ABSTRACT
THE IDLE YEARS ended when Richard was just into his twenties. He opened a bookstore in Cambridge. Wallace Dickson was his partner. First they were friends, then they were partners, and later when they weren’t friends and partners anymore, they became brothers-in-law. Dickson & Blackmur, Sellers of New and Old Books, didn’t set the world on fire. Within a year or so the bookstore was failing and the young partners were at sword’s points. But the chance acquaintance Richard struck with Wallace Dickson cast a long shadow. It comprehended his unlucky marriage, also the real beginning of his literary career. Selling books put him in the way of Lincoln Kirstein and friends, who were creating at Harvard the best and most famous of the little magazines. So, as one thing leads to another, Richard found himself editor of the Hound & Horn. He wrote in his notebook: “Vocation is the right naming and right following of our nature.” In his twenties he discovered his vocation and this was a lucky chance. Sometimes—to take a line from the poetry he was writing then—chance flowers to choice.
