Claude, Me, and the Journal
The life I lived—and carry—behind his pages. . .
Before it became a lifelong project, Claude’s journal was a daily act of presence—an effort to record, to remember, to understand. This week, I turn the lens toward my own memories, and the life Claude and I built together in this house where I still live.
Claude Fredericks (1923–2013) kept one of the longest personal journals ever written—over 65,000 pages across eight decades, now preserved at the Getty Research Institute. Since January, I’ve been sharing excerpts from that record here in Extracts.
But I’ve yet to properly introduce myself, to step into the frame and speak not just as the editor of these extracts, but as someone who, for nearly two decades, shared a life and a union with Claude—a marriage in all but name, formalized only near the end.
It’s time for that.
This post is a departure from the usual rhythm—but also, in a way, a beginning. In the weeks ahead, I’ll return to the chronology—next week, in fact, we’ll step back into 1947 and Claude’s founding of the Banyan Press. But today, I want to write not as literary executor or custodian of the archive, but simply as someone who loved Claude—and who was loved deeply by him in return.
Before We Were the Journal
The life we shared was not conventional. We were nearly fifty years apart in age. I was 26 when I moved in; Claude was 72. To many, that seemed bewildering—impossible, even. But for us, it worked from the start.
There’s a series of four photos Claude took of me that first day—July 30, 1995—one right after the other. I’m in a blue polo shirt, sitting on the back terrace (and yes, with a cigarette—soon to be my last). They’re a little silly, and I look giddy, embarrassed, eager, happy—all at once—as Claude snaps each one. The whole sequence must have taken thirty seconds, but it catches something true: the lightness, the anticipation, the unmistakable sense of a new life beginning.
Claude had prepared a feast. He brought out his favorite white wine—Fontana Candida—and when I asked about it, he told me it came from Frascati, in the hills outside Rome. That opened the door to one of our first long conversations that day, as he spoke of that city with deep affection—its beauty, its ghosts, its meaning to him. We talked about books, food, music, art, and meaning.
Then he gave me a tour—highly anticipated by me—of the house, a gleaming white Greek Revival farmhouse he had purchased in 1947. I remember the stillness, the light. The unadorned plaster walls, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with Greek and Latin texts, English classics, and Oriental books, the yellow-painted floor in the Pressroom, and the quiet presence of Theodora, his 1906 Golding press.
I remember thinking: I could live here the rest of my life.
And I have.
That was almost thirty years ago. I was 26 then. I’ll be 56 this summer.
We built a world here, quietly and deliberately, mostly apart from the world at large. We had no internet. We had few visitors. Most of our time was just the two of us, creating a daily rhythm that was all our own.
Mornings were sacred: coffee in bed, often with breakfast on square lacquered Japanese trays, followed by a few hours with the Journal—Claude writing downstairs in the Pressroom while I transcribed the early volumes upstairs, both of us adding to the same lifelong book. We meditated. We cooked—he taught me to bake bread, to prepare dishes from classic French and Italian cuisine, and to make some of his favorite Japanese one-pot meals like sukiyaki, yudofu, and tori mizutaki. We gardened. Evenings were for books, or music, or old foreign films. On Wednesdays, we went into town for groceries and errands—a ritual we always looked forward to.
Every few years, we punctuated our life in Vermont with extended trips—especially to Rome, a city Claude had known intimately since living there in the early Fifties. We returned often to the same streets, the same cafés, the same small pensione in the via delle Croce near the Spanish Steps. Paris, New York, and even Les Saintes in the French West Indies offered other rhythms, but it was always Rome we came back to.
People didn’t always understand. Friends vanished. At the supermarket, we were mistaken for father and son—or grandfather and grandson. But I never wavered. It felt true from the beginning. Claude often said, all he ever needed was ‘one true friend.’ He found that in me.
And I found in him a teacher, a companion, and a love that changed everything.
From that day forward, our life together became the Journal’s final—and perhaps its most sustained—focus. Claude wrote thousands of pages about our days here, year after year. And though I’ve only begun to share them, that’s where Extracts is ultimately headed.
A Memoir in the Making
What I’m sharing here is more than a memory—it’s the beginning of something I’ve been working on for some time: a memoir. Extracts has become the space where that project first finds form. Week by week, I’ve begun to tell our story—not only through Claude’s journal, but also through my own recollections, the texture of our daily lives, and the long arc of our partnership.
Today’s post marks a turning point. It’s the first time I’m offering a glimpse of the memoir-in-progress—and the stories I’ve not shared until now.
To mark the anniversary of my arrival here in 1995, I’m sharing the poem Claude wrote for me nine years later: A Thousand Hyperboles All of Which Are Sterling Truth. It became the final piece in Selected Poems, the volume we published together in 2005. The full holograph of the poem is below, freely available to all readers.
I, who love you with all I am and have and know…
That line, in many ways, contains the essence of our life together.
Paid Subscribers get access to:
Claude’s full journal entries from July 30–31, 2004
High-resolution images of all holograph pages
A full transcription for easier reading
A private midweek release of additional poems from Selected Poems, including To Touch, Because of Marco—a beautiful piece Claude wrote for me in 2001
A high-resolution scan of A Portrait of Claude Fredericks by Marjory Morse (1944), used as the cover image for Selected Poems
[🔓 Upgrade to paid to unlock full access.]
Looking Ahead
Thanks for letting me share this chapter. I’m grateful you’re here. More next week—Claude’s world in 1947, and what he began building long before I ever arrived.
Copyright Notice: All journal entries and photographs are © Marc Harrington. No portion of these materials—whether photographs, full journal entries, excerpts, or extracts—may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission. With gratitude to the Getty Research Institute for preserving the original manuscripts.
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