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3 When I read the poems of Robert Friend, the relationship to my own poetry is perfectly obvious. He was the father who passed on to me the key, and his own poetry is the mother ground I started from. It is true that Dunstan Thompson, W. H. Auden, and Constantine Cafavy were major influences on me almost from the beginning , but first there was Robert Friend. His poem “Dancing with a Tiger” is a good metaphor for us: A crowded floor of couples at a dance and only I, his tail wrapped round us both, dancing with a tiger. . . . but suddenly —what had I said to him?— the strong grip loosened, . . . and he growled. . . . In our relationship, he was the tiger, which made things complicated. If he was intellectually stimulating to be with, he could certainly be a 16 17 royal pain in the ass, or to follow the metaphor of the poem, growl and swipe me with a paw. I met him on the converted troop ship on which I was able to book passage to France in June 1948, for with the end of the war there weren’t enough ships to accommodate the rush of people back to Europe, so the wartime “liberty ships” were adapted for civilian traffic—it was far from luxurious and there were still military double-decker bunks in the hold. By chance and the imperatives of the alphabet, Field and Friend were seated next to each other in the ship’s dining room. I quickly learned that the distinguished, owleyed , professorial man next to me was a published poet, and though I had no grounds for claiming that I too was a poet, except that I wished to be, he accepted me at face value. Ten years older than me and a native of Brooklyn, he had been teaching in Puerto Rico and Panama for some years, and after getting his Masters at Harvard, had landed a job at Queens College, a lucky break that would bring him back to New York again. So he was celebrating by going to Paris for the summer. A mistake, for postwar Paris turned out to be even more seductive than New York. During the ten-day sea voyage, he gathered, or rather, there gathered around him, a group of young would-be artists and writers who were taking the leap into the unknown of a Europe that had been closed to the outside world during the long years of the war and promised the intellectual thrill of a new movement, Existentialism, that had arisen out of the drama of the German occupation and was flourishing in the feverish atmosphere of postwar Paris in the ambience of Left Bank cafés and cellar clubs. Not only the founder of Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and his sometime lover and intellectual partner Simone de Beauvoir, but Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso, Cocteau’s actor/lover Jean Marais, and chanteuse Juliette Greco were to be seen at the Café Flore and the Deux Magots in St. Germain-des-Près, the red-hot center of the movement, where most of us were headed. Robert Friend was a natural teacher, and it was with evident pleasure that he led the group’s discussions throughout the voyage. It has been true through the ages and in all cultures that when there is sexual interest on the part of the teacher, the student blossoms in the particular glow of his attention, and learns. I myself thrive on being paid attention to, and one of the reasons for my failure in college, I think, was the hopeless anonymity of sitting in those postwar classes swollen by returning GIs, and trying to concentrate on the drone of the professor’s voice. Face to face with Robert Friend, discussing literature and ideas, was not like studying and nothing like school. I didn’t respond to him physically—indeed, I didn’t see him that way, with his round shoulders and undeveloped body that seemed a mere appendage to his mind—I just loved the attention. On the ship he was having a more-rewarding flirtation with a teenage French boy from Toulouse. Robert was “just” a friend. And I blossomed. We continued our discussions for several months on the Left Bank in Paris, where intellectual and sexual life among the expatriates and refugees from every country of the world flourished in spite of that spartan postwar period of coupures—electricity cuts—and rationing...

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