Foreword
A serious-minded student of the Anglo-American novel who wished to catagorize this unusual book would be obliged, perhaps, to think in terms of Voltaire's Candide, or even better, Thomas Mann's The Confessions of Felix Krull, as a source of inspiration. But on the other hand, given Billie Monday's devotion to sexuality as a means of unfolding her stories, perhaps our serious-minded young scholar would not wish to catagorize Adopted Daughter at all; the book is too funny for an academic approach and substantially sexier than anything normally found in a Department of English literature at one of our serious-minded universities.
For the reader who is accustomed to thinking of Billie Monday as an in-depth analyst of contemporary social ills and evils, the cheerful sensuality of this novel may come as a pleasant surprise. At least the editors were happily jolted by this book and Miss Monday was kind enough to provide us with some notes on the source of her inspiration.
"As you know," she wrote us recently, "my work on the North African White Slavery Trade has been progressing very slowly, thanks to the tons of United Nations reports on the subject which the Secretary General's office persists in sending me and which have to be read before I can conceivably pretend that my study is definitive. To complicate matters, I had foolishly agreed to direct the doctoral disertation of a student sent to me by an old friend who teaches oriental philosophy at Oxford, and it was necessary to spend several hours a day with this sober young man, explaining the difference between Ying and Yang, at least as the concepts appear in the works of a minor Bengali theologian, whom I knew from my days with the Harvard Anthropological Expedition there."
"Frankly, I was depressed by it all, and in a fit of pique, I packed my student off to Bangladesh to do some field research, stuffed my notes into a suitcase, and took off for a few weeks of relaxation on the smallest and most isolated of the Tremiti Islands, setting up shop in a pleasant little cottage which is kindly maintained fo me by the Italian Government in recompense for some trifling services I was able to render during the World War Two Resistance
Movement. For several days, I relaxed, sitting on a crystal white beach and gazing mindlessly at the bluest sea one can find anywhere in the Mediterranean area. One day, I heard the sound of running feet on the sand, and looked up to see a totally naked girl race by my beach chair. She was an oriental, Japanese perhaps, with naturally dark skin burnished by the sun to a magnificent hue of brown, and her body was the equal to any one of my fictional heroines, supple, heavy-breasted, sensuous ..."
"I sat up in amazement as this fantastic apparition hesitated before me and then sped off into the bushes. An instant later, three Italian fishermen half-in and half-out of their pants, pounded into view, zipping up flies and trying to fasten their sandals and run at the same time. One of them spotted the girl's tracks in the sand, and the dauntless trio charged off in hot pursuit. I never fo'und out what this extraordinary incident meant, but late that night after a dinner of gamberi and scampi washed down by a clear light Tuscan wine, the idea for Adopted Daughter sprang uninvited into my mind and I began to write."
"By the way, the book on the White Slavery Trade will be a few months overdue. But you understand."
We understood, and we expect the reader will understand as well.
The Publishers