Mel Kalfus Remembered

My association with Mel Kalfus began in the spring and summer of 1990 when we gave papers at the Psychohistory Forum meetings on a topic that was entitled “Genius and Empathy,” about how two 19^th-century men of genius, Charles Darwin and Frederick Law Olmsted, expressed intense anti-slavery views but differed in their empathy for slaves. Our papers had grown out of the biographies we had written on Darwin and Olmsted. In my paper I delineated the empathy Darwin felt for slaves, while Mel showed that Olmsted lacked this empathy. After the Forum meetings we discussed and wrote up our papers but were unable at the time to find a scholarly journal to publish them. [Editor’s Note: Lengthy excerpts are published in this issue on pages 1 and pp. 36-44.]

From our discussions of Darwin and Olmsted, which sometimes involved recollections of how we each had worked with unpublished letters, Mel and I developed an intellectual friendship. In a review of the paperback edition of Mel’s biography of Olmsted, I noted the “passionate, poignant, and emotionally moving way” in which some of the psychological vicissitudes of Olmsted’s life had been written about. (Journal of Psychohistory 20 (3) Winter 1993, pp. 361-363) On the infrequent occasions when Mel came to New York from Florida, we would meet and talk about our current scholarly work, events in the meetings of the Psychohistory Forum, and a variety of books we were reading or had read in the past. Although I did not share Mel’s belief in Zionism, I was interested to learn from him about the work of the American novelist, critic, and Zionist, Ludwig Lewisohn (1882-1955). I think that Mel would have worked on a biography of Lewisohn had he been able to live near the library which housed Lewisohn’s writings.

Mel was an intense talker whose conversation often gave me a sense of intellectual exhilaration. When I would think of meeting with him I would anticipate experiencing this exhilaration. Now it is painful to know that our talks have ended.

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