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Summary
Summary
From Beckett to Burroughs, The Story of O to The Autobiography of Malcolm X , an iconic literary troublemaker tells the colorful stories behind the stories
Richard Seaver came to Paris in 1950 seeking Hemingway's moveable feast. Paris had become a different city, traumatized by World War II, yet the red wine still flowed, the cafés bustled, and the Parisian women found American men exotic and heroic. There was an Irishman in Paris writing plays and novels unlike anything anyone had ever read--but hardly anyone was reading them. There were others, too, doing equivalently groundbreaking work for equivalently small audiences. So when his friendslaunched a literary magazine, Merlin, Seaver knew this was his calling: to bring the work of the likes of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet to the world. The Korean War ended all that--the navy had paid for college and it was time to pay them back. After two years at sea, Seaver washed ashore in New York City with a beautiful French wife and a wider sense of the world than his compatriots. The only young literary man with the audacity to match Seaver's own was Barney Rosset of Grove Press. A remarkable partnershipwas born, one that would demolish U.S. censorship laws with inimitable joie de vivre as Seaver and Rosset introduced American readers to Lady Chatterly's Lover , Henry Miller, Story of O , William Burroughs, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and more. As publishing hurtles into its uncertain future, The Tender Hour of Twilight is a stirring reminder of the passion, the vitality, and even the glamour of a true life in literature.
Author Notes
Richard Seaver was an editor, publisher, and translator who became legendary for championing unconventional writers in the face of censorship and cultural prudishness. He was the editor in chief of Grove Press in the 1960s, started his own imprint at Viking in 1971, and served as publisher of Holt, Rinehart & Winston until he founded Arcade Publishing in 1988, which he ran with his wife, Jeannette, until his death in 2009.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Like many American writers in the 1950s, Seaver went to Paris in search of the golden age of adventurous expatriate writers like Hemingway. Soon after his arrival, however, Seaver created his own golden age with his eloquent essays that introduced Samuel Beckett to the world and his adventurous exploits in publishing with the literary journal Merlin, whose fame he helped establish with the writings of Beckett, Sartre, and Ionesco. In this charming memoir, edited by his wife, Jeanette, Seaver cleverly chronicles his decade in Paris, where he met his wife, dipped his toes into book publishing, and introduced not only Beckett and Ionesco but also Jean Genet and numerous others to the world. After a stint in the Navy, Seaver moved to New York and entered publishing, first as a book club editor and scout and then most famously as the editor-in-chief of Grove Press. Grove's founder, Barney Rosset, had noticed Seaver's work on Merlin and had begun courting him even before Seaver left Paris. Together, they built a remarkable list that included the unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, Marguerite Duras, Kenneth Koch, William Burroughs, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and even Eric Berne's best-selling Games People Play. In those heady days of publishing, as Seaver nicely and insightfully details, he and Rosset signed up books if the manuscript was good, the author serious, and the premise was provocative and controversial. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The late Seaver was a book editor whose career, intersecting with authors like Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Henry Miller, followed a colorful, impressionistic pattern, according to his memoir. Its episodes place Seaver first in bohemian Parisian literary circles, which Seaver inhabited from the late 1940s to 1954. Fondly bemused by his years abroad, Seaver recounts them with entertaining panache as he and his companions start a periodical, kite its financing, and tempt the interest of Sartre or Orson Welles. This idyll is interrupted by a U.S. Navy summons to active duty, but once discharged, Seaver resumed working in publishing for Barney Rosset's Grove Press, which routinely invited controversy in the 1960s with titles (like Miller's Tropic of Cancer) denounced as obscene. Breezy, insouciant vignettes of his high-strung boss, eccentric or drug-plagued authors, and adventures with William Burroughs at the Democratic Party's 1968 Convention reflect Seaver's revelry in his vocation, which ends with his departure from Grove in the early 1970s. A wry remembrance for readers interested in the industry, it recalls publishing's precorporate past, when contracts were signed with handshakes over drinks.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN the winter of 1954 my wife, Barbara, and I spent a few weeks in a grand, gloomy Paris apartment amid scratched and faded 18th-century furniture and silken walls at 35 Rue de la Faisanderie, off Avenue Foch, a chic address. The apartment belonged to Doubleday & Company, my employer, and was used by the occasional sojourner from the New York office, though there was no Doubleday business in Paris to justify such luxury. At the age of 25 I was such a sojourner, rewarded for having created a successful new paperback format that would become the industry standard. In Paris I visited the offices of the great French publishing houses Gallimard, Plon and Hachette, and in the evening Barbara and I were treated to Krug and La Tâche at Le Grand Véfour and Chez Allard, where we chatted with our hosts about the Sartre-Camus quarrel, the emerging cold war and the calamity of Senator Joseph McCarthy. If Paris was the scene of a postwar literary revival, no one we met had heard of it. The writers I saw were displaced European intellectuals, former leftists now working secretly for the C.I.A. How I regretted as I read "The Tender Hour of Twilight," Richard Seaver's lovely posthumous memoir of his very different Paris in the '50s and his brilliant, truncated career at Grove Press in the '60s, that I hadn't spent more time on the other side of the Seine. There I would probably have met him among the young American and British writers associated with the quarterly magazine Merlin, which would introduce in English translation the undiscovered writers - Beckett, Genet, Ionesco - whom Dick would later publish in New York at Grove. Only then, when he had become one of the great book publishers of his generation, did I finally meet him and become a lifelong friend and admirer. Dick may have intended his memoir to be read privately by his children, which could explain the liberties he seems to have taken with remembered conversation, though according to his widow, Jeannette, who edited the text and submitted it for publication, he kept a journal and may have taken contemporaneous notes. This is how he describes his introduction to Alex Trocchi, Merlin's heroin-addled Scottish-Italian editor, to whom Dick would soon submit his translations of Beckett and urge the publication of Genet and others: "It was a typical Left Bank hotel room of the time, small and dimly lit, with hideous flowered wallpaper scuffed and peeling in a dozen places. Its only window looked onto an oversized air shaft . . . with a scrawny tree that had managed . . . to push its fragile branches as high as this floor. A hesitant handful of lance-shaped leaves fluttered just outside the window. It turned out to be a sumac. . . . 'Can I offer you some tea?' Alex said. 'Or coffee? Or perhaps a bit of fine Scotch?' He paused. 'Or is it too early for that?'" In an epigraph taken by Seaver from James Salter's classic, "A Sport and a Pastime," a novel set in postwar France, as tenderly evocative as Seaver's memoir, Salter explains how the past may be recaptured: "Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. . . . The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design." One also thinks of Proust. Seaver was in Paris on a scholarship to the Sorbonne, where he defended in French his 300-page thesis, also in French, on Joyce and was awarded a Ph.D., très honorable. In addition to his stipend he picked up a little extra teaching English and translating. Like his fellow seekers, he scraped by cheerfully, falling in and out of love and discovering the writers whom he would later introduce to American readers. He easily read Beckett's difficult French, the language Beckett had adopted in despair of finding an English publisher and because France had been his home since before the war. Jeannette writes in her foreword that "discovering Beckett . . . was for Dick an overwhelming event, a kind of intellectual explosion. It stopped him short. From then on . . . Dick felt unable to pursue his own writing. His muse turned silent," though not permanently, as this enchanting memoir suggests. He tells Trocchi and the other Merlinites how he found Beckett. It was by "chance," he says. "Chance and geography. I live on the Rue du Sabot, and to get to St. Germain, I usually go by the Rue Bernard Palissy, where there is a young French publishing house, Les Éditions de Minuit. . . . I saw two books displayed, 'Molloy' and 'Malone,' by one Samuel Beckett. The name rang a Joycean bell, but . . . I couldn't figure what an Irishman was doing chez Minuit." Seaver assumed they were translations, so he asked two English-language booksellers "if they had the originals, and both said no, never heard of them. So, my curiosity piqued, I went into the Minuit offices and bought both books. Turned out they were in fact written in French. And what French, I might add. They knocked me out." In the spring of 1953 Seaver opened a letter from Barney Rosset, who had just acquired for a few thousand dollars the assets of Grove Press, a stillborn Greenwich Village publishing firm. Rosset said he was coming to France, and could Mr. Seaver introduce him to Beckett? Dick replied that Beckett was reclusive, but he should approach Beckett's publisher, M. Jérôme Lindon at Les Éditions de Minuit. Rosset replied that he was now in touch with Minuit and had made an offer for Beckett in America. Rosset later asked Seaver to join him at Grove, and Dick, now married to the beautiful Jeannette Medina, a concert violinist who had recently won a scholarship to Juilliard, accepted. The '60s would be a time of triumph and tragedy for Dick and Barney. The triumph was the brilliant countercultural list built by Rosset and Seaver: Beckett, Genet, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Brendan Behan, John Rechy, William Burroughs - names that evoke the era. More significant, Rosset also decided with Seaver's support to uproot literary censorship in the United States once and for all, beginning with Grove's defiant publication of the unexpurgated "Lady Chatterley's Lover," followed by Henry Miller's "Tropics"; "Naked Lunch"; and "Story of O." The legal fees were crushing. The victory was historic. Grove's triumph, as Seaver tells it, is an essential contribution to the moral history of the United States, to say nothing of its inestimable value to readers, writers and publishers. Rosset's decision to put his infant firm at risk was an act of Byronic boldness. The other side of the Byronic coin, a coin with no thickness, is rashness. Rosset was a gifted and courageous publisher and a terrible businessman. His undoing was his decision to distribute "I Am Curious (Yellow)," a mildly pornographic Swedish film that unexpectedly became a profitable sensation. With this windfall Barney foolishly built expensive new offices and expanded his staff. My uptown colleagues and i watched with fear and trembling as the tragedy unfolded. Next year's prospects were poor, and the staff, bedazzled by the expensive offices, rebelled, demanding impossible concessions. Some of the staff was let go by an enraged Rosset, and the building abandoned. But by then the profound personality differences between the meticulous Seaver and the mercurial Rosset had become untenable. It was time for Dick to leave. "Have you really made up your mind?" Barney asked in the drab, cramped offices to which Grove had retreated with its depleted staff. "You simply can't afford me," Dick replied tactfully, at which Barney "got to his feet and, with all his 130 pounds, gave me a bear hug worthy of someone twice his size and weight. A hug as hearty as any I'd ever had." Seaver, a college wrestler, writes with authority. Dick carried on at other houses and for the last 20 years with Jeannette at Arcade, their own small firm, until his unexpected death at 82 in January 2009. A brilliant countercultural list: from left, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Seaver, Jeannette Seaver, Jean Genet and William Burroughs, Chicago, 1968. After discovering Beckett, Seaver himself felt unable to write. 'His muse turned silent,' his widow says. Jason Epstein, the author of "Book Business," was for many years the editorial director of Random House.
Kirkus Review
Merlin, published by Alex Trocchi and Patrick Bowles. Seaver, who spoke French fluently and was in the process of completing graduate studies on James Joyce, had become acquainted with the writing of Samuel Beckett, also living in Paris but then fairly unknown although he had been publishing since the late '20s. Seaver's essay about Beckett and subsequent translations of his short work in the magazine helped spread the word about the brilliant but reclusive bilingual author, whom Seaver finally befriended and depicts here in wonderfully explicit passages. Other legendary figures Seaver encountered included the towering Jean-Paul Sartre, who graciously offered pieces from his own Les Temps modernes and urged him to publish Jean Genet. Gradually the magazine ventured into publishing books, inviting Olympia Press publisher Maurice Girodias to act as manager debuting with Beckett's Watt. Marriage to young French violinist Jeanette--later his co-editor at Arcade Publishing and the editor of this posthumously published work--and two subsequent years in the Navy Reserves prompted Seaver to relocate to New York, where he segued naturally into the managing editor role at Grove Press, run by Barney Rosset, the English publisher of Beckett and many of the same incendiary authors Seaver had championed in France. Indeed, the press would make its name fighting pornography charges in the '60s against D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (and Capricorn) and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, and valiantly standing by Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, among many others. A rich record of the vicissitudes of publishing during an inimitable time and place.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1 Café Sitting at St. Germain ONE SPARKLING LATE MAY MORNING in 1952 when, after endless weeks of dreary, unrelenting winterlike weather, the sun had finally wormed its way through the stubborn gray blanket that had been clinging to Paris, I was sitting on the terrace of the Café Royal at St. Germain des Prés, pretending to read the paper but really watching the world go by, a constant stream of locals and a trickle of tourists--the latter so obvious they could have been picked from the crowd even by the familiar cyclopean beggar who went, appropriately, by the name Petit Jésus, bowing scrapingly low at the church door across the square, his floppy beret extended to welcome the occasional oblation--the Parisian girls suddenly out in full force, piquant and pert in their flowered smocks and blouses, their swirling skirts, their high-toned legs. After seven drab months of hibernation, they had, seemingly overnight, emerged in full flower, a medley of primary colors, proclaiming that winter was finally, irrevocably over. Each colorful passerby, floozy or Flora, just waiting to be plucked. I was enjoying my café crème when I heard a male voice, melodious with its South African lilt. "Why are you shaking your head?" "Patrick!" I said, motioning to the empty chair across from me. "You caught me ruminating." "Ruminating, my arse! You were ogling every Parisian lass passing by. I've been watching you for several minutes. "Anyway, I wanted to see you. There is somebody I want you to meet. A writer friend of mine named Alex Trocchi. He has a new magazine." " Merlin ," I said. "I saw it at the kiosk across the street." "Trocchi read your piece in Points and wants to meet you. When is a good time?" I shrugged and glanced at my watch. Eleven thirty. "How about now?" "I am not sure they'll be up," he said. "They?" "He lives with a smashing girl. An American named Jane Lougee. A banker's daughter from Limerick, Maine." "Ah," I said. "Where do Sir Trocchi and Miss Limerick live?" "About twenty minutes from here. At the Hôtel Verneuil." * * * Patrick Bowles, a white South African who could not bear to live in his tortured, apartheid-ridden homeland, had fled a year or so before to London. Appalled by its weather, he had quickly crossed the Channel to Paris, only to discover that the weather here was not all that much better, though the general climate was far more exciting. In his mid-twenties, Patrick was classically handsome: beneath a rich shock of chestnut hair lay a high prominent forehead, an arrow-straight nose, full sensuous lips, and a firm chin. There was a calmness, a gentleness about him that sprang from an inner balance few possessed--or at least few I knew. Like most of us on the Left Bank, he cobbled together an existence by placing a newspaper article here, a book review there, a story or poem in one of the literary mags (payment for which might get you a lunch or dinner at Raffy's around the corner), or, more lucratively, by teaching English at Berlitz (hey! if it was good enough for Joyce, it's good enough for us!) or, even better, teaching English to well-to-do young Parisian ladies, whose parents sensed that in this brave new postwar world their beloved mother tongue would have to yield, if only a tad, to the invasive English, if their offspring were to survive and prosper. Then there was a small supplement from home, wherever home was, a tentative gift from worried parents who pictured their wayward offspring down-and-out in Paris, living just above, or even slightly below, the imagined starvation line. Patrick and I shared another common trait: we both used, as our only means of transportation, the trusty bicycle and in our Paris years had logged thousands of kilometers, not only in Paris itself, but to and from our respective jobs. For a year or so I had earned a share of my daily bread by teaching English to Air France stewardesses twice a week. The pleasure was all mine, since most of them had been picked as much for their stunning looks and shapely forms as for their personalities or amiability. Until these postwar years, the French had never quite admitted to themselves that theirs was not the premier language of the planet and had eschewed all others, including the obtrusive English. But some prescient Air France administrator had doubtless faced up to the dismal fact that in the competitive new aviation world, a place would have to be made for zee Eenglessh . Thus to my Berlitz teaching load was added the more pleasurable, slightly more lucrative, but more demanding post at Air France. Demanding because, twice a week, I had to straddle Big Blue--for such had I dubbed my battered, thin-tired Peugeot bike--and head from the rue du Sabot to Orly Airport, a ride of an hour and a half most days. One way. Thus for an hour-and-a-half teaching twice a week I had to carve out close to six hours of my Paris life. Good for the legs, I kept telling myself. Think wrestling. Think Maurice Goudeket--Olympic athlete, Colette's husband. Think Tour de France. Go, Coppi, go! I would whisper to myself on especially dark or difficult rain-spattered days. But Patrick's gig was far worse: in January he had started teaching English at a school in Le Havre, a good two hundred kilometers from Paris, and lacking the desire--or the wherewithal--to take the train, he bicycled in every weekend. True, he had arranged with the school to have no classes on Friday or Monday, but still, it took him most of those two days to-ing and fro-ing for the pleasure of spending Saturday and Sunday here. But we were young and in Paris, and these presumably daunting mountains were as molehills to us. Both the Deux Magots and the Flore were already famous from before the war, and older writers--Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Prévert--were known to hang out there, lending those starched-waiter places a tone of slight, if not considerable, superiority generally lacking at the Royal. Basking on the terrace there, at what seemed to us both the center of the universe, we felt that there was nowhere else on earth we would rather be. So it wasn't the world of Joyce and Sylvia Beach, of Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald, or even of Henry Miller and Brassaï's haunting Paris by Night . Nor were we, however long their shadows, trying to emulate them. Paris had been their mentor or mistress; now she was ours, to do with what we would. The city had been humbled by the war. Class distinctions had been, no, not eliminated, but certainly greatly leveled--whether permanently or not only time would tell. Virtually everyone was poor. Rationing had been lifted, but luxury goods were still almost nonexistent. And the Parisians, with their reputation as acerbic, arrogant, and disputatious, were actually oftentimes pleasant, not only with one another, but now even with foreigners. That's not quite fair: France, and especially Paris, had long welcomed foreigners, especially those fleeing their own countries in times of repression, war, or revolution. Even in 1952, thirty-five years after the Russian Revolution, a fair share of Paris taxi drivers were Russian. You never knew when you'd be driven home by a prince or a count. There were many new divisions among the French, but today they were more along political than class lines. French politics had always been driven and strident, for, on the one hand, every Frenchman--and woman--had a lock on the truth and, on the other, the French yield uncomfortably, if at all, to any law ever passed, no matter what the regime. But their brutal, unexpected defeat in 1940 had humiliated the country, stripped it bare. And the war years had only humbled it further, as political lines hardened. The occupation brought out the worst in many--as it brought out the best in some--and for those who survived with their lives, if not their consciences, intact, a whole new world of hardship and deprivation awaited them after the momentary euphoria of the liberation had worn off. During my first years here I had stood in line for all the essentials, from bread to wine, milk to meat, sugar to the heating alcohol needed for your two-burner stove. So had everyone. The miracle was that the French handed us étrangers a ration card equal in all respects to those given to their own citizens. As long as you had a valid local address, you had a valid ration card. And--one of the attractions for fledgling artists and writers--life was so incredibly cheap. Thirty cents a day would get you a hotel room--not with bath, mind you, but with eau courante , "running water," as the street-level hotel sign proudly proclaimed. 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. Up to your conscience how clean you came out. 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. As for food, while there were still shortages, the indomitable French culinary spirit, which had been all but crushed by the Germans for five long years, was slowly reasserting itself, stymied only by the recurrent lack of this or that basic ingredient. American aid helped but also led to unfortunate misunderstandings, among them corn flour: there was no way on earth that corn flour could be transmuted into French bread, the country's pride (and rightly so; I could not understand how the United States had lasted all these years with, as its presumed staple, the tasteless white nonsense that passed for bread). The point was, for those lucky enough to be dealing, even partially, in pounds or dollars, one could live for a third of the cost back home. Not well, mind you. I speak only of the Left Bank and the young. There was, we knew, a whole other world across the river, the world of diplomats and businessmen, of journalists and politicians, who lived high on the hog and experienced a whole other Paris than ours. We were here to find ourselves and save the world, presumably in that order, and we were ready to do it on a shoestring. If any of us had come here with false illusions, romantically drawn by the towering figures of past generations, we soon lost them. Not only had Paris changed, so had the world. Politically and artistically, it seemed to us far more complex and challenging than the one in which those two disparate birds--the sovereignly solipsistic Joyce and the hedonistic Hemingway--had lived twenty or thirty years before. The scars of World War II were fresh, unhealed, and, as we would later learn, too often buried. Close beneath the surface, resentments still lingered, as did guilt for those with a conscience. The trials of the French who had actively compromised themselves under the Germans were by now a thing of the past, but few felt that justice had really been done. If "compromise" was an ugly word, it was far less offensive than "collaboration." The French knew that their record under the occupation was less than impeccable. But there was a difference between passivity, of survival at (almost) any cost, and active collaboration, of doing the Germans' bidding in rooting out the Jews, the Gypsies, the homosexuals, and the politically undesirables, rounding them up, and herding them to Drancy, a city just north of Paris, which the Vichy government in 1941 converted from a projected public-housing project to a prison camp, a holding pen from which over the next three years some sixty-five thousand Jews were herded into the cattle cars of death and shipped to Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The profound revelations of the Holocaust, and all it implied, were just beginning to emerge. In a recent issue of Les temps modernes I had read a document that overwhelmed me, written by a Hungarian Jewish doctor, Miklos Nyiszli, who had been deported to Auschwitz in 1944 and survived to tell the tale.1 Other revelations of Nazi atrocities--not just the horrors of war, of any war, but bestial tales of death camps and genocide, murder on a scale never seen before in human history--were emerging, tentatively at first, and with them the need for the French to do some serious soul-searching: How clean was my wartime record? To what degree did I collaborate? Meanwhile, on a whole other level, a thousand miles to the east but seemingly almost next door, the Soviet Union, our erstwhile ally, suddenly loomed as the ultimate solution to some, the ultimate menace to others. No in-between. For many French, an innately conservative people, Communism was strangely the answer, in part because the Communist record for resistance during the war was among the best, and also because the memory of the French right wing's collaboration with the Germans was still embarrassingly fresh. The conservative French often saw Germany as the buffer between them, their goods and possessions, their way of life, and Stalin's barbarian hordes to the east. For much of the war, almost to the very end, these people had lived a life free from fear: their dinner parties, their dances and entertainments, their visits to the nightclubs and concerts virtually unchanged. By late 1943, however, and more certainly with the dawn of 1944, these privileged few knew that the game was up: the invincible führer's brief but devastating stint as emperor of the Western world was coming to a cataclysmic end. But good and evil are rarely as clear-cut as people would like to believe, and for the French there was now almost as great a fear of Uncle Sam, with his frightening new weapon of ultimate destruction and paranoid politics, as there was of Uncle Joe. The scare stories coming out of Washington almost daily left us perplexed and distraught. The other Joe, the bejowled McCarthy, struck fear in our expatriate hearts, and whenever two or three Americans met--I speak still of the Left Bank--sooner or later the conversation would turn not only to the coldly self-serving machinations of the maverick senator who, thank God, was three thousand miles away but, more immediately, to his two swashbuckling sidekicks, Roy Cohn and David Schine, the not-so-funny comedy team traipsing through Europe, wreaking havoc at every embassy and consulate along the way, turning over stone after spurious stone, hoping to find a Communist, or at least a fellow traveler, cowering underneath. The French regarded these two stooges with a mixture of ridicule and disdain, wondering how we Americans could grant them--long before the phrase was born--even fifteen minutes of fame. But the French could look at the McCarthy phenomenon with distant objectivity; as far as they could tell, it did not affect them directly. We Americans, despite the watery distance between us, felt personally threatened. What had happened to the world in so short a time? With Germany and Japan defeated, wasn't there supposed to be a respite? A time to relax and recoup, to enjoy our presumed triumph over evil? After World War I, our elders had mistakenly believed, with the world made safe for democracy now and forever, it was a time to play. Drink and dance the nights away. And Paris had indulged them. Not so our generation: rightly or wrongly, we felt we had awakened from one nightmare only to find another looming. The bomb may have won the war, but it now posed a problem such as the world had never faced before. Existentialism, not hedonism, was the order of the day. Still, on this radiant spring day, it was easy to put all that behind us. Copyright (c) 2012 by Jeannette Seaver Introduction copyright (c) 2012 by James Salter Excerpted from The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the '50s, New York in the '60s: A Memoir of Publishing's Golden Age by Richard Seaver All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.