Postscript: Jonathan D. Spence 1936 - 2021

Jonathan D. Spence (Photo by Misha Erwitt)

I want to pay tribute to Jonathan D. Spence, who died a few months ago, age eighty-five. Spence was an eminent scholar of Chinese history. And he was a great writer. His style was spare and elegant. I’m not a student of Chinese history. But I enjoyed reading his writing, especially his New York Review of Books pieces: see, for example, “A Master in the Shadows” (April 5, 2012); “The Ball and the World” (December 8, 2011); “The Enigma of Chiang Kai-shek” (May 28, 2009); “Portrait of a Monster” (November 3, 2005).

There’s a sentence in the “Acknowledgments” of his wonderful The Question of Hu (1988) that I cherish:

And just in case all that love and caring from so many people might not prove enough, my aged dog Daisy climbed the narrow wooden steps to my summer study countless times a day, and lay across from me during every word, sighing gently in her sleep over my endless attempts to draw some meaning out of the constantly vanishing past.