Portnoy's Complaint made Roth a rich man. In May 1968, he was in debt for eight thousands dollars: "I had been sitting in my room like in Solzhenitsyn's cell," he says, "doling out this money to Maggie and being angry." Suddenly, in June, Maggie was dead, his book was finished, and a messenger had delivered a publisher check for a quarter of a million dollars. (life magazine: "What's the tip on a quarter of a million?") He paid off his debts, he bought a car, he moved to a nice apartment on the East Side, and he took Ann Mudge in a first-class trip to Europe, sailing on the France, He hadn't bought any clothes in years, so he had several suits made at one of the poshest tailors in London--Kilgour, French & Stanbury, on Savile Row. The experience wasn't as unfamiliar as he'd expected. "It was like the Temple B'nai Jeshurun in there," he assures me. "The cloth was like the Torah ark, and the silence and the light coming through the dirty windows, and all the tailors were Jews." He had more bespoke suits made elsewhere. He propositioned the first attractive journalist who was sent to interview him. He hired a call girl, while Ann was off somewhere, for an hour in a London hotel. "I was dizzy," he remembers, "dizzy with success and freedom and money."
Roth Unbound
Claudia Pierpont
ليست هناك تعليقات:
إرسال تعليق