Marc Simont

The first thing I noticed about Marc is that he seemed old. This was in 1980, when Harriette and I and our daughters moved to Cornwall and soon met our Town Street neighbors Marc and Bee. I had just turned 50, and I guessed that Marc was 15 years older. That turned out to be true. But not for the first time I learned that what is true may not be correct. For I soon saw Marc scampering on the tennis court, playing soccer wildly, skiing on Mohawk and hauling his kayak onto Cream Hill Lake for a jaunty run to the other side. So I soon got over the idea that Marc was old, even in his last years .… Beyond the physical, there was the permanent twinkle in the eye, the alert glance, the quality — often associated with adolescence — of doing something and simultaneously watching oneself do it.Now the youthful Marc is stilled, and we undertake the sad duty of paying fit tribute. For me, there is an easy question and a hard one. The easy question is whether Marc was an extraordinary man. I do not say unique because we are all unique. But it is easy to conclude, if one knew Marc and anything about his life, that he was a remarkable person. But why? That is the hard question. It is natural to turn first to Marc’s life’s work, as an illustrator, cartoonist and writer. There one finds creations that touch on politics, civil society, domestic matters and just about everything else, livened with wit, probing portraits and canny insights into the here and now. Marc’s books especially entranced children, who remembered them for years and sometimes forever. In his political work, Marc was an iconoclast and a free spirit, and he often was biting; not everyone appreciated it, especially those who were bitten. Even the tolerant Lakeville Journal, which ran scores of Marc’s cartoons, turned down one or two that were thought to be beyond somebody’s pale. Marc laughed it off. That was a risk of artistic honesty. It is also a reason why I have always thought that Marc’s work was a throwback to the proud tradition of Hogarth, Goya and Daumier, whose greatest efforts embodied a moral statement and not merely a political stance and certainly not, as is the fashion, a clever observation about social life.But work alone, no matter how admirable, is not enough. Another ingredient is needed to make the extraordinary person: relations with other people, and love. I call it a deep sense of community. Anyone who has lived in Cornwall for even a short time has, sometimes unknowingly, felt the impact of Marc’s presence, the force of his quiet but powerful personality. From his early days on a farm, to his time in the Thurber circle, to his days on the sports fields, to his well-earned nonretirement, Marc’s gentleness and his invariable graciousness to young and old placed him in the center of Cornwall life, and therefore in the lives of all of us. Yes, Marc was an extraordinary man. Norman DorsenCornwall