526
PARTISAN REVIEW
his tractor like a real king, knocking over fences, breaking stone walls and
pulling up boundary-markers.
Ralph and I brought the house under civilized control.
He came down to get his breakfast in a striped heavy Moroccan gar–
ment. He wore slippers with a large oriental curve at the toe. He was a very
handsome man. A noteworthy person, solid, symmetrical and dignified but
with a taste for finery. Ralph was never anything but well-dressed, and he
liked clothes of an Ivy League cut. In the days before everybody had elect–
ed to go bareheaded, he wore what used to be called a porkpie hat of very
fine felt. By comparison, I was a stumble bum. He put on his carefully
chosen clothes with aesthetic intent. I often amused him by my (compar–
ative) slovenliness. He studied me, silently amused-deeply amused by my
lack of consideration for my appearance. Day in day out I wore the same
blue jeans and chambray shirt.
Our meals were simple. We ate in the kitchen. I learned from Ralph
how to brew drip-coffee properly. He had been taught by a chemist to do
it with ordinary laboratory paper filters and water at room temperature.
The coffee then was heated in a
bain-marie--a
pot within a pot. Never
allowed to boil.
We saw little of each other during the day. I kept a vegetable garden
and at the kitchen door I planted herbs.
At cocktail time we met again in the kitchen. Ralph mixed very strong
martinis, but nobody got drunk. We talked a great deal, before dinner,
before the martinis took hold. Over dinner, Ralph told me the story of his
life-told me about his mother, about Oklahoma City; about their years in
Gary, Indiana, and later in Cleveland, where he and his brother hunted
birds for the table during the Great Depression. He described to me his
trip, in freight trains, to Tuskegee; and how he learned to play the trumpet;
and how he had come upon certain essays by Andre Malraux that changed
his life. Often we rambled together about Malraux, about Marxism, or
painting or novel wri ting.
There were long discussions of American history and of nineteenth–
century politics, of slavery and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Ralph
was much better at history than I could ever be, but it gradually became
apparent that he was not merely talking about history but telling the story
of his life, and tying it into American history. His motive was in part liter–
ary-he was trying to find the perspective for an autobiography. In this
respect he much resembled Robert frost, who had made a routine, an
entertainment of the principal events of his life and polished or revised
them again and again when he had the right listeners. But frost was his
own hagiographer. He would tell you how Ezra Pound had received him
in his London flat sitting in a hip-bath and treated him-frost-like a
