Clips

Back in Kyiv, Charles and I head to the Premier Palace, a historic hotel built in 1912 and a favorite of the rich and famous. Charles has wanted to visit for a long time and regales me with its storied past as we settle into the beautifully panelled cigar lounge and light up. We discuss literature and quote poems back and forth, and Charles tells me about the great writers he has known. He does this utterly without pretence—in fact, the stories seem to crop up by accident. He spoke French to Jack Kerouac at parties at his parents’ house, “a nice enough fellow but perhaps a little forlorn.” His father called Kerouac “Jean-Louis.” He also knew Ray Bradbury quite well—when they first met, he asked the writer about Rudyard Kipling. Bradbury told him that when he’d asked the great Anglo-Irish novelist Lord Dunsany who the greatest English writer of the 20th century was, Dunsany told him Kipling—“and I have never found any reason to disagree with that opinion.” Charles also knew Aldous Huxley’s wife, “bright eyes, a halo of white hair, thick Italian accent,” and met Christopher Isherwood at Cal State Northridge. -- The European Conservative