Archibald MacLeish died just two-and-a-half weeks before May 7, 1982, when he would have celebrated his ninetieth birthday. He had accomplished what Robert Frost once said it was his hope to accomplish: he had written a few poems it will be hard to get rid of.

The village of Damariscotta Mills looked as though it had been scrubbed and polished, so bright was the light, so transparent the air, on the July afternoon when a taxi left us at a white clapboard house with green shutters, the home of Jean Stafford and Robert Lowell. Though we were not late, Cal (as he was called) greeted us as if he had been impatient for our arrival. 

Two years ago, Frank Fontis, the caretaker of Tennessee Williams’ property in Key West, was murdered. It was an especially vicious killing. He was shot at point-blank range late at night in the living quarters of a railroad museum he operated on the island. It was a curious affair.

An “accelerated course” in French taste for tourists who are still in need of it ought to begin, in my opinion, with a visit to the Marché aux Puces and end with a visit to the studio of Georges Braque. On the one hand the odds and ends, coffee pots, cast-off rags, the second hand goods, in short, produced by several centuries of a unified and centralized culture; on the other, the same objects interpenetrated and flattened out in compositions that have little to do with the well-known genre of the nature morte, although they deserve the name much more legitimately than, for example, those by Chardin or Cézanne, which are so much more vives.

I decided one day in 1976 that I was so bored that if I hit another tennis ball I was going to go crazy. So I thought. Now wait a minute, there’s a small weekly paper in town—the Baton Rouge Enterprise

In March, 1959, Ernest Hemingway’s publisher Charles Scribner, Jr. suggested putting together a student’s edition of Hemingway short stories. He listed the twelve stories which were most in demand for anthologies, but thought that the collection could include Hemingway’s favorites, and that Hemingway could write a preface for classroom use. Hemingway responded favorably. He would write the preface in the form of a lecture on the art of the short story.

The passage in the interview with Stephen Spender published in your issue no. 77 in which Mr. Spender played about with a reference made by W.B. Yeats to Laura Riding, in a talk presumably witnessed by Mr. Spender, came to my attention when I was in the midst of composing a chapter for a book of memoirs, the chapter having the title “Importance.” The reference to myself exhibits an attitude to me as one who is an item of literary mention outside the bounds of the Important Mentions but useful as something of a flourish of special sophistication. Literary interviews bring out this particular worst—addiction to strategic mentions—of the literary—world worsts.

I am sorry that Miss Gellhorn is having trouble with her memory: something that can happen at our age, with which one can only sympathize. However, she should not exploit her oblivion for the purpose of calling me a liar (“apocriphiar”).

 Apocryphal stories would not be worth worrying about if their inventors stuck to the spoken word. What’s a bit of bragging or slander among friends? But when these tales reach print they become accepted fact. 

The Paris Review Eagle, or “the bird” as it was referred to, was designed by William Pène du Bois, the magazine’s art editor, in the spring of 1952. The symbolism is not difficult: an American eagle is carrying a pen: the French association is denoted by the helmet the bird is wearing—actually a Phrygian hat originally given a slave on his freedom in ancient times and which subsequently became the liberty cap or bonnet rouge worn by the French Revolutionists of the 19th Century.