Last spring, readers were shocked to learn that author Tony Horwitz had died of an apparent heart attack at the age of 60, just after the publication of his latest book, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide. Reflecting on 2019, which included the great loss of Toni Morrison, who died shortly after I wrote this column, I noticed that by midway through the year, we had lost a half-dozen notable American and British authors, who fell into three interestingly similar pairs. This column is a tribute to them.Horwitz and British author Philip Kerr both drew on the past, though in different ways. Horwitz viewed history through the experiences of others, including Captain Cook’s voyages (Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before), the European predecessors of the Pilgrims (A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World), and the young journalist Frederick Law Olmsted’s reporting from the pre-Civil War South (Spying on the South). In each book, he balanced historical events and his own encounters with war reenactors or face-to-face chats in bars, on battlefields, and at Plymouth, Massachusetts’ annual Thanksgiving celebration.
Horwitz could draw anyone into conversation and was rewarded with innumerable gems, as when he spoke with a black woman as they watched a Southern pro-Confederacy parade held on Martin Luther King Jr. Day (Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War): “I don’t care if they remember,” she said, “just so they remember they lost.” At the end of A Voyage Long and Strange, he asks Harvard chaplain and Plymouth resident Peter Gomes why people focus on the Pilgrims when many others came before them. Gomes’s reply: “Myth trumps history every time.”
Kerr, whose most recent book Metropolis was published in 2019—a year after his death—spent most of his career imagining the life of one honest cop, Bernie Gunther, and his efforts to pursue justice in some of the most unjust times and places of the 20th century: Nazi Germany and the nations it ravaged. Like many mystery writers, Kerr places Gunther at the scene of the crime wherever there’s a good story to be told: Berlin, Prague, Berchtesgaden, German-controlled Greece, Croatia, and post-war Vienna. Rooted in the noir tradition, Gunther is a loner, unlucky in love, both cynical and idealistic, but determined to rise above the corruption around him. He exists somewhere between Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, whose motto, “Everybody counts or nobody counts,” he could have coined. Although Gunther appears in the most unlikely places, and interacts with almost every leading Nazi, from General Richard Heidrich to Hitler associate Joseph Goebbels, Kerr was meticulous in distinguishing fact from fiction, adding afterwords about the real people he’d inserted, and their fates.
Memoir Lane
Francine du Plessix Gray’s and Molly O’Neill’s memoirs could not begin more differently, though with equal grandiosity. Gray’s Them: A Memoir of Parents asserts: “My mother enjoyed claiming direct descent from Genghis Khan.” O’Neill’s Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball starts: “Every one of my five brothers was bred to play ball. For a long time it wasn’t clear which of the boys would make it to the major leagues, but we had no doubt that The One was among us.”Gray may not have been sure her mother was a Tatar, but she did know her as the lover of the great Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the widow of a hero of the French Resistance, the wife of a major Ukrainian-American artist and art director for Condé Nast publications, and “one of a small handful of professional women who were looked on as New York City’s most commanding fashion presences.” In fact, Tatiana du Plessix Liberman (née Yakovleva) lived, as did many Europeans born before World War I and living for most of the century, a series of lives, any one of which could be a novel’s subject. In Them, Gray paints the surface of a lost world as it appeared to people who fell from privilege to exile, then rose again in the New World. But her real aim is to plumb the depths and grasp what sufferings, losses, and traumas made her parents the complex persons they were.
O’Neill, on the other hand, stays happily on the surface, depicting an American life from the 1950s (“Columbus was the test-market capital of the United States for food products”), when a glittering, dirt-and-germ-free surface was the responsibility of every stay-at-home mom. James Thurber was also from Columbus, Ohio, and at times O’Neill seems to channel such Thurber gems as The Night the Bed Fell. In chapters such as “A Social History of Crab Melts,” “O Pioneers,” and “A Fish Without a Bicycle,” she recounts her family, with particular focus on her plight as the eldest child and only girl in a family where “boys arrived like a litter of Jack Russell terriers.” When the fifth and last came, she “decided that Paul would have to be my baby sister,” with the expected reaction from her father.
Family dreams occasionally come true. Released from pseudo-sisterhood, Paul became The One, playing Major League Baseball for 17 seasons, and starring on four Yankee World Series championship teams, while O’Neill, who trained as a cook, first at home then to pay her way through college, also headed for New York, becoming food columnist for the Times and a James Beard award-winner.
Poetry in Motion
Poetic taste seems to vary widely. W.S. Merwin, to borrow one side of an old distinction, was as Apollonian as they come. Born in New York, educated at Princeton, protégé of R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman, selected for a young poets’ prize by W. H. Auden, colleague of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Langston Hughes, he might be called a poet’s poet. In addition to 24 books of poetry, he published dozens of translations, from Dante to Euripides, Federico García Lorca to Yosa Buson, in languages as varied as Quechua and Sanskrit. Reading his complete oeuvre would qualify you as a one-person encyclopedia of world poetry.Characterizing such a career is difficult, since Merwin went through several poetic incarnations. His first book, A Mask for Janus, is almost overburdened by allusions, scraps of romance languages, classic poetic forms, and such cryptic passages as, “Tell me who keeps infrangible solitudes / But the evening’s dead on whose decided face / Morning repeats the malice and the light.” By his third decade of writing, he had, he said, “relinquished punctuation along with several other structural conventions … to evoke the spoken language.” Erudition also mostly vanished, while family, pastimes, and observations dominate.
If Merwin did almost everything one poet can do, Mary Oliver showed how well a poet can do one thing: celebrate the natural and never-ordinary world. Merwin uses nature as stimulus for thoughts that quickly slip the bonds of their inspiration. Oliver seems to submerse herself in what she sees. Merwin’s “Gray Herons in the Field Above the River” recounts a dream in which “Three … rose into a hemlock tree,” and follows the dream until he wakes. Oliver’s “Some Herons” focuses intently on a pair at dawn: “A blue preacher” who flew “in slow motion,” while “an old Chinese poet / hunched in the white gown of his wings / was waiting.” Titles in Merwin’s The First Four Books of Poems include 25 people, from Proteus to Meng Tzu, and eight nonhumans—including “cat,” “dog,” and “horse.” In New and Selected Poems, Oliver names 45 creatures, from dogfish to snowshoe hare to skunk cabbage—and six humans.
Merwin speculated abstractly on his own death: “Every year without knowing it, I have passed the day / When the last fires will wave to me.” But Oliver asserted, in her passionate way: “When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular and real … I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
We are the better because these writers gave us something particular and real.
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