A FEW COMMENTS REGARDING THE MAKERS
Richard
Adopted by childless parents, Richard knew nothing
of his blood relatives or genetic inheritance, so that
his extraordinary mind was an anonymous anomaly
bestowed by an agency. Raised in an enclave, it wasn’t
until he went off to school that he understood others
lacked a home with acres of books in a two-story library.
He knew Paris, but called New York “the only habitable
city” and lived there most of his life in a tiny apartment
where the bathroom was encrusted with photos of friends
or famous artists or both, and all other walls were shelves
loaded with volumes stacked two deep. Every last inch
of space held a stimulus to thought, and I asked what
he would do when room ran out. “My dear,” he replied,
“if you can’t fit all of western culture into a place this size,
you might as well give up.” The whole of a culture is not
to contain, but Richard was not a man to admit defeat.
Eleanor
Eleanor never tasted an alcoholic beverage in her life,
though her genial husband drank plenty and enjoyed
soirées and was in the habit of asking writers to stop
by for cocktails, so that she entertained often without
benefit of social lubricant. Raised in the rural South,
she had plenty of self-control and a sense of propriety
others mistook for moral rigidity. While her husband
lived, his books received far more attention than hers,
and it wasn’t till after he died that her old-fashioned
poems, still Modernist long after America moved on
to Post Everything, began to win awards. The quietly
devastating accounts of domestic endurance she wrote
waste no word and want concentration to comprehend,
as did she. Always warm to me, she could strike others
as formidable, who didn’t realize that her firm opinions
were a form of defense, and that morality was not the key.
Mark
Most people as handsome as Mark don’t bother
to try hard in life, content to get by on their looks,
so it’s surprising he found the motivation you need
to persist in doing the difficult thing that is poetry.
He taught creative writing for years but didn’t like it,
and did so only so that he could afford top-rated
restaurants and fine wine and travel to foreign places.
Unashamed of his self-indulgence, he was generous
in his way, helping others find jobs and get published.
Like quite a few authors I’ve known, he wanted to be
a painter and entered art school hoping to become one.
One night over dinner and drinks in a Manhattan bistro,
I asked why he abandoned his first pursuit for a second.
“My paintings,” he told me, “just stopped improving,
and the poems I was writing got better and better.
You go where your talent decides to take you.”
George Bradley is a poet, fiction writer, and translator who has published with Yale University Press, Knopf, NYRB Press, HarperCollins and elsewhere. His work has appeared in many periodicals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Paris Review, and he has received numerous awards, including the Yale Younger Poets Prize and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has worked variously in construction, as a sommelier, as a copywriter, and as a literary editor. At present he imports and distributes an Italian olive oil produced on a farm near Florence. When not on the farm, he can often be found in Chester, near the river of rivers in Connecticut.
Photo credit: Chris LeQuire