Credit...Thea Traff for The New York Times

A Master Storyteller, at the End of Her Story

by · NY Times

In June, in the sort of portentous tableau that would not have been out of place in her own fiction, a leak opened in the ceiling of Lore Segal’s apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. For hours, water splashed across the kitchen countertops and onto the tiled floor, collecting in murky puddles and defying all efforts by Segal and her part-time nursing aide to catch it with buckets or stanch it with spare towels. Only when the building superintendent managed to locate the source of the problem — faulty pipes in the unit above — was the flood finally halted. Segal and the aide and Segal’s grandson Isaiah were left to mop up the mess.

Two days later, Segal traveled with her daughter, Beatrice, to Shelter Island to visit a friend. “She was anxious about leaving the apartment,” Beatrice recalled, “so Isaiah agreed to stay, to keep an eye on things, and that seemed to make her feel better. But as soon as we got there, it was clear that something was wrong. She went from being able to walk to not being able to walk in the space of a day.” Segal didn’t want to eat; she drank reluctantly. “Really, all I could do,” she told me, “was lie on my back, on a marvelous stretch of green grass, looking out at a marvelous stretch of water.”

Beatrice cut short the trip and drove her mother back to Manhattan to the emergency room at Mount Sinai. “I remember sitting in the car and thinking, OK, yes, I know the reality of the situation: She’s 96 and not in the greatest of health. Still, I kept fantasizing that the doctors would just give her some fluids, give her some nutrition and send her on her way again.”

Her hopes were not entirely misplaced: Segal had a long history of rebounding from catastrophe. In her 80s, she underwent open-heart surgery to address a misbehaving valve; in her 90s, she had a pacemaker installed. Her left hip had been replaced; during the pandemic, she was hospitalized with what turned out to be a case of pneumonia. And a few months earlier, she lost vision in her right eye. Miraculously, none of the incidents seemed to slow her down. “She was still able to get out, albeit with a walker,” her publisher, Dennis Johnson, told me. “She still had the charm and the wit.” She still wrote too — writing being her way, as she put it to me, of “being understood and understanding myself. I consider it the most amazing thing one can do with one’s life: to find out what has actually happened.”

Even as her eyesight faded, Segal adhered to the same routine she kept for nearly the entirety of her 70-year career: up early, with the first fingers of light through the bedroom windows. Coffee and toast, always rye, always lightly toasted, usually with butter, but occasionally with gooseberry jam, a condiment that reminded her of her time in England, where she fled as a child to escape the Nazi takeover of her native Vienna. Then on to the notepad or typewriter or laptop. It was this practice that allowed her to produce an unparalleled run of wise and funny New Yorker short stories; this practice that yielded five groundbreaking novels, the penultimate of which was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. And it was this practice that had driven her to write, between previous surgeries, a popular sequence of stories centered on the lives of a group of elderly writers and artists in Manhattan. (The “Ladies’ Lunch” series, she called it.)

But sitting alongside her in the hospital, Beatrice could tell her mother’s resiliency would no longer be sufficient. A battery of tests, the doctors explained, showed that Segal had suffered a cardiac event while on Shelter Island — probably a minor heart attack. Was there anything to be done? Not at her age, no. “Between the heart stuff and her blindness, difficulty getting around, lack of hunger — and the kitchen flood, which felt like the last straw — I think she’d lost the last of the will she’d been holding on to,” Beatrice told me.

Segal agreed to start palliative care at her apartment, which had been outfitted with a hospital bed and an oxygen concentrator. In late June, a few weeks after her aborted visit to Shelter Island, she composed a lengthy email to her friends. “I have been wondering how to say what I need to tell you,” the email begins. “How much to dump on you.” She recounted the cardiac incident and the trip to Mount Sinai; “I did not understand,” she went on, “that the decision had been made outside my ken.” But please, she pleaded, please don’t worry for me: “I am not sad or angry or afraid. Why aren’t I? It seems that having had a good 96 years will do very well.”

Segal likes to trace her writerly origins to a very specific time and place: 1940, the English town Guildford. She was 12. Two years earlier, she fled Vienna on the trains of the Kindertransport, a kind of latter-day Underground Railroad devised by the British government to ferry Jewish children out of Eastern Europe. Newly reunited with her mother, Franzi — her father was trapped in a refugee camp on the Isle of Man — she hoped to fashion herself a fresh life, a second act. If only she could shake the stomach bug she acquired along the way. “Between bouts” of vomiting, she recalls in her first, autobiographical novel published in 1964, “Other People’s Houses,” “I lay on a bed in a narrow room at the head of a steep stair; and my mother read me ‘David Copperfield.’ Right then, the concept writer burst upon me. This was what I was going to do.”

Lore Segal as a child with her grandparents, uncle and mother in Vienna.
Credit...From the Segal family

In fact, she already had been doing it, for as long as she could remember, although the words she wrote were not yet committed to paper. “And then I saw something,” she recalls in “Other People’s Houses,” describing a frigid winter walk she took shortly after her arrival in England. “I saw where, in the middle of a semicircle of snow that must in summer have been a flower bed in a grassplot behind the cottage, there grew a tall, meager rosebush with a single bright-red rosebud wearing a clump of freshly fallen snow, like a cap askew. This struck me profoundly. I was a symbolist in those days, and roses and the like were just my speed. It excited me,” she adds. “I would write it in a letter to Onkel Hans and Tante Trude in London, saying that the Jews in Austria were like roses left over in the winter of the Nazi occupation. I would write that they were dying of the cold. How beautifully it all fell into place! How true and sad!”

The passage is quintessentially Segal: the beauty and plain truth of the metaphor, punctuated by a joke at her own adolescent expense, as if to ward off the goop of sentimentality.

In 1945, in the final days of the war, Segal’s father died of a stroke, and Segal and her mother made their way north, to London, where Segal earned a degree in English literature. Six years later, the pair arrived at last in the United States. They never left. “When I think of my world, it’s this,” Segal told me: the initial flat on 157th, formerly occupied by her beloved Uncle Paul, her mother’s younger brother. A considerably newer unit on 72nd. And the rent-controlled apartment on 100th that she took with Beatrice and her husband, David Segal, a book editor, who died suddenly of a massive heart attack in 1970 at 42. By then, Segal also had an infant son, Jacob, and thanks to David’s Social Security checks and some money from his family, enough resources to sustain herself.

She had Franzi, too: her best friend and “mommy and co-parent.” Shortly before David’s death, Franzi rented a unit in the same building as Segal; after his passing, she would drop by her daughter’s apartment every morning to watch the children while Segal wrote. “It was one of the greatest gifts she ever gave me,” Segal recalled. “I felt supported, loved — I felt understood.” In “Tell Me a Mitzi,” a children’s book originally published in 1970, a mother struggles to take care of her kids, who have been laid low by a seasonal cold. She’s saved by a knock on the door — it’s her own mother, and she’s there to nurse everyone back to health. Inevitably the Franzi character comes down with the virus herself but declares it the best cold she has ever had. She’s just happy to have been of help.

Franzi lived with Segal until 2002, when she was 97, at which point she informed her daughter that she would be more comfortable in a nursing home. “She had the grace and the kindness to tell me that she liked it there,” Segal said. “I don’t know whether she did, but she told me that she did. She wasn’t going to make my life difficult.” One afternoon three years later, Segal got a call from the staff at the home. “I hopped in a cab, and by the time I got there, she had died,” Segal says. “Still, she had people around. Nurses, doctors. She was not alone, and for me, there was great comfort in that.”

I recently asked Segal if she and her mother ever discussed the Holocaust, considering the momentous role it played in the lives of her family members, many of whom died in concentration camps. “No,” she said. “Not really. What would we have said? We both knew.”

“Knew what?” I prodded.

“That it was unspeakable,” Segal said.

But with Franzi’s death and the arrival of Segal’s own health problems, something shifted; a window opened. Not long ago, Beatrice sent me one of her mother’s latest stories (which was published this fall in The New Yorker). She had written it by dictation, relying on Beatrice and Jacob’s partner, Jean Halley, as volunteer scribes. (“I tell them where the words go, and they put them down and read them aloud, and then I change them, and together we change them again until it’s what I want,” Segal explained.)

The title is “Who Is Outside?” and it is based in part on the poetry of Theodor Kramer, a Jewish intellectual who, like Segal, fled Vienna in the 1930s for the safety of England. In the story, the elderly protagonist is struggling to complete a translation of Kramer’s famous poem. But she can’t seem to make it work. The lines have invaded not just her life but her dreams, in the manner of “an algebra problem — around and around and around.” She sleeps in horrid, restless fits. “It’s not the night so much as the morning hour, the hideous re-entry into the day — the day, mind you, which I rather like. I do. I like my old lady’s life quite well enough,” she says. “What I mean is the ugly hour before I’m awake — the necessity to wake up.”

Still, with the encouragement of her friends, she presses forward — she solves the algebra problem — and the story sighs to a close with the hard-won results:

Who is outside ringing at the door?

How the fuchsia blooms so near.

Dearest, pack me my toothbrush,

and don’t cry,

They are here.

Reading the story, one senses that the past is finally reaching up to grab Segal — as if time is spinning backward, to days of fear and fire, and to that quiet moment on the floor of the flat in Guildford, where, curled up at Franzi’s feet, she decided she would be a writer. Nearly a century later, she heard the knock on the door, and she knew exactly who was knocking.

This summer, I visited Segal at her apartment on the corner of 100th Street and Riverside Drive. At 96, she is slight and hunched but formidable — unruly eyebrows, a forceful nose, a halo of hair the consistency of a cotton ball. As her close friend Leina Schiffrin has observed, old age seems to suit her. “Lore has this thing about how ugly she was as a child and young woman. Mousy face, glasses; she wasn’t at all satisfied with her aspect. But I think,” Schiffrin went on, “that as she’s gotten older, in addition to becoming more benevolent and benign, she’s gotten more beautiful. She’s become rather an elegant old woman.”

Segal was waiting for me in her bedroom, listening to Bach on speakers that she controlled via an iPad balanced on her lap. “Bach moves me,” she said. “I don’t always understand him, but I know there’s some shape there. A shape that resonates and sings to me.”

Arranged around her, in teetering piles, were stacks of paperbacks, many of them her own. She handed me a copy of “Her First American,” a novel she completed in 1980. “Nothing was ever harder to write,” she said. “It’s my best book, but it took 18 years. After six years, I realized I had a big problem: I knew who the man was, but I didn’t know who the woman was. Was she young? Was she married? So I stopped writing. Then I went back to it, and I discovered I had been enlightened as to who the woman was,” she went on. “And I was ready to finish.”

“Her First American” is a daring, improbable achievement — all the more so for being four decades old. Over the course of 287 short pages, the novel toggles convincingly between the perspectives of two outsiders, one an Austrian Jew living in exile in the United States and the other a handsome Black intellectual based in part on one of Segal’s former boyfriends; the pair fall in love, and fall out of it, all while navigating the complex cultural currents of postwar America. “Though its main characters are a number of Black Americans and a handful of Jewish refugees in New York City,” The New York Times noted in an exuberant review, “Segal may have come closer than anyone to writing The Great American Novel.”

But Segal found it difficult to enjoy her newfound literary fame. “If someone likes my writing or, better yet, if they understand it, that is a great satisfaction, but that is never why I write,” she told me. So when her work began to slip gradually out of fashion, in the 1980s and ’90s, she did not complain. “She was open about it, but it was never a matter of suffering,” says Schiffrin, whose late husband was Andre Schiffrin, the legendary Pantheon editor in chief. “She’d say: ‘Oh, the publishers aren’t answering my letters anymore. Maybe I should change agents.’ The reality, of course, was that the industry was changing. Editors wanted big books, big-money books. Luckily,” she continued, “Lore knew literary trends tend to be cyclical.”

In 2007, the New Press published “Shakespeare’s Kitchen,” a novel composed in part of short stories that had appeared in The New Yorker. The protagonist, Ilka, is a version of the Austrian expat in “Her First American,” but it is never entirely clear if it is the same woman. This Ilka is an established writer, middle-aged, based in New York but working as a visiting scholar at a small university in Connecticut, where she is thrust, head over toes, into a vipers’ pit of petty politics and academic ego. Segal was 79 when “Shakespeare’s Kitchen” was published and 80 when she learned that it had made the list of Pulitzer finalists.

That same year, at a party in Manhattan, Segal was introduced by Andre Schiffrin to Dennis Johnson and Valerie Merians, the husband-and-wife team who run Melville House, a respected independent publisher. Within a few months, Segal and Melville House had reached a deal to reissue a novella called “Lucinella,” which has attained cult status for its vivid rendering of the New York literary world in the 1970s; an original novel, “Half the Kingdom,” followed, as did a collection of memoir and fiction titled “The Journal I Did Not Keep.”

“With writers who survive into their old age, my sense is that sometimes the spirit is willing, but the ability to get it onto the page starts to wane,” says the critic and author James Marcus, a close friend of Segal’s. “It’s just not true for Lore.”

About 10 years ago, Segal asked Marcus to read a new, unpublished short story — one of the first in the Ladies’ Lunch sequence. He was struck by its unsparing depiction of a period of life — namely the end — that is typically rendered with a gauzy wistfulness, if it’s ever rendered at all. The characters are earthy and profane; they laugh and bicker, at the same time doing their best to ignore the gathering darkness overhead. “Our children,” one character thinks, “would not believe how calmly we look around the table wondering which one of us will be next.”

Death is everywhere for these women, but so is its opposite. “You read the stories, and everything feels so extremely alive,” Marcus told me. “You’ll get to a passage set in a hospital, but she finds the humor in it, the hope. And I’d argue that goes to something profound about her whole career,” he continued. “She still approaches everything in life and her writing in the same way: as something interesting, something to be dealt with as directly as one can manage.”

Even as she has continued to publish new installments in the Ladies’ Lunch series, in recent years Segal has been assiduously revisiting her earlier work, tinkering with phrases and descriptions. “I remember setting up an event for her once for the release of ‘Lucinella,’” Dennis Johnson told me. “At one point, I thought: Wait a second. That’s not how that line goes. So afterward, I asked to see her copy, and sure enough, she’d slashed out a sentence and added a totally different one. I was like: ‘Lore, this book was first published 30 years ago. What are you doing?’ And she said: ‘It’s embarrassing. It never should have been done that way.’ All those decades later, the right phrase had come to her. And I just thought: Damn. That’s a true writer.”

When I asked Segal this summer if the constant revising was a matter of accuracy, she disputed the premise of my question. “Accuracy is something else entirely,” she said. “I don’t ever know if I’m being accurate. I just know I want the word that says, ‘OK, this is what I mean.’” For the same reason, she explained, she had grown to despise the euphemistic language of old age, which is notably absent from the Ladies’ Lunch stories. “You get to a point where people start to talk to you about being elderly, about being a ‘senior citizen,’” she said. “Listen to me: I disavow it! I refuse to use the words. I refuse to be ‘elderly.’ I refuse to talk about ‘passing away.’ Where am I passing? Can you tell me? No. The point of writing, I believe, is finding the right words. And being old is being old. Dying is dying. You must not be scared to say it.”

The last time I saw Segal was in early August, on one of the hottest mornings in a summer of record-breaking heat. Beatrice had warned me by text that her mother hadn’t had a good night — her throat was dry; she had some pain in her chest — and when I entered the bedroom, Segal inclined her head birdishly toward me, rather than sitting up, as she had on previous visits. The oxygen machine rasped away in the corner of the room. “Tell me about your mom,” Segal said.

I repeated a version of the story I’d told her before: In the spring, my mother died after a month in home hospice care — a major reason I’d asked to write about Segal in the first place. Being this close to death again seemed a necessity, a way of processing an event that I worried had gone dangerously unprocessed in my own mind.

Segal took my hand. “I don’t think I know how to do hospice,” she admitted suddenly. “Nobody knows how to live; nobody knows how to die. But we all figure it out, don’t we?”

She looked out the window, over the adjacent rooftops, south toward Midtown. “I’ve been wondering,” she said, “whether going on hospice is something that I want to write about. I haven’t decided whether it’s somehow. …” she trailed off. “I’m not sure it’s fair.”

“Why?”

“When I figure out the why, I will either do it or not do it,” she smiled.

“But you’ve written your way through your whole life,” I said.

“You may be right about that, but to write well, you need the clarity that comes with time, and I don’t have more time. Maybe this conversation will give me the clarity,” she went on.

“That’s a nice thought,” I said.

“But listen to me — I don’t want to make it too easy,” Segal cut in, before I could say anything more. “I don’t want to make it funny. I don’t want to make it cute. It’s not.”

I reached into my bag for a copy of “The Journal I Did Not Keep,” which contains my favorite Segal short story. “Dandelion” is bifurcated in structure: In the second half, a father and his young daughter (a version of Segal herself) go hiking in the Austrian Alps. But in the first, the girl is alone, lying in a meadow, reverently observing the light slipping over the head of a nearby flower. So ecstatically beautiful is the sight, so “new and inevitable,” that the girl thinks it must have been created for her by God. “Lieber Gott,” she says, “if I ever ask you for anything, you don’t even have to listen, because nothing is necessary except this.”

I read aloud the passage to Segal and saw that her mouth was moving silently along with mine: She knew the words by heart. “I am not a religious person,” she said. “I don’t think there is an afterlife. But I am a spiritual person, and I’ve experienced a lot of what I think of as visions. That was one, with the dandelions. Here’s another: I was standing with a friend in New York, and it was also good light, and the light was flitting on her sunglasses and making a brilliant reflection.” Here she smiled. “I remember thinking to myself: Ah, OK, Lore. This is what it’s all about.”

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