William Pfaff: Personal Recollections RIP

William Pfaff:  Personal Recollections

By Norman Birnbaum | May 1, 2015

There is much to be said about Bill’s views but my sense of loss  has to do with his unfailing courtesy, his appreciation of cultural and personal difference, his amusement as well as sorrow at human folly, and a large capacity for empathy---even when he was writing of fools and miscreants.

Bill was both an American southerner and a Catholic, moved into the urbane settings of New York and later Paris with a sense of self as well as a certain delight in adventure. He and Carolyn lived in a superb apartment on a quiet street in the Eighth Arrondisement and they enjoyed nothing so much as a constant stream of dinner guests. They had rare gifts for friendship and conveyed the virtues of domesticity by example, They were anything but intrusive and yet let one know that one’s meanderings were not hidden. Bill sometimes wrote of French manners and understood these (I recall a note on speaking with the concierge) as the necessary and welcome substratum of existence, giving it point and form. He could trace a line between Ancien Regime and etat de bien-etre and was obviously grateful at being allowed to share in some small way the destiny of a nation he greatly admired.

I sometimes encountered him in other settings. I recall a conference in Rome under the auspices of the Fondazione Alcide DeGasperi, at which we laughed at a rather unique fusion of warm hospitality and organizational inefficiency.

It is difficult to imagine  but it is true that at one point he worked with The Hudson Institute and he went to Paris originally as its representative. At times he spoke quite warmly of his beginning as a junior member of the staff  at Commonweal. He understood the consolations of religion and treated these as evidence for what little human creativity our existence allows.