On Grief and Reason: Essays

And, by the same token, consider the part of the world I am writing to you from, the outskirts of the Pax Romana, ocean or no ocean, distance or no distance. We've got all sorts of flying contraptions here to handle that, not to men­tion a republic with the first among equals built in, to boot. And tetrameters, as I said, are still tetrameters. They alone can take care of any millennia, to say nothing of space or of the subconscious. I've been dwelling here for twenty-two years now, and I've noticed no difference. In all likelihood, here is where I'll die. So you can take my word for it: te­trameters are still tetrameters, and so are trimeters. And so forth.

It was a flying contraption, of course, that brought me here from Hyperborea twenty-two years ago, though I can as easily put down that flight to my rhymes and meters.

Except that the latter might add up to an even greater dis­tance between me and the good old Hyperborea, as your dactylic Caspium does to the actual size of your Pax Romana. Contraptions—flying ones especially—only delay the inev­itable: you gain time, but time can fool space only so far; in the end, space catches up. What are years, after all? What can they measure save the decay of one's epidermis, of one's wits? Yet the other day I was sitting in a cafe here with a fellow Hyperborean, and as we were chatting about our old town in the delta, it suddenly crossed my mind that should I, twenty-two years ago, have tossed a splinter of wood into that delta, it could, given the prevailing winds and currents, have crossed the ocean and reached by now the shores I am dwelling on, to witness my decay. That's how space catches up with time, my dear Flaccus; that's how one truly departs from H yperborea.

Or: how one expands Pax Romana. By dreams, if necessary. Which, come to think of it, are yet another—perhaps the last—form of life's regeneration, especially if you've got no company. Also, it doesn't lead up to Caesar, beating in this sense even the bees. Although, I repeat, it's no use talking to you like this, since your sentiments toward him were in no way different from Virgil's. Nor were your methods of conveying them. You, too, preach Augustus' glory over man's grief, saddling with this task not—to your considerable credit—idling souls but geography and mythology. Com­mendable as this is, it implies, I'm afraid, that Augustus either owns or is sponsored by both. Ah, Flaccus, you might just as well have used hexameter. Asclepiads are just too good for this stuff, too lyrical. Yes, you're right: nothing breeds snobbery better than tyranny.

Well, I suppose I am just allergic to this sort of thing. If I am not reproaching you more venomously, it is because

I am not your contemporary: I am not he, because I am almost you. I've written in your meters, and in this one particularly. That, as I've said, is what makes me appreciate "Caspium," "Niphaten," and "Gelonos" sitting there at the end of your lines, expanding the empire. And so do "Aqui- lonibus" and "Vespero," but upward. My subject matter, of course, was more humble; besides, I used rhyme. The only way to overlap with you completely would be by setting myself the task of repeating all your stanzaic patterns in this tongue or in my native Hyperborean. Or else by translating you into either. Come to think of it, such an exercise is plausible—far more so than redoing, say, Ovid's hexameters and elegiac couplets. After all, your Collected is not such a large book, and the Carmina itself is just ninety-five pieces of varying length. But I am afraid the dog's too old for new and old tricks alike; I should have thought of that earlier. We are destined to stay separated, to remain pen pals at best. Not for long, I'm afraid, but long enough, I hope, to get close to you now and then. Even if not close enough to make out your face. In other words, I am doomed to my dreams; but this doom is welcome.

Because the body in question is so rum. Its greatest charm, Flaccus, is the total lack of the egocentricity that so often plagues its successors, and I daresay the Greeks also. It seldom pushes the first person singular—though that's partly the grammar. In a language so highly inflected, it's hard to zero in on one's own plight. Although Catullus managed; that's why he is loved so universally. But among you four, even with Propertius, the most ardent of all of you, that was out. And certainly with your friend, treating as he did both man and nature sui generis. Most of all with Naso, which, given some of his subject matter, must be what turned the Romantics against him so sharply. Still, in my proprietary (after last night) capacity, this pleases me considerably. Come to think of it, the absence of egocentricity may be a body's best defense.

It is—in my day and age, in any case. Actually, of all of you, Flaccus, it is you who are perhaps the most egocentric. Which is to say, the most palpable. But that isn't so much a matter of pronouns, either: it is, again, the distinctness of your metrics. Standing out against the other guys' sprawling hexameters, they suggest some unique sensibility, a char­acter that can be judged—while the others are largely opaque. Sort of like a solo versus the chorus. Perhaps they went for this hexametric drone precisely for reasons of hu­mility, for purposes of camouflage. Or else they just wanted to play by the rules. And hexameter was that game's standard net; to put it differently, its terra-cotta. Of course, your logaoedics don't make you a cheat; still, they flash rather than obscure individuality. That's why for the next two thou­sand years practically everybody, including the Romantics, would embrace you so readily. Which rattles me, naturally —in my proprietary capacity, that is. In a manner of speak­ing, you were that body's tanless part, its private marble.

And with the passage of time you got whiter and whiter: more private and more desirable. Suggesting that you can be an egocentric and still handle a Caesar; that it's only a matter of equipoise. Music to so many ears! But what if your famous equipoise was just a matter of the phlegmatic tem­perament, easily passing for personal wisdom? Like Virgil's melancholy, say. But unlike the choleric upsurges of Pro- pertius. And certainly unlike Naso's sanguinic endeavors. Now, here's one who paved not an inch of that highway leading to monotheism. Here's one who was short on equi­poise and had no system, let alone a wisdom or a philosophy. His imagination couldn't get curbed, neither by its own in­sights nor by doctrine. Only by hexameter; better yet, by elegiac couplets.

Well, one way or another, he taught me practically everything, the explication of dreams included. Which be­gins with that of reality. Next to him, somebody like the Viennese doctor—never mind not catching the reference! —is kindergarten, child's play. And frankly, you, too. And so is Virgil. To put it bluntly, Naso insists that in this world one thing is another. That, in the final analysis, reality is one large rhetorical figure and you are lucky if it is just a polyptoton or a chiasmus. With him a man evolves into an object, and vice versa, with the immanent logic of grammar, like a statement sprouting a subordinate clause. With Naso the tenor is the vehicle, Flaccus, and/or the other way around, and the source of it all is the ink pot. So long as there was a drop of that dark liquid in it, he would go on— which is to say, the world would go on. Sounds like "In the beginning was the word"? Well, not to you. To him, though, this adage would not be news, and he would add that there will be a word in the end as well. Give him anything and he will extend it—or turn it inside out—which is still an extension. To him, language was a godsend; more exactly, its grammar was. More exactly still, to him the world was the language: one thing was another, and as to which was more real, it was a toss-up. In any case, if one thing was palpable, the other was bound to be also. Often in the same line, especially if it was hexameter: there is a big caesura. Failing that, in the next line; especially if it is an elegiac couplet. For measures to him were a godsend also.

He would be the first to confirm this, Flaccus, and so would you. Remember his recalling in Tristia how amid the storm that hit the ship taking him into exile (to my parts, roughly; to the outskirts of Hyperborea) he caught himself again composing verses? Naturally you don't. That was some sixteen years after you died. On the other hand, where is one better informed than in the netherworld? So I shouldn't worry that much about my references: you are catching them all. And meters are always meters, in the netherworld es­pecially. Iambs and dactyls are forever, like stars and stripes. More exactly: whenever. Not to mention, wherever. Small wonder that he eventually came to compose in the local dialect. As long as vowels and consonants were there, he could go on, Pax Romana or no Pax Romana. In the end, what is a foreign tongue if not just another set of synonyms. Besides, my good old Celoni had no ecriture. And even if they had, it would be only natural for him, the genius of metamorphosis, to mutate into an alien alphabet.

That, too, if you will, is how one expands the Pax Ro­mana. Although that never happened. He never stepped into our genetic pool. The linguistic one was enough, though: it took practically these two thousand years for him to enter Cy­rillic. Ah, but life without an alphabet has its merits! Exis­tence can be very poignant when it's just oral. Actually, as regards ecriture, my nomads were in no hurry. To scribble, it takes a settler: someone who's got nowhere to go. That's why civilizations blossom more readily on islands, Flaccus: take, for instance, your dear Greeks. Or in cities. What is a city if not an island surrounded by space? Anyway, if he indeed barged into the local dialect, as he tells us, it was not so much out of necessity, not in order to endear himself to the natives, but because of verse's omnivorous nature: it claims everything. Hexameter does: it is not so sprawling for noth­ing. And an elegiac couplet is even more so.

Lengthy letters are anathema everywhere, Flaccus, includ­ing in the afterlife. By now, I guess, you've quit reading, you've had enough. What with these aspersions cast on your pal and praise of Ovid practically at your expense. I continue because, as I said, who is there to talk to, anyway? Even assuming that Pythagorean fantasy about virtuous souls' sec­ond corporeality every thousand years is true, and that you've had a minimum of two opportunities so far, and now with Auden dead and the millennium having only four years to go, that quota seems to be busted. So it's back to the original you, even ifby now, as I suspect, you've quit read­ing. In our line of work, addressing the vacuum comes with the territory. So you can't surprise me with your absence, nor can I you with my perseverance.

Besides, I have a vested interest—and you, too. There is that dream that once was your reality. By interpreting it, one gets two for the price of one. And that's what Naso is all about. For him, one thing was another; for him, I'd say, A was B. To him, a body—a girl's especially—could be­come—nay, was—a stone, a river, a bird, a tree, a sound, a star. And guess why? Because, say, a running girl with her mane undone looks in profile like a river? Or asleep on a couch, like a stone? Or, with her arms up, like a tree or a bird? Or, vanishing from sight, being theoretically every­where, like a sound? And, triumphant or remote, like a star? Hardly. That would suffice for a good simile, while what Naso was after wasn't even a metaphor. His game was mor­phology, and his take was metamorphosis. When the same substance attains a different form. The main thing is the sameness of substance. And, unlike the rest of you, he man­aged to grasp the simple truth of us all being composed of the stuff the world is made of. Since we are of this world. So we all contain water, quartz, hydrogen, fiber, et cetera, albeit in different proportions. Which can be reshuffled. Which already have been reshuffled into that girl. Small wonder she becomes a tree. Just a shift in her cellular makeup. Anyhow, with our species, shifting from the ani­mate to the inanimate is the trend. You know what I mean, being where you are.

Smaller wonder, then, that a body of Latin poetry—of its Golden Age—became the target of my relentless afl'ection last night. Well, regard it perhaps as a last gasp of your joint Pythagorean quota. And yours was the last part to submerge: because it was less burdened with hexameters. And attribute the agility with which that body strove to escape the banality of bed to its flight from my reading you in translation. For I am accustomed to rhyme, and hexameters won't have it. And you, who came closest to it in your logaoedics, you too gravitated to hexameters: you groped for that radiator, you wanted to submerge. And for all the relentlessness of my pursuit, which stood—no pun intended—for a lifetime of reading you, the dream never turned wet, not because I am fifty-four, but precisely because all of you were rhymeless. Hence the terra-cotta sheen ofthat Golden Age body; hence, too, the absence of your beloved mirror, not to mention its gilded frame.

And do you know why it wasn't there? Because, as I said, I am accustomed to rhyme. And rhyme, my dear Flac- cus, is itself a metamorphosis, and metamorphosis is not a mirror. Rhyme is when one thing turns into another without changing its substance, which is sound. As far as language is concerned, to say the least. It is a condensation of Naso's approach, if you will—a distillation, perhaps. Naturally he comes frightfully close to it himself in that scene with Nar­cissus and Echo. Frankly, closer even than you, to whom he is metrically inferior. I say "frightfully" because, had he done so, for the next two thousand years we all would have been out of business. Thank God, then, for the hexametric inertia that kept him off, in that scene in particular; thank

God for that myth's own insistence on keeping eyesight and hearing apart. For that's what we've been at for the past two thousand years: grafting one onto another, fusing his vision with your meters. It is a gold mine, Flaccus, a full-time occupation, and no mirror can reflect a lifetime of reading.

At any rate, this should account for at least half of the body in question and its efforts to escape me. Perhaps, had my Latin stunk less, this dream would never have occurred in the first place. Well, at a certain age, it appears, one has reasons to be grateful for one's ignorance. For meters are still meters, Flaccus, and anatomy is still anatomy. One may claim to possess the whole body, even though its upper part is submerged somewhere between the mattress and the ra­diator: as long as this part belongs to Virgil or Propertius. It is still tanned, it is still terra-cotta, because it is still hexa- metric and pentametric. One may even conclude it is not a dream, since a brain can't dream about itself: most likely, it is reality—because it is a tautology.

Just because there is a word, "dream," it doesn't follow that reality has an alternative. A dream, Flaccus, is at best a momentary metamorphosis: far less lasting than that of rhyme. That's why I haven't been rhyming here—not be­cause you wouldn't appreciate the effort. The netherworld, I presume, is a polyglot kingdom. And if I've resorted to writing at all, it is because the interpretation of a dream— of an erotic one especially—is, strictly speaking, a reading. As such, it is profoundly anti-metamorphic, for it is the undoing of a fabric: thread by thread, line by line. And its repetitive nature is its ultimate giveaway: it asks for an equa­tion mark betveen the reading and the erotic endeavor itself. Which is erotic because it is repetitive. Turning pages: that's what it is; and that's what you are or should be doing now,

Flaccus. Well, this is one way of conjuring you up, isn't it? Because repetition, you see, is the primary trait of reality.

Someday, when I end up in your part of the netherworld, my gaseous entity will ask your gaseous entity whether you've read this letter. And if your gaseous entity should reply, No, mine won't feel offended. On the contrary, it will rejoice at this proof of reality's extension into the domain of shadows. For you've never read me to begin with. In this sense, you'll be like many people above who never read either one of us. To say the least, that's one thing that con­stitutes reality.

But should your gaseous entity reply, Yes, my gaseous entity will not be much worried either about having offended you with my letter, especially its smutty bits. Being a Latin author, you would be the first to appreciate an approach triggered in one by a language in which "poetry" is feminine. And as for "body," what else can one expect from a man in general, and a Hyperborean at that, not to mention the cold February night. I wouldn't even have to remind you that it was just a dream. To say the least, next to death, dream is reality.

So we may get along famously. As for the language, the realm, as I said, is most likely poli- or supra-glot. Besides, being just back from filling up your Pythagorean quota as Auden, you may still retain some English. That's perhaps how I would recognize you. Though he was a far greater poet than you, ofcourse. But that's why you sought to assume his shape last time you were around, in reality.

Worse comes to worse, we can communicate through meters. I can tap the First Asclepiadic stanza easily, for all its dactyls. The second one also, not to mention the Sapphics. That might work; you know, like inmates in an institution.

After all, meters are meters even in the netherworld, since they are time units. For this reason, they are perhaps better known now in Elysium than in the asinine world above. That's why using them feels more like communicating with the likes of you than with reality.

And naturally I would like you to introduce me to Naso. For I wouldn't know him by sight, since he never assumed anyone else's shape. I guess it's his elegiacs and hexameters that conspired against this. For the past two thousand years, fewer and fewer people have tried them. Auden again? But even he rendered hexameter as two trimeters. So I wouldn't aspire to a chat with Naso. All I would ask is to take a look at him. Even among souls he should be a rarity.

I shall not bother you with the rest of the crowd. Not even with Virgil: he's been back to reality, I should say, in so many guises. Nor with Tibullus, Gallus, Varus, and the others: your Golden Age was quite populous, but Elysium is no place for affinities, and I won't be there as a tourist. As for Propertius, I think I'll look him up myself. I believe it should be relatively easy to spot him: he must feel com­fortable among the manes in whose existence he believed so much in reality.

No, the two of you will be enough for me. One's taste sustained in the netherworld amounts to an extension of reality into the domain of shadows. I should hope I'll be able to do this, at least initially. Ah, Flaccus! Reality, like the Pax Romana, wants to expand. That's why it dreams; that's why it sticks to its guns as it dies.

In Memory of Stephen Spender

I

Twenty-three years later, the exchange with the Immigration Officer at Heathrow is brisk. "Business or pleasure?" "What do you call a funeral?" He waves me through.

I I

Twenty-three years ago, it took me nearly two hours to pass his predecessors. The fault, as it were, was mine. I had just left Russia and was heading for the States via London, where I had been invited to take part in the Poetry International festival. I had no proper passport, just a U.S. transit visa in a huge manila envelope issued to me at the American Con­sulate in Vienna.

Apart from the natural anxiety, the wait was extremely uncomfortable for me because ofWystan Auden, with whom I had come on the same plane from Vienna. As the customs officials grappled with that manila envelope, I saw him pacing frantically behind the barrier, in a state of growing irritation. Now and then he'd try to talk to one or another of them, only to be told off. He knew that I knew nobody in London and he couldn't leave me there alone. I felt terrible, if only because he was twice my age.

When in the end we emerged from customs, we were greeted by a strikingly beautiful woman, tall and almost regal in her deportment. She kissed Wystan on the cheek and introduced herself. "I am Natasha," she said. "I hope you don't mind staying with us. Wystan is staying with us also." And as I began to mumble something not entirely gram­matical, Auden intervened, "She is Stephen Spender's wife. Best if you say yes. They've prepared a room for you."

The next thing, we were in a car, with Natasha Spender at the wheel. Evidently they'd thought of everything; per­haps they'd discussed it over the phone—although I was a total stranger. Wystan hardly knew me, the Spenders even less. And yet . . . The London suburbs were flashing by in the car window and I tried to read signs. The most frequent was BED AND BREAKFAST; I understood the words, but luck­ily couldn't grasp—due to the absence of a verb—their meaning.

III

Later that evening, as the three of us sat down for supper, I tried to explain to Natasha (all the while marveling at the discrepancy between that wonderfully chiseled face and the homey-sounding Russian name) that I was not exactly a total stranger. That in fact back in Russia I'd had in my possession some items from this household, brought to me by Anna Akhmatova upon her return from England, where she had received an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1965. The items were two records (Dido and Aeneas by Purcell and Richard Burton reading a selection from the English poets) and a veritable tricolor of some college scarf. They were given to her, she told me, by an extraordinarily handsome English poet whose name was Stephen Spender and who asked her to pass these things on to me.

"Yes," said Natasha. "She told us a lot about you. You were in prison, and we were all terribly worried that you would be cold. Hence the scarf."

Presently the doorbell rang and she went off to open the door. I was in the middle of a conversation with Wystan, or more exactly, I was listening to him, as my grammar would allow for very little initiative. Although I'd translated quite a bit from English (mostly the Elizabethans, as well as some modern American poetry and a couple of plays), my con­versational skills at that time were minimal. I'd say "trepi­dation of the ground" instead of "earthquake." Besides, Wystan's speech, because of its extraordinary speed and truly transatlantic texture, required considerable concentration on my part.

But momentarily I lost it completely. In walked a very tall, slightly stooped, white-haired man with a gen­tle, almost apologetic smile on his face. He moved about what I assumed was his own dining room with the tenta- tiveness of a newcomer rather than the master of the house's certitude. "Hello, Wystan," he said, and then he greeted me.

I don't remember the exact words, but I remember being stunned by the beauty of their utterance. It felt as if all the nobility, civility, grace, and detachment ofthe English language suddenly filled the room. Like an instrument's chords being played all at once. To me, with my then un­trained ear, the effect was spellbinding. It owed, no doubt, in part to the instrument's stooping frame: one felt not so much this music's audience as its accomplice. I looked about the room: nobody betrayed the slightest emotion. But then accomplices never do.

IV

Still later that same night, Stephen Spender—for that was he—and I went to the BBC television station, for the late- news program's on-camera interview. Twenty-three years ago the arrival in London of somebody like me still counted as news. The whole thing took two hours, including the round trip by taxi. During those two hours—and during the taxi ride especially—the spell I was under began to let up somewhat, since we were talking logistics. Of the TV inter­view, of the Poetry International that began the next day, of my stay in England. Suddenly conversation was easy: we were just two men discussing relatively tangible matters. I felt oddly comfortable in the presence of this six-foot-tall, blue-eyed, white-haired old man I had never met before, and I marveled, Why? Most likely, I simply felt protected by his superior height and age, not to mention his Oxonian. But_ quite apart from that, in the gentle tentativeness of his deportment, bordering on the awkward and accompanied by a guilty smile, I sensed his awareness of the provisional, faintly absurd nature of any reality at hand. To this attitude I wasn't a stranger myself, as it comes not from one's phy­sique or temperament but from one's metier. Some people are less ready to display this, some more. Then there are those incapable of concealing it. I sensed that he and I be­longed in the latter category.

v

I'd pick this as the main reason for the subsequent twenty- three years of our unlikely friendship. There were several others, and I'll mention some. Yet before I go any further, I must say that if what follows sounds a bit too much like a personal memoir, with too much of my own presence in it, this is because I find it impossible—at least for now—to speak about Stephen Spender in the past tense. I don't in­tend to play the solipsistic game of denying the obvious: that he is no more. It would perhaps be an easy thing for me to do, since for all these twenty-three years that I've men­tioned, we saw each other rather infrequently, and never for more than five days in a row. But what I think and do is so intertwined in my mind with his and Wystan Auden's lives and lines that to reminisce seems more appropriate at present than trying to comprehend my emotions. Living is like quoting, and once you've learned something by heart, it's yours as much as the author's.

VI

For the next few days that I stayed under their roof, I was mothered by the Spenders and by Wystan in the most minute way, from breakfast to supper and into the nightcap. At one point, Wystan tried to teach me how to use the English public phone and was alarmed at my slow-wittedness. Ste­phen attempted to explain the Underground system, but in the end Natasha drove me everywhere. We lunched at the Cafe Royal, the scene of their courtship during the Blitz, where they'd sit for a hot meal between air raids as the waiters swept away shards of the cafe's broken windows. ("As the Germans were pounding us, we were actually wondering how soon the Russian planes would join them. In those days we were expecting the Russian bombers anytime.") Or else we'd go for lunch to Sonia Orwell. (" 1984 is not a novel," Wystan declared. "It is a study.") Then there was dinner at the Garrick Club with Cyril Connolly, whose Enemies of Promise I'd read just a couple of years before, and Angus Wilson, of whom I knew nothing. The former looked gray, bloated, and oddly Russian; the latter, in his pink shirt, resembled a tropical bird. The conversation escaped me, and I was reduced to observation.

This was often the case with me at that time, and I felt rather awkward on a number of occasions. I explained that to Stephen, but he evidently believed in osmosis more than analysis. One evening he and Natasha took me to a dinner party somewhere in South London, at the local bishop's rec­tory. His Eminence turned out to be a bit too lively, not to say gregarious; too purple, not to say lavender, for my un­trained eye. Still, the food was superb, so was the wine, and his stable of pretty young clerics waiting on the guests was lovely to look at. When the meal was over, the ladies de­parted to an adjacent chamber; the gentlemen stayed for their port and Havanas. I found myself sitting across from C. P. Snow, who began to extol to me the virtues and verities ofMikhail Sholokhov's prose. It took me about ten minutes to summon the appropriate entries from Partridge's dictionary of English slang (back in Russia, I had only Volume I) for an adequate reply. Mr. Snow's face went indeed white; Stephen laughed uproariously. In fact, I was aiming not so much at the pink novelist as at the lavender host, whose lacquered loafer was footsieing my honest Hush Puppy under the table.

I was trying to explain that to Stephen on the way back in the car, but he kept giggling. It was around midnight. As we crossed Westminster Bridge, he looked out the window and said, "They are still sitting." And to me: "Are you tired?" I said no. "Then let's go in." Natasha stopped the car; we got out and walked to the Houses ofParliament. We climbed several flights of stairs, entered a large hall, and landed in the gallery chairs. It was, I believe, the House ofCommons, and some tax debate was in full swing. Men of more or less similar height and complexion would rise, deliver vehement- sounding tirades, and sit down, to rise again in a short while. Stephen tried to whisper in my ear what this was all about;

still, it remained, to me, largely impenetrable, practically a pantomime. For a while I sat scrutinizing the rafters and stained-glass windows. Here I was, face-to-face with the most sacred notion of my youth, and I found the proximity blind­ing. I began to shake with silent laughter. The disparity between my mental and physical realities suddenly gaped vast: while the latter was occupying a green leather seat in the heart of Westminster, the former dragged its feet, as it were, somewhere behind the Urals. So much, I thought, for air travel, and looked at Stephen. Apparently osmosis worked.

VII

The Poetry International was a large, somewhat messy affair held on the Thames's South Bank, in Queen Elizabeth Hall. Few things could be worse than the mixture of poverty and concrete, but the mixture of concrete and frivolity is one of them. On the other hand, it matched what was transpiring inside. The West Germans in particular got into the spirit of the place, taking vers libre one step further by resorting to plain body language, and I remember Wystan saying mo­rosely into the backstage TV monitor, "This is not what you were paid for." The pay was measly, but for me these were the first pound notes I ever held in my hands, and I felt thrilled at putting into my pocket practically the same tender that was used by Dickens's and Joseph Conrad's characters.

The opening party was on the top floor of some high- rise on Pall Mall; New Zealand House, I think, was the name. As I write this, I look at a photograph taken there that day: Stephen is saying something funny to Wystan, who laughs heartily back, while John Ashbery and I look on. Stephen is much taller than any ofus, and there is an almost detectable tenderness in his profile as he faces Wystan, who, hands in his pockets, is immensely cheered. Their eyes meet; at this juncture, they have known each other for forty years, and they are happy in each other's company. Ah, this un­bearable snapshot laughter! That's what one is left with— with these arrested instants stolen from life without any an­ticipation of the far greater theft ahead that will render your hoard the source of utter despair. A hundred years ago one would be spared at least that.

VIII

Stephen read on a different night than Wystan and I, and I wasn't present at the reading. But I know what he read because I have the Selected he gave me when he got back that night. There are seven pieces he had marked in the table of contents—the way we all do before a reading. The edition was a twin of what I'd had back home, courtesy of an English exchange student, and I knew it well enough to notice that my favorites—"Air Raid Across the Bay at Plym­outh" and "Polar Exploration"—were not included. I believe I asked him why, although I could partly foresee the answer, since both poems were fairly old. Perhaps it's for this reason that I don't remember his reply. What I remember, how­ever, is that the conversation very quickly ran to Henry Moore's Shelter Drawings of the London Underground, and Natasha produced their dog-eared paperback edition, which I took with me to bed.

He mentioned Moore's Drawings, I suppose, because I mentioned the "Air Raid" poem. It had astounded me in my previous, Russian incarnation (in spite of my dim English) with its searchlight imagery's progression from the visual to the visionary. I thought the poem owed a lot to the contem­porary, post-Cubist (what we called in Russia Constructivist) paintings, to somebody like Wyndham Lewis. Needless to say, searchlights were an integral part of my childhood: my earliest memory, in fact. So much so that till this day when I see Roman numerals I immediately recall the wartime night sky over my hometown. So I suppose I'd said something to that effect to Stephen, and the next thing was Henry Moore's little book of drawings.

IX

I'll never know now whether that was just a shift in conver­sation or a part of Stephen's osmosis game plan vis-a-vis my innocent self. Either way, the impact of the sketches was extraordinary. I'd seen a fair number of reproductions of Moore's work: all those reclining microcephalics, single or in groups. Mostly on postcards, though a couple of catalogues passed through my hands as well. I'd heard enough about pre-Columbian influences, organic forms, the hollow-versus- solid-mass concept, etc., and wasn't very much taken by any of it. The usual modern-art palaver, the song of insecurity.

Shelter Drawings had very little to do with modern art, and everything to do with security. If the sequence had any root, it must have been Mantegna's Agony in the Garden. Moore, evidently, was similarly obsessedwith ellipsoids, and the Blitz provided him with a veritable safari. The whole thing takes place in the Underground, which is an apt word in more ways than one. Thus, no airborne angel carrying the cup is in sight here, though "Let it pass from me" is pre­sumably on all lips. To paraphrase Wystan, Shelter Drawings is not a graphic work but a study. Above all, in ellipsoids, from the swaddled bodies covering platforms to the stations' vaults. But it is also a study in submission, since a body reduced to its generic form for reasons of safety won't for­get this reduction, won't straighten up fully. Once you've crouched in submission to fear, the future of your vertebrae is set: you'll crouch again. Anthropologically speaking, war results in a backslide—unless of course you are a witless babe.

And that's what I was when Moore was busy with his study of ellipsoids and Stephenwith his exploration of search­lights. As I looked at the Drawings I practically remembered the crypt-turned-bomb-shelter of our nearby cathedral, with its vaults and shrouded or swaddled bodies, my mother's and mine among them. While outside "Triangles, parallels, parallelograms,Iwere experimenting with hypotheses/on the blackboard sky . . ." At this rate, I said to myself as I was turning the obsessively penciled pages, I may remember even my own birth, perhaps even the time before; in fact, I may—perish the thought—go English.

X

Something of the sort had been well under way since I'd laid my hands on the Penguin anthology Poetry in the Thir­ties. If you are born in Russia, nostalgia for an alternative genesis is inevitable. The thirties were close enough, as I was born in 1940. What made the decade even more con­genial was its grimy, monochrome denomination, owing chiefly to the printed word and black-and-white cinema: my native realm was of the same shade and stayed that way long after the Kodak invasion. MacNeice, Auden, and Spender —I mention them in the order I found them—made me feel at home at once. It wasn't their moral vision, since my en­emy, I believe, was more formidable and ubiquitous than theirs; it was their poetics. It unshackled me: above all, metrically and stanzaically. After "Bagpipe Music," the good old tetrametric, quatrain-bound job seemed—initially at least—less tempting. The other thing I found terribly at­tractive was their common knack for taking a bewildered look at the familiar.

Call this influence; I'll call it affinity. Roughly from the age of twenty-eight on, I regarded them as my relatives rather than as masters or "imaginary friends."They were my mental family—far more so than anybody among my own contemporaries, inside or outside of Russia. Chalk this up to my immaturity or to disguised stylistic conservatism. Or else simply to vanity: to some puerile desire to be judged under a foreign code of conscience. On the other hand, consider the possibility that what they did could be loved from afar. Or that reading poets writing in a foreign tongue bespeaks one's appetite for worship. Stranger things have happened: you've seen the churches.

XI

I lived happily in that mental family. The wall-thick English- Russian dictionary was in fact a door, or should I say a win­dow, since it was often foggy and staring through it required some concentration. This paid off particularly well because it was poetry, for in a poem every line is a choice. You can tell a lot about a man by his choice of an epithet. I thought MacNeice chaotic, musical, self-indulgent, and imagined him moody and reticent. I thought Auden brilliant, resolute, profoundly tragic, and witty; I imagined him quirky and gruff. I thought Spender more lyrical and ambitious with his imagery than either, though rather conspicuously modernist, but I couldn't picture him at all.

Reading, like loving, is a one-way street, and all that was going on unbeknown to any of them. So when I ended up that summer in the West, I was a total stranger indeed. (I didn't know, for instance, that MacNeice had already been dead for nine years.) Less so perhaps to Wystan, since he wrote the introduction to my Selected and must have realized that my "In Memory of T. S. Eliot" is based on his "In Memory of W. B. Yeats." But certainly to Stephen and Na­tasha, no matter what Akhmatova could possibly have told them. Neither then nor in the course of the subsequent twenty-three years did I talk to him about his poems, or vice versa. The same goes for his World Within World, The Thir­ties and After, Love-Hate Relations, Journals. Initially, I suppose, the culprit was my timidity, saddled with my Eliz­abethan vocabulary and shaky grammar. Eventually, it would be his or my transatlantic fatigue, public places, people around, or matters more absorbing to us than our own writ­ings. Such as politics or press scandals, or Wystan. Somehow from the threshold it was assumed that we had more in common than not, the way it is in a family.

XII

Aside from our respective mother tongues, what would keep us apart were more than thirty years of life in this world, Wystan's and Stephen's superior intelligence, and their— with Wystan more and less with Stephen—private lives. That might seem like a lot; actually it wasn't much. I wasn't aware of their varying affections when I met them; besides, they were in their sixties. What I was aware of then, am now, and will be to my dying day is their extraordinary intelligence, to which thus far I've seen no approximation. Which of course puts my intellectual insecurity somewhat to rest, though it doesn't necessarily close the gap. As for their private lives, they came into focus, I believe, precisely for the reasons of their perceived intellectual superiority. In plain words, because in the thirties they were on the left, with Spender joining the Communist Party for a few days. What's done in a totalitarian state by the secret police in an open society presumably is the province of one's opponents or critics. Still, the reverse ofthis—attributing one's achieve­ment to one's sexual identity—is perhaps even more silly. On the whole, the insistence on man's definition as a sexual being is breathtakingly reductive. If only because the ratio of one's sexual activity to other pursuits—say, earning a living, driving a car—is dismal even in one's prime. Theo­retically, a poet has more time on his hands, but considering the way poetry is paid, his private life warrants less scrutiny than it gets. Especially if he writes in a language as cool about gender as English. And if the language is not con­cerned, why should its speakers be? Well, perhaps they are precisely because it isn't. At any rate, I indeed felt we had far more in cgmmon than not. The only gap I wouldn't be able to close was that of age. As for the difference in intel­ligence, at my best moments, I may convince myself I am getting near to their plane of regard. What remained was the language gap, and now and then I've tried to close it as best I could, though that required prose.

XII I

The only time I spoke to Stephen directly about his work, I am afraid, was when his Temple was published. By that time, I must admit, novels had ceased to be my preferred reading, and I wouldn't have talked to him about it at all, were it not for the book's being dedicated to Herbert List, a great German photographer with whose niece I was once in love. Spotting the dedication, I ran to him with the book in my teeth—I think this was in London—declaring trium­phantly, "See, we are related!" He smiled wanly and said that the world is a small place, Europe in particular. Yes, I said, the world is a small place, and no next person makes it bigger. And no next time, he added, or something to that effect, and then asked whether I actually liked the book. I told him I'd always thought an autobiographical novel is a contradiction in terms; that it disguises more than it reveals even if the reader is partial. That to me, in any case, there was more of the author in the book's heroine than in its hero. He replied that this had a lot to do with the period's mental climate in general and with censorship in particular, and that he perhaps should have rewritten the whole thing. To that I protested, saying that disguise is the mother of literature and that censorship might even claim its fatherhood, and that there is nothing worse than when Proust's biographers scribble away to prove that Albertine was in fact Albert. Yes, he said, their pens move in a direction diametrically opposed to the author's: they are undoing the fabric.

XIV

I see the past tense creeping in, and I wonder whether I should really fight it. He died on July 16; today is August 5. Still, I can't think of him summarily. Whatever I may say about him will be provisional or one-sided. Definitions are always reductive, and his ability to escape them at the age of eighty-six is not surprising, even though I caught up with only a quarter of it. Somehow it's easier to question one's own presence than to believe he's gone.

This is so because gentleness and civility are most last­ing. And his are of the most durable kind, borne as they were by the grimy, cruel, either/or era. To say the least, his manner of deportment—in verse as in life—appears to have been a matter of choice as much as temperament. In sissy times—like these—one, a writer especially, can afford to be brutal, lean, mean, etc. In fact, in sissy times one practically has to peddle gore and garbage, for otherwise one won't sell. With Hitler and Stalin around, one goes the other way . . . Ah, all this paperback brutal talent! So numerous and so unnecessary, and so awash in money. That alone can make you feel nostalgic for the thirties and play havoc with your affinities. In the final analysis, though, what matters in life as well as on paper—with deeds as well as with epithets—is what helps you to retain your dignity, and gentleness and civility do. For that reason alone he is, and will remain, palpable. More and more so, as days go by.

XV

My fanciful notions (affinity, mental family, etc.) aside, we got along very well. This partly had to do with the total unpredictability of his mind and its turns. With people around, he was terribly amusing—not so much for their sake as because he was organically incapable of banality. A re­ceived idea would appear on his lips only to get entirely subverted by the end of the sentence. However, he wasn't trying to amuse himself, either: it's simply that his speech was trying to catch up with the perpetually running train of his thought and therefore was rather unpredictable to the speaker himself. Given his age, the past was remarkably infrequently his subject; much less so than the present or the future, on which he was especially big.

In part, I think, this was the result of his metier. Poetry is a tremendous school of insecurity and uncertainty. You never know whether what you've done is any good, still less whether you'll be able to do anything good tomorrow. If this doesn't destroy you, insecurity and uncertainty in the end become your intimate friends and you almost attribute to them an intelligence all their own. That's why, I think, he showed such interest in the future: of countries, individuals, cultural trends: as though he tried to run the entire gamut of all possible mistakes in advance—not in order eventually to avoid them, but just to know those intimate friends of his better. For the same reason, he'd never make a meal of his past achievements or, for that matter, misfortunes.

XVI

This would give one the impression that he was free of ambition, devoid of vanity. _And that impression, I think, would be by and large correct. I remember one day, many years ago, giving a poetry reading with Stephen in Atlanta, Georgia. Actually, we were raising funds for Index on Censorship—a magazine which, I believe, was essentially his brainchild and about whose fortunes, not to mention the issue of censorship itself, he cared deeply.

We had to spend about an hour and a half onstage and were sitting in the anteroom shuffling our papers. Normally when two poets share a reading, one reads for forty-five minutes solid, then the other. To present the public with a convincing notion of oneself. "Reckon with me" is the idea. So Stephen turns to me and says, "Joseph, why don't we do fifteen minutes each, and then have an interval with ques­tions and answers, and then read for fifteen minutes each again. This way they won't be bored. How does that sound to you?" Marvelous, I say. For it was; it gave the whole undertaking the air of an entertainment. Which is what a poetry reading is in the first place, rather than an ego trip. It's a show, a piece of theater—especially if it's a fund-raiser.

That was Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. Where the public, even a well-meaning one, knows precious little about its own, American poetry, let alone about the Brits. The procedure he suggested wouldn't advance his reputation, nor would it sell his books. Which is to say, he was not in it for himself, and he didn't read anything topical, either. I can't imagine anyone from among his American brethren (of his age, es­pecially) deliberately short-changing himself—either for the sake of an issue or for the public's sake. There were about eight hundred people in that room, if not more.

"I suppose American poets all fall to pieces," he used to say (referring to the famous suicides in the profession), "because the stakes over there are so high. In Great Britain one is never paid so much and a national reputation is out of the question, although the place is much smaller." Then he would giggle and add, "Actually, precisely because of that."

XVII

It's not that he held himself in low esteem; he was simply genuinely humble. That virtue, too, I should think, was metier-inspired. If you are not born with some organic dis­order, poetry—writing it as well as reading it—will teach you humility, and rather quickly at that. Especially if you are both writing and reading it. The dead alone will set you straight fast, not to mention your peers. Second-guessing yourself will become your second nature. You may be en­amored with your own endeavors for some time, of course, provided your peers are worthless; but if in your under­graduate days you meet Wystan Auden, your self-infatuation is bound to be short.

After this encounter, nothing was easy: neither writing nor living. I may be wrong, but my impression is that he discarded far more than he printed. In living, however, where you can discard nothing, this unease resulted in ex­traordinary subtlety as well as in terrifying sobriety (with Auden becoming now and then its target but never a ca­sualty). This mixture—of subtlety and sobriety—is what makes a gentleman, provided their ratio favors subtlety.

xviii

And that is what he was, in a largely uncouth literary crowd on both sides of the Atlantic. He stood out, both literally and figuratively speaking. And the crowd's response, left and right, was predictable. X would chide him for being a pacifist in World War II (though he was nothing of the sort, having been turned down on medical grounds, after which he served as a fireman—and being a fireman during the Blitz in London is a far cry from being a conscientious objector at the time elsewhere). Y would accuse him of editing the CIA-financed Encounter in the fifties (although Stephen resigned this job once he learned the nature of the magazine's purse, and anyway, why didn't these people who were so squeamish about CIA money throw in any of their own to keep the publication afloat?). A righteous Z would jump on him for declaring his readiness to go immediately to Hanoi while it was being bombed but inquire who was to pay the fare. A man living by his pen—over thirty books, not to mention innumerable reviews by Stephen, tells one how he made his living—seldom has money to enact his convictions; on the other hand, he presumably didn't want to manifest his scru­ples at the expense of the Hanoi government. Well, that's only the end of the alphabet. Curiously—or predictably— enough, those reproaches and remonstrations were most often American in origin; i.e., they were coming from a place where ethics enjoys a greater proximity to cash than else­where. On the whole, the postwar world was a pretty crude show, and he would take part in it now and then, not for its applause and flowers, but—the way it appears in retro- spect—as its saving grace.

I notice I am editorializing; the genre begins to dictate the content. This is acceptable, but not under the circumstances. Under the circumstances, the content should determine the genre—even if the net result is fragments. For that's what one's life becomes once it is entrusted to its beholder. So let me shut my eyes, and behold: an evening in some theater in Milan, ten or twelve years ago; lots of people, glitter, candelabra, TV, etc.; onstage—a bunch of Italian professors and literary critics as well as Stephen and myself; we are all members of a jury for some big award in poetry. Which goes this year to Giorgio Caproni, a creaky, crusty octogenarian of rustic appearance, bearing some resemblance to Frost. The old man shuffles awkwardly along the aisle and with great difficulty starts to climb the stage, mumbling some­thing inaudible to himself. Nobody moves; the Italian pro­fessors and literary critics in their chairs watch an old man struggling up the steps. At this point Stephen gets up and starts to applaud; I join him. Then comes an ovation.

Or else it's an empty, windswept square in downtown Chi­cago, well past midnight, some twenty years ago. We crawl out of somebody's car into the winter rain and march toward some gigantic arrangement ofcast iron and steel cables sitting there, dimly lit on a pedestal in the middle of the square. It's a Picasso sculpture; a woman's head, as it turns out, and Stephen wants to see it now because he leaves town in the morning. "Very Spanish," he says. "And very warlike." And suddenly, for me, it's 1938, the Spanish Civil War—to which he went, paying, I believe, out of his own pocket, because it was the last quest for the Just City on human record, not the superpowers' chess game, and we lost, and then the whole thing was dwarfed by World War Il's carnage. The night is grainy with rain and wind, cold and thoroughly black- and-white. And the tall man with absolutely white hair, look­ing like a schoolboy with his hands stretching out from the sleeves ofhis old blackjacket, is slowly circling these random pieces of metal twisted by the Spanish genius into a work of art that resembles a ruin.

XXI

Or it is the Cafe Royal, London, where I insist on taking him and Natasha for lunch each time I am there. For their memories' sake as well as for mine. So it's hard to tell what year it is—but not that long ago. Isaiah Berlin is with us, and also my wife, who cannot take her young eyes away from Stephen's face. For indeed, with that snowy-white hair of his, shining gray-blue eyes, and apologetic grin presiding over the six-foot-tall, stooping frame, he looks in his eighties like an allegory of some benevolent winter visiting the other seasons. Even when he is among his peers or his family, to say nothing oftotal strangers. Besides, it's summer. ("What's good about summer here," I hear him saying while uncorking a bottle in his garden, "is that you don't have to chill the wine.") We are making "the century's great writers" list: Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Musil, Faulkner, Beckett. "But that's only up to the fifties," says Stephen, and turns to me. "Any­one that good now?" "Perhaps John Coetzee," I say. "A South African. He is the only one who has a right to write prose after Beckett." "Never heard of him," says Stephen. "How do you spell his name?" So I get a piece of paper, spell the name, and add Life and Times of Michael K and pass it on to Stephen. Then the conversation reverts to gossip, a recent production of Cosifan tutte, with the singers doing the arias prostrate on the floor, current knighthoods—after all, this is a lunch with two knights. Suddenly Stephen grins widely and says, "The nineties is a good time to die."

And, lunch over, we are giving him a lift home, but on the Strand he asks the cabbie to stop, bids us farewell, and disappears into a large bookstore waving that piece ofpaper with Coetzee's name on it. I worry how he'll get home; then I remember that London is his town more than mine.

And speaking of fragments, I remember how, in 1986, when the Challenger blew up in the air over Cape Canaveral, I heard either the ABC or the CNN voice reading Stephen's "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great," written fifty years ago.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,

See how these names are feted by the waving grass

And by the streamers of white cloud

And whispers of wind in the listening sky.

The names of those who in their lives fought for life,

Who wore at their hearts the fire's centre.

Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun

And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

I think I told him of this episode a few years later, and I believe he smiled, with that famous smile of his that con­veyed at once pleasure, a sense of general absurdity, his partial culpability for that absurdity, pure warmth. If I am tentative here, it's because I can't quite picture the sur­roundings. (For some reason a hospital room keeps popping up.) As for his reaction, it couldn't have been otherwise: "I Think Continually" is his most tired, most anthologized piece. Of all his lines—written, discarded, unwritten, half or fully forgotten, yet glowing inside him nevertheless. For the metier claims its own one way or another. Hence his radiance, which stays on my retina whether I shut my eyes or not. Hence, in any case, that smile.

XXV

People are what we remember about them. What we call life is in the end a patchwork of someone else's recollections. With death, it gets unstitched, and one ends up with random, disjointed fragments. With shards or, if you will, with snap­shots. Filled with their unbearable laughter or equally un­bearable smiles. Which are unbearable because they are one- dimensional. I should know; after all, I am a photographer's son. And I may even go as far as suggesting a link between picture taking and verse writing—well, insofar as the frag­ments are black-and-white. Or insofar as writing means re­tention. Yet one can't pretend that what one beholds goes beyond its blank reverse side. Also, once one realizes how much somebody's life is a hostage of one's own memory, one balks at the jaws of the past tense. Apart from anything, it's too much like talking behind somebody's back, or like be­longing to some virtuous, triumphant majority. One's heart should try to be more honest—if it can't be smarter—than one's grammar. Or else one should keep a journal whose entries, simply by definition, would keep that tense at bay.

481 I In Memory of Stephen Spender XXVI

So now the last fragment. A journal entry, as it were: for July 20 to 21, 1995. Although I never kept a journal. Ste­phen, however, did.

Awfully hot night, worse than N.Y. D. [family friend] picks me up, and 45 minutes later we are at Loudoun Rd. Ah, how well I know this place's floors and basement! Natasha's first words: "Of all people, he was unlikeliest to die." I can't think of what the last four days were like for her, of what this night is going to be like. It's all in her eyes. The same goes for the children: for Matthew and Lizzie. Barry [Lizzie's husband] produces whiskey and treats my glass generously. No one is in good shape. Of all things, we are talking about Yugoslavia. I couldn't eat on the plane and still can't. More whiskey, then, and more Yugoslavia, and by now it's mid­night for them. Matthew and Lizzie suggest that I stay either in Stephen's study or in Lizzie and Barry's attic. But M. booked a hotel for me, and they drive me there: it's a few blocks away.

In the morning D. drives us all to St. Mary's on Pad- dington Green. On account of my Russianness, Natasha ar­ranges for me to see Stephen in an open coffin. He looks severe and settled for whatever it is ahead. I kiss him on his brow, saying, "Thank you for everything. Say hello to Wystan and my parents. Farewell." I remember his legs, in the hospital, protruding from the gown: bruised with burst blood vessels—exactly like my father's, who was older than Ste­phen by six years. No, it's not because I wasn't present at his death that I flew to London. Though that could be as good a reason as any. No, not because of that. Actually, after seeing Stephen in the open coffin, I feel much calmer. Pre­sumably this custom has something to do with its therapeutic effect. This strikes me as a Wystan-like thought. He would be here if he could. So it might just as well be me. Even if I can't provide Natasha and the children with any comfort, I can be a distraction. Now Matthew screws the bolts into the coffin lid. He fights tears, but they are winning. One can't help him; nor do I think one should. This is a son's job.

XXVII

People begin to arrive for the service and stand outside in little groups. I recognize Valerie Eliot, and after some initial awkwardness we talk. She tells me this story: The day her husband died, the BBC broadcast a tribute to him over the wireless, read by Auden. "He was absolutely the right man," she says. "Still, I was somewhat surprised by his prompt­ness." A little later, she says, he comes to London, calls on her, and tells her that when the BBC learned that Eliot was gravely ill, they telephoned and asked him to record an obituary. Wystan said that he refused to speak about T. S. Eliot in the past tense while he was alive. In that case, said the BBC, we'll go to somebody else. "So I had to grit my teeth and do it," said Auden. "And for that I beg your forgiveness."

Then the service begins. It i s as beautiful as an affair of this kind can be. The window behind the altar gives onto a wonderfully sunlit churchyard. Haydn and Schubert. Except that, as the quartet goes into a crescendo, I see in the side window a lift with construction workers climbing to the ump­teenth floor of the adjacent high-rise. This strikes me as the kind of thing Stephen himself would notice and later remark about. And throughout the service, totally inappropriate lines from Wystan's poem about Mozart keep running through my mind:

How seemly then to celebrate the birth Of one who didn't do harm to our poor earth, Created masterpieces by the dozen, Indulged in toilet humor with his cousin And had a pauper funeral in the rain— The like of whom we'll never meet again.

So, after all, he is here: not as a comfort but as a dis­traction. And out of habit: I suppose his lines used to visit Stephen's mind quite frequently, and Stephen's his. Now in either case. they will be homesick forever.

XXVIII

The service over, all adjourn to Loudoun Road for drinks in the garden. The sun is hard-hitting, the sky is a solid blue slate. General chatter; the most frequent openings are "The end of an era" and "What a perfect day." The whole thing looks more like a garden party than anything. Perhaps this is the way the English keep their real sentiments in check, though some faces betray confusion. Lady R. says hello and makes some remark to the effect that at all funerals one thinks inevitably of one's o^, didn't I think? I say no and, when she professes disbelief, explain to her that in our line of work one learns to narrow the focus by writing elegies. That, I add, rubs off on one's attitudes in reality. "I meant that one implicitly wishes to last as long as the person who's just died," maneuvers Lady R. I buy the implication and move toward the exit. As I step outside, I run into a just-arriving couple. The man is about my age and looks vaguely familiar (some­body in publishing). We greet each other hesitantly and he says, "The end of an era." No, I want to say to him, not the end of an era. Of a life. Which was longer and better than either yours or mine. Instead I just muster a broad, cheerful, Stephen-like grin and say, "I don't think so," and walk away.

August 10, 1995