A Farewell
The writer and critic
George W.S. Trow is dead, the end of a life which once held much promise, then spiraled into sadness.
Trow, a Harvard grad and former Lampoon writer, was a writer and cultural critic best known for his essay, "
Within the Context of No Context," which lamented the superficial state of conversation, cultural awareness, and New York, among other things.
His most recent book was "
The Harvard Black Rock Forest," published in 2004 but based on a New Yorker piece from 1984. Funnily enough, I happened to read that article a couple weeks ago as research for my forthcoming story on Derek Bok in
02138. I found it picayune and overlong; it would never be published today, at least, not in the
New Yorker.
Trow, who looked like a man from another era, didn't like the way the world was changing, the influence of television and celebrity in particular. Thus, when Tina Brown took over as editor of the
New Yorker, he resigned in a huff.
Resigning in a huff, it seems to me, is rarely a good idea. The institution from which one resigns usually survives just fine; the resigner often struggles.
As the
Times remembers,
In his note of resignation, Mr. Trow likened Ms. Brown to someone selling her soul “to get close to the Hapsburgs — 1913.”Ms. Brown shot back, in a note of her own: “I am distraught at your defection, but since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught.”
These are two unfair notes, but it seems to me that Brown's is marginally the less so.
Trow did subsequently write something for us at
George, which, given his feelings about celebrity, can only be called ironic. Perhaps he needed the money.
In his final years, the Times reports, "Mr. Trow’s nostalgia for a waning world grew into an enveloping despair." He gave up his home in Germantown, New York, and wandered the world. He did a stint in a psychiatric hospital. He was found dead a week ago in his apartment in Naples, Italy. He is survived by his mother, which I find upsetting, though I'm not exactly sure why.
There's a lesson in all this, I think, about not holding on too hard to the past, about trying to find things to love—people to love—even as the world changes in ways we don't always like. It is deeply sad that Trow could not do that. Sometimes, perhaps, it is possible to believe too much.
George W.S. Trow
