A True Story of Anton Ym

"Perhaps he had told the truth; perhaps there wasn't any truth. I'll leave that for you to decide."

-Anton Ym

As my life has ceased to have meaning, I have developed several intersting reading patterns. This is one of the more interesting people I found. He lived in Paris during World War II before moving to New York after Charles de Gaulle took over France. While he died early and mad he did pen one work that some English Majors might be vaguely familiar with: Modern Romance. It was, at least, one of my American Lit books back in college but now can't even be found on Amazon.com If anybody could actually find the entire book of this I would pay a king's ransom.

Below is a loose interpretation of how the finished product of Modern Romance came to be.

In the original story the Main Character had called himself Fearless and had walked with rain soaked hair by the Seine. Hunting, loving, daring, wanting, forking a thumb at those wormtongueningantagonistss; those savages that represented all that was old, that was evil. Those that stood in the corner of circular rooms, exhaling their cigarettes so that smoke curled up from underneath their fedoras.

And in the climax of this story our hero broke free, he runs away from it all, scooping the girl in a red dress up at the airport, declaring to her that he wants to know that love is wild; that he wants to know that love is real. The bad guys are ripped out of the darkness, are brought to the light, the sun, the glaring judge that casts just mercy down upon those that have done what is wrong and those that should be punished.

Ym congratulated himself. He too stood in the sunlight waiting for the same judgment to pass upon him, sure that the light that was raining warmth upon his face was a brush of peace; that this was a job well done.

But the fat and lavish publisher took a look at the drivel. The glutinouss one pointed his slimy finger at the book and declared that it was too short. That there wasn't enough content. That it needed something to come after the ending of the story. Love these days wasn't selling.

In turn, Ym made the Main Character don a fedora, forced him to give up the name Fearless. The Main Character walked the same paths down the Seine, and felt the same beats that the rhythms of rain gave him. He tasted the same beauty, but this time the brashness of it ran bitter from his mouth, pouring in streams of brown stain down from the corners of his lips.

In the end he didn't go after the beauty; they didn't escape and he left her to take root elsewhere. With the anti-climax growling, the Main Character went to the airport, alone this time, and punched his ticket to anywhere.

When the book was done Ym left Paris. The literary community, if there is such a thing, congratulatedd him on a book well written. Ym later went mad and was often confused over which book was published when he talked about it.

Modern Romance went on to win the William Faulkner Award in 1951. In the mid to late 60s after, Ym had gone mad and had died, there was a small push to have the original interpretation of Modern Romance published, but no publisher ever published it and no copy of it has ever been found.