R_ A_
...
I have a history, I have a past. My first book ... was written and published like a bubble blown into an empty sky. This second book is like a river of narrative crossing, uniting, sustaining a countryside of many episodes, many events.
Both [books] have been efforts to make an intellectual life for myself in surroundings I have felt to be basically non-intellectual. Both Cornell Graduate School, the setting of the first, and UCR, of the second, have been institutions devoted to non-intellectual endeavors. They are educational institutions oriented to the life of the mind, but not necessarily the life of ideas. Both approach knowledge as a product, rather than as an activity. And both schools, located geographically and emotionally at the margins of the problemmatic core of America, see knowledge as distant from problems, as created in isolation and applied, rather than engaged in life. And in both schools, knowledge and ideas are tied strongly to instruction, rather than to invention. In other words, the intellectual life at Cornell and UCR is not creative. And it is not what I have wanted from an intellectual life.
So I know that what has sustained my emotional drive to complete this [my second] book, as well as the first, is my own sense of sustaining an intellectual life, inventing a complicated arrangement--scholarship in book writing--that permits me to engage myself in intellectual dialogue. The books have been, in other words, at the core of my self-respect.
My vision of myself, of the intellectual in a non-intellectual setting, of struggling to maintain a life of ideas in a quasi-intellectual setting to which the creative mind is peripheral, is peculiar, to say the least. For, of course, it is this setting that has provided me with the salary, the definition of my role (whether of student or professor), and the time to engage in scholarship and my private little life of ideas.
So, if there is no community intellectual life in these settings, is the problem in the setting or in me? To ask the question psychoanalytically, does my pecular vision of myself as an intellectual, have less to do with the failure of the setting to be intellectual and more to do with my need to set myself against my setting, in eternal re-creations of the primal drama of youth defining itself by pitting its adolescence against adulthood and parents, with all their mundane concerns? Is the reason that I don't participate in a community intellectual life that I define myself as an intellectual loner, rebelling against the community?
What alternative is there to the vision of myself that I hold? Pittsburgh? I suppose that I can justify the objective accuracy of my vision of myself--and belie the psychoanalysis--by pointing to the community intellectual life of the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh, when I was there briefly as a visiting assistant professor in 1969-1970. There S_ H_ did in fact create a genuinely exciting life of ideas, bubbling with ideas about research, quantification, interpretation in history, with continual discussion and argument, at noon brown-bag lunches, dinner parties, social stand-up parties, on long walks, to and from the campus and Squirrel Hill. It occurs to me that most of those in the midst of that ferment considered themselves engaged with, rather than detached from, the problems of America. At the confused core of America in Steel Town, USA.
Pittsburgh has been the only place, other than at UNH, where I have had sustained truly intellectual conversation. How ironic that UNH should have been one of those places--little backwater U! Yet I have intense and vivid memories of the many hours of conversation, many memories of R_, as another bit of evidence for my contention that my vision of my own intellectual life does not need psychoanalysis. That it has as much similitude of objectivity as any interpretation of life can have.
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Making My Mind
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