The Tender Hour of Twilight
Page 38
Twenty-plus years later, the last time I inquired, the promised parcel had still not arrived.
38
Naked Lunch
THE DECISION to buy the American rights to Naked Lunch had taken a lot of guts, for if defending Chatterley had bled Grove badly, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer had us hemorrhaging, as city after city, state after state, attacked and sued, paying little or no heed to the cases that had already been settled in our favor. To compound the problems, Maurice, who had squandered the considerable earnings of Lolita on building a lavish nightclub complex, the Grande Séverine, saw Naked Lunch as the next pot of gold to save his near-bankrupt enterprise and was threatening to break the contract. The first-printing copies were languishing in the warehouse, for we knew that until Tropic was settled, publishing Burroughs would finally burn to a crisp our already-half-roasted goose.
There are various accounts of how Naked Lunch first saw the light of day, but one person is clearly involved in all versions: the poet Allen Ginsberg. In the most likely version, Ginsberg, a friend and onetime lover of Burroughs’s, had visited him in Tangiers, where he had been living for years, and found his floor littered with papers of all sizes and description, most torn and tattered, covered, as he said later, with rats’ leavings. But even in its present state, Ginsberg, leafing through, knew he was onto something special.
He toted the “manuscript” to Paris in the autumn of 1957 and showed it to Girodias, who found it unreadable. “The manuscript didn’t make much sense,” Girodias wrote later, “due to the deliberate lack of any rule whatsoever in the organization of the text.” The Paris publisher was doubtless also put off by the very look of the document, which, he remembered, “was in such a state of disrepair, eaten away by the rats, it was completely dilapidated, collages, bits and snatches…”
As Terry Southern remembered it, Gregory Corso, another of the wandering Beats, approached him and Mason Hoffenberg (co-authors of the novel Candy, which Grove probably should have published but did not) when they were having coffee at St. Germain des Prés one morning and plopped the manuscript down on the table, announcing that Ginsberg had given it to him and asking that Terry and Mason try it on their (still) friend Girodias, which they did. Perusing the manuscript, Terry relates, Maurice saw there was little or no sex in the first fifteen pages; ergo the book was not for him. When they proudly pointed out to him a blow job on page 16, Maurice scoffed that was not only too little but far too late. Further, he noted, the book was formless, moving skittishly in time and space, whereas his readers wanted clarity, sex on every page, and no ambiguity.
Corso himself, when asked about Mason and Terry’s involvement, said that version was all “bullshit,” that it was Allen and he who dealt directly with Girodias.
In any event, after Girodias’s summary rejection, the indomitable Mr. Ginsberg tried it on his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and owner of a first-rate bookstore and small publishing venture in San Francisco, City Lights, who found it not to his liking at all—in fact, to be frank, “disgusting.” At this point Allen sent a batch of eighty pages to a friend of his, Irving Rosenthal, who was currently editing the Chicago Review, an adjunct of the University of Chicago, who to his great credit immediately understood its importance and courageously decided to publish the extract. However, most university magazines are subject to review by members of the faculty, and they rejected it out of hand. Thereupon Rosenthal, who would later come to Grove as an editor, resigned and started a rival review of his own, with God knows what money, called Big Table, and in March 1959, just as we were preparing to launch Lady Chatterley, published ten episodes of Naked Lunch. The ever-vigilant Chicago postal authorities, alerted by some sixth sense (or an unfriendly faculty member who resented the Chicago Review spin-off?), promptly seized several hundred copies, about which there was a stir in the press, so that the rest of the daring ten-thousand-copy print run, whisked to New York and San Francisco by car, sold out upon arrival. So by the late spring of that year, Naked Lunch was finally in print. At least in part.
* * *
Maurice Girodias was a man not above changing his mind, who knew how to seize an opportunity when he smelled it. With all the publicity Stateside about the book, and the attempted banning of Big Table, it began to look for all the world like an Olympia publication. Dealing through the ubiquitous Ginsberg, Girodias paid Burroughs eight hundred dollars for world rights—a mite better than the standard fare for DBs—without a formal contract, of course, and in July the book appeared in all its green-clad glory, number 76 in the Olympia Traveller’s Companion series.
At Grove, all the hullabaloo about Naked Lunch had not gone unnoticed, and we discussed it at more than one editorial meeting. All we had to go on were the excerpts in Big Table, but they were enough. Though Naked Lunch was far from an easy read, its fragments coming thick and fast, not always joined at the hip or any other part of the literary body, there were scenes of true brilliance, and humor to rival the best movie slapstick, though here it was clad in funereal black. We knew we had to publish, but we were collectively also aware that the timing was all wrong. Burroughs too would doubtless have to be defended in court.
In Paris, Naked Lunch, which had been published in July 1959, had not done much, if any, better than the rest of the line, partly because the French literary press ignored all of Olympia’s books and, more likely, because the one-handed reading public for Olympia’s works could make neither head nor tail of Olympia’s number 76. But Maurice, who rightly sensed that Naked Lunch would explode when published in the United States—and would therefore send royalties quickly his way—began, as the months rolled on, to bombard us, first with pleas to make up our minds, then with growing threats. We explained to Maurice that we could never publish Naked Lunch until we had won the Lawrence and Miller battles: unlike those two, Burroughs was still virtually unknown in the States, which made his defense far more dicey, for surely we would be accused of riding on those two coattails for simple notoriety and swift financial gain. Finally, in November, we signed a contract and, even though we were unsure when we could actually publish, printed ten thousand copies adorned with a magnificent Kuhlman jacket—to placate Maurice, another act of folly, for funds were low and printers had to be paid within a couple months of completing the job. Despite that act of faith, starting in 1960 and continuing for almost two years, Maurice began first cajoling, then badgering, then threatening to take the book away and sell it elsewhere if we did not publish “immediately.” The acrimony culminated in a series of exchanges that should have ended relations, and almost did, until finally Maurice backed down, but only after Burroughs, always the gentleman, had written us a letter of support, for he knew that we were at the breaking point with Miller.
Then, miraculously, in the summer of 1962 a stroke of luck rendered that dispute moot. The English publisher John Calder, with whom we had been in contact over the past year or two because he had been publishing in England several of the same authors as we, including Beckett, and who was deeply involved in the new Edinburgh Festival, invited a number of American writers that year: Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Mary McCarthy … and William Burroughs. In the course of the festival, where Alex Trocchi also appeared prominently, Mary McCarthy declared that Burroughs’s Naked Lunch was a work of art and he a great writer. That praise from an unexpected, prestigious source, plus the attendant publicity, was enough to convince us the time to publish had come. There was a new lawyer on the case, Edward de Grazia, and, also encouraged by him, we set a release date: November 1962. Unlike the jacket designs for Lawrence and Miller, both plain and understated to undercut any charge of exploitation or pandering, with Naked Lunch we decided on a frontal assault. This was a book on and about drugs and the drug culture, explicit, though not blatant, in its treatment of sex, and overtly homosexual when most homosexuals were still very much in the closet. So the jacket was visual, with a spoon, clearly intended for heroin, prominently displayed. Reviews were immediate and,
as expected, mixed: we welcomed even the negatives, for they were so virulent that their readers had to be intrigued to see what all the fuss was about. The book went onto the New York Times bestseller list and remained there for several weeks. Nary a peep from the Feds or, more important, the locals. It looked as if we might even make some money without siphoning off most of it to lawyers, or having our income pinched by the pirates.
But such was not to be. In January, Boston, that bastion of probity, charged Naked Lunch with obscenity, and a long legal battle ensued. Not until two years later—after we had won Tropic of Cancer at the Supreme Court level—did the lower court decision came down: Naked Lunch was obscene. De Grazia appealed, and in 1966—after almost four years!—the highest court of Massachusetts finally ruled in the book’s favor.1
39
Formentor
ONE MORNING in the early spring of 1961, Barney stuck his head in my office and asked if I was free for lunch. I was. Despite the uptown publishing habit of lunching in fancy or favorite restaurants three or four times a week, I preferred to have a sandwich at my desk or grab a hamburger and beer at the downstairs Cedar Tavern. That day Barney also tapped Fred and announced we were lunching at Gene’s, a modest but fine Italian restaurant close by on Eleventh Street. The martini for Barney arrived promptly, for Fred a glass of wine, and for me a beer—for all three of us, the better to think more clearly. Barney pulled a crumpled telegram from his pocket, the gist of which was that several leading European publishers were planning a literary prize—Gallimard in France, Einaudi in Italy, Seix Barral in Spain, Rowohlt in Germany, Weidenfeld in England. Would Grove like to be the American partner? It would be a big feather in our cap, I said. Barney, justly proud at the honor, totally agreed. How was it, we wondered, that Knopf had not been chosen, or Farrar, Straus, both bigger and far more prestigious than we?
In all fairness, Barney confessed, the group had apparently first approached Kurt Wolff, the famous German publisher who had come to America before World War II and founded Pantheon Books. With his many European ties and successes at Pantheon, he was the obvious choice. But time had passed him by: Pantheon had been sold out from under him by his partners to Random House, in one of the early mergers that were reshaping the industry, and though Kurt and his wife, Helen, continued to publish in America through Harcourt, Brace, he did not properly have a publishing house, nor could he as an “imprint”—a new term in the publishing vocabulary for those who had editorial independence within a house but whose other functions, such as production, marketing, and fulfillment, were handled by the parent company—speak in Harcourt’s name. It was apparently Kurt who had suggested Grove, for he had seen what we had been publishing over the past few years, much of it emanating from Europe, and was also impressed by the court battles we were fighting.
Was there a downside to joining the group? I couldn’t think of any, nor could Fred, but we did have some questions. Was there money involved? If so, how much must each publisher commit to, for from a financial viewpoint we were the walking wounded, to say the least. We were also far younger and smaller than most of the other potential candidates. Where was the prize to be awarded, and when? What kinds of writers did the group have in mind? Barney was elated at the idea of our being included—a finger, as it were, to some of the old-time publishers, none of whom had been especially supportive of Grove’s endless legal battles—but at the end of lunch he agreed we needed to know more. It was George Weidenfeld himself who had tendered the invitation on behalf of the group, and it was to him Barney wrote, asking for certain clarifications.
Weidenfeld was swift to write back. According to the plan, he said, the jury, which would consist of two or three writers and critics named by each house, would decide on a short list, from which a winner would be picked at the meeting itself. Or, he amended, winners, for the group was divided on one key point: Should the prize be given to an established writer, crowning his or her work—a kind of mini- or pre-Nobel—or to an unknown? If the former, each national jury would debate and decide on a finalist, with each publisher having one vote. After the first round, when it was presumed the list had narrowed, there would be further debate, then subsequent votes till a winner had been picked. At which point, I wondered aloud, would a plume of smoke appear? If the latter, should the prize go to a young writer, someone who had never published before, or someone with only a brief body of work behind him or her, in other words a kind of discovery prize? If this were the route taken, the publishers themselves would be the jury. As for the prize money, it was to be meaningful, though modest compared with the Nobel: in the neighborhood of ten to twenty thousand dollars. Quickly dividing by eight, for there were apparently two or three Scandinavian houses involved too, we saw there would be little financial exposure.
If the prize crowned an established writer’s work, wouldn’t we for the most part be paying hard cash to promote another publisher’s author? Selfishly, what then was in it for us? If the decision was to bring notice to a younger writer, would the same problem not arise if he or she were already published in a given country? Our concerns, we were told, were shared by others, and after further transatlantic exchanges it was decided that rather than slice the child in two, we would have twins. As for a name, it would be called the Formentor Prize, after the site on Majorca where a number of the publishers had met to discuss the idea the year before, and where the first prizes would be awarded this spring, in April 1961. Each winner would receive ten thousand dollars.
We had one further concern: Formentor was on Majorca, which was part of Spain, which was still ruled by the hated Generalissimo Franco. How could we hold an open, freewheeling discussion in such a repressive country? The reply came from Carlos Barral, head of the Spanish publisher Seix Barral and a key instigator of the prize concept. That was the whole point, he said: to have publishers from around the world who were not subject to censorious repression meet and freely discuss literary, and by inference political, matters. The meeting would, contrary to our fears, spotlight Spain’s political problems, perhaps forcing Franco, increasingly concerned about Spain’s international image, to make some positive changes. Reassuring answers, we felt. Anyway, with these nagging questions settled, we committed, though still pretty much in the dark as to how the whole thing would work. For me, one of the extraordinary side benefits of the prize was that I could stop off in Paris and see Jeannette, who was winding up a three-month concert tour of western Europe. By sheer luck, her final concert was scheduled for Paris on April 21, a glittering event at the Salle Gaveau. Her tour was going splendidly, but I sensed with each succeeding letter or phone call an increasing nostalgia, a longing to see me and the kids. I hired a second babysitter, rallied several friends to spell them on the weekends. Still, I had to break the news to the kids, a task I kept postponing for fear they’d stage a child revolution. Then it dawned on me how to make the announcement: I was going over to Paris to fetch their mother and bring her home! Hurrah for Daddy!
With that battle won, now my dilemma was: Should I surprise Jeannette or give fair warning I was coming? To announce my arrival days before her concert would jolt and upset her. Would it be possible to arrive the day of the concert, attend it incognito, then surprise her in the green room? her mother asked. Or maybe even later? There would be, I learned, a gala reception afterward at Maxim’s. I landed at Orly early on the morning of April 21, grabbed a cab, and headed to the square Port Royal and to our friends the Manchons. The city, bound in fog, was waking up, the cafés already crowded with blue-clad workers downing their pick-me-up red and office-bound men in suit and tie sipping their morning coffee, the sidewalks filled with well-dressed women on their way to work or escorting their kids to school, all bundled up in coats and scarves, for despite the calendar certifying the arrival of spring, the weather was still gray and blustery. Each bakery we passed sent forth the irresistible odor of fresh-baked bread and croissants. Oh, the sights and smells of the city I loved; even the grinding sounds
of green-decked, smoke-spewing buses and, in the distance, the plaintive bop-ba, bop-ba two-note wail of a cop car or ambulance brought a thousand memories rushing back. Why had I ever left this magical place? At a red light I glanced at a nearby kiosk, and there, emblazoned in red and black, was an outsized poster announcing Jeannette’s concert: “Sous la Présidence de Monsieur André Malraux, Ministre d’État Chargé des Affaires Culturelles,” no less. Jeannette had told me of her decision to donate all the proceeds of the concert to victims of polio, which had resulted in Malraux’s sponsorship.
As we crossed the city, I saw the same Jeannette poster on virtually every kiosk, which made me feel, for one day at least, as though I owned the place. And to think I might have missed this! Reflexively, I crossed my fingers, for I knew that, however well prepared she was, nerves were forever ready to betray. I remembered reading somewhere a remark from Arthur Rubinstein, who, though he had concertized for decades with total aplomb, said that even in his later years, in the car carrying him to concert halls, he was always overcome with the certainty that his fingers had suddenly turned to spaghetti.
I set off to wander through Paris, down to the quays, where the irresistible attractions of the bookstalls kept me for an hour, maybe more. I had long frequented the bouquinistes, always sure I could find some neglected gem, some first edition of a favorite author, and had been rewarded often enough to sustain the habit. That morning, as the early fog lifted and the sun shone brilliantly on the troubled Seine and the once-royal palaces beyond, I sensed it would be my lucky day in more ways than one. So instead of glancing absently at the wares I was passing, I began to scrutinize each display, so much so that the vendor, who normally sat on his folding chair reading his newspaper for the umpteenth time, a mégot lingering on his lip, seemingly oblivious of his potential clients, might become suspicious and saunter over: “Vous cherchez quelque chose de particulier?” Looking for something special? To which I would respond, “Une première édition de Proust, par exemple?” Perhaps a first edition of Proust? Which would generally provoke an outburst of uncontrolled laughter, followed by “Mais vous êtes fou, non?” Are you crazy? But that day I was not so crazy, for suddenly, at the fourth or fifth stall, the blue appeared, a blue I had known and coveted for years, a distinctive blue like no other: a copy of Shakespeare and Company’s edition of Ulysses! With trembling hand I picked it up. Indeed! I leafed through the first few pages. So it was not the first edition but the fourth. Who cared? It came from the hand of the blessed Sylvia Beach! Nonchalantly, I turned it over, saw the cover was slightly torn, and put it gently back among the banal others. I picked another book at random from the pack. I did the same for three or four more, part of my clever ploy, one of them Sartre’s La nausée. I asked how much, and the vendor named a price more than reasonable, about half the cover price. I said I’d take it, then let my hand hover over several other weathered tomes before returning to the blue, mon trésor. “Et ceci?” And this one? “Ah,” he said, “c’est spécial.” That’s special. “C’est de Joyce, vous savez.” That’s by Joyce, you know. And he quoted a price well beyond my budget, $15 at the prevailing rates (which would translate into roughly $100 today). “Ah?” I said, as if ignorant of the Irishman, feigning to put it back, my mind racing. “Dommage que la couverture est déchirée au dos.” Pity there’s a tear on the back. He picked it up, turned it over, took a final puff of his mégot—another would have seared his lower lip—shook his head, and lowered the price by a third. I offered one-half. We settled at 27.50 new francs, roughly $5.50, shook hands, and parted, each sure he had won the day.