The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  Clapping my hand over the phone, through which nonetheless some high-pitched sounds still sputtered, not unlike those emitted by a stuck pig, I asked the now-stymied committee if it was time to impart to Barney the rest of the bad news: that, downstairs, the place was being picketed by several hundred people, both employees and union sympathizers, which, while not as immediately threatening as the women upstairs, was an increasing pain in the ass. And Barney was conveniently forgetting that his mass firing of nine people two days before his departure was the cause of all this, for we had also learned that Henry Foner, the union president, had just filed an unfair labor practices complaint against the company. I decided not to draw this causal connection, but the consensus was we’d better tell him, in this upstairs-downstairs drama, about the shenanigans on the sidewalk.

  “Fuck the pickets!” he said. “It’s the Grove archives that have to be saved. Call Rembar and then phone me back.”

  Rembar, the voice of calm, listened quietly as we outlined to him the sequence of events, starting with the threat of unionization—of which, it turned out, he was aware—the Thursday and Friday night massacres, the pickets downstairs, the occupation upstairs, coupled with the serious threat to the Grove Press files, and Barney’s presence in a land far, far away.

  “Call the police,” he said. “You have no choice.”

  We conveyed Rembar’s advice to Barney, who said, obviously forgetting his violent reaction to that same piece of advice from Jules only half an hour before, “Of course that’s what you should do. What the hell are you waiting for?”

  We decided the police needed only the short version, not the background that presumably had precipitated the occupation. Trespassing. Breaking and entering. Threatening destruction of company property. That was all they needed to know. Within half an hour a considerable blue contingent arrived, preceded by the scream of sirens, which swarmed through the jeering picket lines and arrived battle ready on the fifth floor. On the intercom, they ordered the women to surrender. If they did not, they would be charged not only with illegal trespassing but also with resisting arrest. To our great surprise, the occupation forces reacted not with a bang but with a whimper, unlocking the elevator and surrendering almost meekly, though several, when they arrived downstairs, lifted their fists heavenward, to which the pickets responded with shouts of encouragement and support.

  Among the pickets we noted a couple of dozen Grove employees, bearing signs one more ridiculous than the other, making demands they doubtless did not believe in and knew could never be met. When and why, I remember wondering, did an individual abdicate personal responsibility and join the mindless herd? But what galled me and the other Grove executives even more was the sight, among the pickets, of a number of our publishing colleagues from other houses, people I had thought of as friends. One, Aaron Asher, to whom I was—or thought I had been—especially close, was chanting with the others as they slowly circled back on the Mercer Street sidewalk. I sidled up to him and asked him what the fuck he thought he was doing. He gazed at me imperiously and said that he fully supported women’s lib and had heard of the unforgivable way we had fired our editors. “I thought we knew each other well enough,” I said, “that you might have called me and found out the facts before you did this.” He shrugged and made his way slowly round and round, and where he might have stopped nobody knows.

  Studious, bespectacled John Simon of Simon and Schuster (no relation) was also there being interviewed, a microphone pressed close to his fast-moving lips. From what I could catch through the noise, he was accusing us of treating our employees as if this were the seventeenth century. Really! There were no yellow telegrams way back then, you jerk! Besides, I thought, I’ll match our employee benefits against yours any day. Short, paunchy, lightly bearded André Schiffrin, the head of Pantheon, was also present, only too happy to be interviewed by the ever-vigilant press. What he was stressing, if I understood correctly, was the irony that Grove, which had fought so hard for freedom of speech through the years, was now denying it to its own employees. André, you are absolutely right, and may you side with women’s lib when they come and occupy your premises.

  Even more galling was the sight of several of our authors, including Ed Sanders, Calvin Hernton, and, to my special chagrin, Julius Lester, an author I greatly esteemed. I walked over to Lester, ignoring the taunts and jibes of Damio and half a dozen of his cohorts (three of whom I swear I’d never seen), and stuck out my hand. There was a moment’s hesitation, then he took it. Black on white. “Julius,” I said, “do you trust me?” “Implicitly,” he said. “Then when I tell you what Robin Morgan is doing is wrong, terribly wrong, will you leave the line?” He looked me square in the eye. “Sorry, Dick,” he said, “I believe in women’s lib.” “So do I,” I said. “But not in Robin Morgan and what she’s up to. Do you know that none of the women up there, except Robin, are Grove employees?” “True? I was told they all were.” “And they are threatening to burn or destroy our editorial files … including yours. Does that sound like the Ku Klux Klan to you? Or Nazi Germany? It does to me.” We moved aside from the chanting crowd. “Julius, follow your conscience, but I at least wanted you to know the facts. Call me in a day or two and I’ll give you the full gory details.” And I turned and walked away. At the big G entrance, still under allied control, I looked back and saw Julius had quietly left the picket line and was heading north.

  * * *

  By mid-afternoon the crowd had dispersed, but any notion of returning to work was lost. Ward Damio was trying to organize a meeting with other employees on the first floor. Myron ordered them to go back to work, but they refused. After a long phone call to Copenhagen, he reported that Barney would be back next day and would hear their grievances. Barney had also apparently authorized Myron to go down to the precinct and press charges against the arrested women. There he asked the judge to set bail, on the premise that if released they would try to reoccupy the Grove offices. The judge said no and released them on probation.

  Heading home that night, I had the sinking feeling that this had been by far the worst, perhaps most fateful, day I had ever endured at Grove. Straphanging on the shuddering C train north, I also hated myself for toting all this daily garbage back into our hallowed halls, for despite my efforts to separate day from night, work from family, it was becoming harder and harder to do so.

  For the next two and a half weeks, Grove came to a grinding standstill. Union meetings were held throughout the company, and when they were not taking place, most of the staff were arguing with one another from morning till evening, words replacing work. Key manuscripts were put on hold, design and production simply shut down, as did every other department to varying degrees. What the horrendous cost overruns on the new building had not quite accomplished, the unionization battle was, I feared, fast bringing us to an endgame.

  * * *

  If Barney had arrived back from Denmark in a state of near apoplexy, the veins of his forehead visibly throbbing, he was nonetheless, most of us felt, secretly pleased. Crises were his forte, he seemed to thrive on them, and this was a doozy. With Rembar to counsel him, he made the decision not to press charges against the invaders. “They’d love nothing more than to be made martyrs,” he said. Only Myron disagreed. He was still not happy they were out on their own recognizance. It was clear there was going to be a union vote, however, and on Wednesday we had a war council to assess the situation. The first act of business was to try to figure, from the Grove personnel list, who would vote which way. Surprisingly, as we ticked off the list, Barney’s initial fury softened, and he began to joke, acidly, to be sure, when we came to a name he particularly disliked.

  On Friday the seventeenth, a meeting was held in Rembar’s office, where it was agreed both that an NLRB-supervised election would be held “as soon as possible” and that we would submit to binding arbitration the nine fired employees’ request to be reinstated.

  So far all the propaganda had been one-sided. No
w, with Jules calling most of the shots, we began a counteroffensive, issuing our own broadsheets that detailed the liberal benefits already extant at Grove and compared them, point by point, with the union alternatives, which looked far more restrictive. We pointed out some painful truths: unions were no longer what they used to be twenty years earlier; they had consistently supported the Vietnam War; they discriminated against blacks, especially in the building trades; they failed to support students who went to Mississippi to fight segregation. As for women’s rights, “when and where did they fight for equal rights for women?” We also wondered, in print, what the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen—or their Fur, Leather, and Machine Workers division—knew about or could contribute to publishing.

  Finally, on April 30, the vote was held on the second floor of the Grove offices, from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. When the votes were counted, the union was, as Jules had predicted, roundly defeated, by a vote of 86–34, with another 29 votes discarded as unqualified. In subsequent arbitration, we were obliged to rehire the nine employees. Their presence, especially Robin’s, was poisonous, but, thank God, blessedly brief.

  55

  Retreat to Eleventh Street

  WITHIN THE NEXT SEVERAL MONTHS, with income falling like a shooting star in summer, almost half the remaining staff was let go, and it became increasingly clear that we would have to sell our wonderful new building.

  Battered and bruised, but still standing, we began repacking our boxes barely a year after we had moved into these sumptuous quarters. In my twelve years at Grove, we had had times that were daunting, dangerous, discouraging, depressing. But they had all—well, most—been leavened by moments of pleasure, of gratification, even of triumph as a key court case was won or a book you had labored over and worried about—had you done your best for the author? would the reviewers like it? would it sell enough to justify the effort?—exceeded expectations. Now, close to broke, we bantered little as we gathered old manuscripts, correspondence, piles of dead matter that once had been so alive, filling large black plastic bags for the sanitation men who would come tomorrow, hoisting these paper treasures into their bulging trucks without so much as a wild thought of what marvels they were carting to oblivion. How many precious relics were we tossing, which in later years might have brought thousands—tens of thousands?—from rare-book dealers? But there was no recourse. As Napoleon had learned so bitterly, when you were retreating in disarray, you jettisoned whatever it took to save not your soul, hell, no, but your life. Even at an Irish wake they sang and drank. Here, today, it was the silence that hurt. Where was the bonhomie of yesteryear?

  Barney had been adamant: everything nonessential goes. At Eleventh Street, he warned, there will be barely room to turn around. In place of these spacious top-floor offices, we’ll often be two or three in a room. It was as though the clock had been turned back ten years. Maybe twelve. Even 64 University Place had been larger, lighter. I tried to think of something positive. Nothing. No, no: there must be something. Flinging a long galley of Anonymous, one of the Victorian gems, in the general direction of the shiny black garbage bag (it missed), I had an epiphany: Beckett. There was still Beckett, our North Star. Then in a rush a dozen others followed: Henry Miller, Octavio Paz, Bill Burroughs, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Malcolm X, “Cubby” Selby, John Rechy, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Robert Coover, Frantz Fanon, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras … To raise morale—mine—I felt like shouting out their names, to share the good news. But somehow I could not.

  Boxes all packed, taped, and stacked, the guilty black plastic bags lolling by the door, I took one last look around my office. Would I miss it? Not really. You have to have lived in an office for a long time, absorbed its light and smell, imparted yours, to truly regret it. My office, with its impressive desk, its posh leather easy chairs, its generous windows looking west over the Village, light streaming in as the sun dropped slowly behind the rooftops that lay between us and the Hudson, suddenly struck me as foreign. I closed the door behind me, made my way down the broad corridor, glancing left and right into the other offices for signs of life, but all my colleagues had already fled. Only Barney was still there, staring out the window. His face, when he swiveled at the sound of my footsteps, was stricken. Somehow he managed a smile, wan but true, and I raised my hand in a short salute.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Life goes on,” I said, only half believing.

  He nodded.

  “How about a drink at the Cedar Tavern?” I tried.

  He shook his head.

  “Okay, then. Tomorrow.” And as I turned and walked for the last time down the dreamworld hallway to the executive elevator, the great divider, catalyst at least to some degree of all the ills that had beset us these past several months, I had a sinking feeling that my days at Grove were numbered. I didn’t mind in the least returning to cramped quarters, but I knew the treasure chest was sadly depleted, if not empty. This building on Mercer Street had cost us, when all was toted up, probably three to four million dollars—two million plus for the renovations alone—and when NYU had responded to our kind offer with “thanks but no thanks,” it was not interested even at a knockdown price, Helmsley-Spear had been hired to unload it. No takers, even when the price descended well below a million dollars. Meanwhile, we were stuck with the several mortgages—five in all—without the income to cover them. And to think that only months before, Architectural Record had showcased the building in its January issue, honoring us with a 1970 Interior Design Award. Interiors, equally admired among professionals, featured the building in its November 1970 issue. Belated awards, cold comfort as the mighty ship was slowly (or not so slowly) sinking beneath the Mercer seas.

  * * *

  If, in 1969, 80 University Place—to which we had moved several years before when 64 became impossibly overcrowded—with its roughly ten thousand square feet had been far too tight for us, East Eleventh Street at half that size was a pressure cooker, with hallways turned into offices and offices meant for one shared by two or three. Fortunately, Barney owned the building, so the burden of rent was lifted, at least temporarily. When we had moved to Mercer Street, the former Evergreen Theater in the same building had been leased to a movie distributor, so there was a bit of income from that end. But money, or the lack thereof, was only part of the problem. Personal animosities, banked, if not buried, by flush times, resurfaced. Jules Geller and Myron Shapiro, who till now had scarcely concealed their dislike for each other, now openly feuded. Barney, however he disdained the mad accusations and demands of the movement headed by Robin Morgan, was deeply wounded by all that had happened these past few months, especially since he had always considered Grove’s stands in liberating the country from its still Victorian attitudes and restrictive censorship, and its taking on daring works like Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, LeRoi Jones, and Julius Lester in the area of black studies, put it in the forefront of innovative book publishing. Shaken to the core, Bonaparte on Elba, he brooded and plotted, itching to rescue Grove, and himself, from looming defeat. Even worse, his image as an enlightened liberal had been stained, if not shattered, as members of our own profession, suddenly emboldened by our weakened position, had taken up arms against us. Now sequestered in his second-floor office, prowling the premises in search of some internal misdemeanor, he was his own worst enemy. And ours. He was not just fighting the newly emerged demons who had fomented the needless strife; he was fighting for survival, as the multimillion-dollar real estate mistake was compounded by a sudden downturn in the publishing business itself. Even pared to the core, the company was having trouble paying its bills and meeting payroll. The Hudson Street warehouse had to be shut down, and an arrangement was made, just in time, for Random House to handle our distribution. Not without pain, for as part of the deal we had to give up the rights to a dozen of our solid backlist moneymakers, from Games People Play to Malcolm X. Days now were grim, all the hijinks gone. Still, aft
er twelve years on the battlements, I felt it my bounden duty to weather the storm. Nat and Morrie and Jules and Fred all felt more or less the same: we would not go out looking for other jobs as long as there was even a glimmer of light at the end of the Grove tunnel.

  Then one night all that changed. Barney called me at home to say he planned to fire Nat Sobel, but before he did, he wanted to inform us and get our assent. Why? I asked. Because he wasn’t pulling his weight, Barney said, which was nonsense, for Nat was a superb sales director. Further probing resulted in the blunt “We simply can’t afford him.” I started to say something, but Barney hung up without saying goodbye.

  “You’ve got to get out of there,” Jeannette said. “And the sooner the better.”

  “You mean, leave Beckett behind, and all those authors I brought in and love? Not all that easy, darling.” Yet I knew she was right. In fact, she’d been saying as much for almost a year. I was genuinely torn. I had loved my job most of the time and through thick and thin had never kowtowed to Barney or his whims, had always tried to tell him the truth as I saw it, no matter how unpleasant, no matter how he might fulminate and disagree. Ultimately, I felt sure, he respected me for my candor.

  Morrie was the next of the old gang to go, the justification being that much of his time and energy had been spent promoting the films, and now that they were—momentarily?—moribund, there was little for him to do. Besides, “we simply can’t afford him.” Jules, meanwhile, was lend-leased to Random House, to liaise and oversee the new distribution—more to the point, one less burden for the Grove Press payroll. Still, both Fred and I were paid considerably more than any of the three now gone.

  “The problem is,” Jeannette advised, “Barney will never fire you. It’ll be Kind Hearts and Coronets, with you both holding your swords aloft as the ship slowly sinks beneath the waves…” She paused. “The difference is, you can get another job.” But could I? The whole endless Grove debacle had demoralized me, filled me with self-doubt.