I had met Stratis nine years earlier through the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, whose MIT poetry workshop I audited in college. I was a senior at Harvard and would take the subway up to Kendall Square twice a week for Ellen's class and office hours. She and I had first crossed paths at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, where I held one of the now-defunct “waiter” scholarships, serving meals to the conference participants in exchange for tuition. Ellen ran one of the workshops that I attended, and hearing that I would be returning to Harvard in the fall, invited me to visit her class. She also made time to meet with me one-on-one, boosting my confidence and my productivity by agreeing to critique all the poems I could bring her. This relationship lasted past my graduation, with our conversations increasingly veering off the topic of poetry. One day she asked about my plans for employment.

            I mentioned private school English teacher as the only job I was qualified for, on the grounds that I had attended such schools, which in those days preferred to hire their own. Ellen gave me two reasons to rethink my choice: first, private schools were notorious for consuming all of a teacher’s free time; and second, hadn't I made clear how unhappy I had been as a student? She had a better idea: she would recommend me to Stratis for a job in the Woodberry Poetry Room, a small library-within-a-library at Harvard that he served as curator. Stratis had been an adult student of Ellen's in the non-residential MFA program that she founded at Goddard College in 1970. She had helped him to begin writing in English after he had published four books of poetry in Greek. His first book in English, a collection of poems entitled Crossing the River Twice, came out in 1970, followed by a novel, When the Tree Sings, in 1979.

            Ellen knew that I knew of Stratis—like all literary-minded undergraduates and others who took Harvard’s popular Shakespeare course, I was a frequent visitor to the Poetry Room. Constructed of soothing blond wood and designed by the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, it provided a visual and aural oasis within the bland undergraduate library that housed it, stocking contemporary poetry books and journals that could be read in upholstered chairs chosen by Aalto’s wife. Several pod-like consoles housed turntables for listening to Shakespeare plays or the room’s recordings of contemporary poets. Stratis was a familiar sight passing through on the way to his office, stopping to greet the poets who dropped in to browse. Between my Shakespeare listening and investigating the books recommended by my poetry teachers, I was a regular enough presence that I figured he might know me by sight. Also, right before Ellen connected us, I had read When the Tree Sings, which gave me a second motivation for meeting him: not only did he represent the prospect of employment at a place that I already happily visited for free, but my boss would be a writer whose work I admired.

            I detected some recognition in Stratis’s eyes when I walked into his office in the fall of 1980. It was clear from the start of our conversation that Ellen's referral carried great weight with him, and a brief exchange forged our bond. “So you know Ellen,” he began, to which I replied that she was my mentor. “Mine too,” he said. He then apologized that he had no actual job to offer me, but was hoping to replace his current half-time assistant, who had no interest in poetry and performed only the dry, bibliographic part of the job, with someone who could oversee the room’s growing collection of recordings. He proposed that I start out by manning the desk a few nights a week—a job traditionally held by work-study students—and try to hold out financially until something more permanent and better paying opened up.

            I attributed Stratis’s offer to his regard for Ellen. Even if he had recognized me as a regular patron of the room, every undergraduate poet hung out there, the desk jobs were coveted for their minimal workload, and many older writers from the Cambridge scene would have jumped at them. Also, he and I made for unlikely colleagues: I was a six-foot-five blond East Coast WASP with little experience of the world other than a few parent-financed trips to Europe. A foot shorter, with jet black hair and a rakish mustache, Stratis was not only twenty years my senior and Greek, he had grown up during the Nazi occupation of his country and witnessed the murder of his father and his mother’s removal to a concentration camp in Germany. He was well-versed in politics, art, and foreign cultures. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he had campaigned against the far-right government in Greece, which had banned his poetry. After a publication party for a limited-edition broadside of Seamus Heaney's poem “From the Republic of Conscience,” he showed me his copy, inscribed by the author “To Stratis, a citizen of that Republic.”

            Starting in the fall, I worked at the desk a few nights a week. When the permanent job had still not come through by spring, I accepted a position teaching middle school English at a private school outside Boston. I loved my seventh-grade students and the diminutive football team I was assigned to coach, but as predicted, was swamped by grading and lesson plans. That winter, Stratis called to say that my hiring had been approved. I returned to the library, where he had converted a cluttered storeroom into a combined office and studio where I would do the book ordering and re-master recordings. A final duty involved helping him with the readings—greeting visiting poets, serving wine and cheese, and then accompanying Stratis and a changing cast of writers and professors to dinner at the nearby Dolphin Seafood Restaurant, whose Greek owner allowed us to order from a roster of unadvertised specials.

            I marvel at Stratis’s generosity in including me on those heady outings. It wasn’t uncommon for me to find myself at a table with a Pulitzer prize-winning poet, an English professor whose book I had studied as an undergraduate, several Cambridge-area writers, and Stratis, holding court over baked scallops washed down with retsina. My level of awe depended on my opinion of the guests’ writing. Stratis made sure to invite a diverse sampling of authors to read (and dine), but he also loved to schmooze. During his daily rambles around Harvard Square he might run into a poet acquaintance and impulsively propose a reading. When a Harvard professor championed a contemporary poetry book in a review, he or she would urge Stratis to extend its author an invitation. Eager to maintain a good relationship with the English Department, Stratis always complied, often without reading the book, and shrugged off my objections if I told him that the invitee was overrated. This was my first inkling that for all the enviable aspects of Stratis’s job, I wouldn’t be any good at it, nor it for me.

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II

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            The one time that Stratis presented me with an opportunity to audition as a prospective curator, I acquitted myself well. The longtime agent for Vladimir Nabokov inquired whether the Poetry Room would be interested in presenting a reading by Nabokov’s son Dmitri, whose translation of his father's early novel The Enchanter was about to be published, nine years after the latter’s death. Stratis identified with Nabokov, a fellow exile whose father had been assassinated by a Russian monarchist and who had switched to writing in English in mid-career. He had long wanted to publish an album of recordings that Nabokov had made at Harvard in the 1950s. This would require Dmitri's permission, which could be more promisingly requested in person than by letter or phone.

            Then a week before the reading Stratis announced that he had planned a trip out of town with his wife and daughter, leaving the introducing and permission asking to me. Few events embodied Stratis’s vision for the Poetry Room better than Dmitri Nabokov’s visit to Harvard, his alma mater, on behalf of a new book by his father, and I was perplexed that the curator would absent himself. Did he think that the time had come for me to prove myself? Had there been some domestic issue, a conflict with a long-planned family vacation? Was Stratis feeling burned out by his job and unable to face another collision of Harvard and literary celebrity? I never found out, but feared that I would appear unequal to the moment. When I called the agent to arrange for Dmitri's pickup and lodging, we spoke for a few minutes before he asked, “Now, who are you again?”

            The best I could do to improve my qualifications was to brush up on Nabokov Sr.’s oeuvre beyond the single novel, Lolita, that I had read. The agent seemed concerned about Dmitri's obligations before and after the event, and whom he would be interacting with during his stay. In addition to being acutely aware of my underling status, I worried that I lacked Stratis’s faculty contacts—even as a former Harvard student, I knew its professors mainly by reputation or from the distant perspective of a seat in a lecture hall. Was I expected to introduce Dmitri to dignitaries that I had never met? What the agent said next eased my fears. Apparently, Dmitri felt intimidated by his role as scion of a legend; he dreaded being interrogated by Harvard “Nabokovians” and found wanting. A bit of research revealed that the son’s interests ran more to mountaineering, racecar driving, and opera singing than scholarship. The tall, tousled man who emerged smiling from a Logan Airport gate a few weeks later was more strapping jock than exiled Russian aristocrat.

            When I told my wife that I planned to take Dmitri out for a hamburger before his reading, she urged me to reconsider. He was Dmitri Nabokov, for God's sake, visible as a child in iconic photographs being doted upon by Vladimir and Vera, flying in from the longtime family home in Montreux, Switzerland. To escort him to a burger joint would be an insult. We compromised on offering him a choice between Charlie's Kitchen, a student hang-out near his hotel, or the trendy Harvest Restaurant. To my satisfaction, he chose Charlie’s, and several times during the meal mentioned his relief that he hadn't arrived to a congregation of academics quizzing him over a white tablecloth. The rest of the visit went smoothly, with my research paying off. Introducing Dmitri to the audience, I mentioned that in a prelude to his mountaineering career he had scaled the exterior of Harvard's Memorial Hall as an undergraduate. “I did do that,” he chortled from the dais. At the end of the evening, my car wouldn't start, and leaving my wife to wait for AAA, I walked the guest of honor back to his hotel, broaching the topic of publishing his father's readings. Dmitri warmly assented and said that he'd instruct his agent to prepare a contract.

            Dmitri kept in touch after his visit, thrilling me when he would call and ask for me rather than Stratis. The Poetry Room published the audiobook Vladimir Nabokov at Harvard in 1988, with Stratis and me listed as editors. Either out of generosity or because he worried that my bibliographic duties would bore me out of my job before he was ready to retire, Stratis strove to give me credit and responsibility whenever possible. It wasn’t easy. With the curator in charge of the collection and budget, all decisions had to go by him. I could only answer the most basic queries before referring callers to Stratis to decide whether to invite someone to read, provide a copy of a recording, or purchase books from self-marketing poets. Some of his responses were dictated by personal or professional ties: Professor A would receive a quick yes to a plea for a John Ashbery recording, while Poetry Fan B would hear a lecture on copyright. As a result, I could never serve Stratis as a “Radar O'Reilly” type assistant, dispatching questions before they reached his desk.

            It was rare to find him at his desk. Perhaps understandably, given the public/promotional aspect of his job, Stratis rarely did anything that looked like work. With me in nominal charge of the room during the daytime and his wife Heather Cole the head librarian of Lamont Library, which housed the Poetry Room, Stratis was accountable to no one for his schedule or whereabouts. He invariably came in late, read Publishers Weekly or an acquisitions list for half an hour, then stopped by my office to toss these on my desk, marked with books for me to order, with a cursory “I'm off to do errands.” These could take anywhere from an hour to the rest of his workday and typically involved shopping, browsing bookstores, dropping in on library friends, and holding long sidewalk conversations with writers that might end with him urging the person to “come and give a reading for the Poetry Room.”

            Free to dictate my schedule. I would complete the week’s bibliographic work in a few hours, and the taping project would start depressing me after two or three recordings (There were glories to be heard, but also much mediocre poetry and many self-indulgent poets). This left me the rest of the day to sit in my office, with its locking door and intimidating “Recording in Progress” sign, reading the newspaper or working on my own writing. Since even Stratis had to knock for entry, I had time to perform a quick shift to work mode—book order sheet placed over newspaper, recording document brought forward on the computer screen— before letting him in. Eventually I embarked on my own version of errands, stretching trips to other libraries or the stationery store into strolls through Harvard Square, explaining “I was on my way to Widener for a pick-up” or “I needed file folders” if Stratis ever questioned my whereabouts or ran into me on Mass Ave.

            Stratis never let on whether he knew of my derelictions, but in handing me one of my annual evaluations, he apologized for checking “Average” next to “Attendance” because, he explained, “if I mark everything ‘Outstanding’ they’ll get suspicious.” I knew that I wasn’t outstanding, and wouldn’t have minded him telling me so. He had heard me complain about the tedium of library work, noticed drafts of poems on my desk, and witnessed my discomfort with public activities. Only once, when I had begged off several evening readings in a row, did he remind me that my job description called for making recordings, and making nice, on demand. Finally, for all the freedom from oversight his absences afforded me, they had begun to take a toll on my morale. I grew tired of telling people that I did not know where he was, but felt uncomfortable saying, “he's buying toothpaste at The Coop,” or “it's 3 p.m., so he's home working in his garden.” Callers would try back repeatedly, bewildered to the point of annoyance as to why the Poetry Room curator was never in the Poetry Room.

            One morning I was sitting at my desk with the door open when two familiar looking men walked in. I looked from one of them down to the copy of the novel The Sportswriter lying on my desk and said, “You’re Richard Ford. I'm reading your book,” to which his companion, whom I recognized from photographs as his editor Gary Fisketjon, laughed and said, “You see?” as if Ford had been complaining about his readership just before entering. Of course, they were there to see Stratis, a friend of Ford’s from Goddard days, but he was AWOL again and they departed for lunch. When I told him of their visit later, he scolded me for not having called him at home. Would he have raced into work while Ford and Fisketjon waited, then repaired to the Harvard Faculty Club with them for lunch? If he was indeed working on his writing as he claimed, he could have saved us both a lot of hassle by doing it in his office as I did.

            Stratis loved the Faculty Club, situated just across Quincy Street from Lamont and visible from my office window. He loved taking visiting poets there for lunch, entering the wood-paneled lobby and greeting the professors waiting for their tables. Especially for someone of his background—he had worked in construction in Greece and begun his library career as a clerk in Widener Library, overcoming dyslexia and ADHD to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees as an adult—his elevation to curator of Harvard’s poetry collection was a source of great pride, exemplified by his access to the Faculty Club and the bigwigs who frequented it. Just as important was the opportunity it gave him to show his largesse, not least to me. Every few weeks he would treat me to lunch and introduce me around as his “assistant and successor.” Despite my blasé attitude toward Harvard as the third member of my family to attend, I’d be lying if I said that the prospect of succeeding Stratis wasn't sweetened by the fact that this would give me my own club privileges.

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III

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            Anyone who knew Stratis during his Poetry Room years would agree that his greatest gift was for hosting. Part of what motivated him to extend so many impromptu reading invitations to friends (and to withhold so many from poets he did not know who sent him imploring letters) was his sense that the entire process—soliciting a reading; publicizing it with his own hand-drawn posters; recording it “for the archive,” as he would say proudly; delivering a laudatory introduction and presiding over the wine and cheese reception and inevitable Dolphin dinner afterward—was a way for him to show respect and fellowship, to be of service to the art. All of this reached an apogee when the reader was a celebrity, and the two celebrities that Stratis held in highest regard were James Merrill and Seamus Heaney.

            Stratis included me in every pre- or post-reading function, but in the spring of 1985, when Heaney and Merrill read together in Harvard Yard, the guest list for the pre-show dinner was too large for me to fit at the Faculty Club table. Stratis tried to ease my presumed disappointment by saying that he needed me to do crowd control. I should have reminded him of my aversion to large groups, but would never have said that I didn't think Merrill, whom Stratis revered and who had provided a blurb for When the Tree Sings, deserved the star treatment. Merrill’s early collections Water Street and Nights and Days had started me writing poetry in college, but when he began drawing all of his subject matter from communications with a Ouija board, the results struck me as far inferior. (His friend Alison Lurie said of this period that “I sometimes had the feeling that my friend’s mind was intermittently being taken over by a stupid possibly even evil alien intelligence.”) I was in no mood to hear those poems, with Merrill performing the voices of spirits he had contacted. A half hour before the reading, I stood outside the auditorium, telling a growing horde that it was full to its fire department capacity. Far from sympathizing with anyone’s disappointment, I felt like proclaiming Merrill’s betrayal of his gift. When a university police officer arrived, I slipped inside, out another exit, and went home.

            Heaney I would have stayed to hear, having admired him since taking his first undergraduate workshop at Harvard in 1979. As a visiting instructor and later as Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, he was a regular patron of the Poetry Room, a good friend of Stratis’s, and even before he won the Nobel Prize, the most famous person at Harvard. This made him a reliable draw for any event, whether his own or someone else’s. I often thought about the cost to him of being the university’s go-to guy for glamour and charm. At one Dolphin dinner where the waiters greeted him with an effusiveness usually reserved for their compatriot, Stratis, a graduate student at the table commented that it must be nice to receive such treatment. Heaney, who had a gift for seeming to confide in his interlocutor even in public situations, leaned toward the man and said in a low voice, “It is, if you don’t mind being a mascot.”

            In retrospect, this comment illuminates the bond between Heaney and Stratis. I sensed that some people, particularly those who knew Stratis only as the public face of the Poetry Room or had not read his writing, viewed him as an exotic, even clownish figure, lacking the gravitas of the professors and poets whose company he kept. A few close friends knew of his talent and the depth and poignancy of his experience, but I often found myself wanting to protect him from his eagerness to please. His ultimate offering was an elaborate Greek-style lamb roast where the main course rotated on a spit in view of the diners. When Stratis’s small backyard could not accommodate his guests, he would relocate to a friend’s property. One such extravaganza took place at the home of the biographer Justin Kaplan and his wife Anne Bernays, a novelist, both only tangentially connected to Harvard, but still eminences in that milieu.

            My memory of that afternoon is of Stratis running to and from the fire, soaked with sweat, telling guests—writers, professors, and well-to-do neighbors of the homeowners—that the demands of a traditional lamb roast left little time for mingling, then hurrying off to give the beast another turn. Throughout it all, he kept his focus on the quality of the experience for others, reveling in their interest and compliments. In one sense, it was Stratis at his hospitable best and happiest, but who wouldn’t have felt self-conscious performing physical labor for the benefit of Cantabrigians standing around sipping gin and tonics? However he felt about those optics, I suspect that he could empathize with the “everybody’s favorite Irish poet” reception that Heaney alluded to at the Dolphin.

            The most blatant instance of Stratis courting disrespect occurred during a smaller gathering at his and Heather’s house. Sometimes a few drinks would convince him of his gift as a wit or raconteur, for which he lacked Heaney’s facility and tolerance for liquor. Maybe this is why Stratis put up with my shortcomings, appreciating the way my shyness in groups mitigated his strained efforts to charm, just as I took refuge in his willingness to take command of conversations. On the evening in question, about six of us were sitting around a picnic table with the remnants of a barbeque and several bottles of wine arrayed before us. Stratis was not the only one who had drunk too much, though unlike many of the poets we spent time with, he became neither belligerent nor maudlin under the influence of alcohol, just garrulous.

            I watched as he turned to the Harvard English professor sitting next to him and launched into a muddled anecdote. A few minutes into his story, she turned away and began a conversation with the poet seated on her other side, leaving Stratis talking to the back of her head. He registered the snub with a sheepish look, unaware that anyone had seen, then rose unsteadily with a large knife in one hand and a cantaloupe in the other and announced, “And now I shall proceed to slaughter a melon.” It struck me that for all of the friendships that Stratis had nurtured through Faculty Club hobnobbing and English Department collaboration, and the respect shown him by Harry Levin, Robert Fitzgerald, Stanislaw Baranczak, Gregory Nagy and other luminaries, he had never achieved full acceptance into the Harvard fraternity. Whether this was due to his lack of a prestigious education, his eagerness to serve the egos of others, or his slight social clumsiness, I didn't know, but I did know boorish behavior when I saw it, and this time it came from the tenured scholar, not her tipsy host.

 

IV

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            In the late 1980s, representatives of a national union of clerical workers began meeting with library staff. Stratis said half-jokingly that I could get him into trouble by confiding in the recruiters, implying that any mention of his erratic stewardship might reach the college librarian’s office. He reiterated this fear when I was preparing for my exit interview, having decided to leave Cambridge and resume my schoolteaching career. After all he had done for me, it had never occurred to me to betray him in this way. Besides, for all of his socializing and shopping, he had produced four novels in his time away from the office, and continues to serve me as a model for how to protect one’s writing from the demands of a job. Slipping away from campus after my last class, forgoing the myriad activities that fill out an independent school day, I think of Stratis in his felt fedora strolling out of the Poetry Room mid-afternoon, making his getaway.   

            Shortly before I moved, Stratis gave a reading in Harvard Square. He didn’t preview his new novels, instead choosing passages from When the Tree Sings and The Heroic Age, and several poems he had translated by his favorite writer, the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy. In introducing these, Stratis quoted Cavafy, who refused to formally publish his work during his lifetime: “By postponing and re-postponing to publish, what a gain I have had!” Coming from a canonical poet, this statement would give hope to any impatient writer, and I could see why Stratis, then struggling with his novels, took heart from it, as I do whenever a rejection of my poetry manuscript allows me to replace lesser poems with better ones.

            By the time I left Harvard, after four years as a student and eleven as an employee, I had grown fed up with the place, and confused that with being fed up with Stratis. It wasn’t just the aesthetic compromises that he had to make as curator, but the awkward overlap of our personal and professional relationships. We were constant companions, working together during the weekdays and overseeing readings or socializing with our families in the evenings. And even as I respected him for giving his art priority over his paying work, I couldn’t help resenting his absences and habit of showing up in time to play the impresario whenever a prominent writer came to town. We kept in touch for a year or so, but gradually my aversion to phone calls and apathy about writing letters brought an end to our contact. He stopped mentioning my return as his successor, and then stopped communicating altogether. In his last initiative, he invited me to attend a celebration of some milestone in Heaney's career. The reproach in his voice for my silence made me realize the degree to which he had considered me a friend.

            Last year, after Stratis’s death at eighty-five, I reread When the Tree Sings and wished I had returned to it during my Poetry Room employment as a reminder of what a superb writer and sensitive man he was. In one scene the young narrator witnesses his father’s murder by the Nazis. I imagine that many people who knew Stratis less well than I did, or not at all, asked him how closely the passage parallels his experience of seeing his father killed, but I never did, though I feel certain that it brings me closer to him than I was ever able to get in life.

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            I saw my father fall back into the water, the circles around him widening black and red. What had happened? The soldiers ejected the empty cartridges from their weapons. What is this? I shouted, but there was no sound coming out of my mouth. The civilian got into the truck in a hurry while the soldiers accelerated their motorcycles, and, turning around, they drove off, leaving streams of smoke and dust in the air. I pulled my father out, spread his body on top of a smooth rock. He was taking short, quick breaths, which made the blood gush faster from his wounds. I ran my hands all over his chest, trying to stop the flow.

            He cracked open his eyes and smiled. “What do you think you are doing?” he whispered. He was so young.

            My face grew dry, my lips stiff.

            “What are we going to do?” he whispered, his voice trembling.

            I panicked. I stood up and began to walk backward away from him.

            “Don't leave me yet,” he said, covering his eyes.

            I sat down, at a distance, until noon, and when my clothes had dried and I got up again, my father did not object to my returning home.

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            Even if I can’t claim intimacy with Stratis, our time in the Poetry Room, our “work marriage” as it were, allowed me to see a different side of him than those who knew him only as a host, writer, or even friend. That is the picture that I have tried to show here, one that for better or worse has me in the frame. In trying to explain our bond, complicated as it was by our differences and my ambivalence, I realize that I have been asking the wrong question. The mystery is not what he meant to me, but what took me so long to recognize it. I hope I have not squandered it. Forty-five years after Ellen brought us together, I still look to his example as a person and a writer, a mentor of the most enduring kind. What a gain I have had.