The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  “Absolutely, old man, absolutely,” Alex said.

  “You mentioned you know some French writers we might want to publish,” Alex said, turning to me. “One in particular,” I said, fixing Trocchi’s inquiring gaze. “Extraordinary. Like nothing I’ve ever read. And another who’s also very good, though he might not fit into the magazine, since he’s a playwright. Anyway, the curious thing is, neither is French.”

  “I’m afraid you lost me, mon,” Alex said. “I was asking about French writers.”

  “One is Irish, the other Romanian. But both write in French,” I explained. “And both live here in Paris.”

  “Who’s the Irishman?”

  “His name is Samuel Beckett. I came upon him several months ago, and I’ve read everything he’s written, or at least everything available. Some of his early works are out of print.”

  “Wasn’t he somehow involved with Joyce?” Trocchi asked.

  “Right. In fact, I’ve seen more than one reference to him as Joyce’s secretary,” I said. “Apparently, he wasn’t, but he was part of that whole coterie around Joyce—Irish, English, French, God knows who—in the late twenties and thirties, after Ulysses.”

  “What about Beckett?”

  “He wrote the lead piece in the critical volume on Joyce that Sylvia Beach published, I think in 1929 or ’30, about that mysterious work in progress … Also translated, or helped translate, ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ into French.”

  “But what has he written?” Trocchi wanted to know.

  “Three novels, at least one play, and a couple of short stories, all in French. There’s also apparently a slim volume of poems, an earlier volume of stories called More Pricks Than Kicks, both in English. All I know about those last two are their titles. I’ve read the three French novels and both stories. Incredible. And last year I heard a portion of his play En attendant Godot—Waiting for Godot—done at the French radio, by an actor-director, Roger Blin…”

  “Never heard of him,” Trocchi said.

  “Very important,” I averred, “totally committed to the theater, especially the avant-garde. And the portions of Godot they performed were extraordinary.”

  “What about the novels?” Trocchi asked.

  “Three Ms,” I said. “The first is called Murphy, the second Molloy, the third, which has just come out, Malone meurt—Malone Dies.”

  “All these written in French?” Patrick asked. “With such Irish titles?”

  “No, Murphy was written in English. Published just before the war, I think. Not available. But a French translation came out four or five years ago.” I didn’t know it at the time, but it was Beckett himself who had done this translation during the war, to try, as he put it, to keep from going insane. “The novel is good, not great. Still under the Joycean influence, I suspect. As for Molloy and Malone, absolute pure masterpieces.”

  “Dick put me on to Molloy,” Patrick said. “He is right. It’s like nothing I ever read before.”

  “How did you come upon him?” Trocchi wondered. I thought I detected a shadow of annoyance, as if to say: If he’s so special, why haven’t I heard of him?

  “Do you want the long version or the short?”

  “Short,” Christopher said.

  “Is there a medium?” Trocchi asked.

  “Chance,” I said. “Chance and geography. I live on the rue du Sabot, and to get to St. Germain, I usually go by the rue Bernard Palissy, where there is a young French publishing house, Les Éditions de Minuit.

  “Last year, in the window of Minuit I saw two books displayed, Molloy and Malone, by one Samuel Beckett. The name rang a Joycean bell, but for the life of me I couldn’t figure what an Irishman was doing chez Minuit. I assumed they were translations, so I asked both Gaït Frogé at the English Bookshop and George Whitman at the Mistral if they had the originals, and both said no, never heard of them. So, my curiosity piqued, I went into the Minuit offices and bought both books. Turned out they were in fact written in French. And what French, I might add. They knocked me out. At Minuit they told me a further novel, L’innommable—The Unnamable—was coming next year. If you want my opinion, he’s as remarkable as Joyce. Totally different, but remarkable.”

  “If that’s the case,” Trocchi interrupted, “why don’t you write a piece about him, Dick? For the next issue.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “That’s a tall order.”

  “Give it a try, mon. If he’s that important—”

  “When do you need it?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

  “Three weeks,” Trocchi said.

  I shook my head. “Okay,” I said, “I’ll give it a shot.”

  “And who is the second?” Trocchi asked. “You said there was a Romanian…”

  “Ah, yes. Ionesco,” I said. “Eugène Ionesco. A playwright. Romanian, but he also writes in French. He has a new play just on you should see, Les chaises. At the Théâtre Lancry. Different. And very funny. You’d better hurry. It might be closing soon.”1

  “In French,” Alex said. “I’m not sure ours”—nodding to Jane—“is good enough.”

  “Pat or I will go with you,” I said. “Really worth it.”

  We all agreed to meet the following week.

  4

  Tracking Down the Work

  THAT AFTERNOON I sat down and began rereading Molloy; again I fell totally under the spell. It was a masterpiece. Malone, too. How do you write a meaningful comment on such rich, complex, still-undiscovered work without making a critical fool of yourself? So make a fool of yourself. Tentatively, I picked up my pen and wrote:

  SAMUEL BECKETT: AN INTRODUCTION

  It could be no more than that. Exegesis was not my forte. To write more than an “introduction” would be pretentious, for I knew that, however great my visceral admiration, cerebrally I had not begun to plumb the depths of these two works. But what puzzled me most was why Beckett had not been recognized before, in England, if not yet in France. Yes, “introduction” was the proper term, and doubtless the right approach. Out, damned modesty: if conviction means anything, then write from the heart. Slightly less tentatively, I wrote:

  Samuel Beckett, an Irish writer long established in France, has recently published two novels which, although they defy all commentary, merit the attention of anyone interested in this century’s literature.

  Off and running? Well, walking at least. It took me two full weeks to write the piece, and when I was finished, I thought I had barely reached the starting point. I wanted to tear it up and begin again. I had at most scraped the surface. All I was sure of was that I had had the great good fortune of coming upon—“discovering” was far too pretentious—a genius; the term is not too strong. What impressed me most was the deadpan humor, the self-doubt and self-deprecation layered on a bed of rock-hard erudition, worn gossamer light. At the same time, from book to book there was a successive stripping away of the extraneous: what had sometimes glittered but cluttered in Murphy had virtually disappeared in Molloy and Malone. The movement seemed inexorably toward minimalism, perhaps ultimately toward silence. But one thing, it seemed to me, was sure: any influences that might have affected or tainted the earlier voice had gone, been discarded or fully integrated. From Molloy on, Beckett was his own man.

  It was still with tentative pen that, on June 14, I wrote the final paragraph:

  Is it possible for Mr. Beckett to progress further without succumbing to the complete incoherence of inarticulate sound, to the silence of nothingness where mud and Molloy, where object and being, are not only contiguous but one? Mr. Beckett’s next book, announced for publication early this winter, will have to reply. Perhaps the name is significant. It is called L’innommable—The Unnamable.

  That evening I showed the piece to Patrick. He sank into my one easy chair, a street relic I had recuperated one early morning, when in the dim light of predawn it had struck me as an appropriate, indeed necessary, addition to the rue du Sabot’s underfurnished salon. Hailing a near
by clochard, bedded down in the doorway of a recently closed café, now his domain till dawn, a well-worn gray blanket pulled tight around him, empty bottle of red to his right, he too waiting for the sun also to rise, convinced his luck would turn with its arrival, I nudged him and promised fifty francs if he would help me tote the chair the twenty or so blocks to my modest lodging. “A hundred,” he said without a blink. We settled on seventy-five and began our struggle. We were obliged to stop every few meters to rest, so that in due course the sun, having no alternative, finally did heave into view with us still half a dozen blocks from the Wooden Shoe. I was ready to give up, to abandon the precious antique to its morning-after fate, for the clochard, despite our nascent friendship, was menacing to re-demand the hundred, and both of us had such a thirst as only a long white night can instill. We had passed dozens of cafés, but all were dark and shuttered, their chairs reversed onto the tables and entwined in chains that gave witness to the faith the café owners placed in their fellow man. Then suddenly a light shot on in a café half a block away, which we reached, bearing our burden, in a flat sixty seconds. Nothing like a crying need to spur the carcass on. Once there, we parked our elephant by the curb, thoughtfully leaving enough room for the passersby to inch around without stepping into the street, then parked ourselves at the bar and drank a house red, harsh to the palate but healing to the body.

  That evening, when I fell awake, I looked at the chair in the corner and wondered where the hell it had come from. Ah, yes … Gingerly, I stole toward it, the better to assess its merits, only to discover that its innards were bare. Only springs, coiled and menacing. For a moment I thought of throwing it out, then recalled my night’s labors. No, it was mine now, for better or worse. To have and to hold. To stuff and repair. A few old towels spread carefully over the coils, then a throw thrown over them, et voilà, just like new! Well, almost …

  It was into this chair that the unwary Patrick had sunk and started to read my Beckett piece. I felt more and more uncomfortable watching his eyes skim the page, pausing here with a frown, there a faint smile. I headed for the door.

  “Where are you going?” Patrick asked, lifting his eyes.

  “I’ll be right back,” I lied. “I have an errand to run.” No author, I realized, should be present when someone is perusing his work, however modest.

  I decided to go have a glass of predinner red wine at the Royal. There were two more or less direct routes from my former banana-drying-warehouse-primitive-antiques-boutique home to St. Germain, one by the rue du Dragon, past the tempting, garlic-impregnated odors of Raffy’s restaurant, the other via the rue Bernard Palissy. The latter, my favorite by far, passed the offices of Les Éditions de Minuit, Beckett’s new publisher, in whose window at number 7 I had, the year before, seen the pristine copies of first Molloy and then Malone meurt. Molloy, which came out in January, caught my eye by its seeming disparity: so Irish a title and author in so French a cover? It was not until my fifth or sixth passage that I finally made the connection. I was deeply into Joyce at the time. Suddenly the light went on: of course, the man who had written that intelligent, perceptive, and God knows erudite piece in the collection of twelve odes to Joyce entitled, only half facetiously, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, which Sylvia Beach had published a decade before the war.

  Number 7 of rue Bernard Palissy, I was told early on, had until fairly recently been the neighborhood bordello. Just after the war, the puritanical wrath of a famous Gallic zealot, a woman named Marthe Robert, had induced the authorities to remove this prostitution blot on France’s escutcheon, close down its clean, well-regulated, if not well-lit whorehouses, and return the country to the path of moral rectitude. Marthe Robert was not alone, of course, there were other voices and other pressures, but she was the standard-bearer, and the law eventually passed bore her name. Like the work of most zealots, however, her “solution” accomplished little: How can one legislate sex out of business? All she did was chase it out of doors, so that the postwar prostitutes, instead of having shelter, medical supervision, and in most places a madam on whose motherly shoulder the girls could lay their dreams and dramas, were driven into the harsh, cold streets. Gaze as I did, when I first entered the premises, at the few desks and tables, the walls of shelves and files, I could not envision the place as a dim-lit den of iniquity. The only vestige was the grilled peephole on the thick wooden outside door. “What’s the password?” “Poisson.” “Okay, you can come in.” Now above the slightly rusted grille the sign read: ENTREZ SANS SONNER—COME IN WITHOUT RINGING. A bordello replaced by a publisher. Was that progress? I wasn’t sure.

  Anyway, I had finally entered number 7, mounted the ancient staircase, and purchased both books. (My God! Can that have been a year ago?) Later that day I opened Molloy and began to read: “Je suis dans la chambre de ma mère. C’est moi qui y vis maintenant. Je ne sais comment j’y suis arrivé.” “I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind.” Before nightfall I had finished the book. I will not say that I understood all I had read, but if there is such a thing as a shock of discovery, an illumination, I experienced it that day. I was, quite literally, overwhelmed. The utter simplicity, the beauty, yes, and the terror of the words shook me as little had before. And the man’s vision of the world, his painfully honest portrayal thereof, his anti-illusionist stance, tearing down what he had carefully wrought, stating fact, and then questioning it almost before the ink was dry … And the humor; my God, the humor … Page after page, I found myself laughing out loud. If I was not quite Molloy—there was already a profound bicycle affinity—I knew I would doubtless be one day. Or such was my fond hope: to have, in the midst of the utter confusion and despair, one moment of truth and light.

  I had waited a day or two, then reread Molloy, tempted to plunge into Malone meurt, which was sitting on the shelf two feet away, pages uncut (in those days the pages of French books, while folded, gathered, and bound, were not cut along the outer edge, which meant the reader needed a knife or letter opener at his side as he advanced. The practice, which I somehow felt was romantic—perhaps I was romanticizing everything about Paris, about France—has, alas, since been largely abandoned) but resisting the temptation, as one resists the seductive sweet. The second reading was even more exhilarating than the first, more rewarding as well, for further glimmers of understanding began to penetrate my brain. Next day I had gone on to Malone. Full worthy of the first. Two stunning works. Miracles. Like a druggie, I had to have more.

  The following morning I had walked around the corner and again entered number 7, without ringing. This time there was a blue-clad employee downstairs in the entranceway. We exchanged bonjours—without which nothing progresses in France—upon which I asked him if Minuit had published other works by Beckett. “Who?” he wanted to know. “Samuel Beckett,” I said, “the man who wrote Molloy and Malone meurt—there!” and I pointed to the back of the unassuming display case in which the two unheralded masterpieces were still standing, only slightly off the vertical. The man shrugged—“Je ne sais pas, monsieur,” he said prophetically—and gestured me upstairs.

  The door to the office at the top of the stairs was wide open, so I tapped gently and entered, repeating my downstairs question to a handsome, imposing woman seated before a bulky typewriter, vintage 1930s, I judged. “I don’t think so,” she said, “but let me check.” She picked up the receiver of her antiquated cradle phone and dialed. The person she called, I later learned, was Jérôme Lindon, owner, publisher, and editor of Minuit, a man I would soon meet and come to admire beyond measure. His end of the conversation, which went on for a good two or three minutes, must have been detailed, since hers consisted only of “Yes, yes … I see … Uh-huh … All right. I’ll tell him that.”

  “No,” the secretary informed me as she hung up, “those are the only two works by Monsieur Beckett that we hav
e, although another work is in preparation. But there is another, earlier Beckett novel available from another publisher, Bordas, which Monsieur Lindon says is still in print. It is called Murphy.”

  Thanking her, I had dashed down the stairs three at a time, nipped around the corner, hopped on Big Blue, and pedaled over to Bordas, a long stone’s throw away on the rue de Tournon. Murphy, I knew, had been published just before the war by the London firm of Routledge, to little success. But how and when—not to mention why—it had reached French shores, I had no idea. And why it had been published by Bordas, whereas the other works were clearly the coveted domain of Minuit, was another mystery to explore. But the immediate task was to see if Murphy truly existed in whatever format or language.

  Bordas was an unassuming place, a narrow little shop that, from the window display, looked to be a general bookseller, offering the latest in fiction and nonfiction from all the Paris publishers. Nary a sign of Murphy, nor any other visible manifestation that Bordas was a publisher in his own right. Tentatively, I pushed open the door. The only sign of life inside was a slightly stooped fellow clad in a shopworn gray tunic, his pate awash with gray-white hair, unkempt, uncombed, and doubtless unwashed, its front, back, and sides battling one another chaotically for cranial supremacy. Over his frontal area, the unruly mop descended well into his eyes, which he did not seem to mind in the least. He reminded me of my boyhood dog, a smaller, bastardized version of the English sheepdog, whose bangs completely covered the poor pup’s eyes, to no apparent impairment of her sight. The only problem was, with her fluffy upturned tail that looked for all the world like her bangs, people were as wont to pet her tail as her head. “Nice doggie,” they would say, petting her rear. “The other end,” I would say, “unless you prefer the ass.” Upon which most would recoil and hastily retreat.