win hands down. Well, I was dead wrong. When Ablard indicated that temporarily lifting the ban was beyond his authority, Grove applied the next day for a decision from Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield, who after a week of reflection refused to lift the ban. Two further applications were sent, the first on May 29, the second on June 5, to no avail. At which point, more than a month having passed, Grove together with Readers’ Subscription decided to go to court, suing New York’s Mr. Christenberry, the man still holding the bag (of books), in the federal district court of New York. The judge in the case bore the imposing name Frederick van Pelt
Bryan, a man known for his intelligence and no-nonsense courtroom manner. The testimony of the Post Office trial was available to both parties, of course, though persuading courts to reverse Post Office rulings was an uphill battle, apparently. But it was clear that Judge Bryan not only had come with an open mind but was well prepared. Rembar’s opening gambit to the court was, I thought, both dangerous and brilliant. He argued that Bryan should ignore the Post Office material and conduct a trial de novo, that is, from scratch. “It is up to you,” Rembar told the court, “to decide whether D. H. Lawrence was an author or a pornographer.” It was a daring challenge, but one sensed that Rembar, and perhaps the Readers’ Subscription lawyers, felt instinctively that they had before them a rare, independent-minded judge who just might make new law, if they conducted themselves with total probity. Which they did. After all the arguments were heard, the court adjourned, and on July 21 the decision was announced: Grove’s request for summary judgment was approved, and Christenberry was admonished not to deny the mails either to the book or to the Readers’ Subscription newsletter. Rejoicing all around? Not quite, for, predictably, the government appealed, but since the court of appeals was on vacation till fall, the government asked that the mailing ban remain in effect till the appeal could be heard. A three-judge panel denied that request. At long last, Lady Chatterley’s Lover could safely be sent through the U.S. mails.