August 22, 2026
DH called All Souls trying to find me. I called him back, and we had our first conversation in twenty years. I learned things about Broadway Arts and the green door that had been unclear before– how it was founded, for one, and why it was closed when it was closed. I thought maybe B and D had been insulted by the local arts community, but it was simply that building inspections got morestringent, and they had either to spend a lot of money on things like exits and fire escapes or get out of town. They got out of town. D went on quite a lot about what an inspiration I was– “a flame of creativity lighting the whole space.” He cried with emotion near the end, saying he missed me and my “goodness” so much. I never know how to react. When people express hatred of me I am astonished; when people express adoration of me, I am astonished, in each case tongue-tied. D was always a practical figure behind B’s flights of invention. What I remember most is his extreme physical beauty, which I suppose ought not to be mentioned now. I spend so much time dwelling on awful things I said and situations I must have made worse that to hear something good– coming in from outside-- is salvation.
Reading an article on Hannah Arendt called to mind the week I spent with Alfred Kazin. He was at UNCA as a guest scholar, back when UNCA still saw itself as an institution of higher learning. What a horrible man. The presentations he gave here were about how awful other people were, and when he learned I had written on Pound, I was expected to justify the whole history of anti-Semitism. I drove him when we went off-campus, and he moaned, “David. . . David. . . you drive too fast!” Our beautiful female students prepared a lovely picnic to eat with him on the Parkway, which he refused because of the dirt of open places. I adored his books before I met him. I suppose part of his editors’ task was to take out the really nasty parts so anyone would read him at all. He did want a drink at the Brass Rail, as it was then. We went in and had a beer among the red-necks, Alfred Kazin and I. He seemed to be quite comfortable. That should be recorded somewhere.
Michael Yeats came the same year, I think, invited by Poly Sci because of World Government rather than by Literature. Opposite of Kazin, kind and humane, and very, very large. Someone asked about his mother’s automatic writing in a snarky tone, and his response was, “Either my mother did automatic writing or she was lying, and my mother never, never lied.” That put an end to that.
