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By Root 1180 0

you. In all three cities, people practice what Paul Valéry called the “delirious professions,” those careers that depend on self-assurance and the opinion of others rather than on certifiable skills. The delirious professions, I’d hazard, comprise literature, criticism, design, the visual arts, acting, advertising, all of the media—but not dance, for instance, where you can either do your thirty-two tours jetés without “traveling” downstage, or you can’t. If you can do them, you can dance in any company in the world without further ado. But all the delirious professions, having no agreed-upon standards, require introductions and alliances, protectors and patrons, famous teachers or acclaim by someone reputed. In short, they depend upon that most mercurial of all possessions: reputation. Socially static cities such as Paris have less obvious social frenzy, and the rise of a Rubempré or Rastignac is all the more remarkable because it’s so rare. But in a mobile city such as New York, people’s ambitions are much more pressing and obvious. In New York pushy can be a compliment, aggressive is unqualified high praise. I remember how some Swedish friends of mine laughed when an American engineering firm ran an employment ad saying they were looking for “aggressive” applicants. Or was that “candidates”?

I learned all sorts of things from David. How to entertain simply with just a few dishes and everything prepared in advance. How to befriend people who are older, richer, and more famous by being useful to them—helping them send packages, find a caterer, work out a seating plan, bringing back from Europe those heavenly sleeping suppositories (Suponoryl) that weren’t available here—an office that I’d repeatedly perform for Jimmy Merrill. How to keep a short book review simple and unassuming by cutting all of those pointless, show-offy references to Gramsci and Rousseau. In fact, David had a horror of general ideas and liked to quote William Carlos Williams’s remark “No ideas but in things.” David was erudite but never made a show of it, as if he assumed that people could sense a reference even if he didn’t make it explicitly. For that reason, perhaps, his essays and reviews were less noticed than they might otherwise have been. He was too subtle, too graceful. He didn’t make pronouncements the way Harold Bloom did, nor did he lay bare all the formal trappings of a poem as Helen Vendler did. He knew Bloom and Vendler and envied them both, though Bloom cheered him once by saying, “Of course I’m not a real critic the way you are, David; I’m unable to do a close reading of a poem with your style.” David was so subtle that his friends laughingly compared him to Proust’s aunts, those ladies in Swann’s Way who think they’re thanking Swann for the wine by making an extremely indirect reference to it.

I learned to admire but not to imitate David’s way of writing biography (in Becoming a Poet he examined Elizabeth Bishop and her “opposite,” Robert Lowell, and her “covering cherub,” Marianne Moore). David had found a compelling middle path between gossipy narrative and academic close reading. He had a gentle, almost indirect way of starting with a few facts in his subject’s life (Bishop’s witnessing as a child her mother’s mental breakdown) or a scrap of correspondence, then relating it to her poems and stories—not as a “theme” (thematic criticism was the more primitive pursuit Howard Moss performed in his Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust) but as a “strategy” or a trauma to resist or transpose. I think he understood that real writers don’t just idly render one subject or another but conceal or dramatize or convert into other terms the hidden dynamics of their own lives. In her greatest poems, such as “The Bight,” “The Moose,” “At the Fishhouses” or “In the Waiting Room,” Bishop rehearsed and disguised her childhood fears. David wasn’t psychoanalyzing her; he was never reductive, he never mentioned sex, he never talked about repression or “screen memories” or displacement, but he did see a writing career as a series of skirmishes with one’s own