We for whom reading is our daily bread and writing an addictive elixir, we whose words came into being under the exacting eye of Robert Gottlieb, we who now outlandishly outlive him—but stop! Is it possible to outlast a permanence, a presence that has molded a culture, a figure who has no successors and cannot be replicated, who presided over the shaping of books as a cajoler and an untangler of riddles and a tease and a wizardly fulfiller of all needs?     

In Avid Reader, Bob’s publishing memoir, he claimed that I had once asked him for a lock of his hair, and that he had obliged. I was abashed. I had no such memory. Here was this colossus of letters, and had I actually dared so intrusive a plea? A question of mistaken identity, I said; he must have been thinking of someone else. But psychologically, spiritually, metaphysically, it was likely true: After all, hadn’t I sometimes addressed him as “God Boblove”?

And didn’t he excel as a maker of parables? “Maria,” he would begin, referring to Maria Tucci, his wife, actor of repute, while describing a circumstance with an uncanny relevance to my current anxiety. And “Maria,” he would say again, with yet another apt instance designed to provide another apt model. Though we had never met, and whether she knew it or not, Maria was my doppelgänger, my guide, my conscience, my consoler.

[Read: A civil war over semi-colons]

“The way you write stories,” Bob once explained, “is to start off thinking you’ve begun a novel, but then when it won’t move forward, you discover that what you’ve already got is a short story.” Like some wayward playmate, he snatched a balloon out of my then-2-year-old daughter’s hand, prancing all around the office with it. He didn’t mind my showing up with child and balloon. And he made sure to return the balloon.

He never asked me to change a word or phrase or any choice of punctuation, whether in essay or fiction. His ear was my ear. We were of the same generation, and had been nurtured under the same dispensation. He never asked me to cut. Instead, he suggested that I add and expand: always an occasion for rejoicing. He gave his verdict by telephone literally overnight. No other editor since the creation of the world has equaled that.

In proposing a retrospective essay on T. S. Eliot, he led me into a visceral understanding of the time, his youth and mine, when Eliot ruled the humanities. And he told how his Columbia classmate John Hollander (later the poet and Yale professor) had concealed himself behind the door of Lionel Trilling’s seminar, mimicking the great critic’s voice and gestures. Our one significant clash was over the politics of John le Carré. A reprise of the history of Yiddish literature through the work and influence of Sholem Aleichem, though not his métier, was Bob’s idea. He offered me the prospect of a trip to Berlin, where a museum commemorating the Holocaust was being advanced. (I declined.)

If instinct, or the overriding evidence of his superior engagement with language, prompted the presumption that a writer might be lurking in the publisher, he would deny it—definitively, unqualifiedly. And then! Volume after volume after volume, on Balanchine, Sarah Bernhardt, Dickens, Garbo, jazz, and more and more, and countless critical essays born of brainy vigor.

Then who was he really? What, in sum, is he still?

A curator of history: Robert Caro, Toni Morrison, Chaim Potok, Doris Lessing, Joseph Heller, Michael Crichton, Mordecai Richler, each a singular representative of a distinctive worldview. Regarded together, they comprise a mood, a mentality, a meaning—a momentary passage of American civilization that lingers fixed in our literary firmament, even more lasting than a lock of Bob Gottlieb’s hair.

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