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.Hard to conceive of an odder coupling, this rich and worldly Jewess and the monkish author of Molloy and Waiting for Godot.It makes one wonder about Beckett… and his pretentious aloofness, austerity.Because impoverished, unpublished scribes, which is what Beckett was at the time of the liaison, do not take as mistresses homely American copper heiresses without having something more than love in mind.Myself, my admiration for her notwithstanding, I guess I would have been pretty interested in her swag anyway, but the only reason I didn't run true to form by trying to get some of it away from her was that conceit had turned me into a plain damn fool; everything was to be mine the day Sleepless Millions saw print.Except that it never did.In March, when I finished the manuscript, I sent a copy to my agent, Margo Diamond, a pockmarked muffdiver who had been persuaded to handle me by another of her clients, my old discard Alice Lee Langman.Margo replied that she had submitted the novel to the publisher of my first book, Answered Prayers."However," she wrote me, "I have done this only as a courtesy, and if they turn it down, I'm afraid you will have to find another agent, as I feel it is not in your own best interest, or mine, for me to continue representing you.I will admit that your conduct toward Miss Langman, the extraordinary manner in which you repaid her generosity, has influenced my opinion.Still, I would not let that deter me if I felt you had gifts that must at all costs be encouraged.But I do not and never have.You are not an artist—and if you are not an artist, then you must at least show promise of becoming a truly skilled professional writer.But there is a lack of discipline, a consistent unevenness, that suggests professionalism is beyond you.Why not, while you are still young, consider another career?"Slit-slavering bitch! Boy (I thought), would she be sorry! And even when I arrived in Paris and found at the American Express a letter from the publisher rejecting the book ("Regrettably, we feel we would be doing you a disservice to sponsor your debut as a novelist with so contrived a work as Sleepless Millions.") and asking what I wished them to do with the manuscript, even then my faith never faltered: I just supposed that, owing to my having abandoned Miss Langman, her friends were now making me the victim of a literary lynching.I had fourteen thousand dollars left from my various swindles and savings, and I did not want to return stateside.But there seemed no alternative, not if I wanted to see Sleepless Millions published: it would be impossible to market the book from such a distance and without an agent.An honest and competent agent is more difficult to secure than a reputable publisher.Margo Diamond was among the best; she was as chummy with the staffs of snobrags, like The New York Review of Books, as she was with the editors of Playboy.Maybe she did think I was untalented, but really it was jealousy—because what that fishhound had always wanted to do was T the V with La Langman herself However, the prospect of going back to New York made my stomach lurch and dip with roller-coaster aggressiveness.It seemed to me I could never reenter that city, where I now had no friends and many enemies, unless preceded by marching bands and all the confetti of success.To return droop-tailed and toting an unsold novel required someone with either lesser or greater character than I had.Among the planet's most pathetic tribes, sadder than a huddle of homeless Eskimos starving through a winter night seven months long, are those Americans who elect, out of vanity, or for supposedly aesthetic reasons, or because of sexual or financial problems, to make a career of expatriation.The fact of surviving abroad year upon year, of trailing spring from Taroudant in January to Taormina to Athens to Paris in June, is, of itself, the justification for superior postures and a sense of exceptional achievement.Indeed, it is an achievement if you have little money or, like most of the American remittance men, "just enough to live on." If you're young enough, it's okay for a couple of years-but those who pursue it after age twenty-five, thirty at the limit, learn that what seemed paradise is mere scenery, a curtain that, lifting, reveals pitchforks and fire.Yet gradually I was absorbed into this squalid caravan, though it was some while before I recognized what had happened.As summer started and I decided not to return but to try to market my book by mailing it around to different publishers, my head-splitting days began with several Pernods on the terrace of the Deux Magots; after that, I stepped across the boulevard into Brasserie Lipp for choucroute and beer, lots of beer, followed by a siesta in my nice little river-view room in the Hotel Quai Voltaire.The real drinking began around six, when I took a taxi to the Ritz, where I spent the early evening hours cadging martinis at the bar; if I didn't make a connection there, solicit an invitation to dinner from some closet queen or occasionally from two ladies traveling together or perhaps from a naive American couple, then usually I didn't eat.My guess would be that, in a nutritional sense, I consumed less than five hundred calories a day [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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