I met Dick in the fall of 1956, and thus was initiated a fifty-seven-year-long literary conversation and friendship. In 1956, Dick was just starting out in the University of Chicago English department while I was teaching freshman composition in the College. He was twenty-seven, I was twenty-three. I had just returned from the army to Chicago, where I’d earlier received an MA in English. Dick and I started to talk immediately about writers and books and didn’t stop until just a week or two before his death.His assiduous engagement with everything literary never diminished. He was reading fiction, writing fiction, teaching fiction (over the phone to me, in bed with his wife, Alane), he was talking about fiction right down to the end. For me, as his friend and fellow writer, his appetite for literature, along with his knowledge and understanding of literature, was an inexhaustible treasure.
What did I prize most in him? What do I miss most about him? His titanic scrutinizing engrossment with every last vicissitude of existence, his raptness and his rapture, his lucidity, his being perpetually wide awake as if he were being stung by life, his childlike geniality, his gentle and not-so-gentle force, the swiftness of his perspicacity, his impulse to celebrate, his miniscule antipathies and his benevolent urges and his wide-ranging fellow feeling, his imaginative merging with other lives, the bonding of his vulnerability to his fortitude, a steely literary integrity—beyond everything, the way he was weighted down by love. Because the wellspring for his daemonic attentiveness was, in the widest sense, love.
His mindful presence here, his joy in being among us, his absorption in everything both within and beyond his ken, seemed never to slacken. Living, for Dick, was an unceasing stimulant and the engagement with life never ceased to evolve. Everywhere this urbane and not entirely unwily man went, mankind flabbergasted and enkindled him. His direct apprehension of the real was amazing.
Golk, Europe, In Any Case, Stitch, Other Men’s Daughters, Natural Shocks, A Father’s Words, Pacific Tremors, exquisitely imagined and surpassingly executed by one of our American era’s most distinguished, if unheralded, novelists and men of letters, Richard Stern, who was born in Manhattan on 25 February 1928 and for decades, in the environs of the University of Chicago, lived the life of the mind and the imagination (tempered, as his biographical record will show, by the daily trials, the inescapable crises, the stunning losses and unavoidable conflicts that are engendered simply by going about one’s business on this earth for eighty-four years) and who, after enduring everyman’s thousand ups and downs, died beside his adoring, brilliant, devoted wife, Alane, far from the Hyde Park neighborhood and its renowned university, in his last home, on little Tybee Island, the easternmost point in Georgia, on 24 January 2013—a magnanimous friend, a formidable writer, an exceptional man.
