Editor’s note: This is the second of two parts.
“In happy moments one realizes that the best work is done when one’s eye is simply on the work, not on its consequences, or oneself. It is something done for its own sake. It is, in Lewis Hyde’s term, a gift.” — Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, “Good Prose”
Early in his career, Stuart Dybek, whose fiction writing was later compared to Ernest Hemingway’s, was honored at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. He invited his dear friend and contemporary Tracy Kidder to be his guest, and hijinks ensued.
“I wore fishing boots to the awards ceremony, not understanding a damn thing about it,” recalled Dybek. At the event, among the crowd taking in the displays of Kennedy family history, was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. “There she was, transfixed, while looking at a display of the original wedding dress she married Jack in.
“‘Excuse me, Mrs. Onassis,’ I said, and somebody like her knew how to clock this goofy guy in boots. Then Trace, who was late, gets halfway around the corner and yells out as loud as he could, ‘There’s Dybek, talking to a good-looking babe again!’”
Onassis turned slowly, peered at Kidder, and it was as if time had stopped and the author was frozen in ice. When he could move again, he bolted from the building.
Kidder’s daughter Alice Bukhman said his outsize reactions could be silly, but that when he was in his element, words would pour out of him like music, his big hands wildly keeping time. “I always loved watching when he’d have a dinner party and hold court and sort of perform as this intellectual power,” she said.
Editor of a lifetime
Tommy O’Connor, the Northampton cop whom Kidder followed for “Home Town,” published in 1999, admired the author’s uncanny ability to gain people’s trust. O’Connor let him ride in his cruiser for 18 months so he could learn about the city’s underbelly, where addiction and classism played out in plain sight.
Like many people Kidder followed, O’Connor became friends with the author and gained insight into his imperfections.
“He stopped golfing because he would end up throwing his clubs,” remembered O’Connor. “It would be outbursts like, ‘Dear God!’ I often found myself talking in a British accent with him.”
But Kidder pushed O’Connor to be better. Every day he picked a word, like “defenestration,” that O’Connor would have to use in a sentence at some point during his shift. “It just so happens that the day he picked that word, which means ‘to be thrown out of a window,’ I got called to a rooming house where one of the tenants had literally thrown himself out of the second-floor window. In my report I wrote that he was the subject of defenestration, or he defenestrated himself.” Kidder wasn’t sure he got the usage exactly right, but O’Connor got an “A” for effort.
The author helped O’Connor apply to the FBI, where he went on to serve as a special agent alongside his wife, Jean, for 23 years on the Evidence Response Team based in Washington D.C. “He changed the trajectory of our lives,” said O’Connor.
In the book, the policeman longs to apply to the FBI but is intimidated by the arduous process, which Kidder follows every step of the way. The first hurdle was the handwritten application, which O’Connor filled out and handed to the esteemed author.
On the first line, O’Connor had written that he wanted to be part of the “Federal Bureau of Investigations” — with an “s.”
“It’s the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Kidder told him.
“That’s stupid,” replied O’Connor. “Clearly they do more than one investigation.”
From then on, Kidder became O’Connor’s editor — a position he reserved for family members and close friends.
Tracy Kidder, excavator
Ophelia Dahl trusted Kidder implicitly after she read “The Good Doctor,” an essay about Paul Farmer published in The New Yorker in 2000 that preceded his book “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” Farmer and Dahl were co-founders of Partners In Health, a global organization headquartered in Boston that brings high-quality medical care to countries such as Haiti and Sierra Leone.
She and Farmer were passionate about health equity, and so was Kidder. “He had big ideas, he was bold and big, and he swore a lot,” Dahl recalled. “You could hear the machinations of his mind as he would explain and exclaim, ‘I can’t believe this f—ing government!’
“He was just so justifiably wound up by injustice, but he was very, very forgiving of humanness.”
In the book, Kidder examines Farmer’s seeming saintliness and how it saves countless strangers but makes him off-limits to enduring intimacy. He includes an excerpt of a letter that Dahl wrote to Farmer, her former lover and lifelong business partner, that showcases this tension. Farmer is admirable and fallible, and the letter, in Dahl’s own words, opens readers’ hearts to what might otherwise be hard to wrap their heads around.
Dahl said that Kidder’s dedication to “excavating” others’ experiences made it feel as though his writing wasn’t a job to be finished but a mission to be fulfilled.
‘Lieutenant Gusto’
“I think of him as one of the great social justice warriors of our time by raising people’s awareness about issues we’d rather not think about,” said Marty Klein, who met Kidder four years ago when the author posted photos of wild mushrooms on Facebook and asked “Are these edible?”
Klein, a naturalist from Easthampton, soon started hiking with Kidder, who asked him endless questions about mushrooms, his newest special interest. Soon, Kidder invited Klein and his partner to dinner, and Kidder welcomed him to the symphony.
“I had no idea what I was getting into,” said Klein. “He had a few glasses of wine, and I couldn’t even understand him because he was speaking so fast and words were pouring out of him with a lot of passion. He was like somebody putting a hose in my ear and just filling it with a million words at once.”
Later, Bukhman told Klein that a family friend’s nickname for Kidder was “Lieutenant Gusto.”
Faith and truth
The author was an exceptional thinker who often explored the spiritual — not religion, per se, but how one could have faith at all amidst extraordinary suffering. In Kidder’s last book, “Rough Sleepers,” published in 2023, he follows Jim O’Connell, president of Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, as well as several unhoused people, referred to as “rough sleepers.”
One rough sleeper, given the pseudonym “Tony Columbo,” endures staggering sexual abuse that precedes his drug use and chronic homelessness. Despite his own limitations, Tony becomes the doctor’s right-hand man, attending to his fellows and throwing his weight behind O’Connell’s mission. In a devastating passage toward the end of the book, after Tony confides in “Dr. Jim” about what happened to him as a child, Kidder describes Tony’s crisis of faith:
“‘Where do you see God, Jim? You took theology. Hadda believe in God. Because there’s no way you’re doing all this and you don’t believe in God.’ This seemed at last like Tony’s central, urgent question. ‘You been fortunate and lucky, but you worked very hard for it, Jim. But I believe you’re doing it for us people, because you see what’s going on and you see the truth in our world.’”
When Kidder approached O’Connell, wanting to write about him and his work, the doctor worried about the rough sleepers’ anonymity.
“My great fear was that somebody was going to read something that really violated who they were,” he said. “What was totally fascinating to me was that the only people who had any criticism of the book were the ones who did not get into the book. People really want to have their stories told.”
Even if they didn’t make the book, Kidder signed a hard copy for every rough sleeper he’d spoken to — about 150 in total.
Leading with love, leaving with love
Kidder “certainly had this profound faith in the capacity of people to stand erect in a world that might be slumping around them,” said his friend Alex Kotlowitz, a Chicago journalist. His faith in humanity extended to his subjects and his friends. During their final conversation, when Kidder was “kind of in and out,” Kotlowitz told Kidder he was eager to get back to the book he was working on. He didn’t think Kidder had heard. But the author’s last words to his friend were, “Just make sure you get back to that book, now.”
While Kidder didn’t get to finish his work with Bialecki, they kept in close contact. In March, she called him on a Sunday and he told her he’d been admitted to the hospital.
“Oh heavens!” she told him over the phone.
“Dr. Jim’s here,” Kidder replied without missing a beat, referring to O’Connell, whom he’d insisted Bialecki meet. The two victims talked at length, and then Kidder remembered that on previous Sundays he’d gone with Bialecki to deliver food to the homeless in Northampton.
“It’s Sunday: You were at the encampment,” he said, eager to hear more about her work.
Read Parts 1and 2 of our tribute at gazettenet.com. There will be a memorial service for Tracy Kidder on June 6 at 12 p.m. at Smith College. Details available at tracykidder.com. Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.