A Death In Naples

Seven weeks after the death of the American writer George W.S. Trow on November 24, 2006, in Naples, Italy, his old friend DeCourcy McIntosh sat in an office above the Knoedler Gallery on East 70th Street in Manhattan and pondered the implications.

"I've had the sense of the creation not of a myth, but of a hagiography, a legend," he said finally, though the number of reporters who had called him about Trow seemed quite small.

Trow, best known for "Within the Context of No Context," a prophetic work of criticism published in 1980, was a founding member of the National Lampoon, and a staff writer at the New Yorker between 1966 and 1994, as well as a novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He died alone, probably of a broken-heart attack, at the age of 63. His body was discovered several days after his death. He had been a recluse for more than a decade, as well as a heavy smoker, and his solitary passing, coupled with his disenchantment with contemporary American culture, lends his demise a 19th-century air. One does not expect New Yorker writers to die in garrets, nor to die self-exiled and isolated, without even a phone, in an Italian city that is a byword for hardship and poverty.

Mr. McIntosh, a former director of the Frick Art Historical Center in Pittsburgh who was Trow's classmate at Exeter and Harvard, and visited him twice in Naples, believes his friend had begun to cut himself off from his peers in the early 1980s when he sold his loft on Grand Street and moved to Germantown, N.Y. (He later rented an apartment in Hell's Kitchen.) But the real rupture in Trow's life occurred in 1994, shortly after Tina Brown became editor of the New Yorker. Ms. Brown greatly admired Trow's talents and Trow enjoyed Ms. Brown personally. But he opposed the hype-driven direction in which she took the magazine, and he resigned that year.

He then entered a period of "deep philosophical sadness," said Howard Coale, a novelist and software designer who joined the magazine as an illustrator in 1987. Trow had always been mentally frail, and Mr. Coale believes there were times when he skated very close to the edge of sanity well before he left the New Yorker.

"He was an incredibly bizarre, fascinating talker, and he could wrap people in spiderwebs of amazing ideas. His very nature could cause intense humor or fear in people. Certain things happened that were just bizarre, that would not be classified as sane behavior. George had a laugh that was like an explosive device, the kind that in a 1930s movie would make people drop monocles into their soup. On the one hand, it could be extremely scary and unpleasant; on the other, it was just great. People get to be so completely boring. George was anything but boring. He was always something."

***

Known as "Swift" to his friends, Trow was born September 28, 1943, into a fiercely pro-Roosevelt print-media family. His great-great grandfather, John Fowler Trow (1809–86), was the most important printer in New York City and a demographer who published the United States Business Directory and Trow's New York City Directory. His father, George Swift Trow, was the night editor of the New York Post, then a liberal paper. Trow's family was WASP on his father's side, Irish on his mother's. Trow, who wrote a great deal about his WASP background, nonetheless prided himself on being half-Irish. His "English language hero" was W.B. Yeats.

By the time he came into his own at the New Yorker in the 1970s as a protégé of editor William Shawn, Trow was a handsome man, about 6 feet tall, with a high forehead, longish, receding blond hair, a generous mouth, and a left eye that seemed to gaze farther and more cannily into the distance than the right. He was exuberant, excitable, loud, and extremely funny.

In the violent, druggy 1970s, he announced he was embarking on a new, personal campaign in New York City. He called it the "Anti-Rudeness Campaign." One morning, not long after, he showed up at the magazine's offices on West 44th Street sporting a black eye. "What happened?" someone asked. "Never mind!" Trow answered. "But it's the end of the Anti-Rudeness Campaign!"

Trow played a major role in infusing the New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section with the popculture energy of the 1960s. A profile he wrote on Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, which appeared in 1978, was dubbed "Proustian" by Shawn, perhaps appropriately given the decade it took to write.

Chip McGrath, an editor at the New Yorker in the 1990s, says Trow was a figure of extreme fascination to his admirers, and a meal with him could leave people weeping with laughter. Asked for a writer to compare him to, Mr. McGrath chose Oscar Wilde. "For the wit, the aphoristic quality, the tendency to make pronouncements, the appreciation of style, and social observancy."

Another colleague at the magazine was Jamaica Kincaid. She described Trow's social life as being unusually broad, ranging from a black (male) lover who had been in jail to friendships with Jacqueline Onassis and Diana Vreeland. "George had a weird, complicated life, and all the things he would observe about TV and modern life he knew of them because he knew rich people and poor people," Ms Kincaid said. "Most of his contemporaries were too cowardly to know any of those worlds. If they were going to go into the demi-world, as George did, they'd be afraid of being killed, and if it was Ms. Onassis, they were afraid she wouldn't talk to them tomorrow. George was deeply involved in many worlds, but he never took out membership, so to speak. He had many friends in high places, but they didn't understand that George didn't want to be at the Captain's Table. The minute something seemed corrupt, he'd leave. He was very courageous and unafraid."

***

John Seabrook, author of the book "Nobrow," wrote in 1997 that Trow "saw the future so long before it happened that he wrote about it in the past tense." This judgment is founded principally on "Within the Context of No Context," the elliptical and still occasionally baffling essay that appeared in the New Yorker on November 17, 1980.

Its opening paragraph attempts to take in all of American history, from the arrival of the Pilgrims to the dawning of yuppiedom, in a single glance:

"Wonder was the grace of the country. Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in. Period followed period, and finally the wonder was that things could be built so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life first in the marketplace, still drew on the force of wonder. But then a moment's quiet. What was it now that was built so big? Only the marketplace itself. Could there be wonder in that? The size of the con?"

Trow asserted, in cryptic fashion, that size, or demography, had become the defining element of American existence, sweeping all other concerns aside, and he fingered television as the symbol of the new reality. "The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and chronicle it."

Trow's talent lay not in sustained, logical argument but in startling insights and metaphors. But the overall thrust was that television and mass media, and the "ironic," endlessly self-referential culture they fostered — in his 1999 book, "My Pilgrim's Progress," he compared it to the proliferation of useless weaponry at the Pentagon — robbed America of psychic self-sufficiency, unembarrassed adulthood, and a willingness to make judgments.

Reading "No Context," one often has the eerie feeling that it is being continuously updated, as if it had been written in pixels rather than ink. A recent article in New York magazine about how the Internet has transformed teenage behavior concluded: "But the real question is, as with any revolution, which side are you on?" But the question is false, since one side is a technological tsunami and the other is a lone bather. In "No Context," Trow said it better: "The message of many things in America is, ‘Like this or die.' It is a strain. Suddenly, the modes of death begin to be attractive."

Perhaps the most telling tribute to Trow's essay came from Gawker.com, the fashionable New York gossip Web site. In an item titled, "And Now He's Dead," dated December 1, 2006, Gawker wrote: "Trow's major thesis, that mass media and a cultural obsession with celebrity were ruining society as we know it, is borne out pretty much each day on this website and every other. Rest in peace, George."

***

Trow was entranced by American life and history. Though a Democrat, his hero was President Eisenhower ("the guy of guys," he called him). What comes through his writing is his preoccupation with America as a whole.

"The idea of a common enterprise in America was central to what George was talking about all the time," the writer and humorist Ian Frazier said. "He wasn't just for his own little group. You still see people like that, but less often. George just loved America."

America is at the heart of "My Pilgrim's Progress," which posits that the moment when the country reached the height of its political and military supremacy, 1950, it was invaded by a seemingly innocuous virus — television — that in successive decades would help create a desire for perpetual adolescence, stripping Americans of the very tools they needed to study, understand, and sensibly exercise the global power they inherited after World War II.

Trow was a self-described analyzer of "Mainstream Cultural Artifacts," and in "My Pilgrim's Progress," the number of such artifacts placed under the microscope — ranging from the writings of Alfred P. Sloan to Joan Rivers on the Shopping Channel — is dizzying. In a way, it's too much; in another, it's thrilling and unforgettable. Trow, as the book's title suggests, had entered a religious phase. He regularly attended a church in Germantown, and there is a biblical quality to his modus operandi in the book, which is one of chronicling both people and things. His question — whether thinking about Winston Churchill or MTV's "The Real World" — is always: What is the pedigree of this? Where does it come from and where is it going? Or to take the book as a whole: How did the America of 1950 become the America of 1997?

The book was published in January 1999, when the Internet bubble was at its height and few people were interested in reading a long lamentation about America's failings: They were interested in making money. The book, said Mr. McGrath, "came and went in a nanosecond. It had the shelf life of mayonnaise in a hot sun."

Although Trow's "message" in "My Pilgrim's Progress" was in some ways conservative, the prose in which he delivered it was idiosyncratic, even avant-garde, a peculiarly mesmerizing mix of the analytical and the personal that reads as if the author were making up a new form of cultural studies on the spot. Nonetheless, not everyone found it digestible. One brief passage in particular irked people. Writing about how New York social life, from 1950 onward, influenced contemporary pop culture, Trow wrote: "I happen to know a great deal about that world. You'll have to trust me on that one."

Mr. McIntosh, a keen admirer of Trow's earlier work, remembers his friend being extremely upset by the way "My Pilgrim's Progress" had been ignored.

"I don't think he could accept that many people find it hard to read his very artful prose in large segments," he said. "He couldn't understand why people couldn't go along with the way he was writing. ‘You'll just have to trust me on that.' Well, at the time, I was very busy on a book I was writing, and I just wasn't willing to trust George on that. I also felt it was arrogant of George to expect people trained in empirical analysis to just ‘trust' him on x, y, and z. I think he placed a hell of a burden on the reader."

But other colleagues found maturity in the statement.

"Only a good writer would say ‘You'll have to trust me,'" Ms. Kincaid said. "A bad writer wouldn't know to say that. A lot of his peers couldn't stand someone their age being an adult, even though in his personal life you might say he wasn't responsible. He was talking about the world, a civilization, coming from a society you're not ashamed of, not conspiring with bad things just for your own gain and self-importance. The idea that a contemporary would say something like that was pretentious and absurd because they were all babies and he was telling them to grow up."

***

Trow was a controversial figure in life and, to the extent he is remembered, remains so. One famous contemporary American critic told me that, in "No Context," Trow disguised a thumpingly obvious critique of American culture by arranging it in a confusingly arty collage that made his insights look profound to the superficial. In a separate charge, he added that Trow was an overrated cult figure who appeals to puritans who either loathe or misunderstand popular culture and find Trow's work a useful weapon with which to hammer it.

Mr. Coale conceded that Trow was fascinated by "the putrefaction of popular culture" but added that if anyone had accused Trow of "hating" it per se, he would have been laughed out of the room. "To criticize George for saying TV is ‘bad' is worthless because it's not what he says, but how he says it that's critical. His writing is about the nuances and subtleties that move a culture, as opposed to the statements themselves. I don't think he was truly interested in whether TV was good or bad, so much as a force like physics that just was, and he was trying to describe the nuances of its meaning."

After his break with the New Yorker, Trow wandered North America in a pickup truck, making stops in Texas, Alaska, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland, during which he wrote "My Pilgrim's Progress." In 2000, he had a nervous breakdown and was diagnosed (in his own humorous description) as "Bipolar-lite."

Trow had been brought up in the mores of an upper-middle-class WASP heritage, which he had seen dissolving — rightly so, in his view, because he believed they had grown corrupt — before he left school. He had then adjusted to an entirely new social reality, that of the 1960s, whose energy he admired even as he noted the destruction it brought in its wake. The novelist and screenwriter Michael Tolkin hazarded that "No Context" is no longer fashionable because "It's not a polemic for change. It's just a cold description of where things are going. There aren't many books that are unafraid to be that negative. Most people want to twist it at the end, but that's op-ed writing. That's not taking a thought all the way to its conclusion."

***

Ultimately, Trow's tragedy was that he didn't fit in. He was a WASP with an Irish soul, a Democrat whose favorite politician was Republican, a gay man with a fondness for patriarchy, an essayist who thought more like a poet, a '60s skeptic who got upset when that generation sold out, an oldfashioned patriot who was finally unable to locate an America he could love. It is quite possible that, without the flexibility of the Shawn-era New Yorker, he would have been an obscure figure.

As Mr. McGrath pointed out, it's likely that even as Trow predicted the erosion of all meaningful "context" in American life, he did not foresee the extent to which his diagnosis would prove correct. The irony is that the man who made the prediction was unable to adapt to the results. He is a reminder that as America becomes ever more wedded to ideological and cultural spats, space must be reserved for the true eccentrics who cast a distant eye on society.

"He didn't sound like anybody else, that was the problem," Mr. Coale said. "If you look at the New Yorker Tina Brown inherited as a curiosity shop, Trow was that strange thing they got from Borneo no one could figure out where to put. He was not a snob, in the classical sense. He was a snob of mind. He was original and strange, with eccentric thought processes that expressed a dreamy, occasionally nonsensical intellectual mysticism that is no longer understood in this country."

Trow's last published article appeared on the Internet in 1999. A scathing dissection of Dan Rather's various strategies for maintaining his seat at "Table Number One" (a reference to the movie, "Sweet Smell of Success"), it ends with advice that is straightforward and simple:

"Journalists ought to make of themselves a prideful guild. (The Newspaper Guild used to stand for a little something.) Stand a little apart from this troubled world of ours. Identify the stories which will affect the lives of our children. And cover them."

Those are the last words Trow published in his lifetime. He left America the next year and never expressed interest in returning. It is possible his last years in Naples were not entirely unpleasant. He wanted to be alone and was. He read the International Herald Tribune, kept up, and was known at the trattoria he frequented as "Signor Churchill." He told Raymond Sokolov, the former Wall Street Journal arts editor, who bumped into him there in the spring of 2006, that he had moved to Naples because the Neapolitans were "radical conservatives" like him, a statement that was probably half-true and half a put-on. Trow made it to 63, but it's likely he'd had enough. As he once told the writer Alison Rose, referring to life: "The ongoingness of it is, frankly, a real problem."

bbernhard@nysun.com