Earlier this year, the Corbetts sold their house. Now, however, that era has come to a close. It was a place where art and life came confidently together - and where, as one old friend put it, “everything was vivid.” It was a place where poetry was read aloud and where the idea that to be creative you had to work alone in a cell, giving everything to your muse, was roundly disproved. Over more than four decades, the Corbetts together quietly created one of the most important literary and artistic salons in modern America. (“They always seem to have people there you’d want to meet,” he says.) And after each of his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard in 19, John Ashbery, one of America’s most lauded poets, chose to dine not at some fancy downtown restaurant but at Bill and Beverly Corbett’s table. Denis Leary, while a student of Corbett’s at Emerson, honed his stand-up routines in the living room. Novelist Paul Auster, who set a crucial scene of his The New York Trilogy at the home he’d visited for decades, thinks of 9 Columbus Square as “the hub, the spiritual heart, the exact center” of literary Boston. “That time changed me in a fundamental way,” Lahiri says. ![]() In 1999, she published her collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. ![]() She enrolled in courses at Boston University and began submitting work to journals. But it gradually came to her, in this house, that this life, the life of an author, was one she could inhabit. One day, in a bright room on the top floor, the once “terribly closed off” Lahiri began to write. “And even though Bill was physically absent, he was so present.” “The house had an incredible spirit,” Lahiri says. The desk in the living room where Corbett wrote his own poetry, usually teeming with manuscripts and proofs, had a personality of its own. She pulled books about artists she had never heard of from the shelves, one at a time, listened to the Corbetts’ jazz records, and read back issues of the Paris Review. “I spent a lot of time by myself that summer,” she recalls. Once, while the Corbetts spent time in Vermont, Lahiri had the opportunity to housesit. “I didn’t know people lived that way - surrounded by so much art, by an aesthetic that was so grand and yet so comforting at the same time.” “I had never been in a home like that before,” recalls Lahiri. Above the fridge there was a painting of a pig with the words: “I WANT BEV TO COOK ME!” And then there were the guests - an ever-changing assortment of family friends and writers, students and artists. On the table were the little ceramic shoes that Beverly, a psychologist and self-taught chef, liked to collect. In the Corbetts’ eat-in kitchen, where there was seating for 18, one could find a framed poem by their friend and Nobel Prize recipient Heaney, a rubbing of Ezra Pound’s tombstone, and drawings by the late Philip Guston. She was nevertheless welcomed into a kind of life unlike any she had previously known. On the appointed evening, she took the Orange Line in the wrong direction and turned up late. Lahiri was soon invited to dinner at the Corbetts’ herself. Although Lahiri didn’t know it then, it was an address where, on any given night, you might sit down to a gourmet meal alongside literary luminaries like Seamus Heaney, Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster, John Ashbery, August Kleinzahler, Russell Banks, Basil Bunting, or Don DeLillo. The Corbetts lived at 9 Columbus Square, a red-brick town house in Boston’s South End. Big armloads of books.Ĭreating community where none existed is what William Corbett was devoted to above nearly all else. Marni’s father, a tall man with a commanding, jowly face and mischievous eyes, used to visit the store to say hello to his daughter and to buy books. She also found work at the cash register in a Harvard Square bookstore with a friend of a friend, Marni Corbett, a daughter of poet William Corbett and his wife, Beverly. “At twenty-one,” she recalled in a 2011 New Yorker essay, “the writer in me was like a fly in the room - alive but insignificant, aimless, something that unsettled me whenever I grew aware of it, and which, for the most part, left me alone.”Īfter graduating Barnard in 1989 with a degree in English literature, Lahiri moved to Massachusetts to take classics courses at Harvard. ![]() Although as a child she had harbored dreams of doing just that, they had gradually been eaten away by self-doubt - she could scarcely believe the books she loved had been written by real people. JHUMPA LAHIRI WASN’T SURE SHE COULD BE A WRITER. William and Beverly Corbett at 9 Columbus Square shortly before moving.
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