Many helpers have typed from my dictation. In Ann Arbor for years it was Sharon Giannotta; the year Jane and I moved to New Hampshire, Sharon moved to California with her neurosurgeon husband. Twenty years later, she types an hour’s tape every week. In New Hampshire Lois Fierro, who lives seven-tenths of a mile south in West Andover, types five days a week—a maximum of four hours, an average of two and a half hours a day. Lately, Lois types my letters on an IBM Selectric II and reproduces manuscript on an IBM clone with Word-Perfect; every morning I mess up fresh copy. Lois doesn’t drive, her kids are grown, and her husband Gene leaves for work mid-afternoon. Alone, she helps me out, an arrangement that benefits us both. With her income from typing she and Gene travel; once we met for a pub lunch in Devonshire.

In Ann Arbor I walked by the university library, traveling from my house to the classroom. If I needed to check a fact, I would stop by. Here, I have a large reference library but it’s not always adequate. Did Prescott Bush inherit his money or make it? How long did it take a sailing ship to travel from Boston to Calcutta in the nineteenth century? When I need library help, I hire men and women to look things up, to xerox pages or postcard a date. It saves me time that I would otherwise spend on the road driving to libraries in Concord or Hanover. Sometimes two researchers work for me at once; always two or three people type. On my staff, as it were, no one works more than a few hours a week, but the staff’s labor saves me hours by the dozen—freeing me to work, helping me to manufacture the best day.

Henry Moore is a model for work. I met him first in 1959 when I lived with my family for a year in an English village about fifteen miles from Moore’s house. I had first known Moore for his shelter drawings; and as an undergraduate I thumbtacked to my Eliot House wall a Penguin Print of a study for sculpture. In 1951, coming to Europe for the first time, I saw many of his sculptures outdoors (where they stand in happy competition with the natural world) at the Festival of Britain. In 1959 the American magazine Horizon commissioned me to conduct an interview with him, Paris Review style. That year, on leave without pay from the university, I lived by my wits for the first time—BBC work, reviews for the New Statesman and Encounter, an encyclopedia of poetics co-edited with Stephen Spender—and the interview would contribute to the family budget. I wrote him a letter with the suggestion; he asked me for tea to talk about it, and I took a bus from Thaxted to Bishop’s Stortford seven miles from his house and studios that occupied Hertfordshire farmland. He met the bus in his Rover, generous to take time away from work, and after tea agreed to be interviewed. We met two or three times again, sitting in his living room with a tape recorder between us. He and I played Ping-Pong. He and his wife Irina drove to our house for dinner.