The magazine's politics were radical left. The fact that Merlin and Points had already occupied the niches of experimental and political writing was, if you believe Matthiessen, the reason why the Paris Review was positioned in the mainstream. Whereas it seems to me that the inclination to evaluate niches and markets in the first place has already positioned you. But perhaps I'm harsh. The Merlin people certainly wanted their magazine to succeed. Jane hawked it in the cafés and train stations with Fuki on her shoulder. Partly eccentric theater, living the life, but that was the magazine, too, wasn't it? Trocchi had emigrated from Glasgow because the provincial Glaswegians were not hip to existentialism, which I suppose makes Trocchi one of those zillions of Sartre groupies which Samedi Soir had satirized years earlier. Well, but it was a French philosophy after all, so it's hardly surprising the French were there first. (See workpoints.)

Besides, that's what you did at the time. You had something to say, you were an intellectual, you started a magazine. The Paris Review, like Les Beaux Jours in Simone de Beauvoir's Les Mandarins, belonged to a different social as well as political and economic class. Beaux-jours people are not engag‚. Beaux-jours people interview other writers about their methods, not their neuroses or their politics.

Points had been the first of the post-war English-language literary magazines in Paris, begin in early 1949 by Sindbad Vail, a native Frenchman but the son of Peggy Guggenheim and so natively bi-cultural. Zero followed close on in the spring of that year, its first issue edited from 29 rue Jacob but thereafter packed off to the Tangier scene with Bowles, where Ginsberg and Burroughs would visit a decade later.

New-Story started up in March 1951, about the time Points was fading, at 29 Place Dauphine near the old club Tabou. This was published in New York by Gargoyle and edited in Paris by David Burnett, the son of Martha Foley. This one didn't move as far as Tangier before its second issue, only to 6 Boulevard Poissonnière on the lower border of Montmartre, behind the Bourse.

So on May 15th, 1952, when Merlin published its first 53 pages, there was already a tradition. [note9]

In the autumn of 1952, Alice Jane Lougee of Limerick, Maine, became the publisher of Merlin. But she'd been in it from the first: it was she who'd suggested the idea of a magazine the year before, and it may have been the first issue which she financed by the sale of her car in Maine. The $100 a month she was getting for living expenses from her father went to help support Trocchi's wife in England. Two years and five issues. The leftovers were collected and financed by Olympia Press in the summer of 1955, but by that time it was all over and everyone had gone. When the Paris Review started up in the spring of 1953 it was the end of the line, and soon enough it was in New York.

An issue of Merlin cost £430 to produce. This would be 413,000 francs or somewhere around $1000 in paradiso money, almost a year's living expenses -- about $7600 in 1995 dollars but $32,000 in purchasing power, going by the rule of thumb that things cost then about one-fourth of what they do now. If Jane had contributed her whole stipend she would have made up about half what was needed. Without information on print run I can't say what sales might have contributed, but there seems to be a shortfall of $500 a year or so in the business plan (hence the car was sold), and then somehow Jane's rent in the bed-sit on the rue de Verneuil still had to be paid, so she worked as a charwoman beginning in 1953 for a thousand francs a week ($10 a month), and then as a tutor to military children. The guys did the writing and got the publicity, but this thing was Jane's idea and it was carried on Jane's shoulders.

Sylvia Beach doesn't say what it cost to produce the first edition of Ulysses, but the sales value was 185,000 francs. At the time, 5000 francs a year was enough for a bourgeois life, and the sales value of the book was about a million and a half in current buying power. About the same as five issues of Merlin.

In addition to being hawked around, the magazine was sold at Gaïte Frogé's English Bookshop in the rue de Seine, an atelier and gallery district in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés near the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (route stop 12) and at George Whitman's Librarie Mistral in the Latin Quarter (route stop 24). All the four central Merlin people were noses, present in Paris by the summer of 1951, Trocchi for a year at that point and Richard Seaver for two. Seaver was said (in the credits to the second issue) to be working for a French film company. Trocchi was an ideologue attracted by French thought and oppressed at home. Christopher Logue seems to have been the classic bohemian poet, not unsurprisingly found in Paris. Lougee is more of a puzzle. Subsidized by her father, living in middle-class Auteuil and working as a secretary, she must have had some prior experience of France and command of the language, most probably as a child before the war. But she also seems, as with Sylvia Beach seeking out avant-garde French authors in Adrienne Monnier's bookshop, an agenda of her own, and as soon as she found an entry into the bohemian artistic life she was really after, she took it. But it was a youthful fling -- when the bloom was off the life she went home again, like so many others.

Alexander Trocchi went to Paris from Glasgow with his wife Betty in the summer 1950. Seaver says he met him at the Deux Magots after having published a piece in Points; in another place it was his contacts with Patrick Bowles which led him to Trocchi, which suggests some time in 1951. Trocchi and Logue met that summer, on the stairs of a "run-down hotel in the rue de la Huchette" after returning from the Pyrenees. Patrick Bowles was a young South African, probably also resident by this time. (Bowles was also the main contact with Samuel Beckett, through Jerome Lindon, the editor of Editions de Minuit.) Then in the fall of 1951 Trocchi's wife settled in Newcastle and Trocchi returned to Paris with all the elements in place for a new life. When he met Jane Lougee (she remembers autumn 1951, he said at an art exhibition in January 1952) she said she'd fund the magazine and they were off.

The last major player was Austryn Wainhouse, who had appeared by the third issue (Winter 1952/1953). Wainhouse was an American poet, married (his wife Muffy appears in the Café de Tournon photograph), and working at the time on a translation of Sade. This is how the connection was made, because Maurice Girodias's father Jack Kahane had asked Samuel Beckett to translated Sade for Olympia Press in 1938. Through Wainhouse's introduction, Girodias put money into Merlin (eventually taking it over) and thus with it inadvertantly acquired Beckett's Watt. Wainhouse was sought out by Trocchi through the Librarie Mistral.

Then it was over. Lougee sailed for New York August 10th, 1954, and by December she was married to one Gordon Griscom. Seaver and Wainhouse left the following year, and Trocchi in April of 1956. (I don't know what happened to Logue.)

Among others sometimes associated with Merlin, Terry Southern (not counting Beckett) had been there before them all, since September of 1948. He met Trocchi, he says, in the Café Florian. The date is uncertain, but since this was after the Paris Review had started (Trocchi had gotten Southern's address at the time, in a hotel on the Place de la Concorde, from George Plimpton) this was probably not until 1953. Southern left Paris that year.

Alfred Chester went to Paris in the summer of 1950 and stayed until 1963, but after the first issue his associations were elsewhere. Chester appears in the Café de Tournon photograph. Henry Charles Hatcher appeared in the first three issues but was he ever in Paris? Likewise Burford went home after his Fullbright year. Ernst Fuchs, reviewed by Lougee in n4 (Summer 1953) as a young Viennese painter living in Paris -- he had been one of the community of artists Trocchi knew in 1950 and 1951 before starting the magazine, when Betty was with him -- hints at another, entirely different circle of friends, perhaps the ones whose exhibition drew Trocchi and Lougee together.

Others, only names to me: John P Marquand Jr (writing as John Phillips), John Coleman (the business manager for n5, Autumn 1953), John Stevenson (the business manager for n6, Autumn 1954) and W Baird Bryant (who first appears as an associate editor in 1954). [pic17]

The best thing which Merlin did was to print Beckett. Seaver had begun this almost before there was a magazine, in the winter of 1951 after reading Molloy. En attendant Godot was yet unproduced and getting hold of Beckett was the first hard job. But the word was on the street, and Seaver's article (just about the first in English) appeared in number two, and they wrote some letters, finally and in the late fall Beckett showed up in Seaver's room with the manuscript of Watt, which he had given up thought of selling to anyone.. This was also where Wainhouse and Girodias came in, Girodias being the essential French partner required by the government for foreign publishing ventures, and Collection Merlin the new imprint needed to reassure Beckett, who had no wish to associate with a pornographer. Watt appeared in 1953 follwing on the success of Godot, which somewhat overshadowed it (an Ionesco's The Chairs, also). They sold two thousand copies.

The Merlin folk in their dealings with Beckett are portrayed as bouncy and exuberent kids surrounding him like a pack of pups. Beckett was a shy, kindly man. The image does them credit.

Although nothing is said, I have the impression that the attitude of the Paris Review people was not especially warm. Peter Matthiessen, before he roped Plimpton into the project from Cambridge, had applied to be the London distributor of Merlin and been turned down. Given Matthiessen's CIA money and State Department connections (Plimpton lived at first in the tool shed of a house loaned to some other people by the diplomatic corps) a pairing with Trocchi seems not very workable, anyway. But as the magazines were by that time the only two players, they rubbed along. There is a group portrait taken outside the Café de Tournon (see route stop 45), which was a Paris Review hangout near where a number of them lived -- Roditi, Garrigue, Kunitz and Broughton in the Hôtel Helvetia, Styron and Matthiessen to the south in Montparnasse. (Plimpton lived more upscale in the Hôtel Pont Royal.) [pic18] [pic19] Inspecting the credits supplied by Plimpton one finds Merlin characterized as short-lived (and hence clearly less important) and it's publisher's name mis-spelled as "Logue" while Seaver's subsequent standing requires him to be here merely "associated" with the magazine. Trocchi isn't present. Fuki isn't noticed.

Living conditions are one of the hardest things to imagine about other times. One tours some grand palace in Vienna or rural England or somewhere and has it pointed out the corner where, among the frescos and faience, the befrocked men went to piss on the floor. I never know what to make of such stories. So Ferlinghetti decides in 1948 to move out of his chambre en famille for something a little cheaper. A few years later Mason Hoffenberg and his wife Elie Fauré, an art historian working for the U.N., are living with their child it would seem en bourgeois a little to the south in the rue Henri Barbusse. [pic9] [pic10] Ferlinghetti's place is unheated and they have to keep a stewpot going all winter for warmth -- what? on a campfire on the floor? -- my first apartment in Oregon was like that -- whereas Hoffenberg's concièrge presumably didn't lock him out if he came home after ten o'clock. You can't tell for looking from the street. When Jane Lougee showed up in late 1950 with $100 a month from her father she moved into the rue Leconte de Lisle in Auteuil [pic11] and started work as a secretary. Pretty quiet, pretty nice. Pretty soon she's moved to Saint Germain to a "one-star bedsit" Southern called it, the Hôtel Verneuil. [pic12] [pic13] Looks all right to me. (One star meant only that the toilet and bath were shared, and there might not be a sink, not that it was a dump.) Trocchi says he met Christopher Logue in the stairwell of a run-down hotel in the rue de la Huchette. Cadaverous man in a dirty duffle coat. Probably smelled bad, both of them. All hôtels seem to be run-down. Paris was run-down. People were trying to get by. Rationing ended four years ago but the economy sputters. Cazalis and Gréco lived in the Hôtel Louisiane in 1948 [pic14] [pic15] [pic16] where Simone de Beauvoir had lived five years earlier. In French novels of the time you hear complaints about the grayness of life but also casual remarks about sitting on a street bench on a warm evening while the good sound of jazz floats up from below. What's squalor? Apart from a necessary component of starving artists' lives, that is.

And then of course there is the inscrutable component of actually living there. Not visiting, gawking. Not stopping by for a few months before moving on to the Midi. It's the people who live there who are annoyed when an all-night pharmacy is replaced by a Versace store. It's the people who have to make ends meet who take the places with no elevator and a stopped-up toilet.

Near the Place Maubert, at the spot where every morning early I wait for the bus, three shops stand side by side: Jewelry, Wood and Coal, Butcher. Contemplating each in turn, I observe the demeanor of the coal, the firewood, the cuts of meat.

We won't pause at the metals, which are only the result of an act of violence or dispersion by humans on mud or certain conglomerates which in themselves never had such intentions; nor by precious stones, whose rarity only warrants on their behalf a few well-chosen words in a discourse on nature justly fashioned.

As for meat, palpitations at the sight of it, a sort of horror or fellow feeling, obliges me to the greatest circumspection. Freshly cut, moreover, generating out of itself a veil of steam or smoke to hide from those same eyes which want to estabish what properly speaking is cynicism: I have said all that I dare when I have attracted the attention, for a moment, to its panting face.

But the contemplation of wood and coal is a source of glee which comes as easily as it is sober and steady, which I would be willing to share out. Without doubt it would require many pages, when I have available here not half of one. It is because of this limitation that I propose to you these subjects for meditation: First, time constrained to a particular course always revenges itself in death. Second, brown, because brown lies between green and black on the road to carbonization, that destiny which for wood is still a possibility -- at a minimum -- is an intimation, that is to say a mistake, a mis-step, and every possible misunderstanding.

Francis Ponge, Le parti pris des choses. Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1942.

The Place Maubert is at route stop 24.

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