Lore Segal, who died on Monday, spent the final 4 months of her life looking the window. Her world had been shrinking for a while, as a hip substitute, a pacemaker, deteriorating imaginative and prescient, and different encroachments of previous age had made it troublesome to depart her New York Metropolis condominium, even with assistance from the walker she known as “my chariot.” However now, after a minor coronary heart assault in June, she was confined to a hospital mattress at dwelling. There, she might examine the rooftops and vintage water tanks of the Higher West Aspect—a parochial imaginative and prescient for some, however not for the Viennese-born Segal, who as soon as described herself as “naturalized not in North America a lot as in Manhattan.”
In fact, she was an previous hand at seeing the universe in a nutshell. It was one in every of her nice virtues as each a author and an individual, and her affinity for tiny, telling particulars had drawn me to her work lengthy earlier than I turned her buddy. I additionally beloved her freshness of notion. In Segal’s 1985 novel, Her First American, Ilka Weissnix, newly arrived on this nation, disembarks from a practice in small-town Nevada and has what should be one of many only a few epiphanies ever prompted by a glue manufacturing unit. “The low constructing was product of a rosy, luminescent brick,” Segal writes, “and quivered within the blue haze of the oncoming night time—it levitated. The traditional home windows and sq. white letters, saying AMERICAN GLUE INC., moved Ilka with a way of magnificence so out of proportion to the item, Ilka acknowledged euphoria.”
To some extent, this euphoria will need to have stemmed from Segal’s personal historical past as an immigrant. She left Vienna on the Kindertransport in 1938, then lived in Britain and Santo Domingo earlier than making landfall in the US in 1951. Her books are full of people that have been dislodged from one place and set down in one other. The challenges of such displacement are apparent. However it may be a present for a author, dropped right into a glittering atmosphere whose each element is, to make use of Segal’s favourite phrase, attention-grabbing.
She additionally possessed extraordinary empathy. Segal was fairly particular about what this meant, and resisted the concept of being seen as a sufferer, even when it got here to her slim escape from the Third Reich’s killing machine. “Sympathy pities one other individual’s expertise,” she as soon as wrote, “whereas empathy experiences that have.” It was getting inside different those that counted, even when our grasp of one other human soul was at all times partial.
Her empathetic impulse accounted for a hilarious remark she as soon as made to me about her television-watching habits: “I don’t like to observe reveals the place folks really feel awkward.” As a result of that is the modus operandi of virtually each post-Seinfeld TV present, it will need to have actually minimize down Segal’s viewing choices. I believe what bothered her have been eventualities particularly engineered to convey out our helplessness in social or existential conditions. She discovered it onerous to hate different folks and couldn’t even convey herself to dislike the water bug that lived in her kitchen.
I’m not suggesting that Segal was some form of Pollyanna. She was nicely conscious of our capability for cruelty and destruction—it had, in any case, been shoved in her face when she was very younger. However her fascination with human habits on the person stage appeared to insulate her from acquired considering on virtually any matter. “Contradiction was her intuition, her autobiography, her politics,” Segal wrote of her doppelgänger, Ilka, who reappeared in Shakespeare’s Kitchen greater than 20 years after the publication of Her First American. “Point out a truth and Ilka’s thoughts kicked into motion to spherical up the information that disproved it. Categorical an opinion and Ilka’s blood was as much as voice an reverse concept.” All the things needed to be freshly examined; all the pieces needed to go the litmus take a look at that’s continually being staged in a author’s mind.
Segal additionally introduced this method to ideological truths, few of which made the grade. It’s fascinating to me {that a} author so allergic to ideology managed to supply one of many nice Holocaust narratives and one of many nice American novels about race—initiatives which may now be hobbled by questions of authenticity and appropriation. For Segal, the glut of knowledge, and the moral exhaustion that resulted, turned up to date existence right into a minefield, and politics was no approach out. Decency was, however that took huge work and focus.
“To be good, sane, joyful is easy provided that you subscribe to the Eden principle of authentic goodness, authentic sanity, and authentic happiness, which humankind subverted into a captivating rottenness,” she wrote in an essay. “Statement would recommend that we come by our rottenness aboriginally and that rightness, like some other accomplishment, is one thing achieved.” In all of her books, in each phrase she wrote, Segal struggled for that very rightness. I might say she achieved it too, with wonderful frequency.
I can not take into consideration Lore Segal’s work with out fascinated with my friendship along with her. For years and years, I learn her books and admired her from a distance. It was solely in 2009 that I lastly met Lore, as I’ll now name her. Her writer was reissuing Lucinella, a madcap 1976 novella that by some means mingles the literary life with Greek mythology: Zeus turns up at Yaddo, the celebrated artists’ colony, in a notably priapic temper. I used to be requested to interview her at a bookshop, and we hit it off without delay.
This small, witty, white-haired individual, whose voice nonetheless bore the inflection of her Viennese childhood, was a pleasure to be round. She laughed so much, and made you chuckle. Her marvelous capability to concentrate made you are feeling larger-hearted and a bit extra clever—it was as if you happen to have been borrowing these qualities from her. In her condominium, with its grand piano and Maurice Sendak drawings and thoroughly organized collections of nutcrackers and fin de siècle scissors, we spent many hours visiting, speaking, joking, complaining. We bemoaned the slowness and blindness and intransigence of editors (even through the years after I was an editor). We drank the dry white wine I’d purchase on the liquor retailer three blocks away, and Lore at all times pronounced the identical verdict after her first sip: “That is good.”
In time, she started sending me early drafts of the tales that will ultimately make up most of her 2023 assortment, Girls’ Lunch. As her imaginative and prescient worsened, the fonts grew bigger—by the tip, I might be studying one thing in 48-point Calibri, with only a few phrases on every web page. I used to be flattered, in fact, to perform as a primary reader for one in every of my idols. I used to be touched as nicely to find that she was nonetheless beset with doubts about her work. “Wouldn’t you assume that age may confer the understanding that one is aware of what one is doing?” she lamented in an e mail a few years in the past. “It doesn’t. It deprives.”
We noticed one another, too, at conferences of our e-book group, which Lore had invited me to hitch in 2010. In newer years, we at all times met at Lore’s, as a result of it had change into tougher and tougher for her to bundle herself and her walker right into a taxi. Just a few weeks earlier than she died, the group met one final time, at her insistence. She had chosen a beloved favourite, Henry James’s The Ambassadors, and was not going to be cheated out of the dialog.
We sat round her hospital mattress, along with her oxygen machine giving off its periodic sighs within the background. Lore, peering as soon as extra into the microcosm of James’s novel and discovering the entire world inside it, requested the sort of questions she at all times requested.
“Are the characters on this novel distinctive folks?” she needed to know.
“In fact not,” replied one other member of the group. “They’re completely typical folks of the interval, well-heeled People with out an authentic thought of their heads.”
This didn’t fulfill Lore. She felt that Lambert Strether, despatched off to the fleshpots of Paris to retrieve his fiancée’s errant son, had been loaned a few of James’s knowledge and perceptive powers (precisely as I at all times thought I used to be borrowing Lore’s). “Stay all you may,” Strether advises, with very un-Jamesian bluntness. And right here was Lore, dwelling all she might, generally resting her head on the pillow between one pithy remark and the subsequent. It was the capability to really feel, she argued, that had been woke up within the novel’s protagonist. Empathy, somewhat than evaluation, was Lore’s true foreign money to the very finish.
I visited her only a few extra instances. She was fading; the multicolored array of capsules and eye drops on the desk grew greater and extra forbidding; the oxygen machine appeared louder with simply the 2 of us within the room.
“I hope I’ll see you once more,” I mentioned, the final time I left. These are the form of phrases normally uttered firstly of a friendship, not on the conclusion. “However no matter occurs, I’ll be considering of you.”
Out the door I went, and boarded the elevator, in whose creaking inside I shed a number of tears, and as I strolled up a type of Higher West Aspect streets mounded with the trash baggage that Lore had so eloquently described (“the bloated, inexperienced, large vinyl baggage with their unexplained bellies and elbows”), I discovered myself asking: Why will we cry? How will we deal with loss? What, exactly, is disappointment? These have been the questions that Lore would ask—the questions she had been asking her complete profession. Her books represent a sort of reply, not less than a provisional one. I will likely be studying them for the remainder of my life and, precisely as I promised Lore on my approach out the door, considering of her.
