Arts and Letters

Dear Marc:

For almost a year now they have been telling me you are dead. And now the National Institute asks me to write a commemorative tribute. It is macabre. All right, we'll play it through, like one of our gallows-jokes. And anyway, I'm always glad to write you a tribute.

Gallantry, vitality. Wry, Talmudic humor. A fresh, slanted view of everything. A secret affair with word-notes. Loyalties of improbable intensity, in unlikely places. Endless affection, grace. Endless capacity to suffer through quarrel, to find truth, or if not, to invent it. All these have been yours.

But mostly, survival. I have always thought of you as the chief survivor, of the welts of passion, the agony of commitment, of a long chain of beautiful work-failures. Never have I seen such glowing failures, all in a row, like falling (but not fallen) angels. You have rushed, singing but orderly, from one to another: another, another, always singing. How does one write a commemorative tribute to a survivor?

Dear Marc, they are asking me to finish your uncompleted works. (They say you are dead.) The "Sacco" opera is only half-composed, and full of unresolved choices. Who can guess at how you would have resolved them? Then there's "Idiots First"; that is almost finished. A short scene to be written here and there, ten bars of accompaniment missing here, twelve bars there. It could be done, they tell me. Done? With what notes? Only yours, your own private and mysterious notes. Neither I, nor anyone I know, has access to your luminous caves where those word-notes are forged. Come back from Martinique, come soon, and make more falling angels. They will look lovely in descending flight, like the seagulls we used to watch those summers on the Vineyard. Come back, and we'll play mental Jotto in five languages. It's winter here now, and you have that fine cold-weather suit with the six-button vest. Your god-daughter Jamie is twelve years old now; and little Nina is named for your heroine.

Come back. These unfinished manuscripts of yours stare at me grimly, melodramatically, reminding me of the technique you so often used, of ending a scene or a song without a flourish, no compromise, flat, just like that, with an empty bar. Challenge. But so many empty bars make the challenge absurd.

We all send our dearest love. Everyone misses you terribly—Lillian, Morris, Minna, Felicia. I don't think any of them believes you are dead, either; we are all waiting for you to write and say you are coming home.

Lenny

December 23, 1964