I can't say that he looked at me

"In the late forties, I used to go down to the Pont Royal bar to look at [Jean-Paul] Sartre; I can't say that he looked at me. Americans were not popular with him. Matters were different sixty years ago. When John Dos Passos and E. E. Cummings came to France, it was to drive the ambulances in the Great War and they were warmly greeted, or thought they were. Eager young Americans who hurried to Paris after World War II got icy treatment. But then I think of someone like Kafu Nagai, a writer of genius who read Maupassant and other French novelists in Tokyo early in the 1890s, and, falling in love with them, set out to see them. It took Kafu a long time to cross the American Continent. He stopped in Chicago. He spent more than a year at Ypsilanti State Teacher's College, in Michigan. When at last he reached Paris, he could find no French writers who would talk to him. Those of us who arrived from America in the late forties were not the first to experience pangs of unrequited love."

~~ from Saul Bellow's To Jerusalem and Back