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Saturday, June 20, 2020

Robert Richardson, farewell


Robert Richardson, superlative biographer of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James, has died.




When I couldn't initially confirm this sad report I recalled what he said when he and I had just spoken ten years ago, after he delivered his keynote at the William James centenary conference in Chocorua, New Hampshire. 

"We all eventually have to face up to the deeply unfair side of life..."

He concluded our discussion  quoting Mark Twain, “it’s a terrible death to be talked to death.” For Twain, reports of his death were "greatly exaggerated." I'd hoped the same might be true in this instance, but evidently not.

I was not aware at the time that someone had captured our brief exchange and posted it, beginning at about 26:00":


I'd thanked him for his body of work, & for mentioning during Q-&-A the wonderful WJ statement affirming the capacity of materialist metaphysics to capture the totality of our embodied experience: "To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after. That beloved incarnation was among matter's possibilities.”

Thank you, Bob Richardson, for incarnating such humane and sensitive insight into the lives and thoughts of our tradition's best and brightest.

Prize-winning historian Robert D. Richardson dies at age 86
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK (AP) — Robert D. Richardson, a prize-winning historian known for his elegant and authoritative biographies of such leading American thinkers as William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson, has died.

His friend Arlo Haskell told The Associated Press that Richardson died last Tuesday after sustaining head injuries in a fall. Richardson, husband of the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Annie Dillard, turned 86 just days before his death.

A native of Milwaukee, Richardson grew up in Massachusetts and had a close affinity with Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and other New England writers. The house in Medford was the former meeting place for the Transcendental Club, whose members included Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. Concord was home in the 19th century to Emerson and Thoreau among others.

Richardson won the Bancroft Prize in 2007 for “William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism,” which judges praised as “a virtual intellectual genealogy of American liberalism and, indeed, of American intellectual life in general, through and beyond the twentieth century.” In 1996, his “Emerson: The Mind On Fire” won the Francis Parkman Prize and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist.

“Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind” was published in 1986 and had a more personal impact on his life. The book’s fans included Dillard, who sent him a fan letter. The two eventually met, and after “two lunches and three handshakes” as Dillard later remembered it, they were married.

Richardson was married twice, most recently to Dillard, had two daughters from his first marriage and three stepdaughters with Dillard. He spent at least part of each year in Key West, Florida. From 2001-2009, he served on the board of the Key West Literary Seminar, for which Haskell serves as director.
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Richardson and Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Holy the Firm, Teaching a Stone to Talk,The Writing Life, For the Time Being, The Living..) married after she wrote him a fan letter for his Thoreau bio. Then he wrote her one... (from AnnieDillard.com):

Biography of Annie Dillard by Bob Richardson

My husband Bob (Robert Richardson) is the biographer of Thoreau, Emerson, and William James.    He doesn't write what Sontag called "pathographies."    When Contemporary Authors needed an update in its account of me, he wanted to write it, and did.  Either the agent or the editors there gagged on all this praise and sent it back.
Bob is 76 and has had 2 open-heart surgeries and 2 pacemakers.  He wants to see this piece of work "out there," and requested I put it on the website, so sure
[Note: This was published about the time I met Bob, I had no idea then that he'd had two heart surgeries. jpo]

     Annie Dillard has been considered a major voice in American literature since she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek in 1974 and won a Pulitzer Prize. Her reputation has increased steadily if bumpily since then. Scholars and critics have recognized her scope’s widening from the natural world to history, metaphysics, ever --more narratives, and theology until  Paul Roberts could say in the Toronto Globe and Mail that the 1999 publication of For the Time Being, “places Dillard more firmly than ever among the very greatest of American writers.”
     Dillard has written a novel, some essays, poetry, and a memoir; her most characteristic books, however, are imaginative non-fiction narratives-—witnessings or accounts, stories and speculations–- that resist classification. Her distinctive, and distinctively American, prose style has been widely recognized and openly imitated. She is, like Thoreau, a close observer; she is, like Emerson, a rocket- maker; her works’ prose structures and aims, however, are all her own. “We have less time than we knew,” she writes in Holy the Firm, “and that time buoyant, cloven, lucent, missile, and wild.”
(continues)
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"Richardson's James"... "James bio" -- U@d
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A NOTE from Paul Croce:
Thank you, Daniel Brunson, Ermine Algier, and Steve Bush of SAAP and the William James Society, for sharing the sad news of Robert Richardson’s death. It was good to read your memorials to his fine work and the obituaries in both local and national papers.
  Novelist John Banville praised his trilogy of biographies of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James for their “fluent, agile prose.” Richardson possessed still more of the art that he depicted so well in his books. 
  In the most recent biography, he praises James’s ability to write in different styles for different audiences. James could write with “technical density” for his fellow philosophers, but also with “clear exposition” for students; outside the academy, he could make clear points for the “educated non-specialist,” but also craft words in an “easy popular style. (William James: In the Maelstrom of Modernism [Houghton Mifflin, 2006], 512 and 360).
  Richardson also possessed this range of skills. Before turning to biography, his first works were solid scholarly achievements, all published by Indiana University Press. His Literature and Film (1969) highlights how these art forms “illuminate and enliven” each other for finding “human order in life” (https://books.google.com/books/about/Literature_and_film.html?id=24S0AAAAIAAJ). The Rise of Modern Mythology: 1680-1860, a compilation with Burton Feldman (1972), reveals the way Western culture appropriates non-Western mythologies (so relevant still!). Harvard American Renaissance scholar Lawrence Buell called his Myth and Literature in the American Renaissance (1978) an “excellent book destined to win recognition as a significant text in the field” (New England Quarterly 52 [1979]: 569).
  He could write with some of the same range of skills that he depicted so artfully in his biographical trio. 
  Thank you, Robert Dale Richardson, Junior, for your lifetime of good work!
Paul Croce
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