the last book I ever read (Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel, excerpt ten)

from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: A Novel by Michael Chabon:

The party thrown for Salvador Dalí that last Friday of the New York World’s Fair got considerably more play. It rated twenty lines in Leonard Lyons’s column, a mention in Ed Sullivan’s, and an unsigned squib by E. J. Kahn in “Talk of the Town” the following week. It was also described in one of Auden’s letters to Isherwood in L.A., and figured in the published memoirs of at least two mainstays of the Greenwich Village art scene. The guests of honor, the satrap of Surrealism and his Russian wife, Gala, were in New York to close The Dream of Venus, an attraction, conceived and designed by Dalí, that had been among the wonders of the Fair’s Amusement Area. Their host, a wealthy New Yorker named Longman Harkoo, was the proprietor of Les Organes du Facteur, a Surrealist art gallery and bookshop on Bleecker Street, inspired by the dreaming postman of Hauterives. Harkoo, who had sold more of Dalí’s work than any other dealer in the world, and who was a sponsor of The Dream of Venus, had met George Deasey in school, at Collegiate, where the future Underminister of Agitprop for the Unconscious was two years ahead of the future Balzac of the Pulps; they had renewed their acquaintance in the late twenties, when Hearst had posted Deasey to Mexico City. “Those Olmec heads,” Deasey said in the cab on the way downtown. He had insisted on their taking a cab. “That was all he wanted to talk about. He tried to buy one. In fact, I once heard that he did buy it, and he’s hidden it in the basement of his house.”