“Of him, of course,” I said. As I shook both men’s hands, I made a youthfully conceited, slyly ostentatious attempt to appraise their positions. In my agitated celebrity consciousness the board looked like a jumble. I did have the decency to move away quickly, genuinely regretting any disturbance that holding out his hand to me had wrought in the great man’s cogitations. The popular journals, which in the Fifties still devoted considerable space to the arts, had reported how Duchamp, elegantly disdaining to create any more art, was concentrating his powers, for the remainder of his life, on chess, much as Rimbaud abandoned poetry for gun-smuggling. I could not believe Doc was giving him much of a game, but had to admire the way my bumptious contemporary had thrust himself forward into the radius of greatness and was cheerfully basking there.

The Paris Review, of which Humes had been a founder, reported in its fond obituary that his own abstention, after his two novels, from artistic practice had stemmed from a supposed run-in, in the early Sixties, with British intelligence, which had implanted in one of his teeth a microscopic radio device that rendered him painfully, obsessively privy to the secrets and subtle clangor of the Cold War. The CIA and KGB had both, he thought, bugged his room, and he would sit swivelling his head to address first one and then the other of the hidden microphones, narrowly averting, with his remarks, an impending cataclysm. He spoke of a black box, called Fido, sent aloft by MIT engineers, which broadcast warnings that only he could interpret. He grew a gauzy big beard, I see on the obituary photograph. He ceased to write. The low thrum of global anxiety became for Doc a deafening static; he was as much a martyr to Cold War tensions as, say, Gary Powers.

Myself, nothing bores me more than conspiracy theories, international espionage, or novels in the portentous paranoid mode. For me, the long stretch of history between Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech and the fall of the Berlin Wall, containing most of my adult life, was a blessed interim, a Metternichian remission of the usual savageries—which have been, I notice, resumed. The Cold War deprived men of the infernal heroic options. I deal in antiques, on Charles Street, with a longtime partner, and the peace of my fragilely loaded shop is what I gratefully owe to the atom bomb, the Marshall Plan, the SAC, and Soviet tanks. Believe it or not, readers of the year 2000, the 1950s were a sweet time of self-seeking, brimming, like my shop, with daily expectancy and quiet value.