It was 1968. He had begun teaching on the Berkeley campus, leaving all his graduate school notebooks and papers in the drawers of the Davis filing cabinet, and I would read them during my long, boring office hours when there weren’t any students—notes about his classes on Romanticism and the eighteenth century; about his special interest in Lord Byron—foreshadowing, perhaps, one of his titles to come, I Would Have Saved Them If I Could (a quote from Byron upon seeing some people about to be hanged). From the doodles in the margins, from his large and strong handwriting, I had the impression of a Byronic character, brilliant, funny, handsome, and desperate. This first impression proved to be true, and also characterized Lenny’s work. Unlike many writers, who surprise by being in person nothing like their books, his personality was inextricable from his work, two manifestations of a unique whole. The events chronicled in Sylvia took place from 1960 to 1963. At Davis it was known that Lenny had had a first wife who committed suicide.
