1998

January-mid-March, in Key West, part of the time with Prudence Crowther; Aldo Buzzi and his companion, Bianca Lattuada, also visit.

Now spends most of his time in Amagansett, returning to New York only for visits to doctors, the dentist, and to attend to business matters.

His depression worsens. “Not good here. Constantly scared by my thoughts (and also by more concrete things),” he writes to Buzzi in April. In May: “I don’t see people because I have to put on a show of normality, man of wit, eloquent. That’s not what I am anymore, an illusion from the past.” And July: “I walk the familiar streets of NY like a ghost.”

August 23, death of his cousin, Henrietta Danson, who had been instrumental in helping him flee Italy and obtain a US visa in 1941-42.

December 16-January 13, after long deliberation, begins a month of shock therapy treatment for depression. During a Christmas break from hospitalization, is devastated to learn that William Gaddis has died—“a blow,” he later tells Buzzi, “from which I won’t recover.”