The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  * * *

  It was all well and good making these great literary discoveries, but money was always at the forefront of our minds. I don’t know whether it was Beckett or Genet—perhaps both—who gave us the idea of starting to publish books. Our twisted logic: If you couldn’t afford a magazine, why couldn’t you not afford books as well? It kind of made sense, in a 1950s sort of way.

  What books? Well, we had two to start, and possibly four. The first was Beckett’s Watt, which, surprisingly, the author had agreed to let us publish, perhaps because for almost a decade now he had failed totally even to interest any British publisher. At first, Beckett had given the manuscript to the agent Richard Watt—he loved the idea of Watt handling Watt—and when his efforts failed, the project was taken on by his old friend from prewar Paris days George Reavey, who also struck out. Routledge, Beckett’s publisher of Murphy, called it “too wild and unintelligible … to stand any chance of successful publication over here at this time … sorry indeed we cannot feel the same whole-hearted enthusiasm for Watt as we did for Murphy.” Half a dozen others felt the same. One came close to taking it on, or was at least complimentary. Fredric Warburg of Secker and Warburg called the manuscript “too difficult” but added that it showed “immense mental vitality” and “a very fine talent for writing,” concluding intriguingly, “It may be that in turning this book down we are turning down a potential James Joyce.” Beckett, the most patient and unassuming of writers, was understandably bitter. Was this the same manuscript we had sat up all night reading, laughing and reading, crying and reading, with the growing feeling we had discovered a genius, the word is not too strong? Were we so perceptive, or were the others so blind? In any event, Watt was the catalyst, if not the cornerstone, of our mad new book-publishing enterprise, which appropriately we dubbed Collection Merlin. To boot, Frechtman had clearly implied that if we were to publish an excerpt in our magazine, Genet would surely approve our publishing the entire work if, as we had blithely let drop, we began to publish books as well. Not a bad beginning …

  I worried about the money. Alex and Jane were reassuring. Could Papa Lougee, I asked, be counted on to help? For we were now talking real money, four or five times what an issue of the magazine cost. No, Daddy had anted up all he was going to. Remember, he had not been reimbursed, even in part, for his outlay for Merlin number 1, and never would be. His capitalist calculations that the ship, once launched, would return its investment in due course, sooner or later, if not in jig time, had been completely thwarted.

  “Your convincing Beckett to forgo an advance is half the battle,” Alex said.

  “I didn’t convince him at all,” I said. “He knew we were short and suggested it on his own.”

  * * *

  Enter Maurice. With my Beckett translation of “The End” lagging, the space in issue number 4 had been filled with the Genet and an extract from Henry Miller’s Plexus, thanks to a new element in the magazine, a French gentleman by the name of Maurice Girodias, who came into our lives via Austryn. Girodias had an impressive publishing background, having founded at the start of the war, when he was only twenty-one, a publishing company, Les Éditions du Chêne, specializing in art books. By war’s end, the then twenty-four-year-old decided to branch out into the broader, more challenging realm of literature, which he did with considerable success, rightly seizing on the Russian classics, then out of favor—and in most cases out of print—reissuing old translations and commissioning new. Girodias, a true chip off the old block, decided also to emulate his father, Jack Kahane, an Englishman from Manchester who had volunteered to give his life for his country in World War I. In the words of Maurice:

  The outbreak of the first World War coincided with a great emotional catastrophe in [my father’s] life. He gave away everything and volunteered to die; but instead of quickly dying he discovered through a telescope, from the gray-white cliffs surrounding Marseilles, a new facet of the life he was not yet to quit, a bubbly, charming, piquant young French bourgeoise, Marcelle Eugenie Girodias, who he was to marry in 1917, after having been through the hell of Ypres and a good bit of what followed.

  After the war Jack Kahane settled in Paris, living in the lap of luxury in his in-laws’ apartment on the avenue du Bois, later renamed avenue Foch in honor of the great French hero of that war to end all wars, named commander in chief of the Allied armies in 1918. In 1929, he and a partner started a company called the Obelisk Press, whose goal was to publish daring, some would say titillating, works in English intended for the tourist market—novels and memoirs the English-speaking world could not purchase in its native lands. One of the company’s daring authors was a poverty-stricken American expatriate, Henry Miller, whose talent Kahane, to his immense credit, immediately recognized. In 1934 he published Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, later in the decade his Max and the White Phagocytes and Tropic of Capricorn, thus bringing the unknown at least to the attention of the literary world, if not yet to the world at large. Kahane also published works by Anaïs Nin and Cyril Connolly, and two short works of another still barely recognized genius, James Joyce. But as the 1930s waned, it was becoming clearer every day that another war was brewing, and Kahane, who had been writing his autobiography, Memoirs of a Booklegger, quickly polished off the work and, virtually on the day war was declared, left this world, “stricken by the sheer horror of it all,” his son wrote. At twenty, then, young Maurice suddenly found himself the head of the family. With no experience or training of any kind, and for working capital an impressive collection of his father’s bar debts, he set out to carry on the family tradition and founded, as the world was literally exploding around him, the aforementioned Éditions du Chêne. The very notion, and the timing, seemed ludicrous, yet to its founder’s great surprise, the company thrived. More surprising was the fact the half-Jewish Maurice made no attempt to hide or flee once the Nazis arrived; his own flair and youthful self-confidence, plus his mother’s good Catholic name and background, apparently sufficed to keep the Nazi exterminators at bay, or at least in the dark. In any event, he survived the war not only intact but having learned a great deal about his father’s old profession. After the war Maurice revived the Obelisk Press and began to republish his father’s Henry Miller titles, plus a new version of that famous old erotic thriller Memoirs of Fanny Hill, which sold almost a hundred thousand copies. Miller’s works had sold only a few hundred copies before the war, but now, as thousands upon thousands of GIs descended on Paris or passed through on leave, they bought in droves books they knew were forbidden at home.

  Further, thanks to Girodias’s father, Miller had come to the attention of the French literary establishment just before the war. In 1940, the distinguished literary publisher Gallimard had acquired the French rights to Miller’s Black Spring, and a smaller and even more daring colleague, Robert Denoël, the rights to Tropic of Cancer. Thus Miller, still unpublished in the United States, was about to appear in French translations in 1940, when the Germans’ sudden arrival that June put a swift end to all such plans. But now, with the Germans finally gone and the memory of their brutal occupation still fresh in everyone’s mind, one figured that the new government, whatever its political orientation, would take no measure that would remind people of the Nazi censors. Thus, toward the end of 1945, Gallimard and Denoël coordinated to issue the two volumes, already translated, simultaneously. Young Girodias, who through his father still owned the rights to Tropic of Capricorn and Max and the White Phagocytes, decided to join the game and, with Miller’s approval, rushed through a translation of both. In December 1945 these four works by Miller appeared, but to the surprise of the publishers, bent on a succès de scandale, the literary critics chose largely to ignore the Miller onslaught, and those readers who happened to open any of the books, through chance or design, were sufficiently shocked to report their contents to priests or police. Hatred of the recent German censors did not seem to have carried over to the not-so-brave new world aborning: one must remember that
the French are, despite the rhetoric and political ranting, an essentially conservative people. Already, fourteen years before, Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night had shocked and upset France, and Miller was even sterner stuff. For several long months, virtual silence greeted the Miller. While silence may be golden for some, for purveyors of the written word it can mean slow death, for without controversy sales stagnate. Finally, in Camus’s Combat, Maurice Nadeau, one of the braver and more perceptive members of the critical establishment, labeled the American a “genius,” though warning the public of his “monstrous immorality.” Still, sales of all four books remained slow. Girodias, convinced he had an easy winner, if only by the coattail effect, had printed fifteen thousand copies of Capricorn, most of which were gathering dust on, or more often beneath, the shelves. Given his fragile finances—which were stretched even thinner by his decision to launch, at almost the same time as he reopened Obelisk, a costly new magazine, Critique, edited by the highly regarded Georges Bataille, and a number of other equally entrepreneurial but cash-draining ventures—his substantial investment in Miller seemed a lost cause. Girodias, having survived the war, was almost sure his fledgling house was about to founder. What he needed was a miracle, and he did not believe in miracles. In late July 1946, however, a group calling itself the Cartel of Social and Moral Action sued all three publishers, who were summoned to appear before the public prosecutor. The last two French works to have been prosecuted for outraging public morals were Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Baudelaire’s Les fleurs du mal almost a century before, which, as Nadeau later noted, “had left an uncomfortable impression in the memory of all French magistrates.” Those precedents, plus the painful recollection of the Germans, played in the publishers’ favor. Within a week of that suit, all fifteen thousand copies of Tropic of Capricorn were gone from the bookstores, and Girodias had gone back to press for another fifty thousand. By September, after the publishers met in an open radio debate with members of the cartel, Capricorn had sold more than a hundred thousand, Cancer even more, for the reaction to the attempted censorship, as the publishers had hoped, was virtually unanimous.

  Despite the Obelisk victory over the voices of repression, and the ensuing sales success for Miller, Girodias, who confessed to having little real notion of money, was warring on another front: his estimable Éditions du Chêne, to which he had been paying scant attention in the flush of this exciting new venture and the attendant publicity, was deeply in debt, and to save it, Maurice came to an arrangement with his creditors whereby, as he noted,

  I slaved for three years on the tiniest salary in order to pay my debts, and I had nearly accomplished that noble aim when one of the creditors conspired to get control of my firm—and then sold his ill-acquired interest to a big publisher. I was expelled from my own company, unable to understand or resist that piece of capitalistic maneuvering … It was a cruel lesson. I tried to put up a fight to recover my property and wasted in the attempt one whole year, as well as money I did not possess, and what little energy I still had in me.

  That “cruel lesson,” however, led Girodias straight to the next stage of his life, namely, “the urge to attack the Universal Establishment with all the means at my disposal.” In the spring of 1953, exactly a year after Merlin’s first issue, he had founded the Olympia Press, an English-language publishing venture whose stated purpose was to shock the establishment and publish, for the growing tourist (and military) market, works certain to be banned “back home.”

  When Austryn brought us word of his new acquaintance, he had the story only partly right. For the dandy Maurice, clothed in his impeccable black suit, white shirt, and tasteful tie, his dainty hands sheathed in leather gloves that fondled the wheel of his gleaming dark blue Citroën traction avant, had struck Austryn and Muffie as blessed with not only sound publishing credentials (“Les Éditions du Chêne? You founded that?”) but the wherewithal to back them up. The truth was, in words that Girodias voiced only years later, Olympia was “a shoestring operation par excellence,” whose office was a tiny room in the back of a bookstore at 13, rue Jacob, exactly five doors down from where I had earlier spent two deliciously happy years chez Madame Germaine. He had far more hope than money, and his past publishing experience had taught him to trust no one, for after he had lost Les Éditions du Chêne he had “led an uncertain, inactive life, trying to absorb the enormous blow I had suffered.” But to us that early September day in 1953, when he drew up in his posh dark blue Citroën in front of Jeannette’s and my door at 76, rue de Rennes to meet the Merlinites, of whom Austryn had talked so enthusiastically, he looked and played the part of the suave, knowledgeable man of the world, someone who with a snap of his well-manicured fingers could solve our mounting problems in a Paris minute—about triple a New York minute—if not in a trice.

  For after issue number 4, Merlin had reached a critical point in its young life: our reputation as slow payers was extending further and further from the center of our universe, and I had wound up my stint at the Chaumont air base, having funded issue number 4 and part of number 5.

  Maurice that day arrived as the messiah. As we sat drinking sherry in our sumptuous, elegant third-floor apartment on the rue de Rennes, Maurice was saying, in impeccable English: “You see, part of Merlin’s problem is that, like any company in this country, you must have a French gérant—‘manager.’ That is the law, no matter if the company is wholly owned and operated by foreigners, as is your case. I have mentioned to Austryn that I could well fulfill that role for you, which would free you to pursue your literary goals.”

  We nodded as one. The will, nay, the need to believe clothed Maurice that day in a mantle of silk. Of gold. He could do no wrong. We were putty in his hands. “I hear that you would like to branch out into books. Here too we might be of help to each other, for I have just founded a company to publish books in English here in Paris. There may be some possible overlap, mutually beneficial. I have printers…”

  Looks of relief and unrestrained joy crisscrossed the room in swift currents in response to the magic word “printers.”

  “I gather you have a name for your publishing venture: Collection Merlin. Most apt, most apt…”

  “We have four books planned,” Trocchi said. “And we have several more in mind, including Austryn’s translation of Sade, of which I believe you’re aware.”

  “I am indeed,” Maurice said. “In fact, Austryn and I have already discussed his Philosophy in the Bedroom. A fine translation. I’m prepared to take that title on immediately. You see, I very much doubt you could publish it yourself without grave danger to your status here. You would all be expelled, alas. We are, when all is said and done, a conservative people, and that sad aspect of the French character, put largely on hold during the war, is, alas, reemerging.” He paused and gazed around the not-so-crowded room, I will not say imperiously but with his chin, therefore his entire head, lifted in the manner of someone who knew that if this was a game, say of chess or even poker, he was certain to win.

  “We will have to draw up some papers,” he drawled, as if the very thought bored him. “I have a lawyer friend, a man I used in my efforts to win back my company. He knows all the ins and outs of the Code. We shall keep it simple. I shall be named gérant, relieving you of that responsibility”—he smiled—“which you foreigners cannot exercise in any event.”

  “We’ll of course need to preserve the integrity of Merlin,” I ventured.

  “Both the magazine and Collection Merlin,” Alex added.

  “To be sure,” Maurice said, “to be sure. You should understand,” he added, “that I have had more than a few battles with those that would stand in the way of artistic integrity, or freedom to publish. More than a few. And I have won. So you need not worry. In fact, I intend to not rest until censorship here is a thing of the past.”

  As he left, he shook hands with all of us and made a point of bringing Jeannette’s fingers delicately to his lips.

  * * *<
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  The two reasons Maurice had been summoned to the rue de Rennes rather than to the rue du Sabot were: first, to impress him; second, to convince him we were not the impecunious, cheap-to-hire down-and-outers his first impression from our initial meetings in the local cafés had undoubtedly led him to believe. If we had fooled him on any count, however, it was not for long. Alex, a bit of the con man himself and thus doubtless blinded to one of that ilk, was overjoyed. “You see,” he said proudly, raising a glass to the assembled crew, “our worries are over. Not only will the magazine have a gérant, ergo legality, but Collection Merlin can now really take wing.”

  If Maurice was what he claimed to be, then he could fill our biggest need, namely, the ability to sell our books. It was one thing to print books, quite another to sell them. In the course of the afternoon Maurice had boasted that he already had a substantial mailing list, inherited in part from his father, plus his many contacts, through Les Éditions du Chêne, in the bookstore network.

  Suddenly the pipe dream of Collection Merlin seemed, if not a reality, at least a distinct possibility.

  21

  High Finance and Misdemeanor

  WE SIGNED PAPERS, which Maurice assured us would simply free us from the financial worries that had plagued us to date. No, he would not fund the magazine, that was still ours to deal with, but he would help us find a printer who would not demand up-front payment, and he would assure the distribution of the books, of which four more in addition to Wand and Quadrant were already signed up: Beckett’s Watt, Austryn’s Hedyphagetica, Jean Genet’s Thief’s Journal, and, on the back burner, a translation of Molloy, though that we knew was pretty far down the pike, since Beckett had no interest in assuming the task of rendering it into English.