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29 Robert Friend in France was the basis of my education in modern poetry and in writing poetry. He somehow imparted to me the process, which I’d been unable to discover for myself in my previous attempts to write. Very soon, in 1949, I made my publishing debut in the glossy, multilingual quarterly Botteghe Oscure, which was published in Rome by the Princess Marguerite Caetani, an American heiress of the Philadelphia Chapin clan. Her nephew Paul Chapin, whom I had met in one of the Left Bank cafés, showed her my poems and she took a group for her second issue. Paris was an education for me in many ways, as it has been for so many other Americans. It was the greatest bargain in the world after the war. I could live on two dollars a day, which included rent, eating all my meals in restaurants, sitting in cafés, and going to the theatre and opera, so my thousand dollars easily gave me a year. At St. Germain-des-Près I met the young Jimmy Baldwin, already a rising literary star, and the singer Anita Ellis, who picked me up in the mail line at American 4 Express, and though I told her I was gay, kept trying to make out with me. Her own brother Larry Kert, the Broadway musical star, was also gay, so it wasn’t naiveté. The movie Gilda, with Anita singing for Rita Hayworth especially the song “Put the Blame on Mame” had wowed everyone I knew. Anita treated me to luxuries like lunch in the Eiffel Tower and dinner at the opulent Hotel George V, where visiting Hollywood stars stayed. Many of the friends I made there have stayed with me throughout my life—Harry Goldgar, translator of Yeats into French and an early translator of Jean Genet into English, who spotted me at the Café Pergola where I wrote every day; Leslie Schenk, who, after a hiatus working for the UN around the world, settled in Paris and is devoting himself to writing again; the poet Arthur Gregor, who was returning to Europe for the first time since escaping the Nazis; and another poet, Ralph Pomeroy, and his best friend, Freddie Kuh. Afew weeks after arriving in Paris in June 1948, I was standing in line at American Express to pick up my mail, as everyone did in those days when it was free, when I noticed the two young Americans . They looked like charming schoolboys of fourteen and fifteen in their short pants, the younger with blond bangs and a face of angelic innocence, whom I got to know later as Ralph, and the other, a little darker and older, but not much, and equally innocent, even with his ironic, self-deprecating smile—this was Freddie. I wondered briefly what were they doing in Paris on their own, that year of 1948 when Americans began to return like the swallows after the long, hard winter—five winters, to be exact—of war. Following my first sighting of the two boys in the American Express mail line, I began seeing them in the Left Bank cafés of the Quartier St. Germain I hung out in, the Café Flore, the Deux Magots, the Royale, La Reine Blanche, even occasionally the august Brasserie Lipp with its dignified waiters and potted palms, and I soon learned that Ralph Pomeroy and Fred Kuh were older than 30 31 they looked, in their early twenties, in fact. In the months ahead, we got to know each other well, since we lived through the following winter in Paris among a vastly diminished band of expatriates, after most of the others left at the end of summer. When I met a grande dame named Madame Khatchaturian—yes, a relative of the Soviet composer—she shivered on hearing that I planned to stay on in Paris through the winter, and said, in her heavy accent, “You are so brave. I go to New York, and central heating.” And indeed the heat in our rooms only came on for a few hours occasionally during that bitter winter. Under his blond bangs, Ralph Pomeroy had a painter’s clear, gray-blue eyes, and a sulky, vulnerable mouth. He was often called “le faux Truman” for his startling resemblance to the author in the jacket photo, with similar bangs, reclining and holding a rose, on Capote’s novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, which made Capote famous...

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