"John Kessel - Buffalo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

A degradation of the marvelous inventions that made Wells
his early reputation, minus the social theorizing that drove
Wells's technological speculations. The common man's
boosterism. There's money to be made telling people like
Jack Kessel about the wonderful world of the future.

The second future is Kessel's own. That one's a lot
harder to see. It contains work. A good job, doing
something he likes, using his skills. Not working for
another man, but making something that would be useful for
others. Building something for the future. And a woman, a
gentle woman, for his wife. Not some cheap dancehall queen.

So when Kessel saw H.G. Wells in person, that meant
something to him. He's had his doubts. He's 29 years old,
not a kid anymore. If he's ever going to get anywhere, it's
going to have to start happening soon. He has the feeling
that something significant is going to happen to him. Wells
is a man who sees the future. He moves in that bright world
where things make sense. He represents something that
Kessel wants.

But the last thing Kessel wants is to end up back in
Buffalo.

He pulls the sketchbook, the sketchbook he was to show me
twenty years later, from under his pillow. He turns past
 drawings of movie stars: Jean Harlow, Mae West, Carole
Lombard--the beautiful, unreachable faces of his
longing--and of natural scenes: rivers, forests, birds--to
a blank page. The page is as empty as the future, waiting
for him to write upon it. He lets his imagination soar. He
envisions an eagle, gliding high above the mountains of the
west that he has never seen, but that he knows he will visit
some day. The eagle is America; it is his own dreams. He
begins to draw.

------------------------------------------------


Kessel did not know that Wells's life has not worked out
as well as he planned. At that moment Wells is pining after
the Russian emigre Moura Budberg, once Maxim Gorky's
secretary, with whom Wells has been carrying on an
off-and-on affair since 1920. His wife of thirty years, Amy
Catherine "Jane" Wells, died in 1927. Since that time Wells
has been adrift, alternating spells of furious pamphleteering
with listless periods of suicidal depression. Meanwhile,
all London is gossiping about the recent attack published in
_ T_ i_ m_ e _ a_ n_ d _ T_ i_ d_ e by his vengeful ex-lover Odette