Steffi and Trina spent the academic year 1970-1971 with me in Burlington at an apartment at 43 South Winooski Avenue, within walking distance of the UVM campus. Our landlady was quite suspicious of us when we first looked at the apartment in early August . She apparently had some bad experience renting to students in the past. The beard that I had started to grow by that time may have added to her suspicions. She was somewhat reassured by the fact that Steffi was German. “Cleanliness is a German national trait, isn’t it?” she asked. Four-year old Trina helped overcome the landlady’s qualms by ingenuously asking her, “Which bed is mine?” Trini also was the only one of us three who would not have minded staying in Burlington right then and there. For Steffi and me renting an apartment was a painful exercise, reminding us that we were also giving up, at least temporarily, a way of life centered on our home in Irasburg, 65 miles to the east. To me it also seemed final proof that I would never fulfill my creative writing ambitions.

Later that year, in November, our house in Irasburg became the source of a terrible row with my former colleague and political soul-mate at Lake Region, David LaRoche and his wife Jean. They had returned in June from a year’s tour of duty with an American aid agency in Laos, which turned out to be a front for the American government’s expansionist policies in Asia. David was very active that summer on the staff of the failed Senate election campaign of former governor Phil Hoff, for whom we had given, at David’s request, a well-attended house party in Irasburg. After the unexpected disappointment of Hoff’s defeat in November, David and Jean asked if they could stay in our now empty house in Irasburg for about two weeks until they had figured out their future plans (which eventually took David to a well-paying legislative staff position in Washington DC). Steffi was very unhappy at the prospect of their staying in her home while we were in Burlington. To her the idea of somebody else living there seemed, if not a defilement, at the very least a violation of our privacy. Although at heart I agreed with her, I found it impossible to say no. Denying good friends such a modest request would have given the lie to our protestations of solidarity and friendship, especially as they also offered to pay rent. But Steffi adamantly refused to accept any money for fear of legitimizing and perhaps prolonging their stay. In my journal I analyzed my disagreement with Steffi:

The ease with which I was überrumpelt (taken unawares) made things worse. It appeared [to Steffi] that I wanted only to play the role of magnanimous benefactor. And it is true that I could have refused David’s request only on the grounds of a selfish property fetishism that David probably knew I could not afford to embrace.

It was useless to try to persuade Steffi that a house serves just a utilitarian function, that it did no damage to have people living in it, that in fact it was good for the house. Her attitude toward the house, to objects in general, is much too aesthetic for that. Each object, even as mechanical an object as the stove, has its own intrinsic aesthetic value: it is there not only to be used, but also to be appreciated. If it is used in a purely utilitarian spirit it is devalued and profaned. Though she is worried about possible dirt (especially from their dog and cat), it is the spiritual devaluation that seems to weigh most heavily. In her mind everything is fragile, delicate, though when pressed to give an example, she cannot think of one. A radical refurbishing is now her only hope. “Ich werde alles rausreissen und neu streichen (I’m going to tear everything out and paint it new),” she said. “And then I’m going to stay there and then I never want to see you again.” By my action I had denied the sanctity and integrity of “home.”

Trina at the piano, 1970

What hurts, too, is the realization that what we would like to do but can’t for the time being – live at home in Irasburg – others can. It throws into bitter relief the dissatisfaction of our present way of life. It questions the very premise of a happy life – that one is doing what one wants to – while showing us how apparently easy it is to do what one wants to do.

And so, with all-too-evident reluctance, we gave the LaRoches permission to move in. But things did not go well.

David’s distressingly “political” side: calling to say that they had finished moving in and that everything was OK: I asked him if the broiler was on, and he said, yes, supper was cooking and all was fine. A moment later, after Jean had said something, he was forced to retract: “Could you repeat your instructions on the [propane] gas? There’s no gas coming in.” Apparently he had simply left the lighting of the stove to Jean, who must have said she knew how. His primary interest was to reassure me. Political principle number one: give the people what they want; make them think they’re getting what they want; tell them what they want to hear.

The dispute with the LaRoches reached a terrible climax after they had moved out, under not-so-subtle pressure from us, around Thanksgiving. I tried to maintain our friendship but had underestimated the degree to which they had found our conduct humiliating. Here is how I described the climactic end of our friendship in a journal entry on December 4th:

At Steffi’s insistence, I called Dave at 10 o’clock at night at the Mosher’s. He was breathing audibly hard when he came to the phone, and I was struggling with myself, too. At first, he was content to follow Jean’s example, or a pre-agreed plan, and spoke in a deliberately brusque and distant way. I asked, “Is anything the matter?” in order to have it out, but I should have waited until I had better control of myself. David said, “I’d like an explanation for the way you’ve treated us, the terse, unfriendly note, and so on.” Without reflecting, I blurted out what I had been thinking, vaguely feeling all the time that I must not back down, as I seem always to have done in relations with David. “Since we have so little money ourselves, I don’t see why we should support you.” – “Support us? You support us? You’ll never support us!” I tried to retract, but it was too late. “You son of a bitch, Rodi. You son of a bitch.” And he hung up. I tried to get him on the phone again, apologizing to Jean and explaining that I had not meant it that way, and had obviously chosen the wrong word in the heat of the moment. But Jean only hung up on me, too. “We’ve had enough of you. Goodbye, Rodi.”

My dilemma was, though I wasn’t aware of it at the time, that I could not give the real reason for our unfriendliness, the reason Dave and Jean were quick to sense: the fact that we (especially Steffi, of course) didn’t want anyone in our house. I had to find something wrong in the LaRoches and clumsily fastened on what was bound to humiliate him most. Now the whole hatred of his violent-prone temperament is concentrated on me. His present predicament, robbing him of his manhood, only aggravates his wound. Telepathy: sensing his hatred, fearing his violence (the symbol of his shotgun shells lined up on the bookshelf. In the old days, I suppose, I would, like Pushkin, have died in a duel.) The sexual symbolism of his intrusion into the house; also the symbol of bacteria and disease. My prophecy (in connection with the [unexpected rise of our] property taxes), “There are bound to be encroachments from outside.”

How property breeds bourgeois values! How my radicalism cracks when it is tested in actual practice! How our happiness and prosperity – our house –seems to invite disaster! And how those underneath, the repressed and excluded, are always right!

Dave and Jean proceeding through life in a series of moral confrontations, each one providing the energy for the next stage of life. Just after he moved in to our house he proudly announced that he had turned down an offer to teach English at North Country [in neighboring Newport]. It does not seem to him, as it does to me, that it is proper to take any job in order to pay your bills.

A few days later I added the following reflections:

What makes it so hard to bear is being in the wrong (particularly hard for someone who has tried to base his life on being in the right).

Realization that what makes David effective as an activist, as a political force, is that he won’t allow himself to be pushed around in the world, whereas I accept that as an inevitable part of life.

And thus I managed by writing about it to somewhat alleviate the pain.

Before our move to Burlington, we had made another visit to Annie Fisher, who had just celebrated her 85th birthday. On August 12th I wrote the following commentary on our visit:

Again the surprise to find her so alert and healthy-minded (meaning ornery and independent). It explains how she can survive in that moribund atmosphere for so many years. “I am dying by inches.” Lacking her mental stamina, the other old persons, whom Annie commandeers with absolute confidence, come in and get some strength from her. She has signed off her body long ago, seeming actually thereby to increase her ability to survive, since its vagaries have become somewhat irrelevant. Even though she was quite well able to get downstairs, she was very annoyed to have been pressured into it (for a birthday cookout on the front porch – her first time out in three years), and she obstinately refused to enjoy it. She still thrives on the love-hate relationships with her various sets of former neighbors, notably the Bedards, who took down her fence and made a hotbed on her property. Thank God for us she defended it! She is marvelously free of self-pity, and even when she says, as she did twice, “Life is sad,” she says it matter-of-factly and firmly, uncomplainingly. How different from old Mrs. Kahn, for whom I “baby-sat” in New York! She has certain stock jokes: “Body by Fisher,” for instance, or “I had an operation on my jaw, but it didn’t hurt my tongue any!” Her age puts things in perspective, too. She refers to Avis Harper, school board member and rather severe pillar of society, as “that little Harper girl.” “She’s an Irasburg girl, you know, Avis Pike. She’s been very good to me.” Even Doris Alexander [in her late sixties] is pushed down a generation.

That same August Olaf took me to visit a former colleague of his, the European historian Fred Krantz, now teaching at Concordia University in Montreal. Krantz had left Duke University out of protest against the Duke administration’s hostility to the student movement. I recorded our visit in my journal on August 21st:

Impressions of visit to Fred Krantz in Montreal, former colleague of Olaf’s at Duke where he was dismissed for his radical views: More Canadian than the Canadians. Struck by the suburban quality of his life, in such contrast to his alleged radicalism. “Showing off” not only the city of Montreal, but also the model apartments and shops in the rather exclusive complex where he lives (Ile de Soeurs). Apparently a rather doctrinaire Marxist: “Chomsky is the guru of the hippie youth today. He’s too anarchist for me.” Krantz is working on a modern European history text (to replace Palmer) from a Marxist point of view. “We have the most with-it department in America today. . . We’ve got quite an intellectual proletariat here.” He was very depressing about Vietnam: “It looks like the U.S. is going to win. It looks like they’re going to bring home the coon-skin. The revolution isn’t going to take place. Vietnam will stay divided.” He had an interesting theory about the First World War: “Germany should have won. Then there would have been a traditional settlement, like 1870.” He had a deep-seated resentment against Duke and in fact the South. “I hate those southerners. I hate WASPS.” Every time Olaf mentioned returning to Durham Krantz laughed, reaching a peak in a kind of falsetto scream, reminiscent of Howard Mosher. Both he and Don Ginter, another “exiled” colleague, had a barely discernible contempt, not for Olaf, but probably for his lack of radicalism. Yet, though I agreed with everything they said, I was surprised how much I preferred Olaf as a person . . .

Krantz and the French Canadians: He belittles the problem, or more exactly, seems unconcerned about it: “If the separatists win, it wouldn’t affect us a bit. I might have to teach my courses in French, but that wouldn’t matter.” A quote from the New York Review of Books on the New School of Social Research seems to apply to him: “Having fled persecution in their homelands, and having found a tolerable environment elsewhere, do they consequently evade all potentially embarrassing political involvement? Does their exile negate their engagement? The exile readily becomes an exilarch, that is to say, a sort of hereditary ruler in the place of exile, recapitulating the culture of the past so far as that is possible, while drawing strength from the mythos of persecution. At the same time the host society is held at bay. . . All is subordinated to the memory of the initial trauma.”

As it turned out, Krantz would later follow a left-to-right ideological trajectory similar to David Horowitz’s, though perhaps not quite so extreme. The erstwhile anti-war and civil rights activist became a staunch defender of the Israeli government, condemning critics of Israel’s apartheid policies and denouncing as “terrorists” students demonstrating against an appearance of former and future Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Concordia University in September 2002. Promoted to the position of Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, Krantz, the former supporter of the 1960s student movement, came to see youthful rebellion in support of Palestinian rights as a dangerous harbinger of fascism. But there were already signs of his coming defection from progressive causes back when we visited him in August 1970:

Krantz voting for Nixon: at the time he told Olaf it was to undermine the system; now he defends it as saving North Carolina from Wallace.

He fears most of all that the student movement is open to demagoguery from the right. He is suspicious of the mass appeal of rock festivals.

His car – the one he sold to Olaf – says as much about him as his words: fitted out with frills and eye-pleasing extras as well as devices to enhance its power. “It’s the biggest car on the road. I found out that for really very little extra money I could make it into something special.”

And already then he subscribed to The New Republic, “to keep up with the left libs.”

As much as I enjoyed studying – what luxury to devote full time to intellectual activity and cultivating the mind – it was not at all easy at my age to return to the subordinate status of student. What made it even more difficult was that quite a few of the profs who had joined the UVM faculty in the rapid expansion of the 1960s were younger than I was. I did not know it at the time, but my later Doktorvater (dissertation supervisor) at the University of Massachusetts, the intellectual historian Will Johnston, had graduated from Harvard two years after I did! By the time I finished my dissertation in 1974 he had already published several books! One of them, The Austrian Mind (1972) is still in print today. On September 2nd I recorded my impressions of my first days back in a university setting:

Remanded by Professor Schmokel for laughing when he said he didn’t know anything about the course in German history he was going to teach: “That’s an inside joke.”

The disagreeable twosome of history profs at the sectioning meeting in the gym: the task – entering students into sections on a large chart – turned them into petty and pompous functionaries. And how docile the students were!

Peculiar kind of awe or fear that Schmokel and Overfield seemed to have of me: Schmokel recommended that I not take German history until the second semester, since he didn’t feel he had enough to offer. Overfield discouraged me from attending his lecture, although presumably I will conduct a discussion group in his Western Civ course. Are they suspicious of me as a potential troublemaker?

The peculiarly strong difference that age makes in contact with students. I sometimes feel I belong to a different species.

Overfield, on taking the discussion sections himself, rather than having me lead them.”They pay so much tuition, I want to give them their money’s worth. I want to at least give them a professor.” And this after I had said I understood perfectly wanting to conduct the discussion sections in one’s own course. Overfield: “Oh no, it’s nothing that selfish.”

My feelings about returning to grad school at age 35 were ambivalent (an experience shared by so many women over the years who had devoted their twenties to raising a family). On the one hand I chafed under a hierarchical system that once again put me on the bottom rung at a time when my peers were becoming well established in their professional careers; on the other hand I understood that the perspective I gained “from below” and “from outside” gave me a certain psychological and perspectival advantage over those of my age cohort in academia who had never tasted failure and whose freedom of thought and political attitudes were constricted by institutional strictures to which they had to submit if they wished to advance in the profession. Although I felt I was being held at arm’s length by the faculty, this sense of exclusion was far outweighed by the delight I felt in finally having returned to a milieu that over the course of a lifetime would prove to be most congenial to my interests and aptitudes.

What do I remember from that year in Burlington? The local cause célèbre at UVM in the fall of 1970 was the student-led campaign in support of young Michael Parenti (b. 1933), a fierce critic of the Vietnam War, who had been denied tenure by the Political Science department. “Why aren’t you indicted? Why aren’t you in jail?” he challenged his faculty colleagues, many of whom also opposed the war, but the decision stood, and Parenti went on to a fine career as an investigative journalist and articulate critic of American imperialism.

My favorite class, or at least the most intriguing one, was an evening seminar given jointly by an Americanist, Jeremy Felt, and a Europeanist, Patrick Hutton. Felt, chairman of the department at the time, was a bit older than I was, and Hutton was a bit younger. I no longer remember the specific topic of the seminar, but in effect it was a comparative intellectual history course on certain ideas and ideologies in their American and European contexts. What made the course so interesting was less its content, though that was interesting enough, but rather the considerable variety and unconventionality of the students it attracted. One such character was a hippie girl named Gwen who always came to class with her well-behaved dog. One time she recommended LSD (“acid”) for the straight-laced Mr. Hutton’s cold! She was quite sincere: “It’ll really get rid of it fast.” Mr. Hutton was not one to take kindly to such scurrility, however. On December 11th I recorded his effort to put her in her place:

Hutton at his meanest last Wednesday evening. The tall “hippy” girl Gwen teased him for being so traditional – the atmosphere in class was light and genial at the time. Hutton paused, and it was obvious that he was collecting himself for a riposte. “If you knew what the word ‘traditional’ meant,” he said, with acid dripping from every word. Gwen did not speak again that class. The incident certainly proved that her criticism had found its mark.

I had my own troubles with Hutton the following spring when he downgraded a paper I had written on Rousseau for its inordinate advocacy of Rousseau’s ideas of participatory democracy. One of the books Hutton had assigned in the course was The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952) by J. L. Talmon, whose interpretation I criticized in my paper. Hutton had earned his PhD under George Mosse at the University of Wisconsin and shared his mentor’s political moderation and suspicion, at least at that stage of his career, of any challenges to middle-class values and conventions, whether from the left or the right. This fetishization of “balance” led me to the following rather sophistic reflection in my journal:

The “golden mean” or “golden rule” does not reject “extremes,” it validates them! It pays tribute to the fact that one’s behavior is constantly modified by “extremes” and in the absence of this modification all behavior is extreme. You can define your view as “moderate” because there are “extremes.”

Hutton had developed a specialization on the nineteenth-century French revolutionary leader Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) on whom he later wrote a book critical of his ideas.

Hutton and Felt evinced an easy and genial rapport in class, based in part on corporate solidarity.

Felt and Hutton laughing gleefully at the thought that garbage collectors get paid more than college professors: “It looks like we chose the wrong profession.”

Felt had rather different limitations than Hutton, which I analyzed as follows:

The Felt syndrome: exposed for so long and on all sides to so much intellectual argumentation that his intellectual honesty no longer permits him to speak in anything but vague generalities and distinctions – such as optimistic vs. pessimistic. His confusion is genuine: because he sees so much, he sees only a maze: hence, perhaps also, his suspicion of what he calls the “New York Review of Each Other’s Books,” which he nevertheless conscientiously reads.

My most uncharitable summation of the Wednesday evening seminar I divulged only to my journal: “Mr. Glib (Hutton) and Mr. Simple (Felt) make up the team of Messrs. Superficial.”

Despite Steffi’s half-feigned objections to my studying German history – “Du hast uns nicht zu studieren (you have no business studying us)” – I had decided to make this my field of concentration, partly, of course, to achieve some clarity about my own background. The faculty member with whom I worked most closely was Wolfe Schmokel, the specialist for Germany in the UVM history department. Through his Doktorvater Hajo Holborn (1902-1969) at Yale via Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954) in Berlin he proudly traced his disciplinary line of descent all the way back to the celebrated historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886). A thoroughly self-made man, Schmokel had obtained American citizenship by joining the U.S. Army directly from Germany. He was recruited into a unit formed in response to the Cold War and made up of European displaced persons from the East. One year younger than Olaf, he graduated from college (the University of Maryland in Iceland!) one year after me. He had been at UVM since 1962 and had published a book on Nazi colonial ambitions in Africa in 1964. We differed on almost everything, from the Parenti case to the student movement, but got along very well nonetheless.

Schmokel on Parenti: “I have spoken to a student who told me, ‘He preaches.’”

On the poster celebrating the Tet offensive, which Parenti had defended: “To glorify the victories of your enemy, that’s going a little far.”

“The trouble is that we take politics too seriously. We think that it can solve all questions. In politics there are no ends, only means.”

He worried that the Parenti controversy would adversely affect the town-gown relationship in Burlington, which up to then had been very good. The conservative Burlington Free Press indeed missed no opportunity to cast aspersions on Parenti and the anti-war cause he represented. Schmokel was also highly critical of the student movement, going so far as to cite the nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896) at length in class on the unshaven, uncouth liberal youth of the 1820s and 1830s. Schmokel: “Some of the puny prophets of today might do well to look back at this period, the early nineteenth century, for a much better discussion of what is going on today.” I saw his inclination to line up with power rather than to question it as the main difference between us. He, for his part, good-naturedly pronounced me to be “far gone.”

What I liked about Schmokel, despite his limitations, was that he seemed to recognize something in me. It is this feeling that a teacher ought to convey to his student. Of course, it may only have been my aristocratic descent that he admired. That was certainly the case with his wife Varian, a socialite whose first husband was related to the Biddles. “We heard a lot about the von Stackelbergs,” she said. Schmokel was impressed to have discovered, on his own, that one of our forebears had been the Russian representative to the Congress of Vienna. What Schmokel professed to hate most were intellectual snobs, whom he seemed to encounter with rather suspicious frequency. “I can remember my own revelation at Damascus very well,” he told me.

When I first got to Yale I was completely cowed. I had never been to college and I had always thought, if you have a historical problem, the way to solve it is to search for another fact, which is one perfectly valid approach to history. At Yale the other graduate students were talking about intellectual movements and concepts I had never even heard of. One day in a seminar the professor asked, “By the way, when was the Peace of Augsburg?” and nobody knew except little old me, and then I knew they were phonies.

Of course he hated the “new left,” which put him in a bit of a quandary in interpreting fascism. On the one hand he wanted to discredit the “new left” by associating them with fascism; on the other hand, perhaps as a result of his family background, he sought to portray Germany’s submission to fascism as not such an unnatural event. What seemed to anger him most was the Marxist concept of “false consciousness,” which for him illustrated the presumption of intellectuals thinking they knew what was best for the working class. He defended the right of people to allow themselves to be deluded or seduced into supporting policies or embracing values that objectively were not in their own best interests. I thought a quote from C. B. A. Behrend’s excellent book on the Ancien Regime in pre-revolutionary France captured Schmokel’s outlook very well: “. . .His belief in the virtues of bourgeois ideology, which indeed he does not see as an ideology at all but as the only correct way of looking at things.” But Schmokel was by nature quite tolerant and easy-going, the opposite of an ideologue – probably a result, as in the case of Papa, of his experience with politics during the war. He didn’t let our ideological differences get in the way of friendship and good relations.

The faculty member who made the greatest impression on me was the preeminent Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg (1926-2007). Although I never had a chance to take a course from him, I heard him at several university functions. One that particularly sticks out in my mind was a panel discussion on the 100th anniversary of the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany in the spring of 1971, at which Schmokel was also a panelist. Hilberg was a commanding presence. He spoke with the kind of authority that only comes from deep conviction and personal experience. His talk was mesmerizing, not so much because he had a way with words, but because he spoke from the soul.

A most enjoyable aspect of my return to graduate school was my exposure to books that I might never have read if they had not appeared on course syllabi. I was very impressed, for instance, by Erik Erikson’s (1902-1994) Young Man Luther (1962), a book viewed by some historians as an unwarranted encroachment on their turf. Schmokel dismissed the whole genre of “psychohistory” as faddish and only marginally legitimate. “After all, you can’t put dead historical figures on the couch.” To me Erikson’s book demonstrated how rewarding a psychoanalytical perspective could be. I loved Erikson’s characterization of Luther’s “secret furious inviolacy.” Some of his insights were more banal, of course, but sound nonetheless: “Fathers, if they know how to hold and guide a child, function somewhat like guardians of the child’s autonomous existence.” One of his statements would have even more meaning for me a few years later, when I experienced the dissolution of our marriage: “Whatever ends in divorce loses all retrospective clarity because a divorce breaks the Gestalt of one love into the Gestalten of two hates.” I recognized myself in the following rather uncomplimentary description of Luther as “one of those addicts and servants of the word who never know what they are thinking until they hear themselves say it, and who never know how strongly they believe what they say until somebody objects. . . Hearing his own words had inspired his convictions.” I could readily empathize with the following piece of advice: “Many individuals should not do the work they are doing, if they are doing it well at too great inner expense. Good work it may be in terms of efficiency; but it is also bad works.” I recognized our own family dynamics in Erickson’s analysis: “In truly significant matters people, and especially children, have a devastatingly clear, if mostly unconscious perception of what other people really mean, and sooner or later royally reward real love and take well-aimed revenge for implicit hate. Families in which each member is separated from the others by asbestos walls of verbal propriety, overt sweetness, cheap frankness, and rectitude tell one another off and talk back to each other with minute and unconscious displays of affect – not to mention physical complaints and bodily ailments – with which they worry, accuse, undermine, and murder one another.”

Another book from which I learned a lot was Peter Pulzer’s The Origins of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (1964). It revealed to me how closely modern (and Christian) antisemitism were related to animosity against the emancipatory values of the left: equal and inalienable rights for all, democracy, internationalism, liberalism, socialism, secularism, indeed the whole set of social and political allegiances emanating from the Enlightenment and French Revolution. It also revealed to me how instrumentalized the charge of antisemitism had become after the founding of the state of Israel in 1948, when it was the left that was increasingly accused of antisemitism for standing up for Palestinian rights. It surely is one of the great ironies of history that today it is the Likud Party in Israel that represents the greatest political continuity of any governing party in the West with the ethnic nationalism of the European far right before the Second World War.

Another book that made quite an impression on me was Ernst Nolte’s (b. 1923) Three Faces of Fascism (1963; English translation, 1967), the book that launched this former high school teacher’s reputation as a historian and legitimated the notion of a generic fascism manifesting itself in varying forms in the 1920s and 1930s in every European nation with the exception of the Soviet Union. However, I instinctively questioned his judgment in identifying Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) as the progenitor of fascism. Only later, after Nolte’s successive works documented his increasing shift to the right, did I realize that his deprecatory interpretation of Nietzsche was a function of his efforts to exculpate the Christian conservatism that had been so instrumental in the fascists’ rise to power all over Europe.

On June 8, 1971, Mama’s sometime partner Connie Sherwin died of liver failure in the hospital in Newport. Mama had already moved out of her house and back into her shack (and after the fire, a trailer) on her own land, adjacent to Connie’s farm, in April 1968. In June 1969 I wrote of their feud:

The Mama-Connie affair come full circle: eight years ago Connie was attracted to Mama because of the goat in her house, the unconventionality that freed her from her New Yorker dead end. Now she courts the approval of the townies by making fun of the goat in Mama’s house.

Their relationship had undergone many ups and downs, and Connie was still hoping, shortly before the unexpectedly sudden end of her life, to persuade Mama to move back in with her. But Mama had a stubborn streak and rejected all invitations and inducements, even to the point of subsisting, for lack of money to buy food, on corn flakes in the winter of 1970-1971, as we did not find out until after our return from Burlington at the end of the semester in May.

On June 9th I wrote in my journal:

Last impressions of Connie: driving Mama home from the library [Mama had volunteered as librarian in Albany] one day last year: Connie is walking up the hill toward [her neighbor] Roland Lawrence’s. I slow down. She sees us, and, instead of ignoring us as expected, waves and makes a gesture as if to speak to us when we stopped. I ask Mama whether she wanted to stop. She says no, and I pick up speed as we go by. Shortly thereafter I vow to stop next time, no matter what Mama says, but there is no next time.

We never were closer to Connie than at the time that Mama and she broke up. Steffi had already prepared an Easter present before we heard that Mama had moved out. She asked us, indirectly, to help persuade Mama to return. “What made her leave?” she asked. I said it probably was her drinking. “But I’ve been drinking ever since she knows me.” Shortly thereafter Mama successfully pressured us to break relations with Connie. “Talking badly about me is the passport to her house.”

Her inferiority to Mama; she was in the wrong because she was weaker.

Mama lost her voice (for about three weeks) from the moment she heard of Connie’s death. “At five after eight Kate Davis drove up and said Connie had died at ten to eight,” Mama reported. “I immediately went with her to call [Connie’s brother] Bob, and when I got to the phone I had no voice.”

Steffi attended the funeral a few days later, but I did not go. On June 13 I outlined what I thought would be a good plot for a novel:

Story of Connie’s funeral: Unable, despite the instructions she left, to prevent a ceremony at which Mama plays a leading part, sitting at graveside, in the “seats of honor,” from which she would have been rudely dislodged if Connie were alive. Playing hostess afterward in the house she deserted more than three years ago. Returning in triumph to live there and “run” the farm she was not permitted to run when Connie was alive. Will she permit Connie’s cows on her land [a constant source of quarrels while Connie was alive]? Mama’s main complaint against Connie was that she went back on their original bargain – to farm together, using Connie’s cows and barns, and Mama’s land. It developed into a struggle for dominance, for who was to have the say-so. For Connie the need to play the “male role” was probably greatest. She wanted to take care of Mama, and certainly did for a time. Psychologically she was more dependent on Mama than Mama was on her. She behaved as she did to Mama, because she wanted to make Mama equally, or more, dependent on her. But she could not get Mama to return on her, Connie’s, terms. The only thing that could make Mama come back was her death. Now it is Mama who is taking care of Connie, or what’s left of Connie. Mama suffered enough, no doubt, before reaping the harvest of her constancy. Her life is an object lesson on how to survive without worrying about it, or even trying very hard. To the superstitious it might seem that fate always rescues her just in the nick of time. And only last week I worried about the fact that the refrigerator which we procured for her (for a dollar at auction) had no shelves, and that with the hot weather her trailer would be invaded by the mosquitoes and black flies that find so many excellent breeding places in the vicinity!

A week later I commented on

Mama’s defenselessness, it seemed, seeing her again for the first time after Connie’s death. Aged in one way, yet more childlike in another way (there is no contradiction). For the first time I thought I could recognize what Connie must have found so attractive about her, that quality so entirely concealed behind a front of abusive anger and vituperation.

Steffi’s refusal to look at Mama while she (Mama) was talking. This gesture, which I generally approve as a necessary method of retaining independence, surprised me now and brought me back to the reality of Mama’s strength. I had expected Steffi to pity her.

Perhaps the grain of truth in Steffi’s remark, when I asked her why she didn’t want me to go to Connie’s funeral, is what humiliated me so: “Ich habe Angst du sagst etwas Peinliches zu Mama (I’m afraid you’ll say something embarrassing to Mama).”

Connie’s brother, to whom Connie left the farm, asked Mama to run it until he could find a buyer. This meant that, ironically, several of our family get-togethers that summer were in Connie’s house, where Mama had lived from 1964, after her first fire, until 1968. Mama now emphasized her cohesion with Connie, perhaps to remove the potential stigma of living in the house to which she had refused to return while Connie was alive. Her conversation was now sprinkled with, “We did this, we did that.” Faithful not unto death, I thought, but after death. Gathering at Connie’s house made me somewhat uncomfortable, not so much because it seemed a violation of Connie’s memory, but rather because it acknowledged the power that Mama had to determine whether and when we were permitted to visit Connie’s home.

Connie’s death gave us four “children” the opportunity to pay off the mortgage on Mama’s land, a right that Connie (who had taken out the mortgage in her own name with the bank in Orleans) had denied us in order to maintain Mama in a state of at least partial financial dependency even after Mama’s steadfast refusal of Connie’s repeated offers of financial support if Mama would return to her. After her death, Connie’s brother was happy to be relieved of the monthly mortgage payments on Mama’s land. In an effort to retain her financial independence Mama had previously sold about 25 choice acres of her property to “flatlanders” (the Minicuccis) from Connecticut, much to the dismay of us “children.” Minicucci built a cabin in a very visible location on his newly acquired land for his family to visit during hunting season and vacations. To avoid having to sell off further parcels to support herself and pay the taxes, Mama decided to deed her property to her four children in return for the right to its use for the rest of her life. In the summer of 1972 Aunt Temple generously had a brand-new three bedroom ranch house built for Mama on the farthest reaches of her property near the Black River, along with a small gambrel-roofed barn for her animals, mostly goats and sheep, with a hayloft on top. Aunt Temple’s original intention was to reside with Mama in Vermont at least part of the year, but over the years her stays grew ever shorter as she sought to avoid any friction with Mama. Olaf, the only one of us without a foothold in Vermont at the time, subsequently bought out his chronically impecunious siblings as co-owners of Mama’s property, and Aunt Temple deeded the house and the barn to him later as well. Olaf, in turn, took over the obligation for Mama’s welfare. By paying off Mama’s last outstanding contributions to qualify for social security (Mama had paid into the system in the late 1940s and early 1950s while working at the Briscoes and at various odd waitressing jobs) he enabled Mama to draw monthly social security checks at age 62 in 1974, thus assuring her a steady, if minimal, source of income that would make her economically independent, though not entirely self-sufficient, for the rest of her life. Olaf benefited as well by claiming her as a dependent on his income tax form and gaining possession of her 150 acre property with house and barn.

That summer Steffi and I again made the rounds of an ever-increasing number of crafts fairs, a practice we had begun in the summer of 1969 at an annual juried fair sponsored by a consortium of craftsmen in the picturesque town of Bennington in southern Vermont. The site of the fair shifted to Rhinebeck, New York, in the summer of 1971 to accommodate the growing number of exhibitors.

But the most lucrative fair, and one of the hardest to get into, was the one in Guilford, Connecticut, in the heart of one of the wealthiest residential areas in the country. Steffi and I had enjoyed what to us seemed like a spectacular success of several hundred dollars of sales in the summer of 1970. In succeeding years we sometimes doubled and even tripled those figures. The summer of 1971 was somewhat of a disappointment, however. This time I was to go alone so as to leave Steffi free to continue making jewelry at home. However, having arrived at Olaf’s in Middletown, where he was once again teaching summer school at Wesleyan, I promptly came down with a debilitating grippe. His 13-year-old son John, who had been slated to assist me, actually was left to run our booth entirely on his own. He did so very successfully, achieving a greater volume of sales than we had attained a year before. The story had an interesting follow-up. Mama’s staunchly conservative neighbor Roland Lawrence, Albany’s representative to the state legislature notorious for his obstruction of any progressive social legislation, heard that something had gone wrong in Guilford. Whether because he credited me with greater strength than I had or because he refused to believe that I was capable of such flagrant delinquency, he got the story all wrong. When I returned to Vermont, he said, “Well, I heard that Steffi was sick down in Connecticut somewhere and John had to do all the selling for her.” I set him straight on who it was that had gotten sick, but not without feeling that I had dropped a notch or two in his estimation. It was not the first time he made me feel deficient in meeting a personal test or obligation. On an earlier occasion, after one of Mama’s cows had strayed on to his land (a not infrequent occurrence, given the state of Mama’s improvised fences), he simply assumed that I would take care of this matter for her. “Do you want a rope around her nose to lead her?” he asked me, assuming as a matter of course that I knew when it was best to drive a cow or when it was best to lead her. Mama and he, on the other hand, despite their political and ideological differences, formed a mutual admiration society, admiring each other for the same trait: rugged individualism. “He wrings a respect for Republicanism from you,” Mama said.

I had noticed some time ago that Mama’s attitudes were often quite conservative, at least compared to mine. I thought, for instance, that her attitude toward American crimes in Vietnam was excessively forgiving (no doubt because they paled in comparison to the crimes she had witnessed in Germany during the Second World War), and I was shocked by her refusal to condemn with what I thought was appropriate harshness the young people involved in the nightrider attack on the Johnson home in the Irasburg Affair. Paradoxical as it may sound, Mama’s conservatism was a function of her growing tolerance for all types of people, even the narrow minded and reactionary natives who were still well represented in the Northeast Kingdom in those days. She had the optimistic and progressive conviction that people were basically good, though she never hesitated to point out their corruptions and mistakes. Mama was a bit of a misanthrope, but the opposite of a cynic. She saw through sham and delusion clearly enough, but despite ritual exclamations of “it’s hopeless” or “it’s useless,” she never gave in to pessimism or bitterness. Hence there was no contradiction between her penchant for personal and political criticism and her sometime acceptance of eccentric right-wing views. She did temper her apologetics for the Vietnam War in the 1970s, but her growing disenchantment with the war was often expressed rather indirectly, in such statements as, “I’m sick of war. It’s the funniest thing. I can no longer read about war.” Even Aunt Temple, who remained hawkish for a longer period and mocked my pacifist views, was beginning to change. “This war has lasted entirely too long,” she conceded, though not yet quite ready to have it shortened by pulling out rather than by applying greater force. The publication in June of 1971 of the Pentagon Papers did much to legitimate the anti-war movement and led me to record the following observation in my journal: “Suddenly my article, calling for governments to act under the same rules and standards that govern the conduct of individual relations, doesn’t seem so childish, silly, naïve anymore.”

Mama’s life may be said to have consisted of unfulfilled dreams, nicely captured (along with Mama’s personal authority, her sense of humor, and her propensity to tease) by my sister Betsy in two vignettes she wrote in 1970 and subsequently sent to me:

I was living in my mother’s hand-made tarpaper shack [in 1966]. It was hard to keep it clean but one could manage it. All around the shack, however, was a tumble of mess and ruins from the old burned-down farmhouse. Wood lay all over, bricks, papers, it was not a pretty sight. At times I was very depressed by my fate which had brought me to this pass. However, there were times without compare.

Every afternoon my mother came down to feed her animals and I always very formally asked her in for a cup of tea. My mother made a big point of not coming in unless she knocked, or I asked her in. She said: “Yes, put the water on, I’m dying of thirst.” It was an extremely mild November afternoon and my mother suggested we drink our tea outdoors. We did. There we sat, behind us a tumble-down tarpaper shack and all around us a terrible mess.

Suddenly my mother said: “How do you like my rose garden?” Of course, I saw none, and I said so. “Why, I can see it plainly, the vines are only half-way up so far,” my mother insisted and still I resisted. “All I can see is a terrible mess,” I said with a certain vehemence. “Why Betsy, I can’t understand that. I see that rose garden so very clearly, not only the flowers, but the steps that lead down to them, because it’s a sunken garden. You do see that, don’t you?” I was becoming infected as I knew I would and I said, very reluctantly, “Yes, I am beginning to see your rose garden, Mama,” and once converted, I became quite enthusiastic and we added many details of perfection to the scene.

“And don’t you love living in my mansion, Betsy? It’s so spacious, three stories high with lots of extra rooms.” For one minute I wanted to resist again and say, No, I don’t like your tarpaper shack, but instead I really caught the fever and saw the beautiful house.

I don’t live there anymore, but every time I go back to visit I see that lovely sunken garden in front of my mother’s beautiful three-story white house.
*****
Yesterday I visited my mother, and it was another classic encounter. As I was driving down she stood in the middle of the road to see who it was. When she recognized my car, she turned away, and I again felt that sinking feeling – Oh my God, she’s in a bad mood. Well, I’ll tell her I can only stay five minutes.

However, she recovered herself and before I had even stopped, she said: “How very opportune. I need you to stand in front of that pig who is trying to get out, while I get nails and a hammer.” So, of course, I did. There I stood, waving a stick at a grunting pig, and thinking, you never know, now, you never do.

That done, I said, could we take a small walk, and my mother jumped at the chance. Half way across the field I knew my dog was getting tired. I suggested we turn back, but no, my mother said we had hardly begun, and I knew we must continue.

We walked. Suddenly my mother stopped, looked all around her at the sloping valley and rolling hills and said: “This is my house.” For one moment I was very startled, no house being visible, but then I said, “It’s very lovely, you chose a beautiful spot.”

“Yes, I like my houses to be protected.” — “I can certainly understand that,” I said and wondered what would come next. It came:

“Oh well, you know,” my mother said, “this is only one of my thirty houses.”

I have pretty much given up resisting my mother and I said: “I didn’t know, Mama. You must show me your other houses too.”

“Well, that would take at least five hours,” my mother said in all seriousness. “I guess we don’t have time for that today then,” I said. “By the way, is this a two-story house?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” and with a sudden loss of interest we moved on.

My dog, Tamara, was very tired by now and I had to pick her up.

“Why not put her in your purse?” asked my mother. So I did. There sat Tamara, only her head looking out.

“She’s not completely happy, but she’ll settle,” announced my mother. After that we walked in silence back to her trailer and I finished the visit with a cup of tea and two pieces of bread with honey.”

In the spring of 1971, after two years of trying, Steffi finally got pregnant again. Our son Nicholas Olaf, named after my two brothers, was born on November 1st.

Steffi was sure he had been conceived on February 9th. “That was your birthday present to me,” she said. Dr. Gage, our chain-smoking local physician, had refused to preside over natural childbirth, which Steffi would have preferred. In those days fathers were not yet welcome in the delivery room, certainly not in Newport, Vermont. The baby was big and healthy and had what seemed to me a marvelously placid temperament. Trina accepted her sibling with a sense of pride, although she had hoped for a sister who would become her playmate.
At the end of the fall semester I completed my MA thesis on the Irasburg Affair and at age 36 prepared to move on to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for my PhD.