The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  47

  The Autobiography of Malcolm X

  THAT MONDAY MORNING was a shocker.

  Many people viewed Monday as blue, the first day of a long week in a job most disliked or endured. I can honestly say these last six years at Grove had been endlessly exciting. There were, very simply, no dull weeks. Challenging, yes, but every day seemed to bring forth a surprise, a revelation, an obstacle to be overcome, an accusation to be countered, a financial drama to be coped with. Did that mean automatic stress? Probably. But we were young and certain we were doing something that had an impact, might even change the world, if only a mite.

  On that Monday, at six thirty, my usual hour, I stooped to pick up the Times outside my door and stood there transfixed. In the center of page 1, the headline read, in twenty-four-point type: MALCOLM X SHOT TO DEATH AT RALLY HERE. Below the headline was a four-column picture of Malcolm, surrounded by aides, on a stretcher being wheeled to the Vanderbilt Clinic a block away from the Audubon Ballroom at 166th Street and Broadway, where Malcolm had spoken at three o’clock as part of the usual Sunday afternoon meeting of his recently founded Organization of Afro-American Unity. Even before I read the article, I muttered to myself, “Bastards!” for I was certain that the killers were members of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, for which Malcolm had long been the most brilliant minister and spokesman until, a year before, he had broken with it, candidly and bitterly. The break, I knew from my friend Benjamin Goodman, one of Malcolm’s closest attendants, stemmed partly from Malcolm’s speech roughly fifteen months earlier, known as the “Chickens Come Home to Roost” affair, in which Malcolm, commenting on the assassination of President Kennedy, had intimated—not in the speech itself, which had been cleared with Elijah Muhammad, but in the question-and-answer period that followed—that Kennedy’s death was a result of the climate of hate and violence prevailing in America. That might have passed unperceived had he not followed with: “Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad, they always made me glad.”

  That was the remark the papers picked up on, and Malcolm was ordered by Elijah Muhammad to report immediately to headquarters in Chicago, where he was told he would be suspended for ninety days. Malcolm could continue to oversee the daily administration of his mosque, Harlem’s Mosque No. 7, but could give no speeches or interviews for three months. Malcolm accepted the order with good grace and later told Benjamin that in all likelihood the Messenger had saved his life, for the outrage occasioned by his remarks made him a likely target for those—and they were legion—who feared and hated the Nation of Islam in general and Malcolm specifically.

  But I also knew that Malcolm’s remarks that day had finally given Elijah Muhammad the excuse he needed to bring Malcolm down. Permanently. For after twelve years of seeming deference and devotion to the Messenger, Malcolm had become in the eyes of Chicago too big for his breeches. It was Malcolm who so often appeared on television and was solicited for radio interviews and in magazine spreads; it was Malcolm rather than Elijah who had signed a contract with the prestigious house of Doubleday to write his autobiography, and Malcolm may well have sensed a growing jealousy.

  What’s more, one of the Nation of Islam’s basic tenets was marital fidelity, and disconcerting stories had leaked out of Chicago about the Messenger cavorting with a number of the Nation’s secretaries, several of whom had mysteriously become pregnant and therefore been expelled from the movement. At first, Malcolm had refused to believe such outlandish tales, surely the work of white devils, but ultimately he confronted the Messenger in Chicago. Elijah had apparently taken him for a private stroll and quoted the Bible at length, citing passages in which Old Testament giants such as Lot and Moses were accused of succumbing to temptations of the flesh. If Elijah meant these remarks as his response to false accusations, Malcolm took them as admissions of guilt. Back in New York, he imparted his increasing disillusion to several of his fellow ministers, at least one of whom reported this back to Chicago. Meanwhile, Malcolm asked repeatedly to be reinstated, but by the end of February, when his suspension was supposed to end but did not, he knew his twelve-year membership in the Nation of Islam was over. For him, it was the bitterest of pills, but being a man of action, and convinced of his importance to the cause of America’s twenty-two million blacks, in early March he set up his own movement, Muslim Mosque Inc., headquartered in Harlem. To the press he stated flatly that the rift between him and Elijah Muhammad, for whom he reiterated his respect and devotion, had been engineered by jealous followers who resented their father-son closeness and had poisoned the Messenger’s mind.

  Most of this I knew from Benjamin, who like many others from Harlem Mosque No. 7 had unhesitatingly joined Malcolm’s new venture. They were painfully aware that the road would be rocky and perilous, with only Malcolm’s energy, willpower, and intelligence to sustain them. What they did not know, or only vaguely suspected, was that on that fateful day of March 8, 1964, Malcolm had, in proclaiming his independence, effectively signed his own death warrant.

  * * *

  I arrived at work well before nine and went directly to Barney’s office. He had the Times spread out on the conference table and a radio on. By nine o’clock we had been joined by Fred, Harry, Nat Sobel, the VP and general troubleshooter, Jules Geller, and the director of publicity, Morrie Goldfischer.

  With the radio blaring in the background, I yelled, “It had to be Elijah Muhammad’s people.”

  Barney, reading from the Times, shook his head. “James X, New York spokesman for the Black Muslims, denied that his organization had anything to do with the killing.”

  “Of course they’re denying it,” Harry said. “They have to. But I agree with Dick: often the obvious solution is the correct one.”

  Barney and Jules were not so sure. They thought the assassination might well have been orchestrated by a government agency, the CIA or the FBI for starters, for Malcolm was viewed by most white politicians—indeed, most whites in general—as an advocate of violence, a danger to society, a demagogue so charismatic and convincing to the nation’s blacks that he would be far better dead than read.

  “I called Haley twice this morning. No answer.”

  “To me,” Harry said, “what makes it even worse, now we’ll never get to read his autobiography.”

  We knew that for the past year, perhaps longer but especially since his break with the Nation, Malcolm had been working on his autobiography with a man named Alex Haley. Just last week Malcolm had postponed a trip to see Haley in upstate New York, where he had intended to devote two full days to the book. Clearly he was too distracted by the firebombing of his house to focus on anything else.

  “Get this,” Jules said, reading from the Times. “Apparently, the man who introduced Malcolm yesterday closed by saying: ‘Malcolm is a man who would give his life for you.’ Isn’t that a hell of a note?”

  * * *

  The next day, I finally reached Benjamin Goodman, Malcolm’s second-in-command. Normally open and friendly, Benjamin now sounded vague. Scared perhaps. This man so close to Malcolm for seven years, who had broken with the Nation the minute Malcolm did, had to be concerned for his own safety.

  “Ben, let me ask you: How in God’s name did those people get into the hall without being searched? I mean, a twelve-gauge shotgun!”

  A long sigh on the other end. “Dick, before I went on, Malcolm was in a state of nerves I’d never seen. At one point as the hall was filling, he turned to me and said, ‘Something seems wrong out there.’ I think he knew something was going to happen—maybe not specifically, but something. Some of the brothers had pleaded with him to let them frisk everybody coming in, but he refused. ‘I’m here among my people,’ he told us. ‘I have nothing to worry about.’”

  I had heard Malcolm speak only once—when Benjamin had invited and vouched for me—and he had both seduced and frightened me. But I knew instinctively that on Sunday afternoon America had lost a man capable of m
oving the country forward, of healing the race issues as never before.

  * * *

  Three days later Barney called a meeting at 9:01. “I have some interesting news.”

  We all shuffled in, the same crew that had met to ponder the Malcolm assassination. Barney, with a slight smile of triumph, said dramatically: “Doubleday have renounced their rights to publish Malcolm’s autobiography. It seems they’re concerned for the safety of their employees. What would keep whoever killed Malcolm, they’re saying, from using violence against his publishers? The book apparently attacks the Nation of Islam pretty viciously.”

  “Then we should publish it,” I said.

  “Absolutely,” Harry said.

  Morrie raised his hand. “I second the motion.”

  “Shouldn’t we read it first?” Fred asked—a reasonable question, since three days before we had doubts the manuscript had been completed.

  “Who’s the agent?” Harry asked.

  “Malcolm Reiss at Paul Reynolds,” Barney said. Then: “You realize, of course, that if we go ahead, we run the same risk of retaliation.”

  A collective shrug. “If we miss an opportunity like this,” Harry said, “we shouldn’t be in publishing.”

  Days later we owned the book.

  A meeting was scheduled with Alex Haley, who turned out to be an amiable, intelligent, slightly overweight black man who had served in the U.S. Navy for twenty years, risen to the rank of chief petty officer, and retired with the goal of becoming a writer and with the luxury of a government pension that allowed him to live frugally and indulge his fantasy, for years if necessary. I had heard Benjamin mention his name, but never in a context that allowed me to picture him. When I met him, I was impressed. No, the manuscript was not completed, he said, but it was well along, their scheduled meeting the weekend of his murder would have been essentially to tie up loose ends.

  We’d signed the contract without reading the manuscript, an act of faith. A day or two later, Malcolm Reiss sent down two carbon copies, with the admonition that this was only a draft. We read it immediately and were overwhelmed. Remarkable. Deeply intelligent. Shorn of any self-indulgence. True, it would need work, but the essential was there. The trajectory of Malcolm’s life was so dramatic, so unique, and yet so “normal” for all too many American blacks, deprived from birth of any chance of a normal existence, much less fulfilling the American Dream. For me, the most startling moment in his extraordinary journey came when, after more than two hundred pages of heart-stomping adventures and admissions, more than enough to fill a long life, I read: “Tomorrow I shall turn seventeen!”

  We decided we had to “crash” the book, that is, cut the normal time between manuscript and finished book by half, maybe two-thirds. Still, the manuscript needed work. Who would edit it?

  We debated whether to publish as a paperback original or a hardcover, the former to make it widely available to its core market, which we saw as essentially black, the latter to make sure the book was properly and widely reviewed. The hardcover constituency won out, but the paperback backers were assured we’d issue an inexpensive edition in short order. Finally, advance copies of the finished book, with a list price of $7.50, the lowest we could make it and not lose money,1 arrived in the office, an impressive package bearing a handsome photograph of Malcolm, the bearded prophet, on the jacket. Our first printing was ten thousand copies—if that number seems cautious, many stores refused to stock it—and we sat back to await the reviews.

  Without question, the greatest Grove accomplishment of that year, 1965, was our publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

  48

  Story of O

  IF EVER THERE WAS a man born to become a publisher, it was Jean-Jacques Pauvert. Attracted to books at an early age, the young Frenchman began to publish under his own name when he was still in his teens. In fact, he was only fifteen when, in the fateful year 1941, when the Nazis did an abrupt about-face and attacked the Soviet Union and Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, he was introduced to the legendary Gaston Gallimard, founder of the Gallimard publishing house, and given a job in its bookstore on the boulevard Raspail. During the later war years, his increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the rare-book market—as many in occupied France with money and no safe place to put it sought financial refuge in first and limited editions—enabled him first to double, then to quadruple, his base Gallimard salary of eight hundred francs a month. Among the bibliophilic treasures that fell into his hands in this troubled time was a three-volume edition, published by Stendhal et Compagnie in the 1930s, of the Marquis de Sade’s Les 120 journées de Sodome. He dutifully plowed through, but, he later confessed, he failed to understand not only the book itself but also why he was supposed to be reading “this voice that resonated, at times like a thunderclap, at other times soft as silk, with an undercurrent of enormous humor.” If that most outrageous of Sade’s works confounded him, one must remember he was just sixteen. “So far as I knew,” he wrote of the experience, “there was no other example in the history of literature—or writing—of these gigantic indecencies, these outrageous obscenities, these multiple, methodical, atrocious details.” It would have been disconcerting no doubt if his reaction had been different. Still, the memory of that teenage encounter implanted itself in his brain, where it lay dormant for the next six years.

  At the bookstore he met a number of authors, mostly published by Gallimard: Raymond Queneau, Marcel Aymé, Henry de Montherlant, Jean-Paul Sartre, and—most important, though obviously he was unaware at the time—Jean Paulhan, the éminence grise of Gallimard. Paulhan was much taken by his young colleague’s enthusiasm, precocious knowledge of books, and disposition, and over the next few years he welcomed Jean-Jacques into his open “editorial” meetings at Gallimard’s literary magazine, La nouvelle revue française, or NRF, where the state of literature and politics—in France they are inextricably entwined—was examined and dissected.

  Intrigued by his early reading of Sade, but knowing little about him, Jean-Jacques set out to learn more, to ferret out lesser-known texts by and about him, starting with Eugen Dühren’s Der Marquis de Sade und seine Zeit, Maurice Heine’s editions of selected writings, Paul Bourdin’s Correspondance inédite du marquis de Sade, de ses proches et de ses familiers, and above all Guillaume Apollinaire’s L’oeuvre du marquis de Sade: Pages choisies, in the preface to which the poet declared:

  It strikes me that the time has come for these ideas that have been ripening in the unspeakable atmosphere of the restricted sections of libraries, and this man who was completely forgotten throughout the nineteenth century might well assume a dominant position in the course of the twentieth.

  The marquis de Sade, the freest spirit that ever lived, also had very special ideas about women, whom he wanted to see as free as men.

  Ideas that had a profound effect on the fledgling publisher. Who was this man whose very name sent people into paroxysms of rage on the one hand and elicited such ecstatic praise on the other? Rebel? Revolutionary? Visionary? Madman? Perhaps all four. The more he read and the more he learned about this “monster author,” the more he was beguiled. Was this not an opportunity for a young publisher? If, as Apollinaire had proclaimed, he was the freest spirit that ever lived, should he not be unshackled for the world to judge? By 1948, having read all there was to read by and about the man, Pauvert made up his young mind: he would devote himself to resuscitating Sade, would publish all his work, no matter how long it took or whatever obstacles, including the threat of confiscation, even prison. And, most daring of all, he intended to publish Sade not clandestinely, as others had before him, but with his imprint and address openly and proudly affixed to the cover. When he made this life-altering decision, Jean-Jacques Pauvert was all of twenty-two.

  Flash forward six years. The more-than-decade-long friendship between Jean-Jacques Pauvert and Jean Paulhan had not only endured but flourished. Pauvert still frequently showed up at Paulhan’s weekly Wednesday meetings at Ga
llimard, and Paulhan, aware of Pauvert’s commitment to Sade—which had already resulted in his publication of several volumes, each the subject of legal proceedings—increasingly admired the young man’s pigheaded courage. The two often lunched together, and on more than one occasion Paulhan alluded to a mysterious manuscript that had come across his desk that he found “quite extraordinary,” a term he rarely employed. Somewhat irritating, in the absence of the manuscript itself, was Paulhan’s reiterated statement that Jean-Jacques would be the most likely publisher for it—in fact, the only one daring enough to take it on. His own house, Gallimard, Paulhan confessed, had had first crack at it, dithered for a year and a half despite his own oft-voiced enthusiasm, and finally turned it down, Gaston Gallimard having cast the deciding negative vote after one member of the editorial board had told him, “Gaston, at your stage of life you don’t need to be publishing pornography!” All of which further whetted Jean-Jacques’s literary appetite. Repetition being the mother of lassitude, however, Jean-Jacques stopped saying he’d be only too happy to read it. Until one glacially rainy night in December 1953, or January 1954, as Pauvert relates, he was walking along the rue Jacob when he ran into Paulhan, who suddenly announced: “You know that manuscript I’ve been talking to you about, well, I’ve got it with me!” Jean-Jacques showed little enthusiasm, but Paulhan literally thrust the rain-soaked envelope into his arms and assured him it would be worth his time.

  At home, after dinner Jean-Jacques opened the packet to find a short note from Paulhan saying that unless he was badly mistaken, this was a work that would have an important place in the history of literature, adding that, despite the few corrections in the margin in his hand, the book was in no way his but the product of a very talented, special woman who was choosing to remain anonymous and publish under the pseudonym Pauline Réage. Jean-Jacques noted the intriguing title, Story of O, and began to read. At one in the morning he finished and woke up his wife. “Breathtaking,” he said. “It’s MY book. The book I’ve been looking for all these years. True, I’m the publisher of Sade. But it’s with Story of O I’m going to make my literary mark.”