A Sad Farewell to an American Great
This is for Molly. With apologies to W. H. Auden, for changing the gender within his poem:
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message She Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
She was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
From a September 2006 AP story:
She’s not just the leftist agitator with the 6-foot frame, she’s the leftist agitator with the 6-foot frame from Texas, and she never lets people forget it.
She’s published six books, among them four best-sellers.
Humor sustains her.
“I’ve always found it easier to be funny than to be serious,’ she said, seven years after she was first diagnosed with the cancer that then gave her less than a 5 percent chance of surviving.
This is her third bout with the disease. Chemotherapy has claimed her thick red locks. She’s feeling OK, on the whole, despite the balance problem and constipation.
She has yet to learn if the chemo and radiation treatments have finally eradicated the cancer cells from her body.
If she appeared a bit fatigued during the visit to her home in Austin’s trendy Travis Heights neighborhood, who could blame her. She was grappling with Richards’ death. And she’d returned less than a week before from an 11-day, 227-mile raft trip through the Grand Canyon, a trip which she said reduced her ego “to the size of a grain of sand.”
Her loyal assistant, Betsy Moon, had warned the 16 people on the trip that she was “a fragile case.” So you might have thought Ivins was the empress of China.
“People would bring me food and drink, and put up my tent,” Ivins said.
Then she laughed heartily. She hadn’t asked Moon to elicit sympathy, but she wasn’t complaining.
“I’m not above using cancer as the world’s greatest excuse,” she said.
She was born Molly Tyler Ivins in Monterey, Calif., but she tells people she was raised in “East Texas.”
Her father, Jim Ivins, a corporate lawyer, was a conservative Republican.
“She was going to be anything he wasn’t,” her bother Andy Ivins said. Father and daughter argued about civil rights, the war in Vietnam, the women’s movement.
Molly Ivins attended her mother’s and grandmother’s alma mater, Smith College, where she wrote for the student newspaper and where she read Betty Friedan’s just-released “The Feminine Mystique,” which was sweeping the campus. She spent a year in Paris before graduating and two summers interning at the Houston Chronicle, where she wrote up street closings and bridal news and recalls accidentally marrying off one bride to her father and writing that another had earned a “B.O.” degree.
The mishaps weren’t enough to keep her out of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, or from landing her first job at the Minneapolis Tribune, where she spent three years.
She returned home in 1970 to cover the Texas Legislature, became co-editor of the biweekly leftist newsmagazine The Texas Observer, gained some national prominence and then was hired away by the New York Times. Six years later she was fired by the same paper, a feat she brags about, because the top editor, A.M Rosenthal, didn’t feel she showed “due respect and deference to the great dignity of the New York Times,” Ivins recalled.
Returning home once more, she landed a job as a columnist and has stayed true to her roots ever since.
She writes from home, in the company of her black standard poodle, Fanny Brice. She never married and has no children. Her favorite targets: Republicans, Republicans and Republicans.
A year ago, she announced she would not vote for Hillary Clinton, and also had sharp words for the Beltway Democratic leaders. And here she attacks the compromise on torture. No blogger made that case so well.
If you ever heard her speak, while her wit was sharp as steel, her delivery and voice had the grace of silk. It’s been said that ‘diplomacy is when someone tells you to “Go to hell” and makes it sound like an enjoyable place to visit.’ Molly was no diplomat, but face-to-face in a debate, I’m sure her opponents felt like they’d just gotten beat up by Audrey Hepburn or Shirley Temple.
Consider what she wrote in September, the same month her friend Ann Richards also fell to the only foe that ever defeated Molly.
The earthy Texas humor in her writing gave way to an exquisite grace that was utterly disarming. Listen to her speak of Tom Delay, to understand what I mean about the grace in the way she spoke.
Teens develop mad crushes on rock stars and actors. I spent much of my adult life mad about Molly. It didn’t matter that she was tall and large and fit no conventional definition of beautiful. Because when she smiled, nobody smiled wider. She was, to me, the greatest columnist that ever lived. I will miss her.
My condolences to her family, friends, coworkers, neighbors, employers, every liberal in America, to Texas, to America itself and to the world.
If anything, I’m sure Molly would be about laughter now, not sadness. And encouraging us to fight on in her stead.
Sure, I’m sad, but there’s no time to wallow. In her honor, go needle a Republican. Then let’s go Chimpeach the Shrub.
Update: Daniel DiRito at Thought Theater has Molly on YouTube, in The Dildo Diaries.
Also, you might want to consider a donation to fight breast cancer, via the walking group - The Titsy Chicks - led by my longtime friend, Mary.
Her REAL university, where she was the magna cum laudest, was the Texas Observer, where they’ve put up a memorial and many of her writings.
And this is especially rich, from her NY Times obituary: “In 1976, her writing, which she said was often fueled by “truly impressive amounts of beer,” landed her a job at The New York Times. She cut an unusual figure in The Times newsroom, wearing blue jeans, going barefoot and bringing in her dog, whose name was an expletive.”
Hah!
