Art, as Yeats famously declaimed, allows its makers perfection of the life or of the work -- but never both.
Among writers, it's a notion that has worked its way so far down the food chain that many journalists on their melancholy way out of the divorce court have consoled themselves with the thought that they had at least been faithful to the fierce either-or of the arch-poet's proposition.
The late Marjorie Williams was one of those preternaturally liberated spirits with a keen eye for cant, even the Kierkegaardian kind. That left her free not only to be a much-loved wife, mother and friend, but also to become one of the best American journalists of her generation. Her early death, in 2005 at the age of 47, was a loss not only to her family and admiring acquaintances but also to all those who believe there is a special value to intelligent observation, elegantly expressed on the page. That writing incorporating those qualities seldom surfaces in the torrent of reportage spewing daily from the nation's capital is testament to what journalism lost when Williams succumbed after a long, somehow dignified struggle with liver cancer.
"Reputation: Portraits in Power" is the second posthumous collection of her work to be edited by her husband, Slate columnist Timothy Noah. The first, "The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Politics, Family, and Fate," was a surprise bestseller -- in part, as Noah writes in his introduction -- because it incorporated examples of her weekly Washington Post column and unpublished essays that opened an autobiographical window on an extraordinary woman.
As her colleague David Von Drehle wrote in Williams' obituary: "She wrote trenchantly on topics ranging from the presidency to parenthood, from Julia Child to Jennifer Lopez. She ran the octaves from trivia to timelessness with speed and harmony. She could do funny and wise and sad all in the same paragraph, with no seams showing. Many more people liked Ms. Williams than could easily explain her, for she defied easy categories. Her prose was razor-sharp, her personality gentle. Her mind was relentless, her manner good-natured. Her standards were exacting, her impulse forgiving. She was by nature the center of most rooms she entered, yet preferred to draw out others, to listen."
