Last week, in his final "Now and Then" column published in the Globe before he died, Donald Murray was as in love with writing as he had been as a teenager -- and just as anxious. "Each time I sit down to write I don't know if I can do it," he wrote. "The flow of writing is always a surprise and a challenge. Click the computer on and I am 17 again, wanting to write and not knowing if I can." He could, and did, for decades -- winning a Pulitzer Prize at 29 for editorials he wrote for the Boston Herald, teaching writing at the University of New Hampshire, publishing book after book, penning column after column...."Globe Columnist Donald Murray, 82", Bryan Marquard, Boston Globe, 1/2/2007
With his big, infectious laugh, imposing size, and a keen sensibility for writing and teaching, Don was an instant hit with this writer when first meeting him in 1958. He wasn't the sort who'd take one look at a curious kid, set him down in front of a TV set, and run off in another direction. Instead, he placed a book in the writer's lap, a pictorial essay on scale and perspective. He talked as if the kid might have a brain. He asked the kid challenging questions. He laughed at the kid's answers if they weren't genuine. When the writer, some years later, indicated an interest in writing himself, Don smiled and nodded. Then, when the visit to his and Minnie Mae's New Hampshire house was coming to an end, he presented the writer with a thick green binder filled with essays, citations including lengthy sections of essays, fiction, and stories by many well-known writers, and a few on writing and rewriting by Don himself. The binder had a hand-lettered label on its front: "How To Be Shakespeare." Of course Don laughed when he handed the binder over. The writer still has it. The essays, especially Don's, are still worth reading and their lessons about writing still apply.
The writer never took one of Don's writing classes at New Hampshire. But of those who did, the list is impressive. It includes hundreds of reporters at small and major newspapers and news magazines, dozens of published novelists, a raft of freelance article writers, and the odd screenwriter or two. Don was ferociously singleminded in class. A typical assignment: take ledes on the front page of the New York Times and rewrite them. See if you can make them better. Another assignment: write an article for the next class; followup for the next six weeks -- rewrite it for each class. It sounds terribly dull. The late Mike Kelly, with whose political thinking (as that of this blog), Don disagreed vehemently, didn't think so. Don thought Kelly's writing exemplary, remained fast friends with him from graduation until Kelly's early death in Iraq in 2003, and grieved for his loss as if Mike had been one of his own family.
He and the writer's father were friends for 61 years. They met in Berlin. Both had been paratroopers, Don in the 82nd, the writer's father in the 517th Regimental Combat Team, both remarkable units that had seen extraordinary action. Both men had seen ghastly things. Both had little patience for the Army. Don was determinedly a private, the writer's father a buck sergeant. Nonetheless, the writer's father parlayed a brief acquaintance with Curt Gowdy into an announcer's job at AFN Berlin. As an AFN announcer, he was entitled to a driver. The driver was Don Murray, who acquired a Jeep in a time-honored method of requisition, though one not recognized in the Army Motor Pool's field manual. He stole it. As AFN types, they were both allowed into officers's clubs, which neither had ever seen before. Both agreed vigorously that such places were boring; they only went once. They lived in AFN Headquarters, which was Max Schmeling's house, a lavish place untouched by years of air raids. While they watched the Russians strip everything they could touch in Berlin, the private and buck sergeant became art afficionados studying, but not stealing, Schmeling's splendid art collection. After Berlin, they went their separate ways, Don into journalism, the writer's father into a business career. Both did more than well.
Always the best example for his own teaching, Don never missed a deadline. He filed on Friday, the 29th of December, and died the next day. He will be sorely missed.
Luther
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