A few days after Lance Morrow told me he learned that he had but six months to live, I had a dream about the two of us.
We were tennis doubles partners, and we proceeded from match to match creaming every pair of challengers who came our way. Dressed in old-fashioned whites, we beat professionals as well as preppies who goaded us into games. We rallied with street kids too, hitting balls over invisible nets in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. I played net, and Lance played back, positions that fit with our different writing styles when we took turns writing the Time-magazine Essay page in the 1980s and 1990s. I was quick and flashy, but it was Lance’s game that won the matches for us, as he hit hard, deep shots into our opponents’ court.
We had wonderful years together at Time, Lance and I and the other senior writers, who hid from our editors on the floor below theirs and spent hours in “Dart Stadium,” a dead-end hallway named and refashioned by our colleague John Leo. We missed the dartboard more often than we hit it, and frequently we hit each other. We also collected our favorite books of the year, such as 1587, A Year of No Significance.
Within our cohort there were many funny people, none more than Lance, whose gentlemanly air belied a mischievous as well as comprehensive intelligence. His years as a reporter for Time on major stories such as Watergate and Vietnam before he became an essayist contributed to that intelligence.
No one was better at derisive nonsense, especially when mocking the cant of the day.
He called me Stinky. I called him Four Eyes. And for the past 40 years, long after we both had left Time, we continued on that level of wit, addressing each other and signing off in our frequent e-mails as Flush Gordon, the Emperor Heinie Selassie, Mousey Dung, Shat on a Hot Tin Roof, Chester Bowels, Five Feces Pieces, and Loose Eel Balls.
The material in the body of our letters, however, was on a higher plane (how could it help but be?), as we sent each other things we were writing. I never had a better critic of my work. In our correspondence, as he grew weaker, it was all I could do not to break down. But Lance would always describe his illness the way he wrote his inimitable essays—with a cool clarity that only occasionally dipped into sadness.
That clarity often served a fierce temper. The moral outrage in what became a prized essay of his on the 9/11 attacks is palpable. The essay began: “For once, let’s have no ‘grief counselors’ standing by with banal consolations, as if the purpose, in the midst of all this, were merely to make everyone feel better as quickly as possible. We shouldn’t feel better.”
Later in the essay, he called for “a wholesome and intelligent enmity—the sort that impels even such a prosperous messily tolerant organism as America to act.”
Within our cohort there were many funny people, none more than Lance, whose gentlemanly air belied a mischievous as well as comprehensive intelligence.
That was pure Lance, an observation in which he not only vented his fury but also gave a perfect definition of the country’s natural history. The long, hard, deep shot at the baseline from the player who sees the whole court.
Ours was the strongest friendship, based on certain things in common. Harvard, though we were there at different times. He was Catholic, I Jewish, so we knew the same uses for guilt. Above all, we shared a love of the form we chose to write in. The essay is the orphan of literature, but one may do things with it that no novel or poem can do. Montaigne was our favorite essayist, because he could rove from the confines of his subject and make the reading of his essays an adventure.
In the last weeks of his life, when Lance was in hospice care—a choice he made scrupulously, as he made all his choices, acknowledging the inevitable—my wife, Ginny, and I often visited him and Susan, his wife of 36 years (though they were together for more than 40 years), on their farm in upstate New York. Susan Brind Morrow, a remarkable poet and the author most recently of Water, was a perfect mate for Lance. Quietly creative, tenderhearted, independent, and brave.
I found myself gearing up before each of these visits, fearing that the four of us would have nothing to say but sorrowful things. Instead, there was nonstop laughter, as the hilarity of old memories carried the day. Only once or twice did Lance and I share a glance admitting the presence of the shadow in the room.
He sent me pages of a memoir he had begun in those last weeks, and with which he was having trouble. The story of his childhood, his parents, and their impoverished, often reckless life in Washington. The memoir was beautiful, but eventually Lance had no heart for it. I suspect he had too great a sense of decorum for a tell-all memoir, too much respect for the activities of the great wide world to impose his story upon them.
Some people make their mark in the world through heroic actions and achievements. Lance made his by the use of words, which outlive him now. And his memorial will show in the effect of his work on readers of today and those yet unborn, an effect equally beautiful and practical. “A rattlesnake in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights,” he wrote.
He also wrote, “Never forget the powers of silence.” There is no prolonged silence in his absence, just the occasional pause in which one may reflect on his work, and know that we have been in the presence of a great and good man, and the best of friends.
Above his desk, framed in gold, is a poem from Susan:
Now we know what life is about:
Newspapers and coffee,
The morning light,
And gathering our thoughts
And sitting down to write
I love you Lanny.
Lance Morrow was born on September 21, 1939. He died on November 29
