Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I was amazed to find Robert Lax among your pages. It brought back a flood of memories. Robert was one of those remarkable students who gathered around Mark Van Doren. Robert Giroux, Thomas Merton, Robert Gibney, Ad Reinhardt, and others were his compatriots. Merton cast Van Doren as his Virgil in The Seven Storey Mountain, according to Paul Elie. Gibney was on his honeymoon on a cruise and he and his wife Nancy jumped ship at St. John, bought some land, and never looked back. He became somewhat paranoid so you had to approach his house slowly, carefully. But we loved them both. Lax, as we know, ended up in Greece. And so did I, around that time. I had lived with Greeks in this country and spoke Greek and ended up for long periods in a mountain village on Evvoia. Sometimes Lax would call me from Kos, Patmos, Kalymnos when I was there. He used to joke about each island being for a different purpose—one to wash clothes, one for food, etc.—but never mentioned the troubles he had. He'd send little drawings sometimes. Sometimes Giroux and others of the group would come to visit the Gibneys. Though they were land rich, they were poor and the accommodations were primitive. I wish I could find some of the correspondence with Lax. But I thank you for devoting part of Poetry for Lax. I loved his eccentricities, his unique way of looking at this life. I surely thought he was forgotten forever.

bethesda, maryland