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21 After her Perdue fellowship was over in 1967, May Swenson returned to New York with her new partner, blonde, zoftig, yet athletic Zan Knudson—Stanley Moss told me with a grin that was the kind of woman he went for. They didn’t settle in the Village, but bought a house in Sea Cliff, on the North Shore of Long Island, where both pursued a disciplined writing schedule. Zan started turning out a string of young adult novels, and collaborated with May on several sports poems anthologies. The house was situated on a bluff overlooking the Long Island Sound, and was ideal for the kind of natural observations May made her poems out of. Unfortunately , it was really a summerhouse and so drafty that May developed asthma, forcing them to spend winters in places like California and Florida. It also had an enormous stairway to climb up from the road, which must have been hard to manage with asthma. When I briefly had a car in the seventies, Neil and I would drive out occasionally with the poet, Arthur Gregor, who, with his Viennese formality, was a great favorite of Zan’s—she saw the comic in all of us over-dedicated poets. I always enjoyed Zan with her gruff, 216 217 no-bullshit manner. She would cook large delicious meals for us, and then retire upstairs to watch football games on television, for athletics was one of her passions and the subject of her fiction. But I believe she retreated more from shyness than unfriendliness. She also spent much time, when she had to finish a novel, sequestered in a house she built in Delaware. It was at this time, for a year or two in the transition to suburban life, and adjusting to the fragile state of her health, that May had trouble writing. She missed New York, especially the Village, and when I went to Europe one summer, she took over my studio, where she wrote a poem, “Staying in Ed’s Place,” that appeared in the New Yorker. She continued to despair over the state of the poetry world, and said to me once that when poets started getting money, watch out, which I then thought meant the world was in a spiritually perilous condition. But now I think she meant that it would set off fierce competition for the high rewards that were possible, and it wouldn’t necessarily be the most talented poets who won. In the years since, her gloom certainly seems to be justified. Zan was sometimes overly direct, if not brutal, in getting rid of friends, especially the literary old-timers May knew whom she considered bores. Once, when May, with Zan as always driving, came into New York, we went to lunch at Pennyfeathers, a popular coffee shop on Sheridan Square, and the novelist Marguerite Young, already ancient and half-senile, shambled in swathed in her gypsy skirts and shawls. The minute Marguerite approached our table and started talking to me in a grotesque, flirtatious manner, Zan let out a blast at her for butting in. “Get the hell away from here, you old bag,” she yelled. And discombobulated, poor Marguerite fled, her colorful rags flapping. Marguerite Young, author of Miss MacIntosh My Darling, lived on Bleecker Street in a top floor apartment that she filled with angel dolls. I visited her there once and met Anaïs Nin, whose face, painted like a porcelain doll, was artfully swathed in a chiffon veil, a presentation that denied the ravages of age and illness—for she was shortly to die. I often ran into Marguerite in her shmattas sashaying down the street, and she would stop to talk of her two books-in-theworks about the socialist Eugene Debs and James Whitcomb Riley, both of whom were from Indiana, where Marguerite herself came from. Marguerite had roomed with Jean Garrigue in college, and was always quick to deny that they had been lovers, claiming irrelevantly that at the time she’d been having an affair with one of her professors. After Howard Griffin died in Europe where he’d been living for years, Marguerite complained to me that he had promised her a screen covered with a collage of angels that she had seen in his house in England, but that Nell Blaine, his heir, would not have it shipped over to her. I discussed it with Nell, who told me it was a matter of twenty...

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