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have no idea what man owned the name Doyle. Let’s imagine his true sire to be a loudmouth who spent his days in a candy store in the Bronx, reading The Green Sheet and betting hopeless long shots. When one speaks of the People, one must remember that Joe’s father is always to be included among them. Whole novels, inexplicably, have been written exploring such characters. Perhaps these novels allow them to persist.
    Along about the time that Joe decided that he would be a “writer,” his father’s name shifted in his head so that he came to think of it as Lee. In any event, he led everyone he knew to believe that he believed that the name was Lee. Ah, mystery. Why his father would have changed his name from Lee to Lionni was unexplained, but such a puzzle only served to make everything more hazily romantic. Once an aberration is seized upon, its possible variations are virtually limitless: consider advertising. Soon after this, Joe came to consider himself, I swear it, a descendant of Robert E. Lee, and the dear old shattered South, the grand old decayed plantations, the beautiful old smoldering mansions became part of his heritage. It might have been true if things had been a little this way, or a little that way, right? So Joe perhaps thought of it.
    This spangled rubbish was useful to Joe’s life; with it, he could wrench his father out of roachy shotgun flats and busboy jobs in Horn and Hardart’s and fold him into pink clouds that glowed with the light of romance. He was no longer the man his mother had often bitterly and mockingly described to him, an unemployed lover in a Crawford suit-with-two-pairs-pants and Woolworth’s rose-oil pomade, shining his hair to oilcloth, but a quixotic, footloose hero whose rebel blood drove him to disappear from the verminous kitchens in which Joe had grown up. Joe, of course, had this same imaginary blood.
    He kept all this glittering lost glory subtly in the background, exposing it discreetly when it could get him something, and functioned off its energy. It was indeed an engine of sorts, and did not at all interfere with his job, his social life, or his “writing.” Joe became what he called an artist—and how he loved that word; I can hear him now: “Well, as far as Flaherty being an artist … “—because to be an artist was to be the stubborn Reb in retreat. He began to write poems, actual words, count ‘em, words, on actual paper. It was “interesting,” and admitted him to a world that seemed to offer more than the world of, say, numismatics. That the poems were indeed accepted as art has little bearing on this story—although I suspect that it is not so much a story as a minor change upon a common fable. The world is filled with talented and intelligent people who produce arty bits and pieces by which other talented and intelligent people are somehow nourished; they get what they need for their ailments. Sometimes I think it is all nothing but Joes with their variants of sham honeysuckle and Alabama nights on the one hand, and on the other those who come within range of that nailed-together glamour. It is all exciting and everyone is very pleased.
    Joe first met Helen Ingersoll in 1965, some five years after he manufactured his paper-magnolia legend. He and a friend, Ed Manx, had gone to a poetry reading at a grim, creaking little theater downtown, just off Second Avenue. I believe the theater is now a macrobiotic restaurant or a “head shop”—it is not my fault that the generation’s nomenclature is spectacularly ugly. The poet was a smudgy friend from the fifties who had been living in the Southwest for years and had returned for a month or so to attend to some family matter. His current poems were about freedom and adobe and white sand, mesas and mountains, in the way that Robert Frost’s poems are about America—that is, these concepts were laid on like high-gloss enamel. One can imagine the scarred little table behind which the bard sat, his can of