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.
The readers to whom this spoke adored her—and her vision of a harmonious life. But when reporters came to call, she was a little touchy about the assumption that the pretty and privileged existence of some of her characters was in fact her own; "I speak fluent fuckinese," she said in one interview. A profile writer was ordered to meet her at a deli, not at home, because, Laurie complained, "I'm tired of reading about my china teacups and my cozy little house." (Of course, she eventually took pity on the writer and brought her home, throwing open the door to her daughter's bedroom and saying, "Here's the best room in the house.") Within the insular world of book publishing, the ruptures in some of her friendships were legendary and often mysterious. For readers, however, the names of her books, which drove her editor husband crazy—"We almost broke up over one title"—suggested she led a halcyon life. Happy All the Time. Family Happiness. Goodbye Without Leaving. These were not so much fact as aspiration.
She was ahead of her time, or not quite of it. When she began publishing, more than two decades ago, American fiction was in thrall to writers who relied heavily on clinical depression and chemical substances, anomie and ennui. Of all the words associated with Laurie Colwin, ennui would be last on the list. She had wild enthusiasms for everything from Korean pickles to old doilies to brown and white patterned china, and her friends remember her trademark greetings and odd nicknames. For Juliet Annan, who had been her British publicist, it was "Well, look at you my fine friend!"—in, Annan recalls, "the voice she used to talk to the cat—immensely affectionate." Pat Strachan, a book editor who met Laurie at the school both their daughters attended, remembers that Laurie signed herself "old slave," in a show of pretend chagrin at the demands of motherhood. When everyone in New York was wearing black and going to clubs, Laurie was wearing horizontal stripes and going to the farmers market. "Unlike some people who love to go out, I love to stay home," she wrote. Rick Kot says it was difficult to persuade her to tour the country promoting her books because she was wary of elevators and airplanes.
She feared the professional fate of Barbara Pym, the enormously talented English novelist with whom she was sometimes compared, and whose work for a time had vanished into obscurity. She had long been passionate about food, had cooked for the protesters occupying campus buildings at Columbia in the late '60s and for the homeless women at the Olivieri Center, in midtown Manhattan. ("Lunch today, honey. A disaster!" one of them said after she served an Irish dish called colcannon.) When she was given the opportunity to write about food regularly for gourmet, she decided it would be a welcome counterpoint to her other work, offering, her husband recalls, "distraction and safety." The food essays created their own avid audience; today, the two collections of those pieces, Home Cooking and More Home Cooking, outsell her other work by more than three to one.
These, too, were ahead of their time. In an era when many people were still writing about cooking as though it were transubstantiation, Laurie produced pieces about dreadful dinner parties and comfy suppers that ended with recipes for things like Sautéed Vegetables and Poached Egg in One Pot. One essay begins, "As everyone knows, there is only one way to fry chicken correctly. Unfortunately, most people think their method is best, but most people are wrong. Mine is the only right way, and on this subject I feel almost evangelical." As Laurie herself might have written, either you like this sort of thing, or you don't. The voice is almost corporeal, undeniably hers.
Perhaps that explains why her friends find those particular pieces difficult, even impossible, to reread today. Perhaps it explains why her daughter, Rosa, now 17 and a writer herself, reads and rereads them all the time. Laurie Colwin is utterly alive in them. Laurie's novels contained no great tragedies, no wrenching dislocations, but her life, which so many readers mistook for her work, did. One morning in October 1992 she simply failed to wake up. She had high blood pressure and had relied heavily on Chinese herbalists for help, and her heart gave out. She was 48 years old and the author of ten books. When I saw the familiar Nancy Crampton book-jacket photograph—striped shirt, aureole of curly hair—I thought for a moment that some poor guy in the makeup department at The New York Times was going to get the ax for dropping onto the obit page a picture that was supposed to appear in a book review.
She was buried in Connecticut, at the country place where she loved to spend summers and tend a garden. Alice Quinn says that someone saw a fox nearby watching as the simple pine box went into the dark.
There are certain people so flagrantly alive that their deaths seem an affront to nature. Laurie Colwin was one of those people. The essence of her writing lies not so much in those vivid small details—the pecans in the pancakes, the striped wool stockings, the plates painted with cornflowers—but in the eternal notion of pushing on through everyday matters into the light of life. It was the essence of her existence, too.
Her husband is married now to one of her former writing students, a woman to whom Laurie introduced him, in what in her own novels would be seen as a kind and useful act of posthumous matchmaking, albeit one with a poignant edge of irony. "Laurie had this linoleum block she'd made on the shelf in her office, one of those things you carve as a kid and press into ink and stamp things with," Juris remembers. "I found it the other day and I looked at it and it has one word carved into it. Joy. That story's too sentimental to use."
No it's not.