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“So how did you want rising up in Paris?” I requested George Hodgman, by which I meant bucolic Paris, Missouri, inhabitants round 1,200.
“Are you kidding? A homosexual man rising up in Paris, Missouri? All I needed to do was go away,” got here the reply. “On the age of six, I grabbed the FOR SALE signal from our neighbor’s garden and caught it in entrance of my household’s residence!”
George was my editor at Vainness Truthful once we had this dialog—it will need to have been round 1997. He was a superb, meticulous instructor, a young pal and information, however on the time very a lot in love with exile. Nearly 20 years later, when George would show himself as formidable a author as he was an editor, he would write in Bettyville, his best-selling memoir: “Missouri is a state of stolen names, bestowed to carry the world a bit of nearer: Versailles, Rome, Cairo, New London, Athens, Carthage, Alexandria, Lebanon, Cuba, Japan, Santa Fe, Cleveland, Canton, California, Caledonia, New Caledonia, Mexico, Louisiana. Paris, our residence.” By which he meant, I believe, that that roster of stolen geography was additionally a supply of deep craving, bestowed to encourage flight. At the very least in his case, it did.
A number of days in the past George Hodgman fled life itself. And though his loss of life—considered a suicide—in his small New York house got here as a shock, a extreme and horrible one to his tons of of pals, together with me, I don’t consider it got here as a shock, not solely.
On reflection it’s obvious that he was at all times fleeing, or a minimum of leaving one thing: Simon & Schuster, his first job wherein he realized the artwork of enhancing; then Vainness Truthful, the place he was beloved; then Discuss journal, which he loathed from the beginning (“By no means once more will I work in a spot the place the workplace is stocked with these tiny containers of cereal, these little packets of sugar, and people disgusting breakfast bars,” he informed me. “It means they need you to come back in at 7 a.m.!”); after that, Henry Holt, the place he was a extremely profitable government editor; after which Houghton Mifflin, the place he was a senior government editor. From a minimum of a kind of positions he was, regardless of each his expertise and knack for recognizing expertise—there’s no getting round this—fired. He was, as George himself acknowledged brazenly, an addict, meth and cocaine reportedly his someday companions. They blunted his instincts, stifled his skills.
However when he was sober, which he was for months, even years on finish, there was no one like him.
For one factor—and belief me, this was actually an distinctive trait at Vainness Truthful again then—George despised snobbery. “Don’t even speak to him!” he erupted after I advised consulting on a narrative with one other author who possessed—how shall I put this?—Park Avenue tendrils. “He has completely nothing to let you know. He’s a lapdog of the wealthy!”
“The factor I keep in mind most about George, other than his being extremely humorous and witty, is that he was so good to these of us who have been on our method up,” says Susan Kittenplan, who started as a Vainness Truthful fact-checker. “You bought a way while you have been with him of how a lot he cared—he cared about all the things. Not simply individuals. Each phrase written was necessary to him; he centered. And different issues too. Once I left Vainness Truthful to change into senior options editor at Harper’s Bazaar in 1997, the very first thing he stated to me was, ‘Don’t get too glamorous.’ I believed that was actually humorous.”
