Remembering Diane Middlebrook

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‘Call Diane’ unexpectedly flashed in my mind last week. Though I knew Diane Middlebrook, one of the finest literary critics around, had been battling cancer for several years, I didn’t take this message as an ominous sign. At year’s end, it’s natural to think of those people you’re long overdue to contact. Then I received the news that she had died last Saturday. There are many fine obituaries online that pay tribute to her singular abilities as a critic, as the provocative biographer of poet Anne Sexton and jazz musician Billy Tipton. I can add very little, except that I will miss her.

We had never met, but we shared lengthy phone conversations and email correspondence in recent years, ever since I was dazzled by her study of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, ‘Her Husband.’ In that book, she reread both poets’ works in light of their relationship, and her explorations especially of Hughes’ visceral imagery were luminous and sharp. I asked her if she would have time to share her particular brand of stardust with our readers, and she warmly responded. She graced our section with reviews possessing an intimacy and lightness that any writer knows only come after a lot of hard work. Of a book of John Ashbery’s selected prose, for instance, she began:

‘Nobody but a reviewer will be likely to read John Ashbery’s captivating book of bite-size essays on poetry and painting straight through from beginning to end. Some pieces look tastier than others right away.... But don’t take the bait. Arranged as they are by date of publication, the essays produce, in time-lapse glimpses, the equivalent of a memoir of how Ashbery turned himself into Ashbery.’

We had things in common--a love of Roman poetry (her final project is a biography of Ovid to be published in 2009) and personal experience with cancer. We talked about clinical trials; she wrote from Europe when she went there for treatments; she talked about the cellular behavior of cancer so vividly that I felt sorry for her oncologist. The same formidable curiousity that informs her literary work was so powerfully abundant in the way she thought about her illness.

My final thought, though, is less about Diane than about myself. I wish I had heard that interior voice months ago and given her a call. I won’t be able to open her books again without regret--but when I do, at least I’ll hear her voice.

Nick Owchar