Transcript – Robert B. Silvers Memorial
DATE: April 26, 2016
LOCATION: New York, NY
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY: Lisa Rinzler
TRANSCRIBED FROM: QuickTime file of full interview
Rea Hederman: Good morning. I want to thank you all for coming today. I’m Rea Hederman, the publisher of the New York Review, and for over thirty-five- almost thirty-five years; I was a colleague and friend of Bob Silvers. This morning I was thinking how appropriate it is that we are having this memorial in the New York Public Library, an institution that Bob so loved and as many of you know, was on the board of trustees and became an emeritus trustee as well. It’s also appropriate that we’re in this distinguished room, which since 2002, we’ve held the Robert B. Silvers Lectures each year. We’re going to show a couple of clips from the outtakes from The 50 Year Argument and the first one they will show now. You can see them on both screens.
(Clip of Bob Silvers in NYRB office at night.)
Bob Silvers: And, here we are. And now, we’re going in here. And you see, we have all these things to do.
Rea Hederman: The short clip you’ve just seen, I think, captures the complete enthusiasm and charm in which Bob engaged with his work, with his friends, with his contributors and with the world itself. His work was his driving force, and he was engaged in working till the very end. Up until two weeks before he died, he was still working on the last issue. Soon after- sorry- later in the program, we’ll see a clip of Bob speaking about his time as a fifteen-year-old student at the University of Chicago. Soon after Angela and I came to the New York Review, we sat at a dinner one evening next to one of Bob’s professors from the University. When he learned of our connection with the review, he said not in a very friendly tone, “Oh, yes. Robert Silvers was one of my students.” And then he said no more. I mentioned this to Bob the next day and Bob told me that in that class, he so often contradicted and questioned the professor in class that the professor after making each point would turn to Bob and say “Now, let’s hear what Mr. Silvers has to say.” And thanks to the comments from our speakers today as well as other outtakes from The 50 Year Argument, we can hear what Mr. Silvers has to say today. I should mention that we’re happy to have Jason Epstein here, who was one of the founders of the New York Review along with Bob, Barbara, Lizze and Robert Lowell. And I’d like to thank Tony Marx from the library, and the trustees from the library as well for making this room available on short notice. Bob would have been much pleased to know that his memorial was being held here. And the photos of Bob, the telling and lovely photos that you saw coming in, were taken by Brigitte Lacombe, who is here today as well. The speakers will just come up in order- alphabetical order as they are in your program, so I’ll make no more introductions of speakers and Mary Beard is first.
Mary Beard: Thank you very – um – I feel incredibly honored to speak here today. I feel both, obviously incredibly sad, but also there is that kind of sense of joyous celebration of a life that was not just well lived, but quite astonishingly well lived, I think. I hadn’t known Bob anything like as long as many people in this room. My first review only appeared in the paper almost exactly 10 years ago this week. But even as a relative new girl, I share and felt very close to many of the experiences of Bob that other people have written about and talked about over the last few weeks. I shall never forget the first book that he sent me. It was Robert Harris’ Imperium. Good novel right? It arrived entirely unannounced in my pigeonhole in Cambridge with an invitation – perhaps one might say an instruction I think – to review it. Tucked inside that looked as if it had been hand typed on an Olivetti Princess or something—suspect it had been—the excitement of that, I think, wasn’t entirely the glow of achievement. I think that most of us, when we got our first book sent from Bob, most of us did indulge in a little bit of self-congratulation. I think that for me it was much more the sense that this guy that I heard so much about who was thousands of miles away thought I might have something worth saying about this book. I think that feeling of trust in a way will stick with me forever. I have to say that having read much of the reminiscences about him I feel a little disappointed that I never had one of those Christmas day telephone calls about a tricky semi-colon. I thought, “What did I do wrong?” I had begun to flatter myself that it’s a tribute to my excellent punctuation skills I’ve managed to miss that mixing of the turkey.
So for me, in general, there’s been something, I think terribly bonding about working with Bob, being a small part of his world and a small part of the world of the New York Review of Books. But I see a hardheaded side in this, too. The temptation is, and it’s a temptation I’ve certainly given into, to talk rather mystically about Bob’s qualities as an Editor. Talk about that sixth sense he had in matching the absolutely perfect reviewer to the imperfect book. Or, and I did say this myself, that kind of prognosticatory ability he had to know what you were going to say about the book before you even knew it yourself. I think some of that might be true, in a way, and I think there might be something a bit mystical in the makeup of any great literary editor or perhaps in the makeup of any great anybody.
But looking back again as I have done over the past couple of days, the letters and the emails that I got from Bob, it was something else that struck me actually. I came to the conclusion that Silvers was a great literary editor, also because he knew stuff. Because he had an extraordinary wide range of expertise and recall and an extremely strong, I think, moral sense in part, of how knowledge could be and should be used both in public and in private. I think- when I look at these letters- he wasn’t telling me what to write before I knew it myself; he was giving me the damn bibliography actually.
Right now, we are living in a time – and this is true of both sides of the Atlantic – when in public life especially, expertise and knowing stuff is decidedly unfashionable. But trust me, it will become fashionable again soon, right? And, as that fight against philistinism is won, I kind of think that it is very encouraging and reassuring that in the literary, we will always have that image of Bob as a standard bearer, an example, and as a guide. I think that encourages us all. Thank you.
Rea Hederman: Before I read a letter from Stephen Breyer, who had hoped to be here today to speak, but they are having hearings at the Supreme Court, I just wanted to say that the clips that are provided that you will see today are provided generously by Marty Scorsese and David Tedeschi, and I just want to make sure to give them credit. They have done a terrific job in going through all the outtakes of the documentary they made years ago to find clips that they thought would be appropriate today, and I wanted to thank both of them for doing that.
From Stephen Breyer: I was so sad to learn of Bob’s death, and I am sorry I cannot be with you today to celebrate and to honor his life. Bob’s friends, indeed all who read his reviews, will remember with gratitude Bob’s learning, his talents, his dedication, and his sense of humor. Bob committed his work- working life to the transmission through the review of a tradition of human culture, of critical thought, and personal liberty to his readers. And Bob succeeded. He created a forum that helped to celebrate sense from nonsense and that directed our time and attention to books and articles that deserved them. He insisted on substance written without neglect to style. His legacy, embodied in the Review, will live on. Sometimes I think like that of the honest monks, though times require it.
Ian Buruma: Why did people owe Bob such loyalty, his writers? Why did they think of themselves as writing for Bob as much as they thought of themselves as writing for the Review? I don’t think it was his smart suits or the semicolons that had to be corrected on Christmas Eve. It was something else. It was something, it was something that he stood for. Now, what was it? I don’t think it was ideological because Bob was not an ideologue. He was a liberal in the American sense of the word; he was free-spirited, left of center, somewhat. Although probably not so much as Robert Epstein was. But he was a liberal politically.
But I think it was something else. I think it was something that George Orwell described as decency. And George Orwell meant, when he wrote this, thought this was a particularly English quality, the quality of the gentle land of stamp collectors and pigeon fanciers. The place where the nosy parker was the worst thing to be, and people were left loathed by the State and other busybodies. Negative liberty as Isaiah Berlin would have put it. There was more to it, I think, in the case of Bob. It wasn’t just negative liberty; it was positive liberty, too. And where did it come from? Perhaps it came from something that actually very few of the people who have written tributes to Bob have paid any attention to, partly because it might have embarrassed him a little bit, which was his Jewish background. I’m not saying that he was embarrassed about being Jewish, but he had ambivalent feelings about it. He had no interest in Judaism as a faith; he had no interest in any real faith really. And I remember the one thing that he ever insisted on taking out of a piece I’d written, which was rather telling, I think. It was about an affair where Catholic nuns in Poland had erected a cross outside the gates of Auschwitz. It was a rather loud and objectionable rabbi from Brooklyn, called Rabbi Weiss, who made a tremendous fuss about this. And I said in my piece that objectionable though he may be, he had a certain point. The gates of Auschwitz may not have been the best place to erect a cross. Bob insisted I take this out because he had such a loathing of zealots of any kind that Rabbi Weiss could simply not have a point in his view.
So what did it mean to him? Well I remember a dinner party once, and somebody asked him what Jewishness meant to him. He thought for a bit and said, “Jews are the people of the book.” And what he meant to say was that this explained perhaps his dedication to the written word. But I think there was something else. I think it also perhaps helps to explain his deep feeling for all people who are persecuted, whoever they were. And I think if he had a faith, it was in the basic need for human rights. He always stood for the persecuted, those who were tortured, those who were locked up and so on. That, I think, was the root of his sense of decency. And the magazine, the paper, will no doubt change. Everything does. But I hope and I trust that that element of Bob’s legacy will remain the same. Thank you.
Mark Danner: I heard about Bob’s death when I- shortly after I stepped off the plane in Beirut. And after the initial shock, which was overwhelming – I knew he’d been sick – I’d spoken to him at various times when he was visibly weakening, but I in no way ever allowed a possibility that he would actually die. I was convinced he would live into his nineties, mid-nineties, as his parents had done. His father had famously played golf until he was ninety-three. After the initial shock in Beirut, I realized I had no idea what I was doing there and the one man who could tell me, I could no longer call. I had been calling him to find out what I was doing in Baghdad, Sarajevo, Mar-A-Lago, to name a really exotic place, for thirty-two years. I met him when I was twenty-two. I was a depressed college student sort of cramped up sitting on a couch in Whitney Ellsberg, excuse me, Whitney Ellsworth’s office. And Bob came charging in. He looked like a movie star. I’d never seen anybody- he was extremely handsome with this extremely elegant suit, tan, manicured. He really looked like camera-ready Hollywood version of what an editor, a New York editor is, but never is.
He sat down, he snatched up this paper I’d brought him, this writing sample, which was a piece about El Salvador that I’d done at Harvard for Stanley Hoffman. I was very proud of it. (Motions extremely fast reading) He proceeded to read it in front of me literally that fast, which was a bit disconcerting, needless to say. And then he said, “Mark, you know, the left. You speak about the left in El Salvador. In what sense is there really a left in El Salvador?” he said. And I was a little struck by this because I had learned I was the expert on El Salvador in my college class, and I began to describe what the left was and he argued with me. And we got into a very strenuous argument during which he revealed that he knew far, far more than I did about El Salvador and the FMLN and God knows what else- more even than Stanley Hoffman. And in the heat of this argument, he suddenly stood up and said, “Well, yes, you’ll be hearing from us,” and he was out the room. He had this very disconcerting way, as many of you probably know, of leaving or of hanging up. It would be (motions an abrupt hang up). And he would leave a dinner party (motions an a speedy, abrupt exit) like that. So I was left sitting there. No one came to collect me, I was just sitting in this room, and I eventually kind of skulked out thinking, “Well, I ruined that opportunity.” It was my only job interview ever. I got a call a couple of hours later offering me the job from Barbara Epstein and I said, “Well, I’d be working for you, of course.” I’d fallen in love with Barbara instantly, the most charming person I’d ever met. “No, no, Bob. Bob is very attracted to you,” she said. So within a month I find myself sitting in this famous office with the toppling huge piles of books. These piles going up into this kind of cigarillo smoke floating above the office. Every now and again, the books would topple down catastrophically onto someone’s desk, or onto someone’s head, and Bob would stomp around. He was a very imperious boss, actually, and I want to get that note into this- these events today.
He could be very baby-like, I would say, if things didn’t go his way. There was a constant problem with getting the galleys from Bob’s hands into the hands of Stanley Hoffman, who vacationed in Lucca- Lucca, Italy. And we would send these things and he couldn’t understand why they couldn’t get there in a day. And he would- when they weren’t there in a day, he would say, “Well, this is horrible! How awful! How awful!” And he would stomp the floor, the piles would fall, and so on.
But the amazing thing about this job, I very quickly took on the night shift and would work for him from two o’clock until– it was supposed to be two-to-nine, but usually two to ten, two to eleven, two to twelve, he would pile things into the inbox as soon as you gave any sign of leaving. And it was a marvelous thing because he would throw these pages, edited pages, into his outbox on the desk, and it was my job to skulk over, grab the pages, skitter back to my desk, and retype it. And these would be manuscripts that needed a lot of work. And it was the most astonishing, magical thing to look at what he did with prose. I’ve worked with many editors, and I’ve been an editor myself, and I’ve never seen anything like it. It was as if there was a kind of scrim over writing. It had dirt on it, it had smudges, it had all sorts of strange things in the middle, and eventually he would pull that scrim off and there it would be: clean and resplendent. Clear, above all, clear. Clarity. Or another analogy might be: days go by and you don’t wash your glasses and suddenly you do and the world suddenly is bright. Or cleaning the Sistine Chapel, there’s another grand metaphor. He would, in some way, restore- and while I agree with Ian that his great value was protecting and helping the oppressed, another great value was clarity, was just clarity. Curiosity and clarity. And this he instilled into the prose he worked on.
And the most amazing thing I remember- I’ll use his name because he’s long gone: George Ball, who was known as a wonderful writer. The State Department man had done this piece for Bob and he edited it, completely rewrote it in this marvelous way. And I typed it up, we put it into galleys, we sent it to George Ball, utterly rewritten. Bob wrote his usual note “Dear George, thank you for this very strong piece. You’ll see we had a suggestion, or two. Hope for changes soon. Best, Bob.” And I got the call and I thought “Oh my God, what is he going to think? ‘Well, Bob hasn’t changed a word, I’m so flattered.’” And this happened again and again and I think it speaks not simply to the amor propio of writers- it speaks to a unique ability he had as an editor to make clear what the writer wanted to say. And it was an extraordinary ability that I have simply never seen replicated. I should say he- this kind of gorgeous alchemy he performed- he really performed on me.
One of the reasons I had gotten the job at the review, I think, is because I used reading the New York Review in college as a procrastination aide. I would just- when I had to write a paper, I would read the New York Review. So I knew the paper very well, but I had a terrible fear of writing. And it was Bob, really, whose faith, whose little messages, whose little- you know, he would send you a New York Times clip from that day. I remember Joan Didion once saying to me “Why does he send me New York Times clips every day? I read them every day.” I was the one sending them at the time. He would send you these clips, and of course they were his way of saying, “Hello, I’m thinking about you. I’m thinking about your piece. I want your piece. I have faith in you that you can do it.” And during- I had these huge struggles with him about pieces I did: a big series on Haiti that we fought around deadlines about, I did an enormous series on Bosnia that just went on for a couple of years, eleven pieces. And most of the editing of these pieces went on after midnight when Bob and I would get into these phone calls that would go on literally for three hours, four hours. I remember the light rising up in Fort Wayne, Indiana where I was then living as we got to the end of this last piece on Srebrenica, which was 40,000 words, the horrible massacre of Srebrenica. And my back just hurting so much that I was lying on the floor with my feet up on a chair, and we got to the forty or so footnotes that had to somehow be matched up because they weren’t in the right order. And finally, we’d been wrestling with the angels, you know, just wrestling and wrestling about these various issues for hours. I finally said weakly, “Bob, do you think we could do the footnotes tomorrow?” And he said, “Absolutely not, a set is about to arrive.” This was five in the morning. Five in the morning. Oh god.
So, I think at the end of the day, the shock—and I’ve been walking around in a funk since he died—is the loss of Bob’s faith, his faith. He had faith in me and what I wrote. He had faith to hold the issue open to allow in what I wrote. He had the kind of unremitting, unvarying, unfailing faith that you really are only entitled to from a parent. He was a man who had- people said he worked hard. He didn’t work hard, that’s what he was. There was no division between what was him and the being of an editor, of a great editor. And there was one other aspect of that and that was: he was a man in love.
The greatest moments in working for him at night, if you stayed late enough, was that moment when he got up and charged in- I’m going to read this little note I wrote to him after she died, if I can find it. I had spoken to Bob the day Lady Dudley died. I had been going to call him on his birthday, but she died two days before. I talked to him in Lazan, and he said to me- I had written him already, but he said to me, “I don’t know where I am,” and later on, “I don’t know who I am.” And these were such tremendously shocking things for him to say. I became terribly worried about him, not just that he was experiencing so much pain, but that he wouldn’t recover. And I wrote him this:
“Dear Bob, on the plane from California yesterday I spent some time thinking of Grace. I recall that the first I had come to know of her was when you used to pause during our evenings working at the Review office in the Fiss building to rise suddenly from your chair and race into Whitney’s office to call her. That would usually be around midnight or so. From my humble desk back in the office, I’d hear bits and pieces of your side of the conversation, and I was always struck by how animated and happy you sounded. You would speak for half an hour or so and then return to plop down at your desk and take a manuscript, pencil, and cigarillo again. You always seemed revitalized. I came to look forward to these pauses. It was not only that the transformative affect was so strong and so lovely, it struck me looking at you with my twenty-two-year-old eyes how you seemed to have everything: a great vocation to which you’re deeply devoted and at the same time the love of your life. I thought how rare it must be for a man to have both. Anyway, you seemed awfully lucky to me. This was thirty years ago, or more. Later I came to know Grace a bit and found I never left a conversation with her without feeling exhilarated. I thought again how lucky you were. I can only imagine how hard the pain of loss must be, but I wanted to write with these memories so vivid now in the thought they might be some small help. Ever, Mark.”
As I say I expected him to live into his mid-nineties, and I think if she had lived longer, he certainly would have, too. And now we’re all left here. I think I have to try to keep working in the way he taught me to work. Because indeed for thirty-two years that is among other things what he taught me. So, okay, good luck kiddo, thanks. What Bob said at the end of the night, “We have to keep slogging on- we must keep slogging on,” and then finally, “Thanks, a lot!”
Helen Epstein: A few weeks ago, I was speaking with a young editor who pointed me to a tribute to Bob by Thomas Meaney, a writer who once worked as a New York Review assistant. Meaney’s piece in The Times Literary Supplement contains many vivid images of life in Bob’s office, but what struck the young editor was this sentence: “He has good writers supply him with more good writers who in turn gave him better pieces for the most part than they gave elsewhere.” “How did he do that?” wondered the young editor.
I’d known Bob since I was two years old, but it took me a while to figure out my own thoughts on this. I do know that when I eventually began writing for him, I was surprised by how exciting it could be to address his manuscript queries, digging up some crucial detail, finding the killer footnote that made the argument airtight. By the time a piece was done, I wanted to declaim it in – before Congress. Working with him often felt less like collaboration than conspiracy, and I will miss his courage most of all. Bob didn’t look like a radical in his black suits and cardigans, but he was in the way that his friend Hannah Arendt meant it when she said, “That although evil can be extreme, only good can be radical,” by which she meant intellectually profound. Bob understood how power works. And without partisanship or sentimentality, he was instinctively sympathetic to those too weak or too oppressed to speak for themselves.
About four years ago, I sent him a somewhat unwieldy nine-thousand-word draft of a piece about a crackdown on government critics in Uganda, which is not a country that hogs the headlines typically. I used to call Bob in the office at midnight, as many people did, because I knew he’d probably be there. “Oh, we’re just getting started,” he’d say. When we spoke about Uganda, he said he’d been having some health problems, and his doctor had advised him to avoid working on long articles. I said I didn’t think I could cut the thing. The story was complicated, but not to worry, I could try my luck somewhere else. But then he said, “No, let’s try it.” And in defiance of doctors’ orders, he helped me wrestle it into two parts, and in due course, he published them both. To my considerable relief, he survived the ordeal. But at the time, it did occur to me that maybe I should have pulled those articles as a medical precaution. I don’t know, but I do know that sometimes there are things doctors don’t understand. We also need a reason to live, and Bob found it with the New York Review, and its staff, its writers and readers, and its subjects.
In January, shortly after his companion Grace died, I stopped by the Review to see him. He had been by her side throughout her illness and seemed devastated, and he himself was ill, and we were about to inaugurate a new president. “There doesn’t seem to be any hope anywhere,” he said. Then we talked about a science piece he had been working on, and his desk was piled with manuscripts and books. His assistants were reading and answering phones and asking questions. And he was like an old general preparing for yet another battle. I am so sorry he didn’t make it this time.
(Clip of Silvers interviewed in New York Review of Books office)
Bob Silvers: Among the important things in my life are, one: I was brought up on a farm in Farmingdale on Broad Allen Road where my father had in the twenties bought a house, and my mother had worked on the New York Globe as a music critic. But they decided to, with the Depression, to live on a farm. My father had been a farm boy in Connecticut. So we were brought up, my brother and I, on a farm, where we had five or six thousand chickens. We had enormous freedom during those Depression years to explore the world around us. And the second thing that I think is lucky for me is that I read in a magazine that you could enter the University of Chicago at whatever age you could pass the entrance examination. Didn’t matter if you were a freshman or sophomore in high school. If you passed, they would welcome you at the University of Chicago. And I thought, that sounds like the most exciting thing, to go to a university. High school was fine, but it seemed that we were spending a lot of time on rather limited subjects. The idea of going to college early was exciting.
So I applied to take the test, and they invited me to go to the University of Chicago when I was fifteen years old. It was a terrific experience because there I was a very young person, fifteen, and the campus, in 1945 when I entered, was full of veterans coming back from the war. And so- one time I was sharing a room with a bomber pilot, about thirty-five years old. But all of these veterans didn’t really distinguish between a fifteen-year-old and a nineteen-year-old or twenty-year-old. They had been out there fighting, and they couldn’t have been more friendly. And they just treated one like their younger brother.
Jennifer Homans: I’m not so sure I need that (laughs). So- Bob. Bob was an enormous figure in my life for over twenty years. I first met him through my late husband, Tony Judt, who was writing for the Review, as many of you know, right up until his untimely death some seven years ago. So Bob’s death also reminds me of Tony and of Tony’s great, great devotion to Bob. Over the last few weeks, I have been trying to figure out just how it was that I knew Bob so very well and in another way not at all, or at least that’s how it feels. I first knew Bob as Tony’s wife, and I got used to having him around in our life. Sometimes, it was a little too intimate. I never quite got accustomed to the midnight calls over the comma or the word choice. I think I am probably the only person who picked up the phone and asked him if he would please check the time zones. I think he was amused. I knew to anticipate Tony’s anxious moods when Bob hadn’t called about an essay he had submitted. I knew those calls from Bob trumped everything. I didn’t really know Bob; I barely spoke to him. It would be “Robert Silvers on the line for Tony Judt.” “Just a moment, please.” But he was just in the air of our household.
We all have our Bob stories, so here is one of mine from that time. Tony and I were in our small farmhouse in rural Vermont with our very young boys. I mean really rural. The town is a crossroads, barely a phone. And Tony had purposely not hooked up a fax machine. One evening, a stranger knocked at the door, and he held out a set of galleys—you won’t be surprised—from Bob. He was the owner of the only little shop nearby, and Bob had contacted him out of the phone book and inquired, “Did he own a fax machine? Would he please be so kind as to deliver these documents to Professor Judt, one of our great writers?” A very Bob phrase, right? “Who lived down the road.”
I knew Bob later as a widow, too, and he was there for some very, very difficult and personal moments. Sorry, it gets me emotional already, in our family life. He was deeply loyal to Tony. And he spoke at his memorial. And he later organized a conference about his ideas in Paris. And what I remember about this was that he came to these events, the memorial in particular, armed with data, data and facts about Tony and about his participation at the Review, about letters received, subscriptions revoked, things that made him close to Tony and his great admiration for Tony’s mind.
I even knew Bob through the eyes of a mother. He welcomed both of my boys, Daniel and Nick, who are here today, for summer work at the Review when they were teenagers. And through them, I learned about other sides of Bob. They would come home and tell me about his habits in the office: his habit of thinking out loud, for example, including his entire open office. He didn’t have an office with a closed door. In his thoughts, “Dear Tom,” he would say, talking into the air. And the young people all around him would scramble to grab a computer and write down the impromptu letter or thought that Bob was having. Or his frequent equally public calls at hat time to Lady Dudley, “Get Lady Dudley on the phone!” And then his voice would soften as he spoke with her. He had cranky moments, too, and his office started to sound to me kind of like a family. And we all know how families can take the brunt of a great man’s charm. So there was that side of Bob, too.
Finally, I had the great good fortune to know Bob as a writer myself, and that, too, became very personal very quickly. It was Bob who helped me to write about Tony’s death. When I sent him an essay about Tony, and it was an essay kind of drenched in emotion – it was soon after his death, he called me right away on the phone and left me a very long message. Then we spoke. He said, “We just need something more about the politics so that our readers will understand better how feelings relate to politics and ideas, because that’s what we do.” He was looking for something larger, more elevated, a kind of eye looking in over the shoulder of my very personal experience. I began to think that ideas maybe were one of the locks and keys to Bob’s own emotions. Bob actually helped me a lot with my mourning. Not by greeting me as so many people did—and I was grateful to them, too—as a friend at the door with tears and hugs. Not by crying, but precisely by being dry-eyed, by letting me write and making me focus on words. He was so insistent, “What about those words and ideas?” It was a great relief actually. And as I think about it now, what never occurred to me, and I am kind of, I don’t know why it never occurred to me, is that as we worked, Bob was in mourning, too. He had loved Tony, and he had his own feelings, but he just never inserted himself that way at the time. Even in the many lunches and dinners we had together, Bob had a way of turning a conversation away from himself, and back to me, or over to another writer. The terrific piece that so-and-so is writing about such-and-such. I was interested in him, and I would ask personal questions about love, about women, his childhood. But as I think back on it, those conversations somehow slipped through my fingers in a way. And what I remember, what comes to my mind, is some image of Grace or the way he talked about his time, just as he did for us today, at the University of Chicago, one of his favorite subjects. He told me often of the World War II veteran, a bomber pilot I believe, he had roomed with and whose ideas he admired. Other people, other things. So when Bob told stories, his stories were about ideas and about other people and especially about his writers. About us. When we tell our Bob stories, they are mostly about us, too. The things Bob did for us, the ways he sought us out, brought us out, devoted himself to us, protected us when those letters came in, and he would say, “How shall we respond?” Writing for Bob, I never felt alone.
So when I think of Bob, it’s actually hard for me sometimes to pull up the picture of a man. Instead, I get the picture of all of us, a picture crowded with writers and ideas and Bob’s office family milling around his desk at the Review. I was reminded of this the other day when someone at the Review called to ask if I had any pictures of Tony and Bob. They could only find pictures of Tony, none of Tony with Bob. I didn’t have any, either, and I thought, even the pictures are all of us.
The irony of all of this only dawned on me recently. Here was this seemingly impersonal man making it somehow possible for me and for so many of us to write in very personal ways about things we really cared about. He was like a foil. His reserve acted as a kind of protective cover, allowing me at least to take all kinds of chances. He almost erased himself in a way to feature us. But, and if it was important, he was always there. He was really there all the time in that fine print at the bottom of the page, “Editor: Robert B. Silvers.” The royal we, which he seemed so partial to and which could seem so grand. One of our great writers. We just need a little bit more about the history. Our readers will want to know. Dear Tom, to his entire office. That royal we was not actually royal at all. It was him and us. Maybe it was good for Bob not to be alone, too.
When I was writing for Bob about George Balanchine more recently, I came to think that Bob and Balanchine were strangely similar emotionally. Balanchine was another one who placed his life in service to an art, to dancing and dancers, just as Bob put himself in service to writers and writing. Balanchine, too, put himself in the background. He liked to stand quietly tucked into the first wing, right in the downstage right wing, to watch performances. He was self-effacing and a giant, confident at the same time. And like Bob, he recorded his name modestly in the fine print in the program, “George Balanchine, Ballet Master.”
So when I think about Bob, I think that he left us a body of work, a great body of work. But he also left and perhaps above all a body of people, us. The Review was a kind of collective, an enterprise, a common project, with Bob orchestrating it all, tucked away into the first wing of every issue. His writers, his office, and everyone who made the Review happen. His readers, spreading concentric circles out around the world. All of the royal we that was the review. The Review had started to seem to me, maybe this is just a professional bias, was more like a performance than text or a magazine or a book. He called it “the paper” for a reason. It was ephemeral, here and gone, a testimony to a moment in time, even as it was also a record of a moment in time. And like a performance, it was never a single person. It was made between people in that mysterious thing that happens between a great editor and a writer, in that space in the middle between them. All of it, I think, depended very much on Bob being exactly who he was.
So a body of people, are all still here. At least some of us are. And we are all beneficiaries of Bob’s extraordinary focus and attention on us. He gave us our better selves. So I have been thinking recently to those who say, as many of us have said to each other over the past days, I hardly knew him, even though I knew him so well. I guess I would say maybe we knew him well enough. He was just there all the time. The kind of love you never fully realize until it is gone. Ladies and gentlemen, Robert B. Silvers. Thank you.
Tony Marx: It’s good to have you all here in the library that Bob loved. He always came to every meeting. He was always brilliant. He was always focused on the books, on reading, and on the core, and on the new. He loved what happened here. Bob Silvers leaves us, the library, with a great Cullman Center, which he loved; with the Robert B. Silvers annual lecture; a movie you are all about to see from the great Fred Wiseman, who he introduced us to; the archive of James Baldwin at the Schomburg, which he was so delighted to see happen; and of course, with thanks to Roger and Helen, the New York Review of Books archive, here at the library that he loved. And he loved you all. His company. Because Bob was all about quality of the company he gathered in person and in print. In fact, as I was reading, as were many of us, was the column in the last issue, columns about him, I thought the best I could do was just read from those columns, and then I heard Bob’s voice saying, “You know they can read.”
When I was twenty-two years old, my first boss bought me my first subscription to the New York Review of Books. And he said simply, “You’ll be all right from now on.” Decades later, like so many of us, I look forward to opening the door and finding it there. Going through it, I don’t know how you all do it, but I go through it and I turn down all the corners of the pages of the articles that I am going to have to read over the next couple weeks before the next one comes. They’re sort of assignments to myself, and I am always dismayed, amused, and excited to see that the whole thing is thumbed down. There are so many different ideas, so many different issues that Bob brought to us. It’s a bit like New York. When I think about the New York Public Library, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, there is a theme. This amazing city that brings us all together, that brings together different voices, that is better for more conversation, more thinking, and more debating. That’s New York. That was Bob. That was the Review. Bob knew that there are no dangerous thoughts, but that thinking itself is dangerous. Of course, he also knew that not thinking is even more dangerous – dangerous not to be made better writers by better thinking, and better thinking from better writing.
Even before I met Bob, I learned this. Little did I know the connection to Bob. In college, a professor who had studied with Hannah Arendt handed me an offprint of an article of hers that Arendt had given her. For a kid from Washington Heights, this was sort of an amazing moment. Hannah Arendt had touched maybe this offprint that I was now being given. It’s an amazing essay. I went back after Bob died and re-read it. “Thinking as Moral Considerations.” Hannah Arendt talks about the role of Socrates and the similes he used. To be a gadfly, to arouse us from sleep, by hard questions. To force us to rethink our assumptions subversive to the easy and unexamined life. To be a midwife, to help new ideas be born. To resist the trivial and the dogmatic or the acting without thinking. And to be an electric eel, forcing us in our busyness to stop and think. Bob was truly Socratic. He knew that thinking requires reading and it requires an array of reading, a difference, and it always benefits from revision. Always.
We had a program here where two of the incoming and outgoing editors of the New Yorker spoke last week. David, you will remember. There was some sort of amusement and shock in the audience that even poetry benefits from great editing. Bob was the great editor. Actually maybe the Hannah Arendt piece could be rethought. Instead of thinking as moral consideration, how about editing as moral consideration? Something might be done with that. But thinking and editing aren’t enough to insure morality by themselves. Those need to be tested. They need to be engaged across difference. Open to criticism and editing. It is the meat of it and the mix of it. That is where enlightenment comes from, and the result is essential. To quote from Arendt’s essay, “When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those who think are drawn out of hiding because of their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby comes a kind of action. The manifestation of the wind of thought is the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this indeed may prevent catastrophes in the moments when the chips are down.”
Bob Silvers leaves us reaffirmed in our commitment to enlightenment, the ideals, the ideas, and the action. Not to it being easy, but to keep working at it. Working for it. To write for it. To fight for it. We will all miss Bob. But we will all continue to be inspired by him.
Daniel Mendelsohn: I wish that Martin Scorsese had had his cameras in the green room earlier today. It would have given you great insight into the working minds of the New York Review of Books’ contributors. We were looking at the program and performing exegeses on the order of the speakers. Why are you between childhood and turn on the lights? Why am I closer to the Ligurian coast? Someone said, “Well, actually it’s just alphabetical order?”
If Bob Silvers had had children, who could doubt that one or all of them would be standing here today talking about him lovingly as a man and a father, and not as a figure in the great world, the legendary editor and mentor to so many writers? As we know, he had no children. The Review in a way was his child, his life’s great project. Yet it nonetheless seems important to me to commemorate him as a man with qualities that made many of us love as well as admire him. These qualities did not necessarily lie on the surface. Indeed, for all his considerable worldliness, for all that he was a public figure who relished going out into the world, Bob kept a great deal, most of himself I think, in reserve. This was partly out of a deep sense of privacy, but partly, too, I think, out of an even deeper kind of modesty. When I first considered what to say about him today, there were things I wanted to mention, random things I thought, memories or anecdotes I could talk about in no particular order, that people who didn’t know him ought to be aware of. But after assembling them, I see now that what underlies them all is a surprising quality of humility.
A fictitious child of Bob Silvers might want people to know about his extraordinary kindness, a soul-bred politeness, particularly to people who someone in his position might not had ever noticed to begin with. No one I had ever known was more solicitous of or generally interested in talking to waitresses, barmen, maître d’s, cabbies, bellhops, elevator operators, and doormen. To have lunch with him in a restaurant or to take a cab with him across town was to receive a life lesson in kind egalitarianism that is vanishing from this city and a country, particularly in these terrible times. I recall riding in a taxi to the movies around the time that the Second Gulf War began. We nearly missed the film because Bob was so engrossed in his conversation and in listening to the driver’s thoughts about Iraq. “What a terrific fellow!” he exclaimed as we rushed into the theater. “So many good ideas!” More than once in his final days, the doormen and elevator operators in his building would anxiously take us aside and ask about him. And as they did, they would invariably mention that he was their favorite tenant by far, always asking about them, their lives, and their families. He knew them.
Something else that a fictitious child of Bob might want to mention was his touching, almost boyish capacity for wonder, his infinite ability to be delighted, amused, stimulated, which never left him, even in the final weeks. He didn’t like to fuss about himself, as several people have already pointed out. He didn’t like to talk about what he did or how he did it, but he did take great delight in fussing over others and what they could do. Artists, thinkers, jurists, dowagers, musicians, politicians, socialists, catamites, writers, and above all of course, Grace, that marvelous girl, as he would say, averting his eyes slightly as if overcome by the thought. That marvelous girl with her fineness of mind and spirit. Marvelous, indeed, was a favorite adjective, and he used it often and enthusiastically. I would walk into a restaurant with him, Jean’s on 58th Street, when I first knew him; Perry Street after the paper moved downtown; and most recently the Brasserie Inn. The same maître d’ as usual would usher him to his usual table where he would order the same dish he always did. And yet each time, he’d open his arms wide in a gesture of astonished gratitude and exclaim, “How marvelous! This is just a terrific table!” as if it were all for the very first time, and he couldn’t be more delighted at his great good luck in finding such a terrific maître d’ or table or dish. I don’t think that this was for show. As often, I felt that he was both a bit bemused and rather excited to find himself in the middle of a life that had given him all of this.
As we know, this ability to be entertained by the world served him well as an editor. “Isn’t that marvelous!” he cried one day after I had painstakingly walked him through the plotlines of all five seasons of Battlestar Galactica. “Robots! Robots that look just like humans! Why, how marvelous! Yes, yes, we must have something on it in the paper.” To delight in the delight of others, to warm quickly to the enthusiasm of others, to create a space where someone else’s passions can grow and flourish. We have heard so much recently about how all these made Bob a great editor that we can forget that they are, too, the strengths of a good parent. We here today, who in a certain way are standing in for the children that Bob never had, ought to remember that, too, and be grateful for it.
And then there was this funny thing, which I am happy to see that Jennifer also made reference to. There was this funny thing about Bob that struck me from the very start when he first asked me to contribute to the Review late in 1999. And here I refer to his mysterious use of the first-person plural. At first, I naturally assumed that “we” referred to him and Barbara and thought nothing of it. But even after her death, the plural persisted. I devoted a great deal of exegetical energy to finding out why he referred to himself in this way. Sometimes, I suspected that this “we” was a kind of scream, the plurality allowing him to prod or cajole without seeming too overwhelming, overbearing, too much the authority figure. “We are very much looking forward to the piece,” he might gently write, when I was in fact four months behind with an article. At other times, it occurred to me that the “we” was a kind of mechanism for absorbing the excess of excitement or exasperation that he felt about some subject, as if he felt it was ungenerous, untoward even, to assume that others wouldn’t react exactly as he would. “We do think something on the homosexual question is just right,” he might say. Or alternatively, “We do have the Žižek Antigone to think about if that subject is not too unbearable.” And sometimes it was clear that the corporate pronoun was simply him speaking for a beloved paper. “We do hope,” he would write wearily, “you will find a way to keep the piece to under 3,200 words.” If you didn’t know Bob, you might think that this grammatical tick was rather grand. The only other person who as far as I am aware regularly uses the first-person plural when referring to herself wears a crown and lives in London.
But although Bob’s life had the trappings in many ways of great grandeur, the immense prestige that he rightly enjoyed, the honors and tributes and awards he had deservedly accumulated, the rarefied circles in which inevitably he came to travel, the marvelous apartment filled with the books and beautiful things that he and Grace had amassed through two lifetimes. Although his life had much grandeur in so many ways, it now occurs to me that his reflexive resort to the “we” was actually much more than I had ever imagined. It was, I now think, a sign of a profound and authentic modesty, as if to say “I” would be an act of unthinkable self-aggrandizement. Since his death, many have written and spoken with wonderful eloquence of the way in which he has subsumed himself to the Review entirely and to its mission, and there is no doubt that this is true. But it has to be the case that Bob Silvers’ ability to lose himself in the paper so totally, to efface himself, proceeded from a preexisting quality in his character: this strange and touching humility, a kind of shyness, I would say, that I feel it is important to commemorate today. This finally explains so much about him in retrospect. Not least, it accounts for his public persona, which so many of us knew so well, both the old-fashioned formality and the hail-fellow-well-met bon ami allowed him to deflect attention from himself in the course of an intensely crowded professional and social life. But even more, it has to be the case that this natural modesty, the impulse to deflect attention, was precisely what allowed him to see and take seriously all those people whom others might not even notice in the first place. It was what allowed him to endure the world so thoroughly and take delight in it because he was mortified at the thought of taking up too much of its space himself.
It also explains Grace, whom we ought to remember, too, today. Many of us knew Bob well and loved him, but I have no doubt that the only person who could penetrate his reserve was Grace. If Bob was the lock, complex, sometimes baffling, the workings hidden from view, then Grace was the key. And I do not wonder that he could not live without her. All this also suggests why Bob, who had a lively sense of fun, wasn’t paradoxically terribly funny himself. He preferred others to take center stage, to get the laughs. This brings me to my final anecdote.
The only time I recall Bob ever making a joke was at the end of a long dinner party at his place. This was maybe fifteen years ago, soon after he had taken me under his wing, when I was still over-awed to be invited to his and Grace’s home, where you might find Lizzie Hardwick and Joan Didion and John Richardson and Dame Edna lounging on the sofa. It happened that on the morning of this dinner, I’d had a phone call from a reporter who was working on one of those breathless articles about the succession at the New York Review of Books that pop up from time to time. After declining to talk to the reporter, I emailed Bob immediately to warn him that this piece was in the works. Unaware as I was then as to just how many such articles and queries he had weathered over the years, I didn’t hear back from him all morning and afternoon. And that evening, through drinks and then dinner, when he still didn’t bring it up, I started to fret silently, worrying that I’d overstepped some invisible boundary by bringing up the subject of his stepping down. This was how the reporter had phrased it. Then when the evening was ending and the others were dispersing, Bob walked me down the long hall toward the door. A bit nervously, I cleared my throat and asked him whether he had received my email earlier that day. “Oh, Danny. Oh, Danny,” he said, “How good of you to let me know. You know, I never pay attention to these things.” I sighed with relief. “Okay,” I finally said. “But for future reference, what do I tell them when they ask what happens when you step down?” At this, Bob threw an arm around my shoulders and laughed. “Tell them what I always tell them,” he said, a gleam in his dark eye. “Tell them, ‘Never step down, only step up.’”
(Clip of Silvers interviewed in Oxford, England)
Bob Silvers: Arnaldo Momigliano was one of the greatest classicists in the world. As it happened, when I was seeing Isaiah Berlin right up the street here, I said, “Well, you know, there is a book by Andrew Alföldi about the origins of Rome.” And Isaiah said, “Ha! Alföldi. Well. If you haven’t thought of anybody else, I wonder if you have thought of Arnaldo Momigliano. He’s in London.” And so I rang up Momigliano. But I first read some of his writing. Because the rule of the New York Review is we never ask anyone to write for us, no matter how grand, no matter how brilliant, unless we have carefully read some of their work. Because if we don’t do that, we have the most terrible disappointment. Some of the most famous people turn out to be rather bad writers. And so, in Isaiah’s house, there was a book of essays by Momigliano, and he wrote a marvelous review about the origins of Rome. Then the day came when Isaiah wrote a book on Vico. And I thought, well, here is Momigliano, the great expert on Italian culture, Italian civilization, Italian classics. I sent him this review. Momigliano was a friend of Isaiah. I remembered meeting him in the summers outside Berlin’s house on the Italian Ligurian coast, and he himself, Momigliano, vacationed nearby, and he would come by and we would see him. But, when he wrote this review, he was quite sour about Isaiah Berlin’s book. He didn’t think that this view of Vico was really very convincing and that Vico was rather provincial in his knowledge of philosophy at that time. And I was rather troubled by this review. Isaiah was a friend of mine, and I myself had read the book, and I wondered about some of the statements in it. And I had heard that Momigliano, at that moment, in the early summer, was in residence in All Souls. He had simply turned up there, and he was so important that he could always go there if he wanted, and he was doing research in some library in Oxford. So I was in London briefly. Isaiah said, “You must come down and stay” where he was, having been in Princeton for many years and a great friend of mine in New York. And so I came down and stayed in the library, which had a bed, and I went over to see Momigliano, and I said, “You know, there is something left out of this review. Isaiah has made a great point about Vico’s use of Neapolitan jurisprudential thinking as a component of his idea of each epoch having its own rules.” Momigliano said to me, “Ha! You’ve read these Neapolitan jurors, have you?” So I said, “I am counting on you for that.” He said, “I have read them.” That would suggest the kind of problem that the editor of a magazine runs into. We all have friends. We have to face the fact that they may get bad reviews. And they often do. And I believe in a way that is kind of the price of editing a paper that has some integrity. That up to a point, you want to help the writers, you would like to encourage them, but when it comes to a review that is by someone you respect that is critical, you have to publish it. That is the test of the integrity of a magazine. And I must tell you that we have done it a lot.
Martin Scorsese: That’s one of my favorite—I’m sorry to say – outtake, moments of the many hours of interviews that we did with Bob and others for The 50 Year Argument, which is the film made about the Review that I made with David Tedeschi. Of course, I fully empathize with Bob there because I’m not up on eighteenth century Neapolitan jurisprudence myself. Seventeenth maybe, but not eighteenth. Take us to 2012, I get a letter from Bob Silvers, telling me he liked the film we put together on Bob Dylan called No Direction Home and asked me if I had any interest in making a film about the 50th anniversary of the New York Review of Books. And I- yeah, we had a meeting. I had been a reader as much as possible of the New York Review of Books back, I think, from its first copy back in the early sixties. What eventually intrigued me here was the idea of trying to make a film about thoughts: thinking, reflection, dissent, all expressed by the means of the written word. Thought in action. Thought as action, actually. I mean- obviously featuring the writers discussing their work and the close relationship with their editor, Bob. So I decided to go ahead. David Tedeschi came on. We started with a commemorative event at Town Hall on February 5, 2013. I think some of you here today were there. That was my first encounter with Bob. Encounter, or trying to work with him on some of this stuff. It is still a film in a way. We had the chairs lined up on the stage with our contributors that evening who were going to speak. We had Bob sitting there. But he insisted that the writers be up front. He wanted to sit behind. Margaret Bodde, who was our producer, came up to me and said, “He doesn’t want to sit there.” I said, “He is going to ruin the wide shot. The whole thing is nicely lined up with the A camera, and we have the B camera.” She said, “No, no.” Apparently he got pretty heated about it, Margaret, right? Yeah. He would not sit with the writers or in front of the writers. He sat behind. And we covered it with our B camera.
I mean, no matter what, he was at the center of it all. In a picture filled with so many remarkable presences, for me, he was the most remarkable really, in all that footage. He really was the most remarkable of all. Whether he was in motion, which was really all the time, even if he was just sitting there looking at the computer screen or reading. His eyes were in motion, you know. He was in motion all the time. The scene in the cab, on the phone giving directions to his staff, in person, speaking, editing, reading, social circles. Even in the stills that Brigitte Lacombe did. Those beautiful black and white portraits she did at the time. I really got to admire him. His charm of course, his devotion to learning was always enlarging his own knowledge of the world, and ours as well. I guess sometimes we got in the way with our camera in his office, but I do like the story he tells here about the Review about the Ligurian coast and the review of Isaiah Berlin’s book on Vico. I mean, first of all, it’s the way he tells it. It’s his manner, his formality, his beaming smile, his body language. In effect, what we look at there is really- the kind of films I make, it’s the actor. It’s a remarkable presence.
Then in the story there is a devotion to his friend, Isaiah Berlin. The disappointment that Momigliano had written a sour, mixed review and his commitment to publishing the review anyway. But what I like about that clip and the way he tells the story is the sense that I think that Bob felt he should have been up on his eighteenth-century Neapolitan jurisprudence himself. It wasn’t enough that the writers of the book and the review had read it all. I think he felt he should have. For me, being around him only for those few years, I felt that with Bob, you can never know enough. Your vision can always be widened and sharpened, allowing you to see, or at least think about, new dimensions and directions. I think we’d all agree on that point, and I suppose we’d all agree that we’re at a very strange moment in history, when people in power are using emotion to override facts in history. A time when we need Bob and the Review and thinking more than ever. The word “decency” comes to mind.
And of course, I’m coming at this from my own particular angle, cinematically speaking, and I’m honored to be here today to be able to speak in fond remembrance of a very special human being that I first came to see and know through the lens of my camera.
Anka Muhlstein: Last December, we were—and when I say “we,” I don’t want to sound like Bob Silvers. I just want to say that I was at a Christmas party with my husband Louis Begley. We are at this Christmas party given by John Train. John, among many other things, is the co-founder of the Paris Review. And the party was a noisy, jolly, crowded affair. I noticed Bob coming in and observed how deftly he made his way towards John. He sat next to him, chatted with him for about five minutes, got up, and left. And as he was leaving, he bumped into me. He opened his arms wide to give me his sort of characteristic bear hug and tell me, “Oh, Anka, I am rushing out straight to the airport. I am so happy. I am going to Rosans. I am going to spend the end of the year with Grace. You know, we have such a marvelous time together.” And I watched him, startled by his expression, because at this point, I knew he was gravely ill, and she was facing yet another operation. But he looked so joyous. It didn’t matter. He was going to see her the next day, and that was what counted. But then he added something. As if I had been worried or had any doubt about it. He said, “You know, when I’m in Rosans, I work just as well if not better than when I’m in New York.” He said, “My young people,” he always alluded to his assistants as his young people, “My young people have set up my fax and email in such a way that I read everything that comes through and I can send anything with the greatest ease. So actually, when I’m there, it’s as if I were here.” And on this, he was off.
This is really how I want to remember Bob. I want to remember his indestructible loyalty to his old friends. After all, it is John Train, who sort of lured him to the Paris Review as an editor, and this was the beginning of the great career of course that he had. I want to remember the passion he had for Grace. A passion that gave him this inner strength and I think fueled his energy, his extraordinary energy. And of course, how could I forget? I mean, his absolute dedication to the Review, to his Review. To his obsession with exactitude, to his determination to always have the best possible paper, and for that, he obtained it, thanks to his sort of miraculous capacity of always being available. I have never dealt with anybody else at the Review but Bob during the years I wrote for him. I could always call him. He would always pick up the phone. Emails were answered in less than an hour, if not immediately. And he was always ready to help, to offer what he called always a tiny suggestion. And in my case, he allowed me to write in French.
So I’m grateful that he died at the helm. As we know, he was reading and correcting his galleys up ‘til the very last days, his memory and intelligence intact. As- to use the expression that Daniel used – he never had to step down. He went out- at eighty-seven – he went out as Robert Silvers. Thank you.
Samantha Power: Bob Silvers has always seemed to me to be the keeper of idealism in the United States. There was nothing heavy or self-involved about his idealism. He had a set of grand beliefs of course. Governments shouldn’t kill their people. They shouldn’t interfere with freedom of speech or religion. They shouldn’t lock people up for their point of view. And they should protect minorities and respect the result of fair elections. Sure, he believed all that. But Bob also had a set of ideals that were simpler, more ordinary, to which he summoned all around him. Don’t be indirect. Figure out what you believe. Figure out what you mean. Strive for perfection, even as you remain humble about your ability to achieve it. Be faithful to what you believe and to whom you love. Don’t be a phony. Don’t be a snob. And above all, don’t be a bully. Bob delighted, and that is the word that so many have used, Bob delighted in so many aspects of his life, but especially the freedom that creating his own paper had given him. “Because we own the paper,” he would say giddily, “we can publish what we want.” However unconventional he or his writers chose to be, he got a permanent kick out of the fact that, as he put it, “Nobody can tell us what to do!” And while others hailed the influence and the prestige of the readers of the New York Review, Bob claimed to have no interest in who his readers were. Instead boasting, “We never relied upon or even inquired into the nature of the audience.” End quote. He did pause, and a few seconds later, he admitted, I think with intended humor, “I assume they are quite mature.”
I’ve spent the weeks since Bob’s death listening to Bob in any interview I could find, just to have that voice back. I for the first time heard him speak about the link between his own freedom as an editor and the freedom he sought for others. He told one interviewer, “If you are in the position of an editor who can do what he wants, you do have an obligation to care about people who are being treated brutally. People who are being repressed.” He said, “Speaking up for the most elementary human rights to me is an obvious, basic obligation that editors in our situation have.” Bob took notable pride in having given voice to once obscure prisoners of conscience, in documenting terror in all of its forms, and in calling statesmen and citizens to find their better angels. On the rare occasions that he was prodded into reflecting on his legacy, he kept coming back in interview after interview, back to government abuse and individual liberty, emphasizing as he put it, “If there has been a large theme in our paper in the years since we started, I suppose you would say it is human rights.”
I started writing for Bob in 2002. Back then, I was probably not as scared of dangerous places as I should have been, and I was far more scared of Bob than I needed to be. I triggered his temper on occasion, which was not pleasant, but I was way less frightened of angering Bob than I was of disappointing him. That meant that I didn’t dare resist him. Once, when he came looking for an overdue article, I emailed him back apologetically that I would do my best, but I was in rural Ireland with Cass getting married the day after tomorrow. He wrote back promptly and ebulliently, “How marvelous, you’re getting married. Every good wish to you both. I hate even to mention our piece in the middle of the moment. We’ll simply hope for the entire text in the next few days. My best, Bob.” You can’t make this stuff up. He made all of his writers feel as though we were recruits into some global conspiracy striving for truth and virtue. I was amazed to have been included, fearful always of forfeiting his surprising trust and altogether taken by his improbable unpretentiousness and his defining sense of mischief.
When I joined the U.S. government, I assumed it would not be possible to write for Bob. But because I never lost the habit of craving his wisdom, I sent him some of my speeches occasionally, and somehow he never failed to respond. Last year, to my surprise, he decided to publish an article based on one of them. It was a long argument on how the dichotomy between realism and idealism, between national security and human rights was misplaced and obsolete, given the nature of contemporary challenges. In the first draft, I sought to rebut the notion that the way the government treated its people is, as I put it, a purely moral concern- a merely moral concern. I wanted to rebut that idea, that the way the government treats its people is merely a moral concern. His reaction to that phrase, which came by email to me on my phone as I was sitting in the UN Security Council, was negative, and it was overpowering.
Indeed, the best tribute to Bob’s idealism I can offer in closing is his response. He wrote, “The problem with the phrase ‘merely moral’ is that the national security interest can certainly be argued to be of the greatest moral concern. I see you are referring to people who may seem to classify humanitarian issues as moral concerns and, therefore, by their understanding, not of the highest concern, but with lesser concern with respect to the allegedly more important issue of national security. But it is certainly very entirely plausible and rational to argue that maintaining national security entails a great many moral consequences and is therefore a moral concern.” Now he had me at hello. Mine had been a lazy half-thought, not a considered judgment or phrase, but he was not to be stopped. His email continued, “I fear that the use of the phrase ‘merely moral’ would be vulnerable since it would seem to refer to a use of the word ‘moral’ without making it clear just what someone who said an issue was ‘merely moral’ would be referring to. I have not heard someone say that harmful treatment of humans was merely a moral issue. They may feel this is the case in relation to what they regard as issues of political power and influence, but I doubt that would actually be said. And there would be many reasons not to say it. Please consider this, and I hope we can soon be in touch.” That was Bob, precise, determined, and deeply humane. And I consider it one of the great blessings in my life that we had the chance to be in touch. Thank you.
Nathaniel Rich: When a press deadline approached, Bob would gather the remaining unfinished manuscripts and hole up in a small conference room down the hall. The assistants were under strict orders not to interrupt him. We walked on tiptoes by the door, which he left cracked ajar. On one of those tense deadline days, I was slipping past the room when I heard Bob call my name. “Oh, Nat.” I froze, rehearsing in my head the various reasons Bob might want to see me, the mortifying errors I might have made. Perhaps I’d forgotten to enter the last round of changes or failed to sharpen his pencils sufficiently. He showed me the galley he was working on. It was a piece by Marshall Frady, the great civil rights journalist and historian. He had been writing for the New York Review for more than thirty years. Frady was sixty-four now and dying of cancer; he would die about a month later. But he’d managed to submit a final piece to Bob, a review of a 750-page book about the 1913 arrest, conviction, and eventual lynching of Leo Frank, the Jewish factory manager falsely accused of killing a thirteen-year-old girl who worked at his plant. Bob pointed out a passage describing Frank’s abduction from his prison bed on a hot August night by a posse of prominent local citizens. “On the long drive back toward Marietta,” wrote Frady, “he sat between two men in the backseat of a car, his nightshirt luminous among the galoshes and wool hats, neatly resigned now to his doom as the caravan took back roads through moonlit cotton fields, coming into the outskirts of the town, just at dawn, where it stopped at a stand of woods by a cotton gin. Frank was hauled out, blindfolded, tied at his hands and feet, and lifted up on a table. The rope was slung over the limb of an oak tree.” I looked up at Bob. “Well?” he said. I struggled to spot the mistake in the passage. I felt like I was failing a test. “Well?” said Bob. “Isn’t it marvelous?” He sighed. “Poor Marshall. What a wonderful writer. Just marvelous.” I agreed with Bob. It was a beautiful piece of writing, and I thought how remarkable it was that here, after more than forty years on the job, Bob still derived such joy from his life’s work, and that his joy should overcome even the sorrow that attended it. How enviable, I thought, that after all this time, he should still be animated by his love of other writing and writers- other minds as beautiful as his own.
On my way out of the conference room, he called me back. “Oh, Nat. There are changes to be added in the galley,” he said, “and pencils to be sharpened.”
Hederman: I have just a brief note to read from Peter Singer, who is in Australia and couldn’t be here today.
Note from Singer: “Only someone truly open to new ideas, no matter how unfashionable, could have published in 1973, an unsolicited essay on animal liberation from a young and little-known philosopher. The very idea of animal liberation was unknown and liable to be met with ridicule, and indeed, the New York Review of Books was ridiculed for publishing the essay. But Bob’s decision to publish led directly to my book of the same title, which Bob edited and published. I will always be thankful for what Bob did. He played a vital part in triggering the modern animal movement and thus in reducing the suffering of billions of animals.” And Zadie Smith.
Zadie Smith: I expected to feel very sad when Bob died. But what I didn’t foresee was the sense of innovation, of not having a reason to do things. Writers often get asked in an interview, “Who is your ideal reader?” or, “Who do you write for?” And the answer is not expected to be a concrete individual in the world. But when Bob died, I realized how many things I wrote, not only in a technical sense for the Review, but really only existed at all because I wanted Bob’s attention or approval in some way. I even found traces of the same self-pitying thought when a fond parent dies. Who will always be on my side as he was? But all my memories of Bob are very jolly. Of course, I heard tales of the shouting of interns and the throwing of books at their heads, but I never saw any of that. I only ever got the impeccably dressed, lunch-buying, blue-suit-wearing Bob, the root-causes-of-the-Vietnam-War-explaining Bob, the Bob who long ago gave up smoking and drank nothing stronger at lunch than limeade, the Bob with the mischievous line and the kind of literary gossip he knew I loved.
One of the first stories he told me had some of his good humor and grace in it. It was over our first dessert. He told me about accompanying Nabokov to the opera to see Nabokov’s son Dmitri sing. At that time, Dmitri thought he was an opera singer. And Nabokov was tone-deaf. He couldn’t hear or enjoy music. I said to Bob, “How was Dmitri?” He said, “Well, he was really very bad.” And I said, “What did you say to Nabokov?” He said, “Well, I told him he was marvelous, marvelous!” Ha, ha, ha.
When we first met, I was really quite young, and I approached our lunches as you might a meal with an older relative uptown. I never wore jeans. I always tried to look as smart as him. Once to amuse him, I wore a full 1950s skirt suit with a fox fur stole. And it did amuse him. He said it was like having lunch in a Mary McCarthy novel. But everything about my relation to Bob seemed a little fictional. He was part of a New York dream I was having. Every other part of life in the city normalized over the years and became familiar, but lunch with Bob always felt completely improbable. I never got over pretending to nod casually as he described line-editing Baldwin or Didion or Sontag, and I never got over the fact he had any time for me at all. As our lunch ended, he would create the illusion of being exclusively focused on getting some essay or another out of you and only you. It took a while to realize that he practiced this exact same intensity on everybody. He made everybody feel that whatever they were writing was incredibly urgent, even if it was six months late. With Bob goes the urgency. You feel something in you, and you slacken. He was to me a source of constant inspiration and motivation, and in himself was the carrot and the stick, a high bar and a personal model. And like a lot of people here I’m sure, I still owe him a ton of work, pieces we discussed over lunch but I was either too lazy or anxious to start, or pieces I had began but never finished. I suppose most things will get done, all of our work in the end, but never again with the thrilling sense that Galley B is going back to him. Truly an ideal reader and the friend in New York I most urgently wanted to impress. Thank you, Bob.
Patti Smith: Hello, everybody. I was only in recent times summoned by Mr. Silver. He wanted me to write a review of a book about Robert Bresson, one of my favorite filmmakers, but I didn’t feel qualified to write such a piece. But I promised him that I would serve him in the future. So Bob, I am serving you now. And I would like to sing this little song for you. “I was a wing in heaven blue/out on the ocean/sword in the rain/and I was free/I needed nobody/It was beautiful/It was beautiful/I was a pawn/Couldn’t make a move/Couldn’t go nowhere/No future at all/Yet I was free/I needed nobody/It was beautiful/It was beautiful/And if there’s one thing/could do for you/You’d be a wing/In heaven blue/I was an image/In another eye/And I saw nothing/No future at all/Yet I was free/I needed nobody/It was beautiful/It was beautiful/And if there’s one thing/Could do for you/You’d be a wing/In heaven blue/And if there is one thing/Could do for you/You’d be a wing/In heaven blue.” Thank you, Bob. Thank you.
Hederman: I’d just like to say a couple of thank you’s. First, to Patti and the others who were speaking today so eloquently and movingly about Bob. The second thing is Marty mentioned when they were filming The 50 Year Argument, cameras were in our office for days and days. We came to know the crews. It’s nice to be reunited with all of them again, that they put together these outtakes to show us and remind us of what Bob was and how he was. It was so wonderful to see that again. And the work that the crews did, they spent hours setting up the video systems. I’d just like to thank Francis and Margaret and Luca and Lisa and of course Marty and David for putting that together. And finally, I’d like to thank the New York Review staff, many of whom are here, sitting a few rows back. *applause break*
They supported Bob in so many ways over the years. They have sustained the magazine, and they I think have made it possible for the magazine to continue as we definitely will do. And again, thank you all for coming. Thank you.
