R.E. 1932 - 2014
One of my former college professors -- possibly the wisest one that I had, during four years of tutelage under some very, very smart people -- passed away recently. His name was Richard Eder; he was a foreign correspondent for The New York Times for many years and, as I learned just now while looking him up on Wikipedia, he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1987. That’s what my class was about: arts criticism. We met once or twice a week, I disremember, and the fourteen or so of us would sit around a long wooden table that glowed under the lights, and we’d share our reviews of TV and movies and live theater and music and art and whatever else Richard had had us seek out since last time. There was a required reading list, which of course I blew off completely. (Years later, I finally read one of the books on the list, George Orwell’s “A Collection of Essays,” and it’s not an exaggeration to say that I think of that book almost every day now. I can no longer remember what else was on Richard’s reading list, and the sheet itself is, obviously, long lost.)
Richard stands out in my memory for a couple of reasons. He was funny -- once, some years after taking his class, a friend of mine asked him what he’d been up to, and he answered, “Trying not to die!” -- and he walked in a precarious, pulse-quickening way, with his legs bent at impossible angles, which I believe was related to his having contracted polio early in life. He told me I had talent as a writer. I had heard that from teachers before, but always in a way that seemed to mean: Because you have talent, you can do anything. I had never heard it the way Richard said it: matter-of-factly, as though talent was just one item on a checklist. Which, of course, it is. Talent without the ability to focus, to put in labor, to inhabit other perspectives, to make mistakes, to experiment, to trust yourself, to learn for the love of learning, to accept that you don’t know everything and sometimes your ignorance will be apparent to the whole world -- you need all of these things to be a writer, and I had basically none of them when I was a twenty-one-year-old in Richard’s class. He did me the courtesy of not pretending that talent is all you need. He talked to me as one adult to another, although I was not an adult at that point in any but the strictest legal sense.
There was something else about Richard, too. He seemed possessed of the kind of solid self-assuredness that I associate with certain grandparents -- a sense that he had been to some hard places and back, that he had done enough living to be able to attest that the things we tell children are true, that things really do turn out all right in the end, that scales balance, that love conquers, that questions have answers, that compassion and faith and honesty ultimately elevate us and make us a tiny bit more divine. The last time our class met, Richard shared a poem with us that he’d written. It was not long, and I cannot remember what it was called or how any part of it went, but I remember that it was about art, and creators, and critics. I seem to remember that it starred both the Devil and God. I remember that it spoke of these things very plainly, making no effort to convince the reader of their importance, the way you would not try to convince someone that a mountain is big. I remember the frank way Richard handed out copies of this poem and sat at one end of the long table with us as we read it. There was no sense, in that room, that he had suddenly become vulnerable, or bared a part of his soul that he had previously kept hidden. Richard, at least the Richard I knew, was his soul, as far as I could ever tell: his soul and only that. He had never, to us, tried to present himself as anything other than he really was. The poem did not feel like a revelation, like a message from a Richard none of us knew, because all of this stuff had been there, out in the open, since the beginning.
When the semester ended, Richard encouraged me to keep writing criticism, which I more or less have not done. I’ve thought about writing and talked about writing, and it’s easy to convince yourself that those things are just as good. I registered this blog in May 2012, my records show, and until now, December 2014, it’s sat completely empty. But I do feel like the time has come to start stacking up words here. Some will be good, and some will be very very bad, and I’m OK with that if you are. Just keep writing, I think Richard would say, just keep working, keep pushing through it. Talent is great, but that’s something God puts in our heads at the beginning; it’s not something any of us can really take credit for. All the other parts are just as important, and each one of them is something you have to work at. The lie is that it’s easy. But the truth is that it’s possible.