The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

With that experiment behind us, we went on to publish several more, including Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad, again directed by Alain Resnais and starring Jack Youngerman’s wife, Delphine Seyrig; François Truffaut’s masterpiece The 400 Blows, this one starring young, unknown Jean-Pierre Léaud, who turned out to be the son of the Parisian couple I had traveled with in Spain a decade before. We probably would have done many more, but in the midst of all this, in 1963 Hughes was nominated for an Oscar for a documentary on Robert Frost, of which he was the producer. While that honor furthered his career in film, it made him less available for future film-book projects, though we managed a few more: John Osborne’s Tom Jones in 1964, and Jorge Semprun’s La guerre est finie in 1967, to name but two.

  43

  Return to Paris, for Jeannette and Genet

  IN THE SPRING OF 1963, Jeannette was invited to tour in Europe, starting in France but on to several cities in Germany—Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin—and London. It was a unique opportunity for her, for though her career was beginning to blossom here, she had, because of her background and training, far greater recognition in Europe. The Paris impresario who had sponsored her at the Salle Gaveau two years before had sketched out an alluring tour for her, which would last three to four months. Knowing how key it would be, she nonetheless hesitated, wanted to decline because of both the children and me. Nathalie was almost five and in her first year at New York’s Lycée Française. Alex just turned three. Jeannette’s mother proposed to have the children—and Jeannette—stay with her in Paris. “What do you think?” she said. I said the question was now settled, and she had better start preparing for her trip.

  I booked passage for them on the SS America, but it was with heavy heart that I left the United States Lines office with tickets in hand, proof that I would be without the three most important people in my life for several months. Yet I was all smiles and encouragement as I drove them to the pier on the Hudson where the ship was docked, saw them into their neat little cabin with two double bunks, crushed the munchkins in my arms, and kissed Jeannette a long goodbye. From the pier below, as the ship’s whistles announced the leviathan’s impending departure and I saw those three on the main deck high above, waving their white handkerchiefs, I tried to smile through my tears, which fortunately were not visible from the great distance between us.

  * * *

  Ever since I joined Grove, we had been publishing eighty or ninety books a year, plus the four issues of Evergreen Review, which we considered books, for they were the same format as our paperbacks, in essence anthologies of new works, and were numbered in the Evergreen series. Evergreen Review aside, a haphazard mix of hardcover and paperbacks had to follow the normal publishing process from manuscript to bound book, a process that in most houses took roughly the time it took to produce a baby but at Grove generally half that, sometimes less. We were stretched thin, the normal working day ten to twelve hours. When Jeannette and the kids were in Paris, mine stretched even longer, and I was not alone, for often, when I left the office at nine or ten o’clock, Marilynn or Fred was still there.

  In the year just past, 1962, we had published eighty titles, which included not only the time-consuming Naked Lunch but a novel by a new young author, Robert Gover, One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, touted to Barney by Henry Miller, and a major volume of stories by Jorge Luis Borges, who had split the Formentor Prize with Beckett. That year also saw the appearance of perhaps our most controversial (though unfraught with legal problems for once) work, Hitler’s Secret Book, for which Telford Taylor, of Nuremberg trials fame, wrote the introduction, lending weight to its credibility.

  Among the plays we brought out, Genet’s Screens and The Visit by a relatively unknown Swiss, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, translated by my old friend Patrick Bowles, added to the fast-growing drama list. Plus a volume of three new plays—A Slight Ache, The Collection, and The Dwarfs—by Harold Pinter, whom we had begun to publish the year before; Tom Stoppard’s latest, The Real Inspector Hound; John Mortimer’s Three Plays: The Dock Brief, What Shall We Tell Caroline! I Spy; John Arden’s Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance; and an American work, Arnold Weinstein’s Red Eye of Love, which, like The Connection, Jeannette and I went to see and were so taken with I told Barney we must publish. He went to check it out, came back, if anything, more enthusiastic than we, and weeks later the published version appeared.

  I think it safe to say that by the mid-1960s we had virtually cornered the contemporary literary drama market, not because we had set out to do so with some grandiose plan, but because, having seen our publication of Beckett and Genet and Ionesco, the next generation of playwrights—the Pinters and Stoppards and Gelbers of this world—knew their best chance for publication was with Grove.

  * * *

  One evening roughly two and a half months after Jeannette and the kids’ departure, Barney popped his head in my office. “You look tired,” he said.

  “I probably am.”

  “Jeannette’s tour going well?”

  “Winding down. She’s got one more concert in Germany, then a big one in Vienna.”

  “I think it’s time we brought out Genet.”

  “You mean another play?”

  “No, the big guy. Our Lady of the Flowers.”

  I gazed up at Barney with a mixture of admiration and pity. There were still multiple court cases besetting us, which had to be weighing on both his mind and his pocketbook. Yet here he was suggesting we move forward with the Genet novel that was almost certain to bring more legal trouble. It was as if the house were already burning and Barney was handing me another match. But at that point I had not figured out his true, incredibly altruistic strategy.

  “The problem is,” I said, forgetting all of the above, “the Frechtman translation is piss-poor, and Frechtman still has Jean under his spell.”

  “You know Genet, don’t you? Can’t you tell him? Diplomatically, of course.”

  “Won’t be easy. Those novels are Frechtman’s lifelines…”

  “The reason I’m suggesting it—one of the reasons—is that it occurred to me you could kill a couple of birds with one stone: rework the translation with Frechtman, and see your wife and kids in Paris. It would do you, and us, good.”

  Finally, the light went on, and I was deeply touched. True, he—we—wanted very much to publish the Genet novels, but Barney’s timing had much more to do with reclaiming my marriage and my family than anything else. Life without those three had finally gotten to me, and it must have shown.

  “Let me write to Frechtman first,” I said. “He already knows one of the reasons we haven’t gone ahead is the translation. And he knows I’ll edit his text whenever we do proceed. I’ll tell him by working together—the way Beckett did with me—we’ll speed up the process.”

  Barney nodded, told me to go home, and vanished down the corridor into the night.

  * * *

  Next day I airmailed Frechtman, telling him that we now planned to proceed with Our Lady and that to meet our deadline, I’d need to work with him for at least a couple weeks—daily—to edit the translation. The word “edit” was key. Not “retranslate,” “edit.” Barney had once suggested I retranslate the book, but I knew that would never have gone down. Bernie responded immediately that he welcomed the idea, was free and clear for the next month, simply give him the date. I checked availability and booked a ticket to Paris for the following week. So I called. “Darling, I have terrific news. I’m arriving next Thursday. Yes, in Paris. No, I will be completely independent, working with Bernard Frechtman during the day. Yours at night. Don’t tell the kids. I want to surprise them.”

  It was a gift from Barney I shall never forget. I could have “edited” the Frechtman translation in New York, but he rightly sensed I was nearing the end of my rope. That was one of Barney’s often unpredictable generous outbursts.

  Overexcited, I didn’t sleep a wink on the flight over, felt wonderful at the Orly arrival, grabbed a taxi, and arrived an ho
ur after the kids had left for school. So the surprise was for later. Jeannette’s mother, whom I adored, took me aside and said that, however successful and fulfilling the tour had been, she felt, day by day, that Jeannette needed me more than ever, and my arrival could not have been more propitious. When the kids got home to find me seated in the living room, “nonchallently” reading the Herald Tribune for the third time, there were shouts of “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!” that only a parent can appreciate, as two munchkins hurled themselves across the room into my arms. Hugs, kisses, more hugs, then accounting time: “Do you know what they make us do in school?” Nathalie’s indignation was palpable, and Alex was nodding even before she outlined the grievance. “They tie us to our cots after lunch! Tie us! It’s awful!” I listened, commiserated, hugged, then tried to explain that there may have been a purpose in this French school madness. Some children—not they, of course—were hyperactive and especially needed a calm moment after lunch. If they weren’t confined, they’d be running and jumping around the room so that good children—like themselves—wouldn’t be able to rest. Expressions of doubt at first, followed by slightly quizzical looks, as if they were pondering that unlikely possibility. Further, I said, Mother had sent me copies of their homework and writing samples, and I couldn’t believe their progress. It was outstanding! Really? Absolutely! Back home, in nursery school or kindergarten, you wouldn’t even be printing block letters. Here you’re not only writing sentences, but in script! What’s script? Alex wondered. “Like this, you mean?” his all-knowing sister said, pulling from her knapsack a sheet of lined paper on which, indeed, were fragile but legible handwritten phrases. Hmmm. Maybe l’école maternelle wasn’t quite as bad as they had thought.

  * * *

  Every morning at nine I took the metro to St. Germain, where Bernie and I met in one café or another and spent the next four or five hours going over the text line by line. Being back there on my old stomping ground made me feel as if I’d never been away. At my most familiar haunts, the waiters remembered me, welcomed me “home,” and if I hadn’t consciously realized it before, I knew that this was, if not my first, forever my second home. We made progress at roughly fifteen to twenty pages a day, a process sped up by the fact that I had prepared a list of proposed changes before we met. At one point when we were roughly halfway through, Bernie, who had been docile as a lamb till now, in fact thanking me at the end of several sessions for my help in improving Jean’s text, looked up through his thick-lensed glasses and said: “I suppose you’ll want to be listed as co-translator with me.” Accusation or statement of fact? I shook my head. “Bernie, I’m the editor of this book. My job is to make sure Jean’s text is as good as you and I can make it. This is a book for the ages, and your translation should reflect that. I have no desire or design to have my name added to yours.” He looked as though a great burden had been lifted from his ex-GI shoulders, and without another word on we plowed.

  After our first week together, I called Barney and gave him a progress report. “All quiet on the Paris front. I’ll bring back a manuscript ready for copyediting. You can schedule the book for next year.” And again: “Thanks for dreaming this up.”

  That fortnight in Paris also gave me a chance to see Jérôme Lindon again, the man I admired above all others in publishing, not just in France, but in the world. We lunched together at a small family restaurant around the corner from Minuit, no more than three doors down from 8, rue du Sabot (where, in a sign of the times, Oscar’s primitive-art emporium had been replaced by a Japanese restaurant). We were publishing not only his favorite, Samuel Beckett, but also three or four of his other important writers, including Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras. Duras lived only a couple of blocks away, on the rue St. Benoît, and I paid her a visit after one of my Frechtman sessions. A tiny woman now past her prime if one could judge by the photographs of her prominently displayed around the living room, taken for the most part in Indochina, where she was born and brought up, she was cordial and warm but spent the better part of an hour reinforcing my image of her: bright, dedicated, politically involved, and totally self-centered. I had by now translated two of her works, for which she thanked me, a compliment I would have savored more if she had had more than a shred of English wherewith to judge.

  Robbe-Grillet was a whole other matter. When we had first met, I had found him both charming and witty, with a soupçon of malice lurking not far from the surface. Unlike Jérôme, who seemed all business. Alain always had a twinkle, as if one should not take too seriously anything he said or did. He loved to provoke, deflate some academic with an outrageous statement, often about his own work, simply to see how the other person would react. I always sensed there was far more to Alain than met the eye. One of his favorite novels, he admitted early on, was the infamous Story of O, intimating that the masochism so thoroughly explored in that mysterious novel—the author of which, ten years after its publication, was still unknown, though theories abounded—was an area that greatly intrigued both him and his wife, Catherine, a small, pretty, dark-haired, vivacious woman full of mystery herself, with whom, rumor had it, Vladimir Nabokov had been smitten when they met. It was also widely bruited about that she was “Jean de Berg,” the author of The Image, a novel published, oddly, by Minuit, “oddly” because Minuit had never, before or since, to my knowledge published erotica. The Image owed much to the practices and principles of Story of O, but without the passion, stylistic purity, or conviction.

  In any event, catching up with old friends and meeting new added to the wonder and beauty of being back in my almost-native habitat.

  44

  Leaving Coenties Slip

  THE IDYLL at Coenties Slip ended sadly less than two years after we moved in. Most, if not all, of us in the South Street Seaport area were living illegally, tolerated by some officials who knew the occupants of these weary old buildings were only artists, therefore expendable, ignored by others who, if they tried to expel us, faced going to court. We had hired a feisty young lawyer, Seymour “Si” Litvinoff, who was handling legal and tax matters for a score of artists and writers for a relative pittance, either out of innate benevolence or in the belief that one day these youthful creators would become famous and pay him his due. Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman were among his clients, as was Terry Southern.

  Since we were acutely aware of our building’s many violations and the daily concern we might be evicted, Seavers and Youngermans hired an architect to tell us what would bring the building up to code. We loved this unique place and area so much we decided we should try to buy it. Our architect had given us a rough estimate of the house’s value, twelve to fifteen thousand dollars, including the cost of necessary repairs. The owner asked for twenty thousand, then quickly dropped to eighteen. The sticking point was: Who would pay to bring the building up to code, without which the sale would not be approved? Finally, we agreed to pay, telling the landlord it would cost us three thousand dollars, which to us meant his selling price should come down to fifteen thousand. He argued for “sixteen thousand dollars,” and we agreed to agree.

  Litvinoff began soliciting the necessary papers and clearances, and all seemed to be proceeding more or less normally (does bureaucracy ever have a norm?) when Jack and I ran into a new obstacle: the banks. What, a mortgage for a decrepit old building way down near South Street? Nobody in his right mind would live there (we could not admit we already did). Not only would we be keeping our beloved building, but we’d be helping preserve a parcel of Old New York. A week later we received an envelope from Chase Bank, which I carried to the top floor, waving it in triumph. “Dear Sirs,” it began, “we regret to inform you that, after a careful assessment of your application for a building mortgage at Coenties Slip, your application has been denied.” Denied? Could Si find out who the new buyer was? Apparently, the same person or business that had bought our building had been quietly buying dozens of other buildings in the area, most as old as ours, some even older. Historical ge
ms. And, Si added, the plan was to tear them all down.

  We suddenly needed to move with all due speed. We scoured the deep downtown, to no avail. In the West Village everything was well beyond our price range. Youngerman had found another loft, half the size of Coenties Slip. Then one morning at work a friend called and said he’d heard of an apartment just put on the market for $154 a month, rent-controlled. Where was it? Upper West Side, Ninety-third Street. Holy tomato! I was reminded of Jeannette’s frequent pronouncement that she’d never live in that “combat zone.” Without telling her, I subwayed up to see it. A good-sized living room, separate dining room, three bedrooms, decent old-fashioned bath. I knew I wouldn’t find anything close, much less better, for the price. Only drawback: the place was on the ground floor, and even in early afternoon the street noise was deafening, radios blasting from a dozen windows, shouts and murmurs from as many neighboring buildings, in English and Spanish. A far cry from the blessed silence of the evening and night downtown, broken only by the comforting call of the tugboats. But life had to move on. I told Jeannette. Where is it? she insisted. Just off Central Park, I ventured. Where off Central Park? Upper West Side, I finally admitted. The lease was only for a year, we had no choice. When she saw it, she was placated, but only slightly. “You promise we won’t stay for more than a year.”

  Six months later, Si Litvinoff called us. “You won’t believe this,” he said. “The Rockefellers themselves! They’re going to locate the world headquarters of the Chase Bank down there, which is why they’ve been buying up property in the area. As soon as that’s made public, can you imagine what each of those properties will be worth? Ten times what they paid for them!” So much for conserving New York’s landmarks.

  45

  Last Exit to Brooklyn

  MY ROUTE TO GROVE almost inevitably took me past the Eighth Street Bookshop, one of New York’s best, run by two brothers, Eli and Ted Wilentz. Eli was the more visible of the two, generally the spokesman for his shy and reticent brother, and by now, in 1964, I counted him as a friend. He was a staunch, though worried, supporter of Grove, standing by us as we published book after controversial book, which he would stack defiantly near the cash register or in some other prominent spot certain to bring Lawrence and Miller and Burroughs and Rechy to the clients’ attention.