©Nicole Blaisdell Ivey

                     Ray Waddington and Gus Blaisdell 1976

Invitation to a Ghost

for Henri Coulette(1927-1988)

I ask you to come back now as you were in youth,

Confident, eager, and the silver brushed from your temples,

Let it be as though a man could go backwards through death,

Erasing the years that did not much count,

Or that added up perhaps to no more than a single brilliant

forenoon.

Sit with us. Let it be as it was in those days

When alcohol brought our tongues the first sweet foretaste of

oblivion.

And what should we speak of but verse? For who would speak of

such things now but among friends?

(A bad line, an atrocious line, could make you wince: we have all

seen it.)

I see you again turn toward the cold and battering sea.

Gull shadows darken the skylight; a wind keens among the chimney

pots;

Your hand trembles a little.

What year was that?

Correct me if I remember it badly,

But was there not a dream, sweet but also terrible,

In which Eurydice, strangely, preceded you?

And you followed, knowing exactly what to expect, and of course

she did turn.

Come back now and help me with these verses.

Whisper to me some beautiful secret that you remember from life.

Donald Justice

*Read by Raymond Waddington at Gus Blaisdell’s memorial celebration Feb 2005

Email from Ray in 2007

I can’t remember just when I first met Gus.  It wouldn’t have been 

our freshman year at Stanford (I was in a dorm on campus; he was in 

Stanford Village, Menlo Park).  Probably the second year, either 

through Vic Lovell or in Charles Allen’s American lit. class.  Allen 

was an eccentric (didn’t get promoted), whom we both liked; he gave 

Gus a magical stone for a (first) wedding present.  Curiously, 

although he hung out with creative writers, Gus didn’t take C.W. 

classes.  That year I lived in three different places, each with 

different people.  For the third year, fall quarter, I rented a 

cottage in the Los Altos hills and called Gus to see if he wanted to 

share.  I warned him that, since it was ten miles from campus, it 

wouldn’t work if he didn’t have a car.  Without missing a beat, he 

said, “That’s cool.  I’m buying a motorcycle.”  He lied, of course. 

The motorcycle never materialized, and in the end it didn’t work. 

For a while, it was fine.  We both were late sleepers and arrived at 

an elaborate wake-up system.  The alarm would go off; I would get up, 

put a record on the phonograph (Charlie Parker for noise or Mozart 

for annoyance) and go back to bed.  When the sound got to Gus, he 

would get up, swearing, and wake me up.  Eventually, we would go off 

in time for the 10:00 class.  Once we completely lost a day.  Went 

down for our Wednesday classes and found it was Thursday.  We 

explained it as a time warp, but more likely we just slept through. 

At this time, Gus’s particular enthusiasms were Catholic 

intellectualism (much to do about Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, 

et al; and he talked me into taking a course on Christian 

Existentialism with him) and samurai movies.  He was taking beginning 

Japanese, and did a very impressive Toshiro Mifune imitation (he 

always was a great mimic).  I couldn’t believe it when he failed the 

course.  He was already keen on Yvor Winters (although the story of 

Winters rescuing him from expulsion is completely bogus); and we may 

have been the only two undergraduates in one of his classes.  I 

remember that he introduced me to Pat Madden (a Kentuckian who smoked 

cigars and sometimes wore white suits) and his bohemian set of 

hangers-on.  (Bohemian because this preceded the Beat era a few 

years)  Anyway, I got tired of having to wait around campus until Gus 

was ready to go home; but the deal-breaker was when he brought Phil 

Wilson, this weird ex-football player, in to live with us.  Wilson 

was broke, so paid no rent; big (he had been a guard) and took up a 

lot of space, just lying around in his fleece-lined sleeping bag. 

Sometimes his rich girl friend J.J. would show up, playing Lady 

Bountiful, to distribute food and clean house, but that was rare. 

So, at the end of the quarter, we agreed to go our separate ways, but 

stayed good friends.  Of course, we used each other: I always had 

transportation (he didn’t) and he had great entertainment value, both 

in himself and in the people he collected by charming them.  After 

that intense fall, I saw him more intermittently.  Although girls 

were amused by him, there was no girl friend until Carol Gay 

Eichelberger (she of the blank, Little Orphan Annie stare) for a 

while.  Then suddenly there was the really strange thing of the 

marriage.  Five minutes with Glennis and you knew it wasn’t going to 

work.  When I went off to graduate school in Texas and on to my first 

job in Kansas, I lost track of Gus.  But Charles Allen told me that 

he was managing a movie theatre in Craig, Colorado.  We were driving 

through, so stopped to see.  There was the movie theatre on the main 

street and through the window I saw Gus, with his feet on the desk, 

poking his finger through a bullet hole in a WWI German army helmet. 

A good reunion (met Sally, three little kids, of whom you must have 

been one), and we never lost touch again.  He would visit from time 

to time (in Madison WI with Felice, here in Davis); and I last saw 

him at the Yvor Winters Conference—a nice day together at a now 

unrecognizable Stanford.  Mainly we communicated by letters until he 

switched to Sunday morning phone calls.  I still miss them (as does 

Kathie).  I could give you more names conjured from the past (Mike 

Miller, mathematician and jazz pianist), funny stories (his method 

for getting Vic out of the bathtub), one-liners we always shared “I 

theenk it’s gonna be a heet, mon”), but maybe this is enough. I don’t 

know if it’s any help to you, but do let me know if you have 

questions or need follow-up.  Email or phone (530-662-0703) is fine. 

I work at home, so am usually around.  Best,

Ray