Dear Editor,
I was shocked and saddened by the death of my friend Wayne Brown. He was the best and most dedicated prose writer in the region and also a wonderful poet, who gave up that art too young as I complained to him quite often.
I knew he had cancer which was progressing, but he was so matter-of-fact about it I had no idea it was so imminently terminal. How does a man face death so calmly and bravely? We were corresponding a few days before he died. His daughter tells me he completed his last column for Stabroek News on the very verge of his death. There are some lines which I quoted to him in an email a week before his death which he liked. I think they are appropriate in describing a life devoted so much and so well to writing – they are lines from John Updike’s poem Spirit of ’76 in the last great sequence of poems Updike wrote in the months before he died entitled Endpoint:
Be with me, words, a little longer; you
have given me my quitclaim in the sun,
sealed shut my adolescent wounds, made light
of grownup troubles, turned to my advantage
what in most lives would be pure deficit,
and formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts.
Wayne gained considerable recognition and many awards for his literary achievements, but in the end he was one of those great artists who knew, as BC Pires has pointed out in a magnificent tribute, that there was no reward greater, and he needed none more, than the work itself
Yours faithfully,
Ian McDonald
