The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  Much to our surprise, the reviews were mostly favorable. The book-bible New York Times Book Review assigned O to Albert Goldman, a Columbia professor of English, who wrote:

  Story of O—notorious as an underground novel, remarkable as a rare instance of pornography sublimed to purest art—appeared first under mysterious circumstances in Paris in 1954. Bearing the name of an unknown, presumably pseudonymous author, Pauline Réage, and the endorsement of an eminent critic, now a member of the Académie Française, the book was greeted with a mixture of respect and perplexity …

  Story of O is neither a fantasy nor a case history. With its alternate beginnings and endings; its simple, direct style (like that of a fable); its curious air of abstraction, of independence of time, place, and personality, what it resembles most is a legend—the spiritual history of a saint and martyr …

  Despite its sensational action, O’s history maintains the sweetly solemn tone of a female martyrology. This paradox is representative of the book’s imaginative texture, a tissue of intricately woven ironies whose consolidating theme—implied by the religious symbolism of the convent like schools, the iron ring, the flagellations—is a perversion of the Christian mystery of exaltation through debasement, of the extremity of suffering transformed into an ultimate victory over the limitations of being …

  O comes to embody all three aspects of feminine being symbolized by the triskelion—the modest maiden (Diana), the inviting woman (Luna) and the sinister crone (Hecate).

  In one fell swoop Professor Goldman, in our most important print medium, had outdone both Messieurs Paulhan and Pieyre de Mandiargues in endowing O with an almost mythological respectability. Predictably, the book went onto the New York Times Book Review bestseller list and remained there for weeks.

  49

  Grove Goes Public

  AS THE MAN—OR WOMAN—SAID, “I’ve been poor and I’ve been rich, and I can assure you, rich is better.” Or words to that effect. At Grove we were all earning a living wage but little more, and if ever we were tempted to join a larger house at considerably more money, the response was almost inevitably “We’re having too much fun here.” True, Barney was often irascible, a control freak, most of the time manic, prone to panic attacks, reveling in unfairly pitting one so-called executive against another—his method, we surmised, of testing our mettle or seeing how far we could be pushed, for there was a sadistic element in his makeup, in stark contrast to his innate generosity. In all fairness, the brunt of our financial strains lay on his none-too-broad shoulders, for he and his mother owned all the stock of Grove, and when losses occurred, as they often had, it was from their pockets the deficit had to be made up.

  For the three years between 1962 and 1964 we had been in a Sargasso Sea financially, with sales stagnant and profits, when they came, minimal. In 1962 we had lost roughly $400,000 on sales of slightly over $2 million, largely because of the soaring costs of the lawsuits.1 I remember one day that year when Barney disappeared in late morning and reappeared just before five, saying he had spent the day with some people on Wall Street. “To raise money?” I asked. He nodded, said, “No takers,” shrugged, and disappeared into his office. I had always heard that the extent of his inherited wealth was exaggerated, though it stood him in good stead in obtaining bank loans and printers’ credit, but that day I had my first inkling the pockets were really not all that deep. Later I learned he had ventured to the Financial District not to raise money but to try to sell the company. Anyway, the next two years, though our sales were at a virtual standstill—down a bit in 1963, up a bit in 1964—we managed to turn a profit, slight but reassuring. The next year, thanks in part to several bestsellers, including the irrepressible Games People Play, our sales soared by almost 50 percent, with a substantial profit. Nineteen sixty-six saw another 20 percent increase in sales, as the growing backlist, aimed at schools and colleges—with Jules Geller bombarding academe, especially the younger professors, with reading material and teachers’ guides—kicked in and accounted for roughly 30 percent of the business, and another sizable profit. That year, too, we started a book club, which by year’s end had seventy-five thousand members, while the large-format (Playboy size!) Evergreen Review circulation soared from 35,000 in 1965 to 120,000. Add in Cinema 16, purchased from Amos Vogel in late 1966, an eclectic library of art films, documentaries, and film classics aimed primarily at schools and colleges, and the acquisition of three major feature films—including Finnegans Wake—and we began to look like a multipronged media company, constantly ahead of the curve and sufficiently attractive to draw the attention of Wall Street.

  “How would you feel if we went public?” Barney tossed out one day around the beginning of 1967. “They’re talking about making a public offering in June or July of 240,000 shares at somewhere between six and ten dollars a share. That would net us well over a million dollars at the very least and ease all the financial pressures we’ve always had. Money to expand. Buy more and better books. Some feature films. Another book club?”

  Who could say no, especially when we learned that members of the executive committee would all receive shares. Not options: shares. If there was a gimmick, we didn’t see it.

  I can’t say the place swarmed with due-diligence snoopers, but our accountant Joe Warren made available to the underwriter the company’s results for the last five years and a fair estimate for 1967, which looked—to borrow a word from the late great Terry Southern—fab. Proper papers were drawn and duly registered. We were happy to see that several of our suppliers, including printers and paper merchants, who had, not all that long ago, asked us to pay a portion of our bills up front, had jumped on the bandwagon. Finally, on July 7, 1967, each of us received four thousand shares at the offering price of seven dollars per share. It didn’t mean we were suddenly rich, but with gas at roughly thirty cents a gallon, milk at a few cents a quart, and my Central Park West rent $354 a month, it made us all feel less poor. Despite ourselves, we checked the NASDAQ numbers each day as the price of our stock soared, first to ten, then to fifteen, then to twenty, and well above. Morrie Goldfischer, whose sense of humor was pervasive, made an almost daily joke of our sudden riches. Holding The Wall Street Journal open to the NASDAQ page, he would sidle up and whisper, “See today’s quote? Another two grand in our pockets. Not bad, eh?” Suddenly we were rich, not superrich, but seemingly rewarded for our several years of sweat equity. Except …

  Except that we learned, later rather than sooner, that ours was “letter stock” and could not be traded for an extended period of time. While many of our investors bailed out, doubling, trebling, and in some cases quintupling their investment, we could only watch and wait. Barney had never told us of this restriction, and the disillusion was apparent in the office, especially when we saw the frenzied stock soar as high as forty at one point, making us each worth roughly $160,000—on paper—ten to fifteen times our annual salaries. If we had had a watercooler, Grove stock, not exciting new manuscripts, would have been the constant subject of our conversations. Furthering our concern, we knew from our internal numbers the stock was clearly overpriced, and indeed soon it began to drift downward. By the end of the year it had stopped drifting and plummeted to nine, at which point a number of brokers recommended it as a no-brainer “buy.”2 As we watched its downward spiral, all we could do was sit on the sidelines and hope. For believers, pray. Hey, at nine, it was still eight thousand dollars more than our purchase price. The original plan was to sell your stock at some heady price, pay off the loan, and pocket the proceeds. In my case, I had borrowed the twenty-eight thousand dollars from a Connecticut bank, the loan co-signed by my father, who as the stock ascended complimented me on my astute buy. But even that was qualified. “I didn’t know you had any business sense,” he would say. “I guess I was wrong.” But then he too noted the drift and ceased his encomiums, his expression, if not his words, indicating: “Well, I guess I was right in the first place.” Still, the Connecticut bank so far had shown no
sign of worry. But if the stock drifted much further …

  When finally we were free to sell, the stock had reached a point somewhere below a dollar a share. Should we hang on to it, hoping it would rebound? What at this point did we have to lose? Another four thousand dollars, it turned out. When finally I did sell—the bank’s patience was not unlimited—the loss was virtually the entire “investment.” It was a harsh introduction to the vagaries of the stock market, as well as a concrete example of the law of gravity.

  So, I’ve been poor and (on paper) rich, and, believe me, poor is better. Far fewer night sweats. Far fewer heartbreaks. Far fewer scowling faces.

  50

  Genet Comes to America

  THE YEAR 1968, again having no alternative, dawned on a note of mingled hope and despair. The turbulent 1960s were winding to a close—or so it seemed. In fact, the worst—or best, depending on your viewpoint and political bent—was yet to come.

  The United States was still bogged down in Vietnam. What had earlier been termed JFK’s war was now Lyndon Johnson’s, and that albatross was weighing ever more heavily round his thick Texas neck. Quagmire abroad was matched by increasing resistance to that “pointless, hopeless” war at home. And the naysayers and protesters could no longer be labeled by the administration as hippies and druggies (weren’t they the same, after all?), Commies and pinkos, Beats and bohemians. Middle-class Americans were joining the marches and signing the petitions, and even American corporations—perhaps for their own venal reasons, but nonetheless—were alerting Washington to the fact that continued, unqualified support of the war was not a given.

  It was an election year, and the mood of the country did not seem to bode well for the incumbent. Taking political advantage of the nation’s growing winter of discontent, voices of opposition were gathering political strength as the primaries began. One man in particular, the senator from Minnesota Eugene McCarthy, surrounded by a band of exuberant, youthful cohorts, was focusing on the folly of the Vietnam War in particular and, to judge by the polls, gaining in popularity week by week. The greatest political enigma of the moment was the carpetbag senator from New York, Robert Kennedy. Where did he stand on the key issues? Would he or would he not challenge a president he clearly loathed but till now had backed for a second term? As for Lyndon Baines Johnson himself: Would he or would he not run again? If he did, the Democratic nomination was his. But in the late months of 1967 and the early months of the new year, he had been pointedly, and eloquently, silent on the subject.

  For their part, the Republicans seemed intent on nominating that all-time loser, Richard Milhous Nixon, the man who had lost the presidency by a whisker—no, a shadow—to JFK in 1960, then followed up that painful loss by failing in his quest to unseat Pat Brown two years later for the governorship of California. Early in 1968, the New Hampshire primary shocked the country—and the politicians. Gene McCarthy and his youth brigade’s unexpected vote total at the Democratic primary led Johnson to withdraw from the race. The message was clear: in 1968, politics as usual was an endangered species. But even before McCarthy the Good had had a chance to savor his victory, Robert Kennedy, the Great Vacillator, made a decision: it was time to join the race. The detested LBJ was indeed vulnerable. McCarthy had shown the way, but he, however worthy, was vulnerable, too. Once the vaunted Kennedy machine revved up, Gene’s guys and dolls would be revealed as the rank amateurs they doubtless were. Tough, the cries of foul play. Be damned, the accusations of callow opportunism. There was a dynasty to be protected and prolonged. Camelot was not dead after all.

  In a stroke of journalistic brilliance—madness?—Esquire magazine, sensing that the Democratic convention in Chicago might well be a historic event, invited three world-famous writers, all published by or associated with Grove, to cover the convention: the satirist Terry Southern, author of The Magic Christian, “the author most capable of handling frenzy” (Esquire); William Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, the nightmarish work that had propelled him from the North African expatriate drug scene to New York Times bestsellerdom; and Jean Genet, playwright, novelist, ex-convict, and homosexual, author of two long-banned works we had recently published in the United States, Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal, a man dubbed by the State Department as “undesirable” and, as we have seen, by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre as “Saint Genet” (take your pick). And to round out the fearless threesome, Esquire assigned the journalist John Sack to cover the convention from the police point of view. Not quite equal time, but still … Whether it was the publisher, Arnold Gingrich, or the editor Harold Hayes who dreamed up the idea, it was an act of inspired madness. For even Esquire, which early on modestly proclaimed that it “required no special wisdom to foresee that the Convention of the Democratic Party in Chicago was likely to transcend the limits of ordinary politics,” could know that those five days in the Windy City would turn into a lopsided mixture of theater of the absurd, Grand Guignol, and pure tragedy, into an event that the respected newsman Eric Sevareid would later term “the most disgraceful spectacle in the history of American politics.”

  * * *

  At seven o’clock on Sunday morning, August 18, the phone rang in our ramshackle but beloved former horse barn on eastern Long Island, where we spent most weekends. I picked up the receiver, wondering who could be calling at this ungodly hour.

  “Allo. Dick Sivère?”

  My name all right, but with a decidedly French tilt.

  “Jean here. Jean Genet.”

  “Jean! Where are you calling from, Paris?”

  “No, Canada. I’m on my way to New York.”

  “Great. So you got your visa after all.”

  “Not exactly. I’ll explain everything when I see you. I should be there in a day or two.”

  “Shall we get you a hotel?”

  “Yes, I’d appreciate that.” Pause. “Uh, Dick. Nothing too fancy. But as close to Forty-second Street as possible.”

  “Okay. I’ll call you back to let you know where you’ll be staying.”

  There was a pause. “You can’t,” he said. “I don’t have a phone here. When I get in, I’ll come down to Grove, and you can direct me from there.”

  I knew that Genet had no fixed abode, that wherever he went he preferred hotels, and the more frugal the better. Jail had doubtless given him a taste for the spare. He had written eloquently on the terrors of long-term convicts emerging from prison to “freedom,” described how difficult it was to adapt to the world you had dreamed of rejoining, and theorized that ex-cons felt comfortable only in prisonlike surroundings. Thus his penchant for cell-like hotel rooms.

  I called Barney in East Hampton to inform him of Jean’s impending arrival and to settle on a hotel.

  * * *

  Jean’s enigmatic remark about his visa reminded me of the story he had told me about his previous encounter with American officialdom four years before.

  In the early 1960s, several of Genet’s plays, including The Maids, The Balcony, and The Blacks, had been performed in New York to great success, and we had published them as Evergreen paperbacks. By 1964, two of the plays had been performed a thousand times, and to celebrate that twin event, the producers and Grove had jointly invited Jean to New York. Genet went down to the American consulate on the rue St. Florentin and duly filled out the necessary forms. He was then called in to the vice-consul’s office, where he was asked a number of weighty questions, the most important of which was: “Are you now or have you ever been a Communist?” To which Genet truthfully said, “No.” He had in fact briefly been a Trotskyite, but certainly that did not qualify, did it? (I later asked Jean what he would have answered if the man had asked him whether he was a homosexual, fully expecting him to tell me that he would have lied. But Jean rarely gave you the expected. He simply said: “But he didn’t ask me.”) Whereupon the vice-consul stamped his passport with the American visa and Jean returned to his lodgings, a fairly remote Paris hotel.

  A few hou
rs later the landlady yelled upstairs: “Monsieur Jean, you have a phone call!”

  Most no-star Paris hotels in those days had but one phone, down in the owner’s office. Jean did not receive all that many calls and wondered who it could be.

  “Monsieur Genet,” the voice on the other end began, “this is the American consulate.”

  This was not the voice of the man who had stamped his passport. Genet assumed it was the man’s superior, probably the consul himself.

  “I wonder if you’d mind stopping by the consulate,” the man went on.

  “Of course,” Genet replied. “May I ask why?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve made a mistake in giving you a visa. Could you kindly bring your passport back so we can correct the error?”

  Genet remembers thinking that the poor vice-consul, doubtless a semiliterate who had never read his work and had no idea what a threat Jean was to the fabric of American society, would probably be soon on his way to the U.S. equivalent of diplomatic Siberia. Visibly, the man on the phone was better read.

  “Monsieur,” Genet said, “when I needed a visa, I came to your embassy to get it. If you want it back, you can come here and get it.”

  There was a pause.

  “You should know that even with that visa in your passport, they’ll stop you at the border,” the consul said. And with that he hung up.