Love means never having to say.....
Writers of novels, songs, screenplays and academic tomes all died this week. Three of them. Two men who moved and entertained millions of readers:
Robert Parker yesterday and, on Sunday,
Eric Segal, and a woman who wrote and sang lush music and poetry,
Kate McGarrigle.
I wrote about Parker
yesterday and will write more in the near future. He and his characters have been an influence and companions for me and several friends, for years. Here's
a nice piece on him by the proprietor of
The Rap Sheet.
Segal, a scholarly classics professor at Yale, author of many books in his field and member of an Oxford college, was also the author of the monumentally popular
Love Story and
Oliver's Story and, surprising to me, screenwriter of the Beatles'
The Yellow Submarine. One of his obituaries called him the progenitor of "bereavement fiction," something with which we are now entirely familiar. He had suffered from Parkinson's for years but refused to be bowed by it or anything else, evidently. At his funeral, his daughter, Francesca, paid him marvelous tribute by saying that "[at] the core of who he was [was] a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running and my mother, with just the same tenacity."
Meanwhile, Kate McGarrigle, sister of Anna and one half of the McGarrigle Sisters, and mother of marvelous Rufus Wainwright,
died earlier this week as well. She had learned to play the piano from nuns in the small Canadian town where she grew up. Her son's moving
tribute is on his website.
A sad week.
Labels: music, passings, people of note, writing
