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The Man Who Nourished Boston's Literary Scene The man who nourished Boston’s literary scene - Magazine - The Boston Globe 8/12/12 5:20 PM Magazine GLOBE MAGAZINE The man who nourished Boston’s literary scene For decades poet William Corbett and his wife, Beverly, hosted a bustling salon in their South End home. Although they left town this summer, the writers and artists they inspired can only hope the spirit of the place is here to stay. By Sebastian Smee | GLOBE STAFF AUGUST 12, 2012 0 JHUMPA LAHIRI WASN’T SURE SHE COULD BE A WRITER. Although as a child she had harbored dreams of doing just that, they had gradually been eaten away by self-doubt — she could scarcely believe the books she loved had been written by real people. “At twenty- one,” she recalled in a 2011 New Yorker essay, “the writer in me was like a fly in the room — alive but insignificant, aimless, something that unsettled me whenever I grew aware of it, and which, for the most part, left me alone.” After graduating Barnard in 1989 with a degree in English literature, Lahiri moved to Massachusetts to take classics courses at MATT KALINOWSKI William and Beverly Corbett at 9 Harvard. She also found work at the cash Columbus Square shortly before http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2012/08/11/the-man-who-nouri…-literary-scene/K0UC09dcOFLbZyWOsy7IWO/story.html?event=event12 Page 1 of 11 The man who nourished Boston’s literary scene - Magazine - The Boston Globe 8/12/12 5:20 PM register in a Harvard Square bookstore with a moving. friend of a friend, Marni Corbett, a daughter of poet William Corbett and his wife, Beverly. Marni’s father, a tall man with a commanding, jowly face and mischievous eyes, used to visit the store to say hello to his daughter and to buy books. Big armloads of books. The Corbetts lived at 9 Columbus Square, a red- brick town house in Boston’s South End. Although Lahiri didn’t know it then, it was an address where, on any given night, you might sit down to a gourmet meal alongside literary luminaries like Seamus Heaney, Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster, John Ashbery, August Kleinzahler, Russell Banks, Basil Bunting, or Don DeLillo. Writing was celebrated there. Lahiri was soon invited to dinner at the Corbetts’ herself. On the appointed evening, she took the Orange Line in the wrong direction and turned up late. She was nevertheless welcomed MATT KALINOWSKI into a kind of life unlike any she had previously Creating community where none existed is what William Corbett was known. devoted to above nearly all else. In the Corbetts’ eat-in kitchen, where there was seating for 18, one could find a framed poem by their friend and Nobel Prize recipient Heaney, a rubbing of Ezra Pound’s tombstone, and drawings by the late Philip Guston. On the table were the little ceramic shoes that Beverly, a psychologist and self-taught chef, liked to collect. Above the fridge there was a painting of a pig with the words: “I WANT BEV TO COOK ME!” And then there were the guests — an ever- changing assortment of family friends and writers, students and artists. “I had never been in a home like that before,” recalls Lahiri. “I didn’t know people lived that way — surrounded by so much art, by an aesthetic that was so grand and http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2012/08/11/the-man-who-nouri…-literary-scene/K0UC09dcOFLbZyWOsy7IWO/story.html?event=event12 Page 2 of 11 The man who nourished Boston’s literary scene - Magazine - The Boston Globe 8/12/12 5:20 PM yet so comforting at the same time.” Once, while the Corbetts spent time in Vermont, Lahiri had the opportunity to housesit. “I spent a lot of time by myself that summer,” she recalls. She pulled books about artists she had never heard of from the shelves, one at a time, listened to the Corbetts’ jazz records, and read back issues of the Paris Review. The desk in the living room where Corbett wrote his own poetry, usually teeming with manuscripts and proofs, had a personality of its own. “The house had an incredible spirit,” Lahiri says. “And even though Bill was physically absent, he was so present.” One day, in a bright room on the top floor, the once “terribly closed off” Lahiri began to write. Just sketches and ideas at first. But it gradually came to her, in this house, that this life, the life of an author, was one she could inhabit. She enrolled in courses at Boston University and began submitting work to journals. In 1999, she published her collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. “That time [at the Corbett home] changed me in a fundamental way,” Lahiri says. And she wasn’t alone. Novelist Paul Auster, who set a crucial scene of his The New York Trilogy at the home he’d visited for decades, thinks of 9 Columbus Square as “the hub, the spiritual heart, the exact center” of literary Boston. Denis Leary, while a student of Corbett’s at Emerson, honed his stand-up routines in the living room. And after each of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1989 and 1990, John Ashbery, one of America’s most lauded poets, chose to dine not at some fancy downtown restaurant but at Bill and Beverly Corbett’s table. (“They always seem to have people there you’d want to meet,” he says.) Over more than four decades, the Corbetts together quietly created one of the most important literary and artistic salons in modern America. It was a place where poetry was read aloud and where the idea that to be creative you had to work alone in a cell, giving everything to your muse, was roundly disproved. It was a place where art and life came confidently together — and where, as one old friend put it, “everything was vivid.” http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2012/08/11/the-man-who-nouri…-literary-scene/K0UC09dcOFLbZyWOsy7IWO/story.html?event=event12 Page 3 of 11 The man who nourished Boston’s literary scene - Magazine - The Boston Globe 8/12/12 5:20 PM Now, however, that era has come to a close. Earlier this year, the Corbetts sold their house. It was a painful decision, but Beverly, 70, had retired from her work as a psychologist, and the couple wanted to move nearer their two daughters and three grandchildren in Brooklyn. Friends know the Corbetts are going to be just fine in New York, a city that has always been like a second home, even as some wonder who will fill their place in Boston. The departure of the Corbetts, poet Daniel Bouchard said at a recent event, is “a tremendous loss to our city and to the community of poets of which we are a part.” What the Corbetts created at 9 Columbus Square, however, was an ideal as much as a long string of convivial get-togethers. And in that sense, it is not the kind of thing that ever just goes away. *** GROWING UP in Pennsylvania and Connecticut in the 1940s and ’50s, Bill Corbett, now 69, was a difficult student, insecure, academically erratic, and prone to showing off. Although his parents didn’t keep many books at home — at least not until their son asked for a bookshelf in his room — he developed an early interest in literature, writing his first poem at age 13. He loved telling intricate stories, too, even though his grandmother tended to frown on that sort of behavior, scolding Corbett with “Oh, you’re fibbing. Don’t do that.” But while attending the Wooster School in Connecticut, Corbett found people who seemed to understand him. Between his sophomore and junior years at the prep school, his French teacher, novelist Donald Braider, hired him as a baby sitter. Initially, the Braiders’ home felt foreign, bohemian. It was messy. They smoked. Their dog sucked spaghetti straight off a dinner plate on the table. And yet the Braiders treated Corbett like an adult. They offered him wine at his first dinner there. Their home was bursting with art, including works by Jackson Pollock (an old friend and their son’s namesake), Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, and Franz http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2012/08/11/the-man-who-nouri…-literary-scene/K0UC09dcOFLbZyWOsy7IWO/story.html?event=event12 Page 4 of 11 The man who nourished Boston’s literary scene - Magazine - The Boston Globe 8/12/12 5:20 PM Kline, Mary Cassatt, and Pablo Picasso. Best of all, the house was overflowing with books. It felt, Corbett later recalled, as if he had arrived home. In 1964, Corbett graduated Lafayette College with a degree in literature and history and married Beverly Mitchell. The young couple decided to move to Cambridge mainly, as Corbett says, “to get away from our parents.” In 1969, they relocated to the South End, then a tough part of Boston. Once, says longtime friend and neighbor Judy Watkins, Bill and a poet friend came across a dead body on the sidewalk — “that really hit those two poets right in the solar plexus!” A harder and more lasting blow, however, had come some years earlier, when Corbett learned his father, a physician, had disappeared, abandoning his patients and family. The elder Corbett had fled with a mistress to Baghdad, leaving only a note on his office door that said: “I have gone to further my education.” Corbett never saw him again. The abandonment was a defining moment in Corbett’s life, says Beverly.
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