I was so used to seeing his name in print that at first the obituaries did not faze me—the only odd feature was that new tag line, “dies at 83.” He had always seemed to me most fully alive, most present, in print. In person, especially in the last years of his life, he was often heartbreakingly unreachable. He seemed always to be across high water, shouting from across a great divide. “Come here,” he would beckon, only to bellow, if I finally made it, “Why did you take so long? Why are you such a mess?” or even, “Why do you never come?”

No one who loved him—and there were many of us—would have called him anything but difficult. He could be comically, professionally difficult—traveling a rapid circuit from reproachful to accusing, aggressive to indifferent. At such moments— and I confess that there were many of them—I would often seek solace in his books. He was so brilliant a student of his own loneliness that surely his dense defensiveness could be penetrated, no? After all, that ext…