Recently in Unlikely Intersections Category

from top left: James Merrill, Evan Rhodes, Edward Hower, Alison Lurie, Shel Silverstein, Bill Manville, Joseph Lash, Arnold Sundgaard, John Williams, Richard Wilbur, Jim Boatwright.
from bottom left: Susan Nadler, Thomas McGuane, William Wright, John Ciardi, David Kaufelt, Philip Caputo, Philip Burton, John Malcolm Brinnin.

How many words is a picture worth if its subjects have penned more than many thousands of bestselling words apiece, already read by tens of thousands of readers? If in their beach bags are five Pulitzer Prizes, a few National Book Awards, two Bollingen Prizes, and office stationery from the U.S. Poet Laureate?

Thanks to Bill Wright for loaning this excellent group portrait. Liz Lear arranged the event, at Hidden Beach. The photographer was Don Kincaid. Click here for a full-size version. Thanks to Liz Lear, Holly Merrill, and Don Kincaid for their help in identifying the authors.

Key Westers bemoan change. You should've seen it twenty years ago. You should have seen it last week. But look far enough, and you'll see we've made a habit of proclaiming ruin. Still, it's better here than not, and gems do turn up in what looks like faceless change. Today, it's condominiums. Yesterday, it was the Navy. Here's Elizabeth Bishop, in 1942:

Marjorie and I are leaving for Mexico on the fifteenth. We're flying to Mérida, where we'll stay awhile. Then we're going up to Mexico City and then find a cool place—on a lake—to stay for the summer—in fact maybe for "the duration," I don't know. It is impossible to live here any longer. The Navy takes over and tears down and eats up one or two blocks of beautiful little houses for dinner every day. Probably the house on White Street will go, too.

The local build-up for the war was an unprecedented disruption, with thousands of young servicemen and the bustle of war preparations altering the pace of daily life. Though only a part-time resident, Bishop owned a home and had begun to feel at home here. These new transients shook her claim on the place. Who were these crass military men who displaced Miss Bishop?

One of them was nineteen year-old James Schuyler, future Pulitzer-prize winning poet, "simply the best we have," according to John Ashbery, and member of the so-called New York School of poets, along with Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and Kenneth Koch. That's Schuyler in the image above, enrolled in sonar school in Key West during the summer of '43, a year after Bishop's complaint. By delighful coincidence, Schuyler and Bishop worked on the base together as fellow patriots that summer. Neither was aware of the other, but Bishop wrote to Marianne Moore of her adventure in the Navy:

I first heard of the fist-fight between Ernest Hemingway and Wallace Stevens in KWLS co-founder Lynn Kaufelt's book, Key West Writers and Their Houses. It didn't ring quite true, somehow, and yet the story's skeleton alone begged frequent repetition. Hemingway, man of action and hard drinking, fan of violence in so many forms, and Stevens, cerebral, executive, ironic, each gave as much to American writing in the 1930s as any. That they both spent considerable time that decade in tiny Key West was improbable enough. That they actually came to blows over their no-doubt-innumerable differences was gravy, perhaps a fiction but, with apologies to Wallace, a supremely pleasurable one.

It turns out the story is true. Let's let Hem tell it:
Nice Mr. Stevens. This year he came again pleasant like the cholera and first I knew of it my nice sister Ura was coming into the house crying because she had been at a cocktail party at which Mr. Stevens had made her cry by telling her forcefully what a sap I was, no man, etc. So I said, this was a week ago, "All right, that's the third time we've had enough of Mr. Stevens." So headed out into the rainy past twilight and met Mr. Stevens who was just issuing from the door haveing just said, I learned later, "By God I wish I had that Hemingway here now I'd knock him out with a single punch."