Eustachy Rylski

After Breakfast

About the book

1
I remember the days when the sun didn’t cause melanoma, no one got cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol, arteriosclerosis didn’t come from eating good food, sex was not accompanied by the risk of AIDS and, most importantly, cigarettes had nothing to do with lung cancer. In other words I remember the days when I first met Holly Golightly from Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
I was eighteen years old at the time, and although I don’t know how, I was convinced I had a good life ahead of me. Without going into detail, the entire world around me spoke against this conviction, but what spoke for it were the daydreams to which I utterly surrendered, and the ability that I’ve lost with the years to console myself with the sensual, and thus cost-free side of life. The blazing hot summer of 1963 will never be repeated. …

2
Because without looking, without being pretentious and without perjuring myself, reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s was one of my most memorable, and thus most vital literary adventures. Why?
I was already mature and had had all manner of literary initiation. I had read the Russian classics, Iwaszkiewicz, Camus and Mauriac, I was right up to speed on Hemingway and I had tried Faulkner; I couldn’t fail to notice that compared with Bunin, the sex appeal in Breakfast at Tiffany’s was negligible, compared with Iwaszkiewicz’s stories it had no sensitivity, no emotion or sensuality, none of Turgenev’s charisma or the compelling simplicity of his tales; I knew that reading Gogol shows us the difference between having a sense of humour and faking one, and that in Breakfast at Tiffany’s even the charm – that last resort of a writer – is about as enchanting as a bus ticket.
And yet every time I meet a girl with a boy’s figure, Miss Golightly comes to mind, on a journey or on the spot. Whenever I find myself dealing with a bashful, simple fellow who doesn’t understand a thing, I see the horse doctor from Tulip, Texas, whom Holly so insensitively, selfishly and crudely abandoned. Whenever I look at tall, fragile models, I see before me Mag Wildwood, who finally did so well with the millionaire, Rusty Trawler. Whenever I’m at a strained, overcrowded party with boredom congealing in the air and the sort of constraint that no amount of alcohol is capable of relaxing, I remember the one Holly invited the narrator to, at her cramped New York apartment.
And I try to stop a flood of words from any talkative young woman I happen to meet with the comment that she sounds like a girl from Tiffany’s, though at first glance you can see she isn’t. Naturally, there are other literary characters I have never forgotten, including my favourite animals, and with the passage of time in some cases I have had increasingly frequent, ever closer contact with them, but how come those puppets of Capote’s have kept my memory captive for so many years? …
The first merit of this story about the appearance and disappearance of a silly little tart and her buddies is lack of obligation. The author does not feel obliged to his characters, they are not obliged to themselves, the reader is not obliged to them and they pay him back in the same coin. Not just because they take life as it comes, they are bogus and common, or because at the same time the narrator’s contemporaries are fighting tough battles on the Apennine Peninsula, and six months later will shed their blood on the beaches of Normandy, but because they don’t demand anything of us, don’t bother us with anything, and don’t make us face up to anything. And let’s not pretend that doesn’t suit us fine.
There’s no Dr Rieux from The Plague here to intimidate us with his calm bravery. There’s no Lord Jim to make us share responsibility for the Patna disaster. There’s no Raskolnikov hanging about in this story with his unbearable moral shakiness, no bloody Karamazov terrorising us, no Prince Myshkin irritating us, no Bayard Sartoris out of Faulkner wanting to thrash us, and no Wiktor Ruben from The Wilko Girls to torment us with all his nostalgic feelings. …
What Capote’s characters say to us is: why not hang out with us here and there, get knocked about a bit, listen to us talking bullshit, soak up some sun with the girls on the fire escape, have a chat with O. J. Berman about the movie career you’ll never achieve, sit at the bar in Joe Bell’s, and if you get bored of yourself or us, of the city or life, we won’t hold you back. But in parting we’ll say: don’t you worry about the one-eyed cat, he’ll be fine. If the first merit of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is general lack of obligation, the second stems from it, which is youth.
The great Thomas Mann never managed to write anything that could have been under seventy years of age. His unjustly forgotten contemporary François Mauriac did not write anything younger either, and every novel by Virginia Woolf has instantly gone senile with old age. I value old age in literature, not maturity, but wise old age that has dropped its desires; it’s the kind of literature I try to write myself, and if I’m at all capable of accepting artistic innovation, it’s only on condition that the core of it is old age, as in Witkacy, with all his trepidation, but at the time I’m recalling it can’t have been my preference. Marked by old age from childhood onwards, brought up by old people, subjected to old rigours and rituals, I yielded to tireless youth with all its energy, egoism and hopes for everything. I couldn’t find anything else in literature that suited my state of being so well as Capote’s story. And to this day I never have…
Breakfast at Tiffany’s makes us feel sorry for ourselves, like women who have left us because we’ve lost our charm, gone old and ugly, and grown depressingly wise. We are not any worse for that, nor are they better, but they are the ones who leave, just like the girl with a boy’s figure, who went away with her entire menagerie; whereas The Magic Mountain clings to me like a burr on a dog’s tail. And there is no force strong enough to send that highest wisdom to hell, that most sophisticated sophistication, most beautiful beauty, most absolute literary perfection, and I won’t hide the fact that sometimes my hand itches to do it. I’d blindly swap myself as I am for the me who first met Miss Holly Golightly that long hot summer of 1963. I’d swap writers I admire, in whom I have found support, with whom I am united by an affinity of souls, with whom, as I see it, I have made friends, for Truman Capote as he was then, when he wrote the story of Holly and her pals. I’d swap the former for the latter, just to be back before breakfast again, at any price, back before breakfast – at Tiffany’s or anywhere else.

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones