For the writer attempting a portrait in words, a quick sketch of Laurie Colwin is a snap. Collected colanders and birds' nests, wrote letters with a fountain pen on thick blue stationery, favored flea market china and linens, liked English shoes and horizontal stripes, cooked for a homeless shelter and school fairs, was obsessed with nuns and jugglers—yes, that's right, jugglers. The material is so specific, so vivid, so quirky that the assembled ingredients on paper have the feel of some exotic recipe. But Laurie improvised in the kitchen more than she followed recipes, and she proved in her novels, her essays, and her short stories that a good writer doesn't substitute the accumulation of detail for emotional resonance. Her books piled high on my desk, she seems to be warning me to keep this in mind, not to reduce her to the sum of her eccentricities.
Talking to those who loved her, or even to those with whom she had quarreled, is like constructing a flowchart of the worlds of writing and publishing in New York City. She introduced editors to promising writers and women to promising men, engineered meetings and friendships among the literate, the intriguing, and the up-and-coming. A deus ex machina with aggressively curly hair, she invited them all home, first to the one-room place in Greenwich Village—"a little larger than the Columbia Encyclopedia"—then to the apartment on the seminary block in Chelsea, where she lived with her husband and daughter. "Somehow or other I always end up in a kitchen feeding a crowd," she wrote in the opening sentence of one of her much- beloved pieces about food.
It was not just a crowd. It was a gerrymandered family, a family related not by birth but by interests, intellect, temperament, by being single and searching or paired up and fearful, above all by Laurie, who became the hub of the wheel, passing on recipes, little gifts, and advice, solicited and un. "You had to surrender the moment you walked in the door," said Rick Kot, one of her editors. "I remember when she decided to match up her publicist with a juggler she met in the park. She would not take no for an answer." Alice Quinn, the poetry editor of The New Yorker, met Laurie through the novelist Scott Spencer: "If Scottie doesn't bring us together I'm going to hit him over the head with a cutlet bat," Laurie wrote in one of her ubiquitous postcards. "She was a tremendous interrogator," Quinn recalls. "You might not be ready to say you were seeing someone and the next thing you knew she'd have a dinner party and seat that person to her right. She turned your life over in her mind. 'I need it for my art, Al,' she'd say when I held back. 'You have to tell me.' And I always did. She created a home for all of us."
It was a home for friends from every part of her life: friends made during the years growing up in suburban Philadelphia as part of the smart crowd, the ones who quoted Eliot and drank strong coffee; friends from her days as an editor at publishing houses and as a literary agent's assistant; friends she made in a career as a fiction writer that began when she published her first short story in The New Yorker, at the age of 25. Since then, her writing has never been out of print.
Her work routine varied little. She wrote endlessly in notebooks, spent a good deal of time thinking and reading and listening to music—Brahms and Puerto Rican brass and middle-period Motown. "Then she'd sit down at her Hermes 3000 and produce however many pages she could produce in twenty minutes," recalls her husband, Juris Jurjevics, who runs the Soho Press, a small publishing house. "She thought herself a lazy person and therefore she was very disciplined."
It is difficult to write about Laurie's fiction without preaching either to the converted or to the clueless. Nine people out of ten have never heard of her, or at least read her; the other one becomes ecstatic, even incoherent, at the mention of her name. "She is definitely cultish," says Rick Kot. She was well known in writers' circles for the kind of comedy of manners usually associated with the British, which isn't surprising since she was a pronounced Anglophile who endlessly reread Middlemarch and knew all of Orwell. The voice in her work is wry, knowing, but warm and loving, too, not arch. The writing is prime. One character in A Big Storm Knocked It Over, her last novel, is described as a huge man: "You felt that had he been stripped of flesh, two medium-size women could have played gin rummy in his rib cage."
Those who did not care for her work labeled it domestic, as it was, as she was. The characters seem, like Laurie, very specific. In perhaps her best-known novel, Happy All the Time, one woman's apartment is decorated carefully: "On a white table was a bird's nest, an Egyptian figure in blue stone, a Russian matchbox, and a silver inkwell." This is no accident. "There was always a question of how much fiction there really was in the novels," says Juris. "All her girlfriends are in there, every old boyfriend, a lot of old employers who come off badly. Laurie was a big believer in revenge." Her characters work at things like book design and city planning, practice law, and study art. And during the arc of their fictional adventures they usually do no more than marry and have babies, commit adultery and fret about it, lose their jobs or lose interest in them. But that, of course, is the arc of real life, and the strength of these books is that the arc moves inexorably toward those moments that come to us all when we understand ourselves and the world. One of her best short stories, "The Lone Pilgrim," ends like this:
On the one side is your happiness, and on the other is your past—the self you were used to, going through life alone, heir to your own experience. Once you commit yourself, everything changes and the rest of your life seems to you like a dark forest on the property you have recently acquired. It is yours, but still you are afraid to enter it, wondering what you might find: a little chapel, a stand of birches, wolves, snakes, the worst you can imagine, or the best. You take one timid step forward, but then you realize you are not alone. You take someone's hand—Gilbert Seigh's—and strain through the darkness to see ahead.
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