Two bibliophiles

Friday, March 24th., Hotel Majestic, Paris.

This is an excellent hotel, but not the one I would have chosen. It is all we could get. Rosenbach and I have a terrific apartment here: Drawing-room, two bedrooms and two bathrooms for £3.10/- a day. You wouldn't get it in London for twice that. But I shall leave it because the Champs Elysee is such a hades of a length.

We had an excellent journey here, no problem with the crossing. Rosenbach is one of those exhaustless persons. He would go to a music-hall last night  because of the row going on here about nude women on the stage. There is danger of them being forbidden so we had to see them before they were. Well, we saw them all right! Some with a frail girdle, some with nothing whatever. Then he wanted to go forth for 'supper', but I dissuaded him and got him back here by 12.30, and this morning he thanked me heartily for that. Who would have thought that a bibliophile would turn out to be such a lively character? We first met in the U.S.A. in 1911 and at that time he seemed to me to be a typical Jewish intellectual, or at least my stereotype of one. He is known in London as "The Terror of the Auction Rooms", and here as "The Napoleon of Books". Knowing this I suppose I should have guessed that his character would be rather larger than life.

What to make of the nude revues now that I have seen one for myself? What they are not is titillating. They aim I think to be artistic, and perhaps they are, but it is indubitably the nudity that is the attraction. They undoubtedly objectify women and that must be a bad thing. Of course that is what men have always done. Many of the great masters of painting, Titian as an example, did the same thing. Where lies the difference? I did feel uncomfortable, as a man, staring at naked women on stage. I won't be going again.

Rosenbach tells me that he is hopeful of purchasing the manuscript of "Ulysses"  from Joyce. He is confident that it will increase in value, and he certainly seems to be reliable in his judgement as far as books are concerned. For him, it seems to me, the two aspects of books are more clearly defined than for anyone else I have met. He is a man who understands and appreciates literature, but he also acknowledges books as objects, unsentimentally. I think it ironic that there is apparently more money to be made trading in books, if you know what you are doing, than in writing them.