My life this autumn has been astonishingly busy and empty, thanks to a seemingly endless set of tasks for small outcomes. In the midst of all this, my stepfather died, at the age of 100. Somehow I thought he would never die. He was like a sphinx in the desert, always there, always posing riddles in my direction.
In Manhattan, in the lower right-hand corner, I had found a place in which to write, a room near the river, within sight of the cathedral piers of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was on Peck Slip, a broad street near the fish market, strewn with paper and ripped wood by the time I arrived each morning, but quiet with the work of the day by then over. I wrote in this room with its bare wooden floor and ruined sills for a year—it was 1958—struggling with pages that turned bad overnight.
Truman was a great jazz buff. Peggy Lee was one of his favorite singers. So, I called up Peggy who was a friend of mine and I said, “I’m here with Truman and we’d love to take you to dinner. Are you free tomorrow?”
I have shamefully neglected this diary, in which I had meant to chronicle the art life of our metropolis, but the botheration of Christmas was too much for me. I dammed up, and until this sunny May morning, have had not the tiniest inclination to write a word in it. But I think I should capture a reference to last night’s dinner party.
Mr. Beckett is dead. So, then, is Paris, too. I’m told that he died last Friday night. So, then, all of my heroes are dead, since last Friday night.
So disparate, so distinct, even, are the new poems, the new poets who appear in all their multitudes in the office mail, so docile in their return-addressed envelopes yet so indubitable in their variety and delicacy that it would be defamatory for the poetry editor to claim more, in a generalizing way, about this particular clutch of poems than his own taste, his own delight in their particular virtues, their singular vitalities.
Distressed by what he saw happening to Latin American journalism, Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel laureate author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and a former newspaper reporter himself, started in March 1995 what he describes as “a school without walls.”
When I discovered my first maze among the pages of a coloring book, I dutifully guided the mouse in the margins toward his wedge of cheese at the center. I dragged my crayon through narrow alleys and around comers, backing out of dead ends, trying this direction instead of that. Often I had to stop and rethink my strategy, squinting until some unobstructed path became clear and I could start to move the crayon again.
... A couple of days later I went to Vallauris, climbed the overgrown slope to Picasso’s ugly little house, and found the family, including Paulo, the son of the artist’s first marriage, just finishing lunch at about half past two. I was aware that if one were to find them at home, this was the most likely hour. Picasso knew that I had been seeing Cocteau and soon inquired about him.
January 5
Tangier is a lax place. Too much dope and too many servants. Food is fresh, booze is cheap, and rents are low. In other words, paradise!
The following pages have been set aside as a kind of tribute to honor the work of Terry Southern, who died last October in New York City —appreciations, reminiscences, critiques, as well as some original work from his files.