YOU SAY, I SAY
Staying Alive with Literature, Language, and Friendship
by Robert Waxler & David Beckman
Two college friends rekindle their friendship and mutual love of literature in this collection of letters.
Authors Waxler and Beckman first met as 18-year-olds at Brown University in 1962, where they bonded over their love of language and books. In their senior year at the Ivy League institution, the two even published a poetry chapbook together, Echo Aonides, which reflected their preoccupation with classical literature and “caused a small buzz on campus and in our heads.” As often happens with college friendships, life intruded and took the two men on separate paths. Waxler would later serve in multiple academic and leadership roles as a literature professor and dean at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, where his writings took a decisively academic turn. Beckman continued to publish poetry in multiple anthologies—he was nominated for the Pushcart Poetry Prize twice—in addition to his commercial work as a promotional writer. After Beckman found a reference to Waxler in a 2014 alumni magazine, the two resumed correspondence, picking up where they left off half a century before. After a brief introduction, this book offers readers the authors’ correspondence from 2021 to 2024 in which they not only reflect on their own writings but also continue their college debates about classic writers—from Dante Alighieri and William Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot and Franz Kafka. The missives, originally sent as e-mails, have a conversational style and reflect a delightful blend of jargon-free literary banter, featuring the learned insights of two people who share a profound love of the written word.
Even the letters that focus on more thematic or personal topics, such as one titled “Friendship Keeps Us Alive,” contain a wealth of literary references from Homer to Milan Kundera. Others explore the nature of writing itself, as when Beckman, for instance, explores the differences between writing poetry and doing work for advertising firms: “In professional writing, I couldn’t afford dry spells, and so had to force creativity,” he writes, adding that the opposite was true in his career as a poet: “To force a poem into being is to mar its nature before it’s born.” A co-founder of UMass Dartmouth’s Center for Jewish Culture, Waxler often adds religious interpretations to his letters, providing biblical commentary from the Orthodox Jewish tradition. Although many of the exchanges here are lighthearted in nature—even when the authors’ interpretations of a specific Keats poem, Tolstoy novel, or Shakespeare play diverge—they also tackle important existential questions concerning literature today, such as its value in a post-Holocaust world and the future of human culture in a milieu that is increasingly dominated by artificial intelligence. The book’s cover art, created by Brian Singer, repurposes old paperback books in a mosaic patten that, per the artist, seeks “to breathe new life into millions of hidden words, sentences, and stories.” In this art, and in each of the book’s 33 letters, readers will experience a poignant and accessible ode to reading and writing.A touching anthology of correspondence between two friends that’s also a love letter to literature.