I always had a soft spot for Derek Walcott, the poet who died on Friday. In the mid-80s, on a gray winter’s day in Philadelphia, I had drinks with him and Joseph Brodsky. I had gone to a reading the two men had given, accompanying a friend of Hania’s – a tall, striking African-American woman – who had befriended Brodsky in New York. After the reading, the company headed out to a hotel bar, and I was allowed to tag along.
Brodsky was already quite full of himself. This was a couple years before he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; Walcott would get it five years later. Walking up Broad Street, I told Brodsky that his throaty recitations of poetry sometimes reminded me of Okudzhava, the great Russian singer-songwriter, thinking he’d be impressed by my worldliness. He gave a short, derisive laugh.
At the bar, the two men ordered Scotch. At one point Brodsky handed Walcott a new poem he had written, and Walcott read it with pen in hand, correcting a word here, a punctuation mark there (the privilege of the native speaker), before handing it back to him. Then, sensing I was feeling a bit out-of-place, he turned to me and asked, “What do you do, Tom?”
I answered the question – I was writing feature stories for the American College of Physicians – and the conversation quickly moved elsewhere. But I’ve never forgotten his unnecessary kindness.
