ABSTRACT
WHY RICHARD didn’t take his life, unlike his friends Berryman and Randall Jarrell, had “something to do with the survival of the race itself.” He typified the enduring man who preserves the sense that life is precious, and “neither tyranny nor privation—no emptiness” could reduce this sense. “It is how one knows one lives and dies alone.” Enduring, he makes you think of Bloom in the essay on Ulysses. He is “the everlasting hero of the quotidian: truly protean.” This says two things. He went about his business, and he was endlessly resourceful in finding ways to cope. Waning on one side, he grew crescent on another. The void at the center of his life needed filling, and he wrote with greater assiduity than ever before. In the dozen years between 1952 and 1964, he published six books, and his Primer of Ignorance and the biography of Adams were waiting on the stocks when he died.
