In a Grove

Richard Seaver was a renowned editor at Grove Press in the 1960s who advocated for such writers as Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, and William S. Burroughs. But his beginning was far more modest, joining the editorial staff of a precariously underfinanced little magazine named Merlin in Paris in the early fifties. Like many editors, he was left with almost no time to write his own work. His posthumous memoir, The Tender Hour of Twilight, is a charming yet compelling account of the literary life in Paris in the 50s and New York in the 60s, and surely one of the most engaging stories I have read this year.

Seaver had no literary antecedents or personal connections, and was raised in anthracite country in northeastern Pennsylvania. At the University of North Carolina, he wrote a senior thesis on Ernest Hemingway and began writing himself. After teaching Latin and starting a wrestling program at a prep school, he received an American Field Service fellowship to study at the Sorbonne.

Arriving in Paris in 1948, he was impressed by the gratitude the French felt for Americans while amused by their scorn for the English language. Short of funds, like James Joyce, he began teaching English at the Berlitz School for fifty cents an hour and to Air France flight stewardesses at Orly Airport, which he would reach by bicycle, an hour and a half of piston-pumping wrestler's legs each way.

Life was incredibly inexpensive and food was still rationed: one could purchase a bottle of Algerian wine for twenty-five cents. His first hotel room, with its "hideous flowered wallpaper," was a former cramped maid's quarters and cost thirty cents a day. In exchange for watching an antique business for a few hours a week, he moved to a storage depot in what had been a fifteenth-century windmill in St-Germain-des-Prés.

Through a girlfriend, he encountered a purported diamond merchant who was actually a thief and whose promise to finance a literary magazine only got Seaver (and his friend, the painter Ellsworth Kelly) detained by police. Despite the opéra bouffe overtones of this, some of the people Seaver would encounter in Paris would help determine his future career as an editor. Writing film pieces for the English language Paris International Herald Tribune, he met Orson Welles, which only led to conversational delight, and then a young "imperiously tall" Scottish writer, Alexander Trocchi, who spoke with a musical lilt, and who had organized the first issue of a new magazine magically called Merlin.

Seaver would contribute one of the first intelligent assessments of the then barely known Samuel Beckett. He had been an early admirer of Molloy (1951) and Malone meurt (1951). Seaver had read these stripped, minimal fictions in the uncut pages Beckett wrote in French as published by Les Éditions de Minuit (which he tells us accommodated the neighborhood bordello before the war). Intrigued, he read an earlier novel, the bawdier, more self-consciously Joycean Murphy (1938) in English. The result was what Edmund Wilson once termed a "shock of recognition," compounded by the fact that no one in France seemed to have heard of Beckett.

After finding the reclusive Beckett through his French publisher, he asked him to contribute to Merlin. On a night of pouring rain, a tall, gaunt, drenched man in a raincoat (Beckett himself) passed the unpublished manuscript of Watt to Seaver and strode off. Subsequently, in a repeated bonding ritual with red wine at La Coupole and the Dome, Seaver would translate into English, with Beckett's collaboration, a story called "La fin." In the process, Seaver became a first-name friend with some entry to Beckett's mysterious privacy. Beckett even described the spareness of his furnishings—though he had a radio to satisfy his interest in sports—in his two-room cottage, his writer's...