Eulogy

By Al Silverman

I feel lucky having spent 17 years in the company of CLIFTON ("Kip") FADIMAN at the Book-of-the-Month Club, learning from him how to read. Bearing witness to his reports--he wrote one on every book he read for the club--and his discussions at the monthly meeting of the judges was like taking the world's best creative writing course. He was a humane critic, seldom unkind, with few foibles. (I once did hear him say, "Faulkner makes me giggle.") The books he loved most were those that bore two Fadiman standards: lucidity and a mind at work. He found those qualities most notably in a first novel of the 1950s. Not all his colleagues agreed with him, but with his remarkable powers of persuasion, he got "concurrence" from the board on The Catcher in the Rye--"that rare miracle of fiction," Kip called it, "a human being created out of ink, paper and the imagination." Kip was also a master of self-deprecation. When a memoir written by octogenarian William Shirer came in, Kip, a fellow octogenarian, fussed: "One should never reach the age of 80 because by then you realize your life is not worth a good goddam." After hearing all his projects in recent years, I finally got up the nerve to say, "You ought to write your own memoir." He replied, "I haven't had an interesting life. I've only met interesting people."

--AL SILVERMAN, former BOMC chairman