An Interesting Life, So Far

Another cousin would have an even more erratic academic career than my own. Unable to afford studying medical school at Tufts, she had gone to France hoping to enter a Swiss medical school, but returned to USA and while teaching in the New York school system was taking graduate courses in English literature at New York University when we met. We remained occasionally in contact as she moved through various university teaching, administrative, and even presidential positions from New York, to New Jersey, Indiana, Ohio, and back to New York. Each step up the academic and administrative ladder seemed to make her more dissatisfied with life and those with whom she worked. She was the one who eventually inherited the property next to the Kennedy’s at Hyannis Port and which she found was mortgaged and had to sell to pay her father’s debts. About once every two or three years we still exchange an email message to tell each other that we are still alive. She complains, I brag, a regular hee-haw. She helped me through some of the intricacies of family genealogy although like me she remains uncertain who begat whom and did what.

My father had a brother who also became a pharmacist, and owned a small drug store in Philadelphia He, his wife, and two daughters lived in an apartment behind it. Sometime in my later teens, when I had a car, I began visiting when I discovered that the elder of the daughters, Mimi, had a strong interest in literature and knew about the so-called New Critics who were then the champions and explicators of modern literature and its cultural bye ways including the attractions of Roman Catholicism in contrast to the Marxism that had attracted the previous generation.

Mimi had attended Michigan University where she studied with Austin Warren famous for collaborating with Rene Wellek on Theory of Literature and as author of a book on the poet Richard Crashaw and the Baroque sensibility. She also studied at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, one of centers at that time of the New Critics. She and her friends, who taught at such places as Swarthmore and Beaver colleges, had evenings with rosé wine, gouda cheese and crackers, and talked about books, politics and foreign films. Finishing their doctoral dissertations seemed a high hurdle, and they spoke admiringly of the then famous poet critic Peter Viereck who when told that he needed a Ph.d to gain tenure at Mount Holyoke College added footnotes to one of his already published books. To me this was a glimpse of civilization, although perhaps a bit effete.

Such impressions were misleading. Mimi had told me about stealing books at college, about having friends who were communists, and first mentioned to me Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman’s The Armed Vision. I think she had had lovers although she was not physically attractive. I doubt that she ever thought of herself as a literary critic in contrast to someone for whom the critical debates of the period were part of culture and she married someone who she knew would never make a name for himself as a writer, intellectual or as a teacher at a major university. It was a marriage that puzzled me but she knew what she was choosing. She was rational and self-limiting and I think my innocence and energy amused her. I also seemed to have money and had such material goods as my own new automobile, which was beyond her means. She once said I was given financial freedom so my mother could run the pharmacy and her life without looking after me.

Mimi became well-known almost by accident. Having moved to Trenton, New Jersey, where her husband was teaching at a local teacher’s college, she was casually employed by The Educational Testing Service, which thought it should have some females on its staff, an up and coming idea, and before long was in charge of its English literature tests, and then moved further up in the hierarchy of what became an influential international testing organization.

On my occasional returns to the USA after teaching abroad I would visit her, be impressed by her largish collection of pre-Columbian art, follow the progress of the daughter that she and her husband adopted and raised. The direction my life was taking also amused her. I was one of those writing about the new national literatures of the British Commonwealth; Mimi remarked that she thought I was still a scholar of Seventeenth Century British Commonwealth literature. That was better than those who asked if “Commonwealth Literature” referred to the Pennsylvania or Massachusetts Commonwealth.

I also learned that her younger sister, Claire, whom I had wrongly dismissed after her marriage to a high school physical education instructor as someone who telephoned mother about cake recipes, was actually a mathematical genius who gave advanced courses sponsored by the government to other young scientific geniuses who needed mathematical stimulation between high school and college.

Al, the father of Mimi and Claire, seemed to me quietly unambitious, but his wife, Bella, was sharp, clever, and looked down on the family that my father had married into as socially beneath her. Jews from Vienna were highly assimilated German speakers unlike the Yiddish speakers of most of Eastern Europe. My mother’s cooking, when she cooked, was to me uneatable; I would sneak out for a hamburger at a nearby diner. I enjoyed the few meals I had at Mimi’s made by her mother. Something as simple as a Greek salad, the dressing made with mint, oregano, olive oil and lemon juice was a discovery. I once used Mimi’s influence when I was a professor in New Zealand and my marriage was troubled: my daughter decided to apply to American universities for the coming year but it was late for her to apply for the tests that she needed. I telephoned Mimi and an exception was made for Nicole who soon escaped to Bryn Mawr College. I know little of Mimi’s later years. I several times telephoned and was told by her husband Milton that she was suffering from Lyme disease.

There were some very successful genes on my father’s side of the family, although my father seemed not to have inherited them. He started a pharmacy in Trenton after marrying my mother, and supposedly was cheated out of everything by his partner. He had a small pharmacy in Gloucester, New Jersey, to me the end of the world. I think that he had no competition at first; then a large chain opened a bigger drug store. I would be embarrassed when my father and mother, when going out after work, stopped to compare prices of items in the competitor’s windows.

My mother and her family were different from my father. She and her sisters and brothers were physically attractive, energetic, unbookish, not well educated. The men were athletic. I have the impression that they were impoverished and at some point they anglicized their name Goldberg to Gilbert. My mother’s father was from Manchester, England. Grey eyed, cheerful, amusing, he would walk daily across the Delaware River Bridge from Camden to Philadelphia where he sold fruit and vegetables from a pushcart. I hardly ever saw him and heard that my grandmother never forgave him for leaving her to travel around the world as a sailor for a decade. Typical of the confused family history inherited by many Americans I have heard two conflicting accounts for his leaving his wife for a decade. In one version he was one of the Wobblies, heroic, militant, Socialist radicals, and was threatened by strikebreakers that if they saw him again he would be killed. In the other version he was one of the strikebreakers whom the Wobblies threatened to kill. From what I remember of my grandmother I would have been happy for either excuse to get out of town.

She was from someplace on the German Polish border and spoke only Yiddish. She found America disagreeable; as she grew older she seldom left her old fashioned wooden house in a poorer section of Camden. When she wanted something she would telephone her daughters and threaten to throw herself down the stairs if they did not come immediately to help her. My mother was a sucker for such intimidation and took care of her mother during the final decades of my grandmother’s life, an expectation she had about herself and other mothers left on their own in old age. Her two sisters were more hardhearted. I have no idea of what my grandmother was like when younger and I so disliked her that until now the question never came up. On the basis of no actual information I assume my grandmother and grandfather, both immigrants, were brought together by some rabbi, family friend, or marriage broker. My mother spoke with her mother in broken Yiddish and would sometimes use Yiddish expressions when speaking with my father. This was part of their Jewish background of which I wanted no part. Years later when I was having difficulties learning German my mother would insist it was an easy language.

My mother was an attractive grey-eyed woman who had about six years of schooling in Camden followed by a short course in nursing. I understand that she had a crush on some other man but was made to marry my father by her mother who saw him as potentially more successful. I do not know how much of this is true or for that matter how much of anything about my parents is true as they seldom spoke in front of me about their history.

My mother must have married in her late teens and had me about six years later. I know that she felt anxiety around non-Jews and thought that she should have observed Jewish traditions. Her few friends were mostly Jews, and she seemed uncomfortable when I started dating non-Jews. She told me that at the first argument I would be called a “damn Jew”. (It has never happened.) If she ever met someone Jewish whom I was seeing she would praise her as a potential daughter-in-law, for which she had a curiously old fashioned term, someone you would “be proud to bring home”. Yet when I did marry Adele, from a very religious Methodist family, Lillian took to her immediately, unlike Adele’s family who did everything it could to break up the marriage including disinheriting Adele. Lillian justified my marriage by saying that everyone born in America was a “Christian”. Try to unpack that.

She once surprisingly claimed my father had said gentiles were for bedding not marrying. Surprising because my mother was extremely puritanical about sex, spoke of it as a disease, and the main source of my information about her came from a family friend who sarcastically said that poor Joe, my father, had to give her a fur coat to take her to bed. She had no fur coats, desired them badly, (often saying that when I grew up and became wealthy I would buy her a white mink coat).

She had a boyfriend for many years, after my father’s death, whom she hoped to marry until he married someone else. He was tall, well built, played tennis, had a trim old fashioned moustache, and a legal practice which was housed in the Camden offices of Myers Baker, the husband of my aunt Florence. He had an instant tour of Europe and returned saying Oxford and Cambridge are over-rated as the buildings were so old. I cannot believe he was satisfied romancing my mother without results although I have the impression that that is what she would have preferred. There were other men romancing her who also decided to marry elsewhere and she would indicate that despite the money spent on expensive restaurants and trips, these were just friends. She was always well dressed, lady-like, and appeared to make friends easily, but kept turning down offers of employment or marriage that would have taken her away from the world she knew. I also suspect that while she wanted to be desired by men and liked their company she felt one marriage was enough. She was probably afraid of sexual demands, but possibly also afraid of losing her freedom.

She was sensitive about her limitations and tried to hide them. Her lack of educational qualifications troubled her. During the 1960s when there was much talk about university degrees based on life experience, my mother found this perhaps the only part of that period’s liberating ideas with which she agreed. She had to employ trained pharmacists to work in the drugstore after my father’s death, and I think resented that. In a pinch she would illegally fill prescriptions on her own and was fined by the state pharmaceutical body. It was not something she ever told me about and I did not want to know, as her insecurities were troubling, embarrassing, almost insane. If she received a general mailing from the Red Cross or some other body seeking money she would fantasize that General Eisenhower or whoever signed the appeal was writing directly to her personally. Such declarations were depressing and when my mother visited Europe my friends would say “poor you”, but while I was unhappy seeing her I knew I was badly indebted to her. I had inherited her sense of order and cleanliness. I do not like chairs out of place, I cannot leave dishes in the sink overnight, I have seldom been drunk. Although I enjoy sex and feel driven by it, I have been told by women that I am puritanical. Offered a drunken fling I will back out. I am more likely to need seducing than to seduce. Even that I had become a good dancer was because in my teens she was willing to pay for me to take Arthur Murray dancing lessons and also wanted me, and later Adele, to be well dressed. I would have become a less presentable and less sociable creature without her influence.

She wanted me to study pharmacy like my father at Temple University and manage the drug store, for which after his death she had taken a bank loan and remodeled. I had no intention of taking on her or his life and wanted to get to Paris or New York as soon as I could. She paid for my four years at Columbia College, paid for my years as a doctoral student at Leeds University in England and for a time supported my marriage. Wanting to be free from her I broke the financial connection after my first university appointment. How can one speak of disliking someone who gave me an Oldsmobile when I was still in high school, who arranged a wedding party when I married Adele in St Louis (a marriage which her parents tried to prevent and then hoped to break up), and gave us financial support until I earned my doctorate and had my first job, someone who gave us money to furnish our first apartment?

Yet, in truth, I disliked her, at times hated her, as I felt she was always ignoring, or more likely was ignorant of, what I was accomplishing and was continually trying to make me come back into her small world of her Jewish friends, her neighbors, people I had gone to high school with and long forgotten, and of course family relations. Whereas others had moved on, bought apartments in Florida, divorced, remarried, travelled, Lillian stayed in the same area all her life, saw the same or similar people, and depended on a narrowing circle of family. There were her two sisters, a brother, maybe two pharmacists who were friends of my father. She would end with her younger brother’s daughter taking care of her, a destructive relationship for both.

My mother unchallenged came to believe her own fantasies. Fainting in a supermarket and becoming wheel chaired she blamed her fall on a banana skin in one version and in another version on a soapy floor. The supermarket had offered to pay for her hospital and other expenses but when sued in court had no trouble showing that she had a history of falls and conditions likely to provoke falls. She never accepted that she was wrong.

My cousin, Uncle Henry’s daughter, who took care for her never worked a day in her life, came increasing to live in her own imagined world, and rather than being saved from sex and drugs became a bitter aging adolescent who having run through her parents and my mother’s money, and having a series of automobile accidents, kept telephoning relatives asking them to fund her life. My wife, Adele, who is unusually sympathetic to the troubles of others said after a series of such telephone calls that once my cousin got through our door I would never get her out.

About that Oldsmobile. The size, make, and vintage of your car were significant for several decades and for all I know might still be in some social circles. I have since usually had friends where an unassertive smaller car is a sign of good taste, just as at present the educated and sensitive ride bicycles, a skill I never picked up when young. Not only was my mother conscious of the social status of flashy expensive cars, she had moved up to a Cadillac, and assumed that young women would be impressed if I had my own Oldsmobile, She was part of her time in her views. If you telephoned a woman you did not or hardly knew for a date, you would be asked whether you had a car, the brand, the age. It was no doubt a substitute for inquiring about other less public matters. I know that a taste for fancy automobiles continues. I have friends in New Orleans who originally came from small towns in Mississippi and who wear gold jewelry, gamble at casinos, do not read books, and are proud of their cars that they often change. We remain friends and enjoy each other’s company although outside New Orleans with its jazz clubs, restaurants, and amusing bohemian characters we would find little in common. As I sometimes have difficulty explaining to people what I do for a living I mumbled to one that I knew and had written about two Nobel laureates in literature. She looked delighted and said I was the first person she knew who had won two Nobel prizes. An Oldsmobile would not have led to such confusion. Among the ecologically minded do you demand more or less fancy bicycles of your partners?

I can see that my problems with my mother started shortly after my father died and she began to renew herself. I mentioned the bank loan that allowed her to remodel the pharmacy and placed emphasis on selling cosmetics rather than filling prescriptions. She bought a new, younger, fashionable wardrobe, dyed her long graying hair a bright blondish red that she continued to have over the decades until her death and which she insisted was her natural hair color. I immediately smelt a rat when told that I was now her young man expected to escort her to gatherings. I did not need to read Freud to feel sexually threatened. One of my confused memories of childhood was of her kissing my penis (for which she had an affectionate Yiddish term). (Another memory is of being with my mother and her two sisters in a changing room on the beach in Atlantic City where I was conscious of their uncovered breasts, no doubt the start of my wanting to be surrounded by attractive women, a characteristic that others have noticed.) There was often sexual tension. If I closed the door of my bedroom at night she wanted it left open, no doubt suspecting me of masturbation. More likely I was trying to listen to a late night radio show from New York that I followed and which allowed me to feel I was part of a larger world of singers, actors, and other stars.

I did not want to be my mother’s young man; I wanted to be left alone to my own interests including girls my own age. I was at that time discovering literature and jazz music and learning about intellectual topics and I wanted to keep as far away from my mother and her world as possible. Our tastes were opposites. If I wanted a jazz record she would claim it was “sad” and instead buy me something I hated. We rapidly grew apart except for the financial connection.

Yet it was not like this earlier. When I was learning to read and count it was she who taught me rather than my father. I remember her helping me read an illustrated children’s version of Gulliver’s Travels. How was this possible? Where did she find the book? She could not have any notion of the author Jonathan Swift. She also taught me to count. When I went to kindergarten I was upset when the teacher told the class that 900 was followed by ten hundred. I knew she was lying. It should be a thousand. This was the start of my distrust of the academy, and its attempt to reach the less able, and I was, what? Six years old? I already felt a rebel. I had told my mother that I did not believe in God when she said that God would not like something I had done. And I remember in first grade staring out the window and thinking how many more years am I expected to sit through this? Not a good start for someone who would become a university professor.

Lillian had two attractive sisters and three brothers. The sisters were achievers, the men were not. Her elder sister, Florence, was a tall blonde who somehow, I have not the least idea how, became part of the Republican Party establishment in New Jersey. She had lived the life of the jazz age during the depression, knew famous people, attended polo matches, and travelled to Paris and bought clothes there while others were selling apples on the street corners of America. Could her husband Myers somehow have opened the world to her? I doubt it as he always seemed a small figure with an obscure legal practice; I think he was in Real Estate. I see on Google that by 1936 Florence was already an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention. She was several other times a delegate or alternate. I never discussed politics with her but thought that she was on the liberal Eastern Rockefeller wing of the Party. I cannot imagine her approving of the new moneyed trash that came into, and took over, the Party from the West and South. That was not her taste.

I admired her and her selfish self-centeredness, although she could be absurd, as when at a family party she tragically lost the label of a Parisian dress in the toilet. She lived in Pennsauken, New Jersey, just outside Merchantville, an area now a poor ghetto, then ritzy. I was impressed by the size of her house (we lived above our pharmacy), by the fishpond in the garden and by the two stone lions on the steps. She was childless and I became her favorite nephew. When I was small she gave me a Pekingese dog, Mickey, which I loved. When it was run over by a car my parents bought me another but it was no replacement and I lost interest in dogs. Although I insisted that my parents get rid of the third dog, my mother claimed throughout her life that I loved dogs.

I do not know what she did in the Republican Party but Florence would offer me tickets to the Republican party convention in Philadelphia and their meetings in Camden with people like Adolphe Menjou, an older movie star who appeared absurd in his formal tails, stiff shirt, and dead white make up. Florence claimed Menjou was a model for how to dress. For a funeral? My mother complained that her sister would enter Christian churches but then my mother would love ham sandwiches although avoiding pork chops. I gather my Aunt Florence had enemies who said she kept her good looks through face-lifts. I doubt that they were right as there was no evidence of it. She had style. She always had a new Lincoln Continental that in appearance seemed to me to belong to the 1930s, with a raised trunk in back and a spare tire on the side. When she stopped driving she kept her last one garaged for many years as a collector’s piece.

She had influence. When I graduated Columbia and was waiting to go to England I received a puzzled telephone call from Princeton University Admissions saying that a Senator had recommended me for graduate work but they could find no record of my application. In Paris my wife and myself were invited to a July 4th party at the Embassy where I remember slyly letting someone’s baby sip our champagne. Florence had a stroke, was moved into my mother’s apartment and cared for by her until a long time later she died without recovering her speech or ability to walk, which a physical therapist claimed was the result of laziness. The money she willed to me was used to pay for her expenses which were later paid for by Rose, my mother’s younger sister. The property that I admired was illegally sold for a nominal cost by my mother, who assumed power of estate, to her brother Henry’s perpetually hopeless daughter who after waiting for years for some movie or musical star to discover her unexplored talents would be company for my mother in her old age. The classic Continental, now over 25 years old and in mint condition, my mother assumed was junk and sold as such.

If Florence had seemingly effortlessly risen above her origins and joined the political WASP establishment, the youngest sister, Rose, seemed to glorify in her working class roots. She was not petite bourgeois. While the owner of a million dollar meat packing plant she would face strikes by her workers by joining them and discussing their mutual problems. Her personality was stronger than any union. A short pretty dynamic woman with reddish blonde hair and a loud crude voice she dominated her surroundings and those who surrounded her. She had left school in 9th grade, married at 16 Harry Cook, a butcher. He was said to demand sex when on the job, and if she was not immediately available there were female employees who were. He made a fortune during the Second World War by selling meat on the black market.