6.25.2003
John Alexander Coleman, 1935-2003
[Posted 11:08 AM by Roger Kimball]
It is with great sadness that we report that John Coleman, a
long-time contributor to The New Criterion and a close
friend of the editors, died on June 17. He was 67 and had
been battling cancer for over a year.
We met John in the early 1990s at a monthly seminar on
modernism sponsored jointly by The New Criterion and
New York University, where John taught Spanish literature
from forever (as he said) until his (early and eagerly
sought) retirement in 1997.
From the start, it was clear that John was a man of rare
wit, capacious learning, and eager if gently ironical
curiosity. At those seminars, John displayed his easy
mastery of literature–not just Spanish and Latin American
literature, but the entire modernist tradition. He was an
expert in Borges (whose work he translated, edited, and
expounded), and had a deep grasp of Eliot, Henry James, Stevens,
Santayana, and many other figures. But it soon became clear
that John’s greatest passion was for music. He had an
impressive command of the
classical repertory, and, we are
told, an equally impressive command of jazz. Indeed, John
did not discriminate among genres: only between good music
and bad, the excellent and the false, sentimental, or poorly
executed.
In order to distinguish himself from another writer named
John Coleman, our John Coleman had always written under the
name Alexander Coleman. He published on a wide
variety of subjects literary and musical. For The New
Criterion, he wrote delightfully erudite pieces on such
neglected figures as the Portuguese novelist
and man of letters Eça de Queirós, an abundance of music
criticism, and incisive “fever-chart” reports on the cultural
situation in the (generally balmy) places his inveterate
travels took him. We include here a brief Coleman sampler
that shows something of John’s range of interests.
John’s charm was as invigorating as his cooking was
delicious. You knew you had entered the circle of his
affections when he began addressing you as “Doctor” or
“Maestro,” forms of address that his friends found
irrepressibly infectious. John’s passing is a loss for our
readers, who will no longer have the benefit of his engaging
criticism. For us, the loss is deeper. It is hard to
believe that we will no longer be welcoming him around our
table, glass of wine in hand, pertinent
anecdote on tongue’s tip. Farewell, Maestro. We shall miss
you.
An Alexander Coleman sampler:
Sviatoslav Richter, 1915�1997
�O plomo o plata? (a Notebook on Mexico)