My Scholarly Lifeline (article)

Sabbatical years provided the basic training for my retirement. It was easy to move from teaching, research, and writing to pure research and writing—except for the fact that my own standard of work was harder than that of my former employer. I was willing to grant that I was an “old man” at age sixty-nine but brushed past what this had meant to me throughout the earlier years of my life.

I continued working on my own while also enjoying my morning runs. Some thirty years earlier I had begun running an hour, more or less, four or five times a week to control back spasms. I had discovered a deep physical pleasure that included the morning experience of changing seasons, dogs on their morning runs, and other runners, including the generous supply of pretty girls. I had challenged age at sixty-three by running in the New York City Marathon, a rich experience of the city’s variegated boroughs. It was enhanced by the chance companionship of a charming young woman who, however, ran away from me when we got close to the finish in Central Park. The next year I trained up to better my time of five hours and twenty-one minutes but failed when I suffered a heel injury. Still, when restored, I could complacently contemplate the physical exertions combined with the mental as a pattern of healthy living. I proposed to run into my nineties, when the approach of the centenarian state would be graciously recognized and I could flicker out without complaint.

While this is in obedience to Freud’s dictum about work, the attention to the labor of mind and body does not exhaust my existence. (I do not enter here into the corresponding dictum of love.) I cannot find the day complete without a finalizing martini. My wife, an adept of the good things of life, had also happily entered into my enjoyment of serial summer vacations in unspoiled Nantucket, among other locales. At the moment I am now looking toward our pending tour of Verona and the Veneto region of Italy.

My life plan, I grant, has been incrementally eroded. Before I retired I had required hearing aids to hear my students. Then afterward came a successful prostate operation, a mild (but always threatening) heart attack, and the insidious creep of arthritis requiring an invasive spinal operation. My running had to be transformed into slow, if still pleasurable, race-walking.

I had been researching and writing ever since, as a journalist departing journalism, I got the idea for

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a book on the Sacco-Vanzetti case in the 1950s. I presently recognized such projects as my lifeline. It was not terribly distressing when my books on Sacco-Vanzetti, German reparations, and Karl Marx were mostly ignored or denounced. In academia they could serve as scholarly credits if not as income producers. When I retired a decade and a half ago I was working on a book about John Maynard Keynes and his economics. I went on with it and found that it became two books—on the great man’s economics and on his life, published in 1994 and 1999 respectively. Clinging to my lifeline, I then searched for a new subject, wanting to do a biography, but failed to find the essential, a project that would keep me mentally alive for the duration. After a few months, as I was entering the status of octogenarian, I conceived a larger project, one that would fit together what I had earlier investigated with newer material. This is a study of the major world political and economic interactions of the twentieth century, a gathering together of the preoccupations that have seized me all these years. If I am still capable I will not stop with this formal ending. I can always find another subject.

One of my choicest pleasures is to spend a day, accompanied by laptop computer, in Room 315 of the research libraries of the New York Public Library at 42^nd Street. Word by word, page after page, I add enlivening new meanings to my life story. It is not all labor. I arrive supplied with a sandwich and a piece of fruit, and buy a drink at a nearby newsstand. In warmer seasons one can find chairs and tables scattered thoughtfully about the library terrace and enjoy a picnic lunch among others similarly occupied: a pleasant and economic break. In the winter I find shelter in the library entrance and take my enjoyment compressed.

While I think the political-economic book is a promising idea, I doubt that many editors will agree. One of them who was interested in the work-in-progress turned away at the view of the first half. Indeed I have had difficulty in publishing all my books except one, my carefully modest dissertation, and even this one, the reparations study, aroused hostility because it suggested that the ogre Germany had been abusively treated in the 1920s. I have always been attracted to themes that offended or bored the majority of potential readers. But I have long realized this. Thus, I once managed to get

through on the telephone to the editor holding my Sacco-Vanzetti manuscript and got a righteous denunciation. I later learned that he had suffered unpleasantnesses during the McCarthy era. Similarly, the editor of a psychohistory publication, no longer in existence, psychoanalyzed me instantly and assured me that he was “not interested in your angry article on Marx,” defended Marx against criticism I had not made, and demanded a stamped, self-addressed envelope if I wanted it returned. Since I can do no other, I write for my benefit and only incidentally the reader’s. For me the journey rather than the arrival suffices.

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