A BAROQUE AFFAIR
2-41
broken, other people involved. Craven reportedly tried his wife
again, but gave it up and got a divorce, according to Charmian Plaut.
Lucy was in and out of entanglements, and Craven appeared from
time to time like a messenger with a few lines to speak. During
Christmas vacation, he called her in New York, but that was when
Roger Staley was so much in question, so Craven could of course
not be. During spring vacation, when he was at Yaddo, he wanted
her to visit him on her way back to school, but she was in the midst
of such a terrible
thing
with Roger that she couldn't decide to call
Yaddo until she changed trains at Springfield, and then he wasn't
anywhere to be found. Besides, Craven had telephoned at her family's
just when she was having a terrible fight with her mother, and she
couldn't stay on the phone too long because the fight was about just
such people as Donald Craven. Of course he also called some of
her friends. Bunchy met him at the San Remo (or said she did),
Kappy got a call from
him
when she was staying secretly at the
Hotel Earle, Cookie ran into him at the Frick, Binky heard him in
a panel discussion in June at the New School. His name was in the
magazines, in articles on Baudelaire and Crashaw, in poems about
the moral life, although not so often as Lucy had been led to believe.
Finally, Lucy left school at the end of her sophomore year, and then
Craven began to telephone her again.
Of course there had been letters between them. Lucy had written
first, but their correspondence never pleased her. There was, from
the very beginning, a problem in addressing
him:
she thought of
him as "Craven," the Plauts called him "Donald," and he himself
made an elaborate business of calling her "Miss Doob," as if to sug–
gest that he had been brought up in the South and would not take
advantage of her. So she wrote her letters with no salutation at all,
like pages from her diary, and they were equally conscious and tenta–
tive and self-concerned. They ended abruptly, as if someone had come
in while she were writing. Sometimes she didn't even sign her name,
or, when she did, it was only her name, with no closing remarks.
They were, when taken together, like selections from a published
diary-so Craven told her; like Virginia Woolf's, for instance. Then
in some of his subsequent letters he told her she was impersonal pre–
cisely out of a fear of being personal, how she couldn't distinguish
between her own mind and the objects it regarded, and so on. This
gave
him
the material for more than one letter, but Lucy took it
