Edith H. Tarcov
Morton, Brian & Mills, Nicolaus
I remember the evening I discovered that Edith Tarcov was an unusual woman. An article I'd written for Dissent had been accepted but not yet set in type. One night at about ten I received a...
...Don't you think it's really a bit . . . harsh...
...She wasn't worried about longevity but, relentless gardener that she was, about being up to spring...
...Like most dedicated people, she could sometimes be difficult...
...Your heart breaks . . . and you live...
...NICOLAUS MILLS 280 • DISSENT...
...I worked closely with Edith from 1983, when I came to Dissent, until she retired in late 1985...
...She was merciless in her determination to root out careless prose and careless thought—but she was unfailingly patient with writers, even those of us most guilty of those sins...
...The terrible thing," she said, "is that one doesn't die of heartbreak...
...I was late for work, and I didn't call out to her...
...Don't you think the sentence might be better with a simple comma...
...Like all great teachers, Edith had the knack of asking questions that allowed you to become smarter than you thought you were...
...SPRING • 1990 • 279 In Memoriam I had just arrived in New York when I first met Edith, and she quickly led me to believe that editors are supposed to make your writing come out better...
...She did her blue-penciling so deftly that it wasn't until I found myself getting into fights with editors at other magazines that I realized how easy she made a tough job seem...
...her husband, Oscar, died very young of a heart attack...
...What I remember most about those afternoons, however, was that no subject was off limits...
...I saw her last about a month before she died...
...Over the last few years Edith found herself spending more time than she wished in the company of doctors...
...I've been thinking about the second sentence in your article," she said...
...She wasn't in good health—in recent years her illness prevented her from flying around town on her bicycle, as she had until about the age of sixty—but even so, she pursued a schedule of activities that I found exhausting even to contemplate...
...Despite everything she'd lived through, it wasn't in her nature to let bitterness or anything else slow her down...
...She had a kind of lift to her step, and she held her head back, like a dancer...
...She gave of herself completely, in just about everything she did...
...I remember the afternoon when she lent me the Saul Bellow novel More Die of Heartbreak...
...Edith could talk as passionately about Ernie Banks, the Chicago Cubs shortstop of the 1950s, as she could about the newest Saul Bellow novel...
...Edith was an editor of the old school: tireless, exacting, and passionately devoted to clarity...
...and one of her grandchildren was killed in an automobile accident recently...
...One night at about ten I received a phone call from Edith...
...It angered rather than discouraged her...
...With an awful regularity, her life had been marked by grief: her parents were murdered in the Nazi death camps...
...She worked like a demon, for little pay, little reward of any kind, lavishing great care on the smallest details...
...Did some grape hyacinth bulbs I had brought from Ohio have fungus...
...after that we met often for lunch...
...Of course the sentiment is lovely . . . but I've been wondering about that dash you use...
...I remember being struck by her youthfulness...
...But I stopped for a moment to watch her before she turned the corner...
...But if she demanded a lot of the people she worked with, she demanded much more of herself...
...As soon as the weather turned warm, we would sit on her balcony, where our initial subject was always Edith's plants...
...She was walking on West End Avenue, a block away from me...
...After she stopped her work at Dissent, the late afternoon still seemed the best time to meet...
...She held it in her hands a moment, looking at the title...
...BRIAN MORTON I first got in the habit of visiting Edith Tarcov when she was managing editor of Dissent...
...I came to admire her, as I learned how hard-won her habitual good cheer was...
...Rather than mail my page proofs back, I would drop them off at her West End Avenue apartment just before starting my daily run through Central Park...
...Would a late frost get her tulips...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
