REMEMBERING JONATHAN LIEBERSON

Richard Avedon spoke of him as an adolescent who idolized Plato. Sidney Morgenbesser recalled him as the brilliant colleague in Columbia's philosophy department he in due course became. Shelley Wanger, editor of Interview, reminisced about his affection for awful movies and read a magazine piece that testified to his having been one of the funniest travel writers since Evelyn Waugh. Torsten Wiesel, Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher at Rockefeller University, noted his irrepressible curiosity about Wiesel's rarefied line of work. Brooke Astor said she had spent some of the most enjoyable afternoons of her life with him. The actor Peter Eyre delivered his appreciation by reading Lytton Strachey's appreciation of another protean figure, the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon. And literary critics Elizabeth Hardwick and Alfred Kazin, editors Jason Epstein and Robert Silvers, all stood up to eulogize his startlingly well-furnished mind and the delight of his gadfly wit.

Among the hundred or so who assembled with his family on that hot summer evening in the Trustees Room of the New York Public Library were a former First Lady (Jacqueline Onassis) and a rock singer (Donald Fagen of Steely Dan), writers (Philip Roth, Joan Didion, John Gregory Dunne, Renata Adler, Susan Sontag, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Frances FitzGerald) and socialites (Mica Ertegun, Annette Reed, Brooke Hayward), fashion designers (Oscar de la Renta, Diane Von Furstenberg) and luminaries of the stage and screen (Betty Comden, Claire Bloom). It was hard to imagine so many exceptional people from so many different comers of New York getting together, except to remember the boon companion they had all, miraculously, had in common—Jonathan Lieberson, former consulting editor for Vanity Fair, intellectual roamer on everything from Oscar Levant to Karl Popper in The New York Review of Books, man of endlessly surprising parts, and a true original in an age of cutouts, who had died at forty a few days earlier, taking with him considerable joy.

CHARLES MICHENER