9
On top of the three-shelf bookcase in the foyer are four brass pieces.
Two of them, a small bowl and a basket with a large handle, came from the
family house. The other two are eighteenth-century French
candlesticks—or so I was told by Joe
Tucker, who gave them to me. Joseph Eagon
Tucker, a professor of French at the University of Wisconsin, was one of my first acquaintances after
I moved to Wisconsin in September of 1960. I met
him one evening at dinner in the Wisconsin Union,
and I saw him regularly from then on. He was exuberant, gregarious, and
mildly sarcastic. He gave me the candlesticks (eight and a half inches tall,
with knob-and-slot candle-ejectors) to help furnish my
room at the University Club, along with three watercolors by Nicolas Krycevsky (two of Paris dated 1947 – 48 and measuring ten by fifteen inches
and twelve by nine and a half, and one of Venice
dated 1949 and measuring fourteen by twelve). Krycevsky, whose illustrations
for Gogol's Taras Bulba
were published in 1945, was being talked about in Paris during Joe's postwar visits, and
Joe was attracted to his work. These lovely
watercolors now hang on the west wall of my living room; they and the
candlesticks have therefore been in my sight constantly for nearly fifty
years, in my two Madison locations and my one in
New York. In the summer of 1961, on
a trip to the South in his Volkswagen, Joe
stopped off to have lunch with me and my parents in Indiana, and he appeared to be in good health. But in December
he went into the hospital for tests, and in January and February he returned
twice more for extended stays. It turned out that he had leukemia, and he
died on March 12, 1962.
A year earlier, he had undertaken to prepare a section of the
nineteenth-century volume of A Critical
Bibliography of French Literature (which, under the general
editorship of David C. Cabeen, had begun
publication in 1947). Possibly sensing as early as September 1961 that he
did not have the strength to complete the task, he asked me at that time to
collaborate with him. After his death, I did complete it, writing critical
comments on over three hundred articles and books dealing with the English
influence on nineteenth-century French literature (culled from two
thousand items that Joe and I had earlier
identified). I still remember how much time I spent climbing up and down the
stairs in the Wisconsin library stacks seeking out
the material. My comments on each item were duly typed (by my mother) on the
required half-sheets of paper, and the whole was shipped to Albert J. George, the volume editor, at the
beginning of November 1962. But that volume of the Bibliography, as it was then planned, never appeared, owing in
part to Cabeen's and George's deaths. (The nineteenth century was eventually covered
with a different set of contributors in 1994.) I am sorry that Joe's work and his name have no place in this
standard reference.
Joe was fond of his cousin, the historical novelist
Dorothy James Roberts, and I had therefore
heard a good deal about her before she came to Madison for Joe's funeral. She was a
great letter-writer; and although I was not, we exchanged letters
regularly from then until her death in February 1990. My large file of her
letters includes her annual mimeographed Christmas letters—normally a
dreary genre, but hers were far above average because they dealt with
intellectual matters and were written in couplets with Ogden Nash-style rhymes. When I met her, she was about
sixty and shared an apartment at 910 Stuart Avenue in Mamaroneck with Kathleen (Kay)
Smallzried, a journalist who had written a noteworthy autobiography, Press Pass, in 1940. On one of my trips to New York in the mid-1960s, I visited them for
dinner, and the main thing I remember from our conversation is her account
of her working routine. She depended on her income from her novels, which at
times was considerable, when her books were book-club choices. From
1943 through 1963 she often published books in consecutive years, and rarely
did more than three years go by without another book. To keep up this pace,
she had a rigorous schedule in which she tried to finish a book within a
year, spending half the year reading widely in what had been published on
the subject she had chosen and the other half-year writing. Because
she was very heavy
and could not get around easily, her method
of acquiring her source material was to ask a used-book
dealer—one of the Gilmans of Crompond, New
York—to bring a large batch of relevant books to her
apartment, and she bought many of them. At the time I was there, I believe
the last such session had taken place, for her last book,
Kinsmen of the Grail, came out in 1963. I knew who the Gilmans
were because, in addition to their Crompond warehouse, they had a New York shop, which I always visited when I was in
the city, along with all the other dealers in that wonderful (and now
vanished) congregation of Fourth Avenue stores.
I saw her only one other time, in the 1970s after she had moved to Palo Alto with her friend Elizabeth Paschal (who had worked for the Ford Foundation and
its Fund for the Advancement of Education). Their pleasant house at 569
Patricia Lane offered enjoyments not available in her Mamaroneck apartment: a yard full of flowers and fruit trees,
which delighted her. She had her library there and continued to read and
write. One of her projects (since she no longer felt the need to produce
novels) was to reread Shakespeare and to write an
essay on each play. She sent many of these essays to me, and I found them
extremely perceptive and readable. Though she was not able to get them
published, I still think they would make a good introduction to Shakespeare for the general reader. Because she had
gone to college in Wisconsin, I arranged for her
papers to become part of the Newberry Library's
Midwestern Manuscripts Collection, and I hope someone in the future will
discover her Shakespeare essays there.
