The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  I was flattered, and I knew that Grove was where I should be. But I had a problem. Though we had spoken on the phone three or four times since our last lunch, I had never mentioned to Barney I had taken a new job, and it was high time I did. Barney looked puzzled. “I thought you were still with that management consultant guy,” he said. “That world wasn’t for me,” I said. “Anyway, shortly after our last lunch, Braziller offered me a job as editor of his two book clubs, and I took it. There’s no way I could switch now. It wouldn’t be fair to George, leaving just as I’ve learned the ropes.” He nodded, said he understood, and ordered another martini. This said, I told him I’d been reading Evergreen Review and thought it first-rate. He looked pleased. It’s also a great way to get authors, he said. You’d be amazed. And there’s so much going on, both here and abroad, that the big houses are completely ignoring.

  We agreed to stay in touch, and if ever I changed my mind, I’d let him know. It sounded like an open invitation, as Jeannette put it that night at dinner, a nice backup when Braziller drives you over the edge. I duly noted that she had said “when,” not “if.”

  * * *

  To his credit, George, despite his lack of formal education, for he had never gone beyond high school, had a passion for books and aspired one day to be a real publisher, Alfred Knopf his idol. To his debit, he could not for the life of him make up his mind, I suspect for fear of making a mistake—something publishers do, I was learning, with alarming regularity. Went with the territory. Just because you loved a book, and your editors did too, didn’t mean the world would. Chez George, month after month, deadlines arrived and passed, then passed again. Susan, I said, one day early in my second year there, how do we get the man to unstraddle the goddamn fence? Brantl knew how, she informed me. If Braziller hadn’t agreed on a selection by deadline, Brantl picked it for him. The implication was clear. How long, I asked the disturbingly pulchritudinous young lady perched once again on the corner of my desk, her legs scissoring slowly back and forth a scant three feet from my face in time to some private rhythm, does it take to gain George’s confidence? She shrugged. “Brantl was here nine or ten years,” she said. “Maybe more. And he was very intelligent.” I was beginning to love her more and more. She loosed her darts even as her flesh dangled invitingly. Was this a game played daily in offices throughout the country? It sure as hell wasn’t for me.

  Speaking of games, I had learned early that book clubs had a brilliant if diabolical modus operandi called a “negative option,” under which members were obliged to respond to a main selection not if they did want it but if they didn’t. Thus a certain percentage of acceptances came under the dubious rubric “sloth,” or “Where the hell is the goddamn Book Find newsletter? I forgot to write and say I didn’t want this month’s selection.”

  Normally, I began writing George notes a good week before each month’s deadline reminding him time was running out. Another reminder two days later, then a third with the notes now marked URGENT. In most cases, we finally came up with the selections with no more than two or three days’ delay. But there came a month in the dark of winter when he not only ignored my notes but refused to talk to me when we passed in the hallway. No idea why. He had faulted me, ergo I was hated. I was beginning to learn how things worked in the world of business. Or maybe George was an exception. In any case, with the deadline more than a week behind us, George ordered me into his office one afternoon and demanded to know how on earth I expected to get this month’s newsletter out without a selection? I mentally considered getting him in a half nelson and pinning him to his desk before he knew what was happening, but wisely refrained. In summer, when George had exchanged long-sleeved shirts for short, I had seen the rippling biceps as he strode past my cubicle and knew that despite my wrestling prowess he might wriggle out of my hold and toss me out the fourth-floor window onto Park Avenue South without so much as an au revoir. Susan had intimated Atlas had nothing on George in the build department; how she knew I did not inquire.

  There was a sliding library ladder behind his desk that soared impressively from floor to ceiling and covered the full length of his voluminous bookcase. I saw George suddenly rise from his seat, clamber up the ladder, mutter to himself, reach forward and pull out a book, toss it in my general direction, then inch the ladder farther along, pull out another, toss it over his shoulder, repeating the process until the floor, his desk, my arms, were laden with a dozen books. “One of these,” he said, “will be this month’s selection. Narrow it down to two by tomorrow and I’ll decide”—he must have seen my face, for he temporized—“we’ll decide,” and he turned his back to let me know the “meeting” was over.

  Jeannette first burst out laughing when I told her the story that night, for she adored slapstick, then suddenly she turned serious. “You should get out of there,” she said. “First of all, he’s driving you crazy. And second, you’re not spending enough time with the four of us.” I paused to make sure I had heard right. “The four of us!” “Afraid so,” she said. “Dr. Berenberg confirmed it today.” “And when might this happen?” “On or about April Fools’ Day. And that’s no joke.” Fifteen minutes later I was uncorking a bottle of Laurent-Perrier, vintage 1954, toasting our new son, for this time it would surely be a boy, while at the same time looking warily around our one-bedroom apartment and wondering where in God’s name we’d welcome the lad.

  * * *

  Nineteen fifty-eight faded into 1959, and the overall climate at 215 had improved measurably: more often than not, after that Chaplinesque over-the-shoulder book tossing, deadlines were being met, most of our selections were exceeding the dread minimum, and Susan had stopped swinging her now-sheer-stockinged legs at my desk corner. In late January, plump, gentle Herman Figatner—Mr. Purse Strings—who rarely left his desk from dawn till dusk, called me in and announced that George had approved a raise for me. Five hundred dollars. Starting next week. I could hardly contain my joy. Should I kiss Herman or strangle him? I settled by thanking him, perfunctorily, I trusted, and rushed home to tell Jeannette the good news. “I haven’t checked it out,” I offered, “but it might just buy the new baby a pair of shoes.” I patted her increasingly rotund belly and bent down to hear the infant’s nightly thrashing. From the earnest kicking, I knew the little guy, more than six months old according to the Nepalese method of counting, was going to be a world-class soccer player, just as I was sure Nathalie would be a writer, teacher, or at least bookworm, for her favorite sport, now that she could walk, was to speed to the bookcase and take therefrom, in no special order but with obvious relish, the entire bottom shelf of books, one by one, and cast them onto the floor. Need one have better proof? Or was it her way of telling me to throw out book publishing and spend more time with her?

  * * *

  George admired Alfred Knopf more than any man in publishing and called him frequently for advice before making up his mind on a selection. He had learned to do so over the years because Mr. K., doubtless sensing his power, never failed to phone and berate George if he learned of a main selection of which he disapproved. For the moment at least, the club was doing fine, making reasonable money, but George was clearly tired of hawking other people’s wares; it was high time he published on his own. He rightly understood that American agents would send him only leftovers, books already turned down by the major houses, and when someone suggested he look abroad, a light went on. But it quickly went out when submissions arrived from France, Germany, and Spain, with no one he trusted able to read them. He knew I read French; the question was: Did he really trust me? Still, one morning, instead of calling me imperiously into his office, he dropped by my cubicle waving a book with a familiar cover: Les Éditions de Minuit. It was a thin book by a certain Henri Alleg entitled La question, graphically detailing the tortures by the French military in Algeria of North African nationals. A most unlikely candidate for a country supremely uninterested in France’s colonial wars, I thought. Nonetheless, I was delighted simply
to have a Minuit book in my hands, and I read it that night, sharing its contents and my thoughts with Jeannette. It made harrowing reading: How could a country I loved so dearly, which had suffered firsthand the horrors of World War II, the mindless murders, the physical and mental agonies, allow itself to become the bourreau—the “torturer”—in turn? Next morning I wrote George a report attesting to the book’s importance but cautioning that if he expected meaningful sales, he should desist. He came back and asked me to translate a few pages, which I did that night. He read them, peered back into my office, and announced he was going to publish the book, which was already a major bestseller not only in France but in several other European countries as well. George had the brilliant idea of asking Jean-Paul Sartre, who was at the height of his fame here, to write the introduction. A rushed translation, which I edited almost as quickly, and the book came out to major reviews. And it went onto the New York Times bestseller list! I was confounded. George was ecstatic. And now that it was a bestseller, he said, his eye always on the club, it should become a main selection of the Book Find Club, no? I nodded: a main selection, but of course!

  29

  To the Budding Grove

  IN JANUARY 1959, Barney called again and wondered whether we could have lunch the next day. I canceled a lunch I’d scheduled and said yes. Again to One Fifth Avenue. Lunch the usual euphemism: two martinis and, for Barney, food a toy to push about the patient plate. That day Barney was in especially fine fettle, barely able to contain himself. For years he had been itching to bring out Lady Chatterley’s Lover, not the “acceptable” version published earlier by Knopf, which had licensed a paperback edition to New American Library, but the final, integral text D. H. Lawrence had written, a whole other kettle of unadulterated sex, bound to raise hackles. In the late 1920s, Lawrence had written three versions, the last of which was published unexpurgated in 1928 in Florence and known as the Orioli edition, long banned in both Britain and America. One of the work’s champions was the distinguished professor of English at UC Berkeley Mark Schorer, who in 1954 had gone to Taos, New Mexico, to meet with Lawrence’s widow, Frieda Lawrence Ravagli, and examine all three manuscripts. Barney had contacted Schorer that same year and indicated his interest in publishing the integral version. He also had sought advice from Grove’s lawyer, Ephraim London, who warned that “chances are better than even that efforts to ban the book will be made if the third version is published.” Undeterred, Barney had written to Lawrence’s widow, explaining he wanted to publish the final version, and she had agreed. But before any action could be taken, Frieda died and Lawrence’s British agent, Laurence Pollinger, refused to move forward. Still, Barney wrote to dozens of luminaries eliciting their support for the project: Edmund Wilson, whose Memoirs of Hecate County had recently suffered the censors’ wrath; F. R. Leavis; Henry Steele Commager; Bennett Cerf, the head of Random House; James Thurber; Edward R. Murrow, the brave journalist who had dared take on Senator McCarthy, to name but a few. The responses were mixed, some counseling caution, others deeming the cause lost in advance. To complicate matters, Barney said, while Lawrence’s American agent backed the plan, Pollinger still adamantly opposed it. Barney wrote to Pollinger, trying to sway him, to no avail. After a year of effort, Ephraim London advised Barney to “shelve the project for the time being.” Reluctantly, Barney did. But the project was not dead, only dormant, waiting for a spark to reignite. That spark came two years later, when in 1956 the British publisher Heinemann, sensing an opportunity or perhaps taking a page from Girodias’s book(s), published the third version in the Netherlands “for distribution except in the British Empire and the U.S.A.” When the following year Grove began publishing Evergreen Review, Mark Schorer was commissioned to write an article that appeared in issue number 1, a defiant defense of the long-banned work. Almost simultaneously, a film version of Lady Chatterley was released and immediately banned in New York. Ephraim, who had successfully defended a film banned earlier in the decade on the grounds of blasphemy, The Miracle, assumed defense of the Chatterley film. The case worked its way up through the courts until, in December of the previous year, Barney said, the Supreme Court had agreed to hear it later that month. At which point London, confident he was going to win, told Barney he now felt the time was right to bring out the novel.

  When was all this to take place? I asked. “In March we’re informing The New York Times of our intent to publish in May,” Barney said. “Sounds exciting,” I said, wondering whether Barney and Maurice had actually met. I was sure they had been in sporadic correspondence from as far back as the Merlin years, and Barney had mentioned his belated attempt to buy the rights to Lolita roughly a year ago—too little and too late, he admitted, for by the time he did, Putnam’s Walter Minton had flown to Paris and sealed the deal.

  “Why don’t you join the excitement?” Barney said, with a gesticulation so wild the contents of his martini glass went flying halfway across the room, barely missing several sedate patrons, while the glass itself clattered to the floor and splintered into a thousand little pieces, and he ordered another, which arrived promptly. “You’re wasting your time at those book clubs.” I reminded him that Braziller had now started publishing, and in fact already had a major bestseller. “But look at our list,” he urged. “You’d fit right in,” repeating his mantra of a few months before. “Beckett, Ionesco, Artaud, Genet, Sartre … And by the way, Brendan Behan, too. If I remember correctly, he was a friend of yours in Paris, no? What’s more, I’d want you to co-edit the Evergreen Review with me. By the way, our Evergreen paperback line is doing better every year.” I did know: a year or so after we met in Paris, Barney had—following the example of young Jason Epstein, who in 1952 had intuited that a ready market existed in that fertile but fallow realm between the standard hardcover titles and the inexpensive mass-market paperbacks, namely paperbacks of quality works—started a Grove paperback line, a mixture of Grove’s own titles and reprints of out-of-print or neglected classics, which now numbered almost 150 titles.

  What would I be doing? I asked. Managing editor of Grove itself, he said, defining that role in some detail—not just the shepherding of works from manuscript to finished book, the normal definition of the job at larger houses, but in essence the senior editor, finding and editing new works of fiction and nonfiction. What about Don Allen, the present co-editor of Evergreen? I asked. He had moved to the West Coast, Barney said, still involved with Grove but not on a day-to-day basis. In fact, except for Evergreen, Don was now working for Grove essentially on a freelance basis. And what, I dared ask, might my salary be? Barney mentioned a figure, better than my present income but not enough to be persuasive if money was the issue. “Let me talk to Jeannette,” I said. “I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

  Jeannette as usual was clear and precise: of course I should go to Grove. Would Barney be hard to work for? I wondered aloud. Probably, she said, but any harder than Braziller?

  From my office at 215, shortly after nine o’clock, my voice hushed, my back to the corridor, I called Barney, who wasn’t yet in, his secretary, Judith Schmidt, told me. Any idea when? Not really, she said. Try again in a couple hours. I reflected as I hung up that I was probably dealing with a rich dilettante, for whom working hours were governed largely by whiskey and whimsy, for I had heard stories that he loved to prowl the city deep into the night. But when I reached him, he apologized and said he’d had an eight o’clock meeting with the lawyers over the Lawrence book. Another facile cliché shattered … Anyway, he was pleased I was coming, very pleased in fact. When could I start? “I haven’t told George yet, and in all fairness I have to put the next newsletter to bed.” So, four weeks okay? How about three? Agreed.

  The last weeks at Book Find were not pleasant. George did not take my departure kindly. “But I’ve just got you trained,” he protested, “and you’re already leaving! What about the new publishing program—doesn’t that tempt you?” Then the eternal ploy: he was grooming me to be his successor
! It was the second time in two jobs I had heard that tossed out. Maybe a decade or so older than I, George was not only in fine physical shape, his ego was such that he never, I suspected, planned to groom any successor, even if he lived to be a hundred.1 Further, he felt that three weeks’ notice was not enough, so I consented to four after consulting with Barney. “But for God’s sake, no longer,” Barney said. “Things are heating up down here.”

  And so it was, on Groundhog Day in 1959, I showed up bright and early at 795 Broadway, checked the downstairs landmarks—Nat’s Clothing Store and the Hot Dog Emporium—and hastened up the rickety stairs, loaded for bear. Or was it woodchuck? In any event, the day was cloudy, a welcome omen. In contrast to Braziller’s pin-dropping environment at 215 Park Avenue South, where sometimes days passed with barely an exchange among employees, circulating memos in a name-routing envelope, memos being the preferred means of communication, 795 Broadway, only a few blocks south, was a beehive of scuffle and scurry. Barney spent a good hour reintroducing me to the staff: his secretary, Judith Schmidt, a young woman of indeterminate age who, simply by the way she looked at him and listened to his every word, seemed to be in Barney’s thrall; Fred Jordan, a man roughly my age in whom I detected a slight accent, which turned out to be the vestiges of his native Vienna, who had started at Grove in sales and was introduced as the head of publicity; to my delight Phyllis Bellows, who had been all too briefly a colleague at Braziller and who greeted me with a warm smile and hearty hug that made me feel immediately at home; a pink-cheeked young Englishman, the sales manager John Pizey, who punctuated every sentence with a hearty chuckle; Richard Brodney, the hirsute, purposeful production manager, whose ashtray was already half filled with cigarette butts and here it was only ten o’clock; and tall, thin, slightly stooped Donald Allen. Allen had been Grove’s first editor, then left to work for New Directions, which he hated, then moved to another new house, Criterion, which he found even more frustrating, after which Barney invited him back to Grove. He agreed, but only after working out an arrangement whereby he could work from home, for he had finally understood that he and office life were incompatible. Scholarly, aloof, diffident, Allen gazed at me with half-closed eyes as he shook my hand with such lack of vim, or was it vigor, that I suddenly wondered whether my arrival was the reason for his departure rather than, as Barney had put it, the contrary. So cold was his reception, in fact, that I thought I had better clear the air before it turned rancid. Pulling Barney aside, I asked him about Don. “I get the distinct feeling he wishes I weren’t here,” I said. “No, no,” Barney said, “it’s not you. I owe him a lot—he’s the one who turned me on to the Beats, for one—but he’s so glum. In all the time he was here, he hardly ever spoke. To me or anyone. And God forbid you should pay him a compliment. He’d look at you as if you’re the most stupid person alive, and then make sure not to talk to you for weeks. But anyway, he no longer works in the office, in fact hasn’t for some time now. He’s moved to San Francisco. He just happens to be in town for a few days.” Later, when I saw some of the work he had accomplished at Grove during his tenure, including his masterful New American Poetry, 1945–1960, which would influence, if not form, the poetic taste of an entire generation, I came to admire Don greatly. But always from afar. I saw, too, that he had translated four of Ionesco’s plays, and looking at them more closely, I found the translations first-rate. Socially, however, Don was his own worst enemy. Currently, he was still on the Grove payroll, his official title being West Coast salesman, a pure sinecure, but his was an editorial mind, and in fact it was he who had planted in Barney the seed of Evergreen Review, whose first six issues he had co-edited. He was the man I was to replace in that role, and a careful look at the first two years’ offerings made the Allen shoes look large indeed. The only other editorial person visible was a thin, intense, bespectacled young lady who, from our first meeting, seemed frightened of her shadow (although, as noted, there was none that day), Marilynn Meeker. Barney remarked that he thought of her as his utility infielder, capable of filling in at virtually any position. Despite her shyness, we made immediate eye contact, an important element in any incipient relationship, I have found. I liked her on the spot, an instinct borne out a thousand times over the next twelve years.