Ben Demott and Gloria LaBarbera

 
My mother, Gloria LaBarbera who died recently, and the writer and cultural commentator Ben Demott forged an affectionate friendship over many years-. The relationship was largely epistolary as they grew older,  though very personal as children walking to Hewitt school from the Nottingham area. I was very proud of the relationship--my mother knew quality, and intellectually, Demott was about the best Rockville Centre has put out, esteemed as a cultural contributor and one of the most respected public intellectuals of his day.  Now gone, my mother at age 99 and Demott at age 81, some 18 years ago, since they were contemporaneous, I am able to write about them more intimately than I would have during either of ther lifetimes. I also have inherited many letters from Demott, as well as some other luminaries. In any case, the friendship sparked about 1929, even though Demott did not exude immense charisma during his gradeschool days. While others strove to show athletic prowess of the football team or some other sport, per the ethics of that time where sports played a larger role in popularity than nowadays, Demott marched to the beat of his own drum, playing in the school band. He was, in fact, somewhat uungainly ooking as a youth. I need not describe just how he was ungainly looking since there are many photographs of Demott on the internet, given an international repution as a cultural critic and pundit during the 1980s and 1900s, as well as perennial chairman of the Amherst English Department.

In terms of popularity, and my mother was the epitome of popularity (voted most popular of the Seniors in the Southside class of that distant year, cheerleading captain)  he was at the bottom rung of that school hierarchy where the more physically fragile, aesthetic, or neurodiverse kids (and sometimes smartest kids) reside in a miserable 12-year prison yard. His march would lead him to the position of Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Amherst, funded by the Mellon Foundation, a distinction shared by Nobel prize winners and scholars such as Henry Steel Commager, and the academic equivalent of  an All-Pro player. Chairman of the English Department for many years at Amherst he was a celebrity in that particular academic world, and published in New York Times, Atlantic, and Harpers. Demott's story is appealing because it is a true-life version of Revenge of the Nerds. He came from the same Demott family of which the street in Rockville Centre is named, though he did not grow up at all wealthy. Or rather, his wealth was in his abilities, the broad inner landscape of erudition. So, I am glad that my mother (who also did some writing and enjoyed English) had the prescience to befriend this ungainly student. She remarked in later years that no one was friendly to him except her, and this trait seems to be amongst the most I admired of my mother. Her lack of interest in a person's status. He returned later in glory some years later to a reunion and dazzled all with new teeth replacing the misaligned ones and strabismus now corrected.

I have looked through these letters between Mother and Demott repeatedly for ten or more years. Once I nearly lost them by forgetting to pick them up for a couple of weeks at a copy center. I called The Amherst College library to see if they might  be interested and they conveyed some perfunctory interest, though not enough to actually devote any effort to acquire the letters. I was directiedme to the English department who discussed the papers briefly. Demott's story might not inspire, in this day and age, much academic fervor or interest or dissertation thesis, so back to obscurity he goes, though maybe he will be rediscovered by some astute scholar in the future. He did have his day in the sun, and my mother had sufficient compassion at that age to befriend this gawky peer.

 The ever-quotable Maya Angellina describes this type of connection: "Friendship knows no bounds of conventional expectations or societal hierarchies. It thrives in the unconventional, in the shared moments of vulnerability and authenticity."   I would say though, more prosaically, is that what they both had, speaking as a psychologist, were certain things that draw people together: proximity, shared neighborhood, out-of-sight verbal skills that facilitated communication, and a lofty style of appraising the world around them intuitively and with humor.

Demott enjoyed much praise upon his death. Described as a "prominent writer, scholar, and cultural critic" by The New York Times in his obituary, The Guardian in England wrote that Demott " was best known, especially in the United States, for a dozen books in which he branched out from a university career to discuss contemporary American life. He did so in a popular, rigorous, and even salty way; he was among the first academics to turn cultural commentator and tackle such themes as race, sex and class as they changed during a tumultuous era. He was not hidebound by theory, and he wielded a sharp pen." I personally like this type of prose, so value Demott's work, and style of cultural criticism. 

 Their letters became a sanctuary where they shared their thoughts, spoke about the changes in their life, their medical problems, lost friends, and solace in their connection.  Increasingly, the trials of their lives-- medicalization of day to day life, characterized the letters. There were fleeting references to their Rockville Centre past, some glowing with nostalgia, but mostly to list what peers had died. They were two unique and notable individuals who followed the trajectory of success to inevitable surrender to time. Now, here,  with a sense of honor and remembrance, I share one of the many correspondences between them, honoring the memories of two remarkable Hewitt Schoolers who are no longer with us. I have a slew of letters if any scholar wishes to review them.