Carl Schorske—famous historian, the
Dayton-Stockton Professor emeritus,
amateur musician, friend, and matchless Mensch—died over the weekend at the Meadow Lakes
retirement community in Hightstown midway through his one-hundred-and-first
year. Joan was expecting this. She had last visited him on the previous
Friday, by which time he was already in “hospice” mode, only dubiously aware of
her presence. She told me he must soon
slip away altogether. But the rational
acceptance of the inevitable lacks the sharpness of its final actuality, and
she is left grieving.
Most of us, even when we do not
think of ourselves as living in “spheres”, operate within more or less public
and private arenas. As Carl’s colleague
on the Princeton faculty I was very much aware of the man’s professional
fame. It was in 1980 that he published
his masterwork: Fin-de-siècle Vienna:
Politics and Culture. It had been
long anticipated, and it became instantly famous, winning (among numerous other
trophies) the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1981. Its subject, of course, is the extraordinary
richness and fecundity of the artistic and intellectual milieu of the Austrian
capital in the age of Sigmund Freud and Gustav Klimt. It is beautifully written, with a subtlety
that honors complexity and a clarity that guides the general reader through it.
Many honors followed. Carl was recognized repeatedly by the
Austrian government for his outstanding contributions to the study of their
national culture. He was in the first
“class” of the then-new MacArthur Fellowships, which the press had dubbed the
“Genius Awards”. These are lucrative as
well as prestigious. For a party marking the honor a witty childhood friend of
Carl’s from Scarsdale wrote a poem with the refrain “’Til the fin-de-siècle he’ll be counting his
dough”.
Schorske had enjoyed what I
sometimes described as an ideal career for an American academic. One of the great things about higher
education in this country is its variety. Carl experienced the best of it.
He began his teaching career at Wesleyan, one of our finest liberal arts
colleges. He then went for a decade to
Berkeley, the flagship campus of one of the greatest of our great state universities. Finally of course he came here to Princeton,
among the most distinguished of our private research universities. In a sense he had it all.
fêted in Vienna
But I must leave the public side of
Carl Schorske to the major obituaries that are certain to appear soon. Our feeling of loss, especially Joan’s, is
intimate and domestic. Since about 1970
she regularly made music with Carl and other friends in a string quartet. The photograph below will not be found on any
CD covers, but it is a monument to decades of joyous companionship. It is of uncertain date, but it must be from
the mid-Seventies. It shows from left
to right Joan and Carl, the two violinists, Jerrold Seigel, an eminent historian
then at Princeton and latterly at NYU, and Kathleen Amon, who worked in
administrative offices at the University.
Carl was a regular well into his eighties, and the group continues to
play today with two of its original members—Joan and Kathleen.
The love of music, though doubtless
magnified by his talent as singer and player, was part of a broad, delightfully
old-fashioned, and courteously deployed culture that included literature,
the visual and plastic arts, travel, current events, the New York scene—you
name it. He was interested in everything
including—maybe even especially—in whatever it was his friends were doing or
had to say. If you hang around academics
you are bound to meet lots of brilliant people whose talk consists of engaging
mini-lectures or mini-seminars.
Encountering them is often exhilarating, but Carl had the rarer gift of
being a truly brilliant conversationalist: a man brilliant alike in his talking
and in his listening.
I last saw Carl in March, at a gala
party celebrating his hundred birthday.
It was held in one of the public spaces of his retirement
community. I have to confess that in
general visiting nursing homes creeps me out, probably in the fashion that
visiting prisons might creep out a bank robber.
Yet this was a wonderful event, meticulously organized by Carl’s dear
friend the musicologist Christopher Hailey, an expert in Viennese
modernism. The place was packed with old
friends, old colleagues, old students, not a few of them minor eminences
themselves. There was an excellent
presentation featuring professional musicians from New York and beyond. The Austrian Minister of Culture had come
from Vienna to present Carl with yet another gaudy kreuz of Ruritanian appearance.
But the high point of the day for me came in the informal refreshment
hour following the program. I am unsure
of how it happened exactly, but to the delight of the revelers Joan and Carl
spontaneously joined in duet singing a song from Gilbert and Sullivan. It was Jane’s song from “Patience”: Silvered is the raven hair. “Silvered is the raven hair….Halting is the
youthful gait….Spectacled the limpid eye….” I was able not merely to hear but to see it all perfectly, having
recently undergone successful cataract surgery.
Like many of the important cultural
figures he wrote about Carl could be rightly described, I suppose, as a secular
intellectual. But he fully honored the
role of the religious tradition in creating our western civilization. What lover of classical music does not? Liz, his wonderful wife of more than sixty
years, who herself died only last year at a great age, was a life-long serious
Roman Catholic. It is condign that this
great man, so rich in years and accomplishments alike, should leave us at the
portal of the High Holy Days.
-o-
We are preparing to depart in a few
hours for ten days in England, and while I try to keep a regular schedule with
my blog posts, I do not go to fanatical ends to do so. As Jesus reminds us the Sabbath was made for
man, not the other way around. I will
travel more blithely without schlepping a computer about with me. And even as this post is a few hours early, the next will probably be a few
days late. Deo volente, I shall be in
touch soon enough.
