Walking alone in Paris on a rainy Sunday, Roy found himself on rue de l’Odeon in the sixth arrondissement in the early morning, only a couple of other solitary walkers on the street, men with berets pulled down over their foreheads. Roy stopped in front of a bookshop window. The year was 1965, he was eighteen years old, destitute and homeless. The night before, having fallen asleep on a bench in the Gare d’Austerlitz, he had been shaken awake by an attendant demanding that he show a ticket for a morning train. Only passengers with valid tickets were allowed to wait inside the station. Since Roy had no ticket to produce, he was ordered to leave. It was after midnight before he found shelter under a bridge among other bums who had sought a place to sleep. This was early October but the weather had already turned cold and now the rain had started. He settled into a vacant spot, separated by several feet from a dozen snoring men. Roy was one of them, les clochards, tramps, lost souls. There was nothing romantic about it. He needed to acquire enough money to take a train and then a ferry across the Channel back to England, to London, where he’d been living before taking off to explore the Continent. His friends there would help him out, at least give him a place to stay while he looked for work.
Roy paused to inspect the books displayed in the window. Being Sunday, the shop was closed. All of the titles were in French, as well as the literary magazines and journals. Several issues of the most prestigious journal, La Nouvelle Revue Française, or NRF, founded by André Gide in 1909, were given the most prominence. There were photographs of contributors on the covers, as well as listings of their works contained in that particular issue. Among them were writers such as Sartre, Camus, Reverdy and Duras. Roy thought of himself as a writer, though he was as yet unpublished. He asked himself, “How do I get from where I am, an indigent vagabond on an unfamiliar street, to there, a person featured on the cover of La Nouvelle Revue Française?”
Twenty-five years later, Roy’s name was on those covers, his stories, essays and poems contained in what would eventually become six issues of the NRF. La Nouvelle Revue Française ceased publication early in the following century. To have been among those contributors to the NRF gave Roy perhaps his greatest gratification, a fulfillment of what more than a quarter of a century before had been a kind of crazy dream. Given the circumstance of his initial recognition of the distance between that teenage boy standing in the rain on the rue de l’Odeon, gazing at what appeared to him evidence of an alien universe, how could it be otherwise? Publishing his work in La Nouvelle Revue Française had remained an enduring symbol of success, one that was and would be no matter of importance to anyone other than himself. Roy was still looking through the window.
