“What You See” by Susan Daitch, page 5

        When his marriage to Esperanza ended in divorce, Lenny, in despair, returned to Brooklyn. He considered following his brother's prescription by treating depression with the needle, but instead he turned to writing, and out of his misery What You See was born. He found his sister Ruthie who was working at the Met as a conservationist, and she was able to get him a job as a security guard on the night shift. It was not much of a job; all he did was sit at a desk near a loading dock and write long hand on yellow legal pads. During the day he would type out the manuscript on a half busted Royal Electric, revising as he went along, then sleep five to six hours until it was time to go to work again.
        What You See opens with the murder of an unknown man in a snobbish auction house, but the apparently run of the mill local homicide leads to the unmasking of a ring of art forgers. This, however, is only the beginning of the story. The counterfeiters turn out to be straw men set in place by someone else. Their operations are a false floor which diverts attention from more serious crimes. From the highest echelons of the New York art scene where paintings pass as currency and signs of class, to basement studios in the Lower East Side, the real answer to the murder and those that followed it, lay in Paris 1942 when Nazis and their French collaborators looted the great European art collections of those they murdered.
        In 1974 Lenny sent What You See to a publisher picked at random from the phone book. He wrote under the name E. Goldberg, and the book was accepted immediately by a medium size imprint that, as it turned out, was also publishing Beckett and Genet in the United States. He was paid $10,000 for the book, an astonishing sum in those years, and Lenny finally agreed to publish under his name. Despite the large advance he kept his job at the Metropolitan, like Houdini keeping up his dues in the necktie union, just in case. Unlike Houdini, Lenny, would need to keep working once the money ran out, and run out it did.
        The thriller was an immediate sensation, and Lenny found himself compared in popularity to both Ian Fleming and Jacqueline Suzanne which irritated him no end. He grew deeply disillusioned. All his intentions consistently missed their targets. If meaning lay right on the moon his rockets were celebrated for hitting Mars when he didn't give a crap about Mars and wanted to avoid it altogether. Always quick to smell a conspiracy he suspected his publisher was promoting his work this way in order help fill coffers which were foundering.
        "So nobody wants to read Genet or Beckett. Why should I be made into their errand boy? It was a racket, a plot to avoid taking the real fascists seriously. Why not cast the movie version of my book with Jack Benny who did so well as Concentration Camp Eberhardt? `So they call me Concentration Camp Eberhardt?'" Lenny impersonated Benny.
        When I look back on this conversation now I realize this scrambled reference may have been a sign of a mild stroke. He was referring to Jack Benny's performance in Ernst Lubitsch's To Be or Not to Be, a comedy in which a troupe of actors trapped in Warsaw try to outwit the occupying Germans. The point of his outrage was that while some writers would have been pleased with commercial success, Lenny believed it came at the expense of being taken seriously. He thought of What You See as a serious, if not avant-garde, work.
        When Julie Christie was photographed reading What You See for the cover of Time Lazarus went off the deep end, saying he no longer recognized himself in the mirror, yelling over the phone at the publicist who hung up on him.
        "No doubt Julie Christie's face assured that tens of thousands of books would be printed and read, but I didn't give a rat's patootie. Time meant nothing to me. Middlebrow waffling was not my intention," he shouted even years later when no one remembered What You See much less who had been photographed reading it.
        Stella, the novel's narrator, was made into a feminist James Bond which he found nauseating, and at the same time What You See was criticized as a fantasy. Stella was too intrepid, almost a Kung Fu champion of a character, one assisted by digital special effects before such things were even dreamed of.
        "Even if I wanted to write The Green Lantern, I couldn't. The American tradition of social realism kept tugging at my sleeve. The headless horseman has to stop for a drink sometime. You run into him at the 7-11. Hitchcock understood this perfectly. You have enough suspense right in your backyard. There's no need to make things up. What I wrote about, a lot of it was real."
        Yet when pressed to name his sources in 1974, Lazarus was silent, a silence he grew to consider cowardly. Afraid of repercussions he stopped short of saying, I knew these people, and they live the high life, still. Fearing the long arm of the Barbie machine (with its sympathizers and supporters) would find him, the fact that he was drawing actual former Nazis and art smugglers he knew personally from his days in Marseilles could in no way be revealed.
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