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iron fence in the West Sixties. At school dances in the city on Saturday night a portion of them were likely to appear, and there were parties on Park Avenue with fruit punch in the dining room, the rug rolled back, and parents out of sight in a distant bedroom or at a movie.
    The ennui of those parties, the schoolboy sophistication and dancing in darkened rooms. There were no passionate moments or slamming of doors. We did not have love affairs at that age. There were no notes from fifteen-year-olds that said, I love you. I will give you anything. Such notes as there were were teasing or clever. As boys we dreamed of the prescription quantum vis, “as much as you please,” but there was never that. Nor were there many real couples. It was all too formalized and familiar.
    I carry within me, however, the memories of those girls, the last of a breed, their freshness and animation, their refusal to be lured. I pass the buildings where they lived, where they live, those who went away, who married, the one who didn’t, the one who went insane.
    Among those schoolmates who achieved some notoriety there is Julian Beck. Foppish and unathletic, he was the object of ridicule behind his back and was probably aware of it—he followed Cocteau’s dictum, whatever you are criticized for, intensify it. Bony-wristed, he floated through schoolboy theatrical productions, a long-nosed, fruity Hamlet, and fifteen years later, having abandoned a try at painting, he was director of an underground theater, metamorphosed into a visionary bringing a vivid and disturbing play, The Connection, to the stage. The theater was makeshift, up a narrow flight of stairs. I was astonished by the coolness of a play about drugs and failed to recognize its foresight, but it shone like a diamond. I met Beck several times afterwards but the level was superficial; in a real sense he declined to talk. He had stepped over me and was unwilling to be confronted on the old terms.
    With Kerouac, though I never saw him again, it was the same. I recognized his photograph, sensitive down-turned face, in a bookstore window on the jacket of a thick first novel. It was The Town and the City. I read reviews of it after, filled with praise. By then I had tried to write a novel myself and failed. His was lyrical and repetitive and, to me, crushing. What he had done staggered me.
    In an interview read later I saw the side of him that had been so unsuspected. He was asked about haiku and enthusiastically said, Yes! Then, before one’s eyes, he proceeded, like a man peeling an apple in one unbroken strip of skin, to compress an incident—a leaf blown onto the back of a tiny sparrow in a storm—into three succinct lines through trial and error, crossing out words in midair, so to speak. I remembered sitting in the classroom while a favorite teacher tried to kindle our interest in the haiku and its seventeen syllables, but the essence of it, large things evoked by small, was beyond us.
    Richard Wooster was the teacher’s name. He was young andhad a wide, unnerving smile. Kerouac did not know him nor did Wooster, I think, know the swaggering Lowell boy. Among the teachers, Mr. Wooster was the one to whom I felt closest. When he went into the navy during the war he wrote to me as if to an equal. In the life after, I went to see him when I had published a novel. He was married by then and had four or five children. He was gray but still smiling. We sat in the living room of the large, disorderly house he no doubt had dreamed of. I meant him to see that his faith in me had been confirmed, but I am not sure what he saw—his smile was one of not quite remembering. His children had replaced me and life now crowded in. As if the school years had been a vine and something cut them and they fell.
    ——
    My first duck I tasted in the dining room of a silvery apartment off Fifth Avenue. Across from me, aware of nothing remarkable, sat my friend. At the head of the table was his