Deborah Weisgall

Writer

Examiner Club Secretary

The first things I published, not long after I graduated from college, were poems, in Poetry magazine and in The Atlantic Monthly, as it was called when its offices were on Arlington Street. Soon after that, while I was working, not very successfully, as some kind of primitive marketing and development person at Harvard’s brand new Office for the Arts, I submitted a list of topics to Harvard Magazine that I thought might generate interest in the college’s efforts to include the study of performance along with criticism and observation—painting, for instance, along with art history. John Bethel, the magazine’s legendary editor, asked me if I would write up one of those suggestions: a history of the performing arts at Harvard. I said no, I was writing poetry. He kept after me. I finally said I’d give it a try, thinking that it would turn out to be a kind of term paper. Thirty thousand words later, to my shock and surprise, John Bethel published the whole thing as a separate section, an insert, in the magazine. And I discovered that journalism was less lonesome than poetry.

I have written for many publications, including The Atlantic, Connoisseur, Fortune, The New Yorker, and, mostly, for the New York Times and mostly about high art and culture: profiles in the Times Magazine include Peter Serkin, Rudolf Serkin’s brilliant and complicated son; Marguerite Yourcenar, the first woman elected to the Académie Française, who tried to elude me after telling me that she would meet me in Bruges; Peter Martins; and Mikhail Baryshnikov. I watched George Balanchine choreograph one of his last great ballets. I tracked down Picasso’s heirs and family and wrote a cover piece on how they were dividing the spoils. His widow, Jacqueline, took me through their villa in Mougins, and we sat in Picasso’s studio, surrounded by portraits he had painted of her. I wrote about how they all seemed to have his eyes, not hers, and how she played a recording of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. I did not write about how I burst into tears sitting opposite a tiny, not quite coherent woman whose soul had been hollowed out.

I’ve written a couple of librettos for the Boston Symphony, and I’ve also written two novels. Still Point is about a dancer and the ephemerality of dance, and The World Before Her, about the last six months of George Eliot’s life. That story intersects with the story of a contemporary woman, whose life intersects with Eliot’s characters. In between those books, I wrote a memoir, A Joyful Noise: Claiming the Songs of My Fathers; it is about how I grew up in a musical Jewish family where the men took center stage—they were the singers, the musicians, the scholars—and how I learned to hear my own voice despite—and because of—their glorious cacophony. 

During the pandemic, I have been working on a book that is rooted in domestic fact but that seems to be veering towards invention…