I sent him a fan letter almost 50 years ago, telling him how much I loved his Villon translations in Poetry. I enclosed a ballade. I was stunned, a week or so later, to get a reply from him, and I met him shortly after. We kept up sporadically over the years, and I regret that there was never enough time just to sit and talk. One of the last times I saw him was in 2008. My brother had just died, as had his. Laurie spent most of his post-war life on a VA psychiatric ward. Dick told me that in his final years Laurie would excitedly talk about leaving the hospital and finding a job as a tennis instructor in California. This was told with gravity and kind bemusement. I later wrote a poem about it.
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