Postscript: Mark Singer
Mark Singer, who contributed to this magazine as a staff writer for fifty-two years, died of cancer, at Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan, not far from his apartment, on June 19th. He was seventy-five years and eight months old, to the day. He started out writing pieces for The Talk of the Town, then moved on to humor, personal essays, and long reported stories, some of which were collected in books or became whole books themselves. His 1985 book “Funny Money,” a deadpan nonfiction comedy about the collapse of a fraudster bank in Oklahoma during the savings-and-loan crisis, was a best-seller. My copy is inscribed “Dear Sandy—This is the only free copy of this book that you will be receiving. Love, Mark.”
He grew up in Tulsa, the middle child of five, with two brothers and two sisters. The siblings were Sandra, George, Ellen, and Stephen. A family business, Singer Brothers, founded by a grandfather and a great-uncle, did oil exploration and production, and prospered with a network throughout the state. His mother, Marjorie, and his father, Alex, could take a person by surprise with their laconic Oklahoma humor. A family story: One day while playing in a field, Mark and one of his brothers started a grass fire. The owner of the field called Mark’s father and said, “Mr. Singer, two boys just started a fire in my field, and although I can’t make out their faces, I think they might be your sons.”
Alex Singer said, “Describe them.”
The man said, “Well, one of the boys was flipping matches, and when the fire started he ran away.”
Alex said, “That would be [Mark’s brother].”
The man went on, “And the other boy was flipping matches, too, but, when the fire started, this boy ran to the irrigation ditch and took off one of his boots and filled it with water and ran back to the fire, but tripped and fell on the way and spilled all the water from the boot, and thus failed to put out the fire.”
Alex said, “That would be Mark.”
He went to Tulsa public schools and won citywide spelling bees. On his high-school wrestling team, he competed in the hundred-and-five-pound weight class. He developed a good game of golf, despite sometimes playing on courses where the fairways were dirt with tufts of grass and the greens were dirt that had been rolled flat and oiled. When he got to Yale, he realized that his high school had taught him not one thing about how to write an essay. He set about learning under William Zinsser, a professor of writing and the author of the book “On Writing Well.” After Mark graduated, Zinsser recommended him for a job at this magazine.
I started at The New Yorker in 1974, the same year as Mark. We were twenty-three. At first, we weren’t friends (my fault: meanness, narcissism). Then he won me over with a Christmas gift of a Greenberg Smoked Turkey, from Tyler, Texas. Every year after that, he sent me a Greenberg turkey—through our long friendship, that has added up to fifty-one turkeys, with one year lost because in 2020 the plant in Tyler evidently oversmoked itself and had a fire. Each year, I used the convenient shipping box of heavy-duty white cardboard to hold my income-tax documents. I don’t know what I’ll do for ’27.
There never was a more generous person. He loaned money to people and sometimes didn’t get it back. He helped friends who found themselves with a doctor’s bill that they couldn’t pay. He gave more than anybody I know to the Holy Apostles Soup Kitchen, on Ninth Avenue, and gave consistently. The soup kitchen sponsors fasts to raise money. One year, Mark tried fasting, but he told me he had to stop because he found that it made him really hungry.
His writing did good for the world. He had a connoisseur’s appreciation for cons and scams and got to the bottom of some notable ones. His long piece about an Indianapolis con man and accused murderer required a lot of gruelling reporting and hanging out with the guy, and later became a book that exposed him. When the guy got out of prison and tried to make a con-artist comeback, Mark’s book was there, standing in the way. I like to think that Mark saved Obamacare. A piece that he wrote in 2017 about his own autoimmune disease and the upcoming vote to kill the health-insurance program is said to have influenced Senator John McCain’s deciding “no” vote. And back in the nineteen-nineties Mark wrote a Profile of Donald Trump, then just a publicity-seeking real-estate developer, that did not follow the usual red herrings with which Trump was delighting the media. Instead, Mark looked for his actual soul. Where it should have been he found—nothing. He looked hard at the nothing and gave the reader a sense of it, long before it became the giant expanding hell pit we’re falling into now. At a certain level of writing, you may be visited by prophecy, as happened there.
If Mark were Lakota, his name might have been Respects Nothing. He was uncaught by any orthodoxy, would talk back to any authority, and often voiced the unwelcome but true intrusive thought. One thing he had no respect for was death. His health problems resembled a fall down a long flight of stairs, with pauses at several landings. He endured treatments that were painful and enervating in order to get time to work, and to fish with Jeb, Reid, Tim, and Paul—his wonderful sons—and with Zoe and William, his grandchildren, and with John McPhee and David Remnick and me. Fishing the Delaware and the Housatonic Rivers with Mark was some of the best fun of my life. Now he lies in an upstate cemetery thirty miles from where we used to fish, and I’ll be able to visit the grave when I go back.
When I got off the phone with Mark, I always said, “I love you, you’re a gorgeous person.” I did, and do, and he was. ♦