I have to begin with an apology and a correction. In my last post, I misreported the date of Karen Wessel Marcus’s death as Sunday, May 3. It was actually Monday, May 4. During this pandemic, the days have lost their distinctiveness. Half the time, I don’t know if its Monday or Thursday. At any rate, my apologies to Karen’s family and friends for the error.

I won’t be writing about death in every post, but I have to now; two other friends died the same week as Karen: Marian Wood, who bought and edited my first book, A Rumor of War, and helped make it a success; and Dennis Ginosi, an old colleague from the Chicago Tribune.

Although their passing occurred during this pandemic, neither was caused by the Corona virus. That’s academic, as they’re gone and I’ll miss them both. I’ll devote this post to Marian.

She was a brilliant editor and vivid personality, feisty, witty, opinionated, formidably smart. Dark-haired and about five feet eight inches tall, she threw off an aura of glamour  — not high society glamour, nor the glamour of New York’s lit-crit world, but a kind of intellectual glamor. Once, in circumstances I cannot precisely recall, she and I were listening to a symphony on a car radio. She identified its composer, its title, and the movement we were hearing at that moment. I was impressed. She said that she and her classmates at Barnard College and Columbia University, where she did her graduate work, used to hold classical music contests. They would play a segment from a piece; whoever could identify the symphony or concerto, the part that was being played, and its composer was the winner. That’s what Marian Wood was doing while my bozo buddies and I were driving around in American Graffiti cars, rockin’ out to Buddy Holly and Carl Perkins.

Marian was a 37-year-old senior editor at Holt, Rinehart & Winston (now Henry Holt) in 1975, when the unfinished manuscript for my Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War, landed on her desk. She later confessed to me that it sat there, unread, for nearly a month. At the time, with American society as bitterly divided as it is now, the Vietnam War was toxic as a subject for literature. A writer would have had an easier time publishing a book full of explicit sex in Victorian England. Eventually, her conscience got the better of her. She read the partial MS, liked what she saw, and decided to take a risk. She gave me a modest advance ($6,000), and marching orders to finish the damn thing. When the book was published in 1977, she backed it with fire and passion. A lot of worthy books are published and disappear. A Rumor of War became a national best-seller and received universal rave reviews on its own merits, but it owed no small measure of its success to Marian’s excellent editing and her fervent support.

She and I remained a team for next eight or nine years, through the publishing of my first two novels. We had fun working together, playing together as well. We got drunk a couple of times, she wined and dined me at posh restaurants like (the now closed) Lutece. Looking back, I think I was a little bit in love with her; she might have felt the same toward me, which complicated our relationship — we were both married. I sound that intimate note because when we parted company in 1986, our professional divorce had the aspect of a bitter marital divorce. In time, we smoothed things over, metaphorically kissed and made up. Marian left Holt to start her own imprint, Marian Wood Books, at G.P. Putnam’s Sons, working with internationally acclaimed authors like Sue Grafton, Philip Kerr, and Hilary Mantel.

In her later years, she became something of a recluse, working out of her home on the North Fork of Long Island. We stayed in touch, off and on. She phoned me in 2008 with news that her husband, Tony Wood, had died. Gradually, however, “off and on” became more off than on. In late April, I had a dream about her, the details of which fled my mind as soon as I woke. But I had a feeling that I should call or write her and find out how she was faring in the pandemic. Less than a week later, I got an email from her niece, Nina Eigerman, telling me that Marian had stopped eating and appeared to be near death. The coincidence with my dream was eerie. She wasn’t afflicted with the Corona virus. Her condition, Nina went on, was one of general decline.

“She fell at home about a year ago, and could no longer manage the steep stairs in her Greenport home,” Nina wrote.  “I think she hated that.  And she took the deaths of some of her key authors, Philip Kerr and Sue Grafton, quite hard.  They also led to her being pushed out of Penguin, despite the success of Fowler’s last novel.  Without her work, and limited in her movements, I think she was a bit adrift.  Her circle got smaller and smaller, and I suspect it just didn’t seem worth it.”

Another email arrived on May 3, informing me that Marian had passed the previous night, age 82. Nina wrote that Marian had a copy of A Rumor of War at her side table. “I thought you would want to know that she kept it close until the end.”

I was touched, and I was heartbroken, picturing the young, vibrant, fiery woman I’d known going gently into that good night. 

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