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By Root 1165 0

meeting of the Society of Poets, then have dinner with his lover. The lover was Sanford Friedman, the author of Totempole, an early gay novel that involved the love affair between an American soldier and a young Korean man. Sandy and Richard lived together in a spacious apartment in the West Village, where Richard and I would have to tiptoe through the darkened room in which Sanford was prostrate on the couch, afflicted with depression or migraine, I never knew which. We’d head back for Richard’s cozy, brilliantly lit study, packed from floor to ceiling with books, everything brass and green glass and red upholstery. We’d close the door and try to keep our voices down. When Sandy’s father died, I wrote him a complicated, overly literary, neurotic condolence letter, which Sandy responded to by writing back, “I appreciate the gesture if not the sentiment.”

Richard loved literature with a magnanimous, all-encompassing, energetic love. Whereas many established poets or novelists read only the talismanic texts that had impressed and shaped them in their youths over and over or, with a mixture of disdain, curiosity, and distrust, skimmed the latest books by friends and rivals, Richard had nothing but friends and no rivals and he liked everything. He had translated more than 150 books from the French, and if the authors were alive, he usually knew them—Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Roland Barthes, the pessimistic Romanian aphorist E. M. Cioran. Later in the seventies Richard would introduce the poet James Merrill and the critic David Kalstone to Cioran in Paris, and they were astonished that the invariably gloomy writer did nothing all evening but crack jokes, drink wine, and consume hundreds of periwinkles, fishing them with a straight pin out of their tiny black shells.

Richard had even translated Charles de Gaulle and had a story about being invited to an official lunch at the Élysée Palace. Academicians, admirals, and actresses were at the lunch, and de Gaulle posed a question to each. When de Gaulle got to Richard, he asked where he’d learned such good French. Richard replied, “In a car between Ohio and Florida, mon général.” When Richard was a child, an uncle had started teaching him French while they were driving down to Miami. After the lunch de Gaulle took Richard aside and asked him what had been his model for his style while translating the de Gaulle memoirs. Richard said, “Tacitus.” Which was just the right response.

Richard was only ten years older than I but he treated me as if I were a child—an intelligent, well-mannered child who was eminently sortable, but a child nonetheless. He’d call me up and say, “I have a little surprise for you. Meet me in half an hour at the Riv on Sheridan Square.”

I’d drop whatever I was doing and rush to join him. He’d take me off to meet one of his eminent friends. Through Richard I met Howard Moss, the poetry editor of the New Yorker, who had a dry sense of humor and looked like Mr. Magoo, the nearsighted cartoon character with poached eyes and folds in his face. Howard lived on Tenth Street off Fifth Avenue in an apartment in a brownstone with a bright red door. He said he was “allergic” to cigarettes. In fact, he probably just didn’t like the smell of smoke, but in those days the smoker had such unquestioned rights that people who objected had to invent a medical excuse. Howard had stopped smoking two years earlier but still sucked a plastic cigarette all the time, a sort of pacifier. I, who smoked three packs a day, would become so desperate that I’d have to lean out his window—and pull the guillotine-style sash down to my knees, so that no smoke would leak back into his rooms. Even on freezing nights at midnight I’d be hanging out his window; now smokers would have to go down to the street.

Howard was a New Yorker born and bred and seemed a holdover from the 1950s. I never saw him out of a coat and tie, but not the sumptuous Italian suits men wear now. No, he always had on those pinched, buttoned-up, pin-striped Brooks Brothers “sack suits” writers and profs wore in the fifties