Authors: Rosamond Bernier

Some of My Lives (24 page)

BOOK: Some of My Lives

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A large sculpture was wheeled out that still had a long way to go, and clearly Henry was rejuvenated by the very sight of all that stone just asking to be used. He couldn't wait to manhandle it, with the energy of a man half his age. “When I take up a hammer and chisel, I begin to whistle and hum,” he told me.

He described an earlier visit to the quarry. “There was one huge block as big as a roomâturned on end and twice as highâand a ladder with a man perched on top of it, and in one corner, a man's bowler hat, a hat of about 1900 â¦ and this hat and the ladder and the man on top of it combined to give one a sense of almost unbelievable scale and reminded me of things that I could try to get out of the block.”

I had taken for granted that after the visit to the quarry we would go back to Henry's cottage and settle down for my interview. But not at all.

“We must have our bathe,” Henry said (British for “swim”). That was the last thing I wanted to do with the clock ticking away. But there was no getting out of it.

Next thing I knew, I had taken my bathing suit out of my suitcase and we were bobbing up and down in the surf. “There's no time like the present,” I thought. As Henry emerged from a wave, I asked him, “Do you really like those late marbles?” And the whole interview was conducted like that.

I just had time in Milan to type out my notes on the little Olivetti portable we all used in those days, and I actually got to Athens on time.

Walking down the aisle with Aaron Copland at the Philharmonic Gala, 1967