I OPENED THE New York Times the other day to discover that Jervis Anderson, “New Yorker Writer and Biographer of [Bayard] Rustin, is Dead at 67.” I realized, with a stab of hopeless sadness, that we hadn’t spoken for nearly three years — a long time for someone I liked as much as I liked Jervis. “Joe,” he would say when he called, his part-English, part-Jamaican accent able somehow to extract two syllables out of my first name, “Jervis Anderson,” adding his second name, as if I knew — or had even heard of — another person named Jervis.
His calls always pleased me, though they came too seldom. Often they would begin being about baseball, about which he was a knowledgeable fan, and then go on to other, larger things. Sports was one of many interests we had in common. He had grown up playing cricket, about which he also knew a vast deal and on which he wrote a brilliant essay, “Cricket and C. L. R. James,” for the American Scholar, one of the few things that succeeded in making that highly mysterious game intelligible to Americans, or at least to this American. He also knew boxing, in both its glory and its gory aspects, and he wrote well about it, too.
Jervis had a generous smile and an explosive laugh, which it was always a pleasure to evoke. I don’t think I knew anyone who had less meanness or side. Through the worst period of black-white relations in America, he never, in my presence, even hinted that, as a black man who had doubtless suffered his share of prejudice, he existed in a state of moral superiority. He was what my friend Edward Shils called “a sweet character.”
Not without his mysteries, Jervis was, to use an old-fashioned word, personable without being in the least personal. In all our meetings and conversations, he told me almost nothing about his private life. Once he adverted to an early marriage, long ago ended and with no children. About his life in Jamaica, he rarely spoke. We never discussed anything about the arrangements necessary to everyday existence: apartments, food, clothes, money.
Although he wrote mostly about black subjects — producing biographies of A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, New Yorker profiles of Derek Walcott and Ralph Ellison — Jervis read much more widely than his writings might suggest. He read as a writer reads, with an intense interest in the little secrets of how it is done. He read vast quantities of novels and stories. So far as I know, he never attempted to write fiction, but, nearly 20 years ago, he mentioned that he would love to write about his boyhood in the Caribbean, and I gather he had begun to do so before his death.
Jervis was an immensely patient worker. Before writing his biographies, he put in years of reading, leg-work, interviewing, holding back on actual composition until he was fully prepared. I don’t know if he wrote about black subjects because they most closely interested him — he also wrote a fine book on the Harlem Renaissance — or because, as a black writer, he felt called upon to do so.
What I do know is that Jervis seemed to need subjects he could admire, even though he first appeared on my own intellectual map with a quietly devastating attack in Commentary — written in 1968, when it took courage to write such a piece — on Eldridge Cleaver, then a radical who justified violence on racial grounds. Subjects worthy of his admiration did not come cheap. He may have sensed the world running out of them.
Jervis was almost too nice a man to be a writer. Neither strong criticism nor self-assertion came easily to him. The putdown was not a form he practiced. He was deeply respectful, but in a most discerning way. His admiration for William Shawn, under whose editorship he was first invited to write for the New Yorker, was complete, and he never referred to him, in my hearing, other than as “Mr. Shawn.”
Now that he is dead, what impresses me most about Jervis, apart from the seriousness with which he practiced his craft, was his loneliness. Not that he himself ever suggested he was lonely. Still, as a West Indian black in America, he had to have suffered some of the prejudice against blacks without the compensatory feeling of full solidarity with American blacks. As an intellectual, he was essentially an appreciator, an isolated position among people — journalists, artists, intellectuals — happiest on the attack. Greatly good-natured though he was, I’m not sure he was able to extend the gift of intimacy to many people.
Jervis lived and died alone. His neighbors, the New York Times obituarist noted, only suspected something was wrong when his newspapers and mail began to pile up. The delayed knowledge of his death speaks more profoundly to his isolation than anything else could. I hope he had some awareness of how attractive a man he was. Montaigne writes: “There is no sweet solace for the loss of our friends other than that which is given us by the knowledge that there was nothing we forgot to tell them.” I, alas, forgot to tell Jervis that he was a gent, the real thing, and a member of that best of all minority groups, the good guys.
Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
