9 OCTOBER, 2021

Dear Harry,

I know you believed in what the church called “the sanctity of marriage.” I’m assuming that you observed the principle yourself. You belonged to a generation where divorce was still an unconscionable alternative, where it was spoken of amongst respectable people only in hushed whispers, not only a sign of a failure of character but also a family disgrace.

What a bitter, deeply distressing experience for you and Peggy, then, to know that the marriages of both your children ended in divorce.

There are matters too delicate and too hurtful still, after many years, to write about without due compassion and respect, so I want to keep this, insofar as possible, between you and me. I blame no one, and take full responsibility for own my part in these events, no matter how long ago they occurred.

You’ll remember that you came across to Germany, with Peggy of course, to officiate at the church ceremony where Liz and I were married. Flora and her new husband John were there too, as was my old Cambridge friend Hugh Welchman, my best man. It was a moment of mutual commitment, hope, and love. We spent what was, for me—I hope it was, too, for Liz—a wonderful week on honeymoon in Amsterdam. Returning to Düren, we settled into a downtown apartment for the first months of our life together.

Were we ready for the responsibilities or married life and, soon enough, of bringing children into the world? I wasn’t. For now, and for too many years to come, I allowed myself to drift along with little foresight and less planning. We were still in Düren when I first began to realize the need to get a real job and settle down into adult life (as though such a thing were possible for me, Harry!) and, impractically hopeful as ever, I wrote off in response to a three-week old announcement in the “wanted” column of one of the leftist New Statesman weeklies that Peggy used to forward me from England. A private grammar school in Nova Scotia, Canada, was looking for someone to teach English. They were offering a salary of five thousand dollars, wealth I had never dreamed of!

I applied at once. The response came in short order: unsurprisingly the advertised post had been filled already. But the school was now also looking for a French and German teacher. Was I interested?

I telegraphed my assent.

This is how I came to cross the Atlantic Ocean for the first time, Harry, putting an even greater distance between you and me.

We settled in Halifax, Liz and I. And Nova Scotia was good to us. As anyone who has traveled there will tell you, it is a truly lovely province with its wild, rocky coastline and scores of inland lakes where, in winter, I could enjoy the novel spectacle of car races on ice. It was cold, yes—colder by far than anything we’d ever known in Europe. There was real weather, blizzards in winter, hurricanes in the summer, a blaze of color as the seasons changed in the fall. We had a tiny basement apartment with a black and white TV set where we watched ice hockey every Saturday evening. We had a gray cat named Plato. We bought a brand new car—the first I’d ever owned, a tiny powder blue Mini Minor. Liz was seriously pregnant but I insisted foolishly on taking us out for a spin on our new car’s first day, despite weather forecasts predicting the imminent arrival of a hurricane. What did I care about hurricanes? They were only a word to me… (I learned only later that this was Ginny, a Category 2 storm, one of the most destructive to ever hit the Nova Scotia coast). Before we knew it we were in unfamiliar territory, lost in the rocky wilderness on a side road where the tarmac abruptly ended, giving way to a rough dirt surface, and the storm was hurtling all around us. I drove on. What else could I do? I was terrified, yes, by this time, but we were committed. Then suddenly, inexplicably, the road descended to sea level and we found ourselves driving alongside the ocean, dark and angry, with massive waves crashing down across the road. A wrecked cargo ship tilted at an angle on the rocks, not far distant.

We survived. My reckless insistence had exposed not only myself but my wife and our soon-to-be-born child to grievous danger. What saved us I will never know. Your God? More likely it was the little Mini’s front wheel drive, gripping the mud and pulling us valiantly through. When we finally reached the highway back to Halifax, I stopped to check on the car and opened up the hood. The entire engine of my beautiful brand new Mini was coated in a layer of thick, red, salty mud.

Hubris? I learned, at least, to pay attention to storm warnings in the future.

And then to our great joy our first son, Matthew was born.

All of which was fine, except that I had apparently forgotten the lesson learned at Rutlish: I was not cut out to be a teacher, particularly not at a secondary school for boys. It was a lesson I re-learned rather quickly at the Halifax Grammar School. It would be ungracious to complain too loudly. I was fortunate to have a good job. To be earning what seemed to us in those days a fine salary. And the school was a progressive one, with a well-qualified staff of committed colleagues and interesting, socially active parents—all good, compatible, caring people with whom Liz and I would socialize at evening events and on weekends at the shoreline where crabs and lobsters were thrown liberally into pots of boiling water and gobbled down with gusto on warm summer beaches.

We moved. We had no room for a baby in our tiny basement flat, so we found what I recall as a rather bleak modern apartment with an extra bedroom and a shared laundry room that came in handy with the diapers. We had a portable stereo with a collection of classical records that we loved, and French Canadian folks songs. (Ah, si mon moine voulait danser, A la claire fontaine… I remember them). We discovered the lovely, haunting voice of Joan Baez… I think, no, I’m quite sure that we were happy, just the three of us.

And yet, and yet… There was still that poet in me, “yearning to be free”; the one who kept nudging me to write and making me feel empty and unaccomplished when I didn’t. In fact I was writing poems at the time. I had belatedly discovered the work of e.e.cummings and my poems were heavily influenced by his whimsical play with language. Meanwhile, more and more, the hours I spent in the classroom reminded me that teaching was not a passion but a requisite, money-earning chore.

It was at the end of the first school year in Nova Scotia that the son of one of my colleagues arrived with his wife to spend the summer with his parents. We hit it off well. He was a poet, a well-known poet, a successful poet even—a concept I had previously never entertained. In my ignorance, I had not heard of him before; I had been writing poems in my own little backwater, uninformed of the greater world of my contemporaries. What I saw in Mark Strand, a tall, powerful man, confident in himself both as a writer and a man, was everything I longed to be and clearly was not yet. He was kind enough to read my poems, assuring me that he found them to be intelligent, interesting; they showed promise. Nova Scotia was no place for me, he said; I should be at the Poetry Workshop at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he had a teaching job.

A poetry workshop! Here was a new concept, Harry! Iowa! Who would have ever dreamed?

Sadly, Mark died before his time, a short while ago. I owe him a debt of gratitude. He recommended me to Paul Engle, the poet, founder and at that time still the man who ran the Writers’ Workshop, and the rest followed with relative ease. I was offered a grant, and a teaching assistant’s job in the French Department which provided me with an adequate income for the family, and a place in the Ph.D. program in Comparative Literature. I was given an on-campus office of my own and low-cost graduate student housing in a Quonset hut just a short walk from the campus… It was everything I could have asked for.

I was thrilled with this unexpected change in my prospects that had fallen from the heavens into my lap. School-teaching was forever behind me, vistas of life as a genuine writer opened up. There were, I soon discovered, more poets per square block in Iowa City than I could have imagined possible. And the Ph.D, my new Comp. Lit. professors assured me, would be a breeze for someone with my language skills and a degree in languages and literature from Cambridge University.

I hope you were proud of your new son, Harry, when all this began to happen. Or did you, in your wisdom, already intuit disaster looming in the years to come? I’d love to have known.

Your all too often deluded son, Peter