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of me there are several novels by James Purdy on the desk. I’ve been writing about him, and wondering why so unique a writer has been so ignored. But then, “unique” will do it every time hereabouts. Nearby, a volume of Montaigne’s essays, the ultimate touchstone for anyone trying to recollect himself as well as others.
    I resist opening Montaigne for as long as possible. I spent an hour once in his sixteenth-century Gascon tower and saw the same view that he saw from his third-floor study window. But where he tells us he had his chicken run, there are now ducks at ground level. Otherwise, inside that round tower room, one can imagine oneself inside his head, preserved in this room as his attempts—essays—inhabit his books. Unable to resist, I turn to the page where he frets about his poor memory. “I am so outstanding a forgetter that, along with all the rest, I forget even my own works and writings. People are constantly quoting me to me without my realizing it.” Since I am now thirteen years older than the author of
Palimpsest
and since most of my contemporaries are vanishing, I am often drawn to Montaigne on the subject of memory and its lapses, not to mention on our common mortality. He is surprisingly sardonic on this last delicate subject: “Everybody goes out as though he had just come in,” he writes. “Moreover, however decrepit a man may be, he thinks he still has another twenty years.” Hardly a delusion of mine as I examine a new cancer on my forearm, all the while waiting for diabetes to do its gaudy final thing. I sometimes imitate Montaigne when he notes that: “I have adopted the practice of always having death not only in my mind but on my lips.” Hence, Susan; I am told that a failed marrow implant, not to mention a harrowingly painful chemotherapy procedure, ended her ordeal. Since “each man bears the entire form of man’s estate,” as Montaigne puts it, I can take part, at a near-remove, in her now abandoned estate so like that of all the rest ever born.
    I grow homesick when I read where I was in 1992, my workroom in Ravello: “a white cube with an arched ceiling and a window to my left that looks out across the Gulf of Salerno toward Paestum; at the moment, a metallic gray sea has created a white haze that obscures the ever more hostile sun.” As I quote these lines I will myself back to then where Howard is still alive and our world has not yet cracked open.
    Where am I now? I am in a second-floor study that an old friend, Diana Phipps, copied from a picture of Macaulay’s book-lined study. Through the windows in back of my chair, a steady monsoonlike vertical rain has been falling for days, rattling the straight palm trees that hide the road which crosses over from Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley.
    I have also just found the deed to the house; apparently, I bought it March 24, 1977, not long after we had bought the villa La Rondinaia (“The Swallows Nest”) in Ravello. We moved back here after a routine physical examination; our doctor showed me the X-ray of Howard’s chest: at the top of the right lung was a round object like an eyeball with glaucoma, startlingly white against the black foil of the radiogram. A lifetime of smoking had finally done its work; every attempt to stop the addiction had failed and continued to fail. Even after two “successful” cancer operations, he kept right on smoking and that is how “we” ceased to be we and became “I.”
    To my left, as I write this at the partners desk, there is a chair that bars entrance from the study to the door to Howard’s room. Norberto, our Filipino housekeeper, has placed in the chair a puppet Mephistopheles with a white skull-like head and pointed mustache—to ward off the evil eye? But surely that eye has already failed to do its work.
    The books here in Macaulay’s study are neither mine nor his, alas, but those of an old friend who has finally gone back East. Apparently, during his Western