Richard Gilman: In Memoriam
Richard Gilman, my teacher and mentor,
long incapacitated by illness, died in Japan on October 29. His
wife Yasuko wrote to friends: "No struggle, no pain. Suddenly
he stopped breathing, without any sign of doing so. In peace.
He had reached the limit and decided to leave." Dick would have
savored the description. No excess words or sentiment: the calm
certainty that the terrible facts speak for themselves bears the
stamp of his magisterial sang-froid. Dick's supple, elegant, mellifluous
prose was a gift to theater criticism. I always thought that the
theater was lucky he chose it as a subject, even though many theater
artists, guardians of a chronically degraded art, resented his
expectation that they could or should rise to his level. As a
teacher, Dick could be neglectful, even cruel at times, but he
could also be shockingly perceptive, unaccountably generous, and
lavish in his enthusiasms. He had a characteristic expulsion of
delight that always began the same way: head turned sideways,
hand on the back of his neck squeezing a slender cigarillo, then
(after due cogitation) a gust of eloquent praise. That's the Dick
Gilman I'll remember.
--Jonathan Kalb
