William Safire died yesterday. He was a wonderful writer and a man whose grammatical flair, his intense style and his sense of right and wrong I will always admire. When I read the news of his death, I was saddened, but reminded of my own personal connection to a man who helped shape my direction as a writer.
It was the spring of 1992, my last semester of high school and I was studying Hamlet in AP English. We were forced to learn the whole “To Be or Not to Be” soliloquy by heart and as if that wasn’t tragedy enough for my teenage schedule, my English teacher, Mrs. Brown, gave the class what appeared to be a fairly straightforward assignment but would take me someplace I never anticipated.
The assignment: Mrs. Brown, gave the class a photocopied “article” written by William Safire that was a list of 20 Hamlet quotes. We were to correctly identify the act, scene, and line of each quote. Simple enough, right? I was able to easily identify 19 of the 20 quotes. I read Hamlet 15 times, by this point. No lie. 15 times. I scoured each line looking for the last quote, but nothing about it was familiar. No giveaways, no hints, no obvious character patois. It was a real puzzler.
No one else in my class could identify the last quote either. Being the industrious and brazen girl I’ve always been, I decided that if I was going to get number 20, I was going to have to go right to the source. Naturally, I did what any normal 17-year-old highschool senior would do, I called The New York Times and asked for some dude named “William Safire,” like he was just some sort of rookie desk jockey, not the respected, award winning journalist that he was.
The receptionist put me through to the Washington division, and then within a second, William Safire answered his own phone, just like he was a regular person. I introduced myself and explained my assignment. I asked if he would just please tell me the answer, after all, he would know, he wrote the thing! His tone was gravely serious. “No, I won’t tell you. That’s cheating.” That wasn’t quite the outcome I was hoping for.
He started off condescending. “Did you even read the play?” I explained I had read the play 15 times now, that coupled with all the re-skimming to find the quote. To prove myself, I even recited “To Be or Not To Be,” for him. He, unlike Mrs. Brown, clapped for me when I was done.
Safire said I was “charming” and then asked “do you know what a Concordance to Shakespeare is?” A Concordance to what? “Uh, no sir, I do not,” I replied. He told me to go the library, and there, I would find a book called A Concordance to Shakespeare. Contained inside this magical book would lie my answer. I should call him back when I have the answer that’s all he said. Like Bastion the young boy in The Never Ending Story, I was on a quest, to find a book that would provide the answer and save the world (well, the first of the two anyway).
Armed with theses instructions, I raced to the library, there I found the magical tome with the answers I sought. A Concordance to Shakespeare is an alphabetical list of every Shakespeare quote from every play, sonnet, anything he ever wrote. If you just know one line from something, you can look it up and voila, all the info you would ever need. And there it was the 20th quote in all its glory! Maybe there was something to this Safire guy after all!
That night at dinner my parents asked me about the William Safire assignment and had I found the 20th quote? I told them “Well yeah, I called The New York Times and spoke to William Safire” My step-mother, Eileen, nearly spit out her wine. My father almost choked. They wanted to know everything; had I spoken to him, what did he say, what was he like?
I couldn’t understand why they cared about some writer guy. My family was impressed with my tenacity, it took gumption to get a literary celebrity on the phone. A “literary celebrity?” Who, this Safire guy? As my family relayed his importance, I felt humiliated, I must have made a fool of myself in front the the prestigious Mr. William Safire.
The following day, I called back William Safire, he again answered his own phone. I told him his advice worked brilliantly and I thanked him for taking the time to help. He told me to hang in there, I told him I’d be going to NYU and he was sure I would do well as a writer.
Six months later, my father and step-mother were attending the White House Correspondence Dinner and found themselves standing next to William Safire at the bar. He was relaying a story of a ballsy high school girl who called him up once to ask for the answer to her homework. My parents looked at each other, as my step-mother interjected, “That was my daughter.” William Safire spent the evening with my parents, he was very nice and inquired about me. They told him how I was thriving at NYU and how happy I was. He was delighted.
Sometimes, as a writer (and as a person) you may not know the rules, and you brazenly run into a room only to have weapons turned on upon you at the doorway. William Safire taught me it was okay to know that I didn’t know. The spirit of asking questions, however potentially embarrassing, has been thoroughly instilled in the very fabric of my writery being.
And so, today, as I was on my Blackberry, the world’s information at my fingertips, I got word that William Safire died. Suddenly, I felt like it was 1992 all over again, and I was an unabashed high school student with nothing but promise and a willingness to get the job done regardless if I would embarrass myself. As I remember my brief encounter with him fondly, I can never discount the power of personal connection with a phenomenal talent; something for which I will be forever grateful. I’ll miss you, William Safire.
Thank you deeply for making me work for it.