Benjamin Chambers writes:
Hortense Calisher, who published nine stories in The New Yorker between 1948 and 1956, died last month at 97. The AP wire story about her death describes her, rather unfairly, as being “known for her dense, unskimmable prose,” and then goes on—obscurely—to say that she “composed in the thick, quantum rhythms of the mind.”
A former president of PEN, and guest editor of Best American Short Stories, Calisher started her writing life late, and she was past 90 when her most recent book was published. Some links:
* Calisher’s amusing short story, hardly dense or unskimmable (though who would want to?), “Il Ploe:r Da Mo Koetr,” from the September 8, 1956 issue of The New Yorker, in which the narrator, who learned a perfect French accent via phonetics in school, discovers years later that she cannot understand the language at all. (Features a classic scene in which Frenchmen solemnly toast each other with cries of “Pearl Buck!”)
* A fragment from her interview with the Paris Review.
* Roger Angell’s amusing anecdote involving Calisher’s hairdo at the opera.
* Joyce Carol Oates’ thoughts on Calisher. Scroll down for in-depth reviews of two of Calisher’s novels, which sound quite fascinating.
Category Archives: In Memoriam
John Updike, 1932-2009
Alfred A. Knopf has announced that John Updike died of lung cancer today at age 76. More words to come (including yours in the comments).
- The Times obit by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt.
- Updike’s 855 author search results on the New Yorker website, as well as reminiscinces and other posts on the newyorker.com blogs Book Bench and Goings On. (This comment thread is open for readers’ memories of the author.)
- An archive of Emdashes posts on Updike.
- The New York Review of Books‘ Updike archive (unfortunately, almost all subscription-only)
- From Vanity Fair, James Wolcott—noted here just the other day for his all-embracing take on The Widows of Eastwick—with a tribute and a recommendation of a “book that captures Updike’s writerly public persona best.”
- The London Review of Books‘ homepage showcases 21 essays on Updike from its archives—by 17 men, I might add, including Frank Kermode, the Woods James and Michael, and the Jameses Atlas and Wolcott aforementioned. The Times Literary Supplement unsheaths its 1996 review by Gore Vidal of In the Beauty of the Lilies (and “the failings of its author”), which at 10,000 words is “the longest review ever printed in the TLS.”
An Obit Fit to Blog, and Print
Jonathan Taylor writes:
Having taken note of Ben Bernanke’s possible slowness on the uptake about the country’s financial situation, it is, sadly, now an occasion to pay tribute one who did see what was coming, and who has died of ovarian cancer: “Tanta” of Calculated Risk, Doris Dungey. I recall reading a lot of predictions that there was going to be hell to pay from the mortgage market quite a while back, mostly at Atrios‘s place, and if I recall correctly, a lot of those posts were inspired by the work of Calculated Risk; naturally, I’ve been reading the site more and more in recent months.
I was also a little struck by the headline on Tanta’s New York Times obituary: “Doris Dungey, Prescient Finance Blogger, Dies at 47.” After all, an archive search shows that Tanta is just the third person identified primarily as a “blogger” to have been the subject of a Times obit. (The other two were Cathy Seipp and Steve Gilliard.)
Having attended the recent roundtable on obituary writing at the New York Public Library, I’m led to wonder how the Times is keeping tabs on who’s worthy of an obit (not to mention The Verb) among bloggers. Not to be too morbid, but there will be more blogger obits, and Dungey’s includes what may one day become a classic trope:
The blog quickly drew a lively and informed group of commentators, few livelier and none more informed than someone who called herself Tanta. She began by correcting some of Mr. McBride’s posts. “She would tell me either I was wrong or the article I was quoting was wrong,” he said Sunday. “It was clear she really knew her stuff. And she was funny about it.”
Tanta soon graduated from merely commenting to being a full-scale partner. Her first post, in December 2006, took issue with an optimistic Citigroup report that maintained that the mortgage industry would “rationalize” in 2007, to the benefit of larger players like, well, Citigroup.
John Leonard, 1939-2008
Emily writes:
Apart from my parents, there are two people most responsible for whatever success I’ve found in writing and journalism. One is Katha Pollitt. The other is John Leonard, who I’ve just learned has died. He was loquacious and brave, extravagant and rigorous, profound and mischievous, demanding and incredibly generous. He believed in older writers’ service to younger ones and put his money where his mouth was. He knew more than a football field of literati. His sentences were outrageous Cyclone rides, until later in his life and in his illness, when they settled down a little in syntax, if not in erudition and clarity.
I will miss him.
Later: Andrew Leonard, John’s son, read a “eulogy for my father’s words,” at John’s memorial service on March 2, 2009, and the eulogy is now on Salon. It was one of many moments that made up an evening worthy of John’s greatness of spirit and boundlessness of language.
Do read Scott McLemee (another believer in those overlapping categories, books and justice), Hillary Frey, and Jane Ciabattari at the National Book Critics Circle’s Critical Mass (which is collecting more remembrances as they appear) on the loss of John.
And in honor of his irresistible passion for juicy word combinations, here’s the title of a book he published in 1999, and a link so you can buy it (and I hope you do): When the Kissing Had to Stop: Cult Studs, Khmer Newts, Langley Spooks, Techno-Geeks, Video Drones, Author Gods, Serial Killers, Vampire Media, Alien Sperm-Suckers, Satanic Therapists, and Those of Us Who Hold a Left-Wing Grudge in the Post Toasties New World Hip-Hop. From the Times obituary: “The comma seemed to have been invented expressly for him.”
Tom Nissley at Omnivoracious has written a graceful tribute. This sentence from his post was hard to read but deeply good to know: “I know he managed to get to his polling place to vote in New York on Tuesday, and I hope he was able to appreciate the results of the night.” Laura Miller’s remembrance in Salon includes the doubly astute observation, “To say John Leonard was a reviewer at heart is to pay a great compliment to a profession that currently seems to be limping toward an undeserved obsolescence.” And: “Unlike most of his colleagues, he never burned out, never grew bitter or nasty about the books.”
Art Winslow, another force in my Nation years who gave me a leg up for which I’ll always be amazed and grateful, writes in the L.A. Times: “In a literary sense, he took it as his mission to drive the money-changers from the temple and to feed the multitudes, or at least try.”
At The New Yorker‘s Book Bench blog, Ligaya Mishan quotes John from his Harvard Crimson years, on “Ginsberg and his fellows”: “In a critical sense, we academicians know these men as psychopaths, and perhaps they are. They believe in sensuality, not sense; in thrill, not mere experience.”
Which made me think of a story John once told about leaving the Crimson office at near-dawn after a long closing night, with the snow falling on the Boston streets making his footsteps almost completely still, when suddenly he heard a voice singing so sweetly it couldn’t possibly be human. It was a very young Joan Baez, maybe at Club 47, where my mother also saw her perform around that time, and John went inside and listened till she stopped singing—it was that beautiful.
I also just remembered that it was John who told me about the scene in Renata Adler’s Speedboat in which a tour guide on a bus full of visitors to the city calls out, pointing at the protagonist, “Look, there’s one of them now!” And how he always identified with that sense of targeted mystery, wondering what the world makes of you, what they think you are. I hadn’t seen him in a while, just heard bulletins, read Meghan O’Rourke’s excellent profile in CJR, and was my usual optimistic, time-senseless self. The world of words is poorer, and so is mine.
The New Yorker Pays Tribute to David Foster Wallace
Martin Schneider writes:
On the New Yorker website, fiction editor Deborah Treisman contributes a thoughtful postscript about David Foster Wallace. I particularly like that Treisman discusses Wallace from her perspective as a fiction editor. He made ample reference in his footnotes to his bouts of intractability when it came to having his work edited, and the glimpses Treisman permits us into that process sound very consistent with that.
Wallace’s four works published in The New Yorker are also available:
“Several Birds,” June 27, 1994
“An Interval,” January 30, 1995
“Asset,” June 21, 1999
“Good People,” February 5, 2007
David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008
Martin Schneider writes:
Wow. This is very, very, very, very sad. Wallace was one of my very favorite writers, and I’m devastated that he’s gone, of suicide, at the young age of 46. I value his essays and journalism as much as anything written since 1990 or so. The one about the cruise, the one about McCain, the one about Michael Joyce…. top marks, all, and so many others. His work wasn’t for everyone, but I really took to it. He made the literary landscape more special than almost anyone I can think of.
One day in 2005, I noticed that his Wikipedia page was practically empty. Consternated, I proceeded to contribute about ten moderately feverish paragraphs of questionable accuracy attempting to summarize his work to date. There was a lot wrong with it, and subsequent Wikipedia editors were neither slow nor shy in undoing some of my more intemperate remarks. That page has changed a lot, but I was the first to give it a skeleton. In a very small and inconsequential way, I’m proud to have played a role in the public perception of this very special writer.
I saw him read once, at the Union Square Barnes and Noble in support of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (he was incredibly entertaining) and afterward I lined up to get a book inscribed. A very thrifty friend of mine had brought a battered hardback of Infinite Jest, recently thrown out of the Newark Library System, and Wallace engaged in a little banter about that. I happened to have a Robert Coover novel with me, and rather flippantly handed it to him to sign; in his hyper-scrupulous way, he made it plain that he could not in good conscience put his name in a book by another writer. (I’m an idiot.) Instead he inscribed my copy of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I’ll never forget that chilly blast of ethics; it still reminds me of his essayistic voice.
In the Wikipedia link above, readers will notice that I pursue an extended comparison between Wallace and Norman Mailer. I’ve put it out there a few times, and I think nobody really agrees with me, but I still think it has legs. Experimental writer of “big” ambitious fiction capable of sublime passages of ten or fifty pages; journalist of genius. That describes both men; how unspeakably horrible to lose both within the space of a year.
A few years ago I started a small collection of original periodicals containing Wallace articles; it’s so upsetting that they have become true collector’s items so soon.
Update: Those who (like myself) find themselves separated from their collection of Wallace’s writings may be eager to know where they can get some online. I know of three complete works to read, and most of one to listen to.
His 2001 overview of the “usage wars,” which appeared in Harper’s, can be read here.
His 2004 article about the ethics of consuming lobster, which appeared in Gourmet magazine, can be read here (PDF).
His 2005 essay about a conservative radio host, which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, can be read here.
I don’t think many people are aware of this, but there is an excellent podcast of Wallace reading from his article about 9/11 that appeared in Rolling Stone right after the tragic event. That podcast can be found in iTunes under “KCET podcast: Hammer Conversations.”
Robert Giroux, 1914-2008
Robert Giroux is gone. We met at a party maybe ten years ago; we had both been editors of the Columbia Review while at school, so we compared notes–he said something funny about it that I can’t remember, but I do remember his graceful, easy manner and palpable intelligence. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt writes in the Times, “If the flamboyant Roger Straus presented the public face of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, presiding over the business end, Mr. Giroux made his mark on the inside, as editor in chief, shaping the house’s book list and establishing himself as the gold standard of literary taste.” What a palace of thought and beautiful design that man built.
Manny Farber, 1917-2008
Martin Schneider writes:
In the mid-1990s, an artist friend gave me his well-thumbed hardback copy of Negative Space. It was one of the better presents I’ve received. What a good critic. He will be missed.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, 1918-2008
A great redwood falls. Here’s the New York Times obituary. David Remnick is quoted several times in the piece:
David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, who has written extensively about the Soviet Union and visited Mr. Solzhenitsyn, wrote in 2001: “In terms of the effect he has had on history, Solzhenitsyn is the dominant writer of the 20th century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler? And yet when his name comes up now, it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has been.”
Speaking of greats, here’s the writeup of the William Maxwell celebration at Madison Square Park the other day, by our friend Ron Hogan.
Raymond Davidson, a Remembrance
Paul Kocak writes:
His New Yorker covers of the 1970s are quintessential reflections of urban complexity distilled to a serene and sober simplicity. A Zen focus of particularity, here and now. His spot drawings for The New Yorker, signed “R. Davidson,” celebrated Manhattan archways, doorways, a flowerpot on a windowsill, a wrought-iron fence. Raymond Davidson died just after midnight on July 7 at Tara Home, a hospice at Land of Medicine Buddha in Soquel, California. He was creative almost until his very last days, self-publishing poetry and reflections sprinkled with his pen-and-ink line drawings.
We met in the 1980s; he worked at Doubleday, I at Random House. Creativity was, in his view, a spiritual wellspring. He urged me to write haiku poetry as a spiritual exercise. I did.
In those years, fans of the New York Mets often saw a man with a long gray beard and glasses, wearing a seersucker jacket and bow tie, sitting in owner Nelson Doubleday’s box, right next to the Mets’ dugout. He was painting watercolors of the Mets players. These were exquisite depictions of light and shadow and color; balletic celebrations of form and grace and movement. They are gems.
They are New York.
They are Raymond Davidson, Brooklyn-born of Norwegian immigrants more than eighty years ago.
When the woman at the hospice told me of Raymond’s peaceful death, she said he looked like someone in an El Greco painting. Yes, majestic and heavenly.
She said he was “easy to love,” a fitting signature to his life and work. Raymond Davidson easily loved the ordinary right before our eyes.
I easily loved him like a father and a brother.
Paul Kocak
Syracuse, New York