I never knew Gordon Wood well, or at all. During college, I was assigned The Radicalism of the American Revolution in an entry-level history class, like millions of other students. And of course I remember Wood’s name from the barroom scene in Good Will Hunting, where Matt Damon makes a self-important yuppie look like an idiot, a setup that apparently amused Wood greatly. But when I saw today that the ninety-two-year-old historian had been struck and killed by a car in Providence, Rhode Island, my mind was immediately transported to the single time that I met him, one of the only events in my adult life that I would actually call inspiring.
It was April of 2024, and Wood was being presented with the inaugural George F. Will Award by (who else?) George F. Will. A friend invited me and my wife to the reception at the Waldorf Astoria in Washington, D.C. The event was on the same day that I returned from an overnight flight out of Seattle, a bit of a tight squeeze in terms of timing. But I wanted to go. So, jet lagged and bedraggled, I showed up to the dinner, listened politely to the programming, and succeeded in not nodding off.
When Wood got up on stage, I was surprised. He was ninety years old, but mentally acute. And I was delighted when he sat down in conversation with Will. Here was someone who could be playful, wry, amusing. Though he was one the country’s best-known historians, he was clearly also someone who was still puzzling through the mystery of America for himself.
My favorite moment in his conversation occurred toward the end.
“We have a room full of bibliophiles here,” Will said, gesturing to the two hundred or so people seated in the ballroom. “What have you read recently in American history that we ought to read?”
“What book am I reading?” Wood asked.
Will nodded. “What book in American history?”
“I’m not reading American history right now,” Wood laughed. “I just finished Proust! I said I would do it before I die, and well . . .”
The whole room laughed. Wood was beaming.
“They say to understand it, you have to go back and do it again,” he continued. “And it took me a long time—six months at least.”
He smiled, the grin of a schoolboy who was getting away with something.
After the event was over, my wife and I hung around until the crowd thinned out. A lot of people wanted to shake Wood’s hand or ask him to sign their books. We wanted to hear more about Proust. Like many aspirationally literary people (well, not that many), we are always reading Proust. We have volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu lying all over our house, finished and unfinished in various editions. We were curious to know how Wood had worked through it all.
He had mentioned on stage that he read the book in translation. The ultimate version in English is C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s Remembrance of Things Past, which was released more or less contemporaneously with Proust’s original. Was it that one? Or the revised version by Terence Kilmartin? Or perhaps the most recent popular translation cycle, begun by Lydia Davis? And beyond all that, we were curious about what he made of the novel. Proust has a reputation for wistful mellifluousness—perfect for bedtime reading—and it is a deserved reputation. But just as often his work is painful, incisive, the sort of writing that makes its readers review their own lives with shock and horror. When I first read the “Swann in Love” section as a twenty-four-year-old, I wanted to die from shame. What was it like to encounter it at ninety?
For Wood, to encounter Proust at all was the most important thing. He told us again what he had said to Will: he really wanted to read this novel before he died. And, standing next to him, his wife Louise confirmed. In fact, it had become something of a family project. When I asked which translation he chose, Wood grinned and said he could not remember—whichever one was on Project Gutenberg. (That’s Scott Moncrieff.)
As I drove home, I couldn’t get the image out of my head: the renowned American historian, seated at his computer or perhaps holding an iPad or a Kindle, on a seemingly infinite scroll through the great French novel of the last century. This was incredible. It made me want to read more, to study harder, to do the things I was put on this earth to do. I had to know more about this. Everyone had to.
The next morning I emailed him. Would he be interested in writing on reading Proust at ninety for The Lamp? His refusal was prompt, polite, but firm. He told me that this project was too “personal” for him to write about for a magazine audience. Besides, he said, “it would be pretentious of me to write about Proust when so many others have written so many great books on Proust.” And what difference would one more essay on Proust make? “It is amazing to me that Proust has so many commentators,” he concluded, “and I am only counting those in English.”
At the time, I was baffled, disappointed. But now I am older and beginning to understand. When I first read Proust in my early twenties, I wanted to share my impressions with anyone who would listen. I am now approaching my thirties and becoming more circumspect. Who knows what ninety will bring? For Gordon Wood, the decade appeared to have been a second youth, a time for forming private impressions and understanding the world anew, just in time to depart it.
