The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  * * *

  My roommate in the navy’s V-12 program at North Carolina had been Jack Youngerman, who hailed from Louisville, Kentucky. Blond and blue eyed, he had straw-colored hair, very fine and straight, which the wind combed willy-nilly as it passed from west to east and, indeed, from north to south or vice versa, whenever that happened, however rarely. Jack was slight of build and completely nonathletic and possessed a rare combination of nonchalance and intensity. Less than a year older than I, he had been at the University of Missouri, majoring in journalism, when the navy had snapped him up and shipped him off to North Carolina. Fate, in the form of the navy, had cast our lots together, and we also shared many classes, from calculus to navigation to military history. Though bright as hell, Jack seemed completely uninterested in whatever class, focusing most of his energies on sketching his fellow cadets, the professor, or the classroom itself. Even on those evenings when we were presumably hitting the books, in preparation for some impending test of our worthiness to be included in this officers’ training program, Jack would sit with an open book before him while his right hand, in clear command, sketched and doodled endlessly. On one such night I paused in my own brown study and asked him point-blank: “Why were you majoring in journalism?” “Why not?” he said. “A chance to travel, maybe, meet interesting people. Far better than a stodgy nine-to-five job.” “At Missouri,” I said, “did you also spend most of your time sketching?” “You’ve noticed. I guess so. Why?” “Have you ever thought of studying art?” He looked at me strangely, then shook his head. “Not really,” he said. “You should,” I said, “because you’re damn good.”

  After the war, which we saw through to its bitter end in these same classrooms, Jack went back to Missouri and got his degree in journalism. We exchanged letters, and in each succeeding missive it became clearer that his heart was no longer in journalism, though where it had gone he wasn’t sure. One thing he did know was that following graduation he was going to France, probably to—now, listen to this—“study art”! I’m not sure he even remembered my advice of the year before, for he wrote as though he had come to that conclusion on his own. (Neither of us could anticipate or predict he would become one of America’s foremost artists.) During my year at Pomfret, he had applied for and got accepted into the École des Beaux-Arts, no easy feat for a foreigner. He would write enticing postcards, some depicting alluring views of the City of Light, others depicting buxom, half-clothed lascivious lasses with poetic texts such as “Get your ass over here,” or “You have no idea what you’re missing, Richard.” I needed no urging, only the means, and when the AFS came through, fate landed me a scant two blocks from where Jack was living, in an equally tiny but wonderfully cheap hotel on the rue de Seine, where he shared a room with a charming young Italian lady, Yolanda by name. We took up where we had left off. Jack’s idle sketching had turned into a serious commitment, and his innate intensity, once scattered, was now firmly fixed. He drew incessantly, both in class and out, and like many before him increasingly repaired to the Louvre, where he spent days learning by copying old masters. On several occasions we went to the Louvre together, I to look and absorb, he to muse and comment. He had become a student not only of art but of artists, reading their lives and scrutinizing their work in detail. As we walked the halls, we would pause before a work he especially liked, and he would free-associate about it, talking more to himself than to me. It was during those mostly afternoon strolls that I came to see art in a new way and admire the seriousness of purpose, and knowledge, with which Jack had embraced his new calling. Then one day perhaps a year later I climbed the steps to Jack’s room to see, sitting on the paint-spattered table, a view of Florence, from which I had recently returned. But it was an abstract view of Florence, seen from the hill above it, the rotunda of the Duomo and the campanile clearly visible among the squares and triangles, mostly in green and blue, that made up the rest of the city. “A breakthrough, no? I mean, is that the first abstract painting you’ve done?” “No,” he said, “but it’s the first one I felt good enough about to stand face out.” “I love it,” I said. “I think that’s maybe the best thing you’ve done.” “It’s okay,” he said, “a little derivative, but I think I’ve captured something of the city.” Jack had gone to Florence a few months before I had. In that painting, he had—to my untutored mind, but having roamed and loved the city—in a work no more than eighteen by twenty-four inches, painted not on canvas but on wood, beautifully caught the essence of that very special place. I offered to buy it on the spot, not having the vaguest idea what price Jack might put on it, or whether I had in my dwindling budget the wherewithal to pay for it. “It’s not for sale,” he announced firmly. Would it ever be? I asked. He shrugged. “Who knows if I’ll ever sell any painting,” he murmured. Yolanda was listening intently, and though her command of English was limited, she understood enough to know I was offering to buy the work. “Why don’t you let him buy it?” she asked in French. “We could use the money.” “It’s not for sale,” Jack repeated, closing the discussion.

  Jack never returned to realism, except when he was sketching, seeing something in his mind’s eye he wanted to seize and record immediately: a person, a place, an expression, a chance encounter, a flower, a mere leaf. I followed his artistic evolution with growing admiration, but I learned to limit my compliments, for they elicited only rebuttal. “I admit I’m a fan, but we’re not talking about blind faith here. You’re just damn good. Period.” That was generally where we ended, an unsatisfactory draw, but as time went on, and after his first show at the highly regarded Paris gallery of Denise René, his painterly self-esteem rose a notch or two. It was Jack who turned me on to the writings of Louise Labé, a poet of astounding depth and beauty, and in turn I would talk to him of Joyce, my hero, whose works, especially Ulysses, I studied with the same reverence and intensity as Jack did his favorite painters. I could quote whole passages of Ulysses, and after hearing a recording by the master himself of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake, I would recite it with a broad Irish accent and in the same high tinny voice—the “tinny” doubtless from the ancient recording rather than from Joyce himself, who I knew had a lovely tenor voice. What I especially liked about Joyce was not only the quality of his work but his exemplary focus as an artist. No problem of self-esteem there. “Imperious” was the term that usually came to mind. Imperium. Emperor. Arrogant and self-assured. He knew he was changing the face of literature, and if that meant taking advantage of friends and family, so be it. Jack, I thought, equally dedicated to his art, could have used a little of that Joycean quality. But either you have it or you don’t. As for myself, I was very much in Jack’s camp.

  * * *

  I attended half a dozen classes at the Sorbonne, only one of whose professors seemed enamored of his subject or even vaguely interested. Most were held in large, stuffy amphitheaters where the professor read from notes that, I guessed, had not changed much from the end of World War I. Not the slightest effort to inflect or inform. Further, despite my summer in the Cévennes, I realized that I grasped only half, at best two-thirds, of what the old boys were saying. I had overestimated my fluency. I could speak quite well by now, with only a trace of an accent, but that had the inevitable drawback of making people think I understood more than I did, and their rapid-fire responses soon found me floundering or, worse, pretending. The only exception to the doddering-professor generalization was a youngish professor by the name of Charles Dédéyan. Comparative literature was his domain, and he was clearly in love with his wide-ranging subject. His hour vanished in a trice, and he invariably, having kept us on the edges of our seats, finished with a flourish that, like the last scene of the serial movies, announced the exciting subject of next week’s episode. He also had the virtue of enunciating each sentence, each word and syllable, with such clarity that I understood virtually all. But aside from him, I quickly decided to move my education out of the classroom and into the streets and cafés.
Where the action was. Where life was.

  Back in Paris, in late fall, Walter, one of my fellow campers I liked very much who was born in Belgium and whose family had been killed in the war, noted almost in passing that he was moving out of his room. Had he found a place? He shrugged. Not yet, for his budget was ridiculous. Half joking, I mentioned my two-room suite on the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. If you don’t mind sharing, I said. Truth was, my own budget was getting tight, and relief of half the month’s rent would be welcome. He accepted on the spot.

  Over the months, when we had gotten to know each other well enough to be totally comfortable with whatever subject, I tried on several occasions to sound Walter out about his family, about the war, but after half a dozen of what I thought were discreet questions I gave up, because I could immediately see his jaw tighten. Though he was still in his mid-twenties, I knew he had experienced and suffered more than enough for a man twice his age.

  * * *

  Frank Manchon and Louis DeJuge were another (for me) fascinating pair. Inseparables, they formed an almost comical duo, Frank, tall, aristocratic looking, Louis, short, dark. They both had joined the underground soon after the German occupation.

  It was in the early Resistance movement that Frank met Louis, a working-class kid from the near suburbs. Initially, their job was as courier, passing coded documents from one cell member to another, or from cell to cell. Most of the time—and apparently this was de rigueur throughout the underground—most members of a given cell did not know the rest, let alone the members of another cell. As in the case of Frank and Louis, people sometimes worked in pairs, but that was the extent of the collusion, for if one did not know the cell’s other members, under torture one could not crack and betray. Further, once the Germans knew how tightly compartmentalized the system was and how little each cell member knew, they would be less inclined to torture.

  Later, both Frank and Louis moved south, on the initiative of Pastor Theis, whom they helped seek out, sequester, and wherever possible move to safety the Jewish children.

  After the war, both young men found themselves pretty much at loose ends, as were many in France. By birth, Louis had been destined to manual labor of some sort—carpentry, masonry, plumbing—the French school system being relentless in its triage process between the haves and the have-nots, those who will go to university and those who will not, those who will rule and those who will serve. Frank had a degree in law. He opted to take a position in an architectural firm. Louis for his part did odd jobs, carting and carpentry, often servicing worthy clients such as the Chambonnais for little or nothing. Careerism was a concept that seemed not to exist in these two men, and indeed in many of the French I met in those years. Being fulfilled meant focusing on matters you most cared about, whether or not they were lucrative. In fact, in all my years in France, I don’t recall anyone inquiring about another’s earnings, which would have been considered crass and uncouth. Both men, but especially Frank, were passionate about world politics, and one of the first things that astonished me—less a patriot than an expatriate, but one who had come here not with the basic intent of attacking my own country from the safety of foreign shores, as many Americans seemed eager to do in those postwar Left Bank days—was the relatively common view, to which both Frank and Louis subscribed, of looking equally askance at America and the Soviet Union, of viewing both giants with a wary eye. Again, in all our discussions I had a strong and growing feeling of how different our optics were, mine and my French friends’, that those back home who had witnessed the war from afar and generally via the evening news, whose lives had never been physically threatened and whose deprivations consisted mainly of gas rationing, could never understand the actions and opinions of those who had known not only the physical but the psychic trauma of living in daily dread under the occupation.

  Since I had arrived in Paris, it had become a sort of unwritten new tradition for me to spend Christmas Eve with the Manchons, who seemed to have adopted me. In addition to Frank’s friend Louis, and upon occasion his sister, Souris, and her Englishman husband, Jeanne and Frank usually invited a handful of close friends. I say “Jeanne and Frank” because they looked and in many ways acted like a couple, sharing the apartment on the square Port Royal, often going to the theater and concerts together, not to mention entertaining with Frank acting as the host. In fact, Jeanne had a beau, a dashing Austrian count, a composer of some note. He divided his time between Paris and Vienna and often missed Jeanne and Frank’s lively dinners. As gray November melted into darker December that year, 1951, Frank reminded me that I was expected once again for Christmas Eve. Time to polish my shoes and fetch from the closet my better suit, for I had but two, the good one of pepper-and-salt wool, which the mothballs frequented far more than I.

  Before I had left for France, my father inquired about my wardrobe, a term generally absent from my vocabulary if one excepted the obligatory blazer that came with my year at Pomfret. When I responded that I doubted I would need more than one suit, and I already had one I had bought off the rack at a thrift shop in North Carolina three or four years before, he asked me to produce it. He took one look and snorted.

  “Get in the car,” he ordered. “We’re going to New London to have you fitted.”

  “Fitted?” I said. “I’m a forty regular. What’s wrong with Bugbee’s?” That was our local department store.

  “You’re getting a real suit,” he said. “Made to order by Hans’s father. From the finest wool available.” Hans was my father’s factory foreman, a gangly man in his early forties who looked, acted, and talked like Ray Bolger.

  I was twenty-one at the time, and although from my mid-teens on my father and I had had monumental political arguments, I decided in this instance not to argue. Father was making me a gift, based less on his generosity than on his conviction that if I were to arrive in France without a proper suit, I would be making a damn fool of myself (one of his favorite expressions not only about me but about anyone he considered stupid or unworthy, of which, in his inner landscape, there were many, mostly Democrats). He had made it plain years before that once out of high school—or college if I were lucky enough to get there—I should never expect another penny from him. From that point, I was on my own. So I was touched, though a trifle irritated, by my forced trip to New London, just days before my departure, when I had places to go and people to see, specifically Maureen three houses down the road. I made a quick call to the pretty lady, explained my quandary, groveled in mortification, and pushed our rendezvous back till that evening.

  So it was, and now, three years later, I pulled it from the armoire, dusted it off, and gave it an approving look. As good as the day it was bought.

  When I arrived at the Manchons’ punctually at seven, Louis and Frank were in the kitchen busily opening oysters. Of all my talents, of which there are few, shucking oysters with that damn knife was not one. “Here,” Louis said with a grin, “give it a shot.” I demurred, but they would not let me off. My main concern was not losing a finger. I grasped the damn beast with my right hand, probed the delicate spot with the knife point, thrust, and turned. Nothing. On the fourth try, both Frank and Louis doing their best to keep from laughing, I succeeded, to loud applause. “Bravo, mon vieux!” Frank said. “A couple more years and you’ll be working at the seafood counter of the Dôme.”

  Jeanne’s count was there, and another couple, the Medinas, with their young, dark-haired, striking-looking daughter, a budding violinist who was a student at the Paris Conservatory. Paul, the father, a man of medium height whose high forehead was framed by a shock of carefully combed graying hair, was dressed impeccably in a dark suit, a white shirt, and a red tie that matched his lapel’s decoration, the Croix de Guerre. Though soft-spoken, he had about him an aura of intensity and intelligence that made him seem twice his size. Behind his rimless glasses, his gentle blue eyes could, when the subject interested him—and most things did—catch fire and blaze. A highly regarded journalist
, he was Paris correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s leading postwar newspaper. Roszi, the mother, one of Jeanne’s oldest and closest friends, was also a violinist, classically trained like her daughter, not in Paris, but at the Budapest Conservatory, and later in Berlin, where, I had been told, she roomed in the 1920s with an up-and-coming actress named Marlene Dietrich. Between the wars she had, to earn a living, turned her talents to popular music and made a name for herself as a Gypsy violinist, whose nightclub on the Champs-Élysées had become famous throughout Europe. I had seen the Medinas, also at Jeanne’s, two or three times the year before, but this was the first time I had met the daughter, Jeannette. Before dinner, Jeanne and her almost namesake had given an hour-long recital in the Manchons’ elegant living room, furnished with embroidered Louis XVI chairs and couches but dominated by an imposing grand piano, a run-through for a program the young lady was to give a week or two hence. I was overwhelmed by both the beauty of the program and that of the young performer and complimented both musicians after the performance. “The young lady’s very talented,” I said to Jeanne during dinner. “Very,” she said. “She’ll go a long way.”

  As usual, dinner that night was a mixture of politics, literature, exquisite food, and fine wine. The increasingly bitter dispute—indeed rift—between Sartre and Camus was very much the topic of the day: discussed, analyzed, criticized, justified, as sides were taken and the battlefield prepared. Frank was adamant that Camus was forsaking his past, retreating into conservatism; Paul, acknowledging Sartre’s enormous mind and talents, saw him nonetheless edging toward leftist dogmatism, but felt of the two he was with Sartre. I too sided with Sartre, a man I admired, for among other things he seemed to defy the normal bell curve of life, growing younger and more politically vigorous by the day. “No question,” Paul murmured, “he’s a grand bonhomme.” But he questioned the existentialist’s increasingly blind commitment to Communism, especially his Maoist leanings, which struck Paul as naive at best, dangerous at worst. “I’m not comparing Communism to fascism,” he said, “but the abuses of dictatorship are inherent in any such system, and under Stalin millions of lives have been broken, untold others sent to gulags to die. Because of his role in the recent war, many view him as a demigod, but if you reread an objective history of Russian Communism, you’ll get quite a different picture. Ruthless and paranoid. A dangerous combination. You must understand that for decades the French Communist Party, much more than the Socialist, fought for the rights of the workers and peasants. Deep down, the French are conservatives, and the majority detest and fear the Communists. To give you but one example, Léon Blum, who had between the wars headed the so-called Popular Front, on March 11, 1938, when Hitler annexed Austria in the Anschluss, convoked the members of all parties, left and right, in the Salle Colbert of the Palais Bourbon the next day and gave a stirring plea for national unity, asking that the French of all persuasions come together and form a ‘unity government,’ to show Hitler France was not weak and divided—which, alas, it was—and hopefully to deter him from any further expansionist plans.”