Cassandra Langer

This page is a homage to Alberta Murphy that will include commentary, poetry and samples of her writing. I have long wished to create something for Alberta because I feel her work has been neglected and I do not wish to see it disappear without some recognition of her as an extraordinary human being and writer. To begin, Alberta was a product of the Midwest. She migrated south and her writing became associated with such southern writers as Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Conner in the 1950s. She published poetry, short stories and novels. Her two novels, The Lilac Caprice and Richard Sordello and the Others were both published by Jonathan Cape, ltd., a fact she was very proud of. Alberta was much married but always referred to herself as “polymorphous perverse” in a joking manner. Her first husband Martin disappeared while serving in the military, her second marriage to Bower Murphy, a French hornist with the Boston Symphony ended after the birth of her son Willie. Her third and terminal attempt at heterosexual bliss was to the sometime poet Charles Olson celebrated for his brief involvement visiting Ezra Pound while he was in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital after the war.

I met Alberta through the German photographer Hildegaard Sandhusen with who I was living. Alberta was involved in an 8 year relationship with the photographer, Annette Rada. We were thrown together frequently while the two of them went out on shoots. During our conversations we found much in common and a growing rapport. Alberta was a seasoned writer and in her mid fifties. I was just graduating from a master’s program in art history at the University of Miami and an aspiring artist and poet. I was in my mid twenties. sparks flew igniting into an improbable autumn/

spring love affair that changed both our lives forever.

This web page is not about self dramatization but rather to give voice to times past and times present because

my love for Alberta runs through the fabric of my life like a burning scarlet thread that is woven through everything I am and all that I have written and will write.

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