The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  I passed on the message.

  Genet, without missing a beat, reached out and picked up the envelope containing “A Salute to a Hundred Thousand Stars” and stuffed it in his pocket. “Tell Mr. Hayes when I get my full fee he can have the second piece,” he said. I passed on the message.

  Back in his hotel room, Jean took the pages and slowly, methodically ripped them lengthwise into a dozen pieces, tossing strips into the wastebasket.

  I watched, increasingly ill as I saw the shattered manuscript disappear.

  “Why the hell did you do that?” I said querulously.

  “They’ll never pay me,” Jean said. He paused. “Did you ever notice,” he said, “that when there’s a difference between people who have money and those who don’t, it’s always the former who win? I’ve never known it to fail.”

  Friday Night, August 30

  Jeannette was preparing a farewell dinner at our house for Jean, Barney, and some other Groveniks. I was not looking forward to it now, since Jean’s foul mood was sure to permeate the celebration. But again I was wrong. If he was disturbed or angry—and I knew he was—he never let on, and the evening was a resounding success. In fact, I had never seen Jean in finer form, regaling us with stories of the past week.

  What was the high point of Chicago?

  “My meeting with the Black Panthers,” he said, almost in a rush.

  “On Tuesday—no Wednesday—we went to a Free Huey rally in Grant Park where I met Bobby Seale, David Hilliard, and a third Black Panther leader whose name I didn’t catch…”

  “Wendell Hillard,” I supplied.

  “Right. Anyway, Seale gave this impassioned speech in which, if I understood Dick’s translation, he suggested the White House be painted black. What a splendid idea!”

  Laughs all around.

  “But I shook all three hands and told them I was with them in their struggle … And if one day they needed me, I’d come back.”1

  The rest of the evening focused on the future, the upcoming Humphrey-Nixon race, about which Genet opined that it really didn’t matter who won. “They were both connards [assholes], were they not?”

  At one point, he turned to Barney and said, rather gently, I thought, “You missed a great event in your hometown. I thought you were coming on Saturday,” his blue eyes boring into Barney’s.

  “I know, I know,” Barney said. “Actually, at one point Saturday morning I got in my car in East Hampton and headed for the airport. But after a few miles I turned back. I don’t know why.” It was one of the few times in my long acquaintance with Barney that I saw him truly contrite.

  “A shame,” Genet said. Barney, for whom “contrite” was a foreign word, lowered his head. “You missed a great event.”

  Which ended the evening.

  * * *

  Before exiting Jean’s hotel that afternoon, I had been determined not to leave the despoiled manuscript behind. On the pretext that I had left something in the room, I went back up and rescued the remnants.

  The following evening, Jeannette and I drove Jean to LaGuardia, where, without further incident, he boarded a plane for Montreal. He had been in America less than two weeks, but as we headed home from the airport, we both had the feeling we had just lived a mini-lifetime.

  “Why ‘mini’?” Jeannette laughed. “It seemed pretty ‘maxi’ to me.”

  That Sunday, I managed to stitch the scraps together with Scotch tape, translated them, and sent the piece off to Harold Hayes with a note. Not surprisingly, I never got a reply.2

  For several weeks I pursued Jean’s lost cause and also tried to get Hayes to reimburse Jack Wright for his missing camera. Jack was a friend of Terry Southern, who sent a barbed wire or two on Wright’s behalf as well. Finally, with Hayes’s continuing silence ringing in my ears, I wrote to the publisher, Arnold Gingrich, on December 27, in a post-Christmas Dickensian mood of ill humor. On December 30, Gingrich wrote back:

  In Harold’s absence … I can only give my impression of why you may have failed to hear from him.

  I got the feeling that Harold was up to here (!) on everything to do with Genet, after paying the horrendous bills that his presence incurred. This involved, as you know, not only expenses for Genet and you and your wife, but also a substantial payment for an additional piece, which turned out to be such a calculated piece of effrontery that Harold could only assume it had been written as a deliberate put-down.

  Harold paid and paid and paid until he reached a point at which—I take the liberty of guessing—he would have turned down Jesus Christ himself if he had asked him to lend a hand at carrying that heavy cross up the Golgotha Hill.

  If my impression is wrong, I am sure Harold will correct it upon his return.

  Yours always sincerely,

  Arnold Gingrich

  Publisher

  On January 15, with still no word from Hayes, who, it could be presumed, had returned from his “absence,” presumably self-imposed, I wrote Gingrich back. I first reminded him that Genet, a spartan soul, incurred costs in New York, before and after the convention, of a grand total of three hundred dollars. If that was excessive, he and I should sit down and redefine the term. As for the fee, that had been agreed between Hayes and Rosica Colin, so no surprises there, as none for our translation fee, which had been proposed by Hayes. My strong suspicion was that the magazine’s anger was directed not at Genet’s expenditures—which at any calculation had to be termed modest—but at his politics. I closed:

  I am certain that Genet never made any bones about his feelings on the Vietnam War before he came here, and while Esquire has every right not to like the piece he wrote, it was most certainly not a calculated piece of effrontery, and I know that Genet takes the piece quite seriously. I gather, in fact, that it is being published in two or three major European publications.

  What I am saying in effect is that, if Harold “paid and paid and paid,” to the best of my knowledge he did not pay for anything, or at any rate, that he had not contracted for.

  The night of our farewell dinner for Jean, I had taken Barney aside and told him the story of Esquire’s reneging. He was as appalled as I, upset for Jean, and impressed by his good front throughout the evening. He also had an immediate and generous solution. If Esquire turned the piece down, we’d publish it in Evergreen Review and pay Jean the Esquire rate—which was five or six times ours. In due course, the piece appeared in Evergreen Review, which pleased Jean no end when I sent him the issue.

  Strangely, he never asked how “A Salute to a Hundred Thousand Stars” had made it from the wastebasket of his hotel room to the pages of Evergreen Review.

  53

  Goeth Before a Fall

  BY 1968, Grove had tiptoed into film, having purchased, in addition to Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16, a smattering of feature films, as well as producing Beckett’s Film. It was a minor part of the Grove business, but it occupied a special place in Barney’s heart.

  Flash back to the Frankfurt Book Fair 1967. At the fair that year were a curious couple, Eberhard and Phyllis Kronhausen, whose book The Sexually Responsive Woman we had published a few years earlier. The Kronhausens, it was rumored, advised a number of Hollywood stars on how to broaden, and presumably enrich, their sex lives. Why they were at the fair I cannot remember, but I suspect to flog their latest opus to foreign countries.

  On the second day of the fair, Barney showed me an article in The Manchester Guardian that had been brought to his attention about a recently released Swedish film, I Am Curious (Yellow), the subject of enormous controversy for, the article said, its blatant sexuality. Wasting not a moment, Barney sought out the head of the leading Swedish publisher Bonniers, who knew all about Yellow, called the foundation that had made it—for it turned out to be a nonprofit venture—and arranged for a screening. Because we had meetings prescheduled months in advance, there was no way Barney himself could go to Stockholm till after the fair. Wait a minute: What about the Kronhausens? Excellent idea—with one excep
tion. Before the K-couple undertook the burdensome task, they made Barney sign a letter specifying that if we took on the film, they would get 10 percent of the proceeds. I had known that Barney was at times generous to a fault, but what a fault, this! Ten percent for viewing a film, all expenses paid? They reported back that the film was “pretty good,” hardly a glowing recommendation, but Barney, now convinced this was made-to-order Grove, hopped on a plane to Stockholm as soon as the fair was over, viewed it with his wife, Christine, and bought it on the spot for a hundred thousand dollars (well over half a million in today’s dollars).

  First, it wasn’t by any stretch pornography; in fact, it was a serious work about class struggle, about a young girl being exploited by her boyfriend, about women’s rights. But it was titillating, probably what would today be labeled soft porn, and came with a huge aura of controversy. Back in the office, when Barney reported the purchase, there was considerable head shaking, for we were still pretty pissed and beleaguered financially. If the film bombed, would there still be a Grove? From a legal point of view, it sounded as if it was going to be déjà vu Henry Miller all over again, for this time, assuming we got the damn thing through customs, we would have to offer indemnity to all theaters that booked it. Some copies had been smuggled in through Canada, but though these were useful for in-house screenings, no commercial exploitation could occur until customs officially released it. The film was seized at the point of entry, in the instance New York, and held under lock and key at the customs house at the corner of Houston and Varick streets. Several of us made the pilgrimage to visit our prisoner and plead its case, until it was finally released under threat of suit. An empty victory, for the legal fun was about to begin. It was not until March 1969, a year and a half after its Swedish release, that the film finally opened in the United States. Predictably, many theaters refused to book it, even with the promise of indemnity, so that in dozens of cities we rented empty theaters and hired local staff to show it. Time and again we were arrested and the theaters shut down, until one day Ed de Grazia, who was handling the legal end of the project, had the brilliant idea of hiring local attorneys before the film opened, their fees to be 10 percent of the box-office take. Wherever that tempting offer was seized upon, there were no lawsuits, but still a bucketful were wending their way expensively through the courts. Offsetting this, wherever the film was shown, the lines were long, as theater after theater reported sold-out performances around the clock. The Grove Press coffers were daily filled to overflowing, a new experience. Even so, there were many hands in the Swedish cookie jar. Unlike the major film distributors, we had no means to audit a theater’s gross for any given day or week, so were dependent on the honesty, integrity, and moral compass of theaters throughout the land.

  Wherever we lost in court, we appealed, for we needed a final ruling, which could come only from the Supreme Court. The first case to make it there was a Maryland lawsuit, where we had lost twice, in the lower court and on appeal. At the Supreme Court, however, we judged our chances good, both because the court was fairly liberal and because one of the justices, William O. Douglas, had been published in Evergreen. His book Points of Rebellion, a chapter of which we had excerpted, had made an astounding statement; namely, it asserted a citizen’s right to protest, or even revolt, against a government that does not fairly or rightly represent him or her. Pretty daring, in the midst of the Vietnam War. So daring, in fact, that there was a movement afoot to impeach Douglas. As part of that process, Congressman Gerald Ford had brandished on the floor of Congress the copy of Evergreen Review containing Douglas’s piece—a magazine he labeled “pornographic”—and declaimed, “This is the kind of magazine that publishes Justice Douglas!”

  When the I Am Curious (Yellow) case was finally heard, Justice Douglas recused himself because of his association with, or appearance in, Evergreen Review, as a result of which the decision came down 4–4. In other words, we lost. But by then the film had more or less run its course, having been shown in every major city in the country, and having contributed huge (by our standards) numbers of dollars to our dear, no longer (for the moment at least) financially fragile company. But beware of unexpected successes, for, we were learning, they are often the breeding ground of future failures.

  * * *

  If 1968 was the year of revolt and revolution in many countries of the Western world, for us at Grove 1969 was the year when, our coffers for once reasonably full, we published a record number of titles, both FOAs (Faithful Old Authors) and a bumper crop of new. Thanks especially to I Am Curious (Yellow) and to a far lesser extent its companion piece, I Am Curious (Blue), the company had grown exponentially, not rationally, but more or less like Topsy. From 20 or so employees half a dozen years before, our weekly payroll now numbered close to 150, housed in our spanking-new building on the corner of Bleecker and Houston streets, plus our warehouse and book club premises over west on Hudson Street. A dream come true, yes? A nightmare in the making, if truth be known. In our gleaming new office, which one entered through a massive arch in the shape of a capital G, the top executive floor had been laid out with Hollywood in mind: posh everywhere. Barney had gone all out, hiring architects and interior decorators—friends all, so he could feel in his heart of hearts he was not only building an office building worthy of our new wealth and status but helping out buddies as well. The executive offices were spacious, filled with ultramodern furniture that bespoke not nouveau riche but dirty rich (according to our detractors, who were legion), whereas on the floors below and at Hudson Street, hoi polloi were granted warehouse furniture. To make matters more divisive, in outfitting the new building, Barney had decreed an executive elevator accessible only to the top-floor staff. The book club employees worked for sums ranging from seventy-five to eighty-five dollars a week in jam-packed cubicles, breeding resentment and discontent. The ultimate irony: Grove, a liberal institution prone to shaking up the establishment, was, in its fervor to grow, in danger of turning into the establishment itself.

  Nonsense, we kept telling ourselves, we were still publishing good books (though perhaps not as timely and provocative as in years past). Or were we? Among other things, we seemed to be increasingly infected with a serious case of Anonymous, as book after book from Barney’s cache of old-time erotica made its way from his private library to our very public lists. Of varying quality, some were quite charming, dating from the Victorian era or the early part of the twentieth century, when surface mores of utter probity gave way to man’s apparently insatiable desire to document and express repressed sexual fantasies. No fewer than ten of these titillating gems appeared the last gasp of the 1960s, ranging from Miss High-Heels on the Zebra list at $1.75 to Venus School-Mistress, a Grove Press hardcover at $5.00. Nothing to be proud of, to be sure, but who could dispute Barney when, wielding pencil and paper, he showed the break-even point to be only a few hundred copies (“Look, no royalties!”) and the profit margins enticing. After more than a decade of bringing hundreds of new voices to the world, including dozens of poets at a time when most publishers were dropping them as unworthy of their investment, who could condemn a handful of old-time erotica?

  Offsetting, or overbalancing, the Victorian erotica were a relatively rich harvest of the FOAs: new works by Beckett, Burroughs, Ionesco, Pinter, Julius Lester, Jack Gelber, Rechy, Pablo Neruda, the Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz, and three further volumes in our film-book series, Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Truffaut’s 400 Blows, and Antonioni’s L’avventura—enough good works to reassure us we were not sliding down the slippery slope of exploitation.

  One of the titles of which we were especially proud was by Jim Haskins, entitled Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher. The Haskins was important, revealing firsthand the problems of teaching in inner-city schools in the 1960s, mirroring the despair of so much of the Harlem population. The book came out to good reviews, the sales were modest but continuing, and next year it would become an Evergreen paperback, where its more modest price would presu
mably find the audience for which it was intended. By Grove standards, noncontroversial.

  The last week of March, I opened a letter whose return address was Coca-Cola USA, in Atlanta, Georgia. Neatly typed, surely by an executive secretary of impeccable credentials, the letter read:

  Dear Mr. Seaver:

  Several people have called to our attention your advertisement for Diary of a Harlem Schoolteacher by Jim Haskins, which appeared in the New York Times March 3, 1970. The theme of the ad is “This book is like a weapon … it’s the real thing.”

  Since our company has made use of “It’s the Real Thing” to advertise Coca-Cola long prior to the publication of the book, we are writing to ask you to stop using this theme or slogan in connection with the book.

  We believe you will agree that it is undesirable for our companies to make simultaneous use of “the real thing” in connection with our respective products. There will always be likelihood of confusion as to the source or sponsorship of the goods, and the use by such prominent companies would dilute the distinctiveness of the trade slogan and diminish its effectiveness and value as an advertising and merchandising tool.

  “It’s the Real Thing” was first used in advertising for Coca-Cola over twenty-seven years ago to refer to our product. We first used it in print advertising in 1942 and extended it to outdoor advertising, including painted walls—some of which are still displayed throughout the country. The line has appeared in advertising for Coca-Cola during succeeding years. For example, in 1954 we used “There’s this about Coke—You Can’t Beat the ‘Real Thing’” in national advertising. We resumed national use of “It’s the Real Thing” in the summer of 1969 and it is our main thrust for 1970.

  Please excuse my writing so fully, but I wanted to explain why we feel it necessary to ask you and your associates to use another line to advertise Mr. Haskin’s [sic] book.

  We appreciate your cooperation and your assurance that you will discontinue the use of “It’s the real thing.”