'There Were the Late'

The most casually intelligent person I have ever known was D.G. Myers, who died on this date, September 26, in 2014. I prize intelligence but it’s not a virtue that can be valued in isolation. We’ve all known very bright people who are insufferable, who insist on reminding you of their brilliance and behave like intellectual bullies. No question, David was opinionated and loved a good argument but he also appreciated and embodied what Timothy Steele called “reasoned self-forgetfulness.” It was never about his precious ego. Here is Steele’s poem, “Dedication,” dedicated to his friend the poet-novelist Vikram Seth: 

“We enter life and thus inherit

The kingdom of the human voice.

The Word is Word because we share it.

Wonder encourages our choice

To sort out life’s conflicting data,

To come to terms with its traumata,

To shape ourselves to nothing less

Than reasoned self-forgetfulness.

For years we've traded rhyme and measure,

And if our poems are books today,

It is in hopes that others may

Take from them solace, sense, or pleasure,

Though years pass with their wonted speed

And though the times we shared recede.”

 

What David and I traded were not “rhyme and measure” but ideas, books, insights, encouragement and mutual respect. For six years, except on shabbat (David was an Orthodox Jew), we exchanged emails almost daily and occasionally telephone calls. We met only once in person, here in Houston in 2012, in a Mexican restaurant, and the talk never stopped. We covered the conversational waterfront – kids, wives, jobs, Jews, cancer, students, the professoriat, Stanley Elkin, J.V. Cunningham, Irving Howe, David Horowitz, Marilynne Robinson, L.E. Sissman, Toni Morrison’s pathetic prose, Las Vegas and the fate of the codex. We laughed so loud diners at nearby tables had the nerve to stare at us. When we parted, David quoted Yvor Winters at me -- “Write little; do it well.”

 

In 2009, David posted the notes he kept during a class with J.V. Cunningham in 1976 at Washington University. Among them was “How difficult it is to write in praise!” David wasn’t shy about chastising the dishonest, inept and just plain stupid and boring among writers, politicians, et al., but he was also an expert bestower of praise. He loved Vladimir Nabokov, Janet Lewis, Charles Portis, Henry James, Whittaker Chambers, Saul Bellow, Ronald Knox, A.J. Liebling, Michael Oakeshott, Francine Prose, Isaac Bashevis Singer, L.E. Sissman, Peter DeVries and Philip Roth.

 

It’s not an exercise in cheesy rhetoric to say I miss David every day. We had each other’s back. I’ve never had so brief, immediate and deep a friendship. All of us have an obligation to remember our significant dead and share that memory with others. As old Artur Sammler says in one of David’s favorite novels: “Wherever you looked, or tried to look, there were the late. It took some getting used to.”

[The Steele poem can be found in Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems (Random House, 1986).]