I met Andy Gordon in 1981. We had both published our first books on Norman Mailer and one of us, I can’t recall who, got in touch by mail to congratulate the other. We had both taken psychological approaches to Mailer’s work, Andy’s Freudian and mine Jungian, so it was kind of a natural epistolary connection. I was at the time working on a long article on H. G. Wells and took my draft, on the recommendation of an old friend and colleague at Boston College, to the Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Boca Raton, Florida. That’s where I met Andy in the flesh, who was working on the fantastic in contemporary film. We had dinner, got to know each other better, kept in touch by mail, and met on the two other occasions when I attended the conference in Boca Raton again.
After that, Andy and I swapped a couple of manuscripts for critique, but over the ensuing years we fell out of touch until we met again at the first Mailer conference held in Sarasota, FL. That meeting sparked our old friendship and we were once again in touch. When he came to the last Mailer conference we had in Provincetown, MA, we spent a lot of time together. I drove Andy around, showing him Mailer’s house and haunts, and we spent a private dinner together talking about our memoirs, mine recently published and his in process. Two old guys reminiscing about their deep past.
I was looking forward to reading his memoir, but it looks as if death has prevented that work from seeing the light of day. I wonder if some portion of the manuscript is available and whether it could be published in the Mailer Review. Andy was a natural gentleman, and a fine scholar with impressive credentials. He had a fine wit and a sometimes dry but ever-ready sense of humor. As I finished a panel discussion in the third Sarasota Mailer conference, Andy, about to drive home, came up to me, shook my hand, and said, “See you in Macon, Bob!” In less than a year, my old friend was gone.