When he wasn’t reading a book, marking it up with exclamation points and dogearing every page while watching a basketball game and eating potato chips, John could be found either in his garden, a hungry solar panel, sun worshipper, urban Druid, Aztec sacrifice of a napping cat, or crouched over his desk, inside a bunker of books, the fastest two-finger typist in the West.
John had many moving parts, exploding in as many directions as one of his sentences, but he was, above all, an Enthusiast.
He was, of course, a passionate book booster and consummate stylist, the world’s foremost proponent of the semicolon. He counseled friends; championed young writers and traveled hungrily; feasted on ideas and subsisted on red meat, French fries, and ice cream; and he loved my mother more than I’ve ever seen anyone love another human being in real life.
John was deeply principled. He was fiercely loyal, never let go of a grudge (he once refused to shake Henry Kissinger’s hand at a party), treated everyone as though they were entitled to dignity and respect, never fawned, never sucked up.
I always thought of John as a giant head, a benign version of the great and powerful Oz before the curtain’s pulled back. John could barely change a light bulb and once insisted impatiently that he couldn’t fax me a document I needed because the machine was out of paper.
I knew John my whole life; he became my second father when I was nine years old. He never talked down to us as kids; our opinions and stories mattered in their own right. Of course he had a drink in his hand or a bottle hidden in a closet through much of my childhood, which took its own toll on each of us in different ways, but there was a richness to life in that house on Seventy-eighth Street.
We read favorite poems to each other in the living room or watched M*A*S*H and Hill Street Blues together as though the characters were important people in our lives. We saved up stories from our days to eat for dinner. My classmates marveled at the range of topics that came up at our dinner table that somehow always, annoyingly, connected to something we were discussing in class: history, politics, literature.
In the late seventies, our lives were always on the record. Everyone in the family was fodder for his Private Lives columns. He never named anyone, so it seemed people would always attribute to whichever daughter they knew whatever mortifying moment he had revealed in the service of an elegant point. For the record, I was the girl with the galaxy of freckles, and Amy did all the embarrassing things.
John named his alter ego in Private Lives Dmitri, after the brother Karamazov.
It always puzzled people, who thought of him surely as an Ivan, the serious intellectual. But Dmitri was the one besotted with love and drink, as John was besotted with my mother and scotch.
The novel’s central act is patricide, and John thought a lot about fatherhood, about being a father and a stepfather, about the fathers who disappoint and destroy. When he taught criticism at Columbia, his first assignment was to trash a classic, and his last assignment was always for the students to review their fathers. And then they would all go out and get drunk.
John had his stock stories that we all knew—the time they made him kill a rattlesnake and make it into a belt at a logging camp, turning him into a pacifist forever after, or the time he was a young sophomore putting an issue of the Harvard Crimson to bed in the wee hours of the morning and heard the voice of a young Joan Baez lifting transcendent into the Cambridge night. Right before he dropped out.
But the story he told more than any other was his Kobo Abe story. Every time he found a fresh audience, he would launch into his Kobo Abe story, and we would get up to clear the dishes. It was a wonderful story: On a trip to Japan in 1982, John met the novelist Kobo Abe. Abe had fallen into a deep depression and writer’s block after reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, certain that he could never hope to write anything as great. Several days later, Gabriel García Márquez was awarded the Nobel Prize, and John, drawing on his limited knowledge of Japanese culture, honor, and hara-kiri, feared the worst. He raced to Abe’s house, where his wife greeted John at the door and told him that Kobo was happily writing away upstairs. “García Márquez has won the Nobel Prize,” she explained. “Since he is now among the immortals, there is no longer any question of competition.”
John was in a lot of pain his last year, his lungs being drained and filling up with fluid every day, an infinitely renewable resource no one wanted, but he was never late with his copy. The first regular deadline he missed—I’m fairly certain in his life—was the Harper’s column due two days after he died.
How do we make sense of the deaths of our loved ones, of their physical absence? Where does that intelligence, that amassing of knowledge, and the thirteen thousand books he famously read, go? We’re a mixed family, both atheists and agnostics, but I know that John has joined the immortals.