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| Hardback Cover of Advancing Paul Newman by Eleanor Bergstein (click image to enlarge it) |
The novel's preface:
Ila dreamed Kitsy's young man sliced a cat at the lunch table and blood spurted all over. The slices were neat like filet de boeuf only the red center was liquid blood and it spurted all over. Ila jumped up making a scene -- making Kisty upset. Ila blamed herself -- for she knew Kitsy had wanted her to think well of the young man -- and she blamed herself for not having sat pleasantly at the big wooden sunny table for lunch saying oh what an interesting thing to do. When she woke up, she thought she had dreamed of Kitsy's pain.This novel is 373 pages long.
If you were in a bookstore and picked up this book and looked at its cover and then read this preface, would you buy the book? Claudia Will did!
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The preface introduces three characters (not counting the cat):
1) Ila (Rappaport)Ila is dreaming so horribly about Kitsy's young man that Ila jumps up, which upsets Kitsy. It seems that Kitsy had introduced the young man to Ila at lunch. Apparently, Ila only pretended to like Kity's young man at the lunch.
2) Kitsy (Frank)
3) Kitsy's young man
Ila had this horrible dream and woke up because she perceived that Kitsy felt pain about the young man. Two possibilities:
1) Kitsy felt embarrassed that he was her young man=====
2) Kitsy was hurt that Ila did not like her young man.
Chapter One
The third-person narrator informs the reader:
Ila Rappaport is a woman in love with a psychiatrist turned orthopedist, who is "strong but not insensitive". She is a very talented writer who has written a story that was published in The New Yorker magazine, but now she is suffering from writer's block.
She has heavy breasts and skinny legs that look spectacular in short skirts.
She is flying on a passenger airliner and reading leftist materials (for example, Howard Zinn's Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal). She was able to buy the flight ticket because she had collected donations from other people.
When Ila gets out of the airplane, she realizes that Richard Nixon had been a fellow passenger.
Ila rides in a taxi in darkness. On the way, she sees some banners against the Vietnam War. One banner favors anti-war candidate Senator Gene McCarthy in the 1968 Presidential election.
The taxi delivers Ila to her destination. She climbs the stairs to a fourth-story apartment. Inside, some people are lying on the floor. Among them is Kitsy ...
.... crying and twitching and moaning, her arms and legs jerking, mumbling "work to do ... up ..."Someone explains:
... her husband ... killed in Vietnam a few months ago.In the room there's a guy named Jerry Palumbo. He gives Ila a damp cloth and motions her to approach Kitsy. As Kitsy murmurs and moans, Jerry remarks: "Kitsy always said she'd end up on a lunatic fringe".
Ila kneels and puts Kitsy's head on her knees and uses the damp cloth to sponge Kitsy's forehead and cheeks.
This is the story of two girls, each of whom suspected the other of a more passionate connection to life.======
Chapter Two
The narrator returns in time to 1959.
Karen "Kitsy" Frank has just graduated from college and is vacationing in the French Alps. She is riding a tour bus. In the seat behind her, another girl (the narrator regularly uses the word girl) complains to Kitsy that she is suffering from a cold and that Kitsy has opened her bus window.
The two girls -- Kitsy and Ila -- become friends on the bus. They discuss European philosophers. On the bus tour, the two girls find themselves taking care of an elderly woman, Mrs. Jorganssen, the widow of the martyred publisher of a Danish resistance newspaper.
In Paris, the two girls go to a bookstore to buy two pornographic novels written by Henry Miller (illegal to buy in the USA). Because of this bookstore visit, they almost miss their departing train.
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The narrator returns to 1968, where Ila is sponging Kitsy's forehead and cheeks.
Ila, Kitsy and Jerry leave the fourth-story apartment and walk to the hotel room where Ila is staying. Jerry is a poet who will perform a poetry reading in the morning.
On the way to the hotel, the three stop at a luncheonnette to eat waffles. They are joined by two male acquaintances -- law students -- one black and one white. Ila tells the others about being with Richard Nixon on her airliner. Their subsequent conversation is incoherent for the reader. They mention having to write a press release about "the Senator".
Ila and Kitsy leave the luncheonnette and arrive at the hotel. There they are informed that they will share a room with three other girls -- Alice, Susan and Dorothy.
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The narrator returns in time to 1959. [Bergstein was about 21 years old in 1959.]
Ila and Kitsy are sharing a compartment in an overnight train from Paris. In the upper berth, Ila begins to cry. Kitsy climbs up to the upper berth and joins Ila. It seems to Kitsy that Ila began crying because the train had crossed the France-Germany border, where Ila saw a German train conductor for the first time.
Ila and Kitsy talk about their both being Jewish and about the Nazi period.
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The narrator returns to 1968.
Across the street from the hotel there is a movie theater showing the movie In Cold Blood. The movie ends, and the crowd comes out onto the street, where some of the boys joke about mass-murdering the girls.
Kitsy remarks that she suffers from bad dreams. If she seems to be having a nightmare, she remarks, then the other girls in the hotel room should wake her up. Then Kitsy falls asleep.
Ila was on a different time schedule. She lay awake remembering when she heard about Louis and gone running to see Kitsy, and Kitsy had come to the door of her room naked but with no nipples or pubic hair and Ila had thought that grief had turned her pale -- made her neuter -- but it was an opaque body stocking.That paragraph makes no sense to the reader. Louis had not been mentioned previously in the novel.
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The narrator returns to 1959.
Ila and Kitsy are on a beach at Bad Godesberg, Germany. Kitsy is writing about Paris in her notebook.
Kitsy remembers a crazy old Jewish woman who lived in her childhood neighborhood. The old woman had fled from Germany to the USA. The old woman's two adult daughters asked Kitsy's father to commit their mother to an insane asylum. Kitsy's father (a psychiatrist?) declined to involve himself in that family's problems.
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The narrator returns to 1968.
Jerry comes from his poetry reading to the girls' hotel room. The poetry reading was in a nursing home. The old people there were incoherent. During his poetry reading, some girls who were McCarthy supporters tried to convince the old people to support McCarthy. The old people did not understand the poetry or the politics.
As Jerry tells the girls about his poetry reading, the narrator mentions that Jerry and Kitsy had been married "a long time ago".
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The narrator returns to 1959.
The tour group is in a hotel restaurant. An American journalist is lecturing about Germany. He is asked about ex-Nazis in the West German government. He says there are some.
The tour group will travel into Berlin, which is inside East Germany.
Music plays in the restaurant. Ila gets up and dances. Kitsy admires Ila's dancing.
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The narrator returns to 1968.
Kitsy is sitting in a political-campaign office, preparing to mail invitations to a fund-raising party. She throws a temper-tantrum because a young man there left a half-eaten apple on her desk. The apple juice and his spit had spoiled some of the invitations.
It turned out that the young man was a former student of Louis's.The reader still does not know who Louis is.
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The narrator returns to 1959.
The group's tour bus enters Berlin. That evening "Eric the photographer" (apparently a German) takes Ila and Kitsy to a party. There, he invites Ila to come with him to his apartment. Kitsy goes back to the hotel, and Ila goes to Eric's apartment.
In their hotel room, Kitsy washes her own clothes and then washes Ila's clothes.
Ila comes back to the hotel room and tells Kitsy: "When I was frightened he was very gentle."
Kitsy felt like a dirty-minded virgin, was very angry at everyone, and wondered how she could not have realized before that Ila tan, flat, slightly runny nose ... had turned into a golden beauty.-----
The narrator returns to 1968.
Kitsy and Ila leave the political-campaign office in order to distribute some political flyers. The apple guy -- the former student of Louis -- drives them to a supermarket.
While handing out fliers, Kitsy and Ila chat. Ila tells about a dinner date, in her past, with a guy named Stephen. Kitsy asks whether Stephen was Ila's boyfriend "after Loren and before Warren". Kitsy says she dropped Stephen after just one date because he learned that he made model bridges out of toothpicks.
It turns out that Jerry too is handing out flyers at the supermarket.
Also, the apple guy -- the former student of Louis -- is standing by the supermarket's exit ramp, watching people coming out with full shopping carts.
The sun glinted on his hair, and for a moment the ramp seemed electrified, so full of pleasure and sun was he .... Altogether it was that he was alive and Louis wasn't.-----
The narrator returns to 1959.
Eric takes Ila and Kitsy into East Berlin. They are accompanied by another German man, Claus Pieter.
East Berlin policemen stop the four-person group repeatedly, especially questioning the two American girls and checking their documents. Kitsy is exhilarated by the German policemen's attention, but Ila weeps in fright.
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The narrator returns to 1968.
Ila, Kitsy and Jerry continue to hand out political flyers at the supermarket. Many of people respond negatively to the flyers.
It turns out that the flyers are advertising a visit by the actor Paul Newman at the supermarket on the following Thursday. Newman will speak in support of Senator McCarthy's election campaign.
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The narrator returns to 1959.
Ila and Kitsy are late to their airplane flight out of Berlin. Eric comes to the airport and takes Ila to his apartment. Kitsy goes shopping in Berlin. Kitsy tries to phone Eric's apartment, but some problem prevents a connection.
Kitsy thinks that her being lost is bad, but it's not as bad as it would be "to lie inside four walls and have sexual intercourse with an ex-Nazi storm trooper."
It turns out that Ila had told Kitsy that Eric the photographer had belonged to the Hitler Youth when he was 19 years old.
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The narrator returns to 1968.
Still handing out flyers at the supermarket, Ila and Kitsy talk about the fact that many women shoppers are wearing hair rollers so that they will look lovely for their husbands later that evening.
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The narrator returns to 1959.
Kitsy tells Ila that she wants to keep trying to become a professional writer.
Ila responds that she might want to become a writer in the future, but she still did not know what she might want to write. In the meantime, Ila wants to learn how to play the French horn.
Kitsy writes in her diary:
So the lines are drawn. I'm the dirty-minded little virgin and she's the one who really lives.======
To be continued in Part 2.
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