Last year I was invited to give a walking tour and lecture to UNC students in a summer abroad program. I was to take them to St. Germain, St. Sulpice, and the Luxembourg to show them where the writers of the 1950s had hung out. I hoped to make them feel how exciting it was to walk up any street near St. Sulpice and maybe see the now great poet Christopher Logue, even his hair raging, elaborating to Trocchi, or to turn the corner at the Luxembourg and run into the ever busy Robert Silvers maybe with Jack Fisher from Harper’s in tow talking about writers waiting to be published. Or to start down the rue de Tournon and see, on the terrace of the café, Eugene Walters and Pati Hill, Blair Fuller, Alfred Chester, or even Evan Connell on one of his rare daytime visits there.

My father’s opinion is that my judgement is sound most of the time but given to the occasional psychotic break. This evaluation’s based heavily on a travel decision I made as a thirteen year old that lopped a few years off his life. As is often the case, he didn’t know the half of it. That half went like this:

When people say “I’ve stopped living” do they mean that they’re numb with grief? In dire health? Having menopause? Continually drugged or drunk? But these conditions are part of living, they just don’t revolve around love affairs or money. What’s more, all artists “stop living” in order to comment on living. Art is a suspension of life. You can’t write a poem about tears in your eyes with tears in your eyes, the salt water would smudge the ink.

Ever since the earliest humans learned to sail boats on the sea, there have been pirates. Their main job is to steal treasure and bury it in secret places, but they also sink ships, take prisoners, collect strange animals, and perform bizarre tricks of magic. The most bloodthirsty and terrible pirate ever to sail the Caribbean Sea was my own great-great-great-great grandfather, Denis the Pirate. In the early 1700s no man lived who did not fear his name.

Dear Reynolds,

That day in New York, when you asked me whether I could recite any limericks of my own, I was momentarily at a total loss, and couldn’t recall a single one; though in the course of years I’ve composed quite a few. So I thought I would send you some. I record them in a pretty good book called The Lure of the Limerick, by W.S. Baring-Gould. But before I offer any works of my own, I should mention one reputedly by Kingsley Amis.

The fellow who screwed Brigid Brophy

Was awarded the Kraft-Ebbing trophy;

          He was paid eighty quid

          For the thing that he did.

Which many declared was a low fee.

And now, some modest efforts of my own.

In “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” Pound has his poet protagonist say, “I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral … ” When poets die, there is a flurry of attention if not a boom: sections in magazines, reprinted poems, gatherings in honor. Because of renewed attention, the poet’s books may pick up in sales. Circumstances of death contribute to the quantity of response. Suicide is a shrewd career move.

Friday 23 March 1990

This morning in front of the Felix Potin grocery store, rue du Cherche-Midi, Mme D., my next-door neighbor, came along dragging her shopping cart, full of items bought en fonction de her chronic constipation. She said, “The concierge is catching it from the building manager! She’s spent more than seven hundred thousand francs on cleaning products.”

My life this autumn has been astonishingly busy and empty, thanks to a seemingly endless set of tasks for small outcomes. In the midst of all this, my stepfather died, at the age of 100. Somehow I thought he would never die. He was like a sphinx in the desert, always there, always posing riddles in my direction. 

Over the last three decades of his life Erich Maria Remarque lived in the town of Ascona on Lago Maggiore. His house and the gardens below it were on a hillside between the lake and a narrow road cut into the mountain slope that runs southeast from Locarno. Inside the rather small building was a prodigious collection of Pisarro and Picasso, Monet and Manet, gold-leaf Venetian commodes and other seventeenth-century artifacts-so many objects, with so few available spaces left, that a Cezanne hung in the downstairs "powder room" and on the living-room floor were late medieval tapestries stacked like rugs. 

In early December 1946, I arrived in Warsaw at midnight after an arduous train journey from Prague. In their retreat, the Germans had nearly destroyed Poland's railroad system, and our train with its few passengers took four times as long to reach Warsaw as it had before the war.