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PARTISAN REVIEW
Of course, the Cold War was coming on apace, Sartre and his crowd
were moving towards the communists, and there would soon be other
and graver matters to divide us.
Memory being a lure and a delusion, I thought that William had come
over at about that time, as part of a considerable procession that
included Rahv, Hook, Barrett, Baldwin, and Shapiro, but there is no
clear trace of his presence until
1949,
the year of the Kravchenko trial.
Indeed, he is listed in the indices of two book I've recently had in hand–
James Atlas's biography of Saul Bellow and
Living with Koestler,
a selec–
tion of letters from Mamaine Koestler to her twin sister, Celia, written
during Mamaine's years with that tortured man. Thanks to these I can
establish his presence late in
1949,
when I found a charming little hotel
for him and Edna at the Palais Royal and he spent a good deal more time
with my wife and me in Montparnasse and with Saul Bellow and Anita
on the Rue Marbeuf than with the French and other Europeans he had
come over, presumably, to recruit. He had nothing of Saul's huffy com–
bativity with respect to the French, who were slow to recognize Saul's
genius; but he had no affinity with them either-a fact brought home to
me one Sunday morning when William woke me from a deep dream of
peace to ask that I come over forthwith and rescue them from a flood in
their bathroom that he could fix, any damn fool could fix, if he just had
a monkey wrench, a point he was unable to get over to the hotel people.
It
was no big deal; there was a toolbox in the hotel, but neither William
nor Edna knew the French word for it, which I supplied in due course.
In the end the WC was repaired, the bathroom mopped up, and all was
well.
It
took a while, however, and the intervention of various pic–
turesque persons-a long story on which I dined out for months but
which I will now skip in order to go straight to the punch line, moodily
reiterated by William as we had drinks together that evening-to the
effect that he would never understand how the French could build a great
housing development like the Palais Royal and go on and on about Hei–
degger and Husserl and still fail to get the hang of modern plumbing.
He was partly serious but, of course, also making fun of himself, in
the Viennese manner of Manes Sperber, to whom he now turned, say–
ing, "Explain the French to us, Munya ."
Manes Sperber complied, witty as always, in his marvelous mixture
of German, French, English, and Galician Yiddish, but his explanations
fell short and the mystery remained, for the moment at least, unresolved.
Paris at that time was full of Eastern and Central European writers–
mostly poor devils and a few rich ones like Munya, who had hit the
jackpot by publishing Arthur Koestler's
Darkness at Noon
and winning
