Editors seldom earn much notice outside the world of publishing. Edward Garnett fostered the careers of Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, but, I suspect, far more people remember his wife, Constance Garnett, the first great translator of Chekhov, Dostoevsky and many other Russian writers. In this country, only one editor ever appears as a “Jeopardy!” answer: Maxwell Perkins, who worked with Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe.
Yet Richard Seaver is, arguably, just as important to our time as Garnett and Perkins to theirs. While a young man in Paris, preparing a Sorbonne thesis on James Joyce, he happened upon — and was bowled over by — the fiction of a middle-aged and virtually unknown Irishman. With dogged persistence, Seaver urged the work of Samuel Beckett on his friends, with some of whom he edited a small English-language magazine called Merlin. In due course, Seaver and his colleagues printed Beckett’s short stories in the magazine, translated some of his French fiction into English and published the early novel “Watt.” When “Waiting for Godot” opened to a mostly empty house, Seaver was among the few there for that historic first night. He recalls the famous review — which Seaver finds “damning,” although it seems a brilliant precis to me: “This is a play where nothing happens. Twice.”
More from Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
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(Farrar, Straus & Giroux/ ) - ‘The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the '50s, New York in the '60s: A Memoir of Publishing's Golden Age’ by Richard Seaver (Farrar Straus Giroux. 457 pp. $35).
A half-dozen years later, having returned to the United States with his French bride, the violinist Jeannette Medina, “Dick” Seaver joined Grove Press. In tandem with its owner, Barney Rosset, Seaver continued to champion Beckett but also helped establish Grove as the lightning-rod publisher of the 1960s. From the beginning, Rosset and Seaver set themselves against censorship of any kind. Despite suits and First Amendment trials that dragged on for years, Grove brought out Lawrence’s unbowdlerized version of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” Jean Genet’s “Our Lady of the Flowers,” William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch,” John Rechy’s “City of Night,” Hubert Selby Jr.’s “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and Pauline Reage’s “The Story of O,” as well as a great deal of controversial nonfiction, including “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth” and Eric Berne’s best-selling “Games People Play.” Grove also published the now legendary countercultural magazine the Evergreen Review and established a lock on printing avant-garde plays — not only Beckett’s but also those of Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and many others. A related film division made available the screenplays for movies such as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s “Last Year at Marienbad,” produced Beckett’s “Film” (starring Buster Keaton) and imported from Sweden the soft-core classic “I am Curious (Yellow).”
In “The Tender Hour of Twilight,” Seaver looks back on these two heady periods of his life. In the first half, he re-creates the excitement of living in Paris as a young man, growing fluent in French, traveling around Europe and falling in love with several free-spirited young women. “Thirty cents a day would get you a hotel room — not with bath, mind you . . . The room had a bed, a basin, a table, and a chair. Around the corner were the public baths, where for a few francs you could take a scalding-hot shower. Payment by the quarter hour. . . . If your budget was really tight, you could take a douche double, two for the price of one, the sex of your co-showerer up to you, no questions asked by the management.”
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