The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  Beckett arrived in New York on July 10 and was greeted at the airport by Judith, who escorted him to a private, single-engine plane that gave him a bumpy but blessedly short forty-minute ride out to East Hampton on the tip of Long Island, to Barney’s Quonset hut summer residence. Earlier, Barney had asked Milton Perlman, an old friend and for some time now a principal of Grove, whose job it was to administer our too often wayward or antiquated business practices, to be producer, and asked me to be associate producer, a highfalutin title for a job whose main task was to make sure Beckett was happy and well cared for. Perlman had some film experience, but I had none, aside from my endless nights at the Cinémathèque in Paris, where over the years I had probably seen most of the old classics, including all of Chaplin and Keaton.

  The weekend in East Hampton, to which Alan Schneider had also been invited, was spent largely discussing the film, but the weather was splendid and there was swimming, lolling about the pool, and playing tennis. Beckett, who confessed to not having picked up a racket for years, was nonetheless tempted onto the court “to take a few swings,” first with Barney, then with me. One could see that he knew how to play; his form was good, if rusty, and when the ball came back, it was crisp and for the most part accurate—that is, nicely inside the lines. But to Beckett’s growing dismay, he missed every third or fourth ball completely. He kept shaking his head with each miss and finally in disgust left the Har-Tru court, much slower than the grass on which he had played in earlier years, where the bounce is quite different. He muttered about his poor form, but Barney and I both knew that his eyes were largely to blame, for he was plagued with waning eyesight and feared that he might soon go blind.

  Barney had scored a major coup in signing up as cinematographer Boris Kaufman, a legend in the business whose career stretched back to working with Jean Vigo in France in the early 1930s. The cameraman was Joe Coffey, a strapping fellow who also came with high credentials and who, in the course of the shooting, constantly exuded confidence and good humor as one thing after another hit a snag. Back in the city, Alan and Beckett walked endlessly, scouting for locations. Though he was apparently affected by the heat and humidity, never having experienced the equivalent of New York summer weather, Beckett never complained. One day in lower Manhattan, Beckett’s eyes brightened as we came in sight of a dilapidated old wall hard by the Brooklyn Bridge. He nodded and indicated that this is where the opening sequence should be shot, no question. The wall, part of a building slated for demolition, was pure Beckett: sagging, uneven, its cement flaking and crumbling.

  Keaton now in the city, Beckett and Alan paid him a visit in his hotel suite. Beckett, who had suggested Keaton, looked forward to the encounter with, he confessed, a tinge of nervousness. They arrived, as Alan recorded in the published version of Film, to find Keaton watching a baseball game on television and drinking beer, barely nodding to his two distinguished guests, whose efforts at conversation elicited little or no response. Finally, they left the room, but not before Beckett, who missed nothing, observed that he had seen a bit of the ball game, which reminded him of cricket, though obviously quite different. Which team had Keaton been watching? he wondered. The Mets, I said. A fairly young team, I said, still thrashing about. The really good team in New York is the Yankees. Dominant. Would there be time to see a match? he asked. A “game.” Ah, yes, of course. I said I didn’t know because of the shooting schedule, but would inquire.

  Shooting began on a Monday, at the outdoor site Beckett had picked beneath the Brooklyn Bridge. Despite his air of authority, Alan was more than a bit nervous, because for all his theatrical experience he had never directed a film before. The morning was also steaming hot. The scene depicted Keaton, dressed despite the heat in a bulky overcoat and a beat-up hat from which hung a handkerchief, the better to hide from the perceiving eye, skirting the wall to escape the pursuer, finally escaping into an apartment building entrance. Take followed take, with Keaton’s unflappable demeanor impressing Beckett more and more as the day wore on. In and out of Keaton’s flight along the wall moved a number of extras, whom Coffey, following Alan’s orders, panned to include. When in the evening the first day’s rushes were viewed, the result was a total disaster. Something called the strobe effect, the result of the panning, made the scene unusable, painful to watch. Alan was hugely contrite, muttering apologies. Beckett watched impassively; if dismayed, he didn’t show it. Shaking his head, Alan declared that the scene would have to be reshot. Barney or Perlman, probably the latter, nixed that immediately: the strict budget simply did not allow it. The day, which had begun with such high hopes and excitement, was ending badly, recriminations alternating with excuses. It was Beckett, emerging from silence, who saved the day. He said quietly, let’s simply eliminate that scene, which was meant to establish the two elements of the protagonist, and keep only the image of Keaton along the wall, without the extras.

  If gloom and doubt pervaded that first evening, the following days’ shooting went almost without a hitch, especially once we were off the street and into the studio on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where the interior room had been built to Beckett’s specifications. Keaton now was more in his element and, Milton suggested, perhaps was even beginning to understand what the movie was all about. At least an inkling. Keaton, in a rocking chair, had to deal with a cat and a dog, whose appearance required multiple takes as he dealt with their unwanted intrusion. After which he artfully covered other intrusive elements that he perceived threatened his being: a goldfish bowl, a parrot’s cage, the mirror itself that dangerously reflected his image. Then he removed the staring, godlike image from the wall.

  On the second day of indoor shooting, Jeannette joined us, and on a balcony above the set we flanked Beckett, who watched each take with total equanimity, quietly marveling at Keaton’s intuitive understanding of what needed to be done, improving with each take, Beckett nodding perceptively now and then when one pleased him especially, his arms leaning on the railing, one hand on each cheek. At one point, gazing down at the set as a new take was being prepared, he turned to Jeannette and, more serious than facetious, said with a sigh: “That room down there. You know, I could live in it very happily.” Knowing Beckett, you knew he meant it: if you eliminated the trappings—the parrot and the goldfish, the cat and the dog—that plain, square room down there was not all that different from Beckett’s oh-so-plain rooms in Ussy.

  One day, as the shooting went on until late in the evening, we ended up at some restaurant near Barney’s house on Houston Street, then repaired to his upper floor where there were three or four extra bedrooms. Jeannette and the children had returned to East Hampton for the summer, so I was grateful not to have to taxi home. With dawn not that far off but the house still dark, I saw my door open and a spectral vision framed in the doorway, halting and lame, searching for something or someone. Sleepwalking perhaps. The vision took a hesitant step, then two, into the room, and I realized that it was Beckett, stark naked. “Sam,” I said hesitantly. “Dick,” he said, “is that you?” I admitted it was, flattered to be chosen, and asked if I could be of help. “You could,” he said. “I thought this was the loo. If you could kindly direct me to it.” Unsteadily, for it was four in the morning, I left my bed, took hold of his right elbow, and steered him to the door next to mine. The loo.

  * * *

  I had not forgotten my promise to take Beckett to a baseball game. Though my heart was with the Mets, I had hoped that I might show him the best of the sport by taking him to Yankee Stadium. But the Yankees were on the road, so the hapless Mets were all I had. I booked two good seats for July 31, as close to home plate as I could, just down the left-field line. It was a doubleheader, the first game beginning at four, in full daylight. The weather had obliged, so for once Beckett got a taste of a Dublin-like afternoon, cool and breezy. All the way out to Shea Stadium, I had apologized for the team we were about to see, struggling but so often futile. One had to be a die-hard fan not to give up on them, I said
as I tried to explain the rudiments of the game. I had seen cricket only twice in my life, both times with Matthew Evans, who had patiently but unsuccessfully tried to unravel the sport’s mysteries for me; the only similarity I could detect was that there was a player who threw the ball, damned awkwardly, I thought, and a batter. Beckett listened intently as I droned on, at one point he said he thought he got the general idea, and as we settled into our seats, he congratulated me on their choice, so close to the field, for much farther back, he explained, he would have had difficulty seeing. As the game progressed, he asked key questions, wondering why, for instance, when a batter hit the ball so weakly he nonetheless ran as if his life depended on it. And why in the world on what you called a passed ball, the batter didn’t run, just stood there. Balls and strikes he understood immediately, and was especially impressed by the blue-suited umpires, who acted with such histrionic authority. Surprisingly, and defying all my gloomy prognostics, the Mets not only played well but won the first game.

  Almost reproachfully, he turned to me and wondered if they were really as bad as I had made them out. Most of the time, I said sheepishly. Then: “Would you like to go now?” “Is it over then?” he asked. The first game is, I explained, but there’s another to follow. It’s called a doubleheader. Is that unusual? Fairly, I said, generally because at some point in the season a game or games had to be postponed because of rain and needed to be rescheduled. “So there’s a whole other game?” I nodded. “Then we should stay. We don’t want to leave until it’s over, do we?” And stay we did, for another three hours, the latter half of which was spent under the lights, where Beckett, even this close, had trouble seeing. Now every time a ball was hit into the outfield, he rose to his feet, pushed his glasses back into his thick shock of hair, and squinted into the night, intent on seeing whether it was a hit or whether, as he reiterated, it would sadly go for naught. Defying me once again, the Mets took the second game as well. As we stood to depart, Beckett said with a sly grin, “Perhaps I should come to see the Mets more often. I seem to bring them good luck.”

  * * *

  The last week of his stay, Beckett worked closely with the film’s editor, Sidney Meyers, another veteran who, virtually the same age as the writer, shared with him a knowledge and love of music. Meyers was also a connoisseur of painting, and one day he took Beckett to the Met, to view its Dutch collection. But that last week’s main pleasure for Beckett was watching Sidney and Alan edit the film, work it into the shape he wanted. On August 6, four weeks after he had arrived in this strange but interesting country, he boarded a plane at Idlewild and headed home, eager to return to the tranquillity of Ussy, where, he vowed, he would remain for as long as he possibly could.

  42

  Plays and Playwrights

  ALMOST from its inception, Grove had published plays as an integral part of its program, either because a house author had written a play or because, perhaps for the first time, a publisher saw drama as part of literature. At the other end of the spectrum, a few American houses, especially Dodd, Mead, had made a habit of publishing Broadway hits, to capture the moment, and hopefully the theatergoer too. No continuing sale, or very little, after the plays had gone off the boards.

  Beckett, of course, was the pedestal on which the drama program stood. And two of Merlin’s other discoveries, Genet and Ionesco, had likewise crossed the Atlantic and landed at Grove. Genet’s Balcony had been translated by good old Bernard Frechtman, who came with the package, and two volumes of Ionesco’s best short plays, one brilliantly translated by Don Allen, had appeared the year before I arrived.

  In 1959, a Frenchman of Russian birth, Arthur Adamov, whom we also published in Merlin, was added to the list with his Ping-Pong. Joining him was the wild young Irishman I had known—endured?—in my Paris days, who had spent a memorable week under my rue du Sabot roof, Brendan Behan, whose play The Hostage had raised a storm in London the year before. That same year we published A Taste of Honey, again by a young Irish author, Shelagh Delaney. According to the account emanating from Britain, Miss Delaney had gone one night to a play by an established playwright and found it so second-rate she announced she could do far better, went home, sat down, and wrote A Taste of Honey.

  The following year we added several more to the burgeoning drama list: Genet’s Blacks; two more volumes of Ionesco, whose plays were beginning to be put on here; and a play by a Spaniard, Fernando Arrabal, called The Automobile Graveyard that contained more than a few echoes of Beckett but still had shocked Paris, where Arrabal lived.

  Perhaps the most interesting “find” of 1960 was a young American, Jack Gelber. Gelber’s play The Connection had come within a hair of dying a swift death after the first reviews. But the faltering work, which, as its name implies, was about drugs—not all that surprising, given the mores of the 1960s—got a new lease on life when Kenneth Tynan in The New Yorker hailed it as important, indeed seminal. Overnight the play was saved, as people now fought for tickets and trekked downtown to the Living Theatre on West Fourteenth Street to be turned on.

  Jeannette and I had seen the play early on, and both of us thought, despite its not-all-that-concealed debt to Godot—“Waiting for my Connection”—it first-rate. Grove signed it up pre-Tynan, a mark of trust, and I became Jack’s editor and, soon, his close friend. He and his wife, Carol, had, like us, two kids and, thanks to the success of The Connection, were now eating on a fairly regular basis.

  Many of the new literary plays were beginning to be performed, often to glowing reviews, which stimulated young college professors to adopt them in their drama courses. None became a bestseller, not even Godot,1 but more and more often as Barney and I sat down to look for reprints, which we did every month, we found we were going back to press with them. It also occurred to us, publishing geniuses that we were, to begin mailing to college professors desk copies of our wares, which resulted in even more frequent reprints on many of the titles.

  Several years later, a publishing colleague congratulated us on our “excellent strategy” of publishing drama and finding a market where none had existed before. As with most of what we did, however, there had been no strategy. Still, we had virtually cornered that market, a rich lode, for now new playwrights often did not have to be sought out; they came to us.

  * * *

  Arrabal’s translator, Richard Howard, was one of the first people I had met at Grove. He had already translated Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Voyeur. I edited all of Richard’s translations, generally with a very light hand, for I quickly learned that despite the speed of his translations—he often turned them around within a month or six weeks—they were the work of a writer. We too became fast friends and admirers. Richard, openly gay in an era when most homosexuals remained steadfastly in the closet for fear of ruining their lives or losing their jobs, was living with a young novelist, Sandy Friedman, a delight of a man, always cheerful even if stressed or upset. Richard was also a serious poet, and though he earned his living through translations, he spent most of his time writing and reading poetry.

  I had a call one day late in 1960 from Robert Hughes, a documentary filmmaker. He had an idea that involved one of our authors, Marguerite Duras, two of whose novels we had published. When we met a few days later, this young man, beneath his silken red hair and unlined face, impressed me with the depth of his knowledge about foreign films. Duras’s script for Alain Resnais’s superb film Hiroshima mon amour was, he declared, a masterpiece. What he had in mind was to cull stills from the screen—not the publicity shots taken on the set—and integrate them into the text exactly where they fell. There are more and more film courses being taught, he insisted, and there’s a substantial and growing market for such books. Great, I said. But what about the cost, given the number of pictures—maybe a hundred in all, he guessed, that would grace each volume. We’d do it as an original Evergreen, probably at $1.95. When the costs came in, they weren’t outrageous. Barney was all for it, and if this worked, we had a few other art f
ilms down the line we could follow up with. We made an arrangement whereby we’d split the modest advance between Hughes and the author. We decided to bring Hiroshima out as soon as possible, so that weekend I set about translating the script. At an editing table we watched a projection, Hughes pausing every few seconds to mark on a piece of paper a candidate for a photo. By the time I finished translating a couple weeks later, he had come up with 120 to 130 black and whites, with which we covered the conference table. It took several hours, but by eight o’clock we had laid out the book.

  Looking up at the wall clock, I suddenly realized I had not called Jeannette to say I’d be late. I pictured her: carefully dressed and made up—for dinner was a nightly ritual with us—candles lit, wine opened … and no loverboy anywhere in sight. This was far from the first time it had happened and, alas, far from the last: the work at Grove seemed to be devouring me, Jeannette had remarked more than once, not so much a complaint as a statement of fact. Though I was ultimately forgiven, forgiveness usually came with the gentle reminder that all I had to do was call and explain. And once again I had not. Better jump in a cab and face the music. The greeting was cold, but when in my excitement I told her how I had spent the day, she immediately—well, almost immediately—forgave me. Still, I knew that I had better start reversing the ratio. Late hours at Grove meant time taken away from not only her but the kids, who too often these days were in bed when I arrived.

  Published, Hiroshima sold moderately well in the stores, helped of course by the film itself, but as with our drama we mailed copies to every film department in the country, and, little by little, our gem began to be adopted.