Tape Recordings/Darryl Grayson and Selena Harper

Worksheets /Logs of Days

Correspondence/1950-55

Ideas for Phase Two

I took down the box marked Richard’s Letters and broke open the seal. It was packed tight with original notes, all of it handwritten on legal pads. Selena Harper had probably done his typing and kept the originals, maybe without the author’s permission or knowledge. I put the box off to one side and opened the one marked Correspondence . It was full of carbon copies, letters Grayson had written and typed himself during the formative years of the Grayson Press. Here was the man’s life and philosophy…you could plunge in almost anywhere and be caught up in whatever had engaged his mind at the time. He wrote impressions of history to old friends in Georgia; he had long discussions on art with a teacher he’d had in high school and wrote rambling letters on almost any topic to people he’d never met. He was a faithful and generous writer. If you wrote to him praising one of his books, he would answer you, even if he’d never heard of you till that moment. He had a Southerner’s sense of chivalry and honor: women would get more consideration than men, warm, chatty greetings to ladies who loved his work. He had a lengthy correspondence of more than five years with a woman in Knoxville: it was a romance of the mind, as they had apparently never met. I picked up a handful of pages, several hundred, and came upon a correspondence with Bruce Rogers that ran through much of 1953. It was hard-core typography, incredible stuff. Grayson had saved all of Rogers’s originals along with copies of his own replies. At one time they had sent drawings through the mail, the old master illustrating his points to the prodigy in that language that only they and others like them could read. This will be published someday, I thought—some university press will bring it out in two volumes, The Letters of Darryl Grayson , with scholarly footnotes and an index, and some expert—maybe Huggins—would write a long introduction setting Grayson in his proper significance. Grayson was an average speller, and the editor would probably apologize for that and leave it alone. In the final analysis, writing and spelling don’t have much to do with each other.

Behind this box was another, Correspondence/ 1956-58 , and behind that was another covering the next year. Grayson liked to write. He seemed to have written at least one letter a day, sometimes more. I thumbed through the year 1957 and saw many letters headed Dear Laura . It was his old friend Laura Warner, who had not, it seemed, been lost in the blitz after all. She had moved to New Orleans after the war and was following his career from afar. In one letter she teasingly called him My Pyotr , to which he angrily replied that, Goddammit, he was not Tchaikovsky and she was not his goddamn patron saint, and she laughed in her next letter and called him my darling boy and said one of the characteristics of genius was temper. Huggins would die to get into this, I thought. So would Trish. How different their books would’ve been.

The box labeled Tape Recordings was just what it said—a dozen reels of fragile-looking recording tape, sandwiched between sheaths of notes. Selena Harper and Darryl Grayson: October 4, 5, 6, 1958 . The master’s voice, if it could be retrieved, was apparently preserved right here. The oldest recordings seemed to be from mid-1953, brown on white, oxide on a paper backing, and the oxide was beginning to flake. I kept digging. It didn’t take long to figure out what Ideas for Phase Two was. The material dated from 1968 and 1969—notes, letters, and lists of possible projects, along with rough sketches of new alphabets. There was a list of artists whose work Grayson had admired, who might have been invited to collaborate on future projects. I remembered something Huggins had said, that Grayson had seen his career enclosed by those two Ravens , like definitive parenthetical statements, but Huggins had only been half-right. Grayson in no way considered his career finished. He was still a young man with much great work to do: a successful Raven would simply write an end to his youth and launch him into his major phase.

I found a box of letter sketches, hundreds of freehand drawings on thin paper. He couldn’t be sitting still, I thought—if he had dead time on his hands, he’d draw letters. Some were signed, some were not. All were originals.

There was too much. I began to skim.

I tore down the block and scattered the center cartons around the room. In the exact middle was the box with the photographs. There were pictures of Grayson’s childhood home, of the high school, of the parents…but again, nothing of the brothers themselves. There were copies of the newspaper that Grayson had worked on in school and pictures of old girlfriends. In a separate folder was the North Bend stuff—Grayson’s shop under construction, his house, the finished shop, the ancient-looking Columbian press with its cast-iron ornamentation—eagle, sea serpent, snakes—alive in the hard light that poured in through the window. Then there was a run of people shots. Rigby and Crystal: she convulsed over some long-forgotten joke, he slightly uncomfortable in coat and tie, politely amused. Moon in his element, hiking in the high country. Moon again, standing at the edge of a mountain cabin with the alpine scenery stretching out behind him. And there she was, the woman who looked like Eleanor Rigby, posed in the woods with a man I had never seen. She had her arm around him and both of them were laughing into the camera, exuding sexuality. In the background was another woman, obviously unhappy. If looks could kill, the woman in the background would kill them both. There were no names, just that faint inscription in Selena’s hand, giving the location and date, always May 1969. But there was something about the two women that drew them together and kept them that way in your mind.

Then there was the snapshot, shoved deep in the file between papers and obviously taken by a much less sophisticated camera. The Eleanor-woman, fat with child, standing on the mountain at Moon’s cabin: Grayson’s handwriting on the back (I could recognize it now at a glance) giving a date, Sept. 28, 1968, and a short caption, Queen of the world . She had that same seductive smile, a wanton, sexual animal even in the last days of pregnancy. She pointed at the picture-taker with her left hand, at her swollen tummy with the other. I could almost hear her teasing voice in the room: Oh, you nasty man, you naughty boy, you .

Eleanor’s voice.

I heard Amy bumping up the stairs. “Hey,” she called. “You gonna die up here?…It’s almost two o’clock.”

She came through the trap and sat on one of the boxes. “Now maybe you’ve got some idea what I’m up against.”

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