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It had an autumn smell
And that was how I knew
That I was down a well.
I was no longer young.
-Allen Tate, "Seasons of the Soul"
IT was good, Isabella Gardner wrote Doris and Charlie Foster, their friends in Minneapolis, that she and her husband, Allen Tate, were squeezing "all the gayety and people seeing" of their 1962 summer vacation into their twelve days in London-the only people they knew in Florence, the Harry Brewsters and Robert Fitzgeralds, would be away, "and Allen can work." Arriving in London around midnight on a Thursday, June 21, they found "a summons to Edith Sitwell for Friday at 5:30," among other messages. They had a drink at noon Friday with Louis MacNeice and lunch with Julian Mitchell, a writer Allen had known at Oxford when Mitchell was an undergraduate. "Poor Edith was in bed with a slipped disk but was gallantly arranged in a pink bed-jacket and served us drinks and malicious wit," Isabel related. Afterwards they had dinner with Jack and Phyllis Wheelock. Monday was dinner with the Eliots, and the Yvor Richards. They saw W H. Auden, Graham Greene, Mary McCarthy, and others. They saw performances of School for Scandal and The Tempest. The Spenders gave them a cocktail party: "I finally met Natasha Spender (once Allen's love)," Isabella reported to her sister-in-law; she "is far younger (41?) than I expected but far less interesting both to look at and to be with. But extremely nice."
The Joseph Franks were leaving Paris July 1 for Grimaud on the Riviera, where they reserved a room for the Tates beginning on the 8th. (Frank's second wife, Guiguite, was French.) Florence, alas, had temperatures in the mid-90s. "I can't look at another masterpiece," Allen wrote Foster on the 25th, "and Isabella is not as eager as she was a week ago." That evening they were "dining with the Italian translator of The Fathers-Marcella Bonsart and her husband the critic Alesandro B. All our other Florentine friends are at the seashore." They themselves were leaving on the 29th for Corfu. "In Corfu there are no museums: only rocks" and the sea. They were arriving in New York August 20 and in Well-fleet August 22.
Writing Mark Van Doren...