R.I.P. 2025

 In  some of the lists of Notable Deaths of 2025 published in various newspapers and other outlets on the Internet, I'm just starting to see some names of people I know little or nothing about.  That proportion will undoubtedly grow for however many more of these I will view in the future.  But for now, the lists are still dominated by names I know very well, and people I may even have encountered in my life.

For example, I once was walking into the West Village in Manhattan with two young women, both writers at the Village Voice, from the West 4th Street subway station down towards Bleeker Street, when on a patch of grass between buildings we saw someone with a cardboard box that was filled with kittens.  We paused a moment, and out of the corner of my eye I saw a couple beside us stop to look.  I didn't recognize the man but the woman was definitely Diane Keaton, just months after her breakout performance in Annie Hall.  I glanced at my companions, who were so engrossed in their New York conversation that they didn't notice anything.  When I looked back, Diane and her companion were hurrying across the street, and around the next corner.  

I've seen her other movies with Woody Allen (she was even funnier in Love and Death) and many of her later films, and read with admiration her book, Then Again.  Once her death was announced, we watched again her 2003 movie with Jack Nicholson, Something's Gotta Give. It may be her best performance in a very good movie. In Annie Hall days she was a kind of model for some young women and a heartthrob for a certain kind of young man (we were born the same year) but for me she also became somebody I paid attention to over the years, because she was so uniquely herself, sensitive, smart and adventurous.  She was probably also high maintenance but I'll bet she was a fascinating friend.

There were other people who died this year I especially admired.  I've already written at length about Bill Moyers, who died last summer.  Months later I realize more acutely that we now have no one like him, and it seems unlikely we ever will.  Rachel Maddow is carving out her own importance in more ways than one, but there's nobody with Moyers' breadth and depth, his abilities as an interviewer and his incisive writing.  I wouldn't like to imagine my life and who I would be without all those years of Moyers.

In her long life, Jane Goodall did so much for what's been called the more than human world--a true inspiration for young people passionate about saving the variety, the beauty and the viability of the planet. When Native American stories and writers burst into TV and film in the 1990s, actor Graham Greene was always there, bringing incisive life to this important moment.  

Robert Redford was a fine actor, a great movie star (some say the last) with a vibrant intelligence both contemporary and classic.  He not only made All the President's Men; he made it happen. I guess my secret favorite of his films is The Electric Horseman, though Three Days of the Condor is maybe his most perfect film.  Though I expect the one closest to his secret self was Jerimiah Johnson.

The Princess Bride, as directed by Rob Reiner, is on a lot of favorite movies lists as well as mine, but the William Goldman book is already a great template. Reiner found another great writer in Aaron Sorkin for the other of his movies on my list of favorite, The American President.  That movie probably birthed The West Wing television series as well.  

In their public lives these were all good people, and forces for good that continue to sustain those of us who were around when they were active, and can serve as inspiration for the young.

When last December I learned of the death of the writer known as K.C. Constantine--too obscure to make the Notable Deaths lists--it led to a couple of months reading all his work, both books I'd read before and those I hadn't, which then resulted in two essays posted on another blog.  This December I've already embarked on a reading (and viewing project), exploring the life, thoughts and works of playwright Tom Stoppard.  It's going to take awhile.  I've started by re-reading the beginning of Hermione Lee's fine biography, and stopping at the points where a play appears, and then reading that play.

Tom Stoppard died in November.  From his first success in the late 1960s--Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead-- to now, I followed his career and his work longer and more consistently than I have of any other playwright. (One bit of evidence: most of my copies of his plays are first edition paperbacks.) 

From the first I knew he was a writer after my own heart. I was in college then, and experiencing real theatre for the first time.  I came to admire other dramatists of my time (Arthur Miller for example was still alive and writing) but I always suspected that if I had become a successful playwright, my work would be most in sympathy with the work of Tom Stoppard. 

I felt a certain stream in common in those first plays: that ongoing comic exploration of language philosophy so prominent at Cambridge and Oxford, and its relationship with the satire of the 60s--Beyond the Fringe, That Was The Week That Was, the Goon Show and Peter Sellers, Richard Lester and the Beatles, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and later Monty Python and Douglas Adams, with further roots in English Music Hall (or American vaudeville), the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy.  These were exciting me and my writing in the 60s as well, but I knew them only from their artifacts.  Tom Stoppard knew many of the people involved--he even wrote for a magazine run by Peter Cook.  And the collision of Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett in R&G Are Dead was also familiar--in a way, that describes much of my college experience. 

Later plays continued the elegance of language, the high and low humor, the unapologetic focus on ideas in philosophy, science, literature and history, with increasing inventiveness if in quieter ways. And it wasn't all fun and games--for instance, he returned several times, from an early play to one of his last, to the question of what is the nature of the good.

Especially in those early years, he seemed to be reading what I was reading or had read.  We had similar literary tastes.  That we would seldom have agreed on political questions in the Reagan/Thatcher era, and we might not agree on some larger subjects, not only didn't bother me, it didn't occur to me.  These were beside the point.  Besides, by the time his work overtly took sides, in favor of free expression in Eastern Europe, we were on the same page.

 From the first also, there were always stories of people and relationships, including love stories, that were sometimes overlooked--even by the playwright.  Plays are a narrative art, Stoppard insisted.

Besides, it appears he was also a left-handed and right-eared night owl, with even less digital tech than I have.

Over the years I valued Stoppard's musings in and outside his plays, especially as a writer.  Like his very helpful description of the art in writing as controlling the flow of information.  He was a realist with a deep sense of vocation, who said "One's duty is to write as well as you possibly can, and to write whatever it is that you are now in a fit state to write."  That's a kind of classical conception that seems increasingly fragile.

A few years ago as he was giving a tour of his home library to a guest and his film crew, he remarked: "I'm deeply romantic about literature as a devotion."  I identify with that as well, though it also seems a fading feeling in following generations.

Stoppard often insisted that reading his plays was fairly fruitless, not only because the published plays are notorious for having been changed already by the publication date, but because of the nature of them as "description of a future event."  That event is the production, the performance.

Unfortunately, I've seen only a few productions: I did manage to see The Real Thing in its original Broadway production (directed by Mike Nichols), regional theatre productions of The Invention of Love and On the Razzle, as well as college productions of Arcadia, The Real Inspector Hound and R&G (and I've seen Stoppard's award-winning movie based on that play several times.) 

But he also has work preserved in the movies: for example, his contributions to the hallucinatory Brazil,  the Spielberg production of Empire of the Sun, and  his voice in the Indiana Jones film with Sean Connery as Indy's father. (Stoppard had previously written the screenplay for John Le Carre's The Russia House, starring Connery.)  Of course he is most famous for his Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love, which despite co-writer credit is mostly his work.

Perhaps his most sustained work for television was the British miniseries based on the related Ford Maddox Ford novels collected under the title Parade's End.  I admire both the script and the novels greatly.

There are one or two of his other television plays on YouTube, and a few of his radio plays, including Darkside, a remarkably short play that incorporates all of Pink Floyd's classic album, Dark Side of the Moon. (It also concerns the struggle to define the good.)  For those curious about Stoppard, this is not a bad place to start.

Stoppard wrote outrageous comedies and quieter if equally unusual dramas, often incorporating history and playing with concepts of time.  But all his plays had laughs.  The laugh, he told an actor in one of them, "is the sound of comprehension."  

He loved the process of theatre, working with producers, directors, actors, designers, all through rehearsals in major productions, often rewriting on request. That meant the play was still alive. He wrote for small casts and large ones, in one-acts, and in a trilogy (The Coast of Utopia) that took nearly nine hours to perform. In New York, it was the hottest ticket in town.  What was its sensational subject? Mid-nineteenth century intellectuals of pre-revolutionary Czarist Russia. Each of those plays ran separately and consecutively during the week, but all three were performed back to back on Saturdays.  I was in New York briefly during the run and heard the buzz, but the tickets--especially for Saturdays--were sold out far in advance, even if I could somehow afford to buy one. 

Before I started my chronological exploration this month I watched a lot of interviews from recent years, particularly about his last play, Leopoldstadt, a summary work in more ways than one, reflecting aspects of his own life and its previously unknown context--namely that many older members of his Czech Jewish family died in the Holocaust.  The play follows a similar family from the turn of the 20th century to the 1950s.   Performances left people in tears, including on more than one occasion, Stoppard himself.  He was 83 when it was first staged in London, 85 when it came to New York. In interviews he expressed an eagerness to be writing another play, but also admitted that after this play, it was hard to know where to go.

Stoppard died in November, at the age of 88.  "Death is not anything," Guildenstern says towards the end of R&G. "It's the absence of presence, nothing more...the endless time of never coming back..."  He was by all accounts a very sociable man (his large annual parties were legendary), who (he admitted) felt most comfortable alone.  He was a loving husband and father and friend, known for his kindness--and he owned that the kindness was deliberate, a commitment.  A lot of people are missing him.  He's not coming back.  Throughout his life Stoppard quoted another playwright's line to the effect that the obscure current underlying all of life is grief.

His work lives on, and so in this way he lives for me. Stoppard realized his plays would be produced and read for an indeterminant time after his death, but beyond that he felt such speculation was idle. Who knows what will survive and speak, if anything, especially in the increasingly uncertain future. 

Stoppard was committed to writing for the theatre, which of all writing is most obviously experienced in somebody's present. But his reservations duly noted, the same is true of reading his plays, his words.  The writing that is read is also experienced in the present, whenever (and wherever) that present happens to be.

Stoppard's verbal eloquence wasn't restricted to jokes, ironies and epigrams.  In particular I think of the profound and profoundly moving eloquence that appears at the end of play Shipwrecked, the middle play of his Coast of Utopia trilogy.  To me it is as enduring as any lines of any playwright in my lifetime. 

 Alexander Herzen has just suffered the sudden death of his young son.  Michael Bakunin attempts to comfort his by saying, "Little Kolya, his life cut so short! Who is this Moloch...?"  Herzen replies:

 "No, no, not at all! His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced?...   Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question." 

R.I.P. Clayton Davis (1947-2025)

In terms of years of acquaintance rather than age, I lost my oldest friend this passing year. I first remember Clayton Davis from our fourth grade at Sacred Heart School, when after Christmas we suddenly had a teacher who for the first time wasn’t a nun, but a tall blond young woman named Miss White. 

 For awhile we and some other classmates escorted her on her walk home after school—the girls walking with her while the bedazzled and confused boys shambled behind, until the point where Miss White sent us back. Once on our return walk I recall I accompanied Clayton to his house, and I met his mother and the first group of what would eventually be his nine siblings. They would be a part of my life for a long time.

 His family moved away but Clayton and I became reacquainted at Greensburg Central Catholic High School. We were in the same year and we had most of the same classes. We shared the jubilation of the Pittsburgh Pirates winning the 1960 World Series with what has been called the greatest game ever. 

 That first fall we both volunteered for the local John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, and were rewarded a few years later by being named “ushers” so we could attend the only speech President Kennedy made in Pittsburgh—in the fall of 1962, just a week or so before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

 On November 22, 1963 we heard at the same time the news of Kennedy being shot in Dallas, and then of his death. We walked together after school as we usually did that year—I lived just across the weedy fields and Clayton walked to his former home, now his grandmother’s, to await a ride back to his new home in the country. Mostly that year it was the two of us, talking about school and the endless iteration of who was the “toughest” girl in each class.

 But on that day I had prearranged to bring my debate partner home so we could work on our case. He was Michael Krempasky. We all knew that the conditions of our lives and futures had just changed dramatically. The three of us would become lifelong friends. 

 In the next few years we would form a kind of comedy group, starting with taped skits in the manner of That Was the Week That Was, Beyond the Fringe, Steve Allen and Stan Freberg, then adding music and performance. The folk music boom dominated our senior year, and we became a Kingston-like trio, complete with matching striped shirts: the Crosscurrents. 

 I started writing songs, and Clayton—a serious musician—began writing as well. Then I went off to college some 800 miles away. One day I sat in the college library writing lyrics on a yellow pad. I sent them off to Clayton, and he wrote the music. The song turned out well and so we did it again, as we would off and on for the next 20 years.

 When I got home on vacations, the Crosscurrents would work out how to do these songs together, along with songs that each of us wrote on our own. We soon discovered the magic of the Beatles together, returning from a double bill of Help! and A Hard Day’s Night to learn and instantly sing the songs in Clayton’s basement. Our own songs changed as well.

 I’m writing about this in some small detail because I know now, as I sort of did then, that communicating through the making of music, through the sharing and shaping and indeed the creating of our songs, made these friendships unique in ways I can’t explain, except to say that there were many intuited levels of what we shared. 

 That was especially true of my relationship with Clayton, particularly as the years went on and he pursued music professionally in a series of groups, often including some of our songs. We would play together informally, and collaborated in a public way as late as the mid-1980s. The three of us had a last hurrah at an open stage in the late 90s or perhaps early 2000s. 

It wasn't all music, of course.  The three of us generally had a good time together.  Clayton had a quick wit, a way with a pun.  Once when we were on an epic road trip in Ohio in Mike's yellow VW bug, Mike felt something on the back of his neck, like an insect bite.  "Is there a red spot there?" he asked.  "No," Clayton said.  "It's a pigment of your imagination."

 Through the years I attended both of Clayton’s weddings, and spent time with his daughter Nora when she was small. He visited me in Boston and Connecticut. He was there for the funerals of each of my parents. After I moved here to California I never returned to western PA without seeing him, though our lives diverged and we talked less.

 More than a year ago, he was found unconscious on his kitchen floor in Pittsburgh, with a stroke or something like it. He was unconscious for weeks in the hospital, so long that the puzzled doctors were losing hope. Then one day his son Ian said something that made him laugh. Slowly he came back to full consciousness.

 He had other episodes and never fully recovered, but eventually he was well enough to leave the rehab facility and live happily with Ian and Ian’s wife Stephanie in Pittsburgh, where Clayton was also reunited with his beloved dog Nelson. His daughter Nora and sister Mary were frequent visitors. In September he faded and then slipped away.

 Mike, who lives in central PA, visited him several times, but I was always 3000 miles away. I tried to communicate with him in the way we used to—through music. I sent him several mixes of songs from our past (including the Brubeck jazz we first listened to early in high school) plus some of our own songs we recorded in one basement or another over the years, and once in a real studio.

 I also wrote to him a few times. I learned he was having memory problems, and it seemed he was clearer on the far past, and sometimes felt he was living in it. So in my last letter I recounted some of the same memories from our early days as I have here—the Kennedy experiences in high school, and fourth grade with Miss White.

 His sister Mary told me she’d read him that letter, and he responded: “Miss White! She was hot!” 

 A more complete obituary appears here. May he rest in peace. He lives on in those he left behind, and in the music.  And I'll keep playing our songs, as long as I can.