Five days after that first letter, Miller wrote again, in response to two more cajoling letters Barney had written, one of which enclosed an advance copy of Lady Chatterley.
With your last two letters came one from Girodias (delayed in mails), which made me feel I know you better. Thus far I have heard nothing from either my agent in Paris … or from James Laughlin, whom I wrote about your offer. I’ll be in Paris on the 17th and will see everyone …
This morning Lady Chatterley came … Looks good. And it is, of course, a big step forward. But how slowly everything proceeds. The “Cancer” will be 25 years old this September. Soon I’ll be dead. I’ve lived so long without my rightful earnings I’m used to it now. One has to die first, if you notice, before the ball gets rolling.
I’ll write you again from Paris, when I know more …
A week later Maurice wrote a long letter to Barney saying he had seen both Miller and Hoffman the day before and again outlining in more detail the Miller-Hachette rights situation. He also raised for the first time the problematic nature of Miller’s copyright to these titles in the United States:
I am not unaware of the copyright situation … Probably the best thing you have to do now, before you come, is to write another letter to Hachette … outlining the danger of a pirated edition being published at any time in the States, now that the publication of books like “Lolita” and “Lady Chatterley” has changed the standards of censorship in America. They are certainly unaware of the copyright problems (which are very different here). So you should explain to them why the danger is real, and immediate.2
Meanwhile, in Paris, Girodias had met with Miller and his fourth wife, Eve, at the home of Miller’s French translator and old friend Georges Belmont. There he pressed Grove’s case: fifty thousand dollars was not to be sneezed at, especially since the publisher would hold Henry harmless in case of litigation—that is, Grove would bear all legal costs, indemnifying Miller. Later the next night, after Miller had gone to bed, Maurice took Eve out to a nightclub in Montparnasse, Elle et Lui, where they danced the night away and where, once again, he raised the subject of American publication. She was all for it, she assured Girodias, but she reminded him that where they lived in California, Big Sur, wealth was frowned upon. Most of the residents were there because of the quiet and beauty, and were the Tropics to appear, their peace would be lost forever. Already, she said, despite the relative isolation of the place, fans of Henry’s work kept intruding—to such a degree that Henry had engaged a friend, Emil White, to fend them off. They would be better off in another town or city, but Henry loved being there and never planned to leave.
It would be another year before the Grove-Miller deal would finally be consummated. More than once over that time, Eve pressed the case with Henry. The terrain was further prepared when, the following winter, Miller flew again to Paris, where he consulted with Hoffman before entraining for Hamburg to visit his German publisher, Heinrich Ledig-Rowohlt, the head of Rowohlt Verlag, a convivial, carefree man whom Miller esteemed and enjoyed, for he was not only his faithful publisher but also a reveler, a man of zest and great good humor, who wined and dined his authors with consummate charm and who, to top off an evening, would often in the wee hours rise from his chair, retreat a dozen yards from the end of the table well laden with glasses and bottles, race forward as if heading for a pole vault without a pole, and somersault over the groaning board without breaking a glass or, incredibly, his neck. What other German publisher could offer his well-oiled authors anything close?
Ledig, as he was known, was the illegitimate son of the company’s founder who had pointedly retained his mother’s name in his surname to let the world know that he was proud of his maternal background. Since he had taken over the publishing house after the war, he had lifted it to new levels, with a keen eye both for young German writers and for foreigners whose work had been ignored or repressed during the long Nazi night, Hemingway for one. His impeccable anti-Nazi wartime credentials had won him the immediate favor of the occupying forces as early as 1945, with the accompanying perks—access to paper, printing and binding facilities, warehouse space—that had enabled him to build the company rapidly into a publishing powerhouse. He was also among the earliest to recognize the need for reasonably priced books in Germany and had started a mass-market paperback line of rare distinction, Rororo. Miller talked to Ledig about his friend and Paris-based English-language publisher, Maurice Girodias, whose joie de vivre he touted, and they decided he should be invited to join them in their Hamburg revels.
Everyone was in a positive and convivial mood, and Girodias again raised the idea of American publication. Henry relented, calling Hoffman in Paris, who cabled Barney in New York, urging him to catch a plane to Hamburg, with a copy of the contract in hand and, of course, a check for fifty thousand dollars. For Grove, whose advances in those days were in the low thousands, or more often in the high hundreds, this was a mighty leap of financial faith. But Barney, unlike Jay Laughlin at New Directions, was ready to bet the house on Henry Miller.
It took Barney three days to arrive in Hamburg, his plane to London having been diverted to Glasgow, where he was grounded for two days before flying down to London and thence to Hamburg. During his forty-eight hours in Hamburg, Barney found a radically changed Miller, no longer glum and negative but cheerful and full of beans, even challenging Barney to a game of Ping-Pong. In the course of two days, the contract was signed, the check handed over, and the future of Grove assured. Surely the publication of Tropic of Cancer in America had to be a huge success.
Or were the problems over its publication about to begin?
* * *
When they had first met a year or so before, Barney and Maurice, recognizing an instant affinity, had sensed they had much in common both personally and professionally. But theirs was a fragile friendship, born in a mood of celebration, and one that would not long endure. Among other things, what Maurice would soon realize was that Grove’s forthcoming battle against censorship in America would, in relatively short order, bring down the embattled walls of his little Parisian kingdom. Olympia’s success rested squarely on the still-Victorian attitudes toward sex both in England and in America. As long as anti-obscenity laws prevailed in the English-speaking world, Olympia’s increasing output and growing backlist—which in a number of cases now reprinted every few weeks—had a virtual monopoly. Still, on that heady day in Hamburg, as the several parties toasted to the future of the Tropics in America, the only clouds on the horizon were those, dark and lowering, that hovered over that harsh northern German city on the Elbe.
35
Frankfurt bei Nacht
MY MEMORY of the Frankfurt Book Fair, to which I had first gone two years before for George Braziller, was of chilling rain, unfriendly waiters, and the Boschean vision of presumably sane publishers rushing madly to and fro through Halle Fünf—Hall Five—from one appointment to another as if their very lives depended on it, which they probably did. So when Barney announced in midsummer I’d of course be going to Frankfurt with him, I was not overjoyed. On that earlier trip I had been alone, a novice in publishing, with few contacts and only a vague idea of what kinds of books George might be interested in for a house that was still only a gleam in his eye, so I concentrated on books that I thought might work for one of the book clubs, which meant essentially art books. For fun, I tried one or two of the city’s underground Weinkellers, where by ten or eleven o’clock at night the locals were swilling beer a-go-go and breaking into what sounded disturbingly like army marching songs that sent chills up my spine. Strolling the streets at night, I had stumbled upon a warren of strip joints, smack in the city center, dark and dreary, that struck me as the saddest I had ever seen.1 Even the posters outside that advertised the delights within made one shrink, literally. My modest hotel near the train station, whose only virtue I could detect was relative cleanliness, became a welcome refuge after my brief nocturnal explorations.
I had be
en there a full three days before I suddenly realized, upon turning a corner and seeing the colonnaded facade of the Frankfurter Hof Hotel, that I had already passed this way before a decade earlier, on my trip with the cartoonist George Booth through a demolished and devastated Germany that, we both predicted, would never rise again, certainly not in our lifetimes. Well, by God, in nine years it had indeed risen, changed so much that, until the sudden landmark, I had recognized nothing, the rubble having been used to erect a whole new city, stone by stone, though vestiges of its leveled self remained everywhere you looked. Not a handsome city—ugly in fact—but impressive by the speed with which its transformation had occurred. How could this recent wasteland have the temerity, the chutzpah, to host the world’s publishers as if the Holocaust had never happened? Why had the victors, France or England, not seized the opportunity to house the fair chez eux? Imagine an international book fair under the fair skies of Nice. Even in cloudy Paris or London. But there you are, Frankfurt am Main had seized the day, despite the fact that there was a scarcity of hotel rooms, transportation was hit-or-miss, and the food was at best edible, unless Wurst mit Kartoffel was high on your culinary list. The explanation, I was told, was that before the war—or more precisely before Hitler—the most famous international book fair had been at Leipzig, now in walled-off East Germany, so Frankfurt had picked up the tradition as if slipping into new clothes.
Unlike most publishers, Grove had no booth at the fair, but we quickly assumed the role of strolling players, visiting the stands of those we knew or were interested in: Gallimard and Seuil in France; Rowohlt in Germany; Einaudi and Feltrinelli in Italy; Faber and Weidenfeld in England; Seix Barral in Spain. At Faber, I hooked up again with my friend Matthew Evans and exchanged editorial notes. Matthew, the freshest voice in British publishing, who had come to visit me at Grove a few months before, suffered fools poorly and had a great gift for poking fun at the stuffed shirts of his chosen profession. We lunched together more than once, Matthew reserving his caustic wit for the Germans now, wondering what he, or any of us, was doing in this beleaguered land of fog, rain, and rubble.
The focus of the fair in that fall of 1959 was clearly Girodias’s Olympia Press, whose discovery Lolita was still riding high on the bestseller lists worldwide. No matter that Nabokov had disowned him and was openly refusing to support his lawsuits against the French government in his behalf, Girodias’s booth was a hotbed of solicitation and intrigue. What’s your next big book? What are you bringing out next season that might work for America? Maurice’s faithful assistant, Miriam Worms, we learned, was reported to have been the object of attempted bribes if only she would reveal what Maurice had planned for the fall and winter. She duly reported all this to Maurice, whose chest swelled accordingly and who hoisted himself immediately at least one rung higher on the ladder of self-esteem.
Upon arrival Barney had rented a car, which he used post-dinner to case joints near and far for fun and games, usually accompanied by the other two mad Musketeers, John Calder, the English publisher, and Maurice, with me and one or two other would-be revelers squeezed in. Despite the countless obligations with the German press and booksellers that limited his nocturnal forays, Ledig-Rowohlt was cajoled into coming. At each joint, the obligatory drink or two brought a girl of the night to perch at one’s table, offering the bounties of her rarely tempting self, then off again to the next spot until two or three or four in the morning. Inevitably, there came a time when, emerging from some low-down lair even more depressing than the previous, we headed for the car to find it had disappeared. “Are you sure it was down this Straße?” “Absolutely!” “Let’s check a bit farther along.” No Avis. No Europcar. That Hertz! Ha-ha-ha! So down another Straße, to no avail. Hey, taxi! Frankfurter Hof, bitte! As dawn impinged upon semiconsciousness two or three hours later, a double coffee—which required some doing, for German coffee at the time was among the worst in the world—failed to reveal what had happened to the rented car, whose color and make evaded all our still-addled minds. “Never mind,” Barney would mumble as he picked up the phone to report to Hertz that his car had, alas, been stolen. “Not to worry, we’ll send another over to you today.” So the next night, true to form, having suffered a dozen meetings that morning and afternoon, to discuss books in which we had no interest, or so little it was difficult to stay awake as the earnest presentations scraped across the remnants of our brains, we’d set off, in an Opel or Volkswagen or Ford whose mark we would write down on a scrap of paper to make sure we remembered in the morning, to repeat the Dantesque rounds. By day three I, hitherto of sound body and relatively unimpaired mind, was what is commonly called a wreck, whereas to my barely disguised jealousy Barney seemed fit as a fiddle. I noted that Calder, a gnome of a man whose cherubic and rotund exterior belied a sly and crafty mind constantly at work, looked worse than I, if that were possible. To my dismay, Girodias looked as though he had just won the lottery, and when I commented to Miriam about his disconcerting ability to rebound from a long white night, she simply said: “He has a long history…,” which explained nothing and everything. As for Barney, his irritating matinal alertness stemmed, I learned, from his long history of amphetamines. On the last day of the fair, when we were at our lowest ebb, George Weidenfeld collared us at nine in the morning, lording it over us zombies at his impressive stand, with a proposal for a dual history of France and England. The idea was, he enthused, that for the history of England he would have André Maurois, a Frenchman of note, and for the history of France an equally prestigious Englishman. Don’t you see, he explained, each of these countries, which have been at each other’s throats for centuries, will now have themselves treated and assessed by the other side, so to speak. Objective and prejudiced at the same time. Brilliant, no? Shall I count you in? Barney mumbled something I thought meant no and George assumed was full agreement. Fine! George thundered and reached over to shake Barney’s still-sleeping paw, for he later admitted he had forgotten that morning to take his wake-up pill.
Pausing for coffee at a stand directly across from Weidenfeld and Nicolson, we stared into space for roughly a minute until Barney said: “What was George’s crazy project?” I laid it out to him, fuzzily but with the general lines intact. “What a fucking stupid idea!” Barney said. “True,” I said, “but I think you just shook hands on it.” “Jesus, no!” he said. “Do you think he’ll hold us to it?” I nodded. He ordered another cup of dreckig coffee.
“By the way,” he said, “any idea where we left last night’s car?”
“Not the foggiest,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “I’ll call Hertz and have them send around another so we can get to the airport.”
* * *
There were a miser’s dozen of Frankfurts after that, with a changing cast of characters but similar traps and mishaps, until one day about halfway through the decade we laid down the law: WE BUY NO BOOKS AT THE FRANKFURT BOOK FAIR! We didn’t sign it in blood, though we surely should have, for there inevitably came the early morning after the late night when we bought a book, or, God help us, a series of books we should doubtless have avoided like the pest. Still, among all the mistakes, from Frankfurt came two German worthies—maybe more, but these are all I remember without recourse to the archives: Rolf Hochhuth’s Deputy and Uwe Johnson’s Speculations About Jakob. It’s possible, too, that Friedrich Dürrenmatt, most of whose plays we published starting in 1962, also emanated from the fair, though Dürrenmatt was Swiss, and there is a faint possibility that he came to us directly from Switzerland.
The Tender Hour of Twilight Page 36
