The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  The revealing—and devastating—extract had appeared a year or so earlier in Jean-Paul Sartre’s magazine, Les temps modernes, founded after the war but already generally considered the most influential French literary-political magazine of the day. Like Trocchi, Austryn and I both felt strongly that in Paris in the 1950s, one could not ignore the political situation, which had evolved so quickly and so radically over the past five years. That fall I had suggested to Trocchi that if we were politically committed—not to any policy or party, but simply recognizing the Realpolitik of our time, as the editorial of number 2 had clearly stated—we should not only editorialize about it but dedicate a Chronicles section of the magazine to it. We could find or commission articles on our own but also make an arrangement with some compatible, like-minded French magazine such as Les temps modernes.

  Alex wasn’t so sure the latter notion was practicable. “What makes you think Sartre would even give us the time of day?” he said. “He’s known bloody worldwide. How do you get to him in the first place?”

  “He lives right here on the rue Bonaparte,” I said, pointing to a window directly across the square from where we were sitting. “Let’s write him a note, enclose a copy of both issues, and tell him what we have in mind. What do we have to lose?”

  This time the response was swift, if only partially positive. Within a week I received a note, on Sartre’s letterhead, not from the great man himself but from someone named Jean Cau, who apparently was Sartre’s assistant. He suggested we meet at the Flore the following week. I wanted Trocchi to join me, but he begged off, worried his poor command of French might be a deterrent.

  “You make the first step, Dick,” he suggested, “and we’ll take it from there.”

  Jean Cau turned out to be young, perhaps half a dozen years older than I, a handsome man with an open expression and ready smile despite the fact that, working daily with Sartre, he bore a lot of the world’s political burden on his shoulders.

  “Monsieur Sartre was impressed with your magazine,” he said as we sipped a beer, “and sympathetic to your idea. He wanted to know how such an arrangement would work and what, if any, articles from Les temps modernes you wanted to translate.”

  “We thought a reciprocal arrangement, formal or informal,” I ventured, realizing as I said it that it would be more a one-way street than reciprocal. “You could use anything from our magazine and we from yours. You’d have to approve our choices, of course, and we yours. But on our end, I assure you approval would be a mere formality.”

  “Can you give me an example?” he said, perhaps testing whether we were actually au courant with the recent contents.

  I gave him a couple, including Nyiszli’s firsthand report from Auschwitz. “We can’t pay much,” I said, “though we can pay something, even if it’s token.”

  “Let me get back to you,” he said. “I know that Sartre’s less interested in money than in getting ideas and events he feels are important more widely disseminated.”

  True to his word, Jean Cau sent me a note the following week asking if I would come and meet Sartre. This time Trocchi’s resistance melted: seeing the Great Existentialist face-to-face was too good an opportunity to pass up.

  Dressed in our pawnshop best, we arrived promptly at the appointed hour, passed muster with the concierge, who even went so far as to smile and tell us Monsieur Sartre was expecting us, and took the elevator to the top floor. Trocchi passed his hand admiringly over the polished wood as the elevator inched its way upward. We, like the majority of Parisians, were not used to elevators, especially on the Left Bank. Most that did exist were charmingly antiquated, too narrow for more than two or three people to squeeze into without committing unconscious sexual assault, and required agility to nip in before the folding doors sliced you vertically in two. But Sartre’s, though slow, was reasonably large and elegantly appointed.

  Jean Cau met us at the door and ushered us through the well-furnished apartment to Sartre’s book-lined study. I was surprised to find such bourgeois taste in a man I associated with fiery left-wing politics; I had expected something more spartan. But I was fast learning that in France, a decidedly conservative country in so many ways, one’s politics and one’s lifestyle could be diametrically different. I remembered once, at a political rally of Sorbonne students, I had seen one of my friends arrive in a chauffeur-driven car. I knew he was not only a Communist but of Maoist bent, but when I asked him how he could accept these upper-class privileges from a society he was intent on destroying, he looked at me pityingly. “I expect you must think I sleep on a pallet and dine on nothing but boiled cabbage or potatoes,” he said. “We’re not trying to destroy the amenities of life, Dick, merely reworking the political system so they won’t be reserved for the happy few. So I see absolutely no contradiction between that goal and using my father’s chauffeur to drive me here.” With which he raised his Maoist banner and plunged into the emotionally charged crowd. Years later I learned he was the recently appointed CFO of a major French business, living in a town house in Neuilly. I wondered if there were statistics on those who, radically left when they were young, became more and more conservative as they grew older. With Sartre, however, age seemed only to have made him increasingly radical.

  He was seated poring over some handwritten pages on his desk. When he stood to greet us, we were both surprised by how short he was. His smile was warm and welcoming. Cau introduced us, and after the de rigueur handshakes Sartre gestured for us to have a seat in front of his desk. Cau sat off to one side. For us, used to the dim light of the rue du Sabot, Sartre’s apartment was blindingly bright.

  “Jean has talked to me about you and your request,” he began, staring, I knew, directly at both of us. I say “I knew” because, although I had heard that Sartre was walleyed, it is one thing to hear it, another entirely to witness it firsthand: one eye looked straight ahead, the other off to the side. Although he was wearing glasses, they seemed only to magnify the problem. Alex, putting on his most stylish Scottish accent, went on at great length about Merlin, its hoped-for place in the English-language literary world. Sartre understood some English—more, I suspect, than he let on—but when his brow knitted at some especially recondite phrase, Cau or I would jump in to interpret. At one pause I added how much we admired Les temps modernes.

  Sartre nodded, but then, proving he had more than glanced at the issues we had sent, said: “I thought Dr. Ayer’s piece in your first issue was very interesting. I don’t agree with a lot of it, of course, but he’s a bright man and his take on existentialism provocative. I suspect you English will never succumb to it.”

  “I’m Scottish,” Trocchi corrected.

  Sartre smiled thinly. “I should have said Anglo-Saxon.”

  “What if we were to do the Nyiszli?” I offered. As I recalled the Ayer article, it was more to bury existentialism than to praise it. Still, Sartre was clearly interested in what Ayer had to say about his philosophy, but also impressed that Merlin had published it. “How would that work?”

  “Powerful piece,” Sartre said. “I fear we’re just scraping the surface of what really went on in those camps. Anyway, ideally you should translate from the Hungarian. Do you have such a person?”

  Trocchi and I looked at each other, nonplussed.

  “Not really,” I said. “What about translating from the French?”

  “Perhaps,” Sartre said, “but in that case I should put you in touch with our translator, Monsieur Tibère Kremer. He lives here in Paris, so you could either translate together or submit yours to him for vetting. Jean,” he said, “do we have Tibère’s address?”

  Cau nodded and went over to the file cabinet to find it.

  “Do we need some kind of formal arrangement?” I asked. “Some sort of letter between us?”

  Sartre shook his head. “I see no reason. We can do this on a piece-by-piece basis. Simply remember to note, for anything you choose, that it’s published by arrangement with Les temps modernes.”r />
  “How about payment?” Trocchi wanted to know.

  “Work that out with Jean,” Sartre said. “Whatever you agree to is fine with me.”

  I had wanted to tell him how much I admired his work, especially the theater—but somehow couldn’t bring myself to do so. He had received us as equals, and it was better, I decided, to keep it that way. We shook hands and took our leave.

  At the door, Jean Cau said: “As for the money, what Sartre meant by leaving it up to me is that you should pay what you can. Whatever you pay your other contributors. We know from publishing literary magazines in our own language how difficult a proposition it is. For the Nyiszli, work it out with Monsieur Kremer. He should have a fee, but we won’t ask for anything beyond that.”

  Downstairs, Trocchi said: “Now, there’s a true gentleman. If only there were a few more of his kind about.”

  “How about the eye business?” I asked as we hastened back toward the rue du Sabot with our good news.

  “Ah, yes, that was a trial, wasn’t it?” Trocchi said. “But d’you know, by the end of the meeting I wasn’t even noticing it, were you?”

  “No, but I now understand for the first time a line he wrote, I can’t remember where: ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres,’ which roughly translates as ‘Hell is other people.’ He must be acutely aware that ‘the others’ are always trying to cope with his walleye problem.”

  9

  American in Paris

  TILL NOW Austryn had been a Merlin “outsider,” interested in but not yet part of the magazine. He and his wife, Muffie, had recently set up housekeeping a few blocks away on the rue des Ciseaux, a virtual alleyway so narrow you could reach out and almost touch the buildings on both sides, which ran between St. Germain des Prés and the rue du Four. One of the exotic but also comforting aspects of living in Paris was these ancient streets with endearing names: the rue du Chat Qui Pêche (the Cat That Fishes Street); the rue des Bons Vivants (no translation necessary).

  Like me, Austryn was fluent in French, but his was an exquisitely mellifluous version that, according to the French themselves when exposed to it, dated “mid- to late eighteenth century.” Quite rightly and courageously, he was interested in the authentic works, those that had made Sade the scourge of his time and had landed him in prison under no fewer than four regimes: the monarchy (two kings), the Revolution, the Terror, and the empire. Austryn was working on, or perhaps had already finished, the unexpurgated version of Sade’s Justine, though what he planned to do with it only he knew, since the work was still banned 140 years after Sade’s death.

  As for Austryn’s novel, Hedyphagetica, only Christopher had seen it—or, actually, patches of it. I asked Christopher how it was, and he frowned, thought for a minute, then said: “Interesting. Quite interesting.”

  We scheduled a dinner for the following night, to which we invited Austryn and Muffie.

  “You have no idea of the political climate over there right now,” Austryn assured us. He was referring to the witch hunts led by the jowly, balding, ferret-eyed Joe McCarthy, who was making political hay, daily, it would seem, by preying on the growing fears in the States about Uncle Joe Stalin and the Communist threat to the American Way of Life.

  “We do read the papers,” Trocchi said, a bit defensively. “What’s going on over there is pretty bloody awful.”

  “And getting worse,” Austryn said. Then he wagged a finger: “And don’t think you’re safe over here. Europe is crawling with CIA agents. Especially Paris.

  “I can tell you that in this very innocent-looking Left Bank restaurant, there are people listening to what we say.”

  “That’s because we’re talking too loud,” Patrick suggested.

  “You really mean here?” Trocchi asked incredulously, nodding around the smoke-filled room. We were in a small restaurant on the rue Bonaparte almost directly across from the École des Beaux-Arts. I’d eaten here dozens of times. The place couldn’t hold more than thirty-five or forty people elbow to elbow, and from my experience most of them, especially at lunch but also like tonight at dinner, were Beaux-Arts students, as one could tell from their provocative clothing and compulsively rowdy behavior. After all, they had a reputation to uphold. At the annual Beaux-Arts ball, known locally as the Bal des Quat’z’Arts, which had been revived after the war, each atelier was tradition-bound to outdo not only the others but also the preceding year’s shenanigans. “More outrageous than last year” was the order of the day, both during the parade through the streets and later into the predawn hours at the Salle Wagram, where the fete ended up. The police were not only indulgent but overtly supportive, and it took excesses well beyond the norm for them to move in and restore order. This was the one night of the year when the young Beaux-Arts students—who would go on to be artists, sculptors, architects, teachers—could loose their libidos with no fear of reproach or recrimination. Tonight as usual the Beaux-Arts restaurant was jam-packed. Yes, the place was noisy as hell and, yes, the clientele was a mixture of students and their elders—Beaux-Arts teachers and outsiders like ourselves. But glancing quickly around, trying to spy an American—and in these postwar days it was relatively easy to pick out tourists, both by their look and by their dress—I saw none. And heard nothing but French from one end of the restaurant to the other.

  “Yes,” Austryn said, “I mean right here.” He lowered his voice almost to a whisper. “You see those two chaps over there?” Austryn, I had noted, used Anglicisms—more often than Alex or Christopher, actually—but somehow they didn’t seem out of place. He nodded toward the far corner, directly behind me, where two men, quite young, were dining quietly with a stunning blonde. Shifting my chair, I saw whom he meant. They had completely eluded my earlier sweep. One point for master counterspy Wainhouse. “They’re both CIA,” he declared.

  “Come off it, mon,” Trocchi said, smiling a bit indulgently. “Why in Christ’s name would the CIA be wasting its time in a low-down restaurant like this?”

  “I assure you,” paranoid Austryn continued, “they’re CIA. You can’t believe how many agents they have abroad these days. London. Paris. Rome. All over Germany. They don’t trust any of these countries, especially France and Italy with their strong Communist parties. And, believe me, they do send people into just such places. To find out what the students are really thinking. And to see what people like ourselves—deserters, if you will—are fomenting.”

  I’m not sure how much of what struck me as a bad case of incipient paranoia anyone did buy that night or in the months and years to come. I certainly didn’t. Nor did I feel inclined to look over my shoulder or lower my voice. But I was intrigued enough to feign a trip to the WC at the back of the restaurant, which enabled me to pass the table Austryn had pointed out.

  “So,” Austryn said, having divined the purpose of my trek, “am I right or not?”

  “They are Americans,” I admitted.

  I—we—saw a look of triumph on Austryn’s face.

  “But that’s all I can say. What their occupation or profession might be, I haven’t a clue.”

  “You see, I can spot them a mile away.”

  However I tried to refute his claims in my mind, I found during the following weeks that I did take a closer look at my compatriots in public places, did try to overhear a snatch of conversation that would reveal the spy behind the mask.

  * * *

  America seemed like a distant memory. On my glorious graduation day back in Chapel Hill, I had begun to ask myself: What do you want to do with your life? I was aching to go out and see the world. France was a romantic notion, of course, and to some degree Hemingway and Fitzgerald were responsible, doubtless Henry Miller too, but more to the point, my former roommate at UNC, Jack Youngerman, was already there, extolling in letters Paris’s many virtues. But two or three of my professors had urged me to teach, and I had paid three or four visits to Pomfret School in Connecticut, near where my parents lived. I had met some of the teachers and was much imp
ressed by the headmaster, a tall, sturdy, patrician-looking man in his mid-forties with the equally patrician name Dexter Strong.

  I was hired to teach English and Latin, but within weeks of my arrival the real Mr. Chips of the school, the oldest teacher at Pomfret and the longtime head of the math department, fell ill. Dexter Strong, poking through my college records, noted that I had taken a number of math courses. Indeed I had, for at one point, urged by my father to learn something practical, I had briefly considered becoming an engineer. Plus the navy’s V-12 program—of that, more later—had required me to take some math courses as well. And so I began my career as a professor of mathematics, may all the poor children to whom I was bequeathed forgive me. I worked out a method whereby I stayed at least half a dozen pages in the assigned textbook ahead of the students, and for the better part of the first semester that worked reasonably well. But I knew I was skating on thin ice. The smartest kid by far in the class was the son of the dean of Barnard College in New York, a slight blue-eyed young man of fair skin and fairer hair who looked as though no ray of sunlight had ever touched him. He wasn’t a bad lad; he was simply too smart for his own good, certainly for the likes of me, and clearly math was his favorite subject. One day he asked a question that stumped me completely. I cleared my throat and murmured that I wasn’t inclined to deviate from the morning’s assignment but would happily talk to him later. Fortunately, I had other classes scheduled, so I could not see him till after lunch, which gave me time to repair to my room and look up the answer—thirty or forty pages beyond the math I had mastered till then. During my afternoon meeting with the cherub, I pontificated as I cleared up the question, but in my heart I knew the jig was up: Christopher—for that was my diminutive nemesis’s name—Christopher the Christ-bearing boy, had somehow figured out my strategy of staying just ahead of my wards, so he had diabolically made the great leap forward to a place in the book he guessed I would not have reached. I had no choice: over the next few days—and nights—I moved far ahead of the little bastard, in fact studied page after page, equation after equation, till I reached the end of the hated tome.