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11 Ihad never thought of doing anything but writing poetry, but that was not in itself a full-time occupation. After the affair with Frank O’Hara had ended, with no group therapy meetings to fill up my life anymore, I hardly knew what to do with myself. Elia Braca, the actress wife of Herman Rose, was playing the lead in The Heiress for a small company in the Village, and when I met the director after a performance she suggested I play a part in her next production, The Imaginary Invalid by Moliére. This experience before an audience was a revelation to me, and I decided to become an actor. I started studying the Stanislavski Method with a shrewd dumpling of a woman, Vera Soloviova, who had been a member of the Moscow Art Theatre. Suddenly, my life was filled with classes, rehearsals , auditions. I had less time to think about myself, and, indeed , Method acting is a kind of therapy in itself, in some ways even an improvement on talk therapy, since it makes you use your body, and with the added advantage that you play characters different from yourself, the loser you’re thoroughly sick of. It was also liberating to study speech and start speaking differently from little Eddie 96 97 Field with his Brooklyn accent. I remember the nerve it took, the first time I had to open my mouth with my new vowels in front of my family. It announced that I had the right to be separate from them, be my own person. Madame Soloviova told us right off, “If you want to be an actor, learn to type.” In my ambitions to be a “poet of the people,” I had always resisted working in an office, but she was right—it was the best kind of work for an actor, especially doing temp typing, which allowed for taking time off for auditions and rehearsals. When I relented in my opposition to it, I found being a typist just as enjoyable as my other jobs. For truly, the work isn’t what mattered, it was getting to know all kinds of people. It was at one of my temporary of- fice assignments that I started to write a lot of poetry again. I didn’t write poems at lunch, as Frank O’Hara did, but the first thing in the morning, when I sat down at my desk. Out the window was a spectacular view of the Hudson River and the New Jersey shore, and I found myself writing a new poem each day over the months I worked there, usually starting with that view out the window, and without expecting the poems to be masterpieces. Each poem felt like a small victory, a thawing. I never made acting a lifetime career, but I had the experience of being a leading man, if only in summer theatres. It certainly was part of my development as a poet, and helped me keep audiences awake at my readings. But as the theater became less compelling, I applied for a fellowship at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire to concentrate on my poetry. It was winter of 1958 and we, the “colonists,” walked through silent , snowy woods to our studios, where we lit fires in our iron stoves and worked at our typewriters or easels or pianos. All night long we heard the snow plows clearing the roads linking the studios with the main house. My cheeks were so red from the cold that a Chinese painter in residence accused me of wearing makeup! Jimmy Baldwin, whom I hadn’t seen since Paris, was also a “colonist ,” and had the studio across the road from mine, so we often had lunch together—the lunch boxes were dropped off at our studios during the morning. Even during the day, Jimmy was a steady drinker and liked a glass of scotch and water by his typewriter as he worked—he picked icicles hanging from the roof for ice. This did not prevent him from being a hard worker, and he often went back to his cabin after dinner, through the pitch black woods, to continue with his novel-in-progress, then named Deep Sea Diver, which would become Another Country when it was published. Jimmy was a strange looking man with his bulging eyes and spaced teeth—he was later described, accurately, as looking like a “startled bush baby.” At the MacDowell Colony, he was nervous...

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