The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  A little before eight, Jeannette, Genet, and I drove over to Dave Dellinger’s Peace Headquarters. His “peace room” was a nearly empty, poorly lit place with glassless windows covered with torn plastic that flapped in the night wind.

  “We’re not seeking a confrontation,” Dellinger said before anyone had even had a chance to ask a question. A gentle but imposing man with graying hair, he looked more like presidential timber than any of the candidates from either party, with the possible exception of Gene McCarthy. His “staff” seemed to consist mainly—or perhaps solely—of his son Ray, clad in khaki and wearing a blue beret, who hovered protectively over his father. “We’re here simply to protest the foregone conclusion that there is no alternative to Humphrey. And of course to express our continued opposition to the war in Vietnam.” Did he think there was going to be violence? asked Genet. Would the Chicago police attack young people—those Genet called the “gentle children”—in the park? “I can only hope the mayor’s office would reconsider its position,” Dellinger replied. “Maybe Mayor Daley will realize that the best way to deal with a situation like this is to accommodate it, not defy it,” he said.

  We were then invited to join Dellinger in the protest march scheduled for Wednesday. I translated the invitation for Genet, telling him that, however peaceful the intent, there could well be violence, probably arrests, and reminding him that he had no visa.

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course we will march.”

  * * *

  Allen Ginsberg was staying at the Lincoln Park Hotel, just opposite the park itself, which was our next nonmilitary objective, so we decided to drive over, take the pulse of the park, and see if we could find Allen. I was elected by unanimous vote to do the driving, doubtless on the basis of my long experience in manning getaway cars. Allen was not in his room, we were told, but might be in the park. He had been seen leaving, carrying his instrument. When I translated this for Genet, he smiled malevolently and said, “I certainly hope so.”

  “Hope so what?” I asked.

  “That he’s taken his instrument with him,” he said.

  “The man’s referring to a musical instrument,” I said.

  “Ah!” said Jean. “I thought he meant the instrument.”

  We arrived there about 10:00 p.m. to a menacing sight: hundreds of blue-clad policemen equipped with billy clubs, Mace, gas masks, and riot guns lined the sidewalk circling the park, which was pitch-dark except for a smattering of bonfires here and there. The police, as Genet had imagined them, were beefy and bellicose, the terms are not too strong, and standing among them, like some huge, quiescent, prehistoric animal left over from a grade-B movie, was an armored vehicle on top of which sat a bank of darkened searchlights. Near the vehicle stood a cop with a bullhorn: “This is the final warning. Clear the park. The park will be closed at eleven o’clock. Anyone remaining will be subject to arrest.”

  In the distance, we spotted Ed Sanders, a writer and member of the rock group the Fugs, slinking along the edge of the park just beyond the grasp of the blue-clad finest.

  Terry, always the wit, shouted out to him: “Hey, Ed! Where’s that loony fruit Al Ginsberg?”

  Ed stopped in his tracks as though pierced, turned, and glowered in the direction of the offending voice, ready to do battle or flee, as reason dictated. Then he saw it was only our wacko group.

  “He’s doing his thing,” Ed told us, “over by that fire.”

  His “thing” was chanting the word “om” over and over in the darkness, accompanying the chant with a portable harmonium (his instrument). The oms varied in tone, intensity, pitch; some were staccato brief, others drawn out for several seconds. Seated around him were a couple hundred people, most echoing his chant, others immersed in presumably peaceful thought. Nearby, a group of blacks was playing a flute and bongo drums. Not long before, we were told, as the bullhorn threats grew more strident, rumors had begun circulating that the police were moving in, and some people had panicked. Allen’s om-ing, however, had had a calming effect, and from a very small circle of thirty or forty, his disciples had grown impressively.

  As we approached, Allen saw that Saint Genet was among us. He broke off his chant, came over, and prostrated himself before the master. Jean, seemingly neither surprised nor embarrassed, merely smiled. In fact, I suspect that the completely surrealistic world into which he had landed had by now inured him to virtually any surprise. We sat down with the protesters—numbering by now more than a thousand, I would guess—and began chanting with the best of them. Genet seemed especially delighted by the nocturnal gathering and chimed in his om-ing in perfect pitch.

  It was by now past eleven, and although the bullhorn warnings continued unabated every few minutes, we had begun to take them for idle threats. Maybe Mayor Daley had finally been touched by grace.

  But no.

  Terry Southern described the next half hour’s events with his usual understated acumen:

  Burroughs looked at his watch, and with that unerring awareness of which he is capable, muttered, “They’re coming.” At that instant, the banks of searchlights blazed up on the armored van which was already moving toward us. Fanned out on each side of the van were about a thousand police.

  “Well, Bill, I think we’d better pursue another tactic,” I suggested, getting to my feet. What the hell, we were supposed to be here as observers, not as participants in any of Allen’s crackpot schemes. That the entire reportage team should be busted the first time out was unthinkable. Genet was the most difficult to persuade, but finally, on Ginsberg’s insistence, we all went up to his hotel room.

  There, all inhibitions gone (if ever there had been any), Allen knelt in front of Jean and kissed his feet. “I have read Our Lady of the Flowers,” he said, still on bended knee, “one of the great works of the century. And you, monsieur, are a great saint.”

  * * *

  That night, on television, America saw its children being clubbed, beaten, kicked, maced, and gassed as the rampaging Chicago cops advanced, in a pincer action, on both sides of the armored van’s searchlights. It was, to Americans unused to civil violence, who believed that such confrontations between police and civilians were a foreign vice, a shocking sight. But as always television is a filter as much as a recorder; most of the time it creates a distance between viewer and event. Having lived that event—and the even more violent nights that followed—I can attest to the difference. One point, among many others, that television failed to capture that night was the fact that by employing a pincer movement, the Chicago police had no desire to clear the park. They wanted to club the kids. For as the crowd dispersed and headed for the park’s fringes, presumably leaving the cops behind, it found itself facing another equally menacing phalanx of blue at the park’s exit. Thanks to Terry’s perspicacity, and Allen’s kind hospitality, we were a few dozen steps ahead of the crowd and reached the edge of Lincoln Park before the pincer movement took its toll. Again, Terry Southern:

  Near the street, I glanced back in time to see [the cops] reach the place where we had been, and where a dozen or more were still sitting. They didn’t arrest them, at least not right away; they beat the hell out of them—with nightsticks, and in one case at least, the butt of a shotgun. They clubbed them until they got up and ran, or until they started crawling away (the ones who were able), and then they continued to hit them as long as they could. The ones who actually did get arrested seemed to have gotten caught up among the police, like a kind of human medicine ball, being shoved and knocked back and forth from one cop to the next, with what was obviously mounting fury. And this was a phenomenon somewhat unexpected, which we were to observe constantly throughout the days of violence—that rage seemed to engender rage; the bloodier and the more brutal the cops were, the more their fury increased.

  NOTES FROM CHICAGO DIARY

  Sunday, August 25. Morning.

  About eight o’clock, awake but before we are out of bed, a knock on the door. It is Jean, asking to come i
n. I open. The mischievous gnome, whose room is a few doors down, is wearing a Japanese-style kimono and bearing a sheaf of paper in his hand. Jeannette pulls the covers a bit higher as I stammer apologies for being a slugabed. Jean’s speech more than a bit slurred—not from drink, but from Nembutal, I had been told by Rosica,1 which Jean takes to sleep. He wants to read us his first day’s reportage. I sweep him in with a grand, princely gesture. Jean heads not for the chair but straight for the bed and crawls in beside Jeannette, patting the sheet beside him, a clear invitation for me to join. Rub-a-dub-dub. In I go. Jean begins to read:

  THE FIRST DAY: THE DAY OF THE THIGHS

  The thighs are very beautiful beneath the blue cloth, thick and muscular. It all must be hard. This policeman is also a boxer, a wrestler. His legs are long, and perhaps, as you approach his member, you would find a furry nest of long, tight, curly hair … A few hours later, about midnight, I join Allen Ginsberg in a demonstration of hippies and students in Lincoln Park: their determination to sleep in the park is their very gentle, as yet too gentle, but certainly poetic, response to the nauseating spectacle of the convention. Suddenly the police begin their charge, with the grimacing masks intended to terrify; and, in fact, everyone turns and runs. But I am well aware that these brutes have other methods, and far more terrifying masks, when they go hunting for blacks in the ghettos, as they have done for the past 150 years. It is a good, healthy, ultimately moral thing for these fair-haired, gentle hippies to be charged at by these louts decked out in this amazing snout that protects them from the effects of the gas they have emitted … The person who opens her door to receive us as we try to escape from these brutes in blue is a young and very beautiful black woman. Later, when the streets have finally grown calm again, she offers to let us slip out through the back door, which opens onto another street: without the police suspecting it, we have been conjured away and concealed by a trick house …

  Sunday Afternoon

  We drive out to Midway Airport to cover Gene McCarthy’s arrival. Jean is especially intrigued to see this “outsider,” the decent alternative to the rigged convention. Several thousand people have gathered—still, a numerical disappointment, I would think—but their colorful, flower-bedecked signs, WE WANT GENE, are waving rhythmically, as if a sea of windblown flowers. Three platforms—actually the empty beds of trucks—are gathered in a semicircle. On one, a rock group; on another, a brass band. McCarthy’s plane is about half an hour late. Finally it arrives. Gene, smiling broadly, descends and scrambles up onto the empty platform. Jean remarks on how little police protection there is for him. Virtually none, in fact. McCarthy begins to speak, but no sound emerges from the mike. Dead. Gentle tapping fails to bring it to life. Jean murmurs: “Sabotage?” Realizing how often he is, with a single word or thought, prescient, I wonder if he isn’t right. McCarthy hops over onto the platform of the rock group—no power there either. Ditto the brass band. He returns center stage, and there, miraculously, sound has been restored. He is tall, with a generous shock of gray hair, and a smile that ought to win millions of hearts and, more to the point, votes. I translate for Genet as he speaks. He is here not as a spoiler but as a winner. He will not be denied his final effort to turn the convention around. It has been a long and difficult eight months, but he has voiced an alternate opinion and been heard. The convention cannot ignore your—he is referring to the crowd—demands.

  GENET ON GENE:

  As McCarthy leaves the speaker’s platform, it seems that no one is protecting him, save for the sea of flowers painted by the hope-filled men and women … In order for McCarthy to arouse such enthusiasm, what concessions has he made? In what ways has his moral rectitude been weakened? And yet the fact remains that all his speeches, all his statements, reveal intelligence and generosity. Is it a trick?…

  I realize that in his mind, as in his writing, Genet is relentlessly probing. He has seen and lived too much, and is too brilliant, to accept any surface for what it seems. Especially in politics. But also in most other life situations. His attitude is not to be confused with cynicism, an entirely different stance. No: instinctively, he likes McCarthy; but, automatically, he is searching for the flaw, faint or fatal, the secret motivation, the person behind the mask.

  Seduced by the man, and hoping to learn more about this “outsider,” Genet asked if we could interview McCarthy, whose headquarters we had learned were at the Conrad Hilton Hotel. When we arrived at the fifteenth floor, the senator was not there—otherwise engaged, we were told—but would be available later. He would be informed of our visit. Again, Jean, impressed by the youth of McCarthy’s faithful, tugged my sleeve and said, “I thought all presidential candidates had police protection. Not one in sight, no?” And indeed there was none.

  Monday, August 26. Morning.

  Eight o’clock. Knock on door. This time we are prepared. Again, kimono-clad Jean crawls into bed, unfolds his blue-lined sheets of paper, and begins to read.

  THE SECOND DAY: THE DAY OF THE VISOR

  The truth of the matter is that we are bathed in Mallarmean blue. This second day imposes the azure helmets of the Chicago police. A policeman’s black leather visor intrudes between me and the world … Supporting this visor is the blue cap—Chicago wants us to think that the whole police force, and this policeman standing in front of me, have descended from heaven—made of a top-grade sky-blue cloth. But who is this blue cop in front of me? I look into his eyes and I can see nothing else there except the blue of the cap. What does his gaze say? Nothing. The Chicago police are, and are not. I shall not pass …

  I listen intently as Jean reads. The Chicago police as Mallarmean blue? I wonder how Esquire will cotton to that wool. I have to assume, though, that if a magazine makes the mistake of inviting genius to grace its pages, it cannot be too upset or shocked by the results. And I marvel that Jean will, as he had warned, write his piece from the viewpoints of the policeman’s various body-and-uniform parts. While he had never set foot in Chicago, never seen a Chicago policeman in the flesh, I suspected that he knew before coming exactly how—and probably what—he would write.

  Music, we learned, was one of Genet’s abiding passions. His knowledge of music is encyclopedic and profound, his insights original. In the middle of the political maelstrom Jean and Jeannette abandon themselves to the subject they both love. I listen with a mixture of awe and humility. Where, I wonder, did Genet acquire his musical expertise? Jeannette tells him of her plan for a recital to give back in New York that fall. Although she had been trained as a classical violinist, jazz had always been part of her musical landscape. For the past several months she and several talented jazz musicians had been “jamming” together. The drummer was Jack DeJohnette, the pianists Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea, with three other jazz musicians. When Jeannette mentioned to Genet her plan—innovative at the time—to divide her forthcoming concert between classical and jazz repertory with the appropriate change of costume, Jean got very excited and appointed himself on the spot her production and stage manager. We knew of Jean’s involvement in the theater, but his musical erudition was a revelation to us both.

  Late morning, we all head for Lincoln Park. The yippies are out in force, unfazed by last night’s clubbing and gassing. In fact, the events—probably due to television coverage—have galvanized other forces to join them, including the clergy, who promise to be out in force next time. The yippies proudly display their candidate, the Pink Pig, which they keep in a burlap bag. Burroughs, believing in fairness and equal time, records the pig’s snorts and squeals, which he’ll doubtless later splice in some kind of cut-up masterpiece into the cops’ threats, the delegates’ speeches, the blaring music.

  Monday Afternoon

  Jean, Burroughs, Terry, Allen, Berendt, Jeannette, and I—plus a new member of our sexy septet, the Beatles’ photographer Michael Cooper—head out in two cars for the Convention Hall. Trouble parking, as interdictions abound, and the good citizens of the area, suffering from a severe case o
f hippie phobia, scream at us, “Don’t you park in front of my house! I’ll call the police!” Can’t totally say I blame them from the looks of us, not to mention the hippie mayhem they witnessed on television last night that was coming mighty close to their hallowed homes, by God! As for appearances: Genet as described. Allen bushy. Terry scruffy, despite his protestations to the contrary. Yours truly not exactly a fashion plate either. And to top off the sartorial nightmare, Michael Cooper was decked out in a basically purple outfit—including the hat—with one pant leg blue with white stripes, the other red with polka dots. Shoeless to boot. Only Jeannette, Burroughs, and Berendt lend a modicum of decorum. Not enough, I fear, to offset the others in the eyes of the police swarming around the Convention Hall. In circling to land our outer-space vehicles (“Why,” Genet wonders out loud at one point in our travels, noting the model name of our rented Ford, “would anyone name a car ‘Galaxie’?”), we see the convention area looks more like a military installation, an armed camp, than the center of the democratic process. Three rings of barbed wire, the outermost a good quarter mile from the entrance, and at each barrier a checkpoint manned by a phalanx of Chicago’s finest. Jean has altered my optic, I can no longer refrain from checking out the cops’ bellies and thighs. Precisely as described, to a man. Meanwhile, “concentration camp,” Jean keeps muttering, appalled by the quasi-military surroundings. Trepidations for my charge. There is no way Genet is going to get through all three checkpoints unscathed. I picture him handcuffed and shackled. “Officer, you don’t understand. This is one of the great writers of our time. His ID is back at the hotel. You can’t arrest him.” Burroughs, on the contrary, pleased as punch, reveling in the moment. His normally deadpan face creased with a visible—yes, visible—grin. Armed with his ubiquitous tape recorder, Bill keeps it running full tilt at each checkpoint, as the cops question us at length about our race, religion, professional purpose, and planet of origin. Burroughs, staunch proponent of the cut-up method of writing, doubtless gathering material for future work as well as recording the historic moment. A double whammy, or How to Turn Impending Disaster into Creative Delight.