myriad shapes of brass, glass, and celluloid, and long swinging ropes of faux pearls. Stabbing the air with a cigarette holder that juts up at forty-five
degrees, she flaunts flowing gowns of purple, orange, emerald, or gold, wrapped in stoles (often moth-eaten) of sable, mink, or ermine. Her lipstick is bright red, her powder corpse-pale; somewhat
above where her eyebrows used to be she has pencilled surprised semicircles, and a spangly band holds back her hennaed, bobbed hair.
Her age? Thirty? Forty? Fifty? Impossible to guess.
Her talk is all of young friends. She calls them her protégés and each, she insists, is bound for fame: Misses Maisie and Daisy Mountjoy, the Songbird Sisters – golden-haired
Maisie, copper-haired Daisy – who one day will fill Carnegie Hall (in fact, to my aunt’s delight, they fill many a burlesque theatre); Miss Inez La Rue, the choreographer, Doyenne (so
she calls herself) of Modern Dance; Mr Danvers Hill, her principal dancer (who decamps, disappointingly, to Tripoli, in pursuit of an Arab sailor); Mr Copley Wedger, a rich boy going through a
Bohemian phase, whose talents remain unknown but undoubtedly will be prodigious, or so Aunt Toolie assures us; rumour has it that he is prodigious in other ways.
Of Aunt Toolie’s circle, some were failures, some successes, but she loved them equally: Miranda Cast, the sculptor; Jackson Daunt, the songwriter; Benson Roth, acid-tongued critic (in
later years, a New Yorker legend); Zola May Hudson, leading light in the Harlem Renaissance.
In those days, I regarded myself as a poet. More truly, I was a jobbing hack, a filler writer and book reviewer, though I might (with more accuracy still) have been called Aunt Toolie’s
secretary. Day after day I lit her cigarettes, mixed her cocktails, answered her letters, received her guests, and tramped the streets with piles of her invitations, which she inscribed on little
silver-edged cards embossed with what she insisted was the Sharpless crest. The century was in its twenties, and so was I. Naturally, on leaving Yale, I had headed back to the place I called home
since my days in France: Aunt Toolie’s huge shabby apartment above a speakeasy in an alley off Christopher Street. When my father died on the Pont Saint Michel, Aunt Toolie became all the
family I had.
Wobblewood, as her apartment was known, took its nickname from its treacherous floorboards. Half of them had buckled with damp or in places rotted through, and supplementary planks, sheets of
cardboard, old doors, a legless table, several prone bookcases, and an antique Russian chessboard did their best to supply the lack, with ratty carpets flung on top. At Wobblewood, the energies of
Greenwich Village gathered to a point. There, I wrote the poems that I imagined would make me famous. There, I first grew drunk on bathtub gin, and woke up for the first time with a stranger in my
bed. And there, one blustery November evening in 1926, I met again the boy – the man – whom I would always call Trouble.
Aunt Toolie had thrown one of her many parties. Each party had a purpose, or began with one. The goal this time was to premiere that now-celebrated atonal composition (the beginning, critics
said later, of modern American music), Arnold Blitzstein’s Sonata in No Key . Blitzstein, a wiry, wild-haired Austrian who, at that time, spoke barely a word of English, was my
aunt’s latest discovery. She had found him sleeping rough one night in Washington Square Park and, upon learning he was a composer, became at once convinced of his genius. ‘It’s
frightfully moderne ,’ she told her guests, enthusing about the work they were shortly to hear. ‘Oh, the bit where he beats on saucepan lids... a commentary, Arnold says, on the
alienation of the worker from the means of production.’
That night, as on many a night before, while guests mingled against walls hung with avant-garde posters and paintings, I guzzled gin, knowing I would
degrees, she flaunts flowing gowns of purple, orange, emerald, or gold, wrapped in stoles (often moth-eaten) of sable, mink, or ermine. Her lipstick is bright red, her powder corpse-pale; somewhat
above where her eyebrows used to be she has pencilled surprised semicircles, and a spangly band holds back her hennaed, bobbed hair.
Her age? Thirty? Forty? Fifty? Impossible to guess.
Her talk is all of young friends. She calls them her protégés and each, she insists, is bound for fame: Misses Maisie and Daisy Mountjoy, the Songbird Sisters – golden-haired
Maisie, copper-haired Daisy – who one day will fill Carnegie Hall (in fact, to my aunt’s delight, they fill many a burlesque theatre); Miss Inez La Rue, the choreographer, Doyenne (so
she calls herself) of Modern Dance; Mr Danvers Hill, her principal dancer (who decamps, disappointingly, to Tripoli, in pursuit of an Arab sailor); Mr Copley Wedger, a rich boy going through a
Bohemian phase, whose talents remain unknown but undoubtedly will be prodigious, or so Aunt Toolie assures us; rumour has it that he is prodigious in other ways.
Of Aunt Toolie’s circle, some were failures, some successes, but she loved them equally: Miranda Cast, the sculptor; Jackson Daunt, the songwriter; Benson Roth, acid-tongued critic (in
later years, a New Yorker legend); Zola May Hudson, leading light in the Harlem Renaissance.
In those days, I regarded myself as a poet. More truly, I was a jobbing hack, a filler writer and book reviewer, though I might (with more accuracy still) have been called Aunt Toolie’s
secretary. Day after day I lit her cigarettes, mixed her cocktails, answered her letters, received her guests, and tramped the streets with piles of her invitations, which she inscribed on little
silver-edged cards embossed with what she insisted was the Sharpless crest. The century was in its twenties, and so was I. Naturally, on leaving Yale, I had headed back to the place I called home
since my days in France: Aunt Toolie’s huge shabby apartment above a speakeasy in an alley off Christopher Street. When my father died on the Pont Saint Michel, Aunt Toolie became all the
family I had.
Wobblewood, as her apartment was known, took its nickname from its treacherous floorboards. Half of them had buckled with damp or in places rotted through, and supplementary planks, sheets of
cardboard, old doors, a legless table, several prone bookcases, and an antique Russian chessboard did their best to supply the lack, with ratty carpets flung on top. At Wobblewood, the energies of
Greenwich Village gathered to a point. There, I wrote the poems that I imagined would make me famous. There, I first grew drunk on bathtub gin, and woke up for the first time with a stranger in my
bed. And there, one blustery November evening in 1926, I met again the boy – the man – whom I would always call Trouble.
Aunt Toolie had thrown one of her many parties. Each party had a purpose, or began with one. The goal this time was to premiere that now-celebrated atonal composition (the beginning, critics
said later, of modern American music), Arnold Blitzstein’s Sonata in No Key . Blitzstein, a wiry, wild-haired Austrian who, at that time, spoke barely a word of English, was my
aunt’s latest discovery. She had found him sleeping rough one night in Washington Square Park and, upon learning he was a composer, became at once convinced of his genius. ‘It’s
frightfully moderne ,’ she told her guests, enthusing about the work they were shortly to hear. ‘Oh, the bit where he beats on saucepan lids... a commentary, Arnold says, on the
alienation of the worker from the means of production.’
That night, as on many a night before, while guests mingled against walls hung with avant-garde posters and paintings, I guzzled gin, knowing I would
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