Weeping and gnashing of teeth!

4 Comments to “Weeping and gnashing of teeth!”

1. dan bloom says:

   Wednesday, May 18th, 2005 at 5:26 am

   Hi
   I am crushed too.

   Email me. I didn’t mean to post the photo of me, that was goof. Just trying to find out if and what happened with Mr Egolf’s life and suicide. Email and we can chat. I am on your side. Not spamming. Am in touch with his editors, agent, etc, trying to piece this thing together. maybe you can help. — Dan

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2. Dan Bloom says:

   Thursday, June 23rd, 2005 at 4:47 am

   I found this on the Internet today. It seems to add some info to the continuing story of Tristan Egolf.

   QUOTE:

   “There really is a very interesting only-in-America backstory about Tristan Egolf’s
   life and suicide, it now turns out after reviewing material on the
   Internet, from Google searches to Yahoo windows, and even though the
   American media has
   still not reported much on this after he killed himself earlier in the
   year, [May 7, 2005], here is some more information. This is all
   meant as a healing.

   According to Internet searches, Tristan Egolf was the biological son of the
   writer and journalist
   Brad Evans, and his paternal grandfather is a man named Warren “Bing”
   Evans…of WWII
   ”Darby’s Rangers”. He is still alive.

   Earlier reports mentioned that Tristan’s natural
   father was a journalist in Europe when Tristian was born there, in Spain in fact.

   Brad Evans tragically committed suicide himself, in 1987…

   …..Brad Evans was also a brilliant
   writer (Norman Mailer is said to have once sent him a fan letter about Evans’ published short
   stories in print somewhere), or that….he also worked as a roving political campaign manager
   and newspaper commentary writer for
   some ultra-right-wing operatives, so much so that he incurred the wrath
   of some West Coast liberals and progressives.

   According to Internet sources, Tristan’s father Mr. Brad Evans was a
   brawny 6’6″ blond, bearded Viking/Hemingwayesque macho man (think
   running
   with the bulls in Pamplona, and stuff like that, all true, they say), and he was
   also an international traveller adventurer (including
   rebuilding post-earthquake villages in Guatemala as a volunteer with Catholic
   charities). Brad Evans once personally met with PLO leader Yassir
   Arafat during the early 1980s
   in Beirut, perhaps for a news interview.

   In addition, Tristan’s ”godfather ” when he was born was none other than William F. Buckley, the famous
   conservative writer and publisher of The National Reviewa rightwing monthly magazine — Brad Evans
   was once a close friend of Willim F. Buckley. Evans was a speechwriter for Nixon and Agnew at the time.

   In addition, according to Internet websites, “California” magazine
   published two articles about Brad Evans’ flamboyant, gifted life and
   personal style during the early-mid-1980s, when he was working as a
   campaign manager for ultra-rightwing Senator John Schmitz of Orange
   County.
   Richard Trainor was the reporter who covered Evans, and the pieces he
   wrote were high drama, indeed. In fact, they were eerily
   prognosticative, one might say, upon reading them now.

   Both father and son were apparently sufferers of
   depression, and this was never explained in the media before.

   Of course, like all people, fans everywhere were saddened by Tristan’s gruesome choice of
   exit-strategies. May he rest in eternal peace, and may
   there be closure all around, among Tristan’s many fans and readers,
   among his publishers both in Europe and in the USA, and among literary
   critics and reviewers around the world. And, of course, for his
   surviving family members, mother, father, sister, daughter Orly, Orly’s mom Karla, half-brother, grandparents, all…… There is no doubt that
   Tristan Egolf was loved by many.”

   END QUOTE

   I found this info interesting. Maybe the national media will pick up on it.

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3. danny bloom says:

   Thursday, June 30th, 2005 at 6:42 am

   A tragic, and familial, ending

   By Alex Beam,
   Boston Globe Columnist
   June 30, 2005

   The recent death of 33-year-old Tristan Egolf, a novelist cursed with promise at an early age, has given rise to a literary detective story. Obituaries published last month failed to name Egolf’s birth father, Brad Evans, a flamboyant writer, political activist, and right-wing adventurer who shared many of his son’s gifts and demons — and who, like his son, died by his own hand.

   Egolf’s brief life story reads like a fairy tale. A punk rocker turned street busker in Paris, he struck up an acquaintance with the daughter of Patrick Modiano, a prominent French author and screenwriter (”Lacombe Lucien”). Modiano helped publish Egolf’s first novel, ”Lord of the Barnyard,” in France. Subsequently published in Britain and the United States, ”Barnyard” received gushing reviews. Le Monde likened Egolf to Mark Twain, J.P. Donleavy, and Cormac McCarthy. The French daily and the Times of London both compared Egolf — presciently, it turned out — to John Kennedy Toole, the talented New Orleans novelist who killed himself at age 32.

   Outside his writing, Egolf achieved some renown as a political agitator. In July 2004, Egolf and a group of friends — the ”Smoketown Six” — were arrested in Lancaster, Pa., for stripping down to thong underwear and piling on top of one another during a visit by President Bush, to protest the treatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison. Also last year, he organized an anti-Columbus Day rally and burned President Bush in effigy. You can hear Egolf discuss his protests on his multimedia website, windmillsonline.us.

   The trajectory of Egolf’s life eerily parallels that of his birth father, Evans, who was divorced from Egolf’s mother, Paula, when Tristan was a little boy. (Tristan was adopted by his stepfather, Gary Egolf.) Evans was a University of Louisville football star who worked on riverboats and at a small newspaper in Kentucky before drifting into the ambit of William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine. Buckley’s sister Patricia and her husband, L. Brent Bozell Jr., were Tristan’s godparents.

   Moving further to the right in a society that was tilting leftward, Evans became a speechwriter for right-wing politicians and a publicist/activist for extreme-right fringe groups such as Bozell’s militantly prolife Sons of Thunder, which had declared ”a state of war” between the Catholic Church and the US government. At the end of his life, Evans claimed to have been engaging in paramilitary operations in Central America, according to his father, Warren Evans, and Amber Faith, the mother of Brad Evans’s third child. All of his children — Tristan, Gretchen, and Siegfried — were named after characters from Wagner operas. ”He was very Wagnerian,” says Faith, who lived with Evans for six years.

   ”Brad was approached constantly by these soldier-of-fortune types — they really freaked me out,” says Faith, who ended her relationship with Evans shortly before his death from a drug overdose in 1987. ”He died under questionable circumstances,” says his father. ”It was called suicide.”

   To what extent, if any, was Tristan Egolf’s swashbuckling literary and political lifestyle influenced by his father? The two met only a few times before Evans’s death, although Tristan later developed a close relationship with his Evans grandparents, living on a farm near them in Indiana a few years ago. ”I had the feeling that Tristan had a crush on Brad,” says his godmother, Patricia Bozell. ”Brad was this wonderful, Errol Flynn-like guy. Can you imagine being his son?” ”He remembered his dad very well and rather idolized him,” Warren Evans says. ”They were a fascinating and, for a grandfather, a sometimes heartbreaking story.”

   Why was Brad Evans purged from his son’s obituaries? ”I’m speculating, but I think Paula didn’t want to share her grief with us,” Warren Evans says. ”I know the family has been extremely tight-lipped about Tristan’s father,” says Judy Hottensen, publicity director at Egolf’s publisher, Grove/Atlantic. Reached at her home in Lancaster, Pa., Tristan’s mother, Paula, decried the interest in her first husband and said, ”I am not going to tell you anything.”

   Tristan Egolf’s third novel, ”Kornwolf,” will be published in January.

   Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His email address is beam@globe.com

   [© Copyrighted 2005 Globe Newspaper Company]

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4. abou says:

   Monday, January 9th, 2006 at 12:26 am

   That is some very interesting stuff you posted, Dan. I really appreciate it; as does Heliologue, I imagine.

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