Arts and Letters

There is something quite odd about living to a great age. Among the oddities is that your friends are forced to say things like—“Of course I don't know what he was like before I met him, I only knew him in the last thirty years of his life."

The idea that Louis was sixty when we met is too absurd to even think about. I mean that he could have managed his first sixty years without even once consulting me.

One of the privileges of being an artist is that it gives you so many opportunities to be generous to other artists. Maybe the profusion of opportunities is what makes it so difficult for most artists to choose a target for their generosity. Louis' solution to this problem was to spend and spend and spend his enthusiasm for the work of others that he admired. I've never known an artist who was so helpless to hold back his good opinion.

Maybe this helps explain why, despite his healthy egotism, what some might even call his luxuriant self-regard, Louis managed to give you the feeling that he and you belonged to some hidden, undefined, possibly non-existent yet palpable community; a brother and sisterhood with an unwritten but nevertheless strict constitution whose purpose was the defense of genuine poetry, poets and even people—that is, people whose appreciation of poetry left them vulnerable to the scorn and vengeance of the sensible. One of the unwritten rules of this community was that you might despise anyone you wanted to, but you must not envy anyone.

Louis is commonly and rightly thought of as a kind of handmaiden of poetry—or is it handman or handperson—and it is true that he served that art. Especially through his anthologies and lectures and reviews… and really by just yelling… he gave poetry the right to be considered a form of entertainment. He was not mad about using poetry to paste up a mask of austerity; he loved seriousness, but only when it was delightful and most especially when seriousness took delight in words.

Louis served poetry but it served him as well. I am sure it helped to keep his brains combed out. As men grow older they lose patience with play, they depart from any belief in play; the very idea of play mocks their infirmities which bind them to the merely possible. But words had always been his playthings, and he could summon up old poems and sound the sounds he loved—at will, at your suggestion or because his mind had suddenly reached back ten years or three quarters of a century. He was always a child, really—you came to him with a thought, perhaps, and he gave you back a line of verse.

Like any man of good sense, Louis lived in despair or close to it. Yet I never met anyone who knew him at all well who did not smile when he spoke his name. I think we smiled because Louis kept on coming, and punning and enthusing and welcoming and experiencing wonder long after others had gone dead in the head.

He despaired, though—his despair was as much a source of his fantastic energy as was his enthusiasm. He despaired of the government, he despaired of the people, of men and women, of capitalism and socialism, of all that he had at various times believed or hoped would save. He did not despair of cats and poetry and music, or of his wife, Bryna.

But this is a lot, especially if one remembers that Louis, as playful as his mind always was, thought of art as a form of prophecy, a visitation from some part of the undiscovered sky which magically, from time to time, threw light on how we ought to live. There were laws of motion in language in which he took delight, but language has purpose beyond its formal beauty—deep, deep down in the middle of a poem was an article of government.

Sometimes it is best to end with what everybody knows—Louis was happiest when occasion arose to praise. In a sense we are here because he praised us and thereby introduced us to one another, and to that smile that still breaks out on faces when his name is mentioned. And now let us praise him.