You should, if you can, read John Podhoretz’s eulogy for his mother, Midge Decter. It is a sweeping and loving review of where she came from, what she was made of, how she came to her influential family and her long and remarkable career in letters and ideas. “How had she come to T.S. Eliot? There had been barely a book in my grandparents’ house. My dad says that when he met her Midge had already read Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Proust. Proust! And yet this was a woman who spent her life regretting the fact that she never graduated from college.” On feminism:
The great irony of my mother’s life is that she, a trailblazing female intellectual in a frankly misogynistic world of New York highbrow jerks whose views of women were reductionist and noxious, would end up being America’s most formidably serious anti-feminist. What she could not bear was the culture of complaint. She once said something slighting about Gloria Steinem and I asked why. She told me Gloria Steinem had once whined that she had wanted to write about politics but that they wouldn’t let her. “Who,” this woman who had written plenty about politics by this point, “were ‘they’?” She felt the same way about Betty Friedan and the idea that Friedan and her cohort had somehow been tricked by the capitalist powers that be into moving into beautiful upper-middle-class suburbs in nice houses.
On writing and clarity:
When I was just starting out as a writer, and I would tell her I thought something I was writing was boring, she would say this: “You are incapable of being boring. All you need to worry about is being clear and saying what you mean.” Now, whether or not it’s true that I am incapable of being boring is a subject for another time. The point here is that this was the greatest editorial advice I ever received, and it is advice I’ve passed along to others: Your job is not to be interesting. You are interesting. Your job is to be clear.
She was so very clear. And her clarity came from the quality that made so many people look up to her, emulate her, or feel she was their lodestar. It was an inner thing. You might call it serenity, but while she was very level of mood — except for when she raged under her breath about the little elves her children seemed to think were going to clean up the kitchen after them — she was too engaged with the world to be truly serene. She just had an iron sense of self, as her grandmother had had when she marched away from her widower drunk and chose a different life when nobody did such a thing. Midge had it as a teenager, reading Proust in a home without books.
The whole thing is more than worth your time.