Glimpse, Encounter, Acquaintance, Friendship

Five p.m. on a spring day in 1963, one hundred yards south on the Florian’s side of the Piazza San Marco, I walked past a gallery on Via 22 Settembre which that year was selling paintings of apples by the most commercially successful lousy painter in Venice. The show window was full of gleaming red apples; and, as I gave them the usual look of amused disgust, I saw it mirrored in the face of a middle-aged balding man with a facial tic who was walking in the opposite direction. Our eyes met in aesthetic fellowship reinforced with smiles of superiority. If I hadn’t recognized André Malraux, I would still have enjoyed that second, but that this blink-of-an-eye fellowship was with the author of The Voices of Silence added that special suntan of distinguished celebrity which creates or at least augments what’s memorable.

If instead of Malraux a lovely woman had been my aesthetic fellow, that too would have imbued the second with gold, but of a sort not treated here where the subject is the sovereign touch of literary fame. My life has been enriched by such glimpses and by more extended relationships with people of accomplishment in my own line of work. The half second with Malraux—whom I’d not seen before and wouldn’t again—is here called a glimpse, and will be differentiated from what will later be called encounter, acquaintance, and friendship. I want to exclude from this essay what are some of the richest associations with writers, including the very richest—that with my wife, Alane Rollings, whose poetry (the last of her five published volumes is To Be in This Number, 2005) is too deeply involved with my feelings to write about in the limits of this essay. Then there are the special relationships with those of my students who have become wonderful writers—the late Austin Wright, Douglas Unger, Robert Coover, Peter LaSalle, James Schiffer, Peter Cooley, Campbell McGrath, and quite a few others. Pride in them and often friendship with them constitutes a category in itself.

Why has the Malraux glimpse stayed in my head with such clarity for more than forty years? Most such moments remain out of consciousness and pass unrecorded; others surface without summoning—involuntary memory is Proust’s term for this—to play various roles in our reflective, literary, erotic, sensual, and intellectual lives. A Malraux-like glimpse may be more significant than, say, an acquaintance, even a friendship, which, once terminated, may die barely remembered. It rescues from life’s flux what has a yet-to-be-defined meaning that makes a part of one’s life special, beautiful, meaningful. Colette’s probably right about the use of images: “By means of an image we are often able to hold on to our lost belongings,” but my sense of the glimpse-image is more that of a modest epiphany, a second charged with surprise and pleasure.

In January 2004 I saw the Taj Mahal, something I’d avoided doing as a cliché of tourism in my first visit to India in the summer of 1973. After making my way through several guarded barriers and paying several largish fees, I passed through a narrow door and saw the famous building. That first glimpse was to my surprise surprising, a vision of symmetry floating its intense whiteness into the blue sky, an epiphany-like glimpse which lasted about five seconds and makes me wonder what its relationship is to the Malraux glimpse. Is there an aesthetic or, for that matter, an economic theory which explains such power? An op-ed piece in the Times says that fans unsatisfied by star glimpses are getting star tattoos. The antiquity of the power of distinction is recorded in a stock example from a seventh-century Sanskrit text, The Ornaments of Poetry by Bhamaha: “Eminent men, like roadside trees, provide shelter / shade and fruit.”

II

I want to describe four encounters with four writers that occurred at different times of my life. The first occurred in 1942. I was fourteen and had been...