. 7c. Ruins on the Somme: a lost war poet rediscovered

Of the many thousands of times that I have drawn a dusty nondescript book from a poorly-lit shelf in a used-bookstore during the past forty years, only once can I claim to have pulled down and opened an entirely unknown classic of American literature.  Not that I recognized it as such at the time.  Nor even now, on the eve of its re-publication by [...]

Read Full Post »

. 9. By the banks of the Seine: paupers & Symbolists

My wife Marian was cheated of a life in Paris by Adolf Hitler. Her natural mother, a Jew, whom she never knew, was a performer in the Paris theatre before the war. By 1945, in a state of expectancy, she had fled to Montreal, in all probability to escape the Gestapo sweeps which would have [...]

Read Full Post »