Hermit in Paris (2 page)

My Travelling Companions (Young Creative Writers)

There are only three of them because the German Günther [
sic
] Grass failed the medical examination and, thanks to the barbaric law that you have to have sound lungs to enter America, he has had to give up the scholarship.
¹⁰

There is a fourth writer who is going tourist (third) class because he is bringing with him, at his own expense, his wife and young son, so we have only seen him once. He is Alfred Tomlinson, an English poet, a typical example of a British university type.
¹¹
He is thirty-two but could be fifty-two.

The other three are:

Claude Ollier, French, thirty-seven years old, a
Nouveau Roman
writer: to date he has only written one book.
¹²
He wanted to take advantage of the voyage finally to read Proust but the ship’s travelling library only extends as far as Cronin.

Fernando Arrabal, Spanish, twenty-seven years old, small, baby-faced with a beard under his chin and a little fringe.
^13
;
He has lived in Paris for years. He has written works for the theatre which no one has ever wanted to put on and also a novel published by Julliard. He is desperately poor. He does not know any Spanish writers, and he hates them all because they call him a traitor and would like him to do Socialist Realism and write against Franco and he refuses to write against Franco, he doesn’t even know who Franco is, but in Spain you cannot publish anything or win literary prizes unless you are against Franco because the person who runs everything is [Juan] Goytisolo who forces everyone to do Socialist Realism, i.e. Hemingway-Dos Passos, but he hasn’t read Hemingway-Dos Passos, and hasn’t even read Goytisolo because he cannot stand reading Socialist Realism, and apart from Ionesco and Ezra Pound he does not like very much else. He is extremely aggressive, and jokes in an obsessive and lugubrious way, constantly bombarding me with questions about how on earth I can be interested in politics, and also about what exactly one does with women. There are two targets for his attacks: politics and sex. He and the French Teddy Boys, for whom he acts as interpreter, cannot even conceive of people who find politics or sex interesting. He is only interested in cinema (especially Cinemascope, Technicolor and gangsters), and pinball. Since leaving the seminary (he studied to be a Jesuit, in Spain) he has not had any sexual relations, apparently not even with his wife (they have been married three years), and has never had any desire to have any, and the same goes for politics. He says that the French Teddy Boys who are coming on to the scene now are even more remote than he is from politics and sex. He does not speak a word of English, and writes in French.

Hugo Claus, a Flemish Belgian, thirty-two years old, he began publishing at nineteen and since then he has written an enormous quantity of things, and for the new generation he is the most famous writer, playwright and poet of the Flemish-Dutch-speaking area.
¹⁴
Much of this stuff he himself says is worthless, including the novel which has been translated and published in France and America, but he is anything but stupid and unpleasant: he is a big, fair-haired guy with a stunning wife who is an actress (whom I got to know as she was saying goodbye to him at the quay), and he is the only one of these three who has read a lot and whose judgments are reliable. Four hours after the launch of the first sputnik he had already written a poem about it, which was published instantly on the front page of a Belgian daily paper.

My new and, I think, definitive address for all the time I will be in New York, i.e. up to around 5 January, is:

Grosvenor Hotel
35 Fifth Avenue
New York

From the Diary of the Early Days in New York

9 November 1959

Arrival

The boredom of the voyage is handsomely compensated for by the emotions stirred up on arrival at New York, the most spectacular sight that anyone can see on this earth. The skyscrapers appear grey in the sky which has just cleared and they seem like the ruins of some monstrous New York abandoned three thousand years in the future. Then gradually you make out the colours which are different from any idea you had of them, and a complicated pattern of shapes. Everything is silent and deserted, then the car traffic starts to flow. The massive, grey, fin-de-siècle look of the buildings gives New York, as Ollier immediately pointed out, the appearance of a German city.

Lettunich

Mateo Lettunich, Head of the Arts Division of the Institute of International Education (IIE) (his family were originally from Dubrovnik), who has an obsession with saving money, did not want me to get a porter for my stuff. The Van Rensselaer hotel where he has arranged for us to have rooms is filthy, down-at-heel, stinking, a dump. If we ask him about a restaurant, he always recommends the worst one in the area. He has the worried, frightened look of those Soviet interpreters who accompany delegations, though he has none of the phlegmatic
savoir-faire
with which Victor V., the functionary who was the son of aristocrats, accompanied our delegation of young city and country workers. Those of us who have been spoiled by the hospitality of socialist countries are made to feel ill at ease by the awkward tentativeness with which the land of capitalism manages the millions of the Ford Foundation. But the fact is that here you do not travel as a delegation, and once you have cleared a few formalities, everyone goes off on his own and does what he wants and I won’t see Mateo again. He is a writer of avant-garde plays which have never been performed.

Hotels

The next day I go around Greenwich Village looking for a hotel and they are all the same: old, filthy, smelly, with threadbare carpets, even though none of them has the suicidal view of my room at the Van R. with its filthy, rusty, iron fire-escape stairs in front of the window and its view over a blind courtyard on which the sun never shines. But I make for the Grosvenor which is the Village’s elegant hotel, old but clean; I have a beautiful room in quintessentially Henry James style (it is just a short walk away from Washington Square, which has stayed mostly as it was in his time), and I pay seven dollars a day as long as I guarantee to stay two months and pay a month in advance.

New York Is Not Exactly America

This phrase, which I had read in all the books on New York, is repeated to us ten times a day, and it’s true, but what does it matter? It’s New York, a place which is neither exactly America nor exactly Europe, which gives you a burst of extraordinary energy, which you immediately feel you know like the back of your hand, as though you had always lived here, and at certain times, especially uptown where you can feel the busy life of the big offices and factories of ready-made clothes, it lands on top of you as though to crush you. Naturally, the minute you land here, you think of anything except turning back.

The Village

Maybe I’m wrong to stay in the Village. It is so unlike the rest of New York, even though it’s in the centre of the city. It is so like Paris, but deep down you realize that this is an unwitting similarity which does everything to make you believe it’s deliberate. There are three different social strata in the Village: the respectable middle-class residents, particularly in the new apartment blocks which are rising up even here; the native Italians who try to resist the influx of artists (which began in the 1910s because it cost less here) and who often fight with them (the riots and mass arrests of last spring has meant fewer Sunday tourists, who are mostly New Yorkers from other districts), but at the same time it is thanks to the bohemians and the bohemian atmosphere that the Italians survive and their shops make money; and the bohemians themselves who are all now known popularly as ‘beatniks’ and who are more dirty and unpleasant than any of their Parisian confrères. Meanwhile, the way the area looks is threatened by property speculation which plants skyscrapers even here. I signed a petition to save the Village, for a young female activist collecting signatures on the corner of Sixth Avenue. We Village people are very attached to our own area. We also have two newspapers just for ourselves: the
Villager
and the
Village Voice
.

A Small World

I am right opposite Orion Press, Mischa
¹⁵
lives a block away, Grove Press is just round the corner, and from my window I can see Macmillan’s huge building.

The Cars

The most amusing thing when you arrive is seeing that in America
all
the cars are enormous. It is not that there are small ones and big ones, they are all huge, sometimes almost laughably so: the cars we consider only for major tourist trips are normal for them, and even the taxis have really long tailfins. Among my friends, the only New Yorker with a small car is Barney Rosset, ever the nonconformist: he has one of those tiny little cars, a red Isetta.

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 Cerati
¹⁸
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.