Jenny Robinson discovered her 95-year-old father, Anthony “Tony” Robinson, on the morning of Oct. 27 in the basement apartment of the family’s historic home on Huguenot Street in New Paltz. He had died in his sleep. The previous morning, against all odds, the retired SUNY New Paltz professor of creative writing and English literature had finished his ninth novel, and with it his best reason for remaining on Earth.
Several of us greatly admired Tony’s previous novel, “Father of the Man” (2018), and hoped he might accept that revisitation of youth as his masterpiece, relax, enjoy his family, and eventually “go gentle into that good night.” But “TonyTheRob,” as his email address began, was fixated on one thing: robbing the essence of life and transforming it into fiction, a compulsion honestly and painfully earned.
It began with his father, Henry Morton “Rondo” Robinson, a struggling poet and novelist who gambled by retiring early from his job as an editor at Reader’s Digest. He then struck gold with “The Cardinal,” a two-million-copy bestseller and the “book of the year” in 1950. But in 1961, Rondo, 63, died of burns suffered in a tub at the Columbia University club. Gertrude, his long-suffering, estranged wife and the mother of their three children, rushed to nurse him at the last. Throughout the ordeal, Tony’s own writings show, his loyalties remained with his mother.
All this was a novel already, set in West Hurley’s own hideaway Brigadoon. It was called the Maverick Colony, an ungoverned experiment in communal poverty exalted through the creation of art. At its center stood Hervey White, a charismatic genius on a shoestring budget whose “Maverick Festivals” would prove the model for the Woodstock Festival half a century later. And it would be in one of Hervey’s hand-built cabins — heated by a woodstove and without running water — that Anthony Christopher Robinson, third and last child of Gertie and Rondo, was conceived in the summer of 1930.
But even as Rondo’s job required respectability (impossible to find on the Maverick!), the Robinsons stayed nearby. Rondo bought a farmhouse across Maverick Road (with a nest egg saved by Gertie) and remained one of Hervey’s most trusted friends until the Maverick’s founder died in 1944. Rondo’s boy, Tony, the Tom Sawyer of the Maverick, also experienced a remarkable relationship with Hervey. That’s why, 80 years later, the largest crowd ever assembled at the Woodstock Historical Society came to hear Anthony Robinson, “The Last Living Man to Know Hervey White,” interviewed.
Rondo wasn’t satisfied with Tom Sawyer for a son, however, so Tony spent four miserable years at Andover. By graduation, Rondo’s desired transformation had taken hold, but so had an Oedipal challenge: Tony’s first published short story, “My Finnegan,” crossed swords with his father’s famous “A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.” Rondo had finished that book five years earlier with an unknown, if highly eloquent, Maverick neighbor named Joseph Campbell — who would become one of the more revolutionary thinkers of the century.
At Columbia, Tony won first prize in his fraternity’s national literary competition in 1952. After graduating in 1953, he followed his father into the Navy, shipping out on the USS Owen and earning the rank of lieutenant by the tail end of the Korean War. He kept writing. “The Farlow Express,” written aboard ship, appeared in Prairie Schooner, where it caught the eye of editor Martha Foley, who included it in “The Best American Short Stories 1957.”
Tony now had his father’s full attention, especially once he came home and worked ceaselessly on a novel based on his Navy experiences. It marked the high point of their relationship.
“The best letter I ever received in my life was a letter my father wrote to me about my first novel,” Tony said in an interview with the Woodstock Historical Society in 2023.
In 1957, Tony met and soon married Mary Chika, an Albanian beauty. From their Chelsea apartment, he earned his master’s degree in American literature at Columbia in 1960 while finishing “A Departure From the Rules.” Then the couple moved back upstate, where their daughter, Jennifer, was born in 1960, the same year that first novel became a critical success. Their son, Henry, arrived in 1962, and Tony’s winning streak continued with a second, steamier novel, “The Easy Way,” in 1963.
When a third manuscript struck out, Tony pivoted and nabbed a job as an instructor of English at nearby SUNY New Paltz, eventually becoming director of creative writing, a post he held until he retired in 2000. Teaching didn’t slow his writing, however, not even when IBM opened a plant in Kingston in 1965 and Hervey White’s enchanted realm began its slump into suburbia. The catastrophe demanded expression: In “Home Again, Home Again,” Roland Gray struggles to keep the art colony he loves from falling into commercial hands.
Then came everyone’s favorite year. Out of nowhere, a French exchange program placed Professor Robinson, his wife, and their two children at the University of Paris, where Tony taught literature and writing for the 1970–71 academic year.
When they returned, the Robinsons fled the unstoppable “progress” marching up Maverick Road for a new sanctuary: an 1820s four-bedroom house on Huguenot Street near the SUNY campus. But the afterglow of Paris had faded, and the perils of an open marriage took their toll. The couple separated, and Mary died in 1976.
Not surprisingly, Tony’s output suffered until the unsolved murder of a brother-in-law’s first wife dynamited his writer’s block. Hearing of the tragedy, he visited his sister, Robin, and her new husband to ask whether he could use the murder as the basis for a novel.
Tony’s request was subtle as a sledgehammer, but the result, “The Whole Truth” (1990), proved the page-turner of his career.
He had caddied at the Woodstock golf course as a boy, and his next two books, rife with murder and infidelity, were hailed as “the best novels written on golf.” Between books, he married a childhood friend, the painter Tatiana Padwa, who brightened his life for just over a decade before she preceded him to the Robinson plot in Woodstock’s Artists’ Cemetery.
Now to circle back: “Not Much,” the novel Tony lived just long enough to finish, is a complete rewrite of “The Floodplain” (2011), the published book that pleased him least. That earlier novel drew on the unraveling of his marriage to Mary.
“Tony took his worst book and turned it into — we think — his best,” said Garth Halberg, his longtime friend and editor.
The transformation also owes something to Jenny Robinson’s fiancé, Nick Foad, a computer technician who fielded many frantic calls during Tony’s last years: “It’s gone, Nick! The entire novel!” A few expert commands later, “Not Much” was back on the screen of its Very Much gratified author.
On this particularly haunted Halloween, Jenny and Henry each received an electronic copy of their father’s finished novel.
In a final email, I asked Henry, now 64, what it was like to have Tony for a father.
“Well, Hervey White and Thoreau were his heroes … and I think Dad would have been perfectly comfortable as a hermit in the woods, free to write, fish, hunt, and trap in his old clothes, unbathed … Instead women, responsibilities and children dragged him out into the world. Maybe I exaggerate a touch…”
But maybe not.
Henry also recalled taking his father to dinner at a local restaurant months earlier, when their conversation abruptly stopped.
“You’re being quiet, Dad, are you OK?” Henry asked.
Tony hesitated for a long time before admitting, “I’m ready to go home.”
“Home to the house?”
Tony hesitated again, then said, “No, home to see my mom.”
Tony is survived by his two older sisters, Robin “Nellie” Raymond and Hala Lawrence; his children, Jennifer Eve Robinson and Henry Robinson; his niece, Laurie Ylvisaker; and three great-nieces, Maren Keeley, Brieze Bell and Marlia Newbold.
Writer’s Note: I am indebted to Tad Richards for several biographical details and to Tony’s caregiver, Monica, for her ever-compassionate assistance.
Tad Wise is a contributing reporter. Send correspondence to reporting@theoverlooknews.com.
