Two Bits of Autobiography

[I] My Varied Marital Statuses

   I have lead a fairly even-going life, with no genuinely dramatic turns after the one that brought me and my family from Heidelberg where I was born to New York. That was in 1939, six years after the election of Hitler and the systematic persecution of Jews. After attending school and a  year’s stint in the Navy (the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima while I was in boot camp) I went to on to graduate school, but well before getting my doctorate I married Fannia, so that after twenty-five years as a single person, I attained the of being married.

   But that was only the beginning. Short of forty-two years of our mostly happy marriage, Fannia succumbed to the results of bleeding after what was supposed to be a “routine” operation. (Useless wisdom gained: there is no such thing as a routine operation.) Suddenly, my status changed from married to being widowed.

  For a few years I returned to an unadventurous bachelorhood—there ought to be a name for that status—that ended when I married Gissa, whom I had come to know as a friend of Fannia. That made me the husband of a second marriage.

   We had a pleasant life for some years and did some stimulating traveling, but it nevertheless came to fray. I can’t say whether the fact that I was fourteen years older than Gissa played a role. In any case, after an incident, I invoked the relevant clause in the pre-nup agreement we both had signed and required Gissa to move out. That gave me the new status that of being separated.

   Not all so long after reaching that new stage, I attained what was surely to be the last: Gissa and I amicably agreed to be divorced.

   While I have always thought of myself as having led a fairly quiet life, this account casts doubt on that claim.

[II] Philosophy and After

    Mostly, I think, because I had some prestigious mentors, I was the recipient of two significant fellowships. The fist was a Guggenheim and the second, a few years later, was from the American Council of Learned Societies. Both applications were for work on a book in the philosophy of history; each gave me a year free of teaching; each enabled me to take the whole family away from my campus at the time. I was teaching at San Francisco State when I was awarded the Guggenheim that permitted us to spend the year in Florence, Italy, mostly because I liked the city and the country. Six years later I was teaching at Vassar, with the fellowship year spent at Oxford where a scientist relative of Fannia secured us a berth at Linacre, his college.

   The conditions were favorable to getting work done, in the case of Florence, aided by a couple of cartons of books to compensate for the (correctly expected) paucity there of English works in philosophy. On both these occasions we settled down quite comfortably and while the schooling of the kids was quite different, it was at least adequate. Fannia continued to work on her editing, but took more advantage of what the environments had to offer than I did. That’s because I took my role seriously and spent many hours at my desk, writing.

   Both grants were for essentially the same project--the second grant updated. My diligence produced many pages—but pages that ultimately did not add up to a book. I had failed to think through my task  in requisite detail and was counting on the writing itself to generate the structure that makes a book a book. On both of these fellowship occasions I also wrote some articles that were published in a number of journals, but the residue of most of my writing is a great many pages that I never adequately dealt with after my return.
   There are a number of books on my resume and (of course) far more articles. Many are on a variety of topics in philosophy, but at least as many or more are on themes pertaining to higher education. Indeed, in my view, the latter are the better bunch, with partial evidence given by the fact that one of them received a fairly prestigious prize and regarding another, the publisher asked me to produce a second edition. I also wrote quite a bit about myself, including some considerably larger autobiographical chunks than are to be found on this blog.

   The fact is that not long after our return from Oxford to Vassar I successfully competed for the deanship of Northwestern University’s College of Arts and Science, a job I held for thirteen years. I had enjoyed teaching philosophy and while I was no star, I was pretty good at it. But I enjoyed being dean even more and managed to accomplish a lot in the performance of that role, with quite a few of my innovations still in place, more than a quarter of a century later.

   Perhaps this story of two careers has its origin in a brief moment after my return from a year on a traveling fellowship awarded by Columbia College. The chairman of the philosophy department—from whom I had taken some courses—welcomed me back with a cheerful greeting and told me that if my lot was now to earn my keep by shelving books in the library, I’d be better off doing graduate work in philosophy. He backed that up by getting me a small fellowship. I had applied for a government job that was never funded, so I started graduate courses a week or two later: faute de mieux.