Take It, This Cesspool

Blake Bailey, the acclaimed biographer of Richard Yates, has bad luck with hurricanes. After making it through three Florida storms last year, and then getting caught in Ivan while he was on the road, he and his family moved two months ago…to New Orleans.

“The night before evacuation–we didn’t know that yet–we had a dinner party and our guests congratulated us on our cool house. It was true. For the past week or so, I could hardly get any work done because I kept turning around in my desk chair to survey my awesome new study: the rounded moldings over the doors, the glimmering parquet floors, everything. This was our reward for years and years of hard work.”

You can guess how the story goes from there, although Bailey does still have a flicker of hope: “Mornings are bad, to be sure: that first minute after you wake up, and you remember all over again that you’re broke and everything is gone and your poor old cat is dead; but there, too, is your wife’s warm haunch, right where you left it, and there’s the gaping baby between you.” Left unspoken, however, is the impact on his planned biography of John Cheever. Bailey took his laptop with him, but whatever papers he left behind were destroyed along with the rest of his neighborhood.

UPDATE: A mutual acquaintance passes along this news from Bailey: “all my research is on the computer, thanks,” he says, “and now i don’t have to do even more niggling cross-ref with the paper stuff. onward and upward…” Best wishes from this and many other corners, I’m sure!

5 September 2005 | uncategorized |