Dear Leon,
You once told me that you were thinking of writing a book on the subject of sighing. That got me thinking about sighing, which in general is what you do—get people thinking—and how one sighs as a reflexive gesture, a last breath, for such different reasons as love and exasperation. So, I write you now on the occasion of your resigning from the New Republic, to which you brought the highest expressions of love and exasperation for thirty-one years, in part to thank you for that, in part to state my contempt for the circumstances of your walking out (and to cheer you for that), and in part because I feel helpless to say all that I mean about either intention. Read this letter as a sigh.
Of the marauding destroyers of the New Republic, the new owners who caused you to go, what can one say? Merely reading their quoted remarks gives me a headache, so I cannot imagine what it was like for you to be forced to hear them in person. Their stated aim to “break shit” in order to avoid “the slide toward irrelevance.” My God! My ears! Oh, and of course the inevitable references to the (proverbial, boring, bankrupt) bottom line on and for which they stand. As if any owner of a monumental cultural and intellectual institution should be in it for the dough. As if Marty Peretz, who hired us both in different eras, ever thought of his purchase as anything other than a trust. (Marty, Leon, shall we buy MOMA and sell off the paintings? We’ll be rolling in it.) I especially love the citing of a declining circulation as a justification for cutting the number of yearly issues in half, and for making the magazine digital. My own circulation has been declining in recent years, and I’d hate to be cut in half to improve it.
As for the idea of focusing on the web as an excuse for the desecration, it’s pure bullshit. It isn’t the web that’s at issue, as the surface on which I am writing this letter suggests. What counts for any publication is the purpose and quality of the writing, whether on the web, a legal pad or a wall—the conveyance of a severe and scrutinizing intelligence and a humane soul. Your intelligence, Leon. And your soul.
In your last essay for the magazine on its hundredth anniversary (a celebratory if elegiac piece turned by circumstance into a farewell), you wrote of Whitman’s “Passage to India,” and of the poet “singing” technology while at the same time putting technology in its proper moral place in the service of human needs. You also warned us not to look down on nonsense, because “nonsense murders millions.” (Thus, with some reluctance, I refuse to look down on it here.) Elsewhere you said that the triumph over tyranny “is not a poem about freedom, but a poem about love.” On that and on no other or cheaper basis did you sustain a cultural institution from the vantage point of a caboose that became its engine. When I worked at the magazine, we would say that the back of the book, culture, drove the front, politics. As a sign of the glory of the place, people at the front never objected.
When this latest episode of moral idiocy occurred, I called you and Marty, and we went through the laughs and shrugs (and sighs) that have attended our friendship over the years, as well as all such events that blight the national landscape. Shock without surprise. But in truth, I did not know what to say to you that might be useful. It certainly was not to offer anything new about the decline of the West of which, in fact, we approve from time to time. Neither was it to eulogize a life that at age sixty-two has plenty of kick in it still.
Maybe there is something useful in writing this letter, in deliberately choosing a proven ancient literary form to suggest that we of similar beliefs are as close as words can bring us. And that this very closeness—felt merely as buddy-chatter by the marauders—is what has tacitly sustained our lives, and the lives of the like-minded, and of the Kenyon Review and of all the other small insistent voices that in spirit write this letter with me.
What is it that you did for the New Republic, after all? I mean, after the hiring of young, smart writers and reviewing only books that matter, rather than the ones destined to sell, and writing consistently graceful, instructive, and often gorgeously furious essays yourself. The answer, I think, is simply (hardly simply) that you were there as an embodiment of knowledge, understanding and sympathy. When my daughter Amy died in 2007, I looked out at the crowd at the funeral, and there, risen above the others was your aureole of white hair and your sweet, anguished face. It is that which you brought to the magazine—more than the wit and the inventiveness and the scrupulous standards. It was the vision of a man who wished the world well in the midst of its sorrow. Not merely well-behaved, but well. Reasonable, peaceful, safe, productive, consoled.
In such a wish lies the exquisite beauty of Kaddish, your masterwork of struggle and exultation on the contemplation of the death of your father. One of my writing habits is to keep books of importance to me nearby, as company. Heaney’s poems, Nabokov’s prose. And Kaddish. I do not re-read them. I feel their presence for what each offers. What Kaddish offers me and millions of others is its embrace of life, all life, in its informed joy.
So, that is what I wish you now, dear friend, to be reminded of and to receive the informed joy you have given us from a little perch in a little place—the lantern at the back of the caboose, at night, swung back and forth, and visible for miles.
How else would I sign this letter but with love,
Roger
