The Tender Hour of Twilight

by Richard Seaver

  Miraculously, after proving all our press credentials are in order, we get through the first two checkpoints. But at checkpoint three, we realize the outer Boys in Blue were simply passing the buck. The real test was upon us. At the inner circle, an unusually bulky lieutenant stops us cold. Berendt the Normal draws himself up full height. “These are bona fide Esquire-accredited journalists,” he says firmly. Slight quaver. Wait here. The lieutenant disappears and returns shortly with a gray-flannel human, indelibly stamped National Security, Secret Service Division. Carefully checks all of our press credentials. Then IDs, one by one. I hold my breath. This is it: Genet’s outlaw status will inevitably be revealed. No visa, no washy. Juzgado, Jean baby. But when Secret Service comes to Genet, instead of asking for his ID, gray flannel pauses, looks, smiles, then thrusts out his hand and vigorously shakes Jean’s. Has he by chance recognized him? I doubt it. Still, there is no other explanation. As for Jean, he looks disappointed. In any event, his magic has worked once again. Secret Service to lieutenant: “They’re okay. Let them through.” Disbelief from the Blue, but only a slight shake of the head as if to say, “Your responsibility, hotshot.”

  Inside we mount to the rafters. Speakers droning. Flags waving. Music blaring. Party-hatted delegates swaying. Burroughs madly recording. Jean more upset by the minute. We endure for an hour, maybe an hour and a half. Terry: “The fix is in. Let’s get outta here.” Unanimous agreement. Our return to the hotel quietly depressed, as if some new low point of the trip has just been witnessed. What has been happening in the streets was of no consequence to the people inside the Convention Hall. This could be Any Convention, Any Year.

  Tuesday, August 27. Morning.

  Knock, knock.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Jean.”

  “Jean who?”

  “Jean Genet.”

  “Ne vous gênez pas. Come right in!”2

  Our now-routine morning journal. Jean’s voice thicker this morning—one sleeping pill too many?—but his prose just as lucid as ever.

  THE THIRD DAY: THE DAY OF THE BELLY

  A policeman’s beautiful belly has to be seen in profile: the one barring my route is a medium-sized belly (de Gaulle could qualify as a cop in Chicago). It is medium-sized, but it is well on its way to perfection. Its owner wheedles it, fondles it with both his beautiful but heavy hands. Where did they all come from? Suddenly we are surrounded by a sea of policemen’s bellies barring our entrance into the Democratic convention. When I am finally allowed in, I will understand more clearly the harmony which exists between those bellies and the bosoms of the lady-patriots at the convention—there is harmony but also rivalry: the arms of the ladies of the gentlemen who rule America have the girth of the policemen’s thighs …

  I wonder if Jean will give, in his early wake-up report, his reaction to yesterday’s near slammer miss at the convention. He promptly does:

  The chief of police—wearing civilian clothes and his belly—arrives. He checks out our passes, our identification, but, obviously a man of taste and discretion, does not ask to see mine. He offers me his hand. I shake it. You bastard …

  Genet takes his Miraculous Protection totally for granted.

  Tuesday Afternoon

  Back to the convention. Security no problem, our previous day’s entrance assuring us reentry with no questions asked. The Esquire-appointed freelance photographer, Jack Wright, having been summoned east on another (more important?) assignment, Berendt asked if any of us stalwarts had photographic knowledge or experience. Silence all around. Stupidly, I admitted to having, in my Paris days, accepted two magazine assignments to North Africa, which included taking the pictures. The job, alas, was mine. He handed me the Leica, which Wright had magnanimously left behind. For the next three days, I took eight rolls of film, focusing on our hardy group in perilous situations (at the Amphitheatre, on the streets, at the Coliseum, in Grant and Lincoln parks). Superb all, I am sure, except for a slight mishap, to be acknowledged later.

  The convention still a preordained bore, we stayed but an hour. Then off to Lyndon Johnson’s Unbirthday Party at the Chicago Coliseum, organized by Jerry Rubin and the yippies. “Ah,” breathed Jean, “how much better the air is here.” Perhaps a political contrast, but more likely referring to the stench around the convention center, which was hard by the storied Chicago stockyards. Later, Jean would describe the occasion at the Coliseum: “Part of America has detached itself from the American fatherland and remains suspended between earth and sky.”

  Tuesday Night

  Back to Lincoln Park about eleven. Different feeling in the air. About twice as many people as on Sunday, we estimate, and two or three times as many bonfires in the night. Priests and ministers, true to their word. A large wooden cross has been constructed in the middle of the park. A fair number of men wearing hard hats and helmets; several dozen medics in white, with Red Cross armbands. Allen is worried: no amount of chanting will prevent violence tonight. Palpable tension in the air, not here on Sunday. And tonight, a great many more cops out. Is it my imagination, or do they all seem bigger? Taller? Stouter? Another difference tonight, journalists everywhere. Recognizable media figures milling about. I note, among others, the impressive silhouette of Clive Barnes of The New York Times seated on the grass not far away. Sent to cover the Living Theater no doubt. No: the theater of the absurd. Will they—the media—deter violence? Bashing kids is one thing; bashing journalists quite another. Still, the word is that Mayor Daley has not changed his tune. On the contrary.

  Again the repeated bullhorn warnings, for well over an hour. Shortly after midnight, cops begin moving in, shoulder to shoulder, riot guns at the ready, gas masks donned, preceded by a car filled with four cops wielding shotguns. Someone tosses a stone, or a brick, at the lead car, breaking the windshield. All hell breaks loose. Tear gas, ten times worse than before. The cops charged, both to relieve their colleagues in the car, who were surrounded by furious protesters twenty or thirty strong, now rocking the vehicle back and forth in a clear attempt to overturn it, and to track down and club the unwelcome intruders.

  The first night Terry had suggested a tactical retreat on the premise that it would be unconscionable for such a prestigious reporting team to be wiped out so early in the game. Tonight, when we saw the brick-through-windshield, he again uses good common tactical sense by suggesting that valor will best be served by rapid strategic withdrawal. We flog our way through tear gas, coughing and stumbling, but finally reach the presumed safety of the street beyond the park. Hundreds of demonstrators pound toward us, heading the other way. “Run!” a girl shouts as she passes. “They’re coming from that direction!” and she points away from the park in the direction where we thought safety lay. And indeed, lumbering toward us was another wall of blue.

  “Shit,” Terry hisses.

  “Hmmm,” Burroughs observes.

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?” Jean wonders. What’s happening?

  We start back up the street, but realize that’s No Exit.

  “In here,” I yell, and we all pile into the hallway of a house, move as far to the back as we can, and crouch down.

  Jeannette, who as a little girl had lived through the German occupation of Paris, daily bombings, and more than once seen German soldiers running through the streets in pursuit of their prey, has a seizure of déjà vu. Trembling, uncontrollable trembling. I put my arm around her, but the trembling only increases.

  Through the glass hallway door we see the cops thundering past and for a moment think we are safe. But then we hear them next door and realize they’re routing out the recalcitrants and beating them unmercifully as well. Moments later, in rush four cops, clubs raised. Jean was closest to the street door, therefore first in line to be clubbed. As the cop raised his billy to hit him, Jean simply looked at the man—I dare say straight in the eye—and for several seconds the club remained poised above his head. Then, slowly, he lowered it, as if his arm had been tugged downward by some
invisible, omnipotent, doubtless Genet-inspired force.3 “All right, you Communist bastards,” another cop said, “get the hell out of here.” And with that they prodded us out into the street, back into the Coliseum, where we felt like early Christians—understanding for the first time why the man we were escorting had been called Saint Genet. Through a labyrinth of side streets, we make our way—not proudly—back to the hotel.

  Wednesday, August 28

  Dave Dellinger’s Peace March had evolved into a demonstration in Grant Park, for Mayor Daley has not only refused to grant a permit but brought in the National Guard to buttress the beleaguered police. It is the Guard that blocks our path, standing across the proposed line of march. Unlike the mayor’s Bellies in Blue, these young men, half the age of the police and in most instances half the girth, look slightly uncomfortable, as if they would prefer to be elsewhere on this sweltering August afternoon. Our heavily literary, notably unmuscular group has been invited to be in the front, among the leaders of the march. We link arms and move slowly forward, noting with unease the bayonets gleaming in the bright sunlight before and beside us. We shuffle, mark time, stand still. Finally, after a long wait, we repair to Grant Park, where a stage has been set up. Singers strum guitars and sing of peace and brotherhood. Brightly colored balloons ascend into the cloudless sky. Speeches fill the afternoon air, distorted by less than perfect sound equipment. But we know the message. Shrill attacks on the unnecessary violence. Ringing denunciations of Mayor Daley. Equally scathing assaults on the official convention and the Democratic Party, purportedly the party of the people but obviously blind to the hue and cry of the country’s youth. Humphrey derided. The shamefulness and stigma of Vietnam.

  Vendors sell hot dogs and hamburgers, Coke and Pepsi. If you close your eyes, the odiferous afternoon makes you think you’re at a July Fourth picnic, or out at the ball game, rather than taking part in high political drama. One group decides to set out on a symbolic march to the Chicago slaughterhouse. As we had earlier, they lock arms, eight abreast, and begin their peaceful walk, this time the front line made up of a group of blacks. Like us, they are blocked, this time by the Blue. Unlike us, they continue walking, straight toward the blue line, which stands fast. Then, again, the tear gas and the blue line advances, clubs flailing. This is no Fourth of July. No ball game. It is late August in Chicago, 1968.

  Thursday, August 29

  One presidential candidate not invited to the convention was the comedian Dick Gregory, who in Chicago is dead serious. Angered and frustrated at the city’s refusal to grant permits to marchers, Gregory has a brilliant idea. “Come on down to my house. No one can stop me from inviting you to a party.” Genet was delighted at the ruse. A man of great wit and humor himself, he responded immediately to the same quality in others. Here is Jean on that last day’s invitation to the ghetto:

  Dick Gregory is inviting his friends—there are four or five thousand of them in Grant Park—to come home with him. They won’t let us march to the Amphitheatre, he declares, but there’s no law that says you can’t come on down to my house for a party. But first, he says, the four or five policemen who have stupidly allowed themselves to be hemmed in by the crowd of demonstrators must be freed … Gregory explains how the demonstrators are to walk, not more than three or four abreast, keeping on the sidewalk and obeying the traffic lights. The march may be long and difficult, he says, for he lives in the black ghetto of South Chicago. He invites the two or three who had earlier been beaten by the cops to head the march, for he figures the police, whose job it is to stop the march, may be less brutal with them.

  We walk along the hedge of armed soldiers.

  At long last, America is moving.

  Anyone who doubts the prescience of Jean Genet should read the opening of his last day’s report:

  Is it necessary to write that everything is over? With Humphrey nominated, will Nixon be master of the world?

  We flew back to New York Thursday afternoon. At the airport, an Esquire limousine was waiting to take us to a site in the Bronx where the cover-story photo was to be shot. No one had the foggiest notion what the cover shot was supposed to be, except that Esquire’s Chicago Four would be in it. We arrived at a desolate, deserted street, paved in brick, where a photographer awaited, together with a young male model who looked as if he had been dragged through the streets of Laredo by a posse of Western bad guys before being deposited in the Bronx. The photographer was perched a story above the street. The model was lain with his face down on the curb, his torso on the street, his legs on the sidewalk, his body and the surrounding pavement appropriately drenched in ketchup, which the photographer’s lens would pick up as blood. Genet, Burroughs, Southern, and John Sack surrounded the pseudo-hippie—was he dead or merely sorely wounded, this victim of Chicago’s mindless violence?—staring upward, with looks of accusation, at the offender, presumably Mayor Daley. Or Hubert Humphrey.

  After the photo session, the car drove us back to Manhattan. Genet was beside himself.

  “I detest sham,” he said, shaking his head. “Chicago was one thing. At least there you were a real participant. But this…” I conveyed Genet’s thought to Berendt, who, as always, was understanding, a calming influence. He asked that I try to explain to Jean that there was no way in the madness of Chicago that they could have taken a picture that would properly convey the scene as, he hoped, this simulated version would. Jean, not satisfied, simply shook his head.

  The word “picture” gave me a start. For in the rush and tumble of Chicago, somewhere Jack Wright’s camera and my eight rolls of film had gone missing. Would everyone please check his bags and see if by chance they had its precious—nay, irreplaceable—material … Nothing. I knew Jack Wright was far from well-heeled and vowed to have Esquire reimburse him.

  52

  And Now for My Fee

  JEAN HAD AGREED to write two pieces for Esquire, one of which, “The Members of the Assembly,” he had finished before he left Chicago. The other, entitled “A Salute to a Hundred Thousand Stars,” was in rough draft, and Genet said he would finish it that afternoon, since he wanted to leave New York on Saturday. I had already translated the first piece before leaving Chicago, since Esquire was on a tight deadline, and promised Harold Hayes that I would translate the second piece over the weekend if Jean gave it to me by the end of the day on Friday. Financial agreements on Jean’s Chicago trek had been made between Esquire and Jean’s agent, Rosica Colin. Jean was to be paid in dollars, in cash. I turned in the first piece that same afternoon, later calling Hayes to say Genet was leaving town the next morning and would like to be paid.

  “He’ll be paid when both pieces are turned in,” Hayes said.

  “You already have one to hand,” I said.

  “And the other?”

  “For Chrissake, Harold, we just got back, from five rather harrowing days, I might add.” I felt like asking Hayes how he had spent the past week—nothing dangerous, I trusted—but refrained. “Jean’s finishing up the second piece as we speak, and I promised Berendt you’d have the translation Monday morning. I’d say that’s pretty fast.”

  “I repeat: he’ll be paid in full when we have his pieces in full. Since we have one, he can pick up half his fee this afternoon.”

  I was furious. And ashamed, for it was we at Grove who had encouraged both Genet and Burroughs to accept the job. But I was dealing with a brick wall. Or someone with a brick for a brain. Or someone whose epithet rhymed with brick. I made one final, humiliating plea.

  “Harold, I’m not sure you heard me. Jean is leaving tomorrow for Europe”—I refrained from saying he’d be leaving, precariously, via Canada, assuming he made it across the border without getting arrested—“and the agreement was he’s to be paid in cash, I believe.”

  “If Genet wants the first half of his fee, he can pick it up this afternoon at the office.” Click.

  For a moment, I became a Chicago cop, blind empathy, with a murderous urge to use my club. But I
figured there was no use sparing Genet the solemn truth. The vision of genius laboring away in his hotel room on a piece for which he probably would not be paid struck me as the depths of the absurd. I grabbed a cab to the Delmonico and shot up to room 911. There he was, seated at a tiny desk, his neat blue-penned script covering a schoolboy’s lined white sheets.

  “I’ve just finished,” he said, clearly pleased with what he’d written. “Shall I read it to you?”

  “Please do … But first I should tell you … I just got off the phone with Harold Hayes…”

  “I never liked that man,” he said. “When I first laid eyes on him in Paris, I didn’t like him. Did you tell him I needed my fee today?”

  “Yes, we can go pick it up right now. The only thing is”—I saw Genet lock his blue eyes on my embarrassment as if he knew in advance what I was going to say—“they’re only going to pay you half your fee now.”

  “Did you tell them I’m leaving tomorrow?”

  “Yes, of course. He wouldn’t budge. They say they only have one of the two pieces.”

  “Here’s the other one,” Genet said. “I’ll give it to him when we go there.”

  * * *

  At the Esquire offices there was an envelope for Jean. He opened it and counted the money. Nineteen hundred dollars.

  “That’s only half,” he said to the receptionist in French. She smiled at the cute man, but the cute man wasn’t smiling back.

  “I want to see Hayes,” he said. I passed on the message.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Hayes has gone for the day.”