Why would a woman that age, too blind to read, still polish her stiletto every day from her ancient apartment near Columbia University? Part of the answer is that she started late. The daughter of immigrant Polish Jews, she experienced severe phobias as a child and endured an anxious adulthood. She didn’t even begin to write the piercing book reviews for which she became known until she was in her late 30s. Even then, she wrote no original nonfiction books until she was in her late 70s (when she tackled the Jean Harris story) and no fiction or poetry at all. Motherhood and marriage came first, not out of old-fashioned subservience to Lionel, who died in 1975, but based on an informed insistence on the larger importance of family.
The deeper reason that Trilling kept writing was that she believed something essential was dying in America. Her circle of intellectuals could be a petty, pretentious lot, as Trilling herself never tired of explaining. But they believed in what they called ““a life of significant contention’’–arguing politics and culture in a deep, broad and serious way.
Trilling saw not only the demise of that life but the loss of standards everywhere. Although she moved from being a Communist sympathizer in the 1930s (Whittaker Chambers once tried–unsuccessfully–to recruit her) to an early, liberal anticommunism, she rejected simplistic thinking of all kinds. Trilling’s impatience with careless standards was such that when I once mentioned that my young daughter had drawn a beautiful picture, she said that if it wasn’t genuinely beautiful, I shouldn’t say it was. The woman that the poet Robert Lowell once called ““a housekeeping goddess of reason’’ didn’t want our everyday critical furniture to grow soft and comfortable.
title: “The End Of The Journey” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-05” author: “Sylvester Gaudin”
Last week Pierpaoli, with American philanthropists David and Penny McCall, died in a car crash while on a mission to help refugees from Kosovo. Driving in a hailstorm on winding mountain passes en route from Tirana, Albania’s capital, to the northern town of Kukes, the car carrying the three foreigners and their Albanian driver missed a turn, plunging 400 meters over a cliff.
The McCalls were not standard-issue aid workers. David McCall, of Hotchkiss and Yale, and later of Bridgehampton and New York, was a successful advertising executive, who worked on campaigns for Mercedes-Benz, Tiffany and Exxon. The Max-well House ad kicker “Coffee that tastes as good as it smells” was McCall’s, as was the “Unsell the War” drive, an anti-Vietnam campaign for ad agencies. As director of Refugees International for eight years, Penny McCall had focused on removing land mines. Through the Penny McCall Foundation, she supported the arts in America and Brazil. The couple’s work for the nongovernmental organization took them on treacherous missions to Asia, Africa and the Balkans. “At noon, we bid our goodbyes and fly home, wishing, as always, that we could do more to help,” wrote David in his journal on leaving Albania last year. And, of course, they did. On their trip to the country last week, they went to explore how new technology systems could help give the Kosovo refugees a sense of nor-malcy. The day they died, they’d been testing the satellite radios they were taking to the camps in Macedonia and Albania.
Pierpaoli’s story was different. Born to poor Italian immigrants in the south of France, she left home at 19, when she moved with her baby daughter to Cambodia, a destination she chose after seeing a colored map in a high-school history book. Supporting herself by running an import-export business, she was forced to leave Cambodia in 1975, when the Khmer Rouge took over. She moved to Thailand and began working with refugees. Over the next two decades her commitment took her from Asia to the Balkans and Africa. When bureaucracy frustrated her, Pierpaoli simply sidestepped it, whether personally buying truckloads of supplies for refugees or finding them land on which to resettle. “She’d always remind me that your chief enemy is not your real enemy, because you can always deal with them,” says Lionel Rosenblatt, president of Refugees International. “Your enemies are your so-called friends who are too insecure or cautious.” In Pierpaoli’s autobiography, “Women of a Thousand Children,” she described founding Tomorrow, a nonprofit foundation running centers for street children in Guatemala and Bolivia. She adopted a Cambodian refugee boy, Olivier, now a successful Parisian chef. Her daughter Manou is a ballet dancer in New York City. “Life is a shooting star,” wrote Herve Ludovic-de-Lys, a humanitarian worker who had met Pierpaoli in Mali last year. “Yvette’s life got its beauty from the commitment she made to help refugee stars cross the sky with pride and hope.” Her own star, and those of the McCalls, still shine.
