Remembrance of a Dear Friend

February 4, 2008

Last week I received the news that Phil McDermott died after a three year battle with brain cancer. The past few days, in the moments between tasks, I have been thinking back on our friendship.

Phil was a regular at the literature reading group I inherited when I began to work at Vromans Bookstore in Pasadena. This was back in '97. I knew him first as a distinguished voice in an interesting crowd of readers. I wouldn't call his comments sharp, since they never had a cutting quality. He listened well and his voice, with humming and hawing, set out ideas that came from his deep reading.

Phil was the one who strongly pushed Master and Margarita and The Good Soldier on the reading group.. and steered us toward other books that always managed to surprise me. One of his reasons for attending a reading group was so that he got the enforced opportunity to re-read books he liked. Later as we became friends and spent a lot of time talking I came to value even more highly his sense for books. There were few important modern authors that he could not place for me.. and recommend the best place to start reading. Even today I find myself remembering his advice what to read and what to avoid. I am sure that I will ever again find someone who so well filled the role of reading mentor.

Phil went from reading group acquaintance to friend on the mysterious occasion when we both got pretty sick (summer of '98). In his case it was a diagnosis of liver cancer; for me it was a late attack of mono that hit me hard. We were both at weak points I think.. and we began to go see a movie together in LA on Sunday afternoons. At that point I had little interest in film.. having decided that Hollywood did not do anything for me but knowing little about the pleasures of lesser known foreign and independent films. As I understand it, Phil had originally come to LA to go to film school.. and not finding that to his liking he dropped out and pursued writing. But good humanistic films (not so much experimental ones) remained a love of his.. and that is something I caught from him and have never lost.

On a couple of occasions I went over to Phil's house (which he shared with wife Irene and young son Peter) to watch a rented movie. Once he chose Night of the Hunter; another time we watched a film that he introduced as his favorite film: McCabe and Mrs. Miller. In the final scene John McCabe succumbs to death as the snow flakes gently cover him. I remember not quite knowing what to say, as I was watching this with someone whose future was uncertain.

Phil's health cleared up almost miraculously. The liver cancer, upon being operated on, turned out to be nonexistent. It had responded well to the radiation treatment and Phil had a chance to continue living and watching his son grow.. something he wanted. At the point when we started becoming friends he was still pursuing his writing. He was working then on a novel about anti-abortion activists. (That may even have been part of why he first wanted to talk with me.. to sound me out on religious attitudes.) After his bout with cancer he never, to my knowledge, got back to seriously working on his novel. He wrote a published work in which he presented himself as "rejected".. but it always seemed to me that in the process of what could be considered failure in his writing, he was becoming a winner at life.

In the fall of '99 I moved away from Pasadena to enter a Ph.D. program at Emory University in Atlanta. Whenever I came home to visit my family I made my way out to Pasadena to see Phil.. sometimes we got down to LA theaters on multiple occasions these winter breaks. I loved going back to Emory having seen all the films that would not hit Atlanta for another month or two. We corresponded a lot and exchanged news about what we were reading or watching.. or notes about life. Even in the midst of grad school I knew of no fellow student who could talk so easily about books and reading.

Somewhere in there our correspondence trailed off. Phil began to have seizures and was taking medicine that hurt his memory. Eventually he got a diagnosis of brain cancer, but I am unclear how this related to his earlier health struggles. It seemed horribly unfair for a person who had such a gem of a mind to be attacked in that very place.. and the strong medications he took to combat the cancer had additional side effects. The last time I saw Phil, which would have been in fall '05, he seemed to have aged quite a bit. He was as kind and caring as ever, but it was clear that his energy would be spent with his family.. and I don't think we ever exchanged another letter except for Christmas greeting cards.

I have not mentioned his political temperateness. Something he kept right up through the last time we talked. He was a liberal.. a regular reader of The Nation.. but he exemplified a form of liberalism that was willing to see the world through the eyes of a person who saw things differently. This did not have the effect of relativizing his viewpoints, but gave him the ability to watch political goings-on with a fair dose of humor and compassion. I think he was ultimately pessimistic about political change.. and about the human capacity to look realistically at the world.. but he was in the best sense a humanist who gave himself wholly to no party or group.. and strove to understand.

My best wishes to Irene and Peter.