The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  It was not until March 25, 1960—roughly a year after the book first appeared—that the court of appeals affirmed Judge Bryan’s decision. It had been a long year of concern and worry on the one hand, but of triumph on the other, for over those twelve months the book had been approved and applauded, not only by Messrs. Cowley and Kazin, but by most critics coast-to-coast, as a result of which a Grove book, for the first time in its short history, headed to the top of the bestseller lists.

  But euphoria, we soon learned, is a sometime thing. Let me explain. Because of Chatterley’s itinerant history, the copyright status, at least in the United States, was ambiguous at best. This was common knowledge. On the sidelines, various publishers, not to mention drooling pirates, watched the legal proceedings with increasing relish. To their credit, before the appeals court decision Simon and Schuster’s co-owners Max Schuster and Leon Shimkin sent an envoy, Larry Hughes, to buy the paperback rights from Grove for Pocket Books. The offer, in our view, was far from sufficient. Besides, our six-dollar hardcover edition was doing just fine, thank you. Our unrequited suitor took revenge by suddenly publishing a thirty-five-cent paperback, and our hardcover edition dropped precipitously from the bestseller lists. Semi-panic in the office. Have you no honor, book buyers of the world? (Of course not—who would pay six dollars if he could buy the same novel for thirty-five cents?) In self-defense, Barney contacted a friend at Dell, Bud Baker, suggesting they distribute our paperback edition. Bud took the idea to Dell’s fearless president, Helen Meyer, and virtually overnight our paperback appeared, with the challenging statement that this and only this was the original Grove Press edition, an admonition meant to appeal to all those with a modicum of decency, to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Pocket Books edition, and to justify our higher price of fifty cents.

  Pocket Books did not take our statement lying down. They cajoled some guy in Brooklyn who had a bookmobile—not even a bona fide bookseller!—to sue us for unfair competition. How could little he compete against Big Bad Grove, which was casting aspersions on his wares and claiming his purveyor was a downright dirty pirate? To make the farce even more absurd, Simon and Schuster hired Thomas E. Dewey to represent the bookmobile fellow. Thomas Dewey, no less! Counterpunching, Rembar hired the head of the Brooklyn Bar Association, who probably had more clout than Dewey in his native habitat. The suit ended up in magistrate’s court, a level of the judiciary that, Barney lamented, was generally reserved for cases such as urinating in the subway. So the magistrate took one look at the case, so far above his head he could not even contemplate handling it, and threw it out.

  But for every victory there were many defeats. To further complicate matters, two other publishers entered the lists, New American Library, whose virtue stemmed from its having published the expurgated version all these years, and Pyramid, a small and in our view loathsome Johnny-come-lately. In all, well over six million copies were sold of the various paperbacks. Had they all been ours, the financial crises of later years would never have occurred.

  * * *

  Roughly a month after the birth of Alexander, Barney had thrown a party at his house on Eleventh Street in the Village to celebrate the publication of Lady Chatterley. Grove was still in litigation, but why wait, when the book was already high on the New York Times bestseller list? It was a glittering affair, with dozens of writers and critics, fellow publishers, and a smattering of painters, including Larry Rivers, Howie Kanowitz, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein, most of whom Barney knew from East Hampton. Post-Loly, Barney’s new girlfriend was Linc Bonnell, herself a sculptress, a striking, lissome blonde who looked—and was—the epitome of American aristocracy: cool, a trifle remote, the perfect hostess. I had urged Jeannette not to attend so soon after giving birth, and she had reluctantly agreed. So, great was my surprise when the door opened half an hour into the party and there she stood, resplendent and regal in a new dress, her old trim self, her dark, cascading hair framing her face, her smile warming the room. Barney welcomed her with an enveloping hug, steered her to me. As I kissed her, I asked her nervously who was taking care of the kids. “The Howards,” she said. “As soon as she heard about the party, Mrs. Howard volunteered immediately to babysit.” The Howards were a couple, old enough to be our parents, who lived across the hall from us at Palmer House and with whom we had become close friends. Fine, but how in the world had she, Jeannette, gotten here? She stepped back and said, “I drove, of course!” Barney, who had met her only once before, at that Beckett lunch in Paris, went out of his way to introduce her to as many of the assembled guests as he could. He clearly liked the lady, and over the coming years, when work frustrations surfaced, she always carefully considered Barney’s side before pronouncing herself. True, he was opinionated. True, he sought and savored the limelight. True, he could be irascible, shoot from the hip, court trouble unnecessarily. But, boy, did he have guts! He also had brains. And what other publishing house was even remotely as exciting as Grove? As always, I listened to her with a mixture of wonder and admiration, for I knew she possessed, and always had, an innate wisdom far beyond her years.

  31

  Back with Beckett

  FROM THE TIME Barney read my essay on Beckett in Merlin, and our lunch in Paris where he asked me to help set up his meeting with Beckett, Grove had published several of Beckett’s key works, starting with Waiting for Godot in 1954, which had a slow and decidedly checkered reception in the United States (as indeed it had had the year before in Paris), the American public obviously not ready for its pessimistic, eternally questioning—“Where now? Who now? When now?”—view of the world, as told by a couple of down-and-out clowns. Two years after its publication, it had sold only a few hundred copies. For any of the major, uptown houses, that initial “disaster” would doubtless have deterred them from going on with this strange duck Beckett, whose works of fiction were, if anything, more complex and daunting than the plays. But it had not stopped Grove, which over the next four years published the grand trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable, in 1955, 1956, and 1958 and the plays Endgame and Act Without Words I also in 1958.

  High on the agenda of the not-yet-published works in America was Watt, to which Grove had acquired the rights from Collection Merlin in 1954 in a series of complex and comic negotiations that would have made Chaplin proud. We—Merlin—had bought world rights directly from Beckett, in retrospect an act of folly on his part, but one must remember that the author had all but given up hope of ever seeing that novel in print after so many rejections from England over the years. Determined as we were to make Beckett the linchpin of our Merlin book program, we had also acquired the “European English-language rights” of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable from Minuit. Since Barney was also negotiating to buy the American rights to these and other Beckett works, we had been in contact with him since April 1953 about working together, on translations, production, and distribution. In the middle of all these weighty transactions on both sides of the Atlantic sat Jérôme Lindon, whom both we and Grove were besieging with proposals for Beckett’s work and clarification of the rights situation. Having told Barney we held world rights to Watt, which we firmly believed, for Beckett had granted them to us, we learned the author had written to Grove that he owned the rights, the news of which Barney imparted to Alex on June 18. Alex, Austryn, and I were all involved in these comic, if not cosmic, negotiations, the former two more than I that spring because of my absence from Paris. But on the weekends we had endless strategy discussions late into the night.

  As if matters were not complicated enough, I went to see Lindon on August 10, for I could not believe, knowing his devotion to Beckett, that he would not want to publish Watt. But since he spoke no English, and had no intention at that point of involving himself in the early works written in that language—More Pricks Than Kicks, Murphy, and now Watt—we decided we should approach another publisher. George Plimpton, whom we had invited on the board of Collection Merlin, suggested we sell the
French rights to the old-line house of Plon, with whom The Paris Review was allied. He put us in touch with a Monsieur Bourel, the director of Plon, who seemed interested but turned out to be a tough negotiator. Over several weeks we thrashed out terms, only to find that Lindon, for whom I had nothing but admiration, suddenly awoke to the fact that, au contraire, he should concern himself with Beckett’s English-language works. Through us, he insisted on certain contractual restrictions that, ultimately, Monsieur Bourel found untenable. “In which case,” wrote Lindon on October 30, “we are prepared to commit to the project ourselves and arrange for the French edition of Watt as soon as possible [dans les plus brefs délais].”

  At our first lunch meeting in Paris back in September 1953, Barney had brought up the subject of Watt, for in signing Beckett earlier that year, he knew that much of the work would have to await translation, Beckett having informed all and sundry unequivocally that he had no interest in undertaking that task himself. Watt, on the contrary, was already available. Back then, the original idea—Merlin’s—was that Grove should distribute four hundred copies of our edition in the States, first as a way of helping get Beckett published in America, second as a rather transparent ruse to lighten our inventory, for of the eleven hundred copies printed, we had orders for only about four hundred. At first Barney had agreed, but later he changed his mind and said Grove would need to print its own edition. Perhaps the notion of having to bring our magenta-covered Watt through customs, with all its bureaucratic red tape and surly censorious habits, determined his decision. In any event, shortly after I had arrived at Grove five years later, Watt had still not been published in the States.

  One summer morning in 1959, Barney asked me if by chance I had a copy of the Merlin edition. I did, but it was copy letter L of the limited, signed, hors commerce edition, and something in the very back of my mind, which was filled with the detritus of my almost thirty-three years, therefore clogged as the most laden of ancient arteries, warned me that this precious relic was in serious jeopardy. Still, newly hired and intent on making a good impression, I admitted I did, wondering out loud why it mattered. Barney cleared the air by asking if I might bring it in, if not on the morrow, then within the next day or two. I said I would, made a note not to forget, and stuck the tiny reminder in my breast pocket, unless it was the left trouser pocket, the one with the hole, which I must remember to ask Jeannette to sew. Searching two days later, I could not find the note, and penciled another—WATT: SEARCH AND FIND. BRING TO OFFICE—this time making sure to add it to the bulging contents of my wallet, carried loosely, all too loosely, in my back trouser pocket, an invitation to theft, where I promptly forgot it again. When a week later Barney reminded me, I called home, had Jeannette fetch it from our Bronxville bookshelf, and duly brought it to the office next morning, offering it as if on a platter soaked in blood, for I feared for its fate. Next day Barney called me in, where I found him fondling the off-white relic.1 He thought we might use it to print the Grove edition, which he wanted to bring out as soon as possible, for the contract was about to expire. “Offset” was the term he used, as I recall, a word with which I was scarcely familiar. “But you would return it after use,” I said. Of course. It would have to be dismantled, to be sure, but would be carefully glued back together when no longer needed. And some corrections would have to be made, at the request of the author. Would it not be easier, I asked, in my innocence or ignorance, to simply reset using the Merlin text? It would save Grove several hundred dollars if we offset, was the response. Since I knew my new company was far from well-heeled, despite the stories of Barney’s untold Chicago wealth, I was ready to consent. But then I remembered that Barney some years before had described, to Trocchi or perhaps even to me, the Merlin typesetting as “scrubby and ugly.” I ventured as much, perhaps in kinder terms. He leafed through the volume, shaking his head from time to time, and concluded: “It seems fine to me.”

  In the six years since my lunch with Barney in Paris, Beckett had become, or was fast becoming, one of the stars of the house. For the moment Lady Chatterley was the North Star, shining brightly in the Grove firmament, and Henry Miller, just over the horizon, was poised to be the house’s aurora borealis, electric and electrifying, but Beckett would soon outshine them all. New works no longer poured from him as they had in that magic postwar period of the early 1950s, and in response to queries about new works in the offing, the reply was most often that the well was dry, or new efforts so painful they had to be abandoned. Nonetheless, shorter plays and prose works filtered in, always accompanied by comments of self-deprecation—not sure, not sure these should be published, let me know what you think. Curiously, for having in the late 1940s switched to writing in French and seemingly having found his true voice there, suddenly some of the newer works arrived in English, starting with Krapp’s Last Tape. Perhaps, I suggested one morning to Barney, he was simply weary of translating his French into English. To which Barney replied that the problem still remained, for with Krapp and the other prose and plays in English, only he could turn them into French.

  32

  Reenter Trocchi

  ONE MORNING only a few short months after I had joined Grove, I arrived at the office to find a scrawled note from Barney on my desk bearing two words: SEE ME! I asked Judith if he was in, and her reply of “Oh, yes!” raised both my curiosity and my pulse, her “Oh, yes!” fraught with heavy implications I was too new to grasp. Till now my relations with Barney had been all sweetness and light, but I figured I must now have committed some unpardonable sin, for his scrawled handwriting spelled anger. “Come in!” came the voice behind the door, and I entered to find Rosset agitated.

  Fingering a piece of paper on his desk, he nodded two or three times. No gesture for me to take a seat, but a scowl of deep concern. “Your friend Trocchi,” he said, “is back in town.” Well, better than Mack the Knife, I thought. “He wants to see me.” Barney shook his head. “I’m not seeing him. You are.” I shrugged. I hadn’t seen Alex in five or six years, and though we had drifted apart before I left Paris, I still thought of him as a friend and colleague. He and Barney had exchanged a number of letters after I left Paris in mid-1954, mostly about Beckett, and they were cordial. But at his one meeting with the Scotsman, Barney had found him overbearing, even menacing. And that was before Alex had been deep into drugs. Trocchi had dabbled when we were in Paris, but now he was apparently a full-fledged addict, hooked on heroin. “He called about the novel he’s writing, an extract of which we published in Evergreen a couple years ago that came to us unsolicited, without return address, so we never knew where to find him. Frankly, I doubt he’ll ever finish it.” Still, I countered, in all fairness we should take a look. “Okay,” Barney said, “but keep him away from me.”

  * * *

  A couple days later, Frieda announced: “A Mr. Trocchi for you.” I picked up the receiver with a mixture of anticipation and slight trepidation. “Dick,” he said, “I didn’t know you were at Grove.” The same voice, warm, friendly, seductive. Time collapsed; I was hooked. He had found a job as a scow captain, plying between Queens and the Hudson, hauling sand and gravel. “I was a valued employee of the Trap Rock Construction Company.” He laughed. “You’ll recall I’m an accomplished scow man,” he said, referring to the hero of Young Adam, Joe, whose similar job in Glasgow we all presumed was based on Trocchi himself. The job had given him ample opportunity to write. The new book was set in New York. “I’m calling it Cain’s Book,” he explained. Any biblical connection? I asked. “Of course.” From his voice he was the same.

  When he entered my office the following Tuesday, he looked exactly the same: imperiously tall, his smile as seductive as ever. Only the eyes seemed different, more sunken, and where they had always been in repose, self-assured, now they darted nervously about from time to time, as if checking the terrain to make sure it was safe. In his hand he was bearing a manila envelope, wrinkled and slightly stained. Thin. I had been hoping for a full manuscrip
t, but this was clearly only a fragment. Suddenly I wondered if Barney wasn’t right: he’d probably never finish it …