April 7, 2003
I had the great pleasure of meeting Ric only a few weeks ago while on a
research fellowship to the Bunting Centre. My wife Barbara and I had dinner
twice with him and Ann, once in the company of Peter & Meredith Quartermain,
after which I was quite hungover thanks to the splendor and generosity of
Ric’s liquor cabinet, and a second time a few days later. So it still comes
as a shock to me that he’s suddenly gone now. Our last time together we
dined at Michel Angelo’s, a few doors down from their place at Neville’s
Cross, where their daughter Lucy had once managed the bar. Ric and Barbara
ordered the risotto, which inexplicably had been prepared with long-grain
instead of Arborio rice, though we were all having much too good a time for
anyone to care about it. During the course of the meal, he confided that his
health had shown some very encouraging signs of improvement that would allow
him to make his reading trip to Prague this month. We even spoke of him
coming to Boulder. Though I can hardly claim to have known him well, I felt
an instant fondness for him. He radiated at once a very real kindness and
sweetness, along with a sly, delightful wit and an acute intelligence. His
work, of course, is extraordinary, and continues to resonate and astonish me
in new, unexpected ways. The series that closes “Magpie Words,” “Writing in
the Dark,” would be the work that he would continue at until the end, he
told me. He said this with the most amazing calmness and serenity, as a
simple statement of the case, without the least trace of either self-pity,
or resignation, and if nothing else registered it that evening, this made it
clear that I was with someone who had achieved a remarkable degree of peace
in the face of the unfaceable. We talked about jazz (I’ll always be grateful
to him for turning me on to pianist Brad Mehldau), and the niceties of
letter-press, and Bunting’s use of Aneirin in “Briggflatts,” and what was
the peatiest of all malts. It was a wonderful conversation that had just
begun and it saddens me greatly that it’s ended now.
Patrick Pritchett
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