The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  After that exchange, Genet decided he didn’t want to go to the United States. Jean never knew why the reversal, but he assumed it was either his homosexuality, his status as ex-convict, or, most likely, the fact that Grove at the time was being harassed by a whole panoply of would-be censors for its scandalous publications, from D. H. Lawrence to Henry Miller, William Burroughs to, yes, Jean Genet himself.

  This time, Grove decided to take the matter into its own hands rather than leaving it to the Paris bureaucrats. Barney had a relatively highly placed friend in Washington to whom he wrote several letters. The replies, when they came, were politely evasive. He would look into the matter. He would see what he could do. He understood that Mr. Genet was a writer of world stature. There were proper channels, however, as he was sure Barney would understand. Esquire, having concocted the triumvirate, seemed vague on the matter. If the threesome was reduced to a duo, so be it. Perhaps it was feeling blinded by its own brilliance, and having second thoughts. Irrespective of Chicago, we at Grove very much wanted Genet to come for our own selfish reasons. His works, both fiction and drama, had been well received and highly praised. And for once, despite the usual alarms, neither of his novels had been attacked by the censors. With Genet, there were no court cases to gobble up the proceeds.

  As July waned, we had to admit defeat and inform Genet that we had struck out in Washington.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of it myself.”

  I wondered just how he would take care of it.

  * * *

  The next morning, Jeannette and I took a taxi from our Central Park West apartment to the Biltmore.

  The cherubic bad boy’s (at fifty-seven) only baggage was a tiny briefcase hardly capable of holding toiletries, much less a change of clothes. I knew from my earlier meetings with Genet in Paris, and from talking to Bernie Frechtman, that he generally traveled light. But this light?

  “Did you leave the rest of your baggage at the station?” I asked hesitantly. Genet looked at me as if I were mad.

  “This is my baggage,” he said with the trace of a smile, pointing to his briefcase. And indeed, for the next ten days, when we lived in close proximity and—as will be seen—in virtual intimacy, Jean needed no more than the contents of his satchel.

  I had forgotten how cherubic-looking the man was. Pixie-like. No more than five feet five or maybe six. His pate was all but bald, with a small snow-white patch of hair just above the slightly protruding ears. And his eyes: pale, pale blue. But it was not so much the color that made them distinctive as the intensity with which they fixed on you. When he talked to you, you were the only person in the universe. Few people in my life have ever made me feel that way—Beckett was one—it is a rare quality.

  After lunch, on our way back uptown to the Biltmore, I asked Jean why he had gone first to Canada instead of directly to New York. I wanted to get the lowdown on the visa. Jean responded by reminding me of the fiasco at the American consulate, saying that he had decided never to make that mistake again.

  “I’ll tell you the whole story,” he said. “But you must promise not to tell Esquire. Otherwise they may get nervous and decide not to send me to Chicago.”

  I solemnly swore.

  “We French don’t need a visa for Canada,” he said. “And since I know the border between Canada and the United States is lax, I figured if I went to Canada first, I’d find a way across the border.”

  “And how did you?”

  “The second day after I arrived in Montreal, I was walking down the street when a young man came up to me and asked very timidly if I was by chance Jean Genet. When I admitted I was, he said he had read my work and seen two of my plays and could he do me the honor of showing me the city. Which he did for the next two days. I told him I was going to New York and didn’t have a visa. ‘That’s no problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive you across the border to Buffalo. You can take the train from there.’ If the border guards asked, he’d pass me off as his uncle. But at the border they just waved us through. And,” he said triumphantly, “here I am!” His delight at fooling the American customs was almost childlike.

  “But, Jean,” I said, always the worrier, “that’s all right for New York. In Chicago, though, there’s going to be a lot of document checking. And the rumor is, Mayor Daley’s got the Chicago police force on full alert. What if you get arrested?”

  He shrugged, and I realized that for Genet the threat of arrest ranked far down in his grab bag of concerns. Still, it worried me, for I knew Jean had a long record, dating back to before the war, for theft, desertion, embezzlement, not to mention “public offense to decency.” But these petty imprisonments paled before the outrage his openly erotic, homosexual novels had caused in France, starting with Querelle de Brest and, later, with Our Lady of the Flowers and The Thief’s Journal. Years before, in Paris, Jean had also confided to Jeannette and me, at an evening with our close friends Monique Lange—who perhaps knew Jean better and longer than virtually anyone—and the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo, that in 1938 he had been a member of the Trotskyist Fourth International. However short-lived and superficial his involvement, that gave him the added label of “Commie.”

  Given the incident at the American embassy in Paris, I had to believe that some worthy branch of government in Washington—probably the FBI—was privy to this information.1 Once we had arrived in Chicago, Jean’s presence there was bound to be noticed immediately, if not sooner, by at least one member of the fifty-thousand-strong contingent of police, U.S. infantry, National Guardsmen, FBI, and Secret Service agents on hand to maintain disorder.

  * * *

  We went to lunch the next day, and at Jean’s insistence sat outdoors at a sidewalk café under a searing August sun. Inside, I knew, the place was mercifully air-conditioned, but Jean would not be swayed. “Inside, we see nothing,” he explained. “Here, we’re part of the city.” Despite the heat, Jean wore the same clothes throughout his stay: beige corduroy trousers, a light cotton shirt open at the neck, and a suede jacket of gracious origins but which had seen better days. Blacks sashayed past wearing tight-fitting pants. Jean eyed them with open pleasure.

  “Les fesses américaines,” he muttered, shaking his head. “There’s something different, very different, about American buttocks.” He followed their undulations down the street until they disappeared around the corner. “New York,” he said, “reminds me of a colonial city. It is a colonial city!” Just then a garbage truck rolled by, stopping directly across the street to gather its loot. All three of the sanitation men were black, well muscled, and two of them were bare chested. Jean could not contain himself and called over to the men in French, praising them for their rhythmic labors and gleaming chests.

  “Jean,” I said, “I wouldn’t. I mean, they might not understand…”

  “Don’t worry,” he said with an irresistible grin. “They understand.”

  And indeed, all three waved back across the street at us and laughed broadly as the truck pulled away. I was beginning to believe that Jean’s innate charm and openness were like an invisible, protective wall around him, fending off all harm. That thought came back to me a few days later in the midst of the Chicago madness.

  * * *

  At Genet’s request, Esquire had hired Jeannette and me to squire him around New York and Chicago and to be his official translators. On Friday, the day before our flight to Chicago, Jean asked Jeannette to take him on a sightseeing tour of Forty-second Street. He’d heard a lot about the movies and peep shows of the area and wondered how they compared with the French equivalent. For an hour or two, Jean explored the lower “porno” depths of Manhattan with Jeannette in tow, emerging from each successive shop looking more and more gloomy. He shook his head.

  “These places are grim,” he told Jeannette. “There’s absolutely nothing erotic about any of them. Not that the French equivalent are much better, but at least the performers have some wit. Here everyone looks mechanical, depresse
d. These places are so dismal. Sex should not be dreary, it should be fun. I do not detect any trace of joy here. Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  That afternoon we paid the obligatory courtesy call to Esquire at 488 Madison Avenue. Harold Hayes oozed Southern charm, asking Jean with a broad smile what he thought of America. Since I knew pretty well the answer, for Jean’s preconceived notions of this country were well-known—he found it racist, overbearing, a potential danger to the world by its military arrogance and might, coupled with a naïveté that allowed itself to get involved in stupid, winless wars, for example, Vietnam—I feared he might blow the deal on the spot, for candor was one of his many dangerous virtues. Jeannette and I were once again fooled by him, taken aback when he declined to respond, merely saying that as a guest of America he preferred not to abuse its hospitality, that he would doubtless have a fairer impression post-Chicago. One of the editors, whose name I had not caught, assured Genet that he was among friends and should feel free to speak openly. Didn’t the fact that the magazine had chosen him to cover the convention signal its openness to controversy? Jean, changing moods, said, “Oh, no, you chose me because of my name. Pure snobbery!” Which sent an immediate chill throughout the already-air-conditioned room.

  The young, simpatico editor John Berendt was the Esquire staff member assigned to (e)squire us through the shoals of Chicago’s windswept waters. Affable, attractive, and efficient, he handed us our press credentials and plane tickets. He’d be flying out a day ahead. With us on the flight was my old friend Terry Southern. Bill Burroughs, coming from London, and the seasoned journalist John Sack, coming from God knows where, would join us later in the day.

  On the plane to Chicago, we tried to brief Jean on the current state of American politics, reminding him of the difference between Republicans and Democrats (Genet: “There isn’t much, right?”), the discontent among the young, the dark horses among the Democrats who might have a chance of upsetting Hubert Humphrey. Genet cut us off.

  “With young Kennedy dead, the only one with a chance is McCarthy, no?” he said. “And as I understand it, he doesn’t stand much of a chance. The party doesn’t like him. Is that true?

  “And how did this fellow Nixon get nominated? He’s such a bad person. Does America like bad politicians? In France, all politicians are bad. But here I thought you had some good ones.”

  Not many, we admitted, but Gene McCarthy stood head and shoulders above the rest.

  “You seem to shoot all the good ones. Will McCarthy be in Chicago? He won’t win, but I’d like to see him.”

  Yes, McCarthy was due in on Sunday, and we planned to see him.

  “Anyway,” Jean said, “it doesn’t matter. I plan to write a piece as seen through the legs of a Chicago policeman.”

  I wasn’t sure I understood.

  “There are going to be a lot of policemen in Chicago, right? Maybe thousands? The policemen will be between us and the politicians. So if you want to write about the politicians, our viewpoint will be from behind the police. I’ll write the piece from behind a Chicago policeman. Maybe from between his legs.”

  Hmmm, I thought. This could be truly interesting …

  * * *

  On Friday, Grove gave a lunch for Genet in Barney’s office above the Evergreen Theater on Eleventh Street. Most of the conversation focused on the events-to-be in Chicago. For days, the newspapers—and especially television—had been enumerating the various “outside” (read: unofficial) disruptive forces that threatened to turn the host city into a Roman circus. A number of countercultural organizations had issued a clarion call to their constituents to show up in Chicago to be both seen and heard: flower children, peaceniks, hippies, yippies. Dave Dellinger, editor of Liberation, a leading figure in the movement to end the war in Vietnam, who the previous fall had led the highly successful and politically effective Pentagon march, would be coordinating similar marches in Chicago, it was reported. The SDS—Students for a Democratic Society—were expected in force. The yippies, led by the stalwarts Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and Ed Sanders, were said to be bringing, appropriately, a pig to Carl Sandburg’s “hog butcher for the world,” not for slaughter, but for nomination. In their eyes, nominating a 150-pound porker for president made fully as much sense as naming a Humphrey of roughly equal weight to the ticket.

  The country was still in shock over the assassination two months before of a second Kennedy: Bobby, however controversial and disliked by some, had gained immediate stature from martyrdom, and his shadow lay broadly over the next week’s events. After his primary victory in California, Bobby had become a viable alternative to Hubert Humphrey. Much of the protest in Chicago was aimed at the notion of a closed convention, that Humphrey the Handpicked was not only a shoo-in but, symbolically, the assurance that the Vietnam War would continue and probably escalate. Gene McCarthy would be there, but Bobby Kennedy had effectively hobbled his candidacy, and the senator had nowhere near the votes necessary to make it a contest.

  All the media hoopla predicting the breakdown of law and order prompted Mayor Richard Daley to reassure his fellow Democrats that their convention site would be made safe and secure. The twelve-thousand-strong Chicago police force, beefy and blue, was on full alert and prepared to handle any situation that might develop. Besides, as backup, there were always five thousand members of the National Guard, four thousand Illinois state troopers, six thousand American soldiers in battle uniform, not to mention swarms of FBI and Secret Service agents. All of which must have been most reassuring to the delegates.

  Given the subtleties and idiosyncrasies of the American nominating process, plus the extraneous, contradictory elements of this year’s convention, I had assumed as I translated the gist of the conversation to Genet that most of it was over his head. Again, I had underestimated the good gentleman.

  “The children are fed up with the old farts in power,” he concluded. “Your Vietnam is our Algeria. To me, all this sounds like April in Paris.”

  He was referring not to the romantic song but to the events four months earlier that had brought France to a virtual standstill and forced an entrenched government out of office. Genet, it turned out, knew a lot more about politics, especially their inner workings, than Esquire, or any of us, had ever suspected.

  Genet reiterated to everyone around what he had confided to me the day before—he planned to write his piece by viewing events through the inverted V of a Chicago cop’s thighs!

  “But last night,” he said, “I watched your television, and it showed some of those flics [cops]. The thighs are still important, but I was also impressed by their bellies—they wear their belts and their revolvers beneath their bellies. And the visors: they all wear visors that cover and shield their faces. You cannot see their eyes, but they can see you. So I shall perhaps write each day not only from between the thighs but also from the viewpoint of the bellies, the visors, the revolver.”

  * * *

  Somehow, Genet knew that Barney was from Chicago and had asked him at our Friday lunch if he was going, too. Barney had responded that unlike Jean he didn’t have a specific purpose that would justify his going.

  “The purpose,” Genet said, “is to be there, no?”

  Barney said that he had to go to the country—East Hampton—that afternoon but that he might well fly out Saturday or Sunday.

  51

  The 1968 Convention

  DRIVING IN FROM O’HARE AIRPORT next day, we were all struck by the desolate, empty outskirts. A vision of utter poverty, neglect, despair.

  “Where are all the blacks?” Genet wanted to know. “If this is where they live, I can’t imagine some people aren’t out in the streets.”

  Occasionally, at a street-corner grocery store, a few blacks were hanging out, but Jean was right: Where was everybody? Maybe, I figured, the massive presence of the police throughout the city was an inducement for them to stay inside. But Jean was unconvinced.

  * * *

  We checked into
the Chicago Sheraton on North Michigan Avenue and agreed to meet at six o’clock in the Downstairs Lounge to make plans for the next five days. That evening we were scheduled to meet Dave Dellinger and hear what he had to say. Then, after dinner, off to Lincoln Park, where most of the protesters had gathered. By this time there were several thousand of them, and without a hotel room to be had in the city, most had come prepared to camp out in Lincoln Park throughout their stay. But that afternoon Mayor Daley’s office had thrown down the gauntlet by announcing that Lincoln Park would be closed at 11:00 p.m. Everyone would have to be out by the curfew or suffer the consequences.

  Burroughs, who had flown in from London that afternoon, joined us in the bar, dressed, as always, more like a Midwestern banker than the true revolutionary he was. Tall, thin, and with a deadpan face that would have given Buster Keaton a good run for his money, Burroughs was the authentic black sheep of the famous family that gave its name to the adding machine and computer company. I had been his editor at Grove for several years now, and we had become good friends. I liked and admired him immensely and felt—as I feel today—that he was a major, if much misunderstood, writer, one of the great experimentalists of our time. Still, he remained to me an enigma: the exterior was impeccable in look, dress, and manners; the inner man was a nexus of high subversion. Not since Sade, in my view, had a writer used more effectively and tellingly an addiction, an obsession, as a creative springboard to inveigh against the clichéd world of the dull, the hypocritical, and the pretentious.

  He and Genet had never met, but each knew—and admired—the other’s work. It was obvious they struck an immediate bond, and for the next two hours we exchanged ideas and formulated plans, some serious, some mad, all impractical, since we had no idea what awaited us in the streets. If Berendt was nervous about his charges’ disparate fantasies, he did not show it, even as drinks flowed and exchanges became less and less coherent.

  Burroughs announced that Allen Ginsberg was in Chicago for the “events” and wanted very much to meet Genet. Allen had come, convinced that, using a method of chanting he had learned in India not long before, he could calm the troubled waters and help prevent violence.