I WAS NO cavalier Buster Keaton when it came to money. I cared about it, I cared a great deal. Money was freedom, and freedom was . . . it wasn’t a fast car or a tropical holiday or an Italian villa in the Hollywood hills. “Whatever else poetry is freedom,” wrote Irving Layton. And freedom, then, must be poetry. One rises spirit-like out of the body of the other. There’s no escape, not really.
I recalled one of my favourite works of short fiction, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” by the poet Delmore Schwartz. The story occurred to me just then, the way that sweet childhood flavour occurred to Proust’s narrator in In Search of Lost Time, except that my memory immediately released the curious wild stench of rotting salmon that I’d been smelling since the middle of the night. Proust put h
