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22 After my stay in Paris in the late forties, I hadn’t returned for thirteen years, not until 1963 when I went with Neil, but Ralph Pomeroy, in a restless search for success and romance, couldn’t be fixed in one place and was always going to Europe, shuttling among San Francisco, London, New York, or anywhere he had a chance at the Big Breakthrough. His talents and energies were the kind that were easily stifled by settling anywhere for long. I always told him he should live a bicoastal life, or, even better, between London and New York. He had an array of talents that he was always quick to exploit if the opportunity arose. But success kept eluding him. Freddie Kuh’s analysis was that Ralph was cursed with being multitalented. Several times he managed a stay of a year or two in London, supporting himself by freelancing. He edited for a London publisher a couple of slight but charming coffee table books on ice cream and breakfast. Then, the immigration authorities caught up with him and he had to leave. But he was an ideal roving correspondent for London and New York art magazines, reporting on art shows wherever he happened to be. 222 223 Ralph still kept up with the power couple, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott, visiting them at their country house near Princeton , and after Wescott’s death, his wealthy sister-in-law, Barbara Wescott, took Ralph on art jaunts to the continent. He also went with her to galleries and advised her on what to buy. In this, with his essential innocence, he didn’t think of his own advantage—once after she had bought, on his recommendation, a painting in a gallery , outside on the sidewalk she told him to go back in and claim his finder’s fee. Usually, this was five percent of the sale price. Ralph had never done this before, but under her stern tutelage returned and got his commission, which the gallery owner expected to pay. With the restaurant booming, Freddie resurrected old literary ambitions and treated Ralph to a stay in Barcelona, where they collaborated on a novel—a nostalgic evocation of the summer of 1948, that golden time of our youth on the Left Bank when we had all met—called, appropriately, That Summer in Paris. It never found a publisher, and soon Ralph became aware that he wasn’t going to make it big as a poet either and concentrated on art. The nail in the coffin of his poetry career had resulted from the publication of a book, In the Financial District, which was inspired by living in the shadow of Wall Street, and contained some of his best poems. This was another dead end. Even though it was published by a prestigious publisher, Macmillan, it didn’t get a single review, and Arthur Gregor, then Macmillan’s poetry editor, said it was the only time that happened to any of his poets. It was to the art world that Ralph in his later phase devoted himself . He published a glossy art book on Theodoros Stamos, and had shows of his own in galleries—paintings, constructions, shaped canvases , collages, whatever seemed to be the latest thing. But after each event, puzzlingly, things never developed further. Alice Toklas was dead right about his painting. He had a true artist’s sensibility, but his work, aiming at what was hot in the art world, followed the fashion rather than led it, and by the time he had a show, it was no longer quite the talk of the town. Perhaps the trouble was that every time it looked like things were developing for him, Ralph would shoot off to London or San Francisco or wherever some opportunity, or lover, beckoned. Following the truism that New York doesn’t forgive you, or remember you, if you leave it, he was offered a visiting curatorship at the University Museum in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but by the time he came back to New York two years later, things had already changed, as they do in the art world, and he found himself on the outside of the scene, and had to take a lowly gallery job again. Neil and I would sometimes meet up with him when we were in San Francisco, or in London where he once introduced us to his current boyfriend, a charming hippie-style youth from San Francisco. Ralph always tried...

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