This week, we attended a memorial service of a friend and editor that one of us anyway, had known for quite a long time and the other, for not so long but had some sense of him from our work together. Both of us had worked with F. over the course of only a year for one, and many for the other, but he had become to each of us a kind of mentor, and certainly a mentor any writer who was interested in, or mired in the subject of biography, for this was Fred's stock and trade, and one in which we too had dealt or were dealing.
Fred was a great writer and editor; known in his profession, widely respected as a teacher and writer and known to each of us for we had both contributed to his series, Biography and Source Studies, which came out in different volumes (the last with both of us was Volume 5, editor, Fred Karl).
I had never met Fred, but despite that, I felt I knew him through our work and so the drive to his service in New York was not a hardship. It was a simple way to pay honor to a man who had been kind to me and smart and had been good enough to ask for my contribution to his esteemed series even when I didn’t think I deserved the accolade. Nonetheless, Fred worked with me, honing the piece and insisting on my contribution, which after months of work was finally in good enough shape and was published. As far as I know, this volume was the last that Fred published before he died and I am honored to be included in such a series with other writers far more talented and widely published than I.
The trip to New York City was longer than expected, the traffic awful, the traffic jam that held us at the tunnel in Boston for over an hour. IT was not an easy journey by any stretch, yet still, we were glad to make it for Fred, because we felt it was important to his family and more, we wanted to pay our respects. We packed our blacks, our darkest clothes, we prepared the car and we made our way through the day and arrived just in time to shower and get ready before heading to the service.
One is never sure what to expect at such events. Will there be much weeping as I have witnessed, or it will it be like an Irish wake with much laughter and people telling stories of the recent past and regaling us with jokes and humorous anecdotes. As fitting, it was neither. We gathered, about a hundred or so of us, or just shy, in a room off of New York University and one by one, various eulogists spoke of Fred. They were as diverse as he himself was and each had a different side of Fred that they conveyed – the grandchildren spoke of baseball and transatlantic phone calls to get the Yankees score, of Fred’s dislike of the Yanks, of the way he would hide Hershey’s kisses in his beard. The adults, as fitting, more solemn, and spoke of his teaching, his organization, his love of his work, and of course, his friends and family – his lovely daughters – who in groups and one by one told of a man who was frail and small in size but large in personality and who gave to the world as much as he possibly could, always working on more than one book at a time and writing some of the greatest biographies of our time on Kafka, Joseph Conrad and other figures who, in many ways, were no more Fred’s superior but his equal in many ways. A great biographer for a great subject, and he wrote his books and achieved his measure of fame and renown and Fred was known and respected as one of the best and most important, if such words apply, writers and biographers of our time.
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