GaraLog

Sister Mary XXXXX, R.S.M., R.I.P.

A friend writes:

"I read that Sr. Mary "Goebbels" XXXXX died peacefully of old age-91.  Too bad for [names of students have been redacted], all heavily medicated, drunken, unemployable, low-self esteemers forever fucked up by an anorexic witch who wrote the book on legitimate teacher-inflicted child abuse.  I am about to subtract 1/10 from 500 in her honor......God, what a woman!  I remember her lifting me up from my chair by my eyebrows.."

And so on. 

In case it is not evident, this was a dispatch from an elementary school classmate who is, to put it mildly, not mourning the death of our sixth-grade teacher.   I was going to use her name, but it has been my experience that whenever you put something up on the web, someone connected to the person you are writing about finds it, and I don't like the idea that some beloved great-niece of our teacher comes across an unsavory glimpse of the sainted aunt.  My own experience of her -- I had forgotten about the eyebrow-lifting, which was probably also employed at Abu Ghraib -- was more benign.  She was very sickly, and given the fact that only about seven inches of her face were exposed by the severe habits of those days, somewhat ageless (it now appears she was in her late 40's when she taught us) , I was amazed to find she had lived more than forty years afterward. 

Yes, she administered collective punishments like those ridiculous subtraction exercises that you would have to stay up past your bedtime doing (usually in circumstances when her back was turned to the class, someone was talking out of turn, and no one would rat on the miscreant), and yes, along with several of our other teachers, she did not do much for the self-esteem of a number of students, but I felt more pity for her at times than anger or fear, and the thing that has stayed with me most over the years is that once she told me, or the class, I don't remember which, that her favorite song was "Blue Moon."  It made her seem more human, and conjured up an image of a frail, awkward teenager no one asked to dance.

When I got the e-mail about her death, I pulled down a photo album I made in 1972 when I went off to college, remembering that I had snapped a few samizdat photos at the end of sixth grade, in June 1966.   And here she is.  I was probably pulled up by my eyebrows afterward.

 

Claiborne Pell

Claiborne Pell, for many years a U.S. Senator from my home state, Rhode Island, died on New Year's Day not long after midnight, after years of suffering from Parkinson's Disease.  He was 90.  I would have noted Pell's passing in any case, but this rather stiff aristocrat -- nicknamed "Stillborn" Pell by many -- was very popular with Rhode Island voters, including my father, who died exactly eleven years earlier, also in the early hours of the new year.

I cast my first Senate vote in 1972 for Pell, and it was a hard one, as his opponent in that race was former Governor John Chafee, at a time when liberal Republican was not an oxymoron, and Democrats were so safely in control of the Senate that it was possible to vote for a Republican without putting that body in the hands of right-wing zealots.  But like most Rhode Islanders, despite my admiration and affection for Chafee, I saw no reason to change a good thing -- it wasn't Chafee's time, though happily it came a few years later.  So I pulled the lever for Pell.

Pell was not a great orator, or a man of the people in the glad-handing sense, and he had many quirks and oddities.  But he was one of a breed of patricians, like the Roosevelts and the Kennedys, who saw their privilege as a base from which to help working men and women.  The college tuition grants that bear his name have made higher education possible for millions who could never have afforded it, and his sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Arts brought access to museums and performances in all corners of the country.  As we enter a period in which it might again be possible to think of government as a positive force in the lives of ordinary people, we ought to tip a glass to the memory of Claiborne Pell, who left an important mark on his country.

Susan Bash, 1937-2008

I got back from vacation last month to learn that Susan Bash, who was my assistant when I was Executive Director of the Texas ACLU in the mid-1980s, had died.  I hadn't been in regular touch in reccent years, but when I saw her and her husband Frank, a retired University of Texas astronomer, at the 50th Anniversary dinner of the Texas Observer in 2004, it was clear she was dealing with a debilitating illness.

Susan was a wonderful person, funny and passionate about politics, her family and much else. I didn't know that she wrote poetry -- it's possible she didn't, in the years we worked together -- but after I had an e-mail exchange with her family, Frank sent me the beautiful little booklet issued to those who attended her memorial service in August at the Lady Bird John Wildlife Center.  It contained a number of poems that Susan wrote during the last five years.  This one, "Living a Life:  The Last Part," which seems to deal with her illness, seemed particularly strong and poignant to me:

Like someone drugged,

immobile, I watch and listen

with moistened lips, as the

family gathers 'round

the bountiful table.

Their knives and forks flashing,

they give grunts of approval,

gulping wine.  Laughter and wit

bounce  back and forth

like a rainbow of bubbles.

They retell tales,

as if they were new,

guffawing with delight:

The aroma of bonhomie

as pungent as the food.

In those small gaps of silence,

one or another turns,

giving me a smile

and a loving glance, and

for the moment, I feel

as if I were one of them.

November 2007

Rolly

There are few people in the world that I care more about, or feel as close and lively connection to, as Roland Algrant, and today he is gone, having lost a long, quiet struggle with prostate cancer, first diagnosed over a dozen years ago, just a few years after I met him. He was seventy-nine.

I met Rolly when I was working for PEN and he was chair of the International Freedom-to-Publish Committee of the Association of American Publishers.  He was a Senior Vice President of William Morrow and Sons, or maybe Harper-Collins -- I can't remember who bought who.  He was also active in Human Rights Watch, where he'd been among the founders, and when I went there to direct the Fund for Free Expression in 1990, he became its chair, too, and we were a team for about six years.  The first American book fairs in Cuba and what was then the Soviet Union, the remarkable collaborative effort among publishers to release a paperback version of the Satanic Verses at the height of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie -- these and other signal events in the human rights movement had Rolly behind them, though his was never a public name.  A year ago, to right the balance a bit, some of us came together to fund a fellowship in Rolly's name at the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch (another thing he cared a lot about; he was its vice-chair), so for many years to come, young people will get a chance to be on the frontlines of human rights work because of Rolly, they'll do the work in his name, and when they go on, as I'm sure many will, to take leadership positions in the human rights movement, their impressive resumes will always bear the mark of his concern.

Though in the years I knew him Rolly never seemed to spend much time at his day job -- he spent weeks with his wife Christine, a publisher-turned-biographer of Madame du Pompadour and Philippe, Duc d'Orleans, at their home in Sanibel, Florida, and long weekends at their other home in West Cornwall, Connecticut -- he must have been very good at it, because Harper-Collins kept him on as a vice-president until the last year or so, well into his seventies.  Conglomerate publishing these days, and for many years, has not been a charity operation, so Rolly produced and produced, even as he went about his good works and relaxed lifestyle.  I don't know how he did it.

Rolly was the only person I've ever met who seemed absolutely blunt and clear-eyed in his essential contempt for his own parents -- they shipped him off, an only child, to a Swiss boarding school as a young boy -- but he was a devoted father and grandfather and a mentor to dozens of young people, particularly young women, in the publishing and human rights fields.  Rolly respected and supported women more than any man I know, certainly more than any of his generation, and as a consequence he was -- I have a hard time typing that small word, "was" -- the favorite man of almost every woman I know who knew him.  He had the most appealingly wry outlook on the world -- I would say Thurber-esque, since Rolly read to the nearly-blind writer as a young man, but from all accounts Thurber was not such a charming fellow -- but behind that a tremendous passion for justice that fuelled his lifelong activism in human rights.

I like to stress Rolly's public accomplishments because he never got enough credit for them, not that he was seeking it, but it always seemed to me it bothered him a bit, so I make it my mission to see that he gets his due, since he had a far greater impact on human rights and publishing than many who do a very good job of letting you know it.  But my main relationship to Rolly was not as a colleague or a fellow-traveler, but as a friend.

It was in some ways an unconventional friendship.  He was old enough to be my father -- in fact, he was older than my mother and a bit younger than my father would have been.  Yet I didn't really relate to him as a father figure, and had a living father of my own for the first ten years I knew him.  In the last days of his life, I heard he referred to me as a kind of stepson -- maybe just to get me past the Sloane-Kettering guards -- but in all the years I knew him I felt him to be as focused on his two sons, Dan and Joe, with as much love, zeal and pride as any parent, so he certainly felt no lack there.  I thought we approached each other as equals, despite the gap in years, and just had a good time with one another.  We had a minor spat or two, but it was an easeful relationship, much more so because it was free of the inherent tensions of family, even a good and close one.  I guess that describes a good friendship, and while for me friendships, of which I have many rich ones, are an extremely important part of what sustains me and makes me go, there is no category of mourning for the loss of a friend.  And yet I feel the loss more than that of many close blood relatives, and will always.

In the twenty or so years that I knew him, I’d guess that Rolly and I had dinner over a hundred times, always at his – or probably, Harper-Collins’ – expense.  At least half of these were at the Harvard Club, where as a non-member I couldn’t even attempt to pay, though we often lunched at the Peninsula and occasionally near his apartment at Paul and Jimmy's right off Irving Place. The conversation never lagged, and ranged from the crimes of Bush and deficiencies of Democrats to the accomplishments of our children.  During one of these dinners about five years ago, a middle-aged woman came over to our table as she was leaving the Harvard Club dining room.  “I’ve been sitting at the next table all night,” she said, “and I hope you don’t think me forward for saying this, but I just have to say I’ve never seen two people who took such obvious delight in one another’s company.”

It brought a slight lump to my throat as she said it – and tears as I recall it – because even then I had a sense that all time with Rolly was borrowed time.  I know he did, too.

Late in his life Rolly did a little acting, in a cameo appearance in one of the films by his son Daniel, a director, and the most excitement and devotion he exhibited in all the years I knew him was generated by the part he won in Sharon's Tri-Arts Theatre's summer stock production of Annie Get Your Gun two years ago.  Here he as Mr. Wilson, in vest and bowler, at the end of a number with the production's kids.  He and Christine sent it as a Christmas card last year.  I am pretty certain it is the way he would want to be remembered.

Norman Mailer

I arrived in Australia, after 18 hours or so in a news-free zone, to learn that Norman Mailer had died. I haven't seen him in some years, though we worked together at PEN almost 20 years ago, where he had been a famously controversial President, as he was a famously controversial everything else, angering many people by inviting Reagan's Secretary of State, George Shultz, to address the PEN Writers Congress in the 1980's. I know he had a reputation as a brawler, but in my experience he was unfailing kind and courteous with the PEN staff, unlike some other more prominent humanitarians. Susan Sontag, Arthur Miller, Grace Paley and now Mailer, all the stalwarts of PEN and leading postwar voices for human rights and free expression, have all died right in a row.  Great collective loss, and generational shift. Who among today's literary writers in America stands in their shoes, engaged in great civic and political debates? Hard to think of many.

Siobhan Dowd

Siobhan Dowd, a lovely, talented and passionately committed person, died yesterday in Oxford, England, where she has lived in recent years. She was 47, and finally lost a long fight with breast cancer.

I first met Siobhan in 1988 when I was running the Freedom-to-Write Program for PEN American Center and she was running the International Writers-in-Prison Committee for International PEN in London.  Among other things, she kept PEN's "census" of imprisoned writers on whose behalf members ran campaigns.  In those days before the end of the Cold War, there were many hundreds of such writers.  I enjoyed our long-distance relationship, and sensed that for various reasons Siobhan was restless for change and challenge, and when I moved on from PEN to Human Rights Watch in 1990, I suggested she move to the U.S. to take over my job, and the switch was made.  She was a terrific success in her seven years here, and made many friends who are among the many grieving today.

Back in England, she did children's rights work, edited a book of prison writing, and started writing her own fiction.  I read her first book, A Swift Pure Cry, last year.  Though it was written for young adults, I thought it was a gem that deserved a wider audience.  Perhaps because she was writing against time, given her diagnosis, she was extraordinarily prolific in the last few years, publishing The London Eye Mystery in June and having finished two more novels with a fifth underway at the time of her death.

Siobhan was an extraordinarily warm and gentle person, qualities not always on display among effective human rights advocates.  I was an hour-and-a-half late for my last lunch with her in Oxford last year -- train problems and poor planning -- and she greeted me sunnily when I finally showed up, and took me around the corner to Blackwell's bookstore, where she proudly showed me the stacks of her just-published novel.

Siobhan bore her illness with the most extraordinary dignity and grace, just as she lived the rest of her life.  It's a terrible loss to the world that she is gone.

It is strange the way deaths are so often paired -- Antonioni and Bergman a few weeks ago, even Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas, two daytime talk show hosts of my youth.  A week before Siobhan died, I read  that Liam Rector, who worked closely with us on censorship issues in the late 1980s and early nineties, shot himself in his Greenwich Village apartment.  Fighting cancer and heart disease, he was 57.  An accomplished poet and intense man, Liam as director of Associated Writing Programs and then director of the Bennington summer writers workshop was a fierce anti-censorship crusader.  I saw him last a year or so ago when I met with the Freedom-to-Write Committee that Siobhan and I once staffed, and of which Liam was an active member.

Very different people, Siobhan and Liam, but hugely talented writers who felt a strong obligation to go to bat for colleagues here and around the world up against oppressive regimes and ever-energetic censors.  There are too few of them -- not censors, but articulate writer-advocates -- and two fewer today.

Bird

I never gave two seconds' thought to Lady Bird Johnson, who died today, before I listened to the LBJ tapes, available in an audio edition -- much better than the transcripts, in book form edited by Michael Beschloss -- a few years ago. In one amazing tape, she calls him up after a press conference to critique his performance. All I was able to find in transcript form Googling today was the following excerpt:

LADY BIRD JOHNSON, on tape: You want to listen for about one minute to my critique, or would you rather wait till tonight?

PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON, on tape: Yes, ma'am. I'm willing now.

LADY BIRD JOHNSON: Your looks were splendid. During the statement, you were a little breathless and there was too much looking down and I think it was a little too fast.

PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: They didn't know what to cut out.

LADY BIRD JOHNSON: In general, I'd say it was a good "B+." How do you feel about it?

PRESIDENT LYNDON JOHNSON: I thought it was much better than last week.

But it goes on in great and sometimes excruciating detail, and you realize not only how tough this woman was, but how astute -- she could easily have had a career as a media trainer or political adviser, and I realized all of a sudden that though she is alternately portrayed as the long-suffering wife of a crude, insecure, philandering power player or the shrewd businesswoman and conservation advocate, in fact she must have been a critical part of his political life. And to judge from the tapes, someone whose judgment he often respected and relied upon.

Laura Gilpin

In the Times today, no "news" obituaries, but in the paid notices one for Laura Gilpin, a poet I knew thirty years ago and had lost track of, who moved to the west coast and worked for a group called Planetree, devoted to humanizing care in hospitals.  I have always loved her one book of poems -- it won the Walt Whitman Prize in 1976 -- called "The Hocus Pocus of the Universe."  My favorite is "The Two-Headed Calf:"

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this

freak of nature, they will wrap his body

in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north

field with his mother.  It is a perfect

summer evening:  the moon rising over

the orchard, the wind in the grass.

And as he stares into the sky, there

are twice as many stars as usual.

The notices says she had just completed a second book, "The Weight of a Soul."  I look forward to it, and am sorry that its maker, a distinct voice who seems to have done much good in the world, is no longer here.  Here's the final stanza of her "Life After Death," written in memory of a friend:

The things I know:

How the living go on living

and how the dead go on living with them.

So that in a forest

even a dead tree casts a shadow

and the leaves fall one by one

and the branches break in the wind

and the bark peels off slowly

and the trunk cracks

and the rain seeps in through the cracks

and the trunk falls to the ground

and the moss covers it

and in the spring the rabbits find it

and build their nest inside

and have their young

and their young will live safely

inside the dead tree.

So that nothing is wasted in nature or in love.

Molly Ivins

Damn if Molly Ivins didn’t up and die on the day Joe Biden said Barack Obama might be the first clean black man to run for President, both stories sharing the front page of the New York Times the day before Groundhog Day. Lucky for Biden, and every other politician “leaving a village without its idiot” or “weaker than bus station chili.” Too bad, and much too soon, for the rest of us.

I met Molly when I was running the Texas ACLU in the 1980s.  You wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of her columns – though many of her targets, like President Bush, paid at least grudging tribute to her – but boy, was she ever a loyal friend.  She spoke at every ACLU event she was asked to headline, from Beaumont to Berkeley. And such was her devotion to the Texas Observer, the hardy pillar of the independent press where she cut her journalistic teeth, that ill as she was, she insisted on being driven in an ice storm to its most recent fundraiser last month.  A God who could take both Molly and her dear friend Ann Richards in the span of a few months must have no sense of humor -- or more likely, a very good one, in need of constant stimulation.

Molly’s humor had the edge it did because it had a moral core as steady and fixed as the lone star.  On the too-rare occasions when she ditched the jokes and wrote from pure, tempered anger on, say, the death penalty or the Bush Administration’s gutting of habeas corpus, there was no voice registering a clearer call to conscience.  There are times when it hurts too much to laugh, and this is one of them.

Lisa Goldberg

There are some people you know are special to you but you don't really know how special they are to many many others until they are gone.  Quite suddenly, that is what happened to my friend Lisa Goldberg, President of the Charles H. Revson Foundation, who died on Monday of a massive brain aneurysm that she suffered on Sunday night. The swiftness with which a young and vital person was removed from us, as if struck by lightning, has left her legions of friends, including me, reeling all week -- struck, in a way, ourselves.

The Times ran some lovely memorial notices today but a small news obituary -- dwarfed by that of the scoundrel Howard Hunt -- that could hardly do justice to who Lisa was.  She never called attention to herself, so perhaps she would have liked it that way.  She spent most of her working life at the Revson Foundation (which once funded a fellowship for me), but I didn't know her well until she became its President in 2003, around the time she and I and a few others were dealing with the question of who would lead the Revson Fellows Program at Columbia once its founding director, Eli Ginzberg, who was in his 90s, moved on.  (Which Eli did, by dying one afternoon reading in his favorite chair.)  I had many dealings with Lisa over that issue,  in which I first came to appreciate the quality of her judgment and the depth of her caring, and we became close.  She was a cherished support and mentor to me, but I am far from alone in feeling that way.

Lisa left her mark on public life and discourse in certain major ways -- funding Bill Moyers' programs and Eyes on the Prize, among other things -- but most of her influence was subtle and barely noticed, hence all the more effective.  On the advancement and empowerment of women, on the strengthening of progressive media, ideas and politics, on the fostering of leadership for the next generation -- in each of these efforts and more (probably many I have no idea of), Lisa was a central figure.  She was farsighted and strategic, always keeping an eye on the larger picture. 

And she was, it must be said, a pillar in the life of another warm and influential (if somewhat less at home in the background :) New Yorker, her husband, NYU President John Sexton, and the most wonderful mother to Katie, just launched as a freshman at Yale.  So good a mother, I think, that Ms. Katie had only a glimpse of the huge significance her mother had in the outer world.  But she will come to know it, and cherish that legacy along with the family ones.

In preparing to write this for me quite painful post, I Googled Lisa, hoping for a photograph, but could not find her among the hundreds of other Lisa Goldbergs it seems there are in the world, though I submit she had more impact on the world than the others combined. I smiled, because it seemed somehow to fit.