Rage, Rage, Against the Dying of the Light

Abstract

Rage, Rage, Against the Dying of the Light Robert L. Hampel (bio) Martin Duberman, Reaching Ninety. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2023. 339 pp. Notes and index. $30.00. In June 2005, Martin Duberman retired after 34 years as a chaired professor at the City University of New York. In June 2006, he finished a 1,551-page draft of his biography of Lincoln Kirstein, patron saint of American dance. For most historians close to 76, leaving the classroom and completing a big book would bring a slower pace after a half century of strenuous exertion. In Marty’s case, he rested only when he had to—for example, in his late 70s and early 80s, prostate cancer, Crohn’s disease, fibromyalgia, and an intestinal blockage sapped his energy until he recovered each time. In retirement, Marty’s productivity exceeded any other period in his life. From 2006 to 2022, he finished nine books, three memoirs, and fifteen articles. The medical setbacks never impaired his mental acuity. A slightly weaker body led to more, not less, time at his desk whenever parties, speeches, restaurants, vacations, and the gym seemed by comparison tedious and trivial. For six to eight hours every day he read, wrote, and emailed. Television after dinner and more sleep were the only octogenarian concessions to age. Occasional out-of-town research trips took Marty to archives, not beaches, and handing pages to an assistant to photocopy helped limit each research foray to a week or two. Steady writing had important psychological benefits. Above all, the work prevented depression. “As I approach 82, the idea of ‘taking it easy’ remains a prescription for suicide,” he noted six months before the prolific novelist Philip Roth admitted he no longer wrote.1 Marty was astonished: “What’s he going to do each day? It’s like announcing your death.”2 Throughout retirement, Marty always found appealing topics to keep busy and stay balanced. To ward off chronic insomnia and periodic anxiety, several low-dose medications gave stability—as did his enduring love for Eli Zal, his partner since 1987—but work was essential. “I only feel contented when writing,” he told an editor in 2020. “I know: I’m old and should be taking frequent naps between TV shows.”3 [End Page 428] What also sustained Marty’s energy was his longstanding interest in and commitment to radical politics. Most of his books after 2005 focused on dissenters he had known and respected: historian Howard Zinn, journalist Doug Ireland, AIDS activist Michael Callen, poet Essex Hemphill, socialist David McReynolds, and feminists Andrea Dworkin and Naomi Weisstein. He paid tribute to courageous men and women he admired for their blunt audacity in challenging economic, legal, and political inequities (he declined the chance to write about a couple he considered politically tame—Alfred and Blanche Knopf—and an author he found personally arrogant—Gore Vidal). What Marty said at Weisstein’s memorial service in 2015 applies to the others and, I believe, to himself: “Naomi questioned everything—and especially sacred pieties. She was an iconoclast in the best sense—with her unconventional mind, she accepted no orthodoxy without challenge, and was always outspoken in her defiance of stale dogma; refusing to bow automatically to authority, she would insist on testing the soundness of a given viewpoint for herself. And never did Naomi hesitate to shake her fist and employ her sharply honed wit against injustice and unfairness.”4 In addition to defiance and stamina, the iconoclasts Marty profiled shared several other traits. They were not single-issue dissenters. Race, poverty, foreign policy, feminism, gay rights, health care, censorship, disarmament: his fist-shakers chose several issues to champion, a multipronged strategy Marty thought gay rights leaders should adopt. Like Marty, each iconoclast knew how to speak effectively in public and also reach distant audiences by writing without jargon or technical mumbo-jumbo. Their private lives also had parallels. None cared about money beyond earning enough to live decently, and even that modest goal was often hard to reach.5 Except for Zinn, everyone had debilitating illness—AIDS, chronic fatigue, osteoarthritis, alcoholism, cancer—and only Zinn lived past 80. Just two stayed married or partnered...