BI But people love it, they need it! (laughter) You met Ferlinghetti on the boat on your way to Paris after World War II. Obviously, you kept in touch afterward.
MP Yes, he was on his way to Paris on the GI Bill. The ship had quite a few of those people, including quite a wonderful young man who was planning to live on the proceeds from contraband that he was very artful in obtaining: hundreds of dozens of condoms.
BI Bringing French letters to France?
MP Yes. They were to prevent the English disease.
BI And were they illegal because France is a Catholic country?
MP I don’t think so. They just wanted to increase the population.
BI Ah, of course. Ferlinghetti is a very different sort of writer from yourself, but you connected.
MP He certainly is not a Beat poet. He is a lyric romantic writer who is very interested in a piece of the thread of Pound’s and Eliot’s enterprise. “These fragments shored…” A lot of his poems recapitulate, rescue or quote in a different context some great lines of poems that are in themselves moving, and then there is the double emotional response to seeing that contextually.
BI Which French writers at that time meant the most to you?
MP I am sorry to say that they were not contemporary. I wasn’t expecting to go see any of them. I was at that point still very interested in medieval texts: various strands of Chrétien de Troyes, the story of Arthur, the story of Troy…. I was led in that direction from childhood on by the Maxfield Parrish edition of the The Song of Roland.
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