Above the fridge there was a painting of a pig with the words: “I WANT BEV TO COOK ME!” And then there were the guests - an ever-changing assortment of family friends and writers, students and artists. On the table were the little ceramic shoes that Beverly, a psychologist and self-taught chef, liked to collect. In the Corbetts’ eat-in kitchen, where there was seating for 18, one could find a framed poem by their friend and Nobel Prize recipient Heaney, a rubbing of Ezra Pound’s tombstone, and drawings by the late Philip Guston. She was nevertheless welcomed into a kind of life unlike any she had previously known.
On the appointed evening, she took the Orange Line in the wrong direction and turned up late. Lahiri was soon invited to dinner at the Corbetts’ herself. Although Lahiri didn’t know it then, it was an address where, on any given night, you might sit down to a gourmet meal alongside literary luminaries like Seamus Heaney, Siri Hustvedt, Paul Auster, John Ashbery, August Kleinzahler, Russell Banks, Basil Bunting, or Don DeLillo. The Corbetts lived at 9 Columbus Square, a red-brick town house in Boston’s South End. Big armloads of books.Ĭreating community where none existed is what William Corbett was devoted to above nearly all else. Marni’s father, a tall man with a commanding, jowly face and mischievous eyes, used to visit the store to say hello to his daughter and to buy books. She also found work at the cash register in a Harvard Square bookstore with a friend of a friend, Marni Corbett, a daughter of poet William Corbett and his wife, Beverly. “At twenty-one,” she recalled in a 2011 New Yorker essay, “the writer in me was like a fly in the room - alive but insignificant, aimless, something that unsettled me whenever I grew aware of it, and which, for the most part, left me alone.”Īfter graduating Barnard in 1989 with a degree in English literature, Lahiri moved to Massachusetts to take classics courses at Harvard. Although as a child she had harbored dreams of doing just that, they had gradually been eaten away by self-doubt - she could scarcely believe the books she loved had been written by real people.
JHUMPA LAHIRI WASN’T SURE SHE COULD BE A WRITER. William and Beverly Corbett at 9 Columbus Square shortly before moving.
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