In September she marked the deaths, three days apart, of Alberto Moravia in Rome and Patrick White in Sydney. The news, not unexpected in either case, was nonetheless “somehow shocking.” Both were, she wrote Donald Keene, “difficult men, and both, I’d say, writers who had lost impetus in later years. But, in part because of formidability, they were the kind who don’t die, don’t appear subject to death.” The following month, “Graham Greene, on phone, tells us he is living from constant transfusions. (He sounded very ill; but livened up as he developed antagonism.) This strange procession, as Barbara Pym calls it.” Greene died six months later; Shirley remarked that after Moravia’s death, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica had the headline “Senza Moravia,” and added, “For Graham too, there were hardly any English-speaking people who had not grown up aware of him and somehow counting on him to be there always.” A few months after Greene it was the turn of her old friend Sumner Locke Elliott, of cancer. Red Warren had died the previous year. Shirley and Francis had gone to Vermont for the usual Christmas visit in 1988; Warren’s biographer, Joseph Blotner, writes that Shirley sat with Red looking out at the winter scene. “She thought of Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ and intoned the lines ‘Winter’s dregs made desolate / The weakening eye of day.’ And he, without missing a beat, took up the next line: ‘The tangled bine-stems scored the sky / Like strings from [sic] broken lyres…’”