Paris, toujours Paris, under American eyes - Richard Seaver

He Knew It When He Saw It

Publishing 'Lady Chatterley's Lover,' '

The Story of O' and 'Tropic of Cancer'

—and bringing Samuel Beckett to English-speaking readers.

By JAMES CAMPBELL

The Wall Street Journal, January 6, 2012

The Tender Hour of Twilight

By Richard Seaver
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 457 pages, $35)

Richard Seaver tunneled under the Atlantic Ocean and smuggled European avant-garde literature into the United States. Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Eugène Ionesco and the pseudonymous author of the sado-masochistic fantasy "The Story of O" were only a few of those who found a welcome from Seaver at Grove Press in the 1950s and 1960s. The name on the cover of the last—Pauline Réage—disguised a French lady of letters. The name of the translator—Sabine d'Estrée—masked Seaver himself. He translated other works, but his proudest achievement, stamped all over these memoirs, was to have unearthed Beckett from his self-entrenchment in Paris and to have set the Irish playwright and novelist before an English-speaking readership.

Seaver (1926-2009) told the story often of how, on a Fulbright scholarship in Paris in the early 1950s, he purchased Beckett's works in French direct from their publisher and then hunted down a French translation of the early novel "Murphy." There were several English-language literary magazines in Paris after the war. Together with a clutch of talented friends, Seaver was producing Merlin. Hooked on the peculiar cadences of Beckett's prose—French lyrics set to an Irish tune—he pursued the Irish recluse for a contribution: "We had all but given up hope of ever hearing from Beckett when, one dark and stormy early evening in late November . . . outlined in the light, was a tall gaunt figure in a raincoat, water streaming down from the brim of the nondescript hat jammed onto the top of his head. . . . 'You asked me for this,' he said, thrusting [a] package into my hand."

The package contained "Watt," Beckett's last full-length work in English. Sections appeared in Merlin, and in 1953 the novel launched the magazine's imprint, Collection Merlin. Though only six titles were brought out, these included the English translation of Beckett's "Molloy" and "The Thief's Journal" by Jean Genet and were enough to earn Collection Merlin a place in literary history.

Despite such highs, the Paris sections of "The Tender Hour of Twilight" lack freshness. Seaver reports extended café conversations and pillow-talk, transmitted from 50-year-old memory. A meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre is rendered in dialogue unworthy of TV-budget drama. The dangers of self-regard lurk in the margins of every other page. Beckett remained indebted to Seaver, yet the reader will learn more from a few pages of the recently published second volume of the Beckett correspondence about why he wrote in French, and what fortified his uncompromising aesthetics, than from all of Seaver's recollections.

If Beckett is the hero of the first act, the second is dominated by Barney Rosset, the owner of Grove Press. Seaver's New York career began, after a stint in the Navy, in 1958 at the firm of George Braziller, about whom he writes unflatteringly. The next year Rosset invited him for lunch and asked: "Why don't you join the excitement?" Grove was planning to publish D.H. Lawrence's banned 1928 novel, "Lady Chatterley's Lover," an event that was to alter the character of publishing. Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" followed, even though the author himself felt initially that the U.S. publication was "premature." Miller, enjoying a peaceful life in Big Sur, Calif., had reconciled himself to the forfeiture of royalties from his infamous books, which were underground best sellers in Europe. Eventually he was persuaded. Next came "Naked Lunch" by William Burroughs and John Rechy's novel of hustling, "City of Night."

In each instance, the campaign was a matter of printing the books, shipping them to those stores willing to stock them and then waiting to see what happened. Lawsuits followed; legal bills followed the suits; ruination for Grove and its employees threatened. "For three years between 1962 and 1964 we had been in a Sargasso Sea financially, with sales stagnant and profits, when they came, minimal," Seaver reports. In 1962, Grove lost "roughly $400,000 on sales of slightly over $2 million," largely as a result of lawsuits. Rosset's private means supported this gambling habit—once readers could get the books, they sold in large quantities—but eventually he succumbed to the successful businessman's fatal flaw: overreach. "From 20 or so employees half a dozen years before, our weekly payroll [in 1969] numbered close to 150, housed in our spanking new building on the corner of Bleecker and Houston streets. . . . One entered through a massive arch in the shape of a capital G."

Preoccupied with legal matters and the extra burden of running the house's literary quarterly, the Evergreen Review, Seaver appears not to have noticed that the carnal appetites of Miller and Rechy and the willing punishments of the "Story of O" were not universally appreciated. In 1970, the company was unionized behind the bosses' backs. Arriving for work at the posh building one morning, Seaver was prevented from entering Rosset's office on the top floor. It was occupied by a group led by a radical feminist who threatened to destroy precious galleys and correspondence. As often happens during social upheaval, a new revolutionary guard was challenging the old. Asked what they wanted, Seaver replied: "I know what they want. Have you seen the broadsheet? They want editorial control of all Grove publications, a few million dollars for assorted causes, a day-care center for children. God knows what else."

The final drama of Seaver's Grove career provides some of the best reading in "The Tender Hour of Twilight." He later moved to Viking, where he had an illustrious career, then—beyond the purview of this book—to Henry Holt and eventually his own Arcade Press. Seaver was among the great publishers of the "excitement" era, and even if daily meetings with formally adventurous authors taught him little about writing, this memoir, arranged from a larger mass of material by his widow, will be sought by everyone who has felt the floppy thrill of a Grove paperback between his fingers.

Mr. Campbell is the author of "Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and others on the Left Bank."