Hermit in Paris Read Online Free PDF

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 was 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