DOM MORAES

Beldam Etcetera

1966

“I INTENDED TO BE like Rimbaud, maudit, at the age of twenty giving it all up,” Dom Moraes says of himself in his autobiography, My Son’s Father. Up at Oxford at the same time as me, he was another young poet turning himself into myth. Away in London a great deal, he acquired a reputation without trying for it. His poems were simple and beautiful, an odd mixture of engagement and detachment as though he was leading a secret life. Standing unbidden at the back of a literary cocktail party or a dinner with a glass in his hand, he had the looks of a debauched cherub. He spoke so little and so softly that he might as well have stayed silent. Marriage to Henrietta Bowler took him into the stricken world of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and their friends and hangers-on, a good few of whom inflicted fates upon themselves more disastrous than Rimbaud’s. Now and again I would receive in the mail a new book with a squiggled ungrammatical inscription: “David love Dom.” At the first international literary festival in India, held in 2002 at Neemrana, I was a guest and there was Dom, still the debauched cherub but now with white hair.