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century of extra-literary gestures, as extraordinary as they are forgotten.
Who will remember it was William who discretely raised funds for a PR
contributor diagnosed with cancer? And who will recall outside my
family how agitated William was when my five-year-old son smacked
his head on a marble pillar and had to have stitches? He drove himself
and everyone around him crazy with worry.
And, yes, to all the other qualities we've mentioned today, I feel com–
pelled to add worry. William was one of the truly great Worriers of the
World, which takes some doing given how stiff the competition is for
that title.
During his final years, after his legs had failed him, after his eyes no
longer worked, after his hearing was diminished and his lungs con–
gested, the one part of William that never gave out was his extraordi–
nary mind. It was every bit as nimble at ninety as it was when we first
met, twenty-five years earlier.
And when that exceptional mind wasn't going against the grains
served in our home, it tended to be focused on literature and politics .
Even after he could no longer read, William stockpiled manuscripts and
journals, books and newspapers. He had the most urgent of these mate–
rials loaded up on an old metal typewriter table, within easy reach of his
chair, at the ready for when his readers came by.
A few days after he died, I excavated that material. Its breadth was
staggering. There were photocopies of
Times
op-ed pieces, submissions
from unpublished novelists and poets, back issues of
The New York
Times Book Review, The New Republic, The London Review of Books,
and
The Times Literary Supplement,
cranky letters to the editor
demanding response, and back issues of
The Nation,
a publication that
William read and criticized with equal fervor.
But wait, that wasn't all. There was also a copy of the
Harvard
Health Letter
(no doubt providing William further ammo for our ongo–
ing margarine vs. butter battle) and an issue of
Pro Football Weekly.
(William, some of you might not know, was a diehard Giants fan. The
perfect athletic complement to that other underdog-literature.)
William often asked me, "What are you reading?" This was not a
question he asked out of politeness. Books were too important to be
debased by etiquette.
I once answered that question by telling him I'd just started reading
a then-obscure novel by Patrick O'Brian, a writer of high-seas adven–
tures. This was around
1985,
at a time when O'Brian was out of print
in the States. I half expected William to dismiss my choice as middle–
brow. But I was wrong.
