Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings Read online

  I am very tempted to hire immediately an enormous car, not even to drive it, just for the psychological sense of being in control of the city. But if you park in the street, you have to go down at 7 a.m. to move it to the other side of the street, since the parking restrictions alternate between the two sides of the street.

  And a garage costs a fortune.

  The Most Beautiful Image of New York by Night

  At the bottom of the Rockefeller Centre there is an ice-rink with young boys and girls skating on it, right in the heart of New York by night, between Broadway and Fifth Avenue.

  Chinatown

  The poor immigrants in their neighbourhoods are rather depressing: the Italians in particular look sinister. But not the Chinese: Chinatown, for all its tourist exploitation, exudes an air of civilized, hard-working well-being and genuine happiness unknown in the other ‘typical’ neighbourhoods in New York. At Bo-bo’s the Chinese cuisine is amazing.

  My First Sunday New York Times

  Although I had read and heard about it, going to the newsagent to take delivery of a bundle of paper you can hardly carry in your two arms, all for twenty-five cents, leaves you stunned. Amid the various sections and supplements I manage to find the NYT Book Review which we are used to thinking of as a separate journal, whereas it is just one of the many inserts in the Sunday edition of the paper.

  My Ford Grant Colleagues

  In New York we came across the English poet who was travelling in tourist class and who now instantly wants away because he cannot settle here and he prefers to live in the country; and the Israeli scholar and essayist on politics and religion, Meged,16 who is also the author of a novel which has never been translated into any European language. He is a serious character, quite different from the others, and not very pleasant; I do not really understand him, and I don’t think I’ll see him again, because he also wants to go and stay in a small university town. The place of Günther Grass (poor Grass didn’t know he was tubercular: he only discovered it when he went for the medical for the visa, and now he is in a sanatorium) will be taken not by a German but by another Frenchman, Robert Pinget, the person who wrote Le Fiston (he has now finished another novel).17

  The Press Conference

  The IIE is organizing a press conference with the six of us. In the biographical notes distributed to those present, the item about me that struck everyone was that I was recommended by Princess Caetani, who has such a high opinion of me. The press conference has the same amateurish and rather forced air that you find in Eastern-bloc democracies, the same kind of people, young girls, silly questions. Arrabal, who speaks no English and replies in a whisper, failed to cause a stir. ‘Which American writers do you want to meet?’ He replies: ‘Eisenhower’, but does so very quietly, and Lettunich, who acts as interpreter, does not want to repeat it. Ollier dryly points out (replying to the question of whether we are pessimists or optimists) that he holds a materialist conception of the world. I say that I believe in history and that I am against the ideologies and religions that want man to be passive. At these words, the President of the IIE gets up from the Chairman’s table, leaves the room and never reappears.

  Alcoholic

  I will become very shortly, if I start drinking at 11 in the morning and continue until 2 a.m. the next night. After the first few days in New York, what is necessary is a strict regime of energy conservation.

  Is my book [The Baron in the Trees] displayed in the bookshops, either in the window or on the shelves?

  No. Never. Not in one single bookshop.

  Random House

  The real pain is that the managing editor, Hiram Haydn, after sponsoring The Baron has left Random House to found Atheneum, and Mr [Donald] Klopfer, the owner and founder, has no faith in the commercial possibilities of my book, talking to me in the same way as Cerati18 does to Ottiero Ottieri.19 Every bookshop received four or five copies of my book and whether they sold them or not, they don’t restock: what can the publisher do in these circumstances? The Americans don’t appreciate fantasy, it’s all very well getting good reviews (there was a wonderful one in Saturday’s Saturday Review), even the bookshop owner reads them and ought to know what to do. I manage to wring a promise from him to send Cerati to talk to the bookshop owners, but I don’t believe it will happen. However, I am having lunch with him on Thursday. I have learnt from the girls (I am always very impressed by them: in terms of its editorial department, Random House is one of the most serious publishers) that there have been mix-ups in distribution because of the IBM machines that Random House has just installed in its sales department: two machines had faults and so tiny bookstores in villages in Nebraska have received dozens of copies of The Baron, while major bookshops in Fifth Avenue have not received a single one. But the basic point is that the publicity budget for my book was only 500 dollars, which is nothing: to launch a book you have to spend half a million dollars, otherwise you will not achieve anything. The fact is that the big commercial publishers are fine when the book is a natural best-seller, but they are not interested in promoting the kind of book which first has to do well in terms of the literary élite: all they want is the prestige of having published it. At present they have three best-sellers: the new Faulkner, the new Penn Warren, and Hawaii by a commercial writer called [James Michener], and those are the ones they sell.

  Orion Publishers

  consists of two tiny rooms. This [Howard] Greenfeld is a bright, rich boy, but it’s difficult to understand what they want to achieve. However, since they only do very few books, they look after the commercial side, also as a kind of public relations exercise, and the Italian Folktales are everywhere, also because they come under children’s books even though Orion has done nothing to push the book in the children’s literature direction. On Sunday there was a review of it in the New York Times Book Review, very flattering as far as the Italian original was concerned but rightly critical of the translation.

  Horch

  She seems a woman who is on the ball, a fearsome old bird, but very warm and kind. She does not want to give The Cloven Viscount to Random House, who now want it, and I agree with her in keeping it for the smallest but most prestigious publishing house. So she will give it to Atheneum which will start publishing soon and it will certainly be a publishing event of tremendous importance since these are three highly prestigious editors who have got together: one is Haydn who used to be manager of Random House, another is Michael Bessie from Harper’s and the third is Knopf ’s son [Pat]. I have already made a bit of a mess of things because I made a promise to Grove who are sticking close to me, and indeed Grove books you find everywhere: they are the most fashionable books in avant-garde circles. Actually they did have an oral promise from Horch, but she wants to give the book to Haydn, and I also believe that Atheneum will be important.

  10 November

  Rosset

  The cocktail party at Barney Rosset’s of Grove was the most interesting party to have brightened up my days here so far, and also the one that had the widest variety of people. It confirmed the verdict we reached on Rosset at Frankfurt: daringly and very classily avant-garde but lacking in historical and moral backbone. Rosset (and his partner Dick Seaver, who was also at Frankfurt, and who lives with a French wife in a hovel at the top end of Manhattan, which has nevertheless been adapted internally into an elegant intellectual’s house) has to be understood mostly by seeing him in the Village: he has the spirit of the Village intellectual’s eternal (and unproductive) protest against the even more eternal conformism of America. Consequently he gives credit to the beatniks because he says they are useful in waking up young Americans from their TV-watching; he gives credit indiscriminately to everything that Europe does in terms of avant-gardism, because it is useful for waking up America.

  The Beat Generation

  Allen Ginsberg came to Rosset’s party, with his disgusting black straggly beard, a white T-shirt beneath a dark, double-breasted suit, and tennis shoes. With him there w
as a whole crowd of beatniks who were even more bearded and filthy. They have all moved from San Francisco to New York, including Kerouac, who did not come tonight, however.

  Arrabal’s Adventure

  The beatniks naturally fraternize with Arrabal, who is also bearded (his Parisian under-the-chin beard and their unkempt beatnik beards), and invite him to their house to listen to his poetry readings. Ginsberg lives with another bearded man as man and wife and would like Arrabal to be present at their bearded couplings. When I got back to the hotel, I found Arrabal looking frightened and scandalized because they wanted to seduce him. This Teddy Boy who had come to America to scandalize others is totally terrified at his first encounter with the American avant-garde and suddenly is revealed as the poor little Spanish boy who up until a few years ago was still studying to become a priest.

  He says that at home the beatniks are very clean, they have a beautiful house complete with fridge and television, and they live as a quiet bourgeois ménage and dress up in dirty clothes only to go out.

  A Broadway Première

  Hugo Claus went to the première of a new play by [Paddy] Chayefski [sic]. He says that after the show he went to dinner at Sardi’s, where all the playwrights and theatre people dine. Everyone awaits the appearance of the next day’s papers in a state of great anxiety, because one hour after the end of the show, around 1 a.m., the New York Times and the Herald are already out with their reviews (the reviews are written then, not at the dress rehearsal). The papers arrive. Amid a total silence one of the actors reads the review. As soon as they hear that the critic liked the show, they all applaud, embrace each other and order champagne. The play will be on for two years; if the notices had been unfavourable it would have been taken off after a few days. Immediately the impresarios and agents come forward, the worldwide rights to the show are sold, people rush off to the telephones, and in the space of an hour the fate of the show for the foreseeable future has been decided, with an instant turnover of millions.

  The Jews

  Seventy-five percent of the publishing world here is Jewish. Ninety percent of the theatre is Jewish. The ready-to-wear clothes industry, New York’s major industry, is almost exclusively Jewish. Banks, however, are completely closed to Jews, as are the universities. The few Jewish doctors are regarded as the best because such difficulties are put in the way of Jews trying to get into university and to pass exams that those who do succeed in graduating in medicine have to be of extraordinary brilliance.

  The Women

  Very attractive women are rare. On the whole they are petite-bourgeois . Whichever way you look at it, it’s basically like Turin.

  Adventure of an Italian

  In order to familiarize himself with the big city, the Italian newcomer spent the evenings going to one party after another, following people he did not know into houses owned by people he knew even less. Thanks to a very witty and intelligent actress, he ends up in the house of a beautiful singer from television, amid a rather commercial crowd of theatre people, impresarios, etc. He meets a young fellow-Italian who is an airplane steward who spends half his week in Rome, the other half in NY. When the Italian newcomer is about to take the actress back to her home, the steward suggests they form a foursome, and persuades the actress to invite along a rather pretty girl who is a cinema actress. The girl quickly agrees, the two Italians are already rubbing their hands as if everything was signed and sealed, and all they had to do was to decide on who takes which girl. But in the actress’s house the conversation turns to culture and progressive politics. By this stage it is clear that there will be no action. The girls are anything but stupid, even the Hollywood actress who at first seemed the usual starlet. It turns out that both are Russian and both Jewish. In the end the two Italians leave and the Hollywood actress stays to sleep with her friend. It turns out that they are both lesbians. The two Italians go out into the deserted, drizzling streets of New York at 5 in the morning.

  The Situation

  My desire to discover something new taking shape in this America which has emerged from the Cold War has not found anything promising so far. It seems that there are no other groups like the New Deal people emerging on the horizon, and the current climate – although everyone agrees it is enormously improved – seems to hold no promise of any change among the country’s leaders. The country continues to prosper and the relaxed mood strengthens the internal status quo.

  Corruption

  Everyone’s conversation these days is about American corruption, the corruption and greed for money in the institutions of power, the newspapers, etc., which they say has never been so rife. The TV scandal concerning Van Doren,20 which is the main topic in the papers, is seen as a symbol of the universal acceptance of deceit. In certain quarters (for instance, in the theatre world) Van Doren is defended as being just a scapegoat for a situation which prevails everywhere.

  The Third Sex

  is even more widespread than in Rome. Especially here in the Village. The unwitting tourist goes into any outlet to have breakfast and suddenly notices that everyone in the place, customers, waiters, chefs, are all clearly of that persuasion.

  A Small World

  The European visitor was really happy with his first American girlfriend. He certainly could not have wished to find anyone better, any girl more joyfully enthusiastic and problem-free. But the thing which he liked best of all was that she was so totally American, devoid of any contact with Europe. She had only spent a few weeks in Europe some years ago. After a few days of contented love, he discovered that when in Europe she had been the girlfriend of his friend X whose ex-girlfriend Z had also been his girlfriend.

  Mischa

  I have only seen him once, out at lunch, because at home his children have got ’flu. But we will see each other a lot. He is the person who says the most intelligent things and gives the most valuable pointers on America. Elizabeth I have only met in the street; she has not written again because she was waiting for Giulio to write.21 Now we will work out how to organize the work.

  Jacqueline

  Wonderful creature. I spent yesterday evening with her. But being with her is difficult for me since her extreme irritability transmits a certain uneasiness (though I’ve noticed that as you speak to her this gradually diminishes), and it is not very useful because I can’t get anything out of her either as regards publishing (her qualities are neither literary nor editorial), nor socially (being a pessimist and a misanthrope, she stays very much inside her shell). She represents the other side of America, the negative, painful one. And as such, she too will be an inevitable point of reference for me, precisely because she is the one American woman I have met so far with whom you cannot instantly establish a naturally cordial relationship.

  How Random House Works

  Editorial Department: every editor (whether Senior or Junior) knows the author personally. A writer such as Faulkner has his own editor with whom he is in continual correspondence for all matters editorial. (Administrative issues are not part of the picture: these are dealt with between the author’s agent and the publisher’s legal department.) The editor works with the author on the book; it is common practice for him to make the author correct his manuscript until there is nothing left that he is unhappy with. The editor is usually the person who has sponsored the book’s publication, in the case of a new author; if the author has long been on the publisher’s books, his editor is the person who has always dealt with him and knows how to approach him. The editor, they tell me, has to ensure that a character who has dark hair in the first chapter does not have fair hair in chapter ten. But in reality the person who deals with these minutiae is the copy-editor who works under the editor: he reads and rereads the proofs finding things to correct, though he is not the person who corrects typographical errors, because they work in the printers and have nothing to do with the publisher. (Random House does not have its own printers.) The person who is responsible in the publisher’s eyes for the book coming out, f
or how long it takes to get published, etc. was called the managing editor while Haydn was there, but now Albrecht Erskine has arrived he is called the executive editor. (Erskine is, moreover, Faulkner’s editor.)

  The Art Department deals with the cover, the binding, the illustrations.

  The Production Department is what we call the technical office.

  The Publicity Department is not to be confused with the Advertising Department. The latter deals with publicity that is to be paid for. Random House has no such department because it has a contract with an advertising firm that deals with publicity for the books, operating on a budget for every book that is decided by the publisher. This firm also prepares the wording of fliers and sends them directly to the publisher for approval. Instead the Publicity Department deals only with the papers, with relationships with reviewers (and when possible with radio and TV), and it all revolves round public relations and lunch invitations, and is always carried out in fact by female staff. Even very small publishers like Orion concentrate their efforts in this area.

  The Promotions Department works on mail-order sales, using advertisements with order forms in newspapers and sending out postcards to various addresses depending on the kind of book. This is a very important department with around ten staff in it.

  The Sales Department is run by machines, as I have explained already and as my book has discovered.

  The Juvenile Department: Random House has one of the largest outputs of children’s literature and this is looked after by a separate editorial department.

  The College Department is for school texts. The Modern Library series was initially under the College Department, but is now under the Editorial Department.

  The Legal Department deals with the question of rights.