Two of the most distinguished American literary artists of their generation—their names as frequently invoked by critics and historians as they are seldom linked—appear here in a conversation that is mostly about being in Pans after the Second World War. The occasion giving rise to this conversation was a late September, 1996, University of Pennsylvania weekend observation of my retirement from the English faculty there. When friends Norman Malier and Richard Wilbur accepted invitations to attend, I suggested talking about this experience that both had often said was personally important, that neither had ever overtly visited in his works, and that happened to have a particular relevance to the Penn audience in that season.

In 1939, with New York City playing host to the World’s Fair, Fortune magazine dedicated its July issue to commemorating the event. The issue would be divided into four sections: The People, They Govern Themselves, They Earn a Living, and What Is This City? The project required seventeen in-house writers and eight editors to capture the breadth of the city and its people, from Harlem to Wall Street, and the magazine turned also to a former staffer they regarded as their finest writer, James Agee. He was tasked with composing “tone poems” to introduce each section. In the end, Fortune editor Russell Davenport chose not to run the prose poems, or the foreword that Agee wrote to open the magazine.

 He was a fascinating talker, in spite of the stammer, and he knew everybody. He was a great friend of Bill Williams. You must have heard the story of his broken arm? He called up Williams at Rutherford and said, “I’ve broken my arm. Can I come and stay with you till it heals?” Bill said, “Certainly.” About a month or two went by and Max did nothing about having the cast examined or changed, so finally Bill insisted  on looking at it and discovered that there had never been any broken arm.

We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, “I love you.” But I didn’t know then how much. I had no idea … We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked. I always knew what was happening—where he was, how he was.

When word came on the last day of October, 1995 that Terry Southern had died, Henry Allen, a staff writer for The Washington Post, asked if he could write an appreciation for the next morning’s edition. He bicycled home in a rainstorm, six miles, to refer to his collection of Southern work, and in two and a half hours wrote his copy for the following day. It is essentially what appears here, with a few additions.

I met Margouleff just after I got out of the hospital where I was seriously ill with hepatitis and told every day that I wasn’t going to make it, and was all prepared to die. I came out all traumatized. Very strange. Margouleff came along.

Since the end of the war, Italian literature has been arousing marked interest in almost all the countries of Europe, and particularly France and England. A great many people, however, seem to imagine that the termination of hostilities and the overthrow of the Fascists started a new era in Italian prose and poetry. Not at all: although even in Italy people expected a radical change just after the liberation, nothing came of it. 

On July 15th, Peter Ardery died in his hotel room in Bombay, India. He was 31 years old. For five years (1965-1970) he had been an editor of this magazine and when he left his name was kept on the masthead as a tribute to his efforts on its behalf. 

On the corner made by the boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail and the rue Delambre, across the street from the large and garish Café de la Rotonde, during those earlier days, was the then smaller place called the Cafe du Dôme. The Rotonde had new soft benches and polished tables. On the walls it had paintings of nudes, and still-lives of fruit and flowers, and landscapes of Brittany and the south of France. It had a fancy, spacious washroom with a woman in charge. 

What follows are the authors’ discussions on the first stirrings, the germination of a poem, or a work of fiction. Any number of headings would be appropriate: Beginnings, The Starting Point, etc. Inspiration would be as good as any.