Slouching Towards Bethlehem

I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me about new faces.” It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already spelt with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men.

Помню, как однажды, холодным ясным декабрьским вечером в Нью-Йорке, я предложила приятелю, который жаловался, что слишком засиделся на одном месте, пойти со мной на вечеринку, где, как я уверяла его с ликующей находчивостью двадцатитрёхлетней, должны быть "новые лица". Он хохотал пока буквально не задохнулся, и мне пришлось опустить оконное стекло в такси и бить его по спине. "Новые лица", сказал он наконец, "не говори мне о новых лицах". Похоже, что последний раз, когда он побывал на вечеринке, где ему обещали новые лица, в комнате было пятнадцать человек, и он уже переспал с пятью из женщин и лишь двоим из мужчин не был должен денег.

That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy. It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.

... that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic. I was in fact as sick as I have ever been when I was writing “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”; the pain kept me awake at night and so for twenty and twenty-one hours a day I drank gin-and-hot-water to blunt the pain and took Dexedrine to blunt the gin and wrote the piece.