Two Features from
“Lesser Lights: More Adventures From a
Hamptons Apprenticeship”
by Sandy McIntosh
by Sandy McIntosh
Meeting Capote at Keene’s in Southampton
One afternoon, when I was in the
bookstore, a tiny man with a squeaky voice pushed his way through the door,
yipping: "Mr. Keene! Who the hell’s book is blocking my book in your
window?"
The Southampton College had recently
published my first poetry collection, Earth
Works, and Keene had given it pride of place, almost entirely blocking
another book.
Keene pointed at me. "It's his
book."
I knew who the screaming man was; I
didn't need an introduction, but Keene introduced us, anyway.
Truman Capote stared at me.
"Suppose you tell me, young man, what kind of book you've written that's
so damn important it gets to block mine?"
"Poetry," I said.
"Oh," he said, his anger
deflating, as if poetry meant nothing. "Hah! Poetry!" he snorted and
turned to Keene, beginning a rant about something else.
“Don’t take Capote seriously,” Keene
consoled me later. “He has no respect for poetry, or history, for that matter,”
he concluded, pointing to a copy of Capote’s In Cold Blood. “Just you read it. Made the whole thing up. You’ll
see.”
When I returned to Keene’s a few days
later, the copy of my book that had been in the window was gone. I suspected
the worst.
Keene protested, “No, I didn’t hide
it. It was Capote. After you left, he bought it.”
*
Keene also published a newsletter
called the Steamboat Press which he
typeset by hand in a shop around the corner. I recall that he published
articles about local history, of which he was an expert, and the Town’s
volunteer historian.
One day, he invited me to visit the
printshop. Cabinets of type were set against the walls, and a long bedded
printing press occupied the center of the room. He showed me how he first inked
the form of cold type set into words, by turning a crank. The crank caused a
roller to impress ink on the type. He then arranged paper on top of the type,
and, turning another crank, lowered a platen, which
pressed the paper against the letters.
I was curious about a stack of type
forms standing against a corner wall that extended from floor to ceiling.
“That’s my full setting of the
original Bible that Johannes Gutenberg published in Mainz,” he told me. “Every
Latin character as it was originally set. Each page exactly forty-nine lines
long. All 973 pages of it.”
“How long have you been working on
this?” I asked.
“Since I opened the shop twenty years
ago. By my calculations, I have twenty more years to go before completing it.”
I never heard anything more about this great project. In fact, no
one I spoke to who had known him could tell me anything about it. Reluctantly,
I’ve come to believe that he had been having fun at my expense, displaying what
Sherlock Holmes described as Dr. Watson’s “pawkish” sense of humor. It was his
joke. He had never set Guttenberg’s Bible.
**
Coffee With Jean
Stafford in The Springs
Walking along Springs Fireplace Road
to the bay, I came upon a woman sweeping leaves into a little pile in her
driveway. As I passed, I said "Good morning."
She lifted her hand to stop me.
"You're the poet staying with the Ignatows?"
Surprised that anyone would know me, I
told her, yes, that was true.
"Would you like some
coffee?" But before I could answer she said. "Oh. I don't have any
coffee."
Each time I met her she was standing
at the end of the driveway, wearing her bathrobe. One day she'd smile; another
she'd be distracted and wouldn't look at me.
The last time I took that path she was
there, dressed formally. "I'm waiting for a car to take me into
town," she said. "Very nice to see you."
"Yes," I said. "And to
see you, too."
I found out later that she had won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for her
Collected Short Stories. She must have been traveling to Manhattan for the award.
*****
Sandy McIntosh is the author of A Hole
In the Ocean: A Hamptons Apprenticeship, as well fourteen other books. Lesser
Lights: Further Adventures from a Hamptons Apprenticeship, from which these
pieces are excerpted, will be published in spring 2019 by Marsh Hawk Press.
