Nicolas Calas: Poems Scattered/Items Left Behind

Fragments and wreckage are what we leave behind us in this world. It may look like a trail, but where it leads is neither clear nor complete. There is something sad and frightening in what ends up as the evidence of our passage. But it's tempting, still wishful, almost alive.

The Nordic Library at Athens on Kavalloti 7, Makrigianni, is a modest, well-kept, elegant building in a quiet, tree-lined, upper-class neighborhood of the Greek capitol. This is the location of 40,000 carefully catalogued volumes on Ancient Greek history, culture and religion, as well as a few collections devoted to Greek writers. (All books and documents must remain on premises) Thirty-four large boxes contain the Nicolas and Elena Calas Archive. In one of these boxes, a researcher may find a folder labelled 19. Douglas Penick, letters and poems, 1974-87 + undated. According to the typed catalogue card this contains:

From 1971 on, I often visited Nico and his Russian wife, Elena but always called Lolya, in their small dark apartment on the Upper East Side in New York. We’d have tea and, in good times, Pepperidge Farm cookies. I’ve written detailed accounts of these visits elsewhere.¹ They liked to gossip about their friends in the contemporary art world: Lawrence Alloway, Sylvia Sleigh, Robert Rauschenberg, Adami, Jasper Johns, Duchamp, and Arakawa who was indeed a friend. Nico would mention in passing his friendships in Paris: Breton, Prevert, Artaud, Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer. Then there were later friendships with Peggy Gugenheim, Margaret Meade, Meret Oppenheim. Occasionally he’d talk about Cavafy whom he’d known before all that. For me it was an immersion in worlds distant and almost legendary. But Nico didn’t live in the past even if it haunted him; it was the current scene in New York and the current actors he cared about. His current investigations into the work of Bosch increasingly commanded his attention.

He never spoke about poetry, and I had no idea he was a poet. Only late in his life did he mention this, and perhaps he only did so because the Greek government awarded him their National Poetry Prize. When I asked about his poems, Nico casually gave me the battered sheaf I’ve transcribed below. This was fifty years ago, and they’ve sat in a file since then. I don’t think they were ever published elsewhere.

Shortly afterwards, I moved away; this was the first of a half-dozen moves across the country and back. So it was many years later that I found the file at the bottom of a box below some yellowed folders: CALAS it said in my usual scrawl. It was here I found the following poems, none of which I’d recalled.

Kimon Friar was a celebrated translator of contemporary Greek poetry, and Nico had won a famous poetry prize, so I read and re-read these poems, over and over. But I couldn’t find him, or at least the him that I knew. The poems came from worlds and concerns remote to me. Who was this? What are they really about?

Guiltily, I put these poems away, and went through other boxes searching for a poem of his that I did remember and liked best of all. It described his joyous delirium as three Puerto Rican girls ran to look after him when he’d been mugged by a black drunk in the subway. He had fallen on his back and been hurt, but his poem celebrated the perfumed fluttering and cooing of those tropical, brightly clad women who had, in that moment of pain and disorientation, descended on him like bird-goddesses from the dark. Much as I looked for it, it was gone from the world if not from my recall. Nico, I’m embarrassed to say and despite all he wrote, lives much more vividly in my memory, or, which is not exactly the same, in my talking about him. And there, it is the beguilingly chaotic way he lived and the bewildering chaos he left behind that still stirs.

This, for instance, is completely clear. I visited Lolya the night Nico died. She lay in bed, and we drank scotch until I could barely stand and get myself a taxi to make my way home. “I should never have married him,” she said. “Greeks are terrible husbands. Impractical. I should have stayed with my first husband. He was an editor at Time and we had a wonderful life. I could have gone on with Nico as a lover. That would have been best.”

Then there is the flotsam and jetsam tossed up on the bibliographical, online and AI shores at the end of two lives in the first half of the 20th century. She was a Russian princes. Her name, almost never used, was: Elena von Hoershelman. Her father's online bio had a name spelled differently:

Lolya wrote an autobiography that was published by Holt and I had a copy which I read but lost it a long time ago. It talked about her life as an aristocrat. Her great-grandfather was a minor noble from a minor German principality, sent to accompany and present a gift of elaborate porcelain clocks to Catherine the Great. Lolya’s forbear remained at the Russian court to wind and maintain them. A descendent of this clock-winder became Minister of Education; another became the Governor General of Crimea. Then, still in Russia, after the revolution, she hid in an underground of artists, unemployed scholars, and other disenfranchised aristocrats (drugs!, sex!). Somehow she escaped to the US where she ended up at Wellesley. For her memoire, she used a pseudonym which I've forgotten and thus I have no way to find her book. But I did read it and we talked about it whenever I visited.

Recently, I found myself remembering her, and I wrote to a friend about her: "I had a splendid friend in the NY of years ago, a Russian Princess/psychiatric social worker, smart, very educated., bitter and unrelenting. She smoked and drank to excess; they were her remaining anchors in the world of the senses. She was furious at everything else. She was considering going to the nursing home run by the Tolstoi Foundation for old Russky aristos and asked me to call them to check it out. (Our relationship involved me doing such occasional little errands, allowing her to avoid facing unpleasant necessities head on.) The lady at the foundation was enthusiastic when she heard of my friend's pedigree, but chilly when I explained that she drank. "We don't allow drinking here," she said. "Please...You can't tell me that you've got a building full of old Russian people, and no one takes a drink." "Well..., well, only three time a day." "I think that could work." But it didn't. My friend correctly recognized that the chaos of her life would not accommodate itself to an institutional regime. She lived out her last year taking advantage of old friends and relying on deliveries from local restaurants and liquor stores. She also succumbed to the slippery charms of the Danish count and practiced lounge lizard. He was the director of the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen and coveted her paintings and papers. At her funeral, the Count behaved like the bereaved and generous host while treating us, the old friends, as needy parvenus."

—

Nico died in 1988. He had become too difficult, strange, and sometimes menacing for Lolya to manage. I went with him to the nursing home. The corridors were spotless but filled with old men and women with no idea of who and where they were. sitting in wheelchairs parked along the corridors. Some were moaning, other looking blankly, others fussing with teddy bears or fake leather handbags. They looked at us without interest as we were escorted to his room.

Nico, it turned out, was assigned to a room with another man who lay silent and inert. As the male nurse took off his street clothes and put him in a pale blue hospital gown, Nico seemed dazed, puzzled and resigned. He was lying staring at the ceiling when the doctor, a dark haired man in his 50s arrived and began speaking to him. Patiently, gently, the doctor explained to Nico that now he was in a nursing home where he would be taken care of. Silently, Nico began to cry. Tears poured down his cheeks as the doctor continued to explain the rules of the facility. “Doctor,” I said, “Please stop. Mr. Calas understands what’s happening.” He nodded, shook my hand, then left. Soon I too went home, leaving Nico staring at the ceiling. He had stopped crying.

Soon after, Nico died. Various people previously unknown to Lolya appeared in her life, hovering around to make use of his archives, her memories, etc. After all, Mr. and Mrs. Calas had known all kinds of people and he’d been almost famous in more than one milieu. She was glad for the company. Among the hoverers: a Danish count, an academic writer on Dada, a young rather bumptious English graduate student. With sweeping enthusiasm, he promised to put on a large memorial presentation in Nico’s memory at Cooper Union. Whenever I visited, he was there, awkwardly garrulous in a sporty kind of way, talking about all the new contacts he was making; so many famous people wanted to give speeches. And he was on to something that would surprise them all.

Lolya was in pretty bad shape, bitter, angry (and drunk) when the event took place. The auditorium was large and about half-full. Many speakers, particularly the younger ones were laudatory, their enthusiasm vague and diffuse. Mainly their talks were exercises in name- dropping. Arakawa gave a wonderfully warm and witty remembrance. Rauschenberg and Johns, though billed to speak, didn’t come. A few second-tier art dealers spoke. Lionel Abel, a wizened writer on drama, once of some note, gave an angry, violent speech referring to Nico as a mediocrity and dilettante.

The atmosphere became uncomfortable as he went on and on. Lolya seemed indifferent. Then, the English organizer said they would now present a wonderful rarity: a 15-minute film, a kind of surrealist extravaganza featuring Meret Oppenheim and… Nico! Something never seen before. “She was his girlfriend,” Lolya grumbled. And then the film came on in bleary color: people wandering around in a garden doing nothing, glancing at each other, eagerly or bored or uncertain, then looking away. There was a tall man with a big nose, supposed to be Nico. “NO!” Lolya shouted. “It’s not Nico. It’s Julien Lévy.” She clenched her jaw. This was just another instance of this world’s innumerable mindless deceits.

There was uncomfortable stirring, people wiggled in their seats, waiting for the now discredited film to end. The English grad student, somewhat shame-faced, said a very fast thank you, glanced at Lolya, gave a silly grin and an unrepentant shrug before he hustled off. The crowd dispersed.

Nico was being un-remembered, moving out of focus, becoming a blur. Someone else took Lolya home. As she left, she looked back at me. I recall her face, hardened with bitterness and disappointment, giving me an empty stare that still conveyed her anger at herself for being taken in. I saw her only once or twice after that.

These and other fragments floated again into view as I opened the file and retyped Nico’s poems. He had outlived several eras in which his passions and his insights had played a part. I realized how little I ever understood and wondered if I had not somehow used or betrayed him. At the end, the rich complexities of his past and his sensibility caught him within himself and made him exotic but incomprehensible. My memories of him and Lolya were clear but a hodge-podge. Beginning anywhere, going in any direction, I had a feeling I was always reaching the same point, empty, incomplete. He, she, the others in their circle, their love affairs, their enmities, accomplishments and failures were now largely forgotten; the atmospheres and auras unique to their lives dissipated in the indifferent air.

WINTER LIGHT, Douglas Penick, Punctum Books, 2025, pp118-123

Nicolas Calas: Poems Scattered/Items Left Behind

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