ABSTRACT
About a year after William’s death, I opened the posthumous volume of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land his widow had edited. It included an unpublished poem marked with a piece of paper. One of our around-the-clock attendants had left him that crumpled purple square with her phone number—after he had told her not to come back. I will never know whether he then inserted this bookmark to identify himself, or to describe me. Or whether he was thinking generically of “the editor,” the one who is stricter on him- or herself than on the manuscripts he or she receives—and whose judgment had better be faultless. Like Eliot’s?
