SO, THIS IS WHERE PEOPLE...

     AFTER a medical procedure the other day,  I was  feeling blessed with the good news and at home now exhausted I opened for no reason in particular Rilke's THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE  and reading the opening and forever seductive opening, "So, this is where people come to live...

     I had no need to continue as I was again walking on West 8th Street in the early morning of a May day in 1966 when I went into the Marlboro Bookstore and bought my first version of this book which I have carried in various editions with me across many countries and all these years.  Together with Thomas Wolfe's LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL it set me on my literary road to....

       That morning I was walking from a modern apartment building--- 416 Lafayette Street--- where I had been the fifth person in a very large bed where I had slept at the edge while these two couples were or were not doing things---though early on I must have thought I would be part of it all--- or at least with Julie--- as I had met these two English girls--- Julie Rowland and Beryl Sayers, who it turns out were waiting for these two guys and we had fallen into a conversation in the English pub on Sixth Avenue near the Waverley Theatre. 

      It was late at night and I had arrived there after my  night shift as a copy boy at The New York Times--- one of the girls was from Yorkshire--- and I had talked with her of having  gone to visit Clive Snape from Hull who I had met at Trinity College in Dublin, in 1965, when I was actually at University College, Dublin--- this guy had been a medical student and lived in rooms as was said in  the college and I was much taken with the idea that he had a servant---they had word for this person which I have forgotten-- who made their beds, cleaned out the fireplace etc...

      I was now working as a copy-boy while waiting to go to the Peace Corps training in Los Angeles for going to Turkey...  this was not to be as in the last week of the training I broke my knee playing soccer so went instead back to Ireland and as many know: on my way later in the following summer to visit friends from that training,  I got off the train in Sofia, Bulgaria in September 1967 and of course as I walked on the Boulevard St Michel with Lilia just before Easter in 1968 I thought of, "So, this is where people come to live...

      Over the years I have thought of that line later with Ruth, the mother of my children--- and yes I have thought of this line even later when walking there with my daughter Elizabeth who was going for a term at the Sacred Heart school in Nantes... I have thought of it while walking along it alone on my way to visit Julian Green...and I have thought of it now and of how the line continues, "...I would have thought it was a city to die in. I have been out.  

I saw hospitals. I saw a man who staggered and fell. A crowd formed around him and I was spared the rest."

                                                              II
      The day after the procedure I was watching the Errol Morris documentary on the photographer ELSA DORFMAN and as she was flipping through photographs I saw a picture of Hannah Green, from back when I first met her.  The picture was used on the cover for THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE...

       Hannah would approve of this sort of post as she valued Rilke, of course, and knew why I was attached to this book and she might like the being remembered from the time when we had first met each other when I sat in her class at Columbia... 

      Here is the picture and then the description by Elsa Dorfman of the taking of the picture.

Summer 1972 Harvey and I went up to visit Hannah Green and John Wesley in Peterborough, New Hampshire. I took pictures of Hannah in front of the farmhouse, inside the barn, in an open field by the pond; they weren't spectacular. And we wanted one for the jacket of her book, The Dead of the House. So Hannah and John came to Cambridge and we tried some in my backyard. They worked.

When I had my show at Boston City Hall in October 1971, Hannah and John drove all the way down from Peterborough to see it. But unfortunately, three days before, Mayor Kevin White had made me take it down because he was having a banquet for big-city mayors in the gallery where it was hanging. He was trying to impress the mayors, especially Alioto and Lindsay, and the media who would cover The Event, and didn't want them 'to see all the sad faces in those depressing photographs.' When I got furious that he suddenly wanted the whole installation down after all that work, he said, 'You look cute when you're angry, my dear, but it's my city hall. If they were Rembrandts and I wanted them down, they'd come down.' When Hannah and John got there after that long drive, and it was a hot day, all they saw was a huge empty space. 'Elsa Dorfman? Never heard of her,' the guard told them.