St. Paul’s School was quite difficult at first because of the language adjustment. I remember there was a word whose meaning I absolutely could not grasp: “Environment.” I did badly on a social studies test because the conceptual peculiarity of this word was not clear to me. It was explained to me as equivalent to all human and natural surroundings, the world around us, but I could not understand the need for a separate word to replace surroundings. The German equivalent, Umgebung (today the preferred translation is Umwelt) carried no special significance. Only much later did the reason for my initial bewilderment dawn on me. The social dimension of “environment” – the dimension revealed by its contradistinction to “heredity” as a causal agent of human behavior – was literally foreign to me. In Nazi Germany, with its emphasis on blood and race, biological and hereditary factors explained all social phenomena and personal traits. For the first time I was exposed to an entirely different explanation for why people acted as they did. It took me quite a while to catch on to the importance of environment as a social (rather than purely biological) concept.
In the first marking period I was a high average student, excelling only in Latin, which I had already studied for years in Germany. In the second marking period, however, my grades soared. From then on I was usually among the top three scholars in my form, a very advantageous rank, as it was rewarded by a special holiday during the year and a Christmas vacation extended by two days. For Christmas we traveled by train and bus to Lakeville, Connecticut, where we were picked up by jeep to be delivered to Cousin Les’s home on Selleck Hill in Salisbury. It was a memorable reunion. Tempy and I sat in the back of the jeep, but we could not talk to each other, as every time one of us tried to say something we involuntarily burst out laughing. The emotions were just too overpowering. Years later I was surprised that some critics of the film Europa, Europa viewed the famous closing scene in which Solly and his brother Isaac could not stop laughing when they saw each other again after the war as unlifelike and unreal. To me that scene rang particularly true.
In the spring of my first form year the intestinal blockage that was diagnosed as “ileitis” was discovered. It would have been discovered far sooner if I had sought treatment when my symptoms first appeared. As it was, I did not go to the infirmary until I was ordered to. My friend Bryce Walker had seen me writhing in pain during a chess game. I told him it would soon pass, it had happened many times before. Beads of sweat gathered on my face as I cramped, but after about five minutes or so the pain would abate, and things would return more or less to normal. I had been brought up in the belief that, like a good soldier, one had to learn to bear physical pain and discomfort without complaining. The measure of a person’s worth was the degree of suffering and sacrifice one was willing to bear. Suffering in silence meant subordinating one’s own personal comfort to the larger good of the whole — a value strongly encouraged in war-time Germany. It took me a while to understand that in America there was no stigma attached to physical weakness or to seeking medical help. The operation was successful, and the affected portions of my intestines were removed. As a bonus I was excused from all my final exams (and I have never had to worry about putting on too much weight).
Although I suffered pangs of homesickness, I enjoyed my time at St. Paul’s, much more so than Olaf, who always felt somewhat out of place. I knew there was something quite odd about me, however. My favorite pastime was to crawl under my bed in the dormitory with the sports section of the newspaper and transcribe the box scores into notebooks where I kept statistical information on teams and players I had made up. By basing this imaginary competition on box scores of real games, I felt I was removing the arbitrary factor in games that took place only in my imagination. Not even I could be entirely sure in advance which of my imaginary teams would win, what the score would be, and how each of my imaginary players would perform. The real fun would come in finding out which of my imaginary teams did best in the league standings I kept and in figuring out the batting averages of my imaginary players. At the same time I became a life-time Red Sox fan, glued to the radio (at home), listening to the play-by-play reports which in those days were still done by teletype in the case of away games. My priorities changed during hockey season, a sport greatly emphasized at St. Paul’s. Here I was often the last person to leave the ice. Skating became as much of an obsession as making up baseball teams had been during the baseball season.
Our tenure at St. Paul’s came to an end in 1948 due to a family quarrel, in some ways no doubt also a late consequence of the terrible war. When Mama first came back from the war, she literally didn’t have a penny to her name. Until she finally got a low-paying housekeeping job in the fall of 1946, she was entirely dependent on the charity of her siblings. In a memorable five-page letter to Maria Marc in Ried in September 1946 she expressed her bitter frustration at not being able to help her old friends in Germany in any way. “I have literally not a penny to my name,” she wrote, “and it might take two or three years to get my money. I have been able to buy nothing, but my family has given me a lot.” Although both Olaf and I received half-scholarships from St. Paul’s, the other half of the tuition was paid by Uncle Nick. Mama had willingly accepted her brother’s offer in her mistaken assumption that her own considerable Biddle inheritance would soon become available to her. In 1948 it was still tied up in the courts due to legislation mandating the seizure of German assets during the war (by her marriage Mama had automatically become a German citizen, without, however, renouncing her American citizenship). In the event, the litigation dragged on for years and when her inheritance finally came through at the end of 1951, most of it had been absorbed by legal fees. Uncle Nick would certainly have been willing to continue paying our tuition in 1948, but he made a tactical mistake by revealing to Mama, apparently in an off-hand remark, that it was all “Morris money” anyway. Morris was the family of his wife, our Aunt Virginia (1907-1990). While Mama was willing to accept “Biddle money” for the education of her sons and daughter, she absolutely refused to accept financial assistance from her sister-in-law, whose political, social, and cultural outlook was very different from her own. As Aunt Temple, whose fabled generosity was also frequently rebuffed, later remarked, “The trouble with your mother is that she doesn’t know how to accept presents.”
The immediate consequence of Mama’s proud renunciation was that we entered a period of dire poverty. She was not, however, too proud to do whatever she could to raise a family of four children on her own. With a new family of his own and a devalued German currency, Papa was in no position to provide any financial help, even if Mama had requested it, which she didn’t. Mama worked as a housekeeper for John and Martha Briscoe and their two sons in Lakeville for $35 a week (later raised to $40). An early riser throughout her life, Mama chose to work from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. so she could be home when we got back from school. To commute to the Briscoe farm, about 20 minutes away, she used a 1929 Model T Ford that had to be cranked by hand to start. Sometimes, especially in cold weather, it took her fifteen minutes or more just to start the car, a labor-intensive ritual that we overheard from the warmth of our beds. On the stove she left us a big pot of oatmeal porridge that constituted our daily breakfast. We three older children chipped in by taking after-school and weekend jobs, if only to earn enough money for our own clothing and personal expenses. Olaf earned the most by working as a garage hand and later a store clerk. Betsy did babysitting, and I, ineligible for a regular job at age 13, did housework for three elderly ladies, mopping the kitchen and porch on my hands and knees, vacuuming the carpets, raking leaves, and doing other household and yard chores for 35 cents an hour. Even nine-year-old Tempy earned money, cleaning storm windows. Later he found a much more lucrative source of income as a caddy at the Hotchkiss School golf course. Meanwhile our own dingy home was often a mess. We rented a small two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of an electrician’s home in Lakeville. There was no dining room and Mama slept on a couch in the living room. Making matters worse, we had a succession of cats that were not properly housebroken, one of which, an albino, we gave the well-earned name of Weisse Scheisse. Mama blamed the dirt and the clutter on us children (in a memorable fit of rage because Olaf had failed to make his bed, she threw his mattress out the window), but in fact she was probably just as much to blame. All her life she surrounded herself with animals (not just cats and dogs, but later chickens and goats as well), indifferent to the fact that as a consequence of her love of animals the interiors of her homes soon came to resemble stables. No less a philosopher than Immanuel Kant once said that people clean their houses for visitors, not for themselves. Well, the good opinion of conventional society would never have been enough incentive for Mama to change her preferred way of life. In her late seventies in Albany, Vermont, when Olaf offered to hire someone to help her with cleaning chores, Mama retorted, “I don’t care if this house is never cleaned again.”
In September 1948 we started high school at Housatonic Valley Regional High School, the first regional high school in New England, opened in 1939, serving the widely dispersed towns of Salisbury, Falls Village, Canaan, Sharon, Cornwall, and Kent in the northwest corner of Connecticut (the name of our school newspaper was “The Northwest Corner”). At age 13 I was one of the youngest members of my freshman class, as I had already been the youngest student at St. Paul’s in 1946-1947. Olaf, on the other hand, was one of the oldest members of his class, as he was forced to repeat his sophomore year. This led to the anomaly that Betsy, who had completed her sophomore year in New York, was a year ahead of Olaf in school. Tempy continued his schooling in Salisbury, entering the fifth grade. The most memorable event of 1948 was the presidential election in November. Mama stayed up all night listening to the returns on the radio, despite her distaste for the commentary of H. V. Kaltenborn, who clearly supported the heavily favored Republican challenger Thomas Dewey. The election was not decided until early afternoon the following day. School was interrupted by our principal Dr. Stoddard’s announcement over the public address system that Truman had won the state of California and thereby the majority of electoral votes. We were among the few families in that generally conservative area to celebrate this unexpected triumph. However, had I known then what I know now, my sympathies would have been with Henry Wallace, who, like so many progressive candidates in elections to come, never had a realistic chance to win.
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the school, Eleanor Roosevelt came to speak. Mama knew Mrs. Roosevelt from her childhood (her father had actually been one of Eleanor’s suitors before FDR made the running). Apparently Mama asked Mrs. Roosevelt to intercede with the State Department to facilitate Wini’s immigration. Whether as a result of this intercession, or simply because of the passage of time, Wini was finally able to rejoin us in Connecticut in 1949. She got a job at Salisbury School, a private school for boys, where she was also given a small apartment to live.
To save money in the summer of 1949 Mama decided to sublet our apartment and camp out on a two-acre plot of land on Farnum Road in Lakeville that the Briscoes were willing to sell to us on a generous long-term installment plan. Here on the isolated hilltop site about two miles from town, named Thornhill by us in a rough translation of Stachelberg, Olaf built a roughly 200 sq. ft. lean-to shack on a four-cornered cinderblock foundation.
The shack Olaf built in the summer of 1949
Our shack on Thornhill, summer of 1950
During that summer of 1950 the Briscoes started construction on a small 1½ story Dutch colonial style house with two dormer windows that would become our first “permanent” home in the fall of 1950. The indoor plumbing and electrical appliances seemed like the height of luxury to us. The living room (with fireplace), kitchen, and bathroom were on the ground floor, as were separate rooms for Mama and Wini. We four children slept upstairs, with Betsy having a room of her own, Olaf and I sharing a room, and Tempy sleeping in the narrow hall-like space at the top of the stairs. To augment our income we took on the job of delivering the Sunday New York Times to its local subscribers (one of whom, as I boasted to my friends, was the celebrated harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, who lived in Lakeville). For this purpose Mama acquired a second-hand, four-wheel-drive jeep truck which Olaf drove while I assisted him in distributing the papers. We had to get up at 3 a.m. on Sundays to put together the many different sections of the paper (some of which had arrived earlier in the week) and to write the names of the recipients on the front pages before loading the papers on to the truck. This was a time-consuming task as there were nearly a hundred subscribers in the region, yet we usually managed to get most of the papers delivered between 6 and 9 a.m. in the morning. More difficult at times was collecting the money owed by subscribers, which was also part of our task. We carried on this business for two years, until Mama’s inheritance came through. When Olaf went off to college in the fall of 1951, I took over driving the truck, once getting into trouble for allowing my young assistant, “Tuffy” Herter, to stand on the running board to save time between deliveries.
Mama looked for other ways to augment our income. While still at the Stilsons’ she hit upon the idea of starting a flower business, as there was no florist in town at the time. On the weekends either Olaf or I would get up very early and accompany her to the wholesaler in Hartford or New York to pick up the flowers which we would then convert into bouquets at home to fill orders taken during the week. These trips were especially tense in winter as our car had practically no heat to protect the flowers from freezing. The other big challenge was Mama’s lack of training in how to make wreaths and other more elaborate floral arrangements, though that didn’t stop her from accepting large orders for weddings or funerals. Lack of knowledge was sometimes an advantage, because by forcing her to improvise with laborious sewing and stitching methods, she was able to turn out products of higher quality than those made with foam rubber or other time-saving expedients by conventional florists. Wini eventually filled this knowledge gap by completing a correspondence course and becoming quite expert at the floral trade. In 1951, when her inheritance finally came through, Mama partnered with Wini in opening a flower shop in a tiny two-story building on Main Street in Salisbury village. Mama soon tired of sitting in the shop waiting for customers (as she described it) and turned the business over to Wini, making a present of the building to her on the birth of Wini’s son John in October 1951. Under Wini’s proprietorship the shop flourished. She sold the shop for a good profit in 1978 and continued living in her upstairs quarters until 2002.
High school was easy and fun, despite my sense of insecurity, a result not only of my retarded physical development, but of other issues as well. One such issue was my name. I was formally enrolled as John R. Stackelberg and therefore was generally addressed as John, throughout high school and college. I didn’t think of myself as John, but was much too shy to buck the overwhelming tide of convention. At home I was called Rodi (or Lodi by my siblings, because Olaf had trouble pronouncing the R when he was a toddler), short for the German Roderich, the only first name on my birth certificate issued in Munich in May 1935. The first name John was apparently added by Mama at my baptism, after Aunt Temple’s husband, John Edmonds, who became my godfather. Papa claimed to have been taken fully by surprise, another chapter, no doubt, in the ongoing marital wars, which were also about our competing maternal and paternal heritages. For me it complicated the questions of personal (and national) identity that have troubled me all my life. Another complication was Mama’s decision in 1948 no longer to use the adjunct “von” in our name, which in Germany indicated hereditary nobility. Not only was this a concession to American egalitarianism and post-war anti-German sentiment, but it also simplified matters by preempting the incorrect American practice of alphabetizing our name under V (for Von Stackelberg) rather than under S, where it belonged.
At Lakeville Grove, 1950
While still at the Stilsons’ in the late 1940s, Mama sometimes read out loud to us from the Dickens classics, from The Fairchild Family, and once from Oscar Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol.” For herself she read a book she enjoyed and praised called The Mature Mind. We listened to the radio most evenings. Tempy’s favorite show was “The Lone Ranger,” introduced by Rossini’s Wilhelm Tell overture. We also listened to Sam Spade and on Sundays to “Your Weekly Hit Parade,” keeping score on how a particular song had progressed from the previous week. “Goodnight Irene” hit the top of the hit parade in 1950 and became my favorite song. In the course of the 1950s I would wear out three successive long-playing records of the Weavers. We also listened to Burl Ives singing folksongs. On the long bus rides to high school I daydreamed about writing a book on world affairs from the perspective of a teenager, but, of course, I never followed through on this idea. High school offered too many extra-curricular diversions for any serious project like that. Olaf played football, advancing to the position of fullback when he proved to the coach that he was just as fast as the team star. Coach Ben Bedini (1921-2008), a young man recently out of Springfield College, asked me to become team manager, a role I gladly accepted, since I was much too small and frail to play any sport. Yet I was very interested in sports, which I covered for our local paper, the Lakeville Journal. My models were the sports writers of the New York Times. I also listened to Marty Glickman on the radio, who proclaimed every made basket “good like Needex”, the orange drink chain that sponsored the broadcasts. I also kept the official score for our Lakeville semi-pro baseball team, where one bright afternoon in June 1950, sitting in the dugout, I heard of the North Korean invasion of the South. The most exciting sports moment came one afternoon in late September 1951, while working an after-school job at the Miners’ horse farm on the Lakeville-Lime Rock road. Here I heard “the shot heard round the world” when Bobby Thompson’s homerun with two men on against the Brooklyn Dodgers put the Giants into the World Series against the Yankees, which, however, the Giants predictably lost in those years of Yankee dominance.
While Olaf was still in school, I was often referred to as “little Olaf.” There was some justification for this as I followed him in virtually all his high school offices, from editor of the school newspaper to founding member and president of our successful high school chess team. Unexpectedly, we beat all the prestigious private schools in the area, including the Hotchkiss, Kent, and South Kent School teams (Salisbury School, as I recall, did not have a team at the time). My best friend, Bob Oliver, played third board on our team. Betsy, who already graduated in 1950, decided to take a postgraduate year before going to college at Barnard. This gave me the opportunity to draw the biggest laugh at our Junior Assembly in spring 1951 by following up my recitation of the comparative virtues of the freshman, sophomore, junior, and senior classes (juniors, of course, emerging as the best) with the comment, “postgraduates don’t count.” I also was quite proud of a joke I came up with on McArthur’s dismissal as commander of UN forces in Korea (for wanting to extend the war into China), which had happened a few days earlier. In a mock newscast I announced, “Word has just been received that General McArthur has been signed up by the air force. President Truman told him to go fly a kite!”
To my great relief Mama was able to pay for my tuition, room, and board at Harvard from 1952 to 1956, which in those days amounted to only $600 a year, but would have been unaffordable, if Mama’s inheritance had not finally come through. Her first cousin, Pauline Emmet (1906-1983), daughter of Granny’s brother Grenville (1877-1937) and his wife, our Aunt Pauline (1879-1947), generously paid for Olaf’s tuition at MIT. Both Olaf and I were responsible for all our personal expenses, including clothing, textbooks, transportation, student fees, and pocket money. Olaf already held down a full-time summer job in 1949. In the summer of 1950 he began a lawn-mowing business, which I eventually took over in 1953. The summer before I went off to college in 1952 I worked full-time at our weekly newspaper, the Lakeville Journal, for whom I had covered local sports and written a weekly column entitled “Housatonic Highlights” – high school news from a student’s perspective – for several years. Much as I enjoyed it, I found out that I wasn’t cut out for a career in journalism, despite having listed as my greatest ambition in our high school yearbook, “to write for the New York Times.”
Betsy and her friend Brigitte Hanf modeling for the Lakeville Journal, 1951
So it was off to college in September 1952 in Olaf’s 1941 Chevy, affectionately named Coogy, which he had bought from his earnings. I found Harvard quite daunting and was rather embarrassed to be referred to as a man, in the orientation addresses by sundry officials, rather than as the boy that I was, not yet having achieved my full growth or begun to shave. At least my voice had changed, which to my consternation didn’t happen until my junior year in high school. I had excelled academically in high school, but Harvard was a different matter. I remember my shock and despair at getting the first C in my life, on a short paper on St. Augustine for my Social Science class. My sense of inadequacy was aggravated by the fact that I thought the paper was quite good. It took a while to adjust to Harvard’s more rigorous standards. It also took me a while to understand that no one, no matter how brilliant or conscientious, could possibly complete all the assignments, required and recommended, on the course reading lists without ending up in the infirmary (where in fact I did land for a short spell after an ill-advised all-nighter to complete a paper in my junior year). My greatest handicap was my reluctance to speak up in class, even in small and informal tutorial seminars, unless called upon, which always induced a pathological anguish, lest I make a fool of myself. In my freshman year I also got drunk for the first (but certainly not the last) time in my life at a Weld Hall party held at Cronin’s, where mere verbal assurances were the only proof required to convince the management that its student patrons were indeed 21 or over.
Despite my feelings of inadequacy and isolation, the positive experiences at Harvard far outweighed the negative ones. I decided to concentrate in History and Lit, with an emphasis on German literature (though not without some residual guilt at so shamelessly taking advantage of my native language skills). I didn’t always understand, but certainly enjoyed, the lectures of John Finley and I. A. Richards in “Hum[anities] 2″. Some lectures were more of an ordeal. William Langer used to sit and read his lectures, and this at 8 in the morning! I was always fighting to stay awake, but managed an A in his course nonetheless. Much more enjoyable was Crane Brinton’s morning class in intellectual history, affectionately called “Breakfast with Brinton.” His informal, conversational style made it hard to take notes, but easy to stay awake! Olaf made the short trip from MIT twice a week in fall semester 1953 to hear McGeorge Bundy hold forth on American foreign policy. He was a Republican at the time (and a Yalie to boot), but his lectures, always delivered to an overflowing hall, were enthralling , if usually more for their eloquent articulation than their rather conventional centrist ideas. One of my tutors was Richard Pipes, still a teaching fellow at the time, a bit intimidating, but quite supportive as well. I remember the totally unwarranted pride that I felt when he pronounced Heinrich Heine a much better poet than Lord Byron. Later I concluded that the inexplicable unease that I sometimes felt in his presence was not only caused by his high expectations, but also by his ingrained conservatism, which eventually surfaced in his interpretation of the Russian Revolution as a totally illegitimate Leninist coup without any genuine popular component whatsoever. My most stimulating course at Harvard was probably Harry Levin’s “Proust, Joyce, and Mann,” later to transmute into “Proust, Joyce, and Kafka.” I also felt a sympathetic affinity with Levin when I learned that he often experienced severe stage fright before delivering his finely crafted lectures. Bob Oliver came to visit and confirmed the uniqueness of Harvard to me by pronouncing the atmosphere at Harvard “much more intellectual” than at Cornell, where he was going to college.
Yet I had the gnawing feeling that I wasn’t living up to my potential, as expressed in this entry in my journal at the end of my junior year on June 8th, 1955:
I am writing on “the morning after.” It is a gray, dark day; Paul [Russell] has left for his grandmother’s [in Belmont, MA], and Sy [Goldstaub] has gone home [to West New York, NJ]. I am staying for Olaf’s commencement.
I am not writing with spontaneous zest, but because I feel I ought to. For one thing, the book, which I “rediscovered” as I was cleaning up yesterday, is so clean and inviting, it demands to be written in. I have a gnawing feeling that I ought to leave some kind of a record of day by day thought and action, just so I won’t feel it has all been wasted. Why did I suddenly give up writing last January? Many reasons: for one thing, it meant considerable exertion because the book would lose its purpose if it were vapid, disorganized, just a catalogue of what I had for breakfast on such and such a day. It is difficult to give coherent expression to incoherent ideas or attitudes. In the mind these ideas are enough to motivate conduct, but on paper they look empty and silly if they aren’t systematically expounded. Furthermore, I realized that I could not be completely frank. Many isolated impressions run through my mind which I could never bring myself to put down. I thought this would completely destroy the value of the book, and indeed make the whole project pretentious, artificial, contrived – as if I were writing it for others to read instead of for my own enjoyment and benefit. I have changed my mind. Instead of trying to bare my soul, I will only try to collect experiences, eventful episodes, as I did in my German childhood diaries. My soul I have to carry with me anyway, but experiences are soon forgotten.
I look back to the year just completed with mixed feelings. In a way I profited more by this one year than by any previous single year. I read some of the greatest German literature: Faust, Lessing’s plays, Zauberberg, Kafka’s novels – and Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s long novel. But I read them under pressure, in haste, and I can’t say that I enjoyed even most of it. And I am still languishing in Group 3 despite my resolve to get straight A’s this year. My papers were especially disappointing. They took the most horrendous effort and were not nearly as good as I know I can do them. My mark in Professor Schneider’s graduate course depended solely on my paper. I could easily have gotten an A if I had been willing to exert myself. I really don’t think I care about marks as such; but insofar as they reflect my ability I do care. I hate to think of myself as a “B” student. Right now I think that I am best suited for some kind of academic vocation; and yet if I can’t do excellent work as a student, I wonder whether I will be able to as a scholar. I have no doubt I could if I pushed myself, but how am I going to push myself to push myself?
Unfortunately, my senior year confirmed my pessimistic self-analysis. It is not too much to say that I had “senioritis” all year — a condition that usually doesn’t afflict students until the late spring of their senior year. To anyone who asks what I learned in my senior year in college, my honest answer would be “to play bridge.” When Paul Russell joined Sy Goldstaub and me as a third roommate at the beginning of our junior year we were allocated a large ground-floor suite in the main entry of Adams House on the corner of Mt. Auburn and Plympton Streets. Diagonally across Mt. Auburn Street was the Lampoon, where John Updike was turning out his cartoons, ribald poetry, and highly entertaining prose. Just up the road on Plympton Street was the Crimson, where Sy had successfully negotiated the rigorous requirements for membership. One of Adams House’s advantages was its close location to the Yard. As a result of its splendidly convenient location as much as anything else, Adams C-5 came to be the gathering place for all our friends.
Sy and I had met at an election eve party in Weld Hall in November 1952 and immediately hit it off as ardent and disappointed Adlai Stevenson partisans. We roomed together in Adams D-44 our sophomore year. Sy was involved in numerous activities and enterprises, including running his own paperback newsstand in the entry to the Student Union in his freshman year and in the entry to Adams House in subsequent years. A government major, Sy would go on to Harvard Law School in the fall of 1956 and a career as a criminal defense attorney. I was a much more sedentary type, lingering over long mealtime conversations with Paul Russell, another Weld Hall resident whom I didn’t really get to know until my sophomore year in Adams House. Paul was a philosophy major with a great interest in psychology as well. He would later combine these interests in his career as an idiosyncratic and innovative psychiatrist with a large private practice. I remember being quite overwhelmed by both the power of his intellect and the warmth of his personality. So impressed was I at the time that I thought I could easily spend my life in service to such a great man. Here is what I wrote about him in my journal in August 1955, after Tempy and I, returning home from a trip to Canada, dropped in unexpectedly at the Russells’ summer home in Turner, Maine:
Paul and Arlie [Paul’s younger sister, the later Arlie Hochschild, a writer and sociology professor at Berkeley] were home and received us with shouts of surprise. Mrs. Russell asked us to spend the weekend. We called Mama and got permission after the customary complaints. Then we visited Devil’s Den, roller-skated, played miniature golf, swam, worked a little on repairs on the barn, played ping-pong and ate profusely. It was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend. Paul’s sociableness, consideration, and intelligent conversation make him very enjoyable company. His main asset is an un-ebbing interest and openness – he is the perfect listener. He is interested in almost everything that is said, and he doesn’t either overwhelm with talk or sit silently. He is the kind of person out of whom you get proportionately as much as you put in. That is, you can disregard him, and say only a few pleasantries, and you will get a few pleasantries in return. Or you can sit and chatter to him about yourself, and you will get a receptive audience. Or you can probe deeper, and inquiringly discuss, deal with a problem or topic with all the resolution you can muster, and you will be sure to get an equal effort, which usually produces a superior result, from Paul. That is why it is always satisfying and usually rewarding to talk to Paul.
Arlie is quite different. She, like most people, is likely to guide conversation to the point she wants it, instead of being stimulated, like Paul, by the points to which conversation has been directed by other people. These things aren’t all black and white. But where Paul is flexible, Arlie is constant; where Paul is vacillating, Arlie is decisive; where Paul is open to suggestion, Arlie is closed to it. I am not comparing them on equal levels, of course. Arlie, being four years younger, is not as mature, her character is not fully molded yet. Nor does she share Paul’s deep intellectuality – for Paul everything is finally an intellectual problem, even human problems which he professes must be treated “humanly” and not abstractly. His love for math, especially geometry, is no accident. It is brought to bear on psychological problems as well, although here he is not dealing with angles, etc. The universe must be Euclidean, the human being must be successful.
Paul had what some might consider an overly fastidious side as well, which came out in his disapproval of the running bridge game that had established itself in our suite some time after the start of our senior year. The game would start around noon, after morning classes, and sometimes ran until late at night, with an ever-changing cast of participants. Sy occasionally played, and I could almost always be persuaded to sit in if a fourth was needed. Our most accomplished player and my mentor at the game was Dick Shader, later a prominent psychiatrist at Tufts University. When I saw him again in the early 1960s, I remember my amazement that he had been able to give up the game so as not to risk disharmony in his marriage. Another enthusiastic player was Gordon Goles, later a geologist at the University of Oregon who specialized in the investigation of rocks on the surface of the moon. Other regulars were the irrepressible, chain-smoking Bob Ausnit, whom I visited at his palatial family home in Sharon, Connecticut, during vacations; Don Blaufox, who went on to an immensely successful career at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine; and Peter Noerdlinger, an aspiring astrophysicist from Denver. We played for a tenth of a cent per point just to keep people honest in their bidding. It was a lot of fun, but also — at least for me — an irresistible distraction from academic assignments. Even Paul was not immune to the procrastinations to which our endless games gave rise. To my amazement he read the entire Critique of Pure Reason in a single night, announcing with dazed assurance in the morning that he had seen “truth”.
In Adams C-5 we also spent many hours talking about the latest sequels “Franny” and “Zooey” in J. D. Salinger’s (1919-2010) ongoing chronicle of the Glass family in the New Yorker. Salinger’s preoccupation with how to live authentically struck just the right note for our generation (or at least for me), worried as we always seemed to be that we were living by standards imposed on us by outside social expectations rather than by our genuine inner needs and wants. We were quite aware in the mid-1950s that we were living in a particularly conformist and un-heroic age, later to be labeled by its critics as the “silent” or “strait-jacketed generation”. Salinger perfectly captured the sense of personal crisis precipitated by the fear that in the seductively easy pursuit of money and professional success we were giving up higher, more important, and ultimately more fulfilling ways of living.
In my junior year I was bitten by the culture bug, which induced a temporary preoccupation with – and eventually a lasting love for – classical, or more specifically, Romantic, music. Using the bounteous resources of the well-stocked Adams House library, I checked out records every day and played them over and over. My favorites were Beethoven and Brahms and the tone poems of Richard Strauss. To the occasional distress of my friends, I became a proselytizer, forcing them to listen to my favorites again and again. For Olaf the Eroica would invariably bring up memories of visits to Adams C-5. Paul was able to impress his family by immediately identifying Shubert’s Great Symphony in C (his own particular favorite) on the radio – an achievement he credited to my influence. I also learned from the more expansive tastes of my friends. Gordon Goles introduced me to the melancholy strains of Villa-Lobos and the seductive charms of Kurt Weill. In the spring of my senior year, we interrupted our bridge game to attend a Lowell House performance of The Threepenny Opera, transforming a mundane weekend into one of the highlights of my college career.
Meanwhile, circumstances were also changing at home. Mama had invested the remainder of her inheritance in a huge and heavily mortgaged dairy farm in the neighboring town of Canaan. We moved to the farm in June 1954, just in time to celebrate Betsy’s wedding to David Rothenburg in grand style, two weeks after Olaf married his high school sweetheart and MIT classmate, Cora Sleighter, in Kent on August 24. Despite our misgivings about the scale of the enterprise she was taking on, Mama would not be dissuaded from her goal of pursuing farming as a vocation. Here is how I described the prospects of the farm in my journal while home for Christmas vacation in December 1954:
Approximately 45 cows are milking at present. The barn is full, however – every stanchion is in use, and heifers, goats, and horses roam about at will. Milk production is somewhat over 2,000 pounds every two days. The farm seems to be prospering, although there are many signs of general inefficiency – the big truck has no battery – it can apparently only be used if the battery from the Massey Harris is transferred; the chain on the manure spreader has to be secured by bailing wire; there is never enough wood; wet feeding is sloppily done – in two small wheelbarrows because the cart designed for the purpose has a flat tire; and most of all, there is no general plan of action. Things are done “on the spur of the moment,” according to temporary whims. Thus Bill and Danny are often excused from work in order to go hunting; no permanent records are kept, as far as I can see; the barn is cleaned, the dishes washed, wood is cut – not according to a “program,” but as the urgencies of particular times require. One day Tempy and I clean the barn, another day Mama and Danny, or Danny and Bill, and so on. Milking times are arbitrarily set. Necessary things are rarely bought in advance of when they are needed – for instance, we are all out of fertilizer for the barn right now, and have been for some days.
Of course, this free and easy system of farm management has a number of advantages over a rigidly planned system. For one thing, employer-employee relationship is here, I think, just about as good as possible, given the individuals and circumstances involved. Bill and Danny are both very likable, but as workers hard to handle – especially over a period of several months or more. Both are temperamental, both drink – and neither of them, particularly Danny, is reliable – or at least they never have been up to now. Mama gives them pretty much of a free hand – she treats them with affection and sincere interest, as friends rather than employees, with never a hint of command or condescension. [She also liked Bill’s politics, whose description of Eisenhower she cited: “He thinks his shit don’t stink.”] It has worked remarkably well. Both men, notorious for their inability to hold down jobs for more than a few weeks, are happy here, and work steadily, if slowly. I think Danny will be here for the rest of the winter at least, or until he gets a job as a painter again. Bill, I’ll bet, will still be here next Christmas.
Mama, I think, is very happy on the farm. She probably would be less so if she had to act according to specific plans, or if she had to promulgate these plans. She is much happier pursuing vague long-range goals, often dreams (goats), while working out day-by-day problems as they arise. She has always advocated resiliency and flexibility in life – and on the farm she puts it into practice. Whether this somewhat haphazard approach precludes real success remains to be seen. Right now the farm, run in plodding fashion, is profitable. But in the long run, the lack of know-how and absence of long-range planning may tell. Fortunately, it would take gross inefficiency or some unforeseeable catastrophe to render the farm unprofitable, so great are the earnings. And since Mama is a great worker, and always will be, it is unlikely that the farm will fail for a while.
With Danny Ashman on the Canaan farm
Alas, my prognosis was wrong. The farm failed within four years. The “unforeseeable catastrophe” did in fact occur when almost the entire herd came down with TB. Before that the workers had already quit or been let go, and in his senior year in high school, 1955-1956, Tempy had to do the milking before going to school in the morning and right after school in the afternoon, adversely affecting both his academic performance and his social life. Alerted to Mama’s plight, Uncle Nick retained our cousin John Rand, a lawyer, to see what could be done. Alas, he only made things worse by calling Mama’s financial troubles to the attention of her many creditors. As a result they all demanded payment at once, leaving no option but legal bankruptcy. Of everything she had invested in the farm, all that was left in the fall of 1958 was enough for a down payment on an isolated 175-acre farmstead without livestock or indoor plumbing in northern Vermont.
On the Canaan Farm, 1954
Deterioration of conditions on the farm led to the break-up of the long and close family relationship with Wini, who lived with Mama and Tempy on the farm but commuted daily to Salisbury to run the flower store full time. In the winter of 1957-1958 she felt compelled to move in with John and Charlotte Rand (John was Cousin Les’s great-nephew, the son of Cousin Bay [the well-known artist Ellen Emmet Rand {1875-1941}]) because of the lack of wood for the wood furnace, although Tempy did gamely try to keep up the supply on rushed weekend visits from Storrs, CT, where he had enrolled at UConn after graduating from high school in 1956.Wini decided she could not risk the health of her young son by staying on the farm in Canaan another winter if conditions didn’t change. Aunt Temple, who had recently moved with her family from Concord to a large farm house in Andover, Massachusetts, invited Wini to move in with her. This, of course, was the worst move she could have made. Mama never forgave what she regarded as a breach of loyalty. Wini did return to Connecticut a few weeks later, but now it was to a small apartment created in the attic above the flower store in Salisbury. Here she lived for more than 40 years, raising her son (whose godfather I had become at Wini’s request) and running her ever more prosperous business. She also took up painting with considerable success that included several exhibitions in New York, beginning in the late 1960s.
The gathering clouds at home seemed to parallel my own downhill slide in my senior year. In stark contrast to a long paper I wrote on Beethoven in my junior year (specifically, on his retraction of his dedication of the Eroica to Napoleon), for which I combed the Widener stacks for literally hundreds of documentary references, I limited the number of secondary sources I cited in the annotated bibliography of my honors thesis on Schiller to exactly one – a self-limitation that one of my readers, Howard Hugo, pronounced as “excessively chaste.” This was in part a consciously rebellious gesture on my part, deliberately rejecting the time-honored student practice of padding bibliographies with works one had never read or which had played no part in forming the paper. But it also reflected the fact that the argument I made in my thesis was generated by my tutor, Harlan Hanson, and did not originate with me. It was a critique of Schiller’s aesthetic idealism as potentially authoritarian, even if the ideal that Schiller extolled was ostensibly the “state of freedom.” It was an argument that in some ways anticipated my much later dissertation and book on “völkisch idealism,” the moralistic urge to regenerate the world and cleanse it of its materialistic impurities, but I had not yet made this argument my own. Perhaps I had not yet outgrown the Schillerian dualism of mind or spirit and matter, the quasi-religious outlook that had permeated my childhood in Germany. It took a while to get used to utilitarian American pragmatism and the far greater significance of popular market forces in determining American values than the prescriptive ideals of European high culture.
By their senior year most of my friends and classmates had long since made up their minds what careers to pursue, but I still didn’t know what to do. My good friend Dick Shader admonished me to sit down for at least half an hour to think about the future. Ever since my childhood in Germany (where Dichter traditionally ranked as the highest calling) I had wanted to be a writer, but was aware, though not quite ready to admit, that neither my talent nor my perseverance would be enough to achieve such an unrealistic goal. In the end I chose the path of least resistance, deciding simply to continue in graduate school what I had been doing for so many years in college. The choice of German language and literature was an obvious and easy choice as well. To the puzzlement of the young graduate students in Adams House, who couldn’t understand why I would not prefer to stay at Harvard, I chose to pursue my studies at Columbia. I hoped that a change of scenery would cure me of the indolence and indecision that plagued my last year in college. But as so often in life, things worked out rather differently than planned or anticipated.
Tempy was the only member of my family to attend my commencement in Cambridge. Olaf had moved to Minneapolis to pursue a PhD in mathematics at the University of Minnesota, before being drafted out of graduate school by our local Litchfield County draft board later that year. Mama had already then become averse to leaving her home turf for any but the most exceptional reason. “She’s always the life of the party,” Tempy once said, “but she’s rarely at the party.” The young junior senator from Massachusetts John F. Kennedy was our commencement speaker that year.
With Sy in front of Adams House on graduation day
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