Corinna Marsh RIP.

TART WAS the word for Corinna Marsh, tart and outspoken. Conservatives she regarded, en principe, as beyond the pale: war mongering, self-interested, pitiless capitalists to a man. Within her beat a strong old-time compassionate socialist heart. But in the shabby two-room apartment in a rundown Manhattan hotel in which she lived in near penury for more than forty years, one was apt to meet a conservative or two, each of whose misguided political views she would excuse because her taste in people was more eclectic than her taste in politics. For the last 25 years of her life the major outlet for the light verse she excelled in was that bastion of everything she despised, NATIONAL REVIEW (her last verse in NR appeared this summer). And week after week she would write the editor of this journal sharp, caustic letters taking issue with this stand we had taken, or that. (She once remarked, after reviewing a book by Aloise Heath, that NATIONAL REVIEW would be vastly improved if Aloise Heath wrote all its articles.)

Corinna Marsh graduated from Barnard in 1914, a feminist, a pacifist, and a reformist. She had a distinguished career as a teacher, then in advertising, and for many years as editor-in-chief of the University Society, publisher of educational materials.

Her final years were a misery. She, who lived for books, went blind. She lost feeling in her extremities: that meant she could no longer cook, because her fingers couldn't hold the pots and pans. Her hearing dimmed. But she kept in touch with the world about her, and her keen mind never lost its cutting edge.

Our joke in the final couple of years was that when I called, instead of asking, "How are you, Corinna?" I would say, "Hello, Corinna. What awful thing has happened to you this week?" And she would laugh, and tell me, and change the subject. In her 95th year she wrote a book of verses as a Christmas present for forty or so very special friends, and called it: The Golden Years, My Foot! She was wonderfully pleased by a letter she received about it from New York Times columnist Russell Baker.

Earlier this year Corinna Marsh was moved to a nursing home, which she loathed. Her friends prayed that she would be given the gift she most desired, her death. (Corinna herself, so much a product of her time and intellectual conditioning, did not pray.) Those prayers were answered a fortnight ago. She leaves a dearly beloved grandson, Philip, who was all any grandmother could have hoped for, and a considerable number of friends, for whom life without Corinna has lost a pinch of pepper.