Confessions of a Guilty Freelancer

Richard Elman

“Richard Elman, Novelist, Poet and Teacher, is Dead at 63,” I read in the New York Times of January 2. My wife and child and I had just returned from a Christmas trip to California and there was a message on our phone answering machine from Richard’s daughter, which had portended as much. He was in the hospital and things were bad. . . . I hadn’tcalledherbackyet,tohearwhatIthoughtmustbeterriblenews. I picked up the Midwest edition of the Times and stumbled upon the obituary. Afewdaysearlier,IhadsentRichardastringofgarlicfromGilroy, California. He had said on the phone, before my family’s trip, how much he liked a plate of mashed potatoes he had eaten. Despite the side effects of the chemo and radiation treatments, it was food he managed to keep down; it was ambrosia. Garlic would make the mashed potatoesevenbetter.Hopinghewouldreboundfromtreatments,Isent the garlic. It wouldn’t have yet arrived. In the empty space shock made, I remembered another writer whosedeathwasannouncedtomebythe NewYorkTimessometwenty years previous: Edward Dahlberg, who had left New York and moved to Santa Barbara. I was riding the PATH train to Newark in 1977 to teach my class at Rutgers when I opened that page and saw his obituary , dead at 77. I recalled Dahlberg because he and Richard were both Richard Elman 17 18 my teachers and both in New York when I was a student, both connected to Columbia University, though Dahlberg had been let go from Columbia before I arrived. (He failed Herbert Read’s son, Piers Paul Read, the future author of Alive. Because of this and other transgressions there had been a student revolt against him.) Even Richard was skeptical of Dahlberg’s social skills and wary of Dahlberg’s influence on me. Shortly after I graduated I published my first book, a work of nonfiction (The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, 1972), and Richard said he was disappointed I hadn’t dedicated it to him. “Why?” I asked, truly baffled. “Because I was the one who turned you on to nonfiction,” he replied . He was sounding quite like Dahlberg then (Dahlberg had only accused me of plagiarizing him.) I didn’t realize it then, but Richard mighthaveturnedmeontononfictioninsofarashisownwork,career, was a model; he had written book-length nonfiction early. Now, I can see his point; then, in my mid-twenties, I was only baffled. Around the same time I made a remark to him I’ve only recently regretted, never noticing until now how full of unconscious youthful blindness it was. I said, “I’ve met two geniuses in my life, Edward Dahlberg and Leonard Boudin.” Boudin was a constitutional lawyer of great renown, the defender of Benjamin Spock, Philip Berrigan and others. One should nevertellafriend,amanofletters,thatheisn’tagenius,evenindirectly andunintentionally. Iwasfullofpronouncementsinmytwenties(and am still not completely emptied of them). Richard was only eleven years older than I was, whereas Dahlberg and Boudin were quite senior indeed. I saw them as a different generation , not certainly Richard’s, and I was only applying genius as a label to someone at least in his sixties. And now, in my sixties, Richard is genius enough for me. 19 And he was a model, though one I haven’t always had the courage to completely emulate. In friendship he was exemplary: he was loyal. His politics, too, from my point of view, were exemplary: as a writer he dared to be unfashionable . And being unfashionable, not tacking with the cultural winds, has turned out to be unpopular and unremunerative politics in the eighties and nineties. His ground breaking reports from Central America (found in Cocktails at Somoza’s, 1981, and fictionalized in Disco Frito, 1988) made both warring sides unhappy. He was a partisan without being partisan; he was no one’s apparatchik. During the late seventies, Richard amassed a large manuscript describing contemporaryBrahminAmericanliteraryfiguresinvolvementswiththeCIA and thoughneverpublishedinfull,itsexistencedidnotmakehimpopular. Peter Matthiessen, I recall, was especially unhappy. A couple of years ago Richard sent me a photograph taken in Paris of Richard Wright with Peter Matthiessen and Max Steele of the Paris Review, c. 1954, which Richard captioned, “Can you guess from this photo who was being spooked and who was the spook?” Back in the seventies being connected to the CIA was not necessarily a reputation polisher; in the nineties, of course, it would only lead to career enhancement. During the eighties Richard gave acerbic, insightful commentary on NPR’s All Things Considered. That gig ended when he launched a...