OBITUARY: Sophie Wilkins, R.I.P.

I wrote in 1965 an article for Esquire magazine in which I told of a young man who had already spent more time in a death house (at Trenton, N.J.) than anyone in American penal history. Edgar Smith had caught my attention after telling a reporter, covering his story on one of the unconsummated eves of his execution, that he would have to do without reading National Review because the prison's chaplain had been reassigned, and with his departure would go the copy of NR which he had been passing on to Smith. I wrote to him to say that we would send him a lifetime subscription; he enjoyed the irony, and we began a correspondence to which he contributed amusing and prepossessing letters every week, from which I drew to tell his story in Esquire.

I thought him innocent, so did Sophie Wilkins on reading the piece, and through him, we became friends. I last saw her in St. Luke's Hospital, where she died last week, 88 years after her birth in Vienna, 75 years after arriving in New York as a twelve-year-old child, bringing with her what seemed the whole inventory of European culture.

Except that she could not give the whole of her infinite attention to any single person or enterprise, I'd be tempted to write that she gave all of her time to Edgar Smith after learning about him. She wrote to him regularly and traveled periodically on the train to visit him, limited only by death-house rules as to frequency. The objective of believers in Smith's innocence was a new trial. That didn't happen, but tough legal work by a resourceful lawyer from Williams & Connolly achieved a Supreme Court order for a new trial, the result of which was a pleading and, after 14 years, his release. Sophie Wilkins edited his memoirs, Brief Against Death, which became, in a way, even more interesting to read five years later, when Edgar Smith tried to kill another woman, and confessed, at trial, to having killed the girl in New Jersey. "I have been so incredibly lucky in so many ways. Imagine owing meeting you to Edgar Smith, which is why I can never really cease to be interested in his fate," she wrote to me when I passed on the news, many years later, that Smith had sent me a copy of a manuscript of a book on a 19th-century convict.

Sophie Wilkins graduated from Brooklyn College and did graduate work at Columbia, studying under Lionel Trilling. She was a linguist with unbounded literary curiosity. She was for many years an editor at Alfred Knopf, and translated Kafka very early on. After her translation of Robert Musil, she was decorated by the Austrian government, which acknowledged, in 1995, her extensive cultural contributions. She did all that, editing, translating, and then there were her personal letters, buoyant with learning, energy, and warmth. And we met periodically for lunch, but last fall she canceled, only hours before we would meet.

"You can see how I can't take a chance on leaving you with such a last impression of me. Especially because to see me in terms of my physical degeneration is misleading. I am quite constantly cheerful and entertain myself by thinking everything through." On two hospital visits on successive days, she was unmistakably alive, in the way that only a very few people are alive, 110 percent alive. Her mind wandered, touched down on the founding of the Mormon religion, the pride she felt for her two sons, the sadness of the final days of her husband, the poet Karl Shapiro. (She had written that his memory was impaired. "It is daily vivid to me that what isn't remembered might as well not have happened.") Sophie Wilkins unmistakably happened, and leaves indelibly in the memory her singular learning and sweetness.

-- WFB