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Show Family. Weekly/April 23, 1967 ’ How I Discovered the Real = By ALEC WAUGH Author of “Island in the Sun’ and “The Mule in the Minaret’ SAW THE SKYLINE of Manhattan for the first time from the upper deck of the Bremen ona late April evening in 1930. It was not myfirst visit to New York; it was my fourth. On two previous visits, however, I had arrived by train from San * This noted English author came to share . aa 3 ’ : . of the country’s purse—and stayed , the riches in to enjoy the richesof its heart Francisco, while on the third I had come by ship—but on a foggy morning. At the time of those previous visits, I was desperately and imprudently in love with an American lady who lived in Mon- terey, Calif. It was a star-crossed romance of which I wrote in a partial autobiography a few years ago. It is enough to say here that for those years, the U.S.A. for me was Monterey. New York was a way station that I hurried through with an eager heart or a port from which I sadly set sail at night. Yet even so, New York hadlaid itsspell upon me. For the English writer of the 1920s, it beckoned as the Spanish Main did to Elizabethan seaman. Fantastic stories were told of the vast sumsthat could be collected from the American magazines and for lecture tours of the Middle West. We dreamed,all of us, of cashing in onit: had been tantalized by my brief visits to my publisher and my agent in New York. There had been so muchbustle, so much heartiness, so much good will. So much’ was happening, so much was about to happen. “The sweet smell of success” pervaded every office. Still it was a wotld from which I knew myself excluded. | had not yet won my spurs in it. My agent, Carl Brandt, and my publisher, John Farrar, both gave me the same advice: Invest some money in your- self, take an apartmenthere,live in it as you would in London for four months, working on a’ novel. Absorb the atmosphere. It’s only a question of getting the right slant. Don’t write about America, they warned me, because there’s nothing more phony than the average European’s novel about America. Go on writing about England and your travels—but visualize an American audience when you do. ft was sound advice, yet instinct warned me that the time was not yet ready. I did not want to edge my way into New Yorklife. I wanted to arrive as someone in his own right. Sooner orlater my chante would come. Sure enough, it did. In March, 1930, I was greeted on my arrival in Mombasa, Kenya, with a cable announcing that.my travel book, Hot Countries, was the Liter- |