Bob Gottlieb, a New Yorker who edited The New Yorker, died the other day, just a fortnight after he had turned 92. He made his name as a book editor, first at Simon & Schuster, then at Knopf, where he was editor-in-chief. He was also an author, a dance and book critic, a father, a grandfather, and an all-around godfather to avid readers who were willing to present their work-to the world as a trade or a craft while tacitly demonstrating in the reasonableness of their ideas, the command of absurdity in their humor, and the music of their sentences that they know the arrangement and distribution of words is an art. Famous for his speed reading (though not for his even more astonishing gift of speed comprehension), he knew what made writing more than important: He knew what made it interesting.
A man of principle and generosity, Bob could be an understated Barnum, drawing in readers with the promise of a little puzzle or dilemma to solve and guiding us over this river and through those trees until, suddenly, one finds that one has arrived at a resolution concerning an improbable subject about which one had never intended to acquire a point of view.
Bob was an only child whose prodigious reading was a huge part of his identity. He also commanded the social skill of making the person he was speaking with feel significant, even unique. In a conversation he would make an investment of himself rather than of his résumé. His glamour was that, by choice, he was beyond conventional glamour: he could rarely be either forced or lured into wearing a tie, much less a suit. He owned several far-flung homes and he never packed so much as a toothbrush when traveling among them; he simply kept an identical wardrobe at each, the clothing heavy on tones of gray, and carried his copious reading on an e-reader.
I was one of a small group of lucky New Yorkers whom he’d ask to accompany him to the dance performances he reviewed for the Observer when his wife, the warm-hearted and esteemed actor Maria Tucci, wasn’t available. Occasionally in the evening Bob phoned me to discuss matters of cultural significance, such as what had happened to his preferred Chelsea neighborhood diner at 23rd and Ninth. (Bob wasn’t what you’d call a foodie; however, he was a connoisseur of New York City diners.) Along the way, the topics we addressed would change momentarily from, say, the extinction of a diner to the extinction of the Oxford comma. In the way of conversations that go on for some time, we would excavate our mutual levels of anxiety down to bedrock. Bob liked walking in the city, although that was as far as he’d go into Nature. He knew the Earth’s climate was irreversibly changing. Rather than dwell on the predicament, he found it more rewarding to reread the novels of Theodore Dreiser and the reports of what people who almost died had experienced. Humanity engrossed him, including humanity in extremis.
In the half year or so before he died, Bob spoke rather a lot about an essay he intended to write that concerned the English translations of novels and essays by the Soviet-era Jewish author Vasily Grossman—“the Tolstoy of the USSR,” Martin Amis called him. Bob often said to me of Grossman, whose most famous novel is the sobering Life and Fate, that, as great a storyteller and stylist as the author was, he was an even greater human being. I became very curious about this paragon and rooted around the Internet for more information about him as I waited for delivery of my copy of The Road: Stories, Journalism, and Essays by Vasily Grossman. That was how I managed, on the ‘Net, to discover the 2011 “Ukraine without Jews,” the first translation of the essay into English since its original 1943 version in Russian, whose publication was firmly squashed by the Soviet journal where Grossman submitted it. (Later, excerpts were published in Yiddish, a language comparatively so little read that publication in it, in mid-century world literature, was just a half step from not publishing.) In the words of Polly Zavadivker, the essay’s English translator, it is “one of the earliest public statements about the murder of the Jews in 1941 and 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine.” She adds, “it is also one of the first attempts in any language to systematically explain the ideological and material motives behind the genocide that Grossman calls ‘the greatest crime ever committed in history.’”
By the time he headed up Alfred A. Knopf, Bob had edited the memoirs of prominent Hollywood stars and figures. One of them, Irene Mayer Selznick, daughter of Louis B. Mayer and ex-wife of writer and producer David Selznick, he considered among his dearest friends. Still, Bob’s Garbo is not exactly a conventional celebrity book; rather, it provides a compendium—constructed with consummate taste—of how to look at a celebrity in a way that brings the reader pleasure, education, fantastical imagery, context, and fact. It had been inspired by an extraordinary essay on Garbo’s films by an historian of cinema, James Harvey, that had knocked Bob’s socks off and that he wanted to answer and—by republishing Harvey’s essay in the back of Garbo—to offer as an object for admiration by others. When Bob Gottlieb was enthusiastic about something, he didn’t simply grab you by the lapels and gush. Like Lincoln Kirstein, one of his heroes, he moved mountains to showcase excellence in a way that would outlast him. Like Kirstein, Bob saw that writers and others in the arts who contributed work he admired were quietly helped in a variety of ways.
Enthusiasm was integral to Bob’s literary energy. A critic he certainly was. He could slice and dice what he disliked or found detrimental to the health of America as eagerly as anyone. Over the thirty-six years I knew him as a colleague at the theater, as someone he edited, and as a friend, every so often I landed on the business end of his vexation, and it wasn’t fun; it was, however, always instructive. And when he let himself plunge into what he treasured, it could be a positively Wordsworthian experience. Bob’s enthusiasm for Garbo’s screen performances produced a book that hangs a velvet rope between one’s passion for a star’s Beauty in the cinema and the beauty—or lack thereof–in the star’s life. (He cautioned me several times on the phone that Garbo’s luster on film turns to paste off camera—that life and art do not necessarily have causal connection.) By his last year, he was saying that he had no more professional obligations to perform anything other than what he wanted to do—and that what he wanted to do, really, was just to read as he waited for Robert Caro to deliver the manuscript of the last big Lyndon Johnson volume to be edited.
The editing of Caro’s final volume will be done by someone else, and Bob’s Grossman essay seems never to have made the leap from his thoughts into his computer. Having read a little Grossman and knowing a bit about how Bob thought, I believe he was attracted to Grossman’s ability to find pop-up moments of amusement during 24/7 horror-even when he had to report, with clarity and consummate pictorial economy, scenes of torment that make Dante’s Inferno seem like a trip in the fun house in Coney Island.
This is part one of a two-part essay. The next section will apppear on July 8.
Mindy Aloff’s most recent book, Why Dance Matters, was published in January by Yale University Press. She was hired by Robert Gottlieb to write the Dance column of Goings On About Town at The New Yorker, in late 1988, and, with two exceptions, contributed that weekly, without a byline, until mid 1993. In addition, she published 45 Talk Stories and Comments on a great variety of nondance subjects, also without a byline, as well as a long, bylined book lead on Sarah Bernhardt. Everything she published at the magazine was meticulously edited and fact-checked by up to eight individuals, including Robert Gottlieb. He treated all the copy, featured and departmental, with exquisite, personal care.
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