On another occasion, a well-meaning scholar of comparative literature had approached her in Harvard’s Barker Center and below a chandelier of bleached antlers introduced himself in order to express his affection for her father’s verses and critical essays. This one was a floating worm, a scoundrel too distracted by his tenure file to recognize that he was effectively robbing Clare of her dream, which was to be anyone she pleased, rather than the daughter of an under-read poet whose crowning achievement was, in the early 1990s, to have been profiled in the New Yorker.

Academics like this obsequious comparatist were blissfully unaware of their lack of tact. They approached her as if she were an unusual nocturnal amphibian, glowing bluely at the edge of a poststructuralist lagoon. They were untroubled by the obvious signal of Clare’s surname, which was of course her mother’s, and which had been permitted to stand as a way of indicating her father’s lack of participation in her early—and, then, her increasingly less early—existence. But Clare had begun to be known for her own fiction in her own sophomoric circles, among her friends, and when this began to occur more and more it was by audiences who did not read poetry and who had little French and who resembled Clare herself, linguistically at least, and who were therefore unlikely to be aware of her father’s biography, much less his literary career, such as, it had to be said, it was.

These, then, were the terms on which Clare had, college diploma and acceptance into the Seminars firmly in her grasp, deigned, at the advanced age of twenty-two, to make her estival pilgrimage to an apartment in northern Paris so that she and her dad could take tea nearby and drive to a friend’s country estate, where, Clare’s father maintained, there was a magnificent library including several modernist first editions which would assuredly be of interest, even to his benighted offspring.