-- Loren

28 January 1988

Editorial Staff
Book of the Month Club

Dear Friends:

It was a great surprise and sadness to read of the death of your Executive Editor, Joe Savago. I went through college with Joe - and I say this as though it were possible to stretch such a simple phrase across such a vast and turbulent experience: but it is not possible. I can't do it, so I will share a few memories of Joe in his youth with you who evidently loved him so well.

First, I must say that I am not entirely sure that the Joe Savago referred to in your recent circular was the same as the man I knew. But could there be two 39-year-olds of the same name, both answering to the description of an "editorial genius with an unerring instinct for picking out books..."? Surely not. But if your Joe was not a Cornell grad, then please return this letter, it's not for you.

In the post-Sputnik era of Cold War hysteria, in the early 60's, the Ford Foundation conceived of a plan to speed up the production of American PhD's and to make a big public splash in the process. A great experiment was funded, in which the brightest High School students that could be found were to go straight for the PhD degree, on a track designed to take just six years. Cornell University was chosen for the job, and Joe and I and 58 other innocents were swept up into the maw of this device. We arrived for the summer session of 1966, which was to serve as our "Freshman year." Ha! It took barely two weeks for most of us to see through the mythology that had been so carefully and artificially woven around us, and Joe was suspicious from the very start. The first week together we spent our time warily circling each other, trying to asses who was smartest, who had star quality, and who might be a loser, but then we closed ranks and began assessing the program itself - and we didn't like it at all. From our base in a women's sorority that was empty for the summer, we began a guerrilla action against any and all authority.

We didn't realize this at the time, of course, but we were just picking up the first weak tremors of the great cultural earthquake that had begun in California only a short time previously. The main shock didn't hit Cornell until later that year, and we were living in the eerie moribund stillness of a departing age. Parietal rules were still in force at Cornell - girls (we called them co-eds then, remember?) had a curfew to observe, and all parties had to have a chaperone, registered with Dean of Students. Drugs were essentially unknown, and beer was king. Political dissent was virtually absent too: there were only a few Quakers who spoke politely of peace. As I recall, there were exactly 8 American black students in the entire student body. Within two years whole dorms, ours included, were staging mass LSD parties (the "electric Kool-Aid acid tests"), and political dissent had become a human tidal wave that surged out of the Universities and over Washington. Within three years the newly recruited black students of Cornell had taken over the student union at gunpoint, and campus governance degenerated into mass democracy, with all major University decisions being made on the basis of a voice vote by 5000 students encamped on the indoor track. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Among the great innovations that Cornell/Ford had planned for us was a new dormitory which, when we moved in in the Fall, became New York State's very first coeducational dorm. The publicity was sensational: Genius Kids Party All Night In Coed Dorm! was a typical headline. The reality was 60 scared kids, most not yet coping with sex at all in any way, trying desperately to erect psychological barriers against a world which had placed them in a goldfish bowl. Joe's defense was withering sarcasm, and he was good! He could reduce an English professor to stuttering nonsense in just a few minutes work, and no student could possibly go toe-to-toe with him. Paradoxically (or perhaps not, given his personality) he became something of a darling to the English department, and a valued friend to those of us who could see through the bluster. His theme was style - if you didn't have it, you were beneath contempt. This, of course, was a two-edged sword, and his own dreams of literary fame crumbled under bitter self-criticism. After a year or so of inner struggle he turned to literary criticism as art form in itself, and mellowed considerably in the process. Meanwhile, however, our own private Demon appeared on the scene, in the form of an insane arsonist who torched our dormitory one cold April night. Joe's roommate, my best friend, was killed along with eight others. We fled into the night, and became refugees in spirit and in fact. Some of us went to other dorms, while Joe and I and six others rented a house in Collegetown. The arsonist followed, and burnt the house and one of the dorms. Words fail me in trying to describe our feelings, and I wish Joe were here to do it for me. We never found out who it was, and each of us passed in turn under the microscope of official suspicion. We wondered about each other, while maintaining a brave public front, and we wondered about ourselves - "Did I do it and not remember? Am I mad?" To avoid the terrors of the night Joe and I and several others became all-night bridge players, and I, for one, didn't sleep during the day either. In this manner we staggered toward our second summer session, which for others became "The Summer of Love," and the beginning of the war resistance movement.

Joe "died" that summer, when he went to Europe. We received word that he had been hit by a motorcycle, and that the funeral was in four days. Some went, but I stayed home, preferring to mourn in solitude. The coffin was buried, and then three weeks later his parent received a letter from him. Consternation! In the end it developed that he had given his passport to an AWOL soldier, and the soldier was the one who was killed. This incident solidified his position in the pantheon of our group, due, I think, to the intensity of the experience and the depth of the irony. Joe, living, became a symbol of hope in the face of such a terrible burden of death. But reality rudely intervened once more, this time in the form of the unexplained absence of another of our group. Timmy, it turned out, was the one who really did die that summer, in a hiking accident. Fate moves along weird ways, and fiction is hard-pressed to follow.

Although our faith in Cornell as an institution waned to absolute zero in this period, it was also the time when we grew closer to the faculty, taken as individuals. Joe, in particular, made some lasting friendships among the professors, and we began to meet them socially almost daily at a certain large table in the student dining hall. In fact we manned the table throughout the day, fending off all outsiders and accepting only those very few profs that we liked. The Sunday crossword puzzle was a major event of the week, and conversation was often dominated by rivalries between those who thought literature ended with Chaucer, and those who thought it began with Joyce. We also waged a friendly war with the black table, which took the form of endless Jukebox competitions between Rolling Stones followers (us, lead pre-eminently by Joe) and the Motown crowd (them). It was a good way to escape the utter chaos outside, and I frequently learned more at that table than in any classroom. Despite myself, I also grew to love Motown. Joe went off to Harvard, to see if graduate school was better there, while I stayed behind. I visited him - one of those end-of-term things, after cramming madly for exams for ten days, then rounding up a herd of hitchhikers into the Volkswagen and careening madly through a blinding blizzard, cross-eyed with sleepiness, from Ithaca to Cambridge. Joe and I watched Hitchcock's The Birds while tripping our brains out, an experience that, for me, defines the ultimate limits of paranoia. Joe came back to Cornell (Harvard was "too cold and competitive"), and we roomed together. At this time I was really getting down to basics in my search for the meaning of Death, and Joe was there when I needed him. The simple reality of making pancakes with Joe after a night of terror was a good tonic. I date my very gradual psychological recovery from those days. Joe had a hard time too, but we pulled through in good style. We rented another basement apartment on the very face of a gorge and spent a summer looking down at rainbows.

It's hard to end a story like this, because real-life endings are seldom tidy and sensible. Joe and I gradually grew apart, and then one day I got a job. I can't recall having said a formal goodbye to Joe, and so this letter will have to serve.

Goodbye, Joe.

Loren Cobb

--------------------------- BOMC Obituary -----------------------------

In Loving Memory

September 27, 1987, our Executive Editor, Joe Savago, passed away after a long illness. He was 39 years old. He was an editorial genius with an unerring instinct for picking out books that mattered. He cared about books. They were his life. He was a sensitive and consummate professional. He was also a dear colleague and friend to all of us. We miss him.

We often felt that reading his editorial reports, written like all our book evaluations about six months in advance of publication and for our eyes only, was one of the privileges of working at the Club.

Here is a passage from one report on a novel by Greg Matthews: "Reading the 500-page galley of Heart of the Country, its pages dense with small type, I recaptured something I often felt as a child, and have rarely felt since. I'm thinking of some of my earliest childhood experiences with "adult" books - fat, heavy novels taken from the grown-up sections of the library: Crime and Punishment Karamazov, anything by Dickens. I'm talking about the awesome, the enthralling sense of immersion - of drowning, if you will, and coming back to consciousness in a world so thoroughly peopled and detailed, so fully realized by the author, so morally complete and provocative on its own terms that I prayed it would not end, that there would always be more to read, more to return to every night of my life. I think that Heart of the Country is a Great American Novel - a great, haunting, darkly bountiful American novel and one of the most sustainedly wondrous reading experiences I've ever had."

March 28, 2002. Errors, comments: email to cobb@Aetheling.com