Centenarian (A Diary)

A moving (and wickedly funny) diary of the legendary New Yorker staff writer Calvin Tomkins’s one hundredth year.

Calvin Tomkins and The New Yorker—two of the most storied names in American writing—were both born in the same year, 1925. As the magazine toasted its centenary, Tomkins began keeping a diary of his one hundredth year of life and sixty-fifth year as a staff writer, one whose nearly four hundred pieces amount to one of the fullest accounts of postwar art ever published. The result is Centenarian, a moving, probing, and wickedly entertaining series of reflections on daily life after nearly ten decades on earth. As Tomkins writes, “The first hundred years are the hardest.”

Tomkins confronts with candor the indignities of old age—macular degeneration and short-term memory loss. But he continues to find humor in everyday absurdities, like assistive devices that come with fine-print instructions. He also looks back on his relationships with some of the twentieth century’s greatest artists—from watching Georgia O’Keeffe’s oven explode while she roasted a chicken to surreptitiously slipping a coin into a Robert Rauschenberg collage, inserting a piece of himself into the art whose rise he would chronicle in real time.

As Tomkins observes, “I sometimes think my main complaint about old age is the way it interferes with looking at art and listening to music.” This ever-inquisitive sensibility infuses the pages of Centenarian, offering a singular model for living well and embracing all the world has to offer in one’s hundredth year and beyond. Above all, Centenarian is a love story—a tribute to Tomkins’s wife of nearly forty years, Dodie Kazanjian, who helped him complete his diary as his eyesight began to fail.