Graham then was in his midsixties; Francis, two years younger; Michael Richey, late forties. I was in my thirties. Graham and Michael were both Catholics, Graham having converted at the time of his youthful marriage. (Years later, after Graham’s death, Michael wrote to me: “One bond—if it’s not too highfalutin’ a concept—was Catholicism; it would not have been the same without that.”) Francis, raised in a Catholic family, had withdrawn from the Church in early youth. I had grown up a perfunctory Anglican. We were, all four, writers and readers in a world where the expressive word, spoken or written, still seemed paramount—beneficiaries of what John Bayley once called “the inevitable solace that right language brings.” We were all, in varying degrees, sociable yet solitary.