NORTHAMPTON — At a memorial service for Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder this month, more than 300 people gathered at Smith College to celebrate his life, but the stories they shared were less about his books than the lives he changed.
Kidder, who won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1982 for “The Soul of a New Machine,” wrote four nonfiction books set in western Massachusetts and was working on a fifth when he died of lung cancer on March 24 at age 80.
He was an interrogator of injustice. An excavator of truths. A failure at golf. But if the formal service of Thanksgiving for his life had a central message, it was this: God worked through Tracy Kidder.
“He was a storyteller, a storyteller with what I recognized as a spiritual sense of vision,” said Rev. Michael Bullock in his homily, which celebrated the author’s unique ability to hold horror and humanity in the same breath, in the same book.
Kidder wrote often about manmade tragedy and, alongside it, the almost superhuman ability to cultivate love. A seer and a mirror of this inner power, he showed his subjects and his audience profound grace.
Work-in-progress
But the 6-foot-1 former football player, whose friends had to “Tracy-proof” their homes, could be physically clumsy, emotionally awkward and excruciatingly human.
Bullock, who was introduced to Kidder through his wife, Fran, told those in attendance that he and the author “danced a cordial dance with one another” until finally, two autumns ago, they agreed to meet for a beer. While Bullock admired the foliage at an outdoor café, he waited. And waited. After calling Kidder and getting his voicemail, he soon received a return message “about Tracy expressing his mortification at missing our meeting, followed by his great urgent promise to reschedule our chat.”
The audience chuckled knowingly: “mortified” and “urgent” were classic Kidder descriptors. He was at once reserved and utterly over-the-top. In fact, his polished prose was the product of a dozen drafts. He wrote in great bursts, then revised by reading pages aloud to his family and friends — whether they liked it or not — and finally in tandem with his longtime editor, Dick Todd.
Maybe God worked through Kidder because he was always a work-in-progress, because he worked so hard to reveal him.
‘His secret power’
After the homily and the hymns, Williamsburg resident Jose Garcia reflected on his friendship with Kidder. “He told me why he did what he did,” he told the crowd. “He saw God in every person that he met; that was his secret power.”
Garcia met Kidder when the two ended up playing golf together — a sport that did not agree with the author. “When the game went south, he would unleash these four-letter words on golf, and that’s the first time I met him. I told my wife, ‘You wouldn’t believe who I played with: Tracy Kidder,’” he told the Gazette after the service. “And she said, ‘That must have been so wonderful.’”
Later, like so many who came to love Kidder — imperfect and transcendent — the two became fast friends. That is why Garcia practiced reading aloud one of Kidder’s favorite poems, “A Noche” by Spanish writer Antonio Machado, ahead of the service. Before reading the English version to close out the memorial, he told Kidder’s loved ones that the author, dissatisfied with other interpretations, wrote his own translation.
“Last night when I was sleeping / I dreamed, blessed illusion! / That a hot sun was shining inside my heart,” read Garcia through tears. “It was hot because it gave / the heat of a red hearth / and it was sun because it shone / and because it made me cry. / Last night, when I was sleeping / I dreamed, blessed illusion, / That it was God whom I had / inside my heart.”
Amazing grace
Following the memorial, the Gazette spoke with Jonathan Harr, a Northampton journalist, who noted that most writers are solitary creatures — but not Kidder, who had “an enormous circle” that he stoked like a fire. The two met after Harr made a disparaging comment about Kidder’s idea for “House,” a book that chronicles a home’s construction published in 1985.
“I said, ‘God, how much more banal can you get?’” recalled Harr, who quickly forgot about the slight and went about his work while the comment got back to Kidder. When the author gently asked Harr out for a beer, Kidder told him, “Books are like tender shoots: You don’t want to stomp on them.”
Kidder became Harr’s best friend, who sat beside him through seven years of Harr’s writing “A Civil Action,” reading countless drafts of the eventual bestseller.
‘Tracy was home’
Three Burundian brothers — Deogratias, Asvelt and Pacifique — for whom Kidder was a father figure, also spoke with the Gazette after the service. The author met all three while following Deogratias, whose name means “thanks be to God,” when writing “Strength in What Remains,” published in 2009.
“He knew how to get you to tell stories you would never tell, like removing fog from your brain,” said Deo of Kidder.
Years later, Tracy and Fran Kidder would help Deo’s younger brothers come to the United States. “They were the foundation, so I could say, ‘OK, now you really don’t have to keep running,’” said Asvelt. “Tracy was home.”
Nurtured by Kidder, Pacifique became an acclaimed writer who lives in Brooklyn and travels often to Burundi, where over the past year he and Kidder established Kigutu Farm to nourish the patients and staff of Kigutu Hospital. Deo founded Village Health Works in Burundi, and Asvelt is a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland.
For the three brothers, Kidder was the answer to an unspoken prayer.
He just asked them to pay it forward — his secret power.
Melissa Karen Sances can be reached at melissaksances@gmail.com.