Frederick Seidel: Laureate of the Louche

April 12, 2009

Laureate of the Louche

By WYATT MASON

One night after Christmas last year, in a dark, well-upholstered restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the American poet Frederick Seidel, an elegant man of 73 with an uncommonly courtly manner, told me a story about poetry’s power to disturb. “It was years ago,” Seidel explained in his measured voice, “in the days when I had an answering machine. I’d left my apartment, briefly, to go outside to get something, and when I came back there was a message. When I played it, there was a woman’s voice, a young woman’s voice sounding deeply aroused, saying: ‘Frederick Seidel . . . Frederick Seidel . . . you think you’re going to live. You think you’re going to live. But you’re not. You’re not going to live. You’re not going to live. . . .’ All this extraordinary, suggestive heavy breathing, getting, in the tone of it, more and more intensely sexual, more gruesome, and then this sort of explosion of sound from this woman, and: ‘You’re . . . not . . . going . . . to . . . live.’ ”

Seidel paused. The bright cries of a group of young women giving a baby shower in the adjoining booth rose and fell behind the bare crown of Seidel’s gray head. “So,” he continued, “the first thing I did was call a girlfriend. And the woman said, ‘I’m coming over.’ And did. And listened to this thing. And burst into tears. Because it really was horrific.” Another friend, a federal judge, also listened, insisting that Seidel call the police immediately and tell them he’d received a death threat. “They came by and they said: ‘It’s real. Have you published a book recently?’ I had. And that was it, really. Meaning nothing happened. But,” Seidel said, his large blue eyes brightening, “it was the most severe review I’ve ever received.”

The most severe but, significantly, not by much. Since Seidel published the first of his 10 collections nearly 50 years ago — a complete gathering of them, “Poems 1959-2009,” will be published this week — his poetry has remained largely unknown to the general public while attracting heated critical commentary. Seidel has numerous distinguished admirers inside the literary world — poets as famous as Billy Collins and Paul Muldoon, critics as respected as Richard Poirier and Adam Phillips, novelists as laureled as Norman Rush and Jonathan Franzen — and has been called by the critic Adam Kirsch perhaps “the best American poet writing today.” Meanwhile, from other corners of that world, Seidel has earned different and more complicated epithets: “sinister,” “disturbing,” “savage,” “the most frightening American poet ever” and even “the Darth Vader of contemporary poetry.”

Seidel is not unaware of what he dryly calls “the energetic response to my work.” As he explained over dinner, through the years it has become plain to him that his verses seem to possess a quality “so upsetting that some people . . . essentially they want to obliterate you.” I asked him if he had a sense of what that quality was. “I think it’s an unembarrassed tone . . . a calmly unembarrassed tone while saying something ‘unacceptable.’ The word unacceptable of course has quotes around it. They are unapologetic, the poems are — I am — the tone is.”

TONE, BUT ALSO SUBJECT, has been central to what perplexes some readers. A significant feature of Seidel’s work is how it has lengthened the list of topics worthy of serious poetic scrutiny. “I live a life of laziness and luxury,” begins the poem “Frederick Seidel,” one of many instances of self-portraiture in Seidel that unfold before backdrops of a certain grade: hotels like New York’s Carlyle (where “The chandeliers were Fabergé sleighs/Flying behind powerful invisible horses,/Powerful invisible forces”) or fine Manhattan restaurants (“I mean every part I play./I’m drinking my lunch at Montrachet”), or the rare motorcycles he covets or owns (“Red/As a Ducati 916,/I’m crazed, I speed,/I blaze, I bleed”). The poetic propriety of such inclusions has, by a certain kind of commentator, been questioned. William Logan, a critical rectitudinarian, called Seidel a “name dropper” whose books trade in “jet-set tastes and upmarket sinning.” But if Seidel’s luxurious inclusions strike some readers as product placement, they are blind to what Seidel is really selling. With a title like “The Ritz, Paris,” some might expect a lifestyle tour is fast upon us, but when we read —

A slight thinness of the ankles;

The changed shape of the calf;

A place the thigh curves in

Where it didn’t used to; and when he turns

A mirror catches him by surprise

With an old man’s buttocks.

— the glimpse we’re given isn’t of what’s fashionable; rather it’s of what’s most perishable. The brute facts of aging are central, the title not incidental given the disconnect it begets: the shuttle from luxury to the ultimate poverty.

But luxury in Seidel is only one instrument in his orchestra of effects. “Climbing Everest,” a recent poem, is representative of the complexity of his art, a pageant not of poshness but of candor. It begins:

The young keep getting younger, but the old keep getting younger.

But this young woman is young. We kiss.

It’s almost incest when it gets to this.

This is the consensual, national, metrosexual hunger-for-younger.

The apparent subject of the poem is familiar: the romantic fascination that older men have for younger women — a favorite of poets for centuries. Seidel’s take on such couplings — “It’s almost incest when it gets to this” — is as novel as it is harsh, even if the line’s iambic pentameter is sweet. So much of your susceptibility to Seidel’s poetry depends upon how you receive — or are repelled by — such loaded lines. And “incest” isn’t even the half of it, only the base camp from which “Climbing Everest” begins its priapic ascent to an even more perilous view. For the title, we come to understand, is a metaphor for the sexual act the poem goes on to detail, in which an old man makes the deliriously pleasurable but nonetheless arduous and by all rights deadly trip into seductively thin, late-life sexual air. When the poet reaches that summit, he pays the price, reduced to being “constantly out of breath . . . reporting to the world from an oxygen tent.” The poet’s mind makes its weary march to the exit music of the poem’s final lines:

A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare,

But right now one is coming through the door

With a mop, to mop up the cow flops on the floor.

She kisses the train wreck in the tent and combs his white hair.

“Those lines caused a great ruckus,” Seidel told me during dinner, ruefully. “I got lots of extraordinarily unpleasant mail.” At first, it would seem easy to understand why. In a poem that features an old man having sex with a very young woman, so frank a statement as “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare” could seem uncomplicatedly cruel, could seem merely cruel. And yet, aging is a nightmare, totally so, a nightmare from which each of us — when we become, inevitably, “the train wreck” the poet has by poem’s end — would only too gladly awake. Seen in this light, Seidel’s line, and the larger poem it serves, presents, with utter candor, the nightmarishness of bodily descent and responds, with honest disgust, to the indignity of that decline. As may be said of so many of Seidel’s poems, “Climbing Everest” produces not relief from experience nor reassurance about experience but — in all its complexity — experience itself.

“When he mentions East Hampton or the Carlyle or Le Cirque or Ducati,” the former poet laureate Billy Collins told me, “it doesn’t even seem like name-dropping. He does what every exciting poet must do: avoid writing what everyone thinks of as ‘poetry.’ ” Collins’s quotation marks around “poetry” are the keys that begin to unlock Seidel’s art. As Lorin Stein, an editor at Seidel’s publishing house, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and a friend of Seidel’s, explained recently, Seidel’s qualities as a poet are in direct opposition to the poetry of many of his peers. “A lot of ways that people gin themselves up to write poetry nowadays require a setting aside of certain crass realities,” Stein said. “Crass realities of everyday colloquial communication; crass realities of money and power and sex; crass realities of the ‘I’ in its filthier manifestations. A lot of contemporary poetry has manufactured these great machines for avoiding coarseness — the dream of an escape.” That Seidel’s poems embrace the crassness at the heart of modern living makes him sound a good deal more like a novelist in the 19th-century mode — Stendhal and his mirror walking down the street reflecting modern life.

And novelists are among Seidel’s most articulate advocates. Norman Rush recognizes how Seidel’s choices can be misunderstood: “The risks Seidel takes have to do with threatening the potential affection of new readers. They may see him as a ‘swell’ and take that presentation as reason enough not to be interested in what he’s doing. He doesn’t cozen the reader. But if you persist, the power and profundity of Seidel’s games, and his nerve, will get you — draw you into the extremely complex set of experiences that he’s laid out for you to have.”

“I GREW UP,” SEIDEL TOLD ME one weirdly warm December afternoon at a diner on upper Broadway near where he lives, “with very large beautifully dark blue trucks with very chaste excellent elegant white lettering saying seidel everywhere you went.” This was in what Seidel describes as the “fierce cold” and “hothouse green sweetness” of the St. Louis of his birth, in 1936. The trucks of the flourishing family business distributed coal and, in summer, ice to white and black families and businesses in the segregated city. Seidel’s father and uncle ran the business started by their father, Seidel’s grandfather, a Russian-Jewish émigré. The Seidels lived well. There were maids, a cook. In that privileged atmosphere, Seidel did not want but, very early, came to know what he wanted — and didn’t.

“I was thought by my cranky violin teacher” — a first violinist of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra — “to be the future, his future.” But when Seidel was 11, he abandoned the instrument in disgust. “I arrived for my lesson and found seated there a kid named John Perkins, a little older than me and well known in St. Louis as an enormously gifted composer and piano player — a genius. My teacher had asked Perkins to come round without having asked me if it were appropriate. And I was just enraged, to the point of tears. I remember the magnification of a tear on my violin, the grain on the fiddle enlarged as I looked down at it. And of course what was appalling about finding Perkins there was also heartbreaking because what he was doing was showing me off.” This was not the last occasion when Seidel would bridle at not having a hand in how he was presented to the world. ‘’When I was asked if I wanted to be Bar Mitzvahed, I was promised that if I did it, two things would come my way,” Seidel explained. “One, I would learn Hebrew — that turned out not to be true — and two, that the speech of the coming of age that I would give I would be able to write and deliver, all on my own. That also turned out to be untrue. There was an enormous and seriously unpleasant struggle between me and the rabbi, in my considerable bitterness and disappointment over learning that the guy wanted me to deliver a speech of nothingness. So I refused. Everybody having been invited, I said I was terribly sorry, I wasn’t going through with it. In the end I gave in. I gave some meaningless speech — part his, part mine. And that was it for religion.”

In the autumn before his Bar Mitzvah, the 12-year-old made a discovery. In the Oct. 25, 1948, issue of Time, Seidel saw a review of Ezra Pound’s long poem “The Cantos.” The unsigned article offers little enduring interest as journalism but provided Seidel with his first exposure to Pound’s verse, lines of which the review quoted, including some from “The Pisan Cantos,” written while Pound was detained in Italy by the U.S. Army during World War II:

What thou lovest well remains,

the rest is dross

What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee

What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage

“That did it,” Seidel told me. “I had a moment of — shall we call it revelation? — age 12 and understanding that this was what I was meant to do — and would do. Like that. So I set about doing it, in a very uncoordinated 13-, 14-, 15-year-old way.”

Seidel’s first private steps on the road to self-knowledge went through the poetry of others: T. S. Eliot, Dante and Pound above all. “I got a great deal from reading Pound,” Seidel told me. “That was a major education. He gave me some sense of the world of literature, some sense of the parity of work from different ages. You tried to understand what was the excellence that you could make use of.” Seidel’s public soul-seeking was quite different. By 13, he was stealing his father’s cars and sneaking off to black nightclubs to hear jazz; at 14, he was answering only the questions on exams that interested him in school; and by 16, he was deceiving his parents into letting him travel alone with a friend to Mexico during a summer vacation, searching for adventure and finding it, but also catching hepatitis along the way, landing him back in a St. Louis hospital for three adventureless months of recovery.

When Seidel arrived for his freshman year at Harvard in 1953, he should have been thrilled to put St. Louis behind him. And yet: “I got to Harvard and was ready to leave Harvard, right away. I got on The Advocate” — the college literary magazine — “and it seemed . . . childish. I thought I made a mistake not going to Cambridge or Oxford.” Uncertain how to proceed, Seidel sought out Ezra Pound. At the time, Pound was incarcerated in Washington at St. Elizabeth’s ward for the criminally insane. “I wrote him and sent him a poem and said, ‘If it’s worth your while it’s worth mine.’ ” Pound wrote back, and Seidel visited at Thanksgiving, thinking he’d go for a day or two. “I stayed a week at least, met Mrs. Pound, saw him every day. I got him to read. I’d never heard Provençal, I’d never heard Cavalcanti. It was lovely. He’d throw his head back and recite in his sonorous voice. It was very purging, very much giving me the feeling that something was being passed on. He gave me that. It was very nice. Very kind.”” Once Seidel returned to Harvard, however, Pound began sending him letters that were anything but kind. “He argued very strongly that I needed to stay at Harvard, that it was important for Harvard that I stay, and that led to the reason I stopped conversing with him.” Pound wrote Seidel a note saying that it was up to him to save Harvard from the university’s Presbyterian head, Nathan Pusey, whom he accused of liking Jews too much, using an anti-Semitic vulgarism. “I explained to Pound that this just wouldn’t do. So that was it with Pound.”

Seidel’s return to Harvard was as inauspicious as his arrival. He wanted to leave, but his parents wouldn’t give their consent; he lasted another year until Archibald MacLeish lobbied the Seidels directly, convincing them that a stay in France would serve their son. When he arrived in Paris soon afterward, he took a vow of silence. “I found it very interesting as an idea, to be silent,” he said. “It’s very difficult to be silent. It lasted quite a long time, months, through that spring until friends arrived in the summer.” Seidel lived the life of a solitary, in a wretched little room in the Hôtel Monsieur le Prince. He walked the city, met no one, read, wrote. “I wrote mostly ruminations, a little bit of poetry, but never got anywhere. I was reading all of Freud in English. I had it in my mind that this was a good moment for systematic, serious introspection.”

Although it would provide a nice causal coda to his time of silence and self-analysis in France, Seidel’s return to Harvard the next year didn’t coincide with the discovery of his poetic voice. He was writing, but “the poetry was not for me very impressive.” He published poems in The Advocate, even one in The Atlantic, but only at the very end of Harvard did one attain a different caliber. Called “The Sickness,” Seidel sent it to The Hudson Review. “I got back a letter from the editor saying that the poem was brilliant . . . but wouldn’t I consider a number of changes they wanted to propose to the poem’s advantage? So I took a look at their suggestions, hung onto the poem and three months later sent it back to them — no changes whatsoever. Back came a note saying: ‘Wonderful! That does it! It’s just superb.’ ”

After Seidel graduated, and given how early and eagerly he fled Harvard, you might suppose he would’ve been especially eager to leave it behind. In a way he did, or, at least, tried to. He moved to the middle of rural Pennsylvania; then to similar circumstances in Maine — houses where he could live alone and write. It was too isolating, and Seidel got nothing done. Shortly thereafter, he married a woman he met at school, a granddaughter of the jurist and writer Learned Hand, and the couple — after a year living in West Gloucester, Mass., in a little house on 50 acres overlooking the sea; and then after nine months in Paris; and then after a few months in the English countryside — returned to New York and acquired a town house on the Upper East Side. There the Seidels led a varied social life divided between literary friends and college friends — lawyers who became judges­, critics who became publishers, friends who became editors.

It was while the couple were living in Europe that Seidel’s “The Sickness” was made the finale to a manuscript of new poems he submitted for the 1962 Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association’s poetry prize. The prize offered $1,500 and a contract with Atheneum Press. The judges — Louise Bogan, Stanley Kunitz and Robert Lowell — chose Seidel’s punningly, provocatively titled “Final Solutions,” until the national head of the Y.M.H.A. grew concerned about the content and possible libel of some of Seidel’s poems. “They said they were anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic — it was preposterous,” Seidel recalled. “They wanted poems removed, changed.” Seidel refused; the prize was withdrawn; the publisher reneged; the judges quit in protest; and The New York Times covered the controversy. Random House stepped in and, the next year, published Seidel’s manuscript unchanged.

Not everyone rejoiced. In his review in The Times, the poet James Dickey wrote: “Literary influence is to be noted in the work of every poet . . . but in Frederick Seidel’s case his relationship to the poetry of Robert Lowell amounts . . . to slavery. . . . The diction is the same as Lowell’s . . . the historical references, the inflated, hortatory style. . . . Imitation and shock tactics are no substitute for personal creativity.”

The poet and translator Jonathan Galassi, a close friend of Seidel’s as well as his editor and publisher at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, told me recently, “I heard Robert Lowell in him.” He continued: “That use of high rhetoric, that resonance with that old tradition, the great tradition. . . . Most people sort of threw that away, wanted to get out from under it, needed to. It’s a postwar thing. A reaction against the elitism of the Lowell generation, a revanchism of some sort.” Read now, Dickey’s review seems less an appraisal of the poems than a referendum on a tradition, one Seidel was building on. For his part, Seidel acknowledges the importance of Lowell to “Final Solutions.” “The influence of Lowell is unmistakable,” Seidel said, “and certainly in places there’s too much influence of Lowell, but the subject matter, the way of going at the subject matter, I think tastes quite different without disputing the point that Lowell is there: Lowell is there.”

After “Final Solutions,” Seidel didn’t publish another book for 17 years. The interval was significant and, for Seidel, difficult. “I stopped writing. I wrote a poem or two or three and then stopped. There was a sense I felt that I didn’t know how to write, and it was going to be a necessity, assuming it was a possibility, to learn how to write, to find a way.” From the outside, his search might seem a curious one — like no search at all. The largest change for Seidel, who had two young children at the time, was divorce. Otherwise, his friends recall the period as undifferentiable from the life he had been leading since arriving in Manhattan. I asked Seidel’s close friend of 45 years, Pierre Leval, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals and another Harvard graduate, about Seidel’s difficulties during this period with not writing. “At the time, in the mid ’60s and early ’70s, when I was talking to him many times a day on the phone and seeing him very regularly, he was leading a very full and active life,” Leval told me. “He was partying, he was out drinking very late at night on a regular basis, he was leading a full social life, and what was going on in his head and in his heart when he was sitting trying to write or trying to get himself to sit and write but instead going out drinking, I don’t know.” Leval also said, “I did not and don’t know the Fred Seidel who sits alone at his typewriter at some times agonizing, at other times producing poetry in huge and rapid volume.”

I asked Seidel if, looking back, he understood what was in the way of his getting back to poetry. Seidel didn’t hesitate:

“Cowardice.”

What was there to be afraid of?

“The expression of aspects of the self that you understand or, rather, that you fancy may not be attractively expressed or attractive once expressed.” He added: “Another way of talking about this is to talk about your becoming yourself: your finding who you are as a poet, finding what you sound like, finding your subjects that bring you out of you that are your subjects. It’s almost as if there’s a moment when you decide, Well, whatever the problem of writing this way, of writing these things, whatever the difficulty with presenting yourself this way . . . well, that’s it. And certainly I think ‘Sunrise’ begins that.”

Published in 1980, winning both the National Book Critics Circle award and a Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, Seidel’s “Sunrise”brimmed with findings. Richard Poirier, founder of the journal Raritan and a founder of the Library of America, said at the time that Seidel’s “Sunrise” was “one of the best books of poetry in the last 10 years . . . [and] transcends his literary affiliations to Pound, Eliot and Lowell.” The book left more than literary affiliations behind. Whereas, in the first poem in “Final Solutions,” Seidel reported:

I had given up violin and left St. Louis,

I had given up being Jewish,

To be at Harvard just another

Greek nose in street clothes in Harvard Yard.

— “Sunrise” left St. Louis behind. Though the city and its substance — and, indeed, its sufferings — would return in later books, in “Sunrise” he traveled, literally and figuratively, elsewhere:

A football spirals through the oyster glow

Of dawn dope and fog in L.A.’s

Bel Air, punted perfectly. The foot

That punted it is absolutely stoned.

Seidel’s subjects became not those of his past reading or early living but of his present life or, if you like, his class. He became, to use his word, “unapologetic” — in taste, in tone, in everything. For if, as it turned out, Seidel was lucky; if he could exploit the fruits of the American empire at its most ripe, its wealth, its freedoms; if that freedom meant not having to struggle to attain the American dream because he was already, as we say, “living the dream”; well, then, he would write the dream, in all its sometimes nightmarish permutations. If he could travel to Australia, Kuala Lumpur, Accra, Tehran, Ghana, Barbados and Bombay; if, while traveling, he could stay at “the most expensive hotel in the world”; if, while becoming a motorcycle enthusiast, he befriended the principals of Ducati and attended superbike races around the world, not as a spectator but with the team, dressed as a mechanic; if, because he was friends with prominent doctors and could go on rounds with them, in a white coat, listening to people in need; if the pursuit of experience, of life in all its variety, turned out to be the stuff of his life — however little some of his pursuits may have seemed, to some, to be the stuff of poetry — then these would be made the stuff of his poetry. And if his poetry found fewer readers than his admirers believed it merited, and if the critics were not as comprehending as they might have been, and if. . . .

“I don’t care,” Seidel told me, on a number of occasions, in response to any number of ifs. “I care about doing what I have to do.”

WHAT SEIDEL DID, IN THE FIRST 25 YEARS of his writing life, was publish a mere 46 poems; what he has done, in the subsequent 25 years, is follow them with 264 more. More remarkable than the increase in quantity is a consistent increase in quality. The poems range in length from a single line to 360, and their subjects from the intimately personal to the emphatically political. “Ooga-Booga,” his ninth collection, contains the poem “East Hampton Airport,” which features this image:

I remember flying back from Montauk.

I was flying the plane.

The instructor asked me, “Notice anything?”

Yes. The plane was absolutely stuck —

Speechless — ecstatically still.

The headwinds were holding us in place in space.

“Speechless — ecstatically still”: the experience Seidel’s readers have over and again with his art. His poems deliver a kind of enchantment, an enchantment that grows out of disenchantment. They are filled with what, in “Sunrise,” he called — exclaimed in fact — “This need to look!” The door of a boxcar filled with Jews in 1918 Russia “is slid open from the outside/Like a slowly lifted guillotine blade.” Sex with an uncommonly genteel woman is “like feeding steak to a hummingbird.” Death, when he comes for you, “sits up like a little dog and begs.” Nor are Seidel’s versions and visions of the natural world — poetry’s oldest quarry — any less novel. The rising sun bulges at “the horizon/Like too much honey in a spoon.” Moonlight is “a wave hushing on a beach.” News received by phone that someone dear has died arrives “like a tear falling in a field of snow.”

“IT IS STRIKING HOW LITTLE SEIDEL FIGURES in accounts of contemporary poetry,” Adam Phillips has written. Striking, yes, but not surprising. As Galassi puts it, with a mix of admiration and resignation, “Fred doesn’t lift a finger to make himself known.” He doesn’t do book tours, nor has he given readings, not one. From one major anthology of poetry, the Oxford, he was excluded for 47 years, and he still won’t be found in another, the Norton. This fact is explained by his having nothing to do with the world of M.F.A. programs. “Think about who the anthology makers are,” Major Jackson, a successful young poet and poetry professor at the University of Vermont, told me. “Who the tastemakers are. Those are folks who have studied creative writing as a discipline and apprenticed themselves and gone on to teach themselves and then gone on to create students who will come along and include their teachers in anthologies. Seidel doesn’t have that kind of empire.”

What kind of empire does Seidel have? I saw it once, on an evening when I visited him in his apartment, a large, warm, bright prewar filled with paintings and photographs and every human touch. His empire was there, sitting on the dining-room table: a high, tight stack of 8 1/2-by-11 paper — the 528 freshly typeset pages of “Poems 1959-2009,” in proof. Seidel had spent the day correcting their minute errors, had finished just before I arrived. He patted the stack with the flat of a hand. It made a solid sound.

“I was thinking about you, going through this book,” Seidel said. We’d been sitting in his living room. Seidel was on his enormous couch, a pillow wedged behind his lower back. “I realized something that I’ve many times realized and then sort of, postpartum amnesia, put out of my mind.” Standing, he handed me a glass of wine and gestured to the hall. We walked, slowly, deeper into the apartment. “Looking at these poems,” he said, passing the proofs on his table, “is sometimes an extremely strange experience, as if . . . who the hell wrote this? What’s odd is that, at the same time, I also remember alternative possibilities and associations at the time of the writing of the things. So it’s interesting, that one should have that going on as well. It’s rather a surprise, almost as if it were a surprise that they managed to get done at all. Extraordinary.”

He led me into his study, a tall, bright, white space with a large window and a broad heavy desk facing it. Books lined shelves that line the walls to the ceiling, tidy rows. Photographs of friends nest everywhere, scenes from a life.

“It’s very much,” Seidel said, “to do with the sense you develop, in the writing of a poem, that at a certain moment it has its separate being from you to which you have your obligations. You’re you; it’s it; and eventually, it really will separate from you and be absolutely not yours anymore — even if you made it. It is, of course. But it isn’t. It’s a thing out there.”

Seidel gestured to the window, to Manhattan, to the lights that shone in the dark. I looked at them and saw, reflected in the glass, hovering over the city, Seidel. I turned back to look at him, the real Seidel.

“So this is where you write?”

“My boy,” he said, “this is where I live.”

Later, as we said goodbye, it occurred to me: this was the apartment where, years ago, a distressed young woman’s voice exploded from an answering machine with a horrific threat: “You’re . . . not . . . going . . . to . . . live.” As I stepped out into the dark winter streets, I could still see Seidel patting the stack of his posterity, and I realized just how wrong the woman had been.

Wyatt Mason translated the complete works of Arthur Rimbaud for the Modern Library. His most recent articles for the magazine were about satire and how America got its name.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/magazine/12Seidel-t.html