Rash's Surname Index
Notes for William Mode SPACKMAN
W. M. Spackman Is Dead at 85; Author of Novels About Romance
By RICHARD F. SHEPARD
Published: August 09, 1990
W. M. Spackman, a writer and classicist who in a burst of creativity late in life became the author of five novels, died on Friday at his home in Princeton, N.J.
Mr. Spackman, who was 85 years old, suffered from prostate cancer, said his daughter, Harriet Newell of Carmel, Calif.
William Mode Spackman wrote novels of romance, but they were by no means romance novels. His style, one couched in prose that drew the admiration of critics and comparisons with the work of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, dealt with male-female relationships with sympathy, humor and knowledgeable understanding.
Alice Quinn, poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine, who was his editor at Alfred A. Knopf, said yesterday, ''Mr. Spackman was a radiant human being and a radiant writer, a writer of great charm and high style, who took as his subject men and women who really liked and enjoyed each other.''
Mr. Spackman's first novel, ''Heyday,'' about the Princeton University class of 1927, of which he was a member, was published in 1953. His second, ''An Armful of Warm Girl,'' was issued in 1978, when he was 72 years old. Yet another, ''As I Sauntered Out, on Mid-Century Morning,'' is awaiting publication.
The Sensibility of Another Century
The scope of Mr. Spackman's sweep of literature drew the attention of John Leonard in a review of a Spackman novel in The New York Times in 1980.
'' 'A Presence With Secrets ' is every bit as delightful as 'An Armful of Warm Girl,' if somewhat less shapely, and just as much a comedy of manners, even if those manners belong more to the 18th century than to the 20th,'' Mr. Leonard wrote. ''Perhaps that is one of his points: the 20th century will make its claims, even on artists and lovers; history and absurdity take no prisoners.''
The author, who was born in 1905 in Coatesville, Pa., was removed as editor of Princeton's Nassau Literary Magazine while an undergraduate. The university president, John Grier Hibben, suppressed an issue that contained what he called the ''most sacrilegious and obscene articles'' he had ever seen in print. About Mr. Spackman, he said: ''I understand that he has been reading a good deal of James Joyce's 'Ulysses' and T. S. Eliiot and other of the modernists in literature. He has evidently been well soaked in this type of literature and has tried to go the writers one better.''
After graduation, Mr. Spackman became a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford. Later he worked as a Rockefeller Fellow in opinion research at Columbia University, as a radio writer, as a public relations executive and a literary critic. He also taught classics at New York University and the University of Colorado. His other novels are ''A Difference in Design,'' and ''A Little Decorum.'' ''On the Decay of Humanism'' is a volume of essays.
In 1984, he received the Howard D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for ''work that merits recognition for the quality of its prose style.''
He is survived by his second wife, Laurice Macksoud Spackman; Mrs. Newell and his son, Peter Spackman of Newton, Mass., his children by his first wife, Mary Ann Matthews Spackman, who died in 1978; eight grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
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