Willis Barnstone

Willis Barnstone, born in Lewiston, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin, the Sorbonne, SOAS, Columbia and Yale, taught in Greece at the end of the civil war (1949-51), in Buenos Aires during the Dirty War, and during the Cultural Revolution he went to China where he was later a Fulbright Professor at Beijing Foreign Studies University […]

11 years ago

Train to Paris

In the night boat train from Le Havre to Paris I sit by a young woman my age who is from Carpentras, daughter of a Breton sculptor, and we are heartsick after our three hours. We know we’ll never meet again except she will remember me, our hands, and I her, though I learn in […]

19 years ago

Gas Lamp, 1893

In brownstone Boston down on old Milk Street, up two gray flights, near the gas lamp, the tailor waits glumly for the midwife. August heat has worn the woman out. Amid the squalor she looks around the bed, clutching a cape she brought from London as a child. It’s dawn and dirty. The dark tailor […]

19 years ago

In Our Life Watch

In our life watch we are down to five or six Pierre Grange watches, a jeweler’s box of soft Swiss straps and a few precious stones we are selling off to pay the Greystone Hotel bill and meals. Dad and I leave early each morning on our rounds in the labyrinths of narrow jewelry stores […]

19 years ago

Room of the Orphans

After my father’s suicide, young Marti, my Mexican stepmother, goes back to the iron bed with her mother Rebeca, a Sefardí from Constantinople, who normally calls me mancebito, young man (in medieval Spanish), but she is afraid I’ll get her daughter as my father had. They rent some rooms behind the great cathedral, a small […]

19 years ago

Fixing the Life Watch

My cousin Harold in French-speaking Maine, where I was born, is humped over the seat by the store window, looking at our Seine— the Androscoggin Falls where waters beat on great black rocks in this Canuck town. Jacques, Jean Pierre and dad are kids who like to cheat the angel death by hanging from a […]

19 years ago

Back in 1901

Outdoors, cows and a Vermont barn. Inside our eighteenth-century summer farmhouse, I quit sanding and oiling wide pine floorboards and show up back in 1901 in Boston, determined to know my dad’s father, whom I never saw. On Milk Street, a ghetto named for a London Milk Street ghetto, I find the lowdown tenement where […]

19 years ago

The Lost Son (Luke 15.11-32)

We were two sons. Father gave me my share of wealth and soon I gathered a few clothes and books and took a ship into the glare of Paris where I spent my loot on booze and women, and one night of revelry I got so stoned a thief came to my room, bagged everything […]

19 years ago