So why did I spend time with Morniel? Well, he lived right around the corner. He was slightly colorful, in his own sick way. And when I’d sat up all night, trying to work on a poem that simply wouldn’t be worked, I often felt it would be relaxing to drift around to his studio for a spot of conversation that wouldn’t have anything to do with literature.
The only trouble—and the thing I always forgot—was that it almost never was a conversation. It was a monologue that I barely managed to break in on from time to time.
You see, the difference between us was that I’d been published, even if it was only in badly printed experimental magazines that paid off in subscriptions. He’d never been exhibited—not once.
There was another reason for my maintaining a friendly relationship with the man. And that had to do with the one talent he really had.
I barely get by, so far as living expenses are concerned. Things like good paper to write on, fine books for my library, are stuff I yearn for all the time, but are way out of my reach financially. When the yearning gets too great—for a newly published collection by Wallace Stevens, for example—I meander over to Morniel’s and tell him about it.
Then we go out to the bookstore—entering it separately. I start a conversation with the proprietor about some very expensive, out-of-print item that I’m thinking of ordering and, once I’ve got all of his attention, Morniel snaffles the Stevens—which I intend to pay for, of course, as soon as I’m a little ahead.