Anthony Rudolf (U.K.)

Afterword: The Guest and the Host

Richard is a comrade, one of my dwindling band of talismanic figures from the 1960s, close friends who have known each other’s best and worst moments in life and work during sixty years; participant observers, you might say. We met on my (and perhaps his) final day as a student in Cambridge, in 1964. He was visiting my next door neighbour John Barrell in Angel Court, Trinity. I knew who Richard was because he had been published in student magazines. I don’t think he knew who I was, given my zero public profile in university publications. However, we hit it off immediately and agreed to get together on his return from Italy where he was heading with his girl friend and future first wife Kim Landers, whom I already knew socially. It’s very unlikely we would have met for the first time later on. Such is the role of chance.

During our early years as pro-active sometimes hyper-active go-betweens, we met and admired and were privileged to learn from senior figures: some were British, but mine were mainly French and American, Richard’s Italian and Yugoslav, and we have both written about them elsewhere. One was from Mexico: Octavio Paz, whose brilliance and charisma and learning (wide and deep) had a huge influence on both of us: a great poet, a natural teacher, a go-between – geographically, mentally and generationally – and a generous friend.

We learned and unlearned wisdom (theirs) and folly (ours) from women in different ways (theirs and ours), and have been ultimately blessed with Melanie and Paula. Blessed too with children and grandchildren, whose mothers were Kim, Brenda and Yasna.

For all the lucidity and depth of Richard’s prose, poetry is at the centre of his being, which makes him at once unassailable and vulnerable. He and I live in different poetico-existential worlds. I am mainly a writer of prose, more reserved in tone and austere in prosody than Richard. I occasionally trick myself into producing a poem on the cusp of other work. Richard, by contrast, was put on this planet to compose poems, with prose arriving from time to time on the circumference of his imaginaire.

I have been privileged to read most if not all of Richard’s books in manuscript. He is a prolific and eloquent, sometimes exalted, writer, and remarkably generous in his hospitality to intelligent critiques of his drafts. If the point is well made, it is well taken. Guest and host, as he likes to say, are the same word in some languages. Magnanimity is the watchword. It is a great privilege to have been his guest and/or host on numerous occasions. A sobering thought is that only one of us can be present at the other’s funeral. That’s life. 

Photo (L to R): Anthony Rudolf, Nasos Vayenas, Elaine Feinstein, Richard Berengarten, Philip Kuhn.

Back to the Introduction here.