dumbfoundry

There were many liaisons and loves, none very enduring. Henrietta Moraes, the first wife, describes how they parted in her eponymous memoirs, Henrietta: "One fine morning Dom said, 'Look darling, I'm off to the pub, just going to get some cigarettes. See you in about ten minutes.' He didn't come back…". It was a life of alcoholic binges, whimsical travel, and mindless partying.

In India, of course, he was envied for his second marriage--for marrying the woman whom Vogue called "one of the ten most beautiful women in the world", Leela Naidu. If poetry came and went, so did the women. [...]

Dom once told me about receiving instruction at the feet of W.H. Auden, then the world's most celebrated poet. Dom said he would show up with the draft of a poem at 10 in the morning. Auden would be in the darkened living room, all the blinds drawn.
"Boy," he would say straight off, "can you find your way to the bar?"
The prodigy would say, yes.
"Then fix me a martini."
"Well," said Dom, "when you fixed Auden a martini you fixed yourself one. And when you fixed him a second, you fixed yourself a second."
"With examples like that," sighed Dom, "how could one fail to learn to drink?" [...]

But that first night in Colaba all of this was still far away. We spoke of many things – food, Bombay's terrible humidity, drinking at the Harbour Bar in the Taj hotel, love and its loss. The one thing we did not talk about was poetry. He did not seem to want to. But as I said good night, Dom took my hand.

"You know about the handshake, don't you," he said.

I said I did not.

"Well, this handshake goes all the way back to Shakespeare, the first poet," he said. "You see, just as you're shaking my hand, I shook Eliot's hand, he shook Yeats' hand, Yeats shook Tennyson's hand, Tennyson shook Keats' hand…" and so it went, all the way back to Shakespeare.

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Wednesday, June 02, 2004 at 11:28 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.