The Girl in the Gold Borsalino a Wider World: Portraits in an

By R.Z. Sheppard

Kate Simon, best known as the author of guidebooks, is one of those rare writers who is preternaturally incapable of composing a dull sentence. Here, for example, are the pickings of a random sampling of her work. A description of a Canal Street flea market from New York Places and Pleasures: "Inside, a sizable jungle of loose white and tan shoelaces, Dracula banks which need batteries for pushing out a pale green hand to grasp a coin, among the books one volume of an obsolete encyclopedia and a novel by Clare Boothe Luce." From Mexico Places and Pleasures: "One young man in an exquisite hat and beautifully made dress keeps circulating among American women asking for a household job which would include cooking, cleaning, dress- and hat-making." And this priceless piece of advice from Italy: The Places In Between: "One assumes that foreign ladies, English and Americans particularly, because they are tremulous, neurotic bags of bone reduced by sexual malnutrition, find all Italians irresistible. Gentlemen who agree with this premise are often to be found in hotels during festa times when numerous visitors, to-ing and fro-ing at odd times, create a nice smorgasbord. Don Giovanni prowls the hallways, listening to accents and watching the sway of buttocks. He selects a recipient for his gifts and tracks her down to her door. He knocks and keeps knocking, asking for one small moment, pliss. If you've glanced at his wares and found them resistible, lock the door and don't answer. In time he will tire of your silly intransigence and go on to offer his golden moments at another door."

Similar bijoux abound in Simon's books about England and, of all places, the Bronx. The northernmost borough of New York City was the setting for the author's childhood, recounted with striking imagery and emotional precision in Bronx Primitive (1982). It too is a sort of travel book. A four-year-old Kate and her rachitic younger brother are transported thousands of miles from Poland to the U.S. at the end of World War I. The girl discovers the American air to be full of strange odors and foreign languages, especially English. She is part of a typical "Jewish immigrant hegira": first the densely packed tenements of the Lower East Side, later the wide open spaces of the Bronx, where her household is a turnstile of transient relatives. Simon's father plugs along in the shoe-design business and resents the energy and inquisitiveness of his wife and oldest daughter. Kate learns early that men can be a primary cause of pain and guilt.

Simon's sequel, A Wider World, begins on the day of her elementary-school graduation, a rite of passage that, she remembers tartly, called for "light rejoicing." Mother buys her a rose; Father gives her the withering news that she can go to high school for only one year of secretarial courses. The 13- year-old's response introduces the principal motif of the book, if not the dominant theme of her life: "Here I stand, hobbled in a sack of doom, determined to tear out of it, knowing that I will."

As in Dickens, such pluck and clarity of intent are completely captivating. A dud in bookkeeping class but an outstanding English student, Simon manages a transfer to an academic high school. Her lively essays attract attention. She has other notable attributes: blond hair, blue eyes, a sensuous mouth and a fortune in cheekbones. But even James Monroe High is a bit restricting. Foreshadowing the future world traveler, she writes, "I had no time for step- by-step projects; the urgent need was for swift voyages, with short stops at many ports of call."

New York in the early '30s was as wide a world as an adolescent could handle. Avant-garde art, radical politics and a blend of bourgeois habits and bohemian attitudes encouraged theatrical poses. Simon's favorite getup is a long gray raincoat, a gold borsalino hat and black stockings. At 15 she is a live-in helper for a Greenwich Village dermatologist and his family. The Bergsons appreciate culture with a capital K, and the baby-sitter, already an amateur anthropologist, enjoys watching their games. Available evidence suggests that the doctor was a pretentious cad and an ideal target for Simon's elegantly decapitating style. "He had, or had invented," she writes, "an aristocratic European background, replete with 'von' relatives, a faint 'Continental' accent that slipped when he was angry, forgetting that he was connected to a 'Statspalais' (as he called it) in Vienna."

Men who may or may not remind Simon of her father tend to become trophies, bagged in the act of looking foolish. A free-love guru known as Jones volunteers to help young Kate shed her virginity. She agrees in principle but falls asleep before the sexual samaritan finishes an overripe lecture on fecundity in nature. Simon's frankness is never gratuitous. A description of her own mistakes combines arm's-length wit with sobering historical detail: "My first was a New Jersey abortion, the result of drinking deeply of synthetic gin and romping with an anonymous beauty over house roofs and down some stairs or other, to roll on the grass in a nearby park." On the procedure itself: "The man, whose face looked like soiled marzipan, said he was going to give me an anesthetic; lie still . . . This he inserted in me, letting loose a flood of icy water, the anesthetic whose effects lasted a few seconds."

There is certainly more to Simon's adolescence than this risky business. She studies literature at Hunter College, sells lipsticks at Woolworth, pastes fake diamonds into junk jewelry, and sits as a designer's model. But in posing for her own self-portrait, Simon has found a true vocation. Together, Bronx Primitive and A Wider World qualify as a minor American classic.