The day we met, Barbara Zimmerman, as she was then, was sitting in the Radcliffe College cafeteria in Agassiz Hall with a cup of black coffee. She was also chain smoking, as she was to do, fatally, for the rest of her life. She was slight and pale and pretty, with soft brown untidy hair and a sudden wide bright smile. Her black turtleneck jersey and stack of books not on any assigned list instantly marked her out as what would presently be called a beatnik. Almost at once I was amazed by her low-key but scarily observant comments on these books, and on some of the other girls sitting nearby, with their tight perms and twinsets, matching lipstick and nail polish, and matching minds. She was a freshman, only sixteen years old, and her nickname at the time was Bubsey, so how did she know so much? It was a question many people were to ask over the next sixty years.
Barbara’s quiet, often almost invisible brilliance was all the more striking because she had started life with real disadvantages. She had a scholarship to Radcliffe, but she could not afford to stay in a dorm; instead she commuted to college from her parents’ small row house in Brighton. Barbara also been born without a left hand, and she once told me that her parents thought at first that they would have to put her in an institution. After she turned out to be extremely intelligent, their highest hope was that she might become a teacher of other disabled children. All her life, her way of dealing with her disability was to act as if it did not exist, and everyone who knew and admired her followed her lead. They opened doors for her and carried bags of groceries or books, without saying anything or asking if they could help. I also had been a damaged child, and we once agreed that our problems were not, as some people seemed to assume, a melodramatic tragedy, but “just a great big lifelong drag.”
After graduating from Radcliffe with honors, Barbara moved to New York, just as I and many of our friends did. But opportunities for young women who couldn’t type or file and had no family connections were rare. It took her nearly a year to find a full-time job, and only unusual courage and determination kept her looking. This courage was visible again at the end of her life when, exhausted, and knowing how ill she was, she continued working until two weeks before her death and came to the American Academy to accept a lifetime award for Service to the Arts (shared with Robert Silvers).
Early in her career Barbara worked as an almost unpaid intern at Partisan Review, and then at Random House, where she met the young editor Jason Epstein, whom she was to marry. They had two intelligent and attractive children, Jacob, now a Los Angeles film producer and screenwriter, and Helen, a molecular biologist specializing in public health in developing countries. But even as a mother Barbara kept on working, now with Edward Gorey at the famous reprint series The Looking Glass Library, which revolutionized paperback publishing by making it both respectable and profitable to reprint literary classics.
The job Barbara was most famous for, of course, was as coeditor, with Robert Silvers, of The New York Review of Books. Founded during the New York newspaper strike of 1963, as what at first looked like a temporary replacement for the New York Times Book Review, the NYRB went on to become probably the most famous literary magazine in the English-speaking world. It changed serious reporting on the arts and politics and science and society by giving writers both the space and the time to say all they wanted to say, and expert help in saying it as well as possible. The NYRB was especially well known for finding writers who were not already well known themselves, many of them from other countries, and encouraging them to propose subjects for reviews and essays, rather than simply assigning currently prominent authors to currently popular topics. One result of all this was a long list of good books that began as NYRB articles, many of which probably would not have existed otherwise.
Barbara’s editorial skill and her editorial tact were remarkable. Her first response to a manuscript was always enthusiastic; but when the proofs arrived, the margins would be full of questions and suggestions and sometimes embarrassing corrections. Often there would be three or four sets of proofs, and I sometimes felt awkward when I received congratulations on one of my articles, since I knew how much its apparently easy style and accuracy of detail were owing to her. Many other writers have said the same, commenting on how much time Barbara had spent on their pieces, and how reluctant she was to take credit for her contribution to them.
Because Barbara was so kind, generous, and modest—she never gave speeches, interrupted anyone, or raised her voice—it was easy to underestimate how much she knew and saw. There seemed to be nothing she hadn’t read, and no one she’d never known or seen—and sometimes seen through. Her accounts of public occasions were often brilliantly comic: I remember how she described Norman Mailer standing on the bottom step of a staircase to lecture George Plimpton and several other men, all of whom were considerably taller than he, on the errors of the current administration. Offered a drink, Mailer seemed eager, but he refused to step down to get it; instead he insisted it be passed to him by his audience.
Barbara gave wonderful parties, successfully mixing unmatching guests: conservatives and radicals, young and old, provincial and international, famous and unknown. Some of the best parties took place during the last seventeen years of her life, which she shared with the gifted journalist Murray Kempton. Like him, she loved a good personal or political scandal, and often somehow knew it before the newspapers did. At the same time, she was strikingly discreet. You knew that nothing you told her would ever be repeated, and also that she would never tell you anything about anyone that you didn’t know already. Sometimes I thought that Barbara carried this rule too far. Occasionally she would say with a sigh of regret that she couldn’t meet me that evening because she had to “go to something.” It would then turn out that “something” was a party given by people we both knew well, and to which I had also been invited. In the same way, she was more likely to conceal than to reveal her close acquaintance with anyone, especially if they were in any way famous.
It was always a wonder to me how Barbara managed to read so much, including, apparently, most of the books discussed in her magazine. When I asked her about this once, she simply said, “I read enough.” In any case, she read enough of a great many books to produce some amazingly perceptive and original remarks about them. One of my great regrets is that I never wrote any of these comments down. Another, more serious, is that Barbara never published anything herself, as far as I know, though for a long time I hoped a manuscript or a diary would turn up. Now and then I would suggest that she should write her memoirs. Her reply was always, “Oh, I couldn’t do that.” Just as well, maybe—the world must still be full of people who are not only grieving for her loss, but sighing with relief that some comic incident in their lives may never be revealed.
It is hard for me, even now, to realize that if I were to go to 33 West 67th Street and take the antique elevator to apartment 3F, where I so often stayed, Barbara would not be there. Without her, the building, once so important in my life, is meaningless; the whole world, and especially New York, seems darker, sadder, and most of all, less interesting.