For a change of pace, I opened a box that Vicki had labelled “Edward’s Notebooks on World Literature.” Ed’s reading program was prodigious. I knew that he was working his way systematically through the Western canon, but I could not appreciate the scope of the project or of Ed’s perseverance until I saw it for myself. I pulled notebooks out of the bins ten at a time and examined them. The first one I opened was labelled “Modern Masters and Their Works: Music,” and it began with Benjamin Britten. Ed was a musicologist. His father, Edwin John Stringham, had been a professor of music at Queens College and had named his son Edward MacDowell after Edward Alexander MacDowell (1860-1908), a composer he adored and whom his son derided as second-rate. Ed was called Mac by his parents. He was an only child.
Next, I opened a notebook labelled “Russian III.” It contained the schedule of a class Ed was taking (“6-8 Wed.”), the Russian alphabet, exercises, and the author and title of the textbook (“Khavronina, ‘Russian As We Speak It’ ”). It also implied the existence elsewhere in the archive of Russian I and Russian II. Another notebook was called “End of Painting,” one of many volumes devoted to art, with biographical sketches of artists and descriptions of individual paintings, as well as paragraphs of authoritative criticism that were either composed by Ed or copied without attribution from professional art critics. It turned out to be the former. Many such notebooks later—there were volumes dedicated to “Portuguese Painting,” “Russian Art I and II,” “Swiss Artists,” “Greek Art,” “Cubism & Dalí,” “Hans Hofmann,” and “Modern American Painting” (which had a whiff of turpentine), as well as a few sketchbooks—I deduced, and Vicki confirmed, that Ed had been working on the definitive book about contemporary American artists. He had a contract for it, and a deadline—a 1960 deadline that first loomed and then passed. “He slowly gave up the idea,” Vicki said. “He avoided doing it, and avoided it and avoided it, and suddenly he wasn’t doing it.” On Sunday, March 13, 1960, Ed wrote, despondently, “So I spend most of the day doing research for more unwritten articles.”
But it is the notebooks on world literature that show Ed’s astonishing range. The first one I happened on, “Albanian History, Music, and Art,” was typical. It contained a meticulous hand-drawn map of Albania and a timeline that begins in 1000 B.C. and culminates with the visit of Chou En-lai, in 1964 A.D. Each volume is organized chronologically, first by century, then by decade, then by year, if a country was at war or in the midst of a renaissance. In a separate section, individual composers, writers, and painters are organized alphabetically, with their works in chronological order. Sources are given at the back.
I blew the dust off notebooks in which Ed had condensed the history, music, art, and literature of Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Russia, Denmark, Norway (Stone Age to Knut Hamsun), Nazi Germany (Hitler’s favorites), East Germany, Latin America, Yugoslavia, Greece, Estonia, Hungary, Turkey, Holland (from the arrival of Julius Caesar, in 58 B.C., and the construction of the first dikes to the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815), Non-Russian, Byelorussian, Poland (the volume called “Polish Composers” is brimful; he loved the deeply depressing work of Krzysztof Penderecki), Iceland, Cuba, Yiddish (somewhat scanty, but supplemented with Moldavia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenia, Tajikistan, and Kirghizian), and Finnish. When I came to a volume titled “Anthology of Modern Yugoslav Poetry,” I dared hope that Ed had left some blank pages, but he took up the slack by annexing Macedonia.
The notebooks also include some surprising one-offs: “Myth” opens with a family tree of the gods of Olympus, beginning with Chaos, and expands to other cultures, notably that of Japan; “Ballets” is a history of choreographers including Balanchine, Massine, and Nijinsky; “ISCM Festivals, 1923-1982” documents the country, composers, and repertoire performed at sixty years’ worth of international music festivals; “Film” is an international compilation of directors, from France to Hollywood; “EB” is a study of the Russian-born stage designer Eugene Berman; “Novels” is a chronologically organized bibliography of the genre; “Leaves of Grass” is devoted entirely to Walt Whitman; “The Middle Ages” features Petrarch (1304-74), Welsh poetry, Galician and Portuguese, Irish mythology cycles, Dante, Marco Polo, and Boccaccio. It came to me that Ed was Wikipedia before there was Wikipedia—he was Wikipedia with judgment.
Once in a while, a slip of paper floated out of a notebook: a shopping list, say (“cheese spread, Ajax, lettuce, Bufferin, Times”), or a brief assessment of some literary phenomenon, like this one of the sensational French novel “Bonjour Tristesse,” by the teen-age Françoise Sagan, published in English in 1955: “True, the Riviera atmosphere is wispily unconvincing; true, the story itself is as preposterous as a fairy tale.” These stray notes brought back Ed’s eagerness to share his enthusiasms, exhorting a colleague to read Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” or Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities,” or John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces,” which he found enjoyable, if flawed. Ed remembered everything he wrote in his notebooks, as if the act of writing things down engraved them in his memory; he never forgot a character’s name or how a story ended. But what to do with all this knowledge? His project brought to mind that of another Edward: Edward Casaubon, in George Eliot’s “Middlemarch,” whose bride, Dorothea, at first enamored of his magnificent intellect, gradually realizes that his great work, the “Key to All Mythologies,” is an illusion and will never be finished. Ed was some kind of genius—an unfulfilled genius. He once said to me, fearfully, on the verge of retirement, “Have I built myself a house of cards?”
