Three days after returning to Boston, I met Dr. Boling for my customary weekly therapy session. I told her excitedly about my visit with Susie, all of which had been arranged since our previous session. She listened to me for a while and then said, quietly, "You have a very simple relationship with Susie." I did not know what to make of that remark, but it has stayed in my memory over the years, and on reflection I have concluded that she was right. My relationship with Cindy had been extraordinarily complicated, requiring constant thought and management. But after a separation of thirty years, Susie and I almost immediately settled into an easy, warm, loving, intimate union. I told her about my sons, about the breakup of my first marriage, a bit about my career. She told me that she had been married three times, first for two years to Gordon, the son of the uranium king, for whom she had left me thirty-three years earlier, then for two years to Ed, a medical student in Chicago, where she had followed Gordon and then settled, finally to Jerry Gould, a University of Chicago Business School professor with whom she had had her two children. Susie's lifelong love of botany had led her to do graduate work at U. of C. and to work for some while both as a graduate laboratory instructor and in the lab of one of the professors there. But neither of us was really interested in spending much time talking about the intervening years. Each of us put away those memories, preserved an important and protected place for our children, and renewed the bond that we had forged as High School Sophomores. As Boling seemed to intuit, it made me uncomplicatedly happy just to be with Susie. We still both loved the baroque music we had so enjoyed as teenagers, and as the years have passed, that has remained an important part of our lives.
The remaining months of my sabbatical were a whirlwind of travel. I reconstructed my doings from my little Coop book for that year. After coming home from Chapel Hill, I turned around less than three weeks later for my scheduled visit to St. Andrews College, stopping both on the way and on the way back to spend time with Susie. The visit to St Andrews was instructive to someone who had spent his career at universities. After talking to the faculty there about their undergraduate philosophy program, I realized that despite being a small school offering no graduate degrees, they were giving their students an extremely solid grounding in philosophy. I have found this at many of the small liberal arts colleges I have visited. Staffed by faculty who trained at some of the best doctoral programs in the country, and who keep up with the field by regularly attending the national professional meetings, these small Philosophy Departments take their students through a rigorous introduction to the history of philosophy and the foundations of epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and logic. In many ways, their students are better served than they would be as undergraduates in big graduate oriented programs in which must of the undergraduate teaching is done either by graduate assistants or by faculty who would rather be teaching their graduate seminars.
A week after returning from St. Andrews, I flew off to Greece, for a visit on my way to Dubrovnik. I was invited by Ann Caccoulos, an ebullient philosopher who lived in Athens with her husband and taught philosophy there. My most vivid memory of the week's stay, aside from an enormous platter of baby lamb chops that is a traditional dish at Easter, was my visit to the Agora. It was much larger than I had imagined, and it had never occurred to me that it was lined by covered stalls. I am afraid the stones did not speak to me as I walked where Socrates had talked with Plato.
Then it was on to Dubrovnik. I do not think I have ever felt so grown up as I did when I checked in and was told that "Ms. Gould is waiting for you in your room." I was there to give a paper at a conference, and I guess I did, but the proceedings left no trace in my memory. Of course I fell in love with old Dubrovnik. Who would not? As we walked on the Placa, the main street of the town, our voices were reduced to whispers echoing from the ancient walls. The stones beneath our feet were worn smooth from centuries of walkers. It was a magical place, perfectly attuned to our mood. Although we have been back only once, Dubrovnik remains for both of us a graceful and sentimental memory.
A week and a half after returning to Boston I was off again to see Susie in Chapel Hill. Two weeks after that, I flew down yet again, but this time I stopped off in New York to attend the annual meeting of the Socialist Scholars' Conference. A session had been organized on Understanding Marx, and several high powered Marxists, including Anwar Shaikh, were scheduled to comment on the book. The meeting was held in The Borough of Manhattan Community College, which is housed in a huge building in lower Manhattan, near Stuyvesant High School. I had to walk all the way around the building before I found the way in, but as I entered the vast reception area, I was stunned. It was packed with people there for the conference. My first thought was, "My God. These are all socialists. We are going to take over the world." But my second thought was, "This is all of us, and we fit into one large room."
The session was a shambles. Shaikh had prepared a fifty minute attack on me, but at the last minute was told he only had ten minutes to present it. The room was so full people were standing in the hallway trying to hear, and each of them, it appeared, had his or her own theory about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. It was nice to be thought of, I decided, but that was not something I wanted to try again. Two weeks later I was off to Africa to teach at Wits.
I went to South Africa on a lark, not realizing that the trip would transform the rest of my life. When I flew out of JFK, the focus of my attention was on a little game viewing excursion I had arranged for myself on the way to Johannesburg. I had always been mesmerized by movies and stories of East Africa, and since I figured this was the only time I was going to be in the neighborhood, I decided to go to South Africa by way of Kenya. In those days, it was impossible to fly non-top to Africa from the United States, so I flew Pan Am to London, changed planes, and headed East for Nairobi. The flight made a series of stops along the way at various West African airports, but I never actually left the plane until we arrived at Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi.
My first stop in Kenya was the Treetops Hotel in Aberdare National Park. It is [or originally was] literally a hotel built into the top of a stand of trees near a waterhole. One sits in comfort in the hotel and looks down at the waterhole. The managers put out blocks of salt to guarantee that animals will come to the hole, and sure enough they do. This is very much an old-fashioned British Raj conception of game viewing. Treetops' greatest claim to fame is the fact that Princess Elizabeth of Great Britain was visiting there in 1952 when her father died and she ascended to the throne. As they liked to say, "She went up into Treetops a Princess and came down a Queen." I have since gone on many real safaris, but this was my very first sight of a wild African animal not in a zoo, and I have a warm spot in my heart for that waterhole. If you have never been on safari, I should tell you that the real thing is very little like the films and television shows you have seen. Films are focused and cut to foreground the cheetah or warthog or giraffe or lion being discussed, but of course nothing like that happens in real life. Animals move slowly and quietly. They drift toward a waterhole, emerging so gradually from the surrounding brush that frequently you do not notice them until they have been fully in view for a while. They blend magically into their surroundings, so that it is perfectly possible to be looking straight at a large animal and not see it. I was once sitting in a Land Rover with some other safari guests staring at a copse of trees for quite some time before I realized that there were several elephants in it.
From Treetops it was on to Amboseli, at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro. Another tip for first time game viewers: rain is great for the animals but bad for seeing them, because in the dry season, they all come to the few remaining waterholes. There had been many days of heavy rain when I arrived at Amboseli, and as a result, I spent most of a day being hustled hither and yon in a Land Rover by a driver trying desperately to find as many of the Big Five as he could [elephant, rhino, lion, leopard, and buffalo]. After a good bit of scurrying about [we did spot the ears of a rhino in the tall grass], my driver got a call on his walkie-talkie and we rushed to a site where five other Land Rovers were already gathered into a semi-circle. As we edged into the group, I saw three or four lions lounging about next to a little grassy rise. I guess this should have been a transformative moment, but I could not help wondering whether one of the lions had said to another, "Wake up, Myrtle, it's eleven o'clock. Time to show ourselves to the tourists." Truly exciting game viewing would have to await a future safari.
I flew into Jan Smuts Airport, as it was then called, and was picked up by Debra and Berendt, who drove me to their home in Melville, a northwest suburb of Johannesburg. The road from the airport was a broad six lane highway, indistinguishable from highways in the United States [save that everyone drove on the left, not the right]. We moved pretty fast, but if I looked carefully, behind the fences that lined the highway I could see acre after acre of hovels. These were shack settlements, "informal communities," not even up to the level of the dismal organized townships like Soweto to which much of the non-White five sixths of the South African population had been consigned.
Melville is a lovely suburb of graceful homes with manicured lawns, marred only by the ubiquitous walls topped with razor wire. The influx control laws passed in the late 40's by the Afrikaaner government forbade Africans from remaining in White cities after sundown, so each morning at dawn, I would see Black women trudging the miles from the train stations and taxi drop-offs that brought them from Soweto and the other townships to their work as servants in the homes of White South Africans. The only exception to the law was for live-in servants, but since it was illegal for Blacks and Whites to sleep in the same building, White homes had a little rondoval in the back yard, physically separated from the main house, where the servant lived. Debra and Berendt used theirs as a guest cottage, and that is where I slept for five weeks.
A word about terminology, which in South Africa was, and still is, extremely important. There are four distinct racial sub-populations in South Africa, a division that under the apartheid regime had the force of law. The descendants of the Dutch and English colonizers, along with European and North American visitors or immigrants, are categorized as Whites [and within that category, informally by language as Afrikaaners or English]. The descendents of the people living in Southern Africa at the time of the colonization are categorized as Africans. The descendents of the intermarriages, or interbreeding, of Dutch settlers and Africans are called Coloureds. The Coloured population lives principally in and around Cape Town, and is, surprisingly, Afrikaans-speaking. Finally, the descendents of the Indian laborers brought by the English from India to work on the sugar plantations of the Eastern part of South Africa are called Indians or Asians. Africans, Coloureds, and Indians collectively are referred to as Blacks, although the contemptuous term kaffir is sometimes used by Afrikaaners, always to refer to Africans. In a country whose entire raison d'etre was race, these terms were heavily laden with meaning, and I very quickly learned to use them correctly. Twenty years after liberation, these racial categories still define the social landscape and dominate the politics of the country.
I settled into an office in Central Block on the East Campus of Wits, just north of Jorrisen Street, and began teaching the students in the second year philosophy class. South African education, as I will explain at length in a later chapter of this memoir, is organized on the English model as a three year undergraduate program with a fourth Honours Year, after which a student can continue for an M.A. or [much less often] a Ph. D. Students apply to a specific program, and without any General Education courses and such, launch into the study of what we in the United States would call their "major." In Philosophy, for example, there was a single first year course, a second year course, and a third year course taken in lockstep by all philosophy students. [Some of this has now changed, but that is a later part of my story]. My job was to teach five weeks of the second year course.
The Wits Philosophy Department, I very quickly discovered, was dominated by men whose conception of philosophy was scarcely broader than that of the majority in the UMass department. Despite living in one of the most political charged places on the face of the earth, they exhibited not the slightest interest in any questions of social justice or even educational reform, preferring to take their guidance from American journals of analytic philosophy. They were dedicated to circling the wagons as tightly as possible around what "was philosophy," keeping away from the campfire anything that smelled of the real world. Pretty clearly, Debra's real reason in inviting me to come out to Wits was her hope that I would serve, momentarily, as a counterweight to their blinkered conception of philosophy. Well, I hadn't flown ten thousand miles to put up with this sort of nonsense again, so I formally challenged the narrowest and most dismissively condescending of the lot to a public debate on the question, "What is Philosophy?" There was a lot of excitement among the students at the prospect of an academic bloodbath, but he backed out, and the debate never took place.
Leaving to one side the Philosophy Department, South Africa was the most exciting place I had ever been. This was 1986, remember, when the struggle against apartheid was in full swing. Everyone I met was instantaneously either my comrade or my enemy. There was no middle ground. It took me a while to adjust. One day I went to a protest on the campus of Wits. The person next to me said, "If you hear a sound like wildebeest stampeding, start running. That means the police are charging, and if you get caught they will beat you really badly." I was astonished and delighted to find that my Marxist convictions placed me not on the margins of polite discourse but right in the middle of a vibrant conversation in which abstract theory and practical politics were fused. The people I met were as likely to read The New Left Review and New German Critique as I was. Marx and Marcuse were on the tips of their tongues. I had traveled halfway around the world but I felt that I had come home.
I was having lunch with the Economics Department after I had been at Wits for a while, and when one of the men [all White, of course] asked how I liked South Africa, I said that I loved it, but that I had not yet seen anything of five-sixths of the population, except for Black men in orange jumpsuits doing work on the roads. The next day, at another rally, a young man drifted up to me and said, "I hear you want to see some more of the country. How would you like to go to Gazenkulu and Lebowa with me this weekend?" Another brief word of explanation. The Africkaaner ideologues who had crafted the pseudo-philosophical rationale of the apartheid state had promulgated a theory of cultural unities [ostensibly derived from Edmund Husserl's writings -- don't ask] according to which each "people" should have their own homeland. Most of South Africa, including all the good farmland, was declared the homeland of the Whites, and Blacks were therefore to be excluded from it [although that did not quite meet the labor needs of the capitalist sector, so townships were to be permitted inside the White homeland.] The African population was then divided, principally along linguistic lines, into ten "nations," and through a series of forced removals and resettlements, sometimes splitting families apart, the Africans were consigned to a collection of dismal provincial territories, each with its own puppet government, passports, and phony national independence. In practice, this meant sending the women and children and old people to desperately poor rural areas and allowing the men to live in hostels near the big cities while they worked in the mines and the factories. Gazenkulu and Lebowa were two of these ten Homelands.
The young man was named Edwin Ritchkin. He was, he said, a graduate student in Sociology, doing his doctoral research in the Northern Transvaal. The next weekend, he would be returning with a small group of Wits undergraduates who belonged to SAVS, the South African Volunteer Services. They had been gathering funds to build schools for the African children and were planning to visit some of their projects. When I told Debra I was going, her first reaction was caution. "Let me check him out. He may be a police spy," she said. Obviously I still had a lot to learn. But she came back and said Ritchkin was all right. I could go. [I have totally lost touch with Edwin, but Google tells me that the next year, he published an article based on the research he was then doing.]
Early Friday morning, we climbed into a Wits Combi and set off for the Northern Transvaal. As we turned off the main highway into White River, I suddenly saw a Kentucky Fried Chicken. I thought, "I came all this way into the Transvaal to see a KFC?" But very quickly, we left the White areas and plunged into Homelands South Africa. The students were there to see the schools they had helped to fund . These were bare cinder block structures without blackboards, desks, or glass in the windows, but they were dramatic improvements on what had gone before. Edwin was there to see Willis Ngobe, one of the subjects of his research. Willis was a successful local faith healer, living with his two wives and one of his mothers-in-law in a substantial structure that had no electricity. Parked in the driveway was an Audi. Chained in the backyard was one of Willis' patients, a man of about forty who suffered from delusions and fits. Willis explained that he kept him chained while he was being treated so that he would not harm anyone.
Edwin was also serving as a courier, an intermediary in an important legal dispute over land and water rights. The Mashele brothers, both serving in the Lebowa parliament, were engaged in an attempt to secure for their constituents the right to access the irrigation system currently reserved for wealthy White farmers just over the "border" in what the government considered South Africa. Before the imposition of the Homeland system, the Mashele family had been leaders of the Northern Sotho speaking people who were now consigned to Lebowa.
Edwin had consulted in Johannesburg with a prominent Indian lawyer, who was engaged in this indirect way in negotiations with the Masheles. All of us -- the students, Edwin, and I -- were invited into the home of one of the Masheles, served tea, and then allowed to listen to the negotiations. Edwin would deliver a message from the lawyer in English. Then the Mashele brothers would consult in Sotho with a group of local bigwigs who had gathered for the discussion. When they had all arrived at agreement, one of the Masheles would relate their response to Edwin in English, and Edwin would then offer the reply he had been instructed to give by the Jo-burg lawyer. This went on for an hour or more, as I watched fascinated. Finally, Edwin was given a message to carry back to Jo-burg, and we left.
Edwin had arranged, or so he thought, for us to sleep that night at a nearby Convent, but when we got there, the watchman claimed to know nothing about the agreement. He wanted some official confirmation of our identity, which Edwin could not provide. Finally, in desperation, I pulled out my UMass picture ID, which I used to check out books. This seemed to satisfy him, and we were permitted to bed down for the night. The next day, we drove back to Wits and Edwin dropped me off in Melville.
Since I was in South Africa and had no idea whether I would ever return, I did everything I could to see as much of the country as possible. I did make one visit to Soweto, with a philosophy graduate student named Vincent Maphai, who lived there, but it was at night, when Soweto was almost totally dark, and I saw very little of the community of one million. Soweto was the largest of the townships, but there are many others, each containing as many people as a middle sized American city. The Boers constructed the townships with an eye to controlling them like prisons. There were at most a handful of ways in and out, each of which could be guarded by South African soldiers in Casspirs, the armored vehicles the state used to police the Black population. Vincent has become quite an important person in the new South Africa, but I am afraid I remember him principally because of his sexual harassment of a woman studying at Wits who later became my very good friend.
Much more important than my SAVS expedition for the unfolding of the rest of my life was the trip I took to Durban, the city on the Indian Ocean in what was then the province of Natal and is now the province of KwaZulu Natal. I was invited to give a talk at the University of Natal, a White university perched on a hill to the east of downtown Durban, but during my visit, I met Rathnamala Singh, a member of the philosophy department of The University of Durban-Westville. UDW, as it was called by everyone, was the institution of higher education created by the apartheid government for Indian students. Mala was then the Professor of Philosophy [this was again the English system, with only one person in a department accorded the title of Professor]. In 1986, UDW, like the other universities set aside for Black students, had a White Rector, but shortly thereafter, one of Mala's close friends, a professor of dentistry named Jairam Reddy, was named the first Indian Rector. Mala became the Chair of the Philosophy Department. Mala's husband, Prem Singh, was a Lecturer in Politics. Unlike Mala, he did not have a doctorate, but he was a very scholarly man and a dedicated teacher. In time, Prem became my closest friend in South Africa.
Quite the eeriest episode of my visit to South Africa was my dinner in Pretoria with Koos Pauw, a philosopher then serving as the number three man in the Ministry of Education. I had gone to Pretoria to meet with director of the Human Studies Research Council, a government funded body that underwrote most of the post-graduate study and academic research in the Social Sciences and Humanities. The visit began with a sightseeing trip to the Voortrekker Monument, a memorial to the famous overland journey that the Boers took in the 1830's and 40's from the British controlled Western Cape east and north into the interior of South Africa, a journey that led to the establishment of a number of what were later South African provinces. ["Trek," by the way, actually means "pull," a fact I learned one day when I saw a door that said "stoot" (push) on one side and "trek" on the other.] The monument is the angriest building I have ever seen. Waves of resentment flow from it as one walks up to the entryway. It told me more about the Boer mindset than a dozen books could have.
That evening I had dinner with the Director and Koos Pauw. As it happened, a convention was in town of elders of one of the three Dutch Reformed Churches in South Africa. They had been debating whether to let Blacks into their church [they decided not to], and now they were unwinding from the day's exertions. They were all stern looking burly men with thick sideburns, shaved cheeks, and carefully trimmed bushy beards. Had they been a happier lot, they could easily have passed for Amish. Our dinner table conversation was an eye opener for me. Pauw was intelligent, relaxed, well-spoken, and utterly evil. I imagined it was what it would have been like to dine with a sophisticated Nazi. I challenged him about apartheid [my parents had taught me to speak up if anyone passed an anti-Semitic remark at a dinner table, and this was the closest I had ever come to putting their advice to use], but he was totally unfazed by my objections, all of which he had of course heard many times.
Wednesday, 9 June 2010
Monday, 7 June 2010
VOLUME THREE CHAPTER ONE FIRST INSTALLMENT
Memoirs Volume Three
My Once and Future Love
I take my title from T. H. White's re-telling of the Arthurian legend, The Once and Future King, supposedly the inscription on King Arthur's tomb. In that charming book, which I read many years ago, the wizard Merlin is represented as living through time backwards, which explains both his great wisdom and his seeming ineptitude at dealing with the world in which he finds himself. Writing my memoirs has turned out to be rather like living my life backwards, because although I know full well how it has turned out, I am constantly surprised to discover things about my earlier days that I had forgotten. Whether I have acquired wisdom in the process I leave to my readers to judge.
Preface
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So Tolstoy famously begins Anna Karenina, thought by some to be his greatest novel. Although this volume begins at the lowest point in my life, it very quickly becomes a story of almost unalloyed happiness. A great deal has happened in these most recent twenty-five years of my life, and I am hopeful that some of it will prove to be of interest to you who read my words, but those looking for conflict, sadness, and bitter regrets will, I fear, be disappointed.
The first two thirds of my story were devoted almost entirely to the life of the mind. In the present volume, you will see me trying my hand at affecting, in however small a way, the larger world about which I had spent so long thinking and writing. I am reminded of the great passage in Plato's Gorgias in which Callicles chides Socrates for the unworldliness of the life he chosen. Plato is of course putting into the mouth of Socrates' antagonist the doubts he had about his own decision to withdraw from public life and found the Academy. "When I perceive philosophical activity in a young lad," Callicles says, "I am pleased; it suits him, I think, and shows that he has good breeding. A boy who doesn't play with philosophy I regard as illiberal, a chap who will never raise himself to any fine or noble action. Whereas when I see an older man still at his philosophy and showing no sign of giving it up, that one seems to me, Socrates, to need a whipping. For ... such a man, even if he's well endowed by nature, must necessarily become unmanly by avoiding the center of the city and the assemblies where, as the Poet says, 'men win distinction.' Such a fellow must spend the rest of his life skulking in corners, whispering with two or three little lads, never pronouncing any large, liberal, or meaningful utterance." [W. C. Helmbold's translation, with one emendation]
Chapter One
I Once Was Lost But Now Am Found
When Cindy walked out of my apartment that June evening, I felt as though my life had come to an end. It was not just that my heart and my mind had been deeply intertwined with hers for my entire adult life. I was without a fixed point of reference because no one in my extended family had ever been divorced. Even my sister, Barbara, who had long since separated from her husband, Reed, was still technically married to him, and would be for many years to come. Now, we are a Jewish family, so it goes without saying that a good many of my relatives were unhappy. But divorced? They might as well have been Roman Catholics for all the advantage they had taken of the liberalized New York State Civil Code.
I was committed to yet another summer of teaching at Harvard, so that would get me out of the apartment five days a week, but beyond that, I was sailing uncharted waters. Bernard and Susan Avishai, a couple I had come to know through Cindy's connection with M. I. T., became my principal emotional support in those dark months. Bernie and Susan are Canadian by birth and education, although their ties to Israel were, it seemed to me, much tighter than to their homeland. Bernie is a tall, handsome, vigorous man with a shock of curly black hair and a perpetual smile on his face. He was then teaching in the Writing Program of the Humanities Department at M. I. T., although his doctorate from the University of Toronto is in philosophy. He has become, through his books and his writings for newspapers and journals, a very well known voice for peace and understanding in Israel. Susan is an artist, some of whose most exquisite works are pen and ink drawings. They had three ebullient children [who are now, by the mysteries of time, all grown up.] Even though Bernie was "Cindy's friend," they folded me into their family with a supportive love.
Let me devote one short paragraph to a subject that was utterly new to me, but has been written about endlessly in the large and amorphous literature on "relationships." When Cindy and I definitively entered the world of divorce, I found that along with the disposition of our chattels movable, we were also expected to divide up the family friends. I got to keep my professional colleagues, of course, along with my books and papers. But ever since coming to Belmont, we had been socializing with people who were "her friends." It was a generous act on Bernie's part and a bit of a daring one on mine for me to put the Avishais on my side of the list of belongings to be parceled out. All during our marriage, I had assumed that people entertained us, when we were a couple, because they liked Cindy and more or less accepted me as part of the package. It came as a gratifying surprise to discover that people actually liked me well enough to see me unaccompanied by Cindy. [Yes, I know that I sound like Sally Fields accepting her Oscar, but I am trying to be true to the moment here.]
It came as a very bitter surprise to discover that as a consequence of our break-up, Barry and Betty Moore wanted nothing more to do with me. No one has ever explained this breach to me, though for reasons I cannot now recall, I have always believed that it was Betty who decided that Cindy was the injured party and I the cause of the divorce. I believe I was actually listed in Barry's will as his literary executor, a role I would have played with great pride and diligence, but after one very painful lunch at a Ground Round in Cambridge, Barry and I never spoke again. I am convinced that it was the breach, and not the subject of the essay I wrote, that led the editor of Barry's festschrift to reject my essay when I sent it to her.
The divorce itself took an unexpectedly long time, principally because Cindy felt deeply aggrieved and wanted an unequal division of the family property, despite the fact that she and I had equivalent jobs and almost identical salaries. I wrote endless memoranda to my lawyer, Robert Mann, carrying out elaborate calculations designed to guarantee that Cindy would be in no way materially hurt by the divorce. Bob charged me for the time it took him to read them and then filed them away. In the end, which was not to come until the last day of 1986, we agreed to an equal division of property, appropriate child support for Toby, who was still a minor, and a sharing of the costs of Patrick and Toby's college education.
While all of this was going on, I was teaching summer school, and then my fall courses. I would pick up the boys to take them to school [by now they were both in high school], drive out to Amherst to teach, and drive back in time to pick them up and take them home. [It was during one of those runs that Bob Nozick honked.] Patrick had become an important national figure in chess, but it was Toby who stunned me one day with an accomplishment of which I was entirely unaware. I was driving him home from one of our weekly dinners, when more or less to make conversation, I asked what he was doing at school. He told me that he had joined a group called The Madrigals. "What voice do you sing?," I asked, very interested because of my own college involvement with madrigal singing. [See Volume One, Chapter Two, blogpost June 28, 2009]. "Countertenor," he replied. Now, you have to understand that to early music afficionados like me, countertenors are the crème de la crème. I had first heard Alfred Deller at a Sanders Theater concert, and was in the front row again at Sanders some years later when Russell Oberlin sang zefiro torno, a transcendentally beautiful duet by Monteverdi. It seemed to me unlikely in the extreme that Toby actually could sing countertenor. Probably he meant that he was a tenor, which would have been nice enough, heaven knows. I asked which madrigals the group was rehearsing. He named several with which I was quite familiar, and then began to sing a few lines. Out of his mouth came an exquisite true countertenor sound, quite like anything I had ever heard him make. Astonished, I blurted out, "Toby, that is the most wonderful thing any son of mine has ever done!" Later that year, the Madrigals gave a concert, dressed in brightly colored costumes that looked as though they had come from the studio wardrobe for A Connecticut in King Arthur's Court. This was no flash in the pan. Toby continued to sing, earning money while at Yale by serving in local church choirs. He studied for a while with the famous American countertenor Drew Minter, and during his senior year sang with the Whiffenpoofs. He even had a solo at Tanglewood in a student performance of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.
At some point that I cannot decisively pin down in the chronology of this Memoir, Toby announced that henceforward he was to be known as Tobias. Since I prefer to err on the side of caution, I shall from this point on speak of him only as Tobias and no more as Toby. I do this with some sadness. He was an adorable child, but he has become an admirable man. Perhaps both the boy and the man can share a place in my heart.
Despite the upheaval in my personal life, things were going well in the AT. Students kept choosing our track, in great measure because of the heroic efforts Bob Ackerman had made to turn himself into a one-man Department of Recent Continental Philosophy. I have lost contact with our students after all these years, but they have made lives and careers for themselves in academic philosophy, for the most part. Mecke Nagel is at SUNY Cortland, exploring penal abolition and African peace making approaches. [Those who have read my blog post about Macros and PC have already met her. It was she who challenged her fellow students' unthinking use of the formula "racism, sexism, classicism, and homophobia."] Alex Pienknagura is one of the coordinators of the 2010 Radical Philosophy Association meetings. Kevin Dodson is still at Lamar University in Texas, where he is now a full professor. Kim Leighton is at American University in D.C., Amie MacDonald is at John Jay College of CUNY, Lisa Tessman is the GPD of philosophy at SUNY Binghamton, and George Leaman, the unofficial chronicler and archivist of the AT, is now with the Philosophy Documentation Center. Early on, George did some splendid detective work on Heidegger's Nazi connections. All of them, and our other students as well, would undoubtedly have found their way into academic philosophy without the AT, but I think it would have been a good deal harder for them to pursue the sort of philosophy that attracted them. All of it, needless to say, was not philosophy in the eyes of the departmental majority.
I was still attending the Boston Colloquium, of course. It remained a highpoint of my rather bland calendar. That November, a talk was scheduled by Debra Nails, the former Colloquium Coordinator, and I was penciled in as Chair. She had left the Colloquium to follow her husband, Berendt Kolk, to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he was Professor of Physics at the University of the Witwatersrand. Debra, it turned out, was teaching in the Philosophy Department at Wits, which was chaired by Jonathan Suzman, nephew of the famous anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman. At the Colloquium dinner before her talk, Debra asked me whether I would have any interest in coming out to South Africa to lecture on Marx to the second year undergraduate philosophy majors. Now, as I have several times noted, Cindy was phobic about flying, with the result that we never went anywhere interesting. When we broke up, I decided that I would speak anywhere I was invited, so long as I had to fly to get there. I asked somewhat facetiously whether you had to fly to get to South Africa, and Debra replied that it was a very long boat trip. Well, I was owed another sabbatical by UMass that I had actually postponed in order to serve as the AGPD of the AT [we talked like that], so I said I would be delighted. It was agreed that I would come out for six weeks starting in late April.
It was about this time that I finally got myself out of the awful apartment and into a very attractive upscale apartment in Watertown. The owner had had some trouble renting it, and I cut a pretty good deal with him. It was a three story townhouse with rooms on the upper two floors and a garage on the ground floor. It was just off Arsenal Street, near the Arsenal Mall. I could see the Marshall's from my rear window. That move gave me a great psychological boost -- I no longer felt that I was being punished for unspecified marital sins -- and I spent a very happy fifteen months there. Since Cindy had sold the Garfield Road house for a hefty sum, half of which was mine, I could finally acquire my half of the family furniture. Opting for value rather than quantity, I ended up with several very nice pieces of eighteenth century English furniture that still grace my Chapel Hill condominium today.
I tried my hand at dating. God knows, I had hated it as a fourteen year old, and it had not improved four decades later. Milton Cantor, always the supportive friend, arranged for me to meet a lovely woman in New York City, and I actually asked one or two women to dinner on my own, but since all I wanted to talk about was what had gone wrong in my marriage, not surprisingly nothing came of those forays into the singles world. Instead, I turned my attention back to the cache of family letters and papers that I had rescued from my father's house. I felt that my life had suffered what I can only describe as a metaphysical break. I could not repair it by falling in love with someone new, and I certainly could not even imagine starting a new family. I had my sons. I was their father. I no more wanted another child than I wanted another heart or brain. I felt a need to reach back to a time in my life that antedated my long involvement with Cindy, and that could only mean my earliest years.
And so I read the letters that I had written home from Harvard, the letters my sister had written home from Swarthmore. I found myself holding in my hand letters like this one, written in the Fall of my Freshman year:
"Greetings, folks, I received your letter today, with the enclosed invite from Shaker Village [the teenage summer work camp I had attended in '47, '48, and '48]. I don't think I will go. I don't have the money or the time, and I want to see a lot of both of you two and Sue during the vacation. I won't be able to work out that staying at home business. There are complications. I was wondering if I could stay home on Friday and go to Harvard Sat. with Sue. I don't want to miss classes, though, so I don't know what I'll do. I had a very wonderful weekend with Sue. The only thing wrong was that I didn't get enough time to see her. This business of seeing her every two weeks is getting me down. We have decided to get married, by the way, although not for a while yet." I was sixteen.
My mother must have freaked out at the last line, because in a later letter from Swarthmore, my sister reassured her that I was a sensible kid and would not do anything foolish.
As I read these letters, I thought more and more about my boyhood love. Susie and I had "gone steady" for five years, and even though we had never gone "all the way," I had thought of her always as my first love. Suddenly, it struck me that the break in the continuity of my life could be repaired only by reaching out to her, for I had loved her before I had ever met Cindy. Immediately, I contacted Connecticut College for Women [as it was then still called], and asked for her address. Rather primly, the Alumnae Office explained that they did not give out the addresses of their graduates, but that if I wrote a letter to her and sent it to them, they would see that it was sent on to her.
I crafted a long, chatty letter, all about my life, my sons, and the ending of my marriage. Back came a very brief note from Chapel Hill, North Carolina [Susie never liked to write letters], in which was enclosed a photo of the two of us at my 1950 graduation from high school. [Susie needed two more courses to graduate in three and a half years and did not finish up until the end of summer school.] She said nothing at all about her marital status, but the return address printed on the envelope read "Mrs. Susan S. Gould." Now, I am well enough brought up to know that a woman does not style herself "Mrs. Susan S. Wolff" unless she is widowed or divorced, but I did not let on that I had decoded this. Instead, I wrote back, telling her that I was scheduled to give a talk at St. Andrews College in Laurinberg, about one hundred miles south of Chapel Hill. Could I perhaps drop in on the way home and visit with her and her husband? Two days later, the phone rang. It was Susie.
It seemed she was indeed divorced, from Floyd "Jerry' Gould, and was raising her two sons, Jon and Lawrence, by herself in Chapel Hill. She would be happy to see me when I came to North Carolina. I nattered on happily, mentioning that in March, shortly after the St. Andrews gig, I would be going to a conference in Dubrovnik, which I had never seen. "Oh," Susie burst out, "That is my favorite place in the whole world." "Well," I replied, "perhaps you could show me it to me." After a bit, I got off the phone, saying again that I would see her in March during my visit to North Carolina.
Two days later, another brief note came from Susie. 'If you would like me to show you Durbrovnik, I would be happy to." Right away, I called her up. "Look," I said, "this is early February and March is a long way off. Why don't I come down to see you tomorrow?" In a soft voice, she said, "All right, if you would like to." "I will call you back," I said. I got off the phone, did my laundry, got a haircut, and called Piedmont Airlines. Then I called Susie once again and told her that I would be arriving the next day at Raleigh Durham Airport. I told her the time and flight number, and she said she would meet me.
As my plane was about to land at RDU, it suddenly struck me that I had not seen Susie in almost thirty years. We had met briefly my first year in Chicago, but that was it. Would I even recognize her? When I got to the terminal, no one who could plausibly be Susie was waiting, but then, after a moment, she walked up. She looked different, of course, but somehow, she looked exactly as she ought to look after all those years. It was as though I could imagine the intervening time in my mind's eye.
When we got to her modern ranch style home on Brookview Drive, we stood in the kitchen while she made us a little something to eat. She said quietly, "I was so glad to get your letter. I was waiting for you." I was stunned, and overjoyed. "What would you have done if I had not written?" I asked. 'I would have gone on waiting," she answered. That night we made love, and the break in my life was healed. I have often since said that I have loved only three women in my life, and two of them are Susie. She was and is my once and future love.
My Once and Future Love
I take my title from T. H. White's re-telling of the Arthurian legend, The Once and Future King, supposedly the inscription on King Arthur's tomb. In that charming book, which I read many years ago, the wizard Merlin is represented as living through time backwards, which explains both his great wisdom and his seeming ineptitude at dealing with the world in which he finds himself. Writing my memoirs has turned out to be rather like living my life backwards, because although I know full well how it has turned out, I am constantly surprised to discover things about my earlier days that I had forgotten. Whether I have acquired wisdom in the process I leave to my readers to judge.
Preface
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So Tolstoy famously begins Anna Karenina, thought by some to be his greatest novel. Although this volume begins at the lowest point in my life, it very quickly becomes a story of almost unalloyed happiness. A great deal has happened in these most recent twenty-five years of my life, and I am hopeful that some of it will prove to be of interest to you who read my words, but those looking for conflict, sadness, and bitter regrets will, I fear, be disappointed.
The first two thirds of my story were devoted almost entirely to the life of the mind. In the present volume, you will see me trying my hand at affecting, in however small a way, the larger world about which I had spent so long thinking and writing. I am reminded of the great passage in Plato's Gorgias in which Callicles chides Socrates for the unworldliness of the life he chosen. Plato is of course putting into the mouth of Socrates' antagonist the doubts he had about his own decision to withdraw from public life and found the Academy. "When I perceive philosophical activity in a young lad," Callicles says, "I am pleased; it suits him, I think, and shows that he has good breeding. A boy who doesn't play with philosophy I regard as illiberal, a chap who will never raise himself to any fine or noble action. Whereas when I see an older man still at his philosophy and showing no sign of giving it up, that one seems to me, Socrates, to need a whipping. For ... such a man, even if he's well endowed by nature, must necessarily become unmanly by avoiding the center of the city and the assemblies where, as the Poet says, 'men win distinction.' Such a fellow must spend the rest of his life skulking in corners, whispering with two or three little lads, never pronouncing any large, liberal, or meaningful utterance." [W. C. Helmbold's translation, with one emendation]
Chapter One
I Once Was Lost But Now Am Found
When Cindy walked out of my apartment that June evening, I felt as though my life had come to an end. It was not just that my heart and my mind had been deeply intertwined with hers for my entire adult life. I was without a fixed point of reference because no one in my extended family had ever been divorced. Even my sister, Barbara, who had long since separated from her husband, Reed, was still technically married to him, and would be for many years to come. Now, we are a Jewish family, so it goes without saying that a good many of my relatives were unhappy. But divorced? They might as well have been Roman Catholics for all the advantage they had taken of the liberalized New York State Civil Code.
I was committed to yet another summer of teaching at Harvard, so that would get me out of the apartment five days a week, but beyond that, I was sailing uncharted waters. Bernard and Susan Avishai, a couple I had come to know through Cindy's connection with M. I. T., became my principal emotional support in those dark months. Bernie and Susan are Canadian by birth and education, although their ties to Israel were, it seemed to me, much tighter than to their homeland. Bernie is a tall, handsome, vigorous man with a shock of curly black hair and a perpetual smile on his face. He was then teaching in the Writing Program of the Humanities Department at M. I. T., although his doctorate from the University of Toronto is in philosophy. He has become, through his books and his writings for newspapers and journals, a very well known voice for peace and understanding in Israel. Susan is an artist, some of whose most exquisite works are pen and ink drawings. They had three ebullient children [who are now, by the mysteries of time, all grown up.] Even though Bernie was "Cindy's friend," they folded me into their family with a supportive love.
Let me devote one short paragraph to a subject that was utterly new to me, but has been written about endlessly in the large and amorphous literature on "relationships." When Cindy and I definitively entered the world of divorce, I found that along with the disposition of our chattels movable, we were also expected to divide up the family friends. I got to keep my professional colleagues, of course, along with my books and papers. But ever since coming to Belmont, we had been socializing with people who were "her friends." It was a generous act on Bernie's part and a bit of a daring one on mine for me to put the Avishais on my side of the list of belongings to be parceled out. All during our marriage, I had assumed that people entertained us, when we were a couple, because they liked Cindy and more or less accepted me as part of the package. It came as a gratifying surprise to discover that people actually liked me well enough to see me unaccompanied by Cindy. [Yes, I know that I sound like Sally Fields accepting her Oscar, but I am trying to be true to the moment here.]
It came as a very bitter surprise to discover that as a consequence of our break-up, Barry and Betty Moore wanted nothing more to do with me. No one has ever explained this breach to me, though for reasons I cannot now recall, I have always believed that it was Betty who decided that Cindy was the injured party and I the cause of the divorce. I believe I was actually listed in Barry's will as his literary executor, a role I would have played with great pride and diligence, but after one very painful lunch at a Ground Round in Cambridge, Barry and I never spoke again. I am convinced that it was the breach, and not the subject of the essay I wrote, that led the editor of Barry's festschrift to reject my essay when I sent it to her.
The divorce itself took an unexpectedly long time, principally because Cindy felt deeply aggrieved and wanted an unequal division of the family property, despite the fact that she and I had equivalent jobs and almost identical salaries. I wrote endless memoranda to my lawyer, Robert Mann, carrying out elaborate calculations designed to guarantee that Cindy would be in no way materially hurt by the divorce. Bob charged me for the time it took him to read them and then filed them away. In the end, which was not to come until the last day of 1986, we agreed to an equal division of property, appropriate child support for Toby, who was still a minor, and a sharing of the costs of Patrick and Toby's college education.
While all of this was going on, I was teaching summer school, and then my fall courses. I would pick up the boys to take them to school [by now they were both in high school], drive out to Amherst to teach, and drive back in time to pick them up and take them home. [It was during one of those runs that Bob Nozick honked.] Patrick had become an important national figure in chess, but it was Toby who stunned me one day with an accomplishment of which I was entirely unaware. I was driving him home from one of our weekly dinners, when more or less to make conversation, I asked what he was doing at school. He told me that he had joined a group called The Madrigals. "What voice do you sing?," I asked, very interested because of my own college involvement with madrigal singing. [See Volume One, Chapter Two, blogpost June 28, 2009]. "Countertenor," he replied. Now, you have to understand that to early music afficionados like me, countertenors are the crème de la crème. I had first heard Alfred Deller at a Sanders Theater concert, and was in the front row again at Sanders some years later when Russell Oberlin sang zefiro torno, a transcendentally beautiful duet by Monteverdi. It seemed to me unlikely in the extreme that Toby actually could sing countertenor. Probably he meant that he was a tenor, which would have been nice enough, heaven knows. I asked which madrigals the group was rehearsing. He named several with which I was quite familiar, and then began to sing a few lines. Out of his mouth came an exquisite true countertenor sound, quite like anything I had ever heard him make. Astonished, I blurted out, "Toby, that is the most wonderful thing any son of mine has ever done!" Later that year, the Madrigals gave a concert, dressed in brightly colored costumes that looked as though they had come from the studio wardrobe for A Connecticut in King Arthur's Court. This was no flash in the pan. Toby continued to sing, earning money while at Yale by serving in local church choirs. He studied for a while with the famous American countertenor Drew Minter, and during his senior year sang with the Whiffenpoofs. He even had a solo at Tanglewood in a student performance of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.
At some point that I cannot decisively pin down in the chronology of this Memoir, Toby announced that henceforward he was to be known as Tobias. Since I prefer to err on the side of caution, I shall from this point on speak of him only as Tobias and no more as Toby. I do this with some sadness. He was an adorable child, but he has become an admirable man. Perhaps both the boy and the man can share a place in my heart.
Despite the upheaval in my personal life, things were going well in the AT. Students kept choosing our track, in great measure because of the heroic efforts Bob Ackerman had made to turn himself into a one-man Department of Recent Continental Philosophy. I have lost contact with our students after all these years, but they have made lives and careers for themselves in academic philosophy, for the most part. Mecke Nagel is at SUNY Cortland, exploring penal abolition and African peace making approaches. [Those who have read my blog post about Macros and PC have already met her. It was she who challenged her fellow students' unthinking use of the formula "racism, sexism, classicism, and homophobia."] Alex Pienknagura is one of the coordinators of the 2010 Radical Philosophy Association meetings. Kevin Dodson is still at Lamar University in Texas, where he is now a full professor. Kim Leighton is at American University in D.C., Amie MacDonald is at John Jay College of CUNY, Lisa Tessman is the GPD of philosophy at SUNY Binghamton, and George Leaman, the unofficial chronicler and archivist of the AT, is now with the Philosophy Documentation Center. Early on, George did some splendid detective work on Heidegger's Nazi connections. All of them, and our other students as well, would undoubtedly have found their way into academic philosophy without the AT, but I think it would have been a good deal harder for them to pursue the sort of philosophy that attracted them. All of it, needless to say, was not philosophy in the eyes of the departmental majority.
I was still attending the Boston Colloquium, of course. It remained a highpoint of my rather bland calendar. That November, a talk was scheduled by Debra Nails, the former Colloquium Coordinator, and I was penciled in as Chair. She had left the Colloquium to follow her husband, Berendt Kolk, to Johannesburg, South Africa, where he was Professor of Physics at the University of the Witwatersrand. Debra, it turned out, was teaching in the Philosophy Department at Wits, which was chaired by Jonathan Suzman, nephew of the famous anti-apartheid activist Helen Suzman. At the Colloquium dinner before her talk, Debra asked me whether I would have any interest in coming out to South Africa to lecture on Marx to the second year undergraduate philosophy majors. Now, as I have several times noted, Cindy was phobic about flying, with the result that we never went anywhere interesting. When we broke up, I decided that I would speak anywhere I was invited, so long as I had to fly to get there. I asked somewhat facetiously whether you had to fly to get to South Africa, and Debra replied that it was a very long boat trip. Well, I was owed another sabbatical by UMass that I had actually postponed in order to serve as the AGPD of the AT [we talked like that], so I said I would be delighted. It was agreed that I would come out for six weeks starting in late April.
It was about this time that I finally got myself out of the awful apartment and into a very attractive upscale apartment in Watertown. The owner had had some trouble renting it, and I cut a pretty good deal with him. It was a three story townhouse with rooms on the upper two floors and a garage on the ground floor. It was just off Arsenal Street, near the Arsenal Mall. I could see the Marshall's from my rear window. That move gave me a great psychological boost -- I no longer felt that I was being punished for unspecified marital sins -- and I spent a very happy fifteen months there. Since Cindy had sold the Garfield Road house for a hefty sum, half of which was mine, I could finally acquire my half of the family furniture. Opting for value rather than quantity, I ended up with several very nice pieces of eighteenth century English furniture that still grace my Chapel Hill condominium today.
I tried my hand at dating. God knows, I had hated it as a fourteen year old, and it had not improved four decades later. Milton Cantor, always the supportive friend, arranged for me to meet a lovely woman in New York City, and I actually asked one or two women to dinner on my own, but since all I wanted to talk about was what had gone wrong in my marriage, not surprisingly nothing came of those forays into the singles world. Instead, I turned my attention back to the cache of family letters and papers that I had rescued from my father's house. I felt that my life had suffered what I can only describe as a metaphysical break. I could not repair it by falling in love with someone new, and I certainly could not even imagine starting a new family. I had my sons. I was their father. I no more wanted another child than I wanted another heart or brain. I felt a need to reach back to a time in my life that antedated my long involvement with Cindy, and that could only mean my earliest years.
And so I read the letters that I had written home from Harvard, the letters my sister had written home from Swarthmore. I found myself holding in my hand letters like this one, written in the Fall of my Freshman year:
"Greetings, folks, I received your letter today, with the enclosed invite from Shaker Village [the teenage summer work camp I had attended in '47, '48, and '48]. I don't think I will go. I don't have the money or the time, and I want to see a lot of both of you two and Sue during the vacation. I won't be able to work out that staying at home business. There are complications. I was wondering if I could stay home on Friday and go to Harvard Sat. with Sue. I don't want to miss classes, though, so I don't know what I'll do. I had a very wonderful weekend with Sue. The only thing wrong was that I didn't get enough time to see her. This business of seeing her every two weeks is getting me down. We have decided to get married, by the way, although not for a while yet." I was sixteen.
My mother must have freaked out at the last line, because in a later letter from Swarthmore, my sister reassured her that I was a sensible kid and would not do anything foolish.
As I read these letters, I thought more and more about my boyhood love. Susie and I had "gone steady" for five years, and even though we had never gone "all the way," I had thought of her always as my first love. Suddenly, it struck me that the break in the continuity of my life could be repaired only by reaching out to her, for I had loved her before I had ever met Cindy. Immediately, I contacted Connecticut College for Women [as it was then still called], and asked for her address. Rather primly, the Alumnae Office explained that they did not give out the addresses of their graduates, but that if I wrote a letter to her and sent it to them, they would see that it was sent on to her.
I crafted a long, chatty letter, all about my life, my sons, and the ending of my marriage. Back came a very brief note from Chapel Hill, North Carolina [Susie never liked to write letters], in which was enclosed a photo of the two of us at my 1950 graduation from high school. [Susie needed two more courses to graduate in three and a half years and did not finish up until the end of summer school.] She said nothing at all about her marital status, but the return address printed on the envelope read "Mrs. Susan S. Gould." Now, I am well enough brought up to know that a woman does not style herself "Mrs. Susan S. Wolff" unless she is widowed or divorced, but I did not let on that I had decoded this. Instead, I wrote back, telling her that I was scheduled to give a talk at St. Andrews College in Laurinberg, about one hundred miles south of Chapel Hill. Could I perhaps drop in on the way home and visit with her and her husband? Two days later, the phone rang. It was Susie.
It seemed she was indeed divorced, from Floyd "Jerry' Gould, and was raising her two sons, Jon and Lawrence, by herself in Chapel Hill. She would be happy to see me when I came to North Carolina. I nattered on happily, mentioning that in March, shortly after the St. Andrews gig, I would be going to a conference in Dubrovnik, which I had never seen. "Oh," Susie burst out, "That is my favorite place in the whole world." "Well," I replied, "perhaps you could show me it to me." After a bit, I got off the phone, saying again that I would see her in March during my visit to North Carolina.
Two days later, another brief note came from Susie. 'If you would like me to show you Durbrovnik, I would be happy to." Right away, I called her up. "Look," I said, "this is early February and March is a long way off. Why don't I come down to see you tomorrow?" In a soft voice, she said, "All right, if you would like to." "I will call you back," I said. I got off the phone, did my laundry, got a haircut, and called Piedmont Airlines. Then I called Susie once again and told her that I would be arriving the next day at Raleigh Durham Airport. I told her the time and flight number, and she said she would meet me.
As my plane was about to land at RDU, it suddenly struck me that I had not seen Susie in almost thirty years. We had met briefly my first year in Chicago, but that was it. Would I even recognize her? When I got to the terminal, no one who could plausibly be Susie was waiting, but then, after a moment, she walked up. She looked different, of course, but somehow, she looked exactly as she ought to look after all those years. It was as though I could imagine the intervening time in my mind's eye.
When we got to her modern ranch style home on Brookview Drive, we stood in the kitchen while she made us a little something to eat. She said quietly, "I was so glad to get your letter. I was waiting for you." I was stunned, and overjoyed. "What would you have done if I had not written?" I asked. 'I would have gone on waiting," she answered. That night we made love, and the break in my life was healed. I have often since said that I have loved only three women in my life, and two of them are Susie. She was and is my once and future love.
Saturday, 5 June 2010
THIS ONE IS FOR JENNIFER
Today was market day in Place Maubert. I bought half a rabbit, cut up for my favorite rabbit dish -- hazelnut encrusted rabbit. But I also bought two quail, and two lovely artichokes, at Susie's request. Here is the artichoke recipe, which turned out to be marvelous.
I first cut the artichokes in half and removed the choke with a spoon. Then I melted a large amount of butter in a deep pan, and sautee-ed the artichokes for about five minutes, until they were browned. Then I added enough chicken stock to half cover them, brought that to a boil, reduced to a simmer, and covered them, simmering them for twenty minutes or so. Meanwhile, I zested an entire lemon and squeezed the juice. When the artichokes were soft, I removed them to a plate and reduced the chicken stock to a sauce [very thick]. I added the lemon juice and zest with some more butter, and when they were all combined, I served up the artichokes with the sauce poured over them. The quail were just broiled in an oven after having been cut open and flattened. At the very end, turn them once to brown the undersides.
All of this with a Sancere blanc for Susie and a Beaume de Venise for me. It was simple and delicious.
The rabbit is for Monday night, when everything is closed.
God, I love Paris.
I first cut the artichokes in half and removed the choke with a spoon. Then I melted a large amount of butter in a deep pan, and sautee-ed the artichokes for about five minutes, until they were browned. Then I added enough chicken stock to half cover them, brought that to a boil, reduced to a simmer, and covered them, simmering them for twenty minutes or so. Meanwhile, I zested an entire lemon and squeezed the juice. When the artichokes were soft, I removed them to a plate and reduced the chicken stock to a sauce [very thick]. I added the lemon juice and zest with some more butter, and when they were all combined, I served up the artichokes with the sauce poured over them. The quail were just broiled in an oven after having been cut open and flattened. At the very end, turn them once to brown the undersides.
All of this with a Sancere blanc for Susie and a Beaume de Venise for me. It was simple and delicious.
The rabbit is for Monday night, when everything is closed.
God, I love Paris.
Friday, 4 June 2010
MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER FIVE FOURTH INSTALLMENT
Ann's last point, about overdetermination, raises an interesting theoretical point which it might be appropriate to say a word about here. This is a topic on which I crossed swords with Rick Wolff one semester when I audited his graduate lecture course for a while. Rick and Steve got the term "overdetermination" from Althusser, and so far as I could make out, they used it to mean that something had many causes, not merely one. But the term in fact has a quite different meaning both in mathematics and in Freud's explication of dreams. Let me take a moment to explain. When a system of linear equations has more unknowns than equations, it is in general impossible to solve the system. You can always eliminate a number of the variables, or unknowns, from the equations, by solving one equation for a selected unknown and then substituting the result into the rest of the equations. Each time you do that, you eliminate one unknown and lose one equation. For someone discussing Marx's economic theories, as Rick and I both were, this means analyzing a system of linear equations representing the production conditions in the different industries. In such a system, there will be n equations, one for each industry. Assuming that there is one quality of labor and a free labor market, there will be a single economy wide wage rate. Assuming as well that capital moves freely from industry to industry in search of the highest rate of return, a single profit rate will emerge. So all in all there will be n equations, n price variables for the n products, a wage rate and a profit rate. You can reduce the number of price variables by one by choosing some commodity [like gold, or silver] and arbitrarily setting its price equal to 1. This will then turn all the prices into what are called "relative prices," which is to say prices relative to one unit of the commodity denominated as money. The upshot is a system of n equations with n+1 variables. The system is then said to be " underdetermined by one degree of freedom." What you can then do, and this is at the heart of all Classical Political Economy, is to solve the system of equations for the relationship between the wage rate and the profit rate, showing that they are inversely related. When the wage goes up, the profit rate goes down, and vice versa. That is why Smith, Ricardo, and Marx all say that the interests of the workers and the entrepreneurs are opposed to one another.
On the other hand, if there are more equations than variables, in general the system is in internal contradiction, because more constraints are being placed on the system than there are degrees of freedom. Such a system is said to be "overdetermined." All of this is well known and not controversial.
Sigmund Freud also uses the term "overdetermined," in an apparently quite different way that turns out, upon examination, to be basically similar to the notion in mathematics or economics. In The Interpretation of Dreams, his greatest work [or so he himself thought], Freud argues that when one traces to the unconscious the sources of each of the elements of a dream, through the process of free association, one frequently finds that even after a dream element has been completely accounted for, associations reveal that there one or even several other unconscious wishes or memories are also finding expression in that dream element. The dream element, in effect, has too many explanations for its presence in the dream. It is, Freud says, overdetermined. If you think about it, it is clear that this notion of overdetermination and the mathematical/economic notion are really at base the same.
But the notion of multiple determination is totally different. To say that an event or a phenomenon has several causes, and hence is multiply determined, is to say that it cannot be completely explained without invoking all of the causes. No one of them alone is adequate to account for the event or the phenomenon.
I was bugged by this seemingly deviant and confusing usage of a term that already had a clearly defined use in both mathematics and psychoanalytic theory. When Rick started talking about overdetermination in his lectures, I raised my hand and questioned him on the matter. Now Rick is a ferociously smart man, but I simply could seem to get him to acknowledge my point. After a while, it became clear that I was getting in the way of his teaching, and I stopped attending the class. But to this day, I do not understand why he and Steve Resnick persisted in their usage.
I was still commuting from Amherst, and as 1983 turned into 1984, my marriage to Cindy moved closer and closer to a breach, but there were courses to plan, students to guide toward the degree, battles to be fought in the Department that we could hope to win. It was grand fun. I think I must have been on the phone to Bob Ackerman every day of the week. To the students, we were simply "the two Bobs." On July 15, 1984, I even took a group of AT students to Tanglewood for a classical music concert. We sat on the lawn in front of the Shed, and listened to some Beethoven. I thought the outing was an ideal imitation of the outings my father used to go on with his high school students in the forties, but if I had been a bit more sensitive, I might have noticed that they would have preferred a rock concert. Oh well.
It was during that happy time that I had a really wacky encounter with the famous zoologist Edward O. Wilson. A Canadian philosopher named Michael Ruse was visiting for a year at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology where Stephen J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, and E. O. Wilson all had their offices. I ran into Michael at the B. U. Colloquium, and hit it off with him. After we had met several times for coffee, he asked whether I would like to meet Wilson. I said sure, and Ruse set it up. It was not unlike my arranged kiss with Marilyn Harris in the eighth grade. [Readers who would like to know how that turned out can take a look at Volume One, Chapter One of these memoirs. The link is on the June 28, 2009 blog entry.] It was agreed that I would spend an afternoon in his office, which doubled as his laboratory. In advance of the rendez-vous, we exchanged gifts. I sent him, through Michael, a copy of The Poverty of Liberalism, and he sent back a copy of his latest book, Promethean Fire, co-authored by Wilson and Charles Lumsden. The volume, which sits on my shelves today, is inscribed "For Robert Paul Wolff, with warm regards, Edward O. Wilson, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard U., January 25, 1984."
We met in Wilson's office in the Museum. After the usual greetings, he showed me the centerpiece of the office, a large table on which, under a plexiglass dome, was a bustling, complex ant colony. Wilson banged the side of the table, which set the ants scurrying, and as they poured out of the anthill he pointed out the soldier ants, worker ants, and so forth. I didn't have much in the way of conversation. What can you say about an anthill, after all? So, casting about for something to say, I mused aloud, "I wonder how many ants there are in the entire colony." "Fifteen thousand," Wilson replied. "How can you be sure?" I asked. "I counted them," he said.
There are moments in life when the scales fall from your eyes and you suddenly see clearly something that has hitherto been obscured from view. This was one of those moments. I had from time to time reflected on how different the workaday lives are of people in different corners of the Academy, even though we all call ourselves "Professor." Richard Taub in the Winthrop House Senior Common Room had gone off to India to do the research for his dissertation. Karl Heider had gone to uplands New Guinea. My sister, Barbara, had spent her time in a bio lab. My notion of an expedition was a visit to the Widener Library stacks. Exploring unknown territory meant going to a level of the stacks I had not previously been on. And here was E. O. Wilson, the creator of Sociobiology, who thought nothing at all about counting fifteen thousand ants. Had anyone asked me to figure out the number of ants in an anthill, the farthest I would have gone was watching eight or ten walk by and then guesstimating the rest.
To be sure, philosophers sometimes descend to the level of the particular. Hegel, after all, attempted to demonstrate a priori that there are only seven planets. But our tendency is to go in somewhat the opposite direction. Confronted with the real world, the reflex reaction of philosophers is to ask about possible worlds. It was clear to me that although we were both professors and authors, Wilson and I led lives so utterly different that no real mutual understanding was likely. It was also clear that however much the world might think of Wilson as the tendentious, controversial author of Sociobiology, his real interest was in those ants.
When our conversation about the anthill began to drag, Wilson took me into a nearby room in which there were rows of file cabinets. He pulled out a drawer at random to show me a card on which was impaled an ant. The card identified the ant as belonging to one of the more than twenty thousand species of ants that are estimated to exist somewhere or other on the face of the earth. A second eclaircissement illuminated my mind. I had a vision of thousands of English curates and amateur entomologists, each of whom had devoted much of his or her life to searching for, identifying, catching, impaling, and thus nailing down for all time one of those ant species. Here again, I saw clearly how different my field was from Wilson's. Philosophy does not advance by the taking of thousands of tiny steps, assuming for the sake of argument that it advances at all. Instead, ages pass during which little or nothing happens, although thousands of philosophers are doing their best. Then, there is a moment of transformation -- fourth century B. C,. in Greece, or the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe. Suddenly, the subject leaps forward, changing forever the way we think. As for all those good, grey, decent souls [myself included, of course] who soldier away, trying to think new thoughts, we might just as well not have existed. Great music is like this, I think. Would anyone ever play the music of Salieri had it not been for Peter Shaffer?
But Entomology is not like that at all. Every one of those file cards was the evidence of a worthwhile piece of work, undertaken, completed, and added to our knowledge of the ant. I was properly humbled. After we parted, I reflected that Wilson probably had learned nothing at all from meeting me, but I felt that I had learned a good deal from meeting him. It might not have been good for him, but it was good for me.
Later that year, near the end of the Spring Semester, the famous German scholar Dieter Henrich came to the campus and gave a talk on Hegel. Afterwards, a group of us took him to dinner at The Lord Jeffrey Amherst Inn, located on the Amherst Common. The Lord Jeff is the closest thing Amherst has to fine dining, although in fact there have only been a few times during the thirty-seven years I spent at UMass when its food was actually any good. Henrich ordered a bottle of wine, which the waiter brought with the usual flourishes, opening it, pouring a tiny bit into Henrich's glass, and waiting for him to taste it. Henrich went through the entire ritual. He swirled it, he sniffed it, he tasted it. And then he pronounced it no good. It was the first time in my entire life that I had ever seen someone actually do that. He made some impressive sounding remarks about the hillside on which the grapes were grown, and sent the bottle back for another one. Once again, he went through the ritual, and this time pronounced it satisfactory, to our collective relief. After the waiter had gone, Henrich allowed as how that bottle really wasn't right either, but he did not want to make trouble. I didn't think much of the talk -- I have never liked Hegel -- but I was mightily impressed by the dinner.
As my marriage to Cindy developed more strains, I quite unexpectedly returned to the violin, which I had played as a boy. [See Volume One, Chapter One, at blogpost for June 28, 2009]. I had not opened the case since 1961, when Barbara Bergmann, Ann Carter and I played string quartets several times during my last year as a Harvard Instructor. I got some new strings, took a few lessons, and began practicing a bit. Cindy had studied piano as a girl and played nicely. In the Barrett Place house we actually had both an upright and a Yamaha baby grand on which the boys practiced during their brief engagements with the instrument. Perhaps as a form of therapy to try to repair our marriage, Cindy and I took to playing Handel violin sonatas together. I wasn't very good, Lord knows, but then, we weren't planning to take it on the road.
One evening, John Harbison and his wife Rose Mary came to dinner. Harbison, who is now one of America's most celebrated classical composers, had even then, in his mid-forties, acquired a considerable reputation. He and Cindy were in different Sections of the same MIT Humanities Department. Rose Mary is a concert violinist who specializes in performing contemporary music. When she heard that we had been playing a bit together, she asked to see my violin. It took her no more than a few moments to declare, in rather minatory tones, "Your bow is dead." That sounded really serious, so i went right out and splurged $300 on a new bow, which did indeed improve somewhat my tone production. I thought of myself as a real big spender. Little did I know that less than twenty years later, I would spend five thousand dollars for a Benoit Roland bow and think myself lucky for having got it at such a good price.
Encouraged by the Alternative Track and the presence in my courses of students who were genuinely interested in what I was teaching, I returned to my Marx project and brought to completion the first of the three books I had sketched in my mind -- the exposition of the evolution of Classical and Marxian political economy leading to my analysis of Marx's explanation of the origin of profit in a capitalist economy. My study of the flood of books published by a worldwide network of Marxian economists gave me a firm grasp of the theoretical foundations, but much more challenging was the task of recasting them in a narrative that a reader could follow who did not have that mathematical material at his or her command.
I conceived the idea of writing a book that would, in its central narrative, demand no more of its readers than the ability to solve little models consisting of two or three linear equations. My meditation on this formal material had led me to the conclusion that the underlying ideas were fundamentally very simple, so that if I could get them clear enough in my own mind, I could expound them using very simple and easily comprehended examples. I decided that I would put in an appendix the formal proofs of the generalizations of all the claims I made in the text. Readers capable of handling the math could look at the appendix for the proofs, while the rest of the readers could simply follow my story from chapter to chapter.
When I had completed the manuscript, which cost me a good deal of effort principally because of the Appendix, I sent it to Sandy Thatcher at Princeton, and he agreed to publish it. In 1985 it appeared under the title Understanding Marx. The title echoed that of my book on Rawls, but the two books could not have been more different. The Rawls book was really an explanation of Rawls' failure to demonstrate his central thesis. In the Marx book I argued that despite problems and confusions, Marx's central insight was and is correct: Capitalism rests on exploitation. By the time I had completed Understanding Marx, I was prepared to call myself a Marxist.
Understanding Marx sold more than 4000 copies during its lifetime, in both hard cover and paper, so perhaps it reached an audience that found it of use, but the larger project of which it is a very minor part seems to have foundered. While I was working on my book, I believed that if one of the really gifted economists around the world ever wrote a full-scale alternative Introduction to Economics that could serve not as a critique of, but as a substitute for, the Samuelson text and its imitators, we could perhaps fundamentally change the way people in the profession understand capitalism. I had in mind a text that would develop explanatory devices as visually powerful and easy to grasp as the ubiquitous supply and demand curves that every beginning student of economics learns. The idea would be to build into the pedagogy the concept of exploitation, so that instead of portraying the capitalist marketplace as a benign institution smoothly allocating scarce resources in ways that maximize consumer satisfaction and the efficient use of those resources, students would be presented with a model of exploitation and crisis. I still believe that the possibility is there, but it does not seem that any of the sophisticated mathematical Marxists has taken up the challenge. I know my limits well enough to be sure that I am not the person for the job.
In 1984, my marriage to Cindy was in serious trouble. I had started once a week therapy with a McLean Hospital based psychiatrist named Lenore Boling, and I used the sessions really just to give voice to my unhappiness with what my relationship with Cindy had become. Despite the unhappiness, I do not think I ever shed a tear in those sessions over the shambles of the marriage. One day, however, I started talking about my work. I tried to explain to Dr. Boling that in all of my writing, whether it was on Kant's First Critique or Hume's Treatise or Das Kapital, my goal always was to plumb the depths of the author's central idea and recast it in a form so simple, so clear, so transparent that I could hold it before my students or my readers and show them its beauty. As I said these words, tears started to well up in me, and I finally had to stop talking because I could not finish. It was the only time in twenty years of psychotherapy that I cried openly in a session. Ever since that day, twenty-five years ago, I have understood that it is this intellectual intuition of the transparent beauty of an idea, not the desire for status or recognition or money, that has throughout my life been the driving force behind my writing and teaching. This is why it makes little difference to me whether reviewers agree with what I say, and it is why I am made somewhat uncomfortable by praise. The intrinsic beauty of the idea is the focus of my concern. It seems that I am, after all, more capable of shedding tears for the central argument of the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding than I am for a failed marriage or even for a deceased parent. I am not at all sure that is admirable, but it is closer to the truth about myself than I have ever come before.
Despite our estrangement, Cindy and I continued virtually to the end to talk endlessly about her work. She was now working on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and by late '84 and early '85 had already begun to write what would eventually be her third book. I was if anything even less knowledgeable about poetry than about fiction, despite my youthful enjoyment of Carl Sandburg and e.e. cummings, but I read a good deal of the corpus, and guided by Cindy, began to understand the richness of Dickinson's work. As always, I read every word Cindy wrote and offered editorial suggestions. At one point when her writing had progressed pretty far along, she heard of a new book on Dickinson that had just appeared. [Emily Dickinson is of course a cottage industry, and new things were being published all the time.] Cindy was anxious that someone might have pre-empted her insights, but she was too freaked out to look at the book, so I got a copy from the library and read enough of it to be able to reassure her that her work remained entirely original and unanticipated by this latest addition to the literature on Dickinson.
In late '84, we began to argue a good deal,, and for the first time actually talked about a separation. I am not going to try to rehearse here the substance of those arguments. There was nothing in them that has not been said by countless couples countless times. Neither of us was seeing someone else, or anything like that. If I had to summarize in a sentence what went wrong, I would say that when Cindy finally achieved the recognition that she had so long deserved, it became more and more painful for her to be in a relationship that had been been built on mentoring and guidance. Finally, in February of 1985, we agreed that we would live apart, at least for a while. Very reluctantly, I accepted Cindy's demand that I move out of the house. We called the boys into the living room and told them that we were separating. It was the very worst moment of my entire life, and writing about it even now, twenty-five years and more later, I cringe with pain and shame at my failure to hold the marriage together at least until both boys had finished high school and left home.
On March 1st, I moved into a wretched apartment not far from the Garfield Road house. The apartment had ghastly yellow shag carpeting and painted plywood on the walls. It was rumored to have been a dentist's office in a former incarnation, and at night I thought I could hear the screams of patients denied novacaine. Cindy I went into couples therapy, in a last ditch effort to salvage the marriage. I think there was actually a moment when the four members of the family between us had five therapists. Meanwhile, I saw my boys as much as I could, driving them to school and home again and taking them to dinner. Patrick was by now well on his way to earning the title of International Chess Master, and his world was the world of big league chess, but Toby, who was only fifteen, found the breach a good deal harder to handle.
Sitting alone in my apartment, I began to sift through and read the boxes of family papers that I had salvaged from my father's house. I think it was for me a form of therapy, a way of rediscovering a connection with a part of my life that antedated my long relationship with Cindy. I began with the letters between my parents dating from the late teens of the twentieth century. My grandmother each summer had taken her children to the Catskills to escape the heat and the disease of New York City, while my grandfather stayed in town to work as a cigar salesman and to pursue his political career as one of the leaders of the Socialist Party in New York. My father and mother were childhood friends, because my father's mother and my mother's mother had worked together in a New York sweatshop as girls. My parents began their courtship in Circle One of the Young People's Socialist League, or YPLS. My mother was forced to leave school at sixteen because of her father's crippling stroke, which made it difficult for him to support the family. As the oldest, my mother had to go to work as a secretary. Fairly quickly, she secured the position of secretary to the City Editor of the old Herald Tribune. All of this meant that in the summers, my father was in West Shokan or Big Indian while my mother stayed in Manhattan. They wrote to each other endlessly, my father sometimes taking my mother on imaginary hikes in the Catskills and describing to her what he saw. As I began to read these letters, I came to an appreciation of how much they had loved those mountains. As I have already written [Volume One, Chapter One], when my sister and I were little, the family went back to the places where my father had gone as a boy.
Ever since the death of my father, I had had in my possession two urns. One contained the ashes of my mother, which my father had never been able to part with. The other contained my father's ashes. By a stroke of fortune, just at that time, I received a letter from Leon Botstein at Bard College, inviting me to give a lecture. I decided to use the occasion of the talk to find a resting place at long last for the ashes of my parents. On Thursday, May 2, 1985, I set out for Annandale-on-Hudson, just across the river from the Ashoken Reservoir. Early in the afternoon, I found my way to a deserted part of the reservoir, which was very low because of a long drought, and walked fifty feet across the sandy shore to the water's edge. There I sat down with the two urns and read some of my father's lyrical descriptions of the Catskills, and my mother's loving replies. I reflected on the long association of myself, my parents, and their parents with this lovely part of New York. Then, mixing the ashes of my parents, I scattered them in the Reservoir, hoping finally to take leave of them.
The ritual did not achieve the resolution I had sought of the complex feelings I still felt for my parents, for there were unanswered questions, and an imbalance in their marriage that cried out to be righted. The questions concerned my father: Why had he become an alcoholic? Why had he changed from a hard-driving, ambitious, vigorous young man to a bitter, self-defeating, resentful older man? Why had he abandoned the deep moral and political commitments of his father, and instead turned inward? The imbalance concerned my mother -- the condescending and deprecatory attitude that my father always adopted toward her because of her lack of formal education and his arrogation to himself of the role of family intellectual, despite the fact that -- as was obvious to my sister and to me -- our mother was more intelligent and intellectually livelier than our father.
For years after I scattered the ashes I was troubled and puzzled by these matters, and I longed to find some answers to my questions. Eventually, I concluded that I might achieve insight and genuine closure by writing the story of their youth, their courtship, and the early years of their marriage as they were revealed in those letters. I have written that story in an unpublished book that sits on my shelf, next to the unpublished book I have written about the love story of my grandparents, and my grandfather's career in the Socialist Party. But those stories are theirs, and this story is mine.
The attempt Cindy and I made to reconcile failed, despite the best efforts of ourselves and our teams of therapists. On June 15, 1985, Cindy came to my apartment and told me that she wanted a divorce. The twenty-eight year love affair was over that had begun when I visited Whitman Hall, on leave from Fort Devens, and saw a beautiful young woman sitting at the Bell Desk. Our marriage of true minds was at long last ended.
On the other hand, if there are more equations than variables, in general the system is in internal contradiction, because more constraints are being placed on the system than there are degrees of freedom. Such a system is said to be "overdetermined." All of this is well known and not controversial.
Sigmund Freud also uses the term "overdetermined," in an apparently quite different way that turns out, upon examination, to be basically similar to the notion in mathematics or economics. In The Interpretation of Dreams, his greatest work [or so he himself thought], Freud argues that when one traces to the unconscious the sources of each of the elements of a dream, through the process of free association, one frequently finds that even after a dream element has been completely accounted for, associations reveal that there one or even several other unconscious wishes or memories are also finding expression in that dream element. The dream element, in effect, has too many explanations for its presence in the dream. It is, Freud says, overdetermined. If you think about it, it is clear that this notion of overdetermination and the mathematical/economic notion are really at base the same.
But the notion of multiple determination is totally different. To say that an event or a phenomenon has several causes, and hence is multiply determined, is to say that it cannot be completely explained without invoking all of the causes. No one of them alone is adequate to account for the event or the phenomenon.
I was bugged by this seemingly deviant and confusing usage of a term that already had a clearly defined use in both mathematics and psychoanalytic theory. When Rick started talking about overdetermination in his lectures, I raised my hand and questioned him on the matter. Now Rick is a ferociously smart man, but I simply could seem to get him to acknowledge my point. After a while, it became clear that I was getting in the way of his teaching, and I stopped attending the class. But to this day, I do not understand why he and Steve Resnick persisted in their usage.
I was still commuting from Amherst, and as 1983 turned into 1984, my marriage to Cindy moved closer and closer to a breach, but there were courses to plan, students to guide toward the degree, battles to be fought in the Department that we could hope to win. It was grand fun. I think I must have been on the phone to Bob Ackerman every day of the week. To the students, we were simply "the two Bobs." On July 15, 1984, I even took a group of AT students to Tanglewood for a classical music concert. We sat on the lawn in front of the Shed, and listened to some Beethoven. I thought the outing was an ideal imitation of the outings my father used to go on with his high school students in the forties, but if I had been a bit more sensitive, I might have noticed that they would have preferred a rock concert. Oh well.
It was during that happy time that I had a really wacky encounter with the famous zoologist Edward O. Wilson. A Canadian philosopher named Michael Ruse was visiting for a year at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology where Stephen J. Gould, Richard Lewontin, and E. O. Wilson all had their offices. I ran into Michael at the B. U. Colloquium, and hit it off with him. After we had met several times for coffee, he asked whether I would like to meet Wilson. I said sure, and Ruse set it up. It was not unlike my arranged kiss with Marilyn Harris in the eighth grade. [Readers who would like to know how that turned out can take a look at Volume One, Chapter One of these memoirs. The link is on the June 28, 2009 blog entry.] It was agreed that I would spend an afternoon in his office, which doubled as his laboratory. In advance of the rendez-vous, we exchanged gifts. I sent him, through Michael, a copy of The Poverty of Liberalism, and he sent back a copy of his latest book, Promethean Fire, co-authored by Wilson and Charles Lumsden. The volume, which sits on my shelves today, is inscribed "For Robert Paul Wolff, with warm regards, Edward O. Wilson, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard U., January 25, 1984."
We met in Wilson's office in the Museum. After the usual greetings, he showed me the centerpiece of the office, a large table on which, under a plexiglass dome, was a bustling, complex ant colony. Wilson banged the side of the table, which set the ants scurrying, and as they poured out of the anthill he pointed out the soldier ants, worker ants, and so forth. I didn't have much in the way of conversation. What can you say about an anthill, after all? So, casting about for something to say, I mused aloud, "I wonder how many ants there are in the entire colony." "Fifteen thousand," Wilson replied. "How can you be sure?" I asked. "I counted them," he said.
There are moments in life when the scales fall from your eyes and you suddenly see clearly something that has hitherto been obscured from view. This was one of those moments. I had from time to time reflected on how different the workaday lives are of people in different corners of the Academy, even though we all call ourselves "Professor." Richard Taub in the Winthrop House Senior Common Room had gone off to India to do the research for his dissertation. Karl Heider had gone to uplands New Guinea. My sister, Barbara, had spent her time in a bio lab. My notion of an expedition was a visit to the Widener Library stacks. Exploring unknown territory meant going to a level of the stacks I had not previously been on. And here was E. O. Wilson, the creator of Sociobiology, who thought nothing at all about counting fifteen thousand ants. Had anyone asked me to figure out the number of ants in an anthill, the farthest I would have gone was watching eight or ten walk by and then guesstimating the rest.
To be sure, philosophers sometimes descend to the level of the particular. Hegel, after all, attempted to demonstrate a priori that there are only seven planets. But our tendency is to go in somewhat the opposite direction. Confronted with the real world, the reflex reaction of philosophers is to ask about possible worlds. It was clear to me that although we were both professors and authors, Wilson and I led lives so utterly different that no real mutual understanding was likely. It was also clear that however much the world might think of Wilson as the tendentious, controversial author of Sociobiology, his real interest was in those ants.
When our conversation about the anthill began to drag, Wilson took me into a nearby room in which there were rows of file cabinets. He pulled out a drawer at random to show me a card on which was impaled an ant. The card identified the ant as belonging to one of the more than twenty thousand species of ants that are estimated to exist somewhere or other on the face of the earth. A second eclaircissement illuminated my mind. I had a vision of thousands of English curates and amateur entomologists, each of whom had devoted much of his or her life to searching for, identifying, catching, impaling, and thus nailing down for all time one of those ant species. Here again, I saw clearly how different my field was from Wilson's. Philosophy does not advance by the taking of thousands of tiny steps, assuming for the sake of argument that it advances at all. Instead, ages pass during which little or nothing happens, although thousands of philosophers are doing their best. Then, there is a moment of transformation -- fourth century B. C,. in Greece, or the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe. Suddenly, the subject leaps forward, changing forever the way we think. As for all those good, grey, decent souls [myself included, of course] who soldier away, trying to think new thoughts, we might just as well not have existed. Great music is like this, I think. Would anyone ever play the music of Salieri had it not been for Peter Shaffer?
But Entomology is not like that at all. Every one of those file cards was the evidence of a worthwhile piece of work, undertaken, completed, and added to our knowledge of the ant. I was properly humbled. After we parted, I reflected that Wilson probably had learned nothing at all from meeting me, but I felt that I had learned a good deal from meeting him. It might not have been good for him, but it was good for me.
Later that year, near the end of the Spring Semester, the famous German scholar Dieter Henrich came to the campus and gave a talk on Hegel. Afterwards, a group of us took him to dinner at The Lord Jeffrey Amherst Inn, located on the Amherst Common. The Lord Jeff is the closest thing Amherst has to fine dining, although in fact there have only been a few times during the thirty-seven years I spent at UMass when its food was actually any good. Henrich ordered a bottle of wine, which the waiter brought with the usual flourishes, opening it, pouring a tiny bit into Henrich's glass, and waiting for him to taste it. Henrich went through the entire ritual. He swirled it, he sniffed it, he tasted it. And then he pronounced it no good. It was the first time in my entire life that I had ever seen someone actually do that. He made some impressive sounding remarks about the hillside on which the grapes were grown, and sent the bottle back for another one. Once again, he went through the ritual, and this time pronounced it satisfactory, to our collective relief. After the waiter had gone, Henrich allowed as how that bottle really wasn't right either, but he did not want to make trouble. I didn't think much of the talk -- I have never liked Hegel -- but I was mightily impressed by the dinner.
As my marriage to Cindy developed more strains, I quite unexpectedly returned to the violin, which I had played as a boy. [See Volume One, Chapter One, at blogpost for June 28, 2009]. I had not opened the case since 1961, when Barbara Bergmann, Ann Carter and I played string quartets several times during my last year as a Harvard Instructor. I got some new strings, took a few lessons, and began practicing a bit. Cindy had studied piano as a girl and played nicely. In the Barrett Place house we actually had both an upright and a Yamaha baby grand on which the boys practiced during their brief engagements with the instrument. Perhaps as a form of therapy to try to repair our marriage, Cindy and I took to playing Handel violin sonatas together. I wasn't very good, Lord knows, but then, we weren't planning to take it on the road.
One evening, John Harbison and his wife Rose Mary came to dinner. Harbison, who is now one of America's most celebrated classical composers, had even then, in his mid-forties, acquired a considerable reputation. He and Cindy were in different Sections of the same MIT Humanities Department. Rose Mary is a concert violinist who specializes in performing contemporary music. When she heard that we had been playing a bit together, she asked to see my violin. It took her no more than a few moments to declare, in rather minatory tones, "Your bow is dead." That sounded really serious, so i went right out and splurged $300 on a new bow, which did indeed improve somewhat my tone production. I thought of myself as a real big spender. Little did I know that less than twenty years later, I would spend five thousand dollars for a Benoit Roland bow and think myself lucky for having got it at such a good price.
Encouraged by the Alternative Track and the presence in my courses of students who were genuinely interested in what I was teaching, I returned to my Marx project and brought to completion the first of the three books I had sketched in my mind -- the exposition of the evolution of Classical and Marxian political economy leading to my analysis of Marx's explanation of the origin of profit in a capitalist economy. My study of the flood of books published by a worldwide network of Marxian economists gave me a firm grasp of the theoretical foundations, but much more challenging was the task of recasting them in a narrative that a reader could follow who did not have that mathematical material at his or her command.
I conceived the idea of writing a book that would, in its central narrative, demand no more of its readers than the ability to solve little models consisting of two or three linear equations. My meditation on this formal material had led me to the conclusion that the underlying ideas were fundamentally very simple, so that if I could get them clear enough in my own mind, I could expound them using very simple and easily comprehended examples. I decided that I would put in an appendix the formal proofs of the generalizations of all the claims I made in the text. Readers capable of handling the math could look at the appendix for the proofs, while the rest of the readers could simply follow my story from chapter to chapter.
When I had completed the manuscript, which cost me a good deal of effort principally because of the Appendix, I sent it to Sandy Thatcher at Princeton, and he agreed to publish it. In 1985 it appeared under the title Understanding Marx. The title echoed that of my book on Rawls, but the two books could not have been more different. The Rawls book was really an explanation of Rawls' failure to demonstrate his central thesis. In the Marx book I argued that despite problems and confusions, Marx's central insight was and is correct: Capitalism rests on exploitation. By the time I had completed Understanding Marx, I was prepared to call myself a Marxist.
Understanding Marx sold more than 4000 copies during its lifetime, in both hard cover and paper, so perhaps it reached an audience that found it of use, but the larger project of which it is a very minor part seems to have foundered. While I was working on my book, I believed that if one of the really gifted economists around the world ever wrote a full-scale alternative Introduction to Economics that could serve not as a critique of, but as a substitute for, the Samuelson text and its imitators, we could perhaps fundamentally change the way people in the profession understand capitalism. I had in mind a text that would develop explanatory devices as visually powerful and easy to grasp as the ubiquitous supply and demand curves that every beginning student of economics learns. The idea would be to build into the pedagogy the concept of exploitation, so that instead of portraying the capitalist marketplace as a benign institution smoothly allocating scarce resources in ways that maximize consumer satisfaction and the efficient use of those resources, students would be presented with a model of exploitation and crisis. I still believe that the possibility is there, but it does not seem that any of the sophisticated mathematical Marxists has taken up the challenge. I know my limits well enough to be sure that I am not the person for the job.
In 1984, my marriage to Cindy was in serious trouble. I had started once a week therapy with a McLean Hospital based psychiatrist named Lenore Boling, and I used the sessions really just to give voice to my unhappiness with what my relationship with Cindy had become. Despite the unhappiness, I do not think I ever shed a tear in those sessions over the shambles of the marriage. One day, however, I started talking about my work. I tried to explain to Dr. Boling that in all of my writing, whether it was on Kant's First Critique or Hume's Treatise or Das Kapital, my goal always was to plumb the depths of the author's central idea and recast it in a form so simple, so clear, so transparent that I could hold it before my students or my readers and show them its beauty. As I said these words, tears started to well up in me, and I finally had to stop talking because I could not finish. It was the only time in twenty years of psychotherapy that I cried openly in a session. Ever since that day, twenty-five years ago, I have understood that it is this intellectual intuition of the transparent beauty of an idea, not the desire for status or recognition or money, that has throughout my life been the driving force behind my writing and teaching. This is why it makes little difference to me whether reviewers agree with what I say, and it is why I am made somewhat uncomfortable by praise. The intrinsic beauty of the idea is the focus of my concern. It seems that I am, after all, more capable of shedding tears for the central argument of the Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding than I am for a failed marriage or even for a deceased parent. I am not at all sure that is admirable, but it is closer to the truth about myself than I have ever come before.
Despite our estrangement, Cindy and I continued virtually to the end to talk endlessly about her work. She was now working on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, and by late '84 and early '85 had already begun to write what would eventually be her third book. I was if anything even less knowledgeable about poetry than about fiction, despite my youthful enjoyment of Carl Sandburg and e.e. cummings, but I read a good deal of the corpus, and guided by Cindy, began to understand the richness of Dickinson's work. As always, I read every word Cindy wrote and offered editorial suggestions. At one point when her writing had progressed pretty far along, she heard of a new book on Dickinson that had just appeared. [Emily Dickinson is of course a cottage industry, and new things were being published all the time.] Cindy was anxious that someone might have pre-empted her insights, but she was too freaked out to look at the book, so I got a copy from the library and read enough of it to be able to reassure her that her work remained entirely original and unanticipated by this latest addition to the literature on Dickinson.
In late '84, we began to argue a good deal,, and for the first time actually talked about a separation. I am not going to try to rehearse here the substance of those arguments. There was nothing in them that has not been said by countless couples countless times. Neither of us was seeing someone else, or anything like that. If I had to summarize in a sentence what went wrong, I would say that when Cindy finally achieved the recognition that she had so long deserved, it became more and more painful for her to be in a relationship that had been been built on mentoring and guidance. Finally, in February of 1985, we agreed that we would live apart, at least for a while. Very reluctantly, I accepted Cindy's demand that I move out of the house. We called the boys into the living room and told them that we were separating. It was the very worst moment of my entire life, and writing about it even now, twenty-five years and more later, I cringe with pain and shame at my failure to hold the marriage together at least until both boys had finished high school and left home.
On March 1st, I moved into a wretched apartment not far from the Garfield Road house. The apartment had ghastly yellow shag carpeting and painted plywood on the walls. It was rumored to have been a dentist's office in a former incarnation, and at night I thought I could hear the screams of patients denied novacaine. Cindy I went into couples therapy, in a last ditch effort to salvage the marriage. I think there was actually a moment when the four members of the family between us had five therapists. Meanwhile, I saw my boys as much as I could, driving them to school and home again and taking them to dinner. Patrick was by now well on his way to earning the title of International Chess Master, and his world was the world of big league chess, but Toby, who was only fifteen, found the breach a good deal harder to handle.
Sitting alone in my apartment, I began to sift through and read the boxes of family papers that I had salvaged from my father's house. I think it was for me a form of therapy, a way of rediscovering a connection with a part of my life that antedated my long relationship with Cindy. I began with the letters between my parents dating from the late teens of the twentieth century. My grandmother each summer had taken her children to the Catskills to escape the heat and the disease of New York City, while my grandfather stayed in town to work as a cigar salesman and to pursue his political career as one of the leaders of the Socialist Party in New York. My father and mother were childhood friends, because my father's mother and my mother's mother had worked together in a New York sweatshop as girls. My parents began their courtship in Circle One of the Young People's Socialist League, or YPLS. My mother was forced to leave school at sixteen because of her father's crippling stroke, which made it difficult for him to support the family. As the oldest, my mother had to go to work as a secretary. Fairly quickly, she secured the position of secretary to the City Editor of the old Herald Tribune. All of this meant that in the summers, my father was in West Shokan or Big Indian while my mother stayed in Manhattan. They wrote to each other endlessly, my father sometimes taking my mother on imaginary hikes in the Catskills and describing to her what he saw. As I began to read these letters, I came to an appreciation of how much they had loved those mountains. As I have already written [Volume One, Chapter One], when my sister and I were little, the family went back to the places where my father had gone as a boy.
Ever since the death of my father, I had had in my possession two urns. One contained the ashes of my mother, which my father had never been able to part with. The other contained my father's ashes. By a stroke of fortune, just at that time, I received a letter from Leon Botstein at Bard College, inviting me to give a lecture. I decided to use the occasion of the talk to find a resting place at long last for the ashes of my parents. On Thursday, May 2, 1985, I set out for Annandale-on-Hudson, just across the river from the Ashoken Reservoir. Early in the afternoon, I found my way to a deserted part of the reservoir, which was very low because of a long drought, and walked fifty feet across the sandy shore to the water's edge. There I sat down with the two urns and read some of my father's lyrical descriptions of the Catskills, and my mother's loving replies. I reflected on the long association of myself, my parents, and their parents with this lovely part of New York. Then, mixing the ashes of my parents, I scattered them in the Reservoir, hoping finally to take leave of them.
The ritual did not achieve the resolution I had sought of the complex feelings I still felt for my parents, for there were unanswered questions, and an imbalance in their marriage that cried out to be righted. The questions concerned my father: Why had he become an alcoholic? Why had he changed from a hard-driving, ambitious, vigorous young man to a bitter, self-defeating, resentful older man? Why had he abandoned the deep moral and political commitments of his father, and instead turned inward? The imbalance concerned my mother -- the condescending and deprecatory attitude that my father always adopted toward her because of her lack of formal education and his arrogation to himself of the role of family intellectual, despite the fact that -- as was obvious to my sister and to me -- our mother was more intelligent and intellectually livelier than our father.
For years after I scattered the ashes I was troubled and puzzled by these matters, and I longed to find some answers to my questions. Eventually, I concluded that I might achieve insight and genuine closure by writing the story of their youth, their courtship, and the early years of their marriage as they were revealed in those letters. I have written that story in an unpublished book that sits on my shelf, next to the unpublished book I have written about the love story of my grandparents, and my grandfather's career in the Socialist Party. But those stories are theirs, and this story is mine.
The attempt Cindy and I made to reconcile failed, despite the best efforts of ourselves and our teams of therapists. On June 15, 1985, Cindy came to my apartment and told me that she wanted a divorce. The twenty-eight year love affair was over that had begun when I visited Whitman Hall, on leave from Fort Devens, and saw a beautiful young woman sitting at the Bell Desk. Our marriage of true minds was at long last ended.
THE INTERSECTION OF IDEOLOGY AND FASHION
As Susie and I were walking along Boulevard St. Germain today,I saw a man dressed in white linen slacks and a white linen shirt with a collar that I have always called a Nehru collar, the entire outfit accented with a colorful scarf. I thought, "That would be a good look for me," so off I went to BHV Homme to see whether they could outfit me. My French is shaky, but I was able to ask a saleslady about a chemise with a col Nehru. She looked mystified. Finally, I managed to convey what I meant, and she said, "Ah, bien sure, un col Mao." Apparently in Paris, Mao trumps Nehru. So much for the Unaligned Third World.
After all of that, they didn't have one.
After all of that, they didn't have one.
Thursday, 3 June 2010
FROM PARIS: VOLUME TWO CHAPTER FIVE THIRD INSTALLMENT
Once the boys were in high school, I would drive them, frequently before commuting out to Amherst. One morning, as I was pulling away from the circular driveway, there was a frantic honking from the car behind me. The driver got out and ran up to my car. It was Bob Nozick, whose son and Patrick were classmates. Bob cried, "I knew it had to be you, as soon as I saw the license plate!" We chatted for a bit and I allowed as how I should have gotten a "Question Authority" bumper sticker to go with it. Many years later, very near the tragically earlier end of his life, Bob taught Patrick in an undergraduate course at Harvard. Bob and I were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but I liked him enormously. Who could help but like him?
Brandeis and Boston University had been busts, but in the Fall of 1982, a possibility arose from a quite unexpected quarter. I got a call from the New School for Social Research, in lower Manhattan. The New School is a fascinating institution. It was founded in 1919 by socialists, and in 1938 created a University in Exile for European Jews fleeing Hitler. That body eventually evolved into the Graduate Faculty, which under one name or another continues to the present day. Over the decades, the great scholars who had formed the core of the faculty of the University in Exile grow old and retired or passed away. The Graduate Faculty, which had six doctorate granting departments, began to lose its luster, and in the case of some departments shrank until it was unclear whether their faculty was large enough and strong enough to survive. New York State, which periodically reviews and re-certifies institutions granting advanced degrees, officially warned the New School that unless it substantially strengthened several of the departments its certification would be withdrawn.
Faced with the choice of rebuilding the Graduate Faculty or closing it, the Board of the New School brought in a new President, Jonathan Fanton, with a mandate to rebuild the Graduate Faculty and return it to its former distinction. In the Fall of 1982, with the memory of the Brandeis and B. U. affairs fresh in my memory, and with the situation in the UMass Philosophy Department as bleak as ever, I was invited to teach a course at the New School and to talk with them about taking over the chairmanship of the Philosophy Department. The New School was an odd duck among American universities. Despite the distinguished history of the Graduate Faculty, it had taken to teaching almost all of its courses in the late afternoon or evening, as though it were an adult education program. By the early 80's, many of the people on its instructional staff were drawn from the New York area universities as moonlighters. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the idea of actually being part of a program in which I would be central, not peripheral, respected, not despised. So on Mondays and Wednesdays, I would drive out to Amherst and teach an Intro to Philosophy course and a graduate seminar on Formal Methods in Political Philosophy, and on Thursdays I would catch the shuttle from Logan to LaGuardia, take a cab to Washington Square, and teach a course on the Philosophy of David Hume.
The offer from the New School, when it finally came, was extraordinary: Chairmanship of the Philosophy Department, Professorships in the Departments of Political Science and Economics, and a salary $30,000 more than my UMass pay. It was a dream offer, tailored to my particular interests and accomplishments. I would be in a position to recruit an exciting group of philosophers, and to craft a powerful interdisciplinary doctoral program integrated with radical economists and progressive political scientists. It would be the first time in my career that I had actually been hired because of who I was and had become as a scholar and an intellectual.
The only problem with the position was that it would require me to be away from home three days a week at a minimum, and with my sons still in high school, that made me very uneasy indeed. The longer term prospect of committing myself to a commute did not really concern me, I confess. Because of my hesitations, I decided to take the offer to the Department to see what they would say. I gave a copy of the letter to Mike Jubien, who was then Head. Several days later, he called me at my home in Belmont. "The senior members have met," he said. [He meant the members of the majority -- Bob Ackerman never heard about the supposed meeting.] "We discussed the New School offer, and we think you should take it." And he hung up. I was furious, and insulted. But I refused to slink away, tail between my legs, even if the position to which I was going was far better than any I could ever hope for at UMass. I called Toby into the living room and asked him to sit down. I told him what was going on, and then I said to him, "Toby, I want you to remember this moment, and I want you to learn from it. When someone treats you badly, you don't run away. You stay and fight."
The next day, I made an appointment to see the Provost, a smart, savvy, attractive man named Loren Baritz, who had come to UMass from heading up NYU's Humanities Institute. Baritz's first response when I told him about the offer was surprising and refreshing. He said, "Congratulations." Then he said, "What can we do to keep you?" had my list of demands all set, and I rattled them off. "First of all, I want you to match the salary." "I will raise your salary by ten thousand. How is that?" I said it would do. Money wasn't really what was driving me away from UMass.
"Second, I want a doctoral program in the Philosophy Department that I can be a genuine part of. I and several others in the Department have been systematically excluded from any real role in graduate education. I want a doctoral program in Social and Political Philosophy." Baritz thought for a moment and said, "I will demand that the Department allow you to create such a program, and if they do not, I will remove the Head and put the Department in receivership."
"Third," I said, "I want a phone in my office."
"I can't do that," Baritz replied. He knew the limits of his power.
Baritz first sent Bob Ackerman and me to see the Dean of the Graduate School, Sam Conti, a smart, brash, no-nonsense guy for whom I have always had a soft spot. When Bob and I told him that we were effectively excluded from the graduate program in the Philosophy Department and that neither of us sat on a single doctoral committee, he told us he didn't believe us. But at UMass, it is the Graduate Dean who officially appoints all doctoral committees, so he had the records in his office. He did a quick check and came back, looking stunned. We were right. That base line established, he called a meeting of the members of the Department to tell them that they had to let us create a track in the doctoral program over which we would have control. Leonard Ehrlich insisted on broadening the scope of the program to include Recent Continental Philosophy as his price for joining our rebellion, and the four of us [Bob, Ann, John, and I] agreed. Fred Feldman assured Conti that there was no interest in those subjects among the students, and that the new variant of the program would be a non-starter, but Conti insisted, and fortunately the members of the majority were too inexperienced in the ways of the Academy to realize that Baritz' threat was really all bluff. The Philosophy Department was viewed as a success by the Administration. Indeed, some years earlier it had been declared one of three "centers of excellence" in the Faculty of Humanities and Fine Arts, a classification that guaranteed it special treatment when Teaching Assistantships and faculty lines were handed out. There was no way the Office of the Provost was going to put it into receivership. I thanked Jonathan Fanton graciously for the offer and stayed at UMass.
And so it came to pass that in AY 1982-83, The Alternative Track in Social and Political Philosophy and Recent Continental Philosophy was born. The AT, as it almost immediately came to be known, was not all that different in substance from the existing doctoral program. Our students would still have to take Logic and the History of Philosophy and all that good stuff. The difference was that our students would not be bullied and sneered at and told that what they wanted to do wasn't philosophy. Bob and I would run the program independently of the members of the majority. There was even some suggestion that we would get a share of the Teaching Assistantships.
There already were a handful of students in the Department who wanted to study with us, for all that they were, in the words of Isaiah, despisèd and rejected. Phil Cox, Ed Rayher, Margaret Nash, a few others. But very quickly, things began to develop. Quite naturally, the establishment of the AT transformed the de facto divisions of the Department into a formal split. We stopped going to their parties and started having parties of our own. Bob and I alternated serving as the AGPD of the AT [which is to say, the Associate Graduate Program Director of the Alternative Track -- Fred Feldman clung like a limpet to the official title of GPD, and I think would rather have died than forfeit it.]
Inasmuch as the creation of the AT had been my price for staying at UMass, I quite naturally imagined that I would now have students eager to study Political Philosophy, but of course nothing quite like that happened. Oh, they all took my courses, even the ones that required them to tackle really difficult logic and mathematics. But their hearts belonged to Recent Continental Philosophy. I should have anticipated this, but I admit it caught me by surprise.
Quite the most astonishing result of the establishment of the AT was the transformation of Bob Ackerman. In one of the most extraordinary bits of mid-course correction that I have ever seen, Bob went from being a Philosopher of Science to being a scholar of Continental Philosophy, seemingly overnight. And I do mean scholar. Bob brushed up his German, which was already excellent, and started teaching Nietzsche and Hegel. He wrote a book on Nietzsche in a year or two. Bob taught himself Danish so that he could teach Kierkegaard. He flipped French word cards to prepare himself for teaching Derrida and Foucault. He very quickly made himself the indispensable core of the AT.
And students responded. To the surprise and dismay of Feldman, Chappell, Gettier, Sleigh, Jubien, Matthews, Robison, and the others, incoming students began to opt for the AT in increasing numbers. Within three years or so, fully half of the graduate students in the doctoral program were enrolled in the AT. Bob and I were swamped with students wanting us to direct their dissertations. I suppose I am so far from being an unbiased observer that my recollections have no evidentiary value whatsoever, but our students really did seem more alive than theirs. Our students seemed to be having more fun than theirs. I don't think our students were smarter than theirs, but they weren't dumber either. They simply had more juice.
Those were good years for both Bob and me. At long last, we had forged a real place in the Department that we could call out own. Neither of us had the slightest wish to "take over" the graduate program as a whole, nor did we have any missionary desire to convert the students of the majority to our way of thinking. It was obvious that what we were teaching was capable of drawing substantial numbers of students to our classes, and that was sufficient for us. There was one problem: we needed more faculty to handle the numbers of students signed up for the AT, but there was no way that the majority could permit that to happen. Indeed, at one point, during a time of budgetary constraint when departments were begging their Deans for permission to hire, the Department was actually authorized to recruit a political philosopher, and the majority chose to pass up the chance rather than run the risk that whomever they found would rat them out and join forces with us.
Our Alternative Track became one more element in a campus wide ferment of high powered leftwing thinking. The conversations in those days among colleagues were, I found, exciting, informed, sophisticated, and fluid. I had encountered nothing remotely like them at Harvard, at Chicago, or at Columbia. Rather than talk in general terms about what those days were like, I should like to give readers of this Memoir some concrete sense of the flavor of our conversations and debates those conversations by reproducing word for word a two page single-spaced memo that my colleague Ann Ferguson dashed off the morning after a meeting of a seminar conducted by Steven Resnick and Rick Wolff, the two Althusserian Marxists in the Economics Department. Resnick and Wolff, you will recall formed the core of the Althusserian wing of the Radical faction in the Economics Department, with Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis at the heart of the opposed faction. When I came across the memorandum in a folder I was leafing through to check something for these Memoirs, I sent Ann an email and got her permission to include it here. It is hurried and completely in the moment, making reference to things that both of them were aware of. Rather than try to explicate it, I will let it stand on its own as an example of the sort of collegial communication that was happening on the UMass campus. Ann became very friendly with Sam Bowles, as she indicates, and was on the Bowles-Gintis side of the divide in the Econ Department. The memo is dated Nov. 5, 1981. Here it is:
"Dear Steve and Rick, Very interesting seminar, albeit somewhat frustrating. Everyone has their own agenda, we don't know each others intellectual work very well. Thus, every seminar seems like attacking another tip of the iceberg, with so many assumptions undeveloped. I appreciate Rick's question about hostility at the beginning -- it's important to understand our political differences. I know about you guys only from the other camp in the Econ Dept, which perhaps unfairly types your political practice as "Class First" (altho it is admitted by all that no-one knows what you two really do for political practice outside the Dep't.) If I were to type my political practice it would clearly be an attempt to do Class, Sex and Race organizing equally; picket lines at strikes for Class, auton. Women's groups around reproductive rights for sex, etc. and working hard to find ways to make alliances with Third World groups and nasty sexist Black Nationalists on campus for race. This is fragmented politics but then the American left is so fragmented that what's to do? And besides, depending on one's criterion for class, it isn't even clear that there is (yet) a coherent American working class, given ethnic, racial, language etc. barriers, waves of immigrants and all -- like Marx on the French peasantry (see my enclosed paper).
A couple of points that would take a whole lot more talking. Thru political practice not on the theoretical level I've discovered that it is necessary to talk to people about their interests and how they'd be better realized by alliance with certain groups against certain groups, etc in order to bring about the elimination of structural situations (in capitalism, patriarchy, racial domination systems) which perpetuate exploitative relations between groups. Now, either your theory about this kind of talk is that it is necessary but ideological (in Althusser's distinction between ideology and "science"), or you are committed to some statement that suggests a relatively privileged (as opposed to absolutely privileged or anything-you-feel-like relativism) position in this sense: given these interests of these groups I identify with (which may be entirely system-constructed), this group would be better off, would be more likely to meet/get/achieve these interests if the adopted my analysis/entry point and concrete (empirical, contextual) analysis of the relevant social groups and their relationships and understood in this context who their enemies really are: This isn't [Rick] Wolff's absolute correspondence theory; it isn't an absolute (i.e. unchanging) distinction between appearance and reality: on the other hand, it isn't the "I like ice cream" variety of relativism either. This is what I meant by the feeling that your epistemology lacks a way to understand/posit revolutionary values. You may not agree with this but I think any political organizing implied an assumption of shared values and a way to achieve them better. It may not be possible to prove/disprove a sceptic or an "I like ice cream you don't" relativism, but the language of politics implies (I think) some kind of intersubjective test of whether a political change has been successful in meeting the group you identify with's interests. In fact, your language in the epistemology paper (e.g. the distinction between thought-concretes and concrete-reals) assumes a distinction between appearance and reality. You may not want to use the concept of "empiricism" as it has been used in the history of philosophy, but in fact David Hume in that terminology is labeled an empiricist, and he did not hold a correspondence theory. In fact he held that what existed was a collection of sense-appearances in the mind, and then some mental operations of abstraction which collected these together into general concepts. He thus rejected the appearance/reality distinction, and in some terminologies is called an idealist for that reason. Hume was the intellectual giant who was the forerunner in important ways of the Vienna Circle positivist school. Interestingly enough, his analysis of morality as collections of feelings also can be said to connect to the positivist's tendency to assume statements about sensible appearances are factual while moral claims are emotional, thus not "scientific." But he also in a contradictory tendency posited an ideal observer theory: what "good" means is what a fictive rational, well informed person would like in X situation, which is the precursor of the American pragmatist "convergence" theories first suggested by C. S. Peirce -- and probably the tradition that informed Jan Dizard's comments last night.
In any case, Hume's empiricism holds there is no distinction between appearance and reality, and obfuscates the distinction between idealism and materialism. So your claims about two interlocking processes, Thought-concretes and concrete-reals he would regard as "metaphysical" garbage, and in fact a version of the correspondence theory.
I enclose this paper of mine written in 1976 and printed in a collection of essays about the Ehrenreich's "New Class" PMC theory, Pat. Walker, ed Between Labor and Capital, South End 1978. I still essentially agree with the view I espouse in that paper although I've since developed a more extensive "Dual Systems" theory like Heidi Hartmanns, as is shown by Nancy Folbre and my paper in Sargent, ed Women and Revolution, South End, 1981, "The Unhappy Marriage of Capitalism and Patriarchy". As you will see by the footnotes, I have done a lot of talking to Sam Bowles about this stuff. However, we disagree a lot: he wants to substitute Domination relations for Exploitation relations as the basic primitive. I'm not convinced, especially since all he can say to object to my arguments that women are exploited not just oppressed is that there is no way to make the distinction between necessary and surplus labor without markets (thus not in the family!) Which cuts out understanding necessary/surplus labor in feudal, slave etc. economies. Anyway, as you can see, hopefully, the paradigm I presented last night of the Radical Feminist approach to understanding feudalism is not mine! I think we need two (and possibly three, I still haven't figured out how to handle race) points of entry to understand the complex interactions and contradictions between exp0loitative sex/affective production systems and other material systems of production.
One last point re overdetermination: One can believe in overdetermination without adopting your kind of relativist stance. One can disagree about points of entry and principles of change/tendencies in social totalities without adopting your kind of relativist stance. You've said yourself that E. P. Thompson's epistemology doesn't affect his concept of class or his concrete analysis of the British WC history. So, if there is only a contingent (accidental) and not logical connection between one's epistemology or methodology and the concrete historical analysis one gives, why in fact should those students in the Economics Dep't worry about epistemology?
Cheers, Ann
I am not going to suggest that broadsides of this length, sophistication, and intensity were being fired off daily, but it is obvious that Ann knows she can assume a level of ideological sophistication that on most campuses around the country would be extremely rare. When people ask me whether I am sorry, in the end, that I left Columbia for UMass, I try to explain that UMass was much more exciting intellectually than Columbia and much more politically sympatico as well. They always look dubious, but I have never had any doubt.
Brandeis and Boston University had been busts, but in the Fall of 1982, a possibility arose from a quite unexpected quarter. I got a call from the New School for Social Research, in lower Manhattan. The New School is a fascinating institution. It was founded in 1919 by socialists, and in 1938 created a University in Exile for European Jews fleeing Hitler. That body eventually evolved into the Graduate Faculty, which under one name or another continues to the present day. Over the decades, the great scholars who had formed the core of the faculty of the University in Exile grow old and retired or passed away. The Graduate Faculty, which had six doctorate granting departments, began to lose its luster, and in the case of some departments shrank until it was unclear whether their faculty was large enough and strong enough to survive. New York State, which periodically reviews and re-certifies institutions granting advanced degrees, officially warned the New School that unless it substantially strengthened several of the departments its certification would be withdrawn.
Faced with the choice of rebuilding the Graduate Faculty or closing it, the Board of the New School brought in a new President, Jonathan Fanton, with a mandate to rebuild the Graduate Faculty and return it to its former distinction. In the Fall of 1982, with the memory of the Brandeis and B. U. affairs fresh in my memory, and with the situation in the UMass Philosophy Department as bleak as ever, I was invited to teach a course at the New School and to talk with them about taking over the chairmanship of the Philosophy Department. The New School was an odd duck among American universities. Despite the distinguished history of the Graduate Faculty, it had taken to teaching almost all of its courses in the late afternoon or evening, as though it were an adult education program. By the early 80's, many of the people on its instructional staff were drawn from the New York area universities as moonlighters. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by the idea of actually being part of a program in which I would be central, not peripheral, respected, not despised. So on Mondays and Wednesdays, I would drive out to Amherst and teach an Intro to Philosophy course and a graduate seminar on Formal Methods in Political Philosophy, and on Thursdays I would catch the shuttle from Logan to LaGuardia, take a cab to Washington Square, and teach a course on the Philosophy of David Hume.
The offer from the New School, when it finally came, was extraordinary: Chairmanship of the Philosophy Department, Professorships in the Departments of Political Science and Economics, and a salary $30,000 more than my UMass pay. It was a dream offer, tailored to my particular interests and accomplishments. I would be in a position to recruit an exciting group of philosophers, and to craft a powerful interdisciplinary doctoral program integrated with radical economists and progressive political scientists. It would be the first time in my career that I had actually been hired because of who I was and had become as a scholar and an intellectual.
The only problem with the position was that it would require me to be away from home three days a week at a minimum, and with my sons still in high school, that made me very uneasy indeed. The longer term prospect of committing myself to a commute did not really concern me, I confess. Because of my hesitations, I decided to take the offer to the Department to see what they would say. I gave a copy of the letter to Mike Jubien, who was then Head. Several days later, he called me at my home in Belmont. "The senior members have met," he said. [He meant the members of the majority -- Bob Ackerman never heard about the supposed meeting.] "We discussed the New School offer, and we think you should take it." And he hung up. I was furious, and insulted. But I refused to slink away, tail between my legs, even if the position to which I was going was far better than any I could ever hope for at UMass. I called Toby into the living room and asked him to sit down. I told him what was going on, and then I said to him, "Toby, I want you to remember this moment, and I want you to learn from it. When someone treats you badly, you don't run away. You stay and fight."
The next day, I made an appointment to see the Provost, a smart, savvy, attractive man named Loren Baritz, who had come to UMass from heading up NYU's Humanities Institute. Baritz's first response when I told him about the offer was surprising and refreshing. He said, "Congratulations." Then he said, "What can we do to keep you?" had my list of demands all set, and I rattled them off. "First of all, I want you to match the salary." "I will raise your salary by ten thousand. How is that?" I said it would do. Money wasn't really what was driving me away from UMass.
"Second, I want a doctoral program in the Philosophy Department that I can be a genuine part of. I and several others in the Department have been systematically excluded from any real role in graduate education. I want a doctoral program in Social and Political Philosophy." Baritz thought for a moment and said, "I will demand that the Department allow you to create such a program, and if they do not, I will remove the Head and put the Department in receivership."
"Third," I said, "I want a phone in my office."
"I can't do that," Baritz replied. He knew the limits of his power.
Baritz first sent Bob Ackerman and me to see the Dean of the Graduate School, Sam Conti, a smart, brash, no-nonsense guy for whom I have always had a soft spot. When Bob and I told him that we were effectively excluded from the graduate program in the Philosophy Department and that neither of us sat on a single doctoral committee, he told us he didn't believe us. But at UMass, it is the Graduate Dean who officially appoints all doctoral committees, so he had the records in his office. He did a quick check and came back, looking stunned. We were right. That base line established, he called a meeting of the members of the Department to tell them that they had to let us create a track in the doctoral program over which we would have control. Leonard Ehrlich insisted on broadening the scope of the program to include Recent Continental Philosophy as his price for joining our rebellion, and the four of us [Bob, Ann, John, and I] agreed. Fred Feldman assured Conti that there was no interest in those subjects among the students, and that the new variant of the program would be a non-starter, but Conti insisted, and fortunately the members of the majority were too inexperienced in the ways of the Academy to realize that Baritz' threat was really all bluff. The Philosophy Department was viewed as a success by the Administration. Indeed, some years earlier it had been declared one of three "centers of excellence" in the Faculty of Humanities and Fine Arts, a classification that guaranteed it special treatment when Teaching Assistantships and faculty lines were handed out. There was no way the Office of the Provost was going to put it into receivership. I thanked Jonathan Fanton graciously for the offer and stayed at UMass.
And so it came to pass that in AY 1982-83, The Alternative Track in Social and Political Philosophy and Recent Continental Philosophy was born. The AT, as it almost immediately came to be known, was not all that different in substance from the existing doctoral program. Our students would still have to take Logic and the History of Philosophy and all that good stuff. The difference was that our students would not be bullied and sneered at and told that what they wanted to do wasn't philosophy. Bob and I would run the program independently of the members of the majority. There was even some suggestion that we would get a share of the Teaching Assistantships.
There already were a handful of students in the Department who wanted to study with us, for all that they were, in the words of Isaiah, despisèd and rejected. Phil Cox, Ed Rayher, Margaret Nash, a few others. But very quickly, things began to develop. Quite naturally, the establishment of the AT transformed the de facto divisions of the Department into a formal split. We stopped going to their parties and started having parties of our own. Bob and I alternated serving as the AGPD of the AT [which is to say, the Associate Graduate Program Director of the Alternative Track -- Fred Feldman clung like a limpet to the official title of GPD, and I think would rather have died than forfeit it.]
Inasmuch as the creation of the AT had been my price for staying at UMass, I quite naturally imagined that I would now have students eager to study Political Philosophy, but of course nothing quite like that happened. Oh, they all took my courses, even the ones that required them to tackle really difficult logic and mathematics. But their hearts belonged to Recent Continental Philosophy. I should have anticipated this, but I admit it caught me by surprise.
Quite the most astonishing result of the establishment of the AT was the transformation of Bob Ackerman. In one of the most extraordinary bits of mid-course correction that I have ever seen, Bob went from being a Philosopher of Science to being a scholar of Continental Philosophy, seemingly overnight. And I do mean scholar. Bob brushed up his German, which was already excellent, and started teaching Nietzsche and Hegel. He wrote a book on Nietzsche in a year or two. Bob taught himself Danish so that he could teach Kierkegaard. He flipped French word cards to prepare himself for teaching Derrida and Foucault. He very quickly made himself the indispensable core of the AT.
And students responded. To the surprise and dismay of Feldman, Chappell, Gettier, Sleigh, Jubien, Matthews, Robison, and the others, incoming students began to opt for the AT in increasing numbers. Within three years or so, fully half of the graduate students in the doctoral program were enrolled in the AT. Bob and I were swamped with students wanting us to direct their dissertations. I suppose I am so far from being an unbiased observer that my recollections have no evidentiary value whatsoever, but our students really did seem more alive than theirs. Our students seemed to be having more fun than theirs. I don't think our students were smarter than theirs, but they weren't dumber either. They simply had more juice.
Those were good years for both Bob and me. At long last, we had forged a real place in the Department that we could call out own. Neither of us had the slightest wish to "take over" the graduate program as a whole, nor did we have any missionary desire to convert the students of the majority to our way of thinking. It was obvious that what we were teaching was capable of drawing substantial numbers of students to our classes, and that was sufficient for us. There was one problem: we needed more faculty to handle the numbers of students signed up for the AT, but there was no way that the majority could permit that to happen. Indeed, at one point, during a time of budgetary constraint when departments were begging their Deans for permission to hire, the Department was actually authorized to recruit a political philosopher, and the majority chose to pass up the chance rather than run the risk that whomever they found would rat them out and join forces with us.
Our Alternative Track became one more element in a campus wide ferment of high powered leftwing thinking. The conversations in those days among colleagues were, I found, exciting, informed, sophisticated, and fluid. I had encountered nothing remotely like them at Harvard, at Chicago, or at Columbia. Rather than talk in general terms about what those days were like, I should like to give readers of this Memoir some concrete sense of the flavor of our conversations and debates those conversations by reproducing word for word a two page single-spaced memo that my colleague Ann Ferguson dashed off the morning after a meeting of a seminar conducted by Steven Resnick and Rick Wolff, the two Althusserian Marxists in the Economics Department. Resnick and Wolff, you will recall formed the core of the Althusserian wing of the Radical faction in the Economics Department, with Sam Bowles and Herb Gintis at the heart of the opposed faction. When I came across the memorandum in a folder I was leafing through to check something for these Memoirs, I sent Ann an email and got her permission to include it here. It is hurried and completely in the moment, making reference to things that both of them were aware of. Rather than try to explicate it, I will let it stand on its own as an example of the sort of collegial communication that was happening on the UMass campus. Ann became very friendly with Sam Bowles, as she indicates, and was on the Bowles-Gintis side of the divide in the Econ Department. The memo is dated Nov. 5, 1981. Here it is:
"Dear Steve and Rick, Very interesting seminar, albeit somewhat frustrating. Everyone has their own agenda, we don't know each others intellectual work very well. Thus, every seminar seems like attacking another tip of the iceberg, with so many assumptions undeveloped. I appreciate Rick's question about hostility at the beginning -- it's important to understand our political differences. I know about you guys only from the other camp in the Econ Dept, which perhaps unfairly types your political practice as "Class First" (altho it is admitted by all that no-one knows what you two really do for political practice outside the Dep't.) If I were to type my political practice it would clearly be an attempt to do Class, Sex and Race organizing equally; picket lines at strikes for Class, auton. Women's groups around reproductive rights for sex, etc. and working hard to find ways to make alliances with Third World groups and nasty sexist Black Nationalists on campus for race. This is fragmented politics but then the American left is so fragmented that what's to do? And besides, depending on one's criterion for class, it isn't even clear that there is (yet) a coherent American working class, given ethnic, racial, language etc. barriers, waves of immigrants and all -- like Marx on the French peasantry (see my enclosed paper).
A couple of points that would take a whole lot more talking. Thru political practice not on the theoretical level I've discovered that it is necessary to talk to people about their interests and how they'd be better realized by alliance with certain groups against certain groups, etc in order to bring about the elimination of structural situations (in capitalism, patriarchy, racial domination systems) which perpetuate exploitative relations between groups. Now, either your theory about this kind of talk is that it is necessary but ideological (in Althusser's distinction between ideology and "science"), or you are committed to some statement that suggests a relatively privileged (as opposed to absolutely privileged or anything-you-feel-like relativism) position in this sense: given these interests of these groups I identify with (which may be entirely system-constructed), this group would be better off, would be more likely to meet/get/achieve these interests if the adopted my analysis/entry point and concrete (empirical, contextual) analysis of the relevant social groups and their relationships and understood in this context who their enemies really are: This isn't [Rick] Wolff's absolute correspondence theory; it isn't an absolute (i.e. unchanging) distinction between appearance and reality: on the other hand, it isn't the "I like ice cream" variety of relativism either. This is what I meant by the feeling that your epistemology lacks a way to understand/posit revolutionary values. You may not agree with this but I think any political organizing implied an assumption of shared values and a way to achieve them better. It may not be possible to prove/disprove a sceptic or an "I like ice cream you don't" relativism, but the language of politics implies (I think) some kind of intersubjective test of whether a political change has been successful in meeting the group you identify with's interests. In fact, your language in the epistemology paper (e.g. the distinction between thought-concretes and concrete-reals) assumes a distinction between appearance and reality. You may not want to use the concept of "empiricism" as it has been used in the history of philosophy, but in fact David Hume in that terminology is labeled an empiricist, and he did not hold a correspondence theory. In fact he held that what existed was a collection of sense-appearances in the mind, and then some mental operations of abstraction which collected these together into general concepts. He thus rejected the appearance/reality distinction, and in some terminologies is called an idealist for that reason. Hume was the intellectual giant who was the forerunner in important ways of the Vienna Circle positivist school. Interestingly enough, his analysis of morality as collections of feelings also can be said to connect to the positivist's tendency to assume statements about sensible appearances are factual while moral claims are emotional, thus not "scientific." But he also in a contradictory tendency posited an ideal observer theory: what "good" means is what a fictive rational, well informed person would like in X situation, which is the precursor of the American pragmatist "convergence" theories first suggested by C. S. Peirce -- and probably the tradition that informed Jan Dizard's comments last night.
In any case, Hume's empiricism holds there is no distinction between appearance and reality, and obfuscates the distinction between idealism and materialism. So your claims about two interlocking processes, Thought-concretes and concrete-reals he would regard as "metaphysical" garbage, and in fact a version of the correspondence theory.
I enclose this paper of mine written in 1976 and printed in a collection of essays about the Ehrenreich's "New Class" PMC theory, Pat. Walker, ed Between Labor and Capital, South End 1978. I still essentially agree with the view I espouse in that paper although I've since developed a more extensive "Dual Systems" theory like Heidi Hartmanns, as is shown by Nancy Folbre and my paper in Sargent, ed Women and Revolution, South End, 1981, "The Unhappy Marriage of Capitalism and Patriarchy". As you will see by the footnotes, I have done a lot of talking to Sam Bowles about this stuff. However, we disagree a lot: he wants to substitute Domination relations for Exploitation relations as the basic primitive. I'm not convinced, especially since all he can say to object to my arguments that women are exploited not just oppressed is that there is no way to make the distinction between necessary and surplus labor without markets (thus not in the family!) Which cuts out understanding necessary/surplus labor in feudal, slave etc. economies. Anyway, as you can see, hopefully, the paradigm I presented last night of the Radical Feminist approach to understanding feudalism is not mine! I think we need two (and possibly three, I still haven't figured out how to handle race) points of entry to understand the complex interactions and contradictions between exp0loitative sex/affective production systems and other material systems of production.
One last point re overdetermination: One can believe in overdetermination without adopting your kind of relativist stance. One can disagree about points of entry and principles of change/tendencies in social totalities without adopting your kind of relativist stance. You've said yourself that E. P. Thompson's epistemology doesn't affect his concept of class or his concrete analysis of the British WC history. So, if there is only a contingent (accidental) and not logical connection between one's epistemology or methodology and the concrete historical analysis one gives, why in fact should those students in the Economics Dep't worry about epistemology?
Cheers, Ann
I am not going to suggest that broadsides of this length, sophistication, and intensity were being fired off daily, but it is obvious that Ann knows she can assume a level of ideological sophistication that on most campuses around the country would be extremely rare. When people ask me whether I am sorry, in the end, that I left Columbia for UMass, I try to explain that UMass was much more exciting intellectually than Columbia and much more politically sympatico as well. They always look dubious, but I have never had any doubt.
Tuesday, 1 June 2010
MEMOIR VOLUME TWO CHAPTER FIVE SECOND INSTALLMENT
I was not ready in those early Belmont years to begin the large multi-volume work on Marx that I had conceived while teaching the seminar on Classics of Critical Social Theory, but I did bring some of what I had learned to the printed page. After the paper in Philosophy and Public Affairs, which I still believe makes a genuine contribution to the further development of Marx's analysis of capitalist exploitation, I wrote several papers that were, in one way or another, designed to remind scholars that Marx is not dead, Paul Samuelson and company notwithstanding. [I have always resented Samuelson's off-hand snide remark that Marx was "a minor post-Ricardian autodidact."]
In '82, Social Research published "Piero Sraffa and the Rehabilitation of Classical Political Economy," which later appeared in translation in an Italian journal, Communita. That same year, Midwest Studies in Philosophy carried "The Analytics of the Labor Theory of Value in David Ricardo and Adam Smith." The next year, the Journal of Philosophy published a short paper, "The Rehabilitation of Karl Marx," and in '84, Social Research carried a much longer essay called "The Resurrection of Karl Marx, Political Economist" [I was obviously running out of titles.] There was nothing remotely original in any of these papers save the first, but I conceived them as a sort of missionary work, bringing the Word to the benighted primitives living in Philosophy. I am afraid I was pretty much a flop as St. Paul. None of those papers, so far as I was ever able to tell, made the slightest impression on the readers of philosophical journals.
At the same time, volumes continued to appear with my name on them, even though for the most part they required very little effort on my part. About Philosophy had done well enough to warrant a second edition, the work for which was completed while we were still living in Northampton. This revision, the first of what have been nine to date, was rather extensive, involving an expansion and reorganization of the text. The odd practices of textbook publishers being what they are, the second edition carries a 1981 publication date, even though the first copies were actually in my hands before the movers came to transport us to Belmont. And of course the translations continued: German and French for in Defense of Anarchism and Spanish for Understanding Rawls. Translations obviously require literally no effort on my part. Indeed, I never see the translation until after it has been published, and even then I sometimes have to hassle the publisher to get my free copies. But my life-long obsession with writing books makes me take a secret and unwarranted pride in each new volume -- even a paperback edition -- that carries my name. At this point there are seventy such volumes, all sitting on a shelf in our little apartment in Paris. It is not for nothing that I think of myself as Mr. Toad.
Even though Belmont is only a short car or bus ride from Harvard, it was at Boston University, across the Charles, that I found far and away the most intellectually exciting and socially satisfying opportunity to widen my circle of friends and acquaintances. Two long-time members of the Philosophy Department, Bob Cohen and Marx Wartofsky, had started an operation known as "The Boston University Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science." Each year, they scheduled a number of sessions -- sometimes as many as one a week -- at which a speaker would present a talk followed by discussion. If you managed to wangle your way into the inner circle of the Colloquium, which I did pretty quickly, you were invited to a dinner for twenty or thirty people before the talk. Those evenings were the high point of my social and intellectual life during the Belmont years.
Bob and Marx had the widest, most eclectic conception imaginable of what counted as "philosophy of science." They brought in historians, medical doctors, physicists, chemists, anthropologists, and sociologists, as well as the usual suspects from Philosophy. The question periods could be riotous affairs, straight out of a Marx Brothers movie. Somehow, no matter how arcane the subject, it seemed that the only other expert in the world was sitting in the audience. I recall one evening when a Professor of Medicine at the UMass Medical School in Worcester showed up to deliver a blood-curdling lecture on the sacrificial practices of the Aztecs. We all sat there in an appalled silence as he went on about priests plucking the hearts from living victims. What could anyone think to ask once the question period came? As soon as Bob called for questions, a young man with long hair jumped up in the back of the room. "I am a descendant of the Aztecs," he began, "and I know something about this." The fight was one. Where on earth had Bob and Marx found him?
I loved those colloquia. They were everything the UMass Philosophy Department had never been. Especially during a time when my marriage to Cindy was becoming more stressful and unsatisfying, the BU evenings were oases in an emotional desert. Bob Cohen had the money for an assistant, who did much of the work of scheduling and such. In the early years of my participation, Debra Nails did the honors. Debra is a philosopher whose scholarly specialty is Plato and the Greeks. She was [and I am sure, after all these years, still is] a vibrant, beautiful red-haired woman whose intelligence and charm did much to lift the colloquium from the category of a scholarly symposium to something like the Old Regime tradition of the soirée.
Despite the Brandeis fiasco, I was still trying to relocate in the Boston area. At one point, discussion began with the B. U. Philosophy Department, which included even some talk about possibly having Bob Ackerman and me take over the running of the Colloquium. Marx had married a New York based political philosopher, Carol Gould, and was planning to move to CUNY. Things went so far as a vote by the Philosophy Department to offer me a professorship, but by then John Silber was President and Emperor for Life at BU, and I was not surprised when he arranged, through his flunky, Provost Jon Westling, to veto the appointment. The fact that I had anthologized Silber years earlier counted for nothing, of course. That was the third time I was denied a senior appointment because of my politics, and in each case things turned out better for the rebuff. But I do feel that I ended one up on John. My Massachusetts automobile license plate for many years read I. KANT. I think he would have killed for that plate.
I was still responsible for teaching a full load of courses in Amherst, of course. I was by now so alienated from the Philosophy Department that I wanted as little to do with them as possible, and the majority who controlled the Department were even more eager to see me fulfill my duties anywhere but in their program. While I was having lunch with Herb Gintis and Sam Bowles one day, I floated the idea of teaching a course in Economics. "I could teach a seminar on Game Theory, " I suggested, "or perhaps one on the Transformation Problem." [That, for the non-Marxists and non-Economists among my readers, is the name given to the theoretical problem of explaining formally the "transformation" of labor values into equilibrium prices in a capitalist market.] Sam and Herb suggested that I send a note to Jim Crotty, who by then was Department Chair. Back came a memo that said, "You have been assigned a section of 200 students in Econ 103, Introductory MicroEconomics, for Spring '82. You will have four TAs." It seems the popularity of the radicals in the Department had created a crisis of abundance. Econ was swamped with students who wanted to take an intro course, and there just weren't enough seats in the regularly scheduled sections. Jim jumped on my offer and set things up before I had a chance to protest.
I was stunned. I had never actually taken an Economics course in my life, although I had, thank heavens, sat in on Don Katzner's graduate Micro course. I went to the Harvard Book Store on Mass Ave and asked them, "What textbook does the Harvard Economics Department use for Introductory Micro?" "Lipsey and Steiner," they said. So I bought a copy of Lipsey and Steiner and assigned it for my Econ 103 section. There I was again, teaching something I didn't know as a way of learning it. The story of my professional life. It was Soc. Sci. 5 at Harvard all over again.
The first day of class, I walked into a large lecture hall filled to overflowing with undergraduates. I had the eerie sense that lurking just outside the doors were milling throngs of students who had failed to make it into any of the Econ 103 sections that term, so that if someone walked out of the lecture hall, the seat would immediately be filled. "Good morning," I began, "my name is Professor Robert Paul Wolff." There was an angry murmur, and I suddenly realized what had happened. The course catalogue said "Professor R. Wolff," and of course all of these Freshmen and Sophomores assumed it meant Richard Wolff, one of the founding Marxists and a wildly popular undergraduate lecturer. I hurried on. 'You have never taken Micro and I have never taught it, so we will learn it together." It would be an exaggeration to say that I had captured their hearts.
I plowed through all the standard topics. From time to time, when I got really stuck, I would call Sam Bowles, and he would in a few sentences explain to me what I was supposed to be teaching. There were some bad moments, needless to say. One day, I wrote on the board the formula for elasticity of demand, always a crowd pleaser. One of the my four TAs, all of whom regularly sat in the first row right in front of me, said in a stage whisper that could, I am sure, be heard throughout the entire auditorium, "You've got it upside down." I quickly erased the formula and re-wrote it, but I am convinced that for the rest of the semester at least half of the class never got it right. At the end of the semester, the TAs handed out computerized Departmental evaluation forms, and I waited anxiously to find out just how badly I had done. Eventually I received a mathematical analysis of the returns from the Econ Department, and it turned out that my teaching had been a triumph. The students rated me as "average." I decided not to try my luck by doing that again.
Patrick and Toby had gone right into the Belmont public schools when we moved to Garfield Road. For Toby, that meant fifth grade at the Winbrook School, one of several Elementary Schools in town, but for Patrick, it meant Middle School. Now Middle School was an innovation after my time as a schoolboy. In the 40s, you went to Elementary School [or "Public School," as it was called in New York City] from age six to age fourteen, at which point you graduated from eighth grade and entered High School. High School was four years long, after which you could go to college. But shifts in the demographic shape of the population created strains on Elementary Schools, which started enrolling more kids than they had seats for, and around the country, a new division of the sixteen years of public schooling was introduced. Elementary School now taught kids up through fifth grade. Something called Middle School took them for grades six, seven, and eight. And then High School kicked in. This rearrangement had the consequence, probably unintentional, that during the three absolutely worst years of the entire growing up process, children were separated from younger kids for whom they might be persuaded to serve as role models. The result was Lord of the Flies.
Patrick was simply miserable in Middle School. At first, we pooh-poohed his upset and assured him that in a little while he would make friends. Then he started begging us not to take him to school -- not good, from the point of view of two professional academics. We found him a therapist, who laid down the law to me: The one absolute rule in a case of school phobia is that the child must go to school. So I would drive Patrick to school, as he cried and screamed and begged me not to make him go. I would physically push him out of the car, and rush off, emotionally shattered. I would then drive out to Amherst, teach, and drive home in time to pick Patrick up at school, dreading the tears and piteous pleas I knew I would face. When I got to the Middle School [there was only one in Belmont], like as not he would come bouncing out and say, "Hi, Dad. What are you doing here?" I wanted to kill him.
Toby, whose social skills were off the charts, fared better than Patrick, but I became really anxious about how the two of them would adjust to high school. I decided to arrange a meeting with the Guidance Counselor at the Middle School. I fully expected that when I had finished with my tale of woe, she would tell me that I was over-reacting, that Patrick was just a sensitive child, and that everything was just fine at the school. I went in, armed with particulars, and explained that I wanted some reassurance from her that things were not as terrible as they seemed. When I was finished with my prepared remarks, she asked quietly, "Have you considered private school?'
I was astonished by this tacit acknowledgement that her school was a snake pit. "But," she went on, "everything will be fine when they go to High School." "How on earth is that going to help?" I spluttered. "The problem isn't the teachers, it is the kids. This is the only Middle School in town, and Belmont High is the only High School. When Patrick goes to Belmont High, all the kids who are making his life hell will go with him." "I know, I know," she replied, "but somehow, everything gets better as soon as they move up."
I was not reassured, so I talked things over with Cindy, and we decided to look into private school, at least for Toby. In Belmont, this pretty much meant either the Belmont Hill School, which was only three or four blocks away, or something called BB&N, which was the merger of the Buckingham School with Browne and Nichols School. Toby was now taking advanced math classes, and gave every sign of being an extraordinary student. I figured that a fancy private school, though very expensive, would offer him challenges and opportunities that a public high school could not match. At BB&N, they told us proudly that students who completed their regular math curriculum early were regularly sent to Harvard by special arrangement to take college level courses. I was suitably impressed, until we went to the high school. There, in response to our question about advanced math, the counselor closed his door and said, sotto voce, that in those cases they managed to place the students in Harvard math classes. Score one for public education.
My interviews at both Belmont Hill and BB&N very quickly revealed that their principal raison d'etre was to somehow shoehorn mediocre students into Harvard. Since both Patrick and Toby were spectacular students, and I wasn't so sure I wanted them going to Harvard anyway, it looked to me like a ton of money just to protect them from a social nightmare that the Middle School counselor assured me ended the day the students entered high school. I got a glimpse of why this might be true at the proceedings ending Patrick's Middle School years. For some reason, this was not called a "graduation" but rather a "moving up ceremony." The featured speaker was the Principal of Belmont High School. He began his remarks by saying, "Up 'til now, nothing you have done in school has mattered, but from the day you walk into high school, what you do will determine the rest of your life." The kids looked terrified, and I began to believe that in ninth grade Lord of the Flies might turn into Little Women.
By now, Patrick had advanced so far as a chess player that from time to time he went to tournaments out of town, and even out of the country. All of this was pretty exciting, of course, and got lots of attention at home, but it left Toby out in the cold. I really wanted to find something I could do with him that would be fully as exciting as one of Patrick's chess jaunts. Toby had studied some French in third grade in Northampton, continuing that study one Summer in Belmont, so I asked him whether he would like to go to Paris. Smart kid, he jumped at the chance. Since Cindy was phobic about flying, it would be just the two of us, which suited me fine.
Toby and I had already forged a strong bond, not just through Cub Scouts. Starting quite early, while we were still in Northampton, I began the practice of reading to him at bedtime. It had started with storytelling. Each evening, when he was still a little boy, I would make up a story that always began the same way. "Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Toby, who lived with his Mommy and his Daddy and his big brother Patrick in a big house at Twenty-Six Barrett Place..." From this, we graduated to the Narnia books, which seemed endless, and then to The Lord of the Rings. I read Toby all three volumes of Tolkein's masterpiece, which I loved as much as Toby did. When we had finished The Return of the King, I cast about for something else to read, and tried out Eighty Days Around the World. I was surprised and fascinated to discover that the language was too difficult for nine year old Toby, and we never did finish reading it together.
With the trip to France all planned, we waited until summer came, and before I started my Summer School teaching, we flew off to Paris for a two week stay. The Paris trip was an unalloyed success. We stayed in a little hotel on the Left Bank, not very far from where Susie and I now have an apartment, and spent a number of days exploring old Paris, even catching an English Language film at Action Ecole, a little cinema on rue des Ecoles that shows golden oldies in the "version originale." For the boffo ending of the trip, we took a train to Reims for a meal at one of France's premier restaurants, the three star Le Boyer. Toby was dressed in a darling three piece suit, and looked like a little gentleman. The meal was wonderful, as might be expected. The capstone was dessert, which was listed on the menu as "Délices de Marjorie," Marjorie being the wife of the chef, M. Boyer. This turned out to be a rolling cart loaded with an assortment of the most delicious looking desserts I had ever seen. One simply pointed at whatever one wished to try, with no limits on amounts or numbers of items, and the waiter would spoon it onto your plate.
Eventually, it came time to leave, and as we stepped outside into the summer night, there was the chef himself, taking a breather after an evening of three star cooking. He greeted us, and Toby, pulling himself up to his not very great height, said, in his best Elementary School French, "C'etait le plus bon repas de ma vie." Boyer burst out laughing and replied, "But you have not lived very long." Of all my memories of Toby in those early years, and there are many, many happy ones, I think that is my favorite. On display that evening was the gravitas that I have come to love.
In '82, Social Research published "Piero Sraffa and the Rehabilitation of Classical Political Economy," which later appeared in translation in an Italian journal, Communita. That same year, Midwest Studies in Philosophy carried "The Analytics of the Labor Theory of Value in David Ricardo and Adam Smith." The next year, the Journal of Philosophy published a short paper, "The Rehabilitation of Karl Marx," and in '84, Social Research carried a much longer essay called "The Resurrection of Karl Marx, Political Economist" [I was obviously running out of titles.] There was nothing remotely original in any of these papers save the first, but I conceived them as a sort of missionary work, bringing the Word to the benighted primitives living in Philosophy. I am afraid I was pretty much a flop as St. Paul. None of those papers, so far as I was ever able to tell, made the slightest impression on the readers of philosophical journals.
At the same time, volumes continued to appear with my name on them, even though for the most part they required very little effort on my part. About Philosophy had done well enough to warrant a second edition, the work for which was completed while we were still living in Northampton. This revision, the first of what have been nine to date, was rather extensive, involving an expansion and reorganization of the text. The odd practices of textbook publishers being what they are, the second edition carries a 1981 publication date, even though the first copies were actually in my hands before the movers came to transport us to Belmont. And of course the translations continued: German and French for in Defense of Anarchism and Spanish for Understanding Rawls. Translations obviously require literally no effort on my part. Indeed, I never see the translation until after it has been published, and even then I sometimes have to hassle the publisher to get my free copies. But my life-long obsession with writing books makes me take a secret and unwarranted pride in each new volume -- even a paperback edition -- that carries my name. At this point there are seventy such volumes, all sitting on a shelf in our little apartment in Paris. It is not for nothing that I think of myself as Mr. Toad.
Even though Belmont is only a short car or bus ride from Harvard, it was at Boston University, across the Charles, that I found far and away the most intellectually exciting and socially satisfying opportunity to widen my circle of friends and acquaintances. Two long-time members of the Philosophy Department, Bob Cohen and Marx Wartofsky, had started an operation known as "The Boston University Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science." Each year, they scheduled a number of sessions -- sometimes as many as one a week -- at which a speaker would present a talk followed by discussion. If you managed to wangle your way into the inner circle of the Colloquium, which I did pretty quickly, you were invited to a dinner for twenty or thirty people before the talk. Those evenings were the high point of my social and intellectual life during the Belmont years.
Bob and Marx had the widest, most eclectic conception imaginable of what counted as "philosophy of science." They brought in historians, medical doctors, physicists, chemists, anthropologists, and sociologists, as well as the usual suspects from Philosophy. The question periods could be riotous affairs, straight out of a Marx Brothers movie. Somehow, no matter how arcane the subject, it seemed that the only other expert in the world was sitting in the audience. I recall one evening when a Professor of Medicine at the UMass Medical School in Worcester showed up to deliver a blood-curdling lecture on the sacrificial practices of the Aztecs. We all sat there in an appalled silence as he went on about priests plucking the hearts from living victims. What could anyone think to ask once the question period came? As soon as Bob called for questions, a young man with long hair jumped up in the back of the room. "I am a descendant of the Aztecs," he began, "and I know something about this." The fight was one. Where on earth had Bob and Marx found him?
I loved those colloquia. They were everything the UMass Philosophy Department had never been. Especially during a time when my marriage to Cindy was becoming more stressful and unsatisfying, the BU evenings were oases in an emotional desert. Bob Cohen had the money for an assistant, who did much of the work of scheduling and such. In the early years of my participation, Debra Nails did the honors. Debra is a philosopher whose scholarly specialty is Plato and the Greeks. She was [and I am sure, after all these years, still is] a vibrant, beautiful red-haired woman whose intelligence and charm did much to lift the colloquium from the category of a scholarly symposium to something like the Old Regime tradition of the soirée.
Despite the Brandeis fiasco, I was still trying to relocate in the Boston area. At one point, discussion began with the B. U. Philosophy Department, which included even some talk about possibly having Bob Ackerman and me take over the running of the Colloquium. Marx had married a New York based political philosopher, Carol Gould, and was planning to move to CUNY. Things went so far as a vote by the Philosophy Department to offer me a professorship, but by then John Silber was President and Emperor for Life at BU, and I was not surprised when he arranged, through his flunky, Provost Jon Westling, to veto the appointment. The fact that I had anthologized Silber years earlier counted for nothing, of course. That was the third time I was denied a senior appointment because of my politics, and in each case things turned out better for the rebuff. But I do feel that I ended one up on John. My Massachusetts automobile license plate for many years read I. KANT. I think he would have killed for that plate.
I was still responsible for teaching a full load of courses in Amherst, of course. I was by now so alienated from the Philosophy Department that I wanted as little to do with them as possible, and the majority who controlled the Department were even more eager to see me fulfill my duties anywhere but in their program. While I was having lunch with Herb Gintis and Sam Bowles one day, I floated the idea of teaching a course in Economics. "I could teach a seminar on Game Theory, " I suggested, "or perhaps one on the Transformation Problem." [That, for the non-Marxists and non-Economists among my readers, is the name given to the theoretical problem of explaining formally the "transformation" of labor values into equilibrium prices in a capitalist market.] Sam and Herb suggested that I send a note to Jim Crotty, who by then was Department Chair. Back came a memo that said, "You have been assigned a section of 200 students in Econ 103, Introductory MicroEconomics, for Spring '82. You will have four TAs." It seems the popularity of the radicals in the Department had created a crisis of abundance. Econ was swamped with students who wanted to take an intro course, and there just weren't enough seats in the regularly scheduled sections. Jim jumped on my offer and set things up before I had a chance to protest.
I was stunned. I had never actually taken an Economics course in my life, although I had, thank heavens, sat in on Don Katzner's graduate Micro course. I went to the Harvard Book Store on Mass Ave and asked them, "What textbook does the Harvard Economics Department use for Introductory Micro?" "Lipsey and Steiner," they said. So I bought a copy of Lipsey and Steiner and assigned it for my Econ 103 section. There I was again, teaching something I didn't know as a way of learning it. The story of my professional life. It was Soc. Sci. 5 at Harvard all over again.
The first day of class, I walked into a large lecture hall filled to overflowing with undergraduates. I had the eerie sense that lurking just outside the doors were milling throngs of students who had failed to make it into any of the Econ 103 sections that term, so that if someone walked out of the lecture hall, the seat would immediately be filled. "Good morning," I began, "my name is Professor Robert Paul Wolff." There was an angry murmur, and I suddenly realized what had happened. The course catalogue said "Professor R. Wolff," and of course all of these Freshmen and Sophomores assumed it meant Richard Wolff, one of the founding Marxists and a wildly popular undergraduate lecturer. I hurried on. 'You have never taken Micro and I have never taught it, so we will learn it together." It would be an exaggeration to say that I had captured their hearts.
I plowed through all the standard topics. From time to time, when I got really stuck, I would call Sam Bowles, and he would in a few sentences explain to me what I was supposed to be teaching. There were some bad moments, needless to say. One day, I wrote on the board the formula for elasticity of demand, always a crowd pleaser. One of the my four TAs, all of whom regularly sat in the first row right in front of me, said in a stage whisper that could, I am sure, be heard throughout the entire auditorium, "You've got it upside down." I quickly erased the formula and re-wrote it, but I am convinced that for the rest of the semester at least half of the class never got it right. At the end of the semester, the TAs handed out computerized Departmental evaluation forms, and I waited anxiously to find out just how badly I had done. Eventually I received a mathematical analysis of the returns from the Econ Department, and it turned out that my teaching had been a triumph. The students rated me as "average." I decided not to try my luck by doing that again.
Patrick and Toby had gone right into the Belmont public schools when we moved to Garfield Road. For Toby, that meant fifth grade at the Winbrook School, one of several Elementary Schools in town, but for Patrick, it meant Middle School. Now Middle School was an innovation after my time as a schoolboy. In the 40s, you went to Elementary School [or "Public School," as it was called in New York City] from age six to age fourteen, at which point you graduated from eighth grade and entered High School. High School was four years long, after which you could go to college. But shifts in the demographic shape of the population created strains on Elementary Schools, which started enrolling more kids than they had seats for, and around the country, a new division of the sixteen years of public schooling was introduced. Elementary School now taught kids up through fifth grade. Something called Middle School took them for grades six, seven, and eight. And then High School kicked in. This rearrangement had the consequence, probably unintentional, that during the three absolutely worst years of the entire growing up process, children were separated from younger kids for whom they might be persuaded to serve as role models. The result was Lord of the Flies.
Patrick was simply miserable in Middle School. At first, we pooh-poohed his upset and assured him that in a little while he would make friends. Then he started begging us not to take him to school -- not good, from the point of view of two professional academics. We found him a therapist, who laid down the law to me: The one absolute rule in a case of school phobia is that the child must go to school. So I would drive Patrick to school, as he cried and screamed and begged me not to make him go. I would physically push him out of the car, and rush off, emotionally shattered. I would then drive out to Amherst, teach, and drive home in time to pick Patrick up at school, dreading the tears and piteous pleas I knew I would face. When I got to the Middle School [there was only one in Belmont], like as not he would come bouncing out and say, "Hi, Dad. What are you doing here?" I wanted to kill him.
Toby, whose social skills were off the charts, fared better than Patrick, but I became really anxious about how the two of them would adjust to high school. I decided to arrange a meeting with the Guidance Counselor at the Middle School. I fully expected that when I had finished with my tale of woe, she would tell me that I was over-reacting, that Patrick was just a sensitive child, and that everything was just fine at the school. I went in, armed with particulars, and explained that I wanted some reassurance from her that things were not as terrible as they seemed. When I was finished with my prepared remarks, she asked quietly, "Have you considered private school?'
I was astonished by this tacit acknowledgement that her school was a snake pit. "But," she went on, "everything will be fine when they go to High School." "How on earth is that going to help?" I spluttered. "The problem isn't the teachers, it is the kids. This is the only Middle School in town, and Belmont High is the only High School. When Patrick goes to Belmont High, all the kids who are making his life hell will go with him." "I know, I know," she replied, "but somehow, everything gets better as soon as they move up."
I was not reassured, so I talked things over with Cindy, and we decided to look into private school, at least for Toby. In Belmont, this pretty much meant either the Belmont Hill School, which was only three or four blocks away, or something called BB&N, which was the merger of the Buckingham School with Browne and Nichols School. Toby was now taking advanced math classes, and gave every sign of being an extraordinary student. I figured that a fancy private school, though very expensive, would offer him challenges and opportunities that a public high school could not match. At BB&N, they told us proudly that students who completed their regular math curriculum early were regularly sent to Harvard by special arrangement to take college level courses. I was suitably impressed, until we went to the high school. There, in response to our question about advanced math, the counselor closed his door and said, sotto voce, that in those cases they managed to place the students in Harvard math classes. Score one for public education.
My interviews at both Belmont Hill and BB&N very quickly revealed that their principal raison d'etre was to somehow shoehorn mediocre students into Harvard. Since both Patrick and Toby were spectacular students, and I wasn't so sure I wanted them going to Harvard anyway, it looked to me like a ton of money just to protect them from a social nightmare that the Middle School counselor assured me ended the day the students entered high school. I got a glimpse of why this might be true at the proceedings ending Patrick's Middle School years. For some reason, this was not called a "graduation" but rather a "moving up ceremony." The featured speaker was the Principal of Belmont High School. He began his remarks by saying, "Up 'til now, nothing you have done in school has mattered, but from the day you walk into high school, what you do will determine the rest of your life." The kids looked terrified, and I began to believe that in ninth grade Lord of the Flies might turn into Little Women.
By now, Patrick had advanced so far as a chess player that from time to time he went to tournaments out of town, and even out of the country. All of this was pretty exciting, of course, and got lots of attention at home, but it left Toby out in the cold. I really wanted to find something I could do with him that would be fully as exciting as one of Patrick's chess jaunts. Toby had studied some French in third grade in Northampton, continuing that study one Summer in Belmont, so I asked him whether he would like to go to Paris. Smart kid, he jumped at the chance. Since Cindy was phobic about flying, it would be just the two of us, which suited me fine.
Toby and I had already forged a strong bond, not just through Cub Scouts. Starting quite early, while we were still in Northampton, I began the practice of reading to him at bedtime. It had started with storytelling. Each evening, when he was still a little boy, I would make up a story that always began the same way. "Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Toby, who lived with his Mommy and his Daddy and his big brother Patrick in a big house at Twenty-Six Barrett Place..." From this, we graduated to the Narnia books, which seemed endless, and then to The Lord of the Rings. I read Toby all three volumes of Tolkein's masterpiece, which I loved as much as Toby did. When we had finished The Return of the King, I cast about for something else to read, and tried out Eighty Days Around the World. I was surprised and fascinated to discover that the language was too difficult for nine year old Toby, and we never did finish reading it together.
With the trip to France all planned, we waited until summer came, and before I started my Summer School teaching, we flew off to Paris for a two week stay. The Paris trip was an unalloyed success. We stayed in a little hotel on the Left Bank, not very far from where Susie and I now have an apartment, and spent a number of days exploring old Paris, even catching an English Language film at Action Ecole, a little cinema on rue des Ecoles that shows golden oldies in the "version originale." For the boffo ending of the trip, we took a train to Reims for a meal at one of France's premier restaurants, the three star Le Boyer. Toby was dressed in a darling three piece suit, and looked like a little gentleman. The meal was wonderful, as might be expected. The capstone was dessert, which was listed on the menu as "Délices de Marjorie," Marjorie being the wife of the chef, M. Boyer. This turned out to be a rolling cart loaded with an assortment of the most delicious looking desserts I had ever seen. One simply pointed at whatever one wished to try, with no limits on amounts or numbers of items, and the waiter would spoon it onto your plate.
Eventually, it came time to leave, and as we stepped outside into the summer night, there was the chef himself, taking a breather after an evening of three star cooking. He greeted us, and Toby, pulling himself up to his not very great height, said, in his best Elementary School French, "C'etait le plus bon repas de ma vie." Boyer burst out laughing and replied, "But you have not lived very long." Of all my memories of Toby in those early years, and there are many, many happy ones, I think that is my favorite. On display that evening was the gravitas that I have come to love.
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