Rabelaisian

Rabelaisian

Rabelaisian figure in the Senate and in life, instantly recognizable by his shock of white hair, his florid, oversize face, his booming Boston brogue, his powerful but pained stride. He was a celebrity, sometimes a self-parody, a hearty friend, an implacable foe, a man of large faith and large flaws, a melancholy character who persevered, drank deeply and sang loudly. He was a Kennedy. Kennedy was a figure of novelistic tragedy. All the potential for greatness he possessed he squandered because of his inability to transcend his own all too human weaknesses. Chappaquiddick was only the worst of it. He did, of course, achieve a kind of greatness, and one shouldn't try to take that away from him. But it's hard to think of him this morning without thinking about what might have been had he been able to bear the burden of history and his slain brothers' legacies. He could have done so much more with what he had been given. He was a Kennedy. RIP.

And so, the last brother of that mythical generation of Kennedys is gone, and of the children of Joe and Rose, only Jean Kennedy Smith remains. After the death of his brothers, and until the election of Obama, Teddy Kennedy was the iconic American liberal. We always like to say that it's the "end of an era" when a historically significant figure passes, but in Sen. Kennedy's case, it really is true. Whatever else one might say about him, Ted Kennedy was a survivor. He endured the rise and fall of American conservatism, though he did not live to see his signature issue -- health care for all -- become a reality. I thought this bit from the NYT obit was spot-on: Mr. Updike's long-established reputation as an exquisite stylist has been used as a stick to beat him with, by readers and critics who seem to wish he were Robert Stone, or at least Joyce Carol Oates. Perhaps because Mr. Updike's verbal precision and delicacy are unaccompanied by conventional restraint (he's as sexually forthright as Henry Miller, for all the latter's Rabelaisian bluster), even admirers of his fiction balk at fixing his star in the firmament occupied by the ambitious, life-seizing likes of Saul Bellow and Joseph Heller or Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.