“I have a new mantra,” Bob Gottlieb told me a few months ago when I called him. “Would you like to hear it? It is as follows: I’m 91 years old, and I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to, except die.” Last week, he did what no one who loved him wanted him to do.
Gottlieb excelled at phone conversations—long ones. They would cover all manner of subjects: Doris Lessing’s lovable (to him) peculiarities were a bedrock; a silken Herbert Marshall in the divine Lubitsch comedy Trouble in Paradise; the value of reading multiple translations of Japanese novels or Chekhov short stories; Mae Barnes’s hilarious rendition of “(I Ain’t Gonna Be No) Topsy,” a before-its-time burlesque of the silly and demeaning parts Black actresses were forced to play; the necessity of re-reading Life and Fate, the doorstop novel by Vasily Grossman, which he considered the greatest work of postwar fiction.
