At a time when the Eastern seaboard regarded Western writers and artists as wild and wooly cowboys, Henry Coffin Carlisle Jr. set them straight. Although descended from Nantucket's founding fathers, he was proud to live among San Francisco literati and to trumpet their excellence.
Carlisle, '50, MA '53, died in San Francisco on July 11, in the same hospital, St. Francis, where he was born in 1926. He was 84.
Carlisle, and his wife, Olga, introduced the works of Soviet dissident writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the West. Her relatives smuggled out manuscripts for The First Circle and The Gulag Archipelago, which the Carlisles translated. "She would translate from Russian to English; he would make the English English," says their son, Michael V. Carlisle, a literary agent in New York.
Solzhenitsyn later accused the Carlisles of cheating him. "He repaid them in a very vicious way for their kindness," says Lazar Fleishman, professor of Slavic languages and literature at Stanford. "It was extremely difficult to smuggle works out of the Soviet Union, but Olga and Henry decided to take it upon themselves."
Olga Andreyev and Henry Carlisle met in 1951 in Paris, where he was studying poetry after serving in the Navy. Attending Stanford on the GI Bill, he joined Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, swam competitively and studied under Wallace Stegner. Later, as a junior editor at Knopf, he worked on Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.
Carlisle had the patrician manners of his Coffin ancestors, whaling merchants on whose ship Herman Melville was a deckhand and whose name appears in Moby Dick. Carlisle's Western circle included Ansel Adams, Richard Diebenkorn, '44, Herb Gold, Niven Busch, Max Byrd, James D. Houston, MA '62, and Oakley Hall, who co-founded the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Carlisle mentored writers at Squaw; his son now directs the nonfiction program.
Onetime president of PEN American Center, the literary and human rights group, Carlisle supported Andrei Amalrik, a Russian writer whose essay "Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" landed him in prison.
Carlisle wrote six novels, starting with a 1965 Cold War satire, Ilyitch Slept Here. He and his wife also wrote a 1999 novel together, The Idealists, set in revolutionary Russia.
In addition to his wife and son, he is survived by a brother, Miles.
Sheila Himmel is a writer in Palo Alto.
