There are some occasions when the editorial “we” is almost viscerally inadequate. Writing about my friend Peter Collier—the prolific biographer and novelist, literary impresario, and tireless cultural warrior—is one such. Although he made it a full decade beyond the biblically sanctioned allotment of three score and ten, the announcement early last month that Peter had died, at the age of eighty, still came as a shock.
It's not that eighty, no matter what the tabloids tell us, is the new fifty (though for some it seems to be the new fifteen). It isn't. But Peter always seemed so vibrant, so vital. He was habitually solicitous about my health, beginning most conversations with a pressing question or two, but his palpable buoyancy led me to take his for granted. Often when we spoke by telephone he had just come from the squash court near his house in bucolic Nevada City, California. He was always busy with a new literary project or helping his lifelong friend David Horowitz (another perpetual motion machine) run the eponymous David Horowitz Freedom Center, with its myriad sub-enterprises. A friend we had in common gave me the news of Peter's death in a codicil to an email about another subject. Much to my mortification, I hadn't even known that he had been ill, but he had been, gravely, first from leukemia, then from the wretched chemotherapy that killed his cancer and then killed him.
Read Full Article »