sounds just like that, like so much honey and roses. But 1 can’t help it because it’s all true. And I was very happy. I’m looking forward now to getting up and around, and even to getting back to the filing cabinets in the Dean’s office, so you see that I must be well, having become so edgey. I’ve written letters to dozens of people, and since you helped us out so long ago, when we were both down in the dumps, I thought it might be pleasant to write to you. The sad thing in life is that we don’t see friends and let small things separate us, and after a while you just think that even a greeting is insignificant. I know that Paul does send his best, and the two of us hope your life at Chicago and your job at the university is going well. It seems like a marvelous opportunity for you, and we would of course be interested in hearing how everything is going and how you like teaching there. It’s time for me to take one of my pills, they’re as big as stones and expensive as jewels, so I must close …
Best,
Libby
I did not answer.
4
Nevertheless, on a dull afternoon late in October of 1956, I was at Midway Airport watching for a plane coming toward Chicago out of the east. In that rippled gray sky I could not be sure which plane was which, but I saw one above me lurch off to the side, tremble in the air for a moment, and I took it to be the one I was waiting to meet. Other planes landed all around, swishing beautifully in, while this one circled and circled and circled. I counted landing gear, I checked the wings, I spotted a dismal little cloud and called it smoke out of the tail. The plane made several worried turns around the clock, and then was roaring down, its nose aiming for the swinging Shell sign across the road from the airport. I closed my eyes and waited. When I looked out again I found it had cleared the sign and was motionless, one safe colossal hulk on the runway.
After most of the passengers had disembarked, a dark undernourished-looking couple stuck their heads through the door. The woman was bundled in a coat and wore a black hat that shadowed her face. The man’s suit pinched his waist as suits were supposed to in 1928. He carried a typewriter and a briefcase; the woman’s arms were filled with two brown paper bags. They whispered to one another and then peered out again at the banal geological dullness of Cook County, Illinois—they might have just made it out of some steamy Latin American country only a few hours before the regime had fallen. I called out to them several times, and finally had to runonto the field shouting their names. Only then, above their parcels and belongings, did I see Paul and Libby smile.
The character sketches which follow may help to explain the reappearance of the Herzes in my life.
John Spigliano.
Chairman of the Humanities II staff, my boss, at one time an undergraduate with me at Harvard. He is reputed now to be one of the most reasonable and scholarly young men in our midst. At staff meetings John explicates texts with the craftiest of understanding. Gibbon’s sentences grow longer—explains John, engraving the blackboard with graphs and charts—as he discusses the furthest outposts of the Empire, and shorter as he returns to the Imperial City itself. “I think we should point out to the student,” John says, having compared the number of adjectival clauses in one paragraph with the number in the next, “how Gibbon impresses upon the reader the geography of the event with the geography, as it were, of the prose.”
As it were, my ass. Spigliano is a member of that great horde of young anagramists and manure-spreaders who, finding a good deal more ambiguity in letters than in their own ambiguous lives, each year walk through classroom doors and lay siege to the minds of the young, revealing to them Zoroaster in Sam Clemens and the hidden phallus in the lines of our most timid lady poets. Structure and form are two words that pass from his lips as
Best,
Libby
I did not answer.
4
Nevertheless, on a dull afternoon late in October of 1956, I was at Midway Airport watching for a plane coming toward Chicago out of the east. In that rippled gray sky I could not be sure which plane was which, but I saw one above me lurch off to the side, tremble in the air for a moment, and I took it to be the one I was waiting to meet. Other planes landed all around, swishing beautifully in, while this one circled and circled and circled. I counted landing gear, I checked the wings, I spotted a dismal little cloud and called it smoke out of the tail. The plane made several worried turns around the clock, and then was roaring down, its nose aiming for the swinging Shell sign across the road from the airport. I closed my eyes and waited. When I looked out again I found it had cleared the sign and was motionless, one safe colossal hulk on the runway.
After most of the passengers had disembarked, a dark undernourished-looking couple stuck their heads through the door. The woman was bundled in a coat and wore a black hat that shadowed her face. The man’s suit pinched his waist as suits were supposed to in 1928. He carried a typewriter and a briefcase; the woman’s arms were filled with two brown paper bags. They whispered to one another and then peered out again at the banal geological dullness of Cook County, Illinois—they might have just made it out of some steamy Latin American country only a few hours before the regime had fallen. I called out to them several times, and finally had to runonto the field shouting their names. Only then, above their parcels and belongings, did I see Paul and Libby smile.
The character sketches which follow may help to explain the reappearance of the Herzes in my life.
John Spigliano.
Chairman of the Humanities II staff, my boss, at one time an undergraduate with me at Harvard. He is reputed now to be one of the most reasonable and scholarly young men in our midst. At staff meetings John explicates texts with the craftiest of understanding. Gibbon’s sentences grow longer—explains John, engraving the blackboard with graphs and charts—as he discusses the furthest outposts of the Empire, and shorter as he returns to the Imperial City itself. “I think we should point out to the student,” John says, having compared the number of adjectival clauses in one paragraph with the number in the next, “how Gibbon impresses upon the reader the geography of the event with the geography, as it were, of the prose.”
As it were, my ass. Spigliano is a member of that great horde of young anagramists and manure-spreaders who, finding a good deal more ambiguity in letters than in their own ambiguous lives, each year walk through classroom doors and lay siege to the minds of the young, revealing to them Zoroaster in Sam Clemens and the hidden phallus in the lines of our most timid lady poets. Structure and form are two words that pass from his lips as
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