Ralph Freedman (1920-2016)
This week I
have had to take time out from my garden, my heat-prostration, my
grandchildren, my Netflix, and my scheduled writing to work on a “memorial
minute” or short obituary essay about my recently deceased colleague, Ralph
Freedman (1920-2016). It is the custom
of our faculty, and the faculties of many institutions, to remember our defunct
colleagues in such fashion; and a fine custom it is. Contemporary American culture is awash in
cheap fame, celebrity, notoriety, and vulgar adulation. It scrimps on respect for genuine cultural
achievement and licit admiration for the
stewards of our spiritual treasury.
Ralph
Freedman was one of those stewards. I
did not know him particularly well. We
were friendly colleagues, certainly, but not close friends. He deserves a better Boswell, but fell victim
to his own longevity. Stately old
institutions, which may seem to the outside observer to move at the gait of
exhausted turtles, actually move apace.
Since Ralph retired about thirty years ago, there are not many people
around here who knew him personally. Am
I alone left to tell the tale? He was
one of the three original members of our Department of Comparative Literature. The others were its founder Robert Fagles (d.
2008), the eminent translator of Homer, and Joseph Frank (d. 2013), the
biographer of Dostoevsky. I was already a
professor of English when in the ‘Seventies I, with others, was invited to a
shared appointment. Ralph told me I had
the one essential for success: a surname beginning with the letter F!
I had my
doubts about the solidity of the idea of “comparative” literature. One cynical definition of “interdisciplinary
studies” was “an English professor with a slide projector.” In like manner I sometimes thought that a
“comparatist” was a French professor who having read all of Balzac had read
some Dickens as well. But medieval
European literature was radically “comparative” in a different way, and the new
department offered me new teaching opportunities. Medieval vernacular literature has the
character of an iceberg. Its submerged
base, international Latin culture, is almost always as important as what rises
into view. Medieval literary education,
the aim of which was to teach young boys to read, write, and declaim Latin, was
rigorous, prescriptive, and fundamentally unchanging over long centuries. When the national languages of Europe
eventually emerged as possible vehicles of “serious” literary expression, a
writer was likely to be self-conscious about choosing to use one. Dante, whose Divine Comedy was a major step in the creation of the Italian
literary language, wrote a whole book in defense of the vernacular language,
but wrote it in Latin. Chaucer, who appeared on the scene at a time
when many conservative English aristocrats still operated in a French-speaking
world, had quite consciously to decide whether to write in Latin, French, or English. He also knew Italian literature to an
impressive degree.
So
“comparatism” made sense to me as a medievalist. Later I would come to appreciate the survival
of a similar, quasi-medieval linguistic cosmopolitanism among my new modernist
associates. Professional colleagues come
to know each other very well, and then again they may hardly know each other at
all. I knew Ralph as a cosmopolitan and
polyglot expert in European Romanticism, with particularly impressive command
of its German roots. One does not too
frequently hear Hölderlin cited on the question of academic calendars, but it
is memorable when it happens. I knew
him—how to put this delicately?--as a charmingly flustered and challenged
administrator of the graduate program, a man who almost seemed to revel in the
faintly facetious stereotype of the absent-minded professor. I was vaguely aware that he had had an
“adventurous” youth, but only now, after his death, did I learn just how
adventurous. He was raised in Hamburg in
a Jewish family that faced, and miraculously survived, the deadly hostility of
the Nazi regime. At nineteen he made his
way to England. This was in 1939, and
just in the nick to time. It is hard
enough to be a writer at all. Fate now
decreed that he would have to write in English,
though all that for a time was pushed aside by emergent occasion. He soon made it across the North Atlantic
despite the U-boats. He began college at
the University of Washington, became an American, became a front-line soldier
in North Africa, in Sicily, and in the Italian push, became an intelligence
“asset” in post-War Austria—the background to one of his two published novels. He studied philosophy as a graduate student
at Brown before landing in the graduate program in Comparative Literature at
Yale. His doctoral dissertation there
would eventually lead to a study that can rightly be called famous: The Lyrical Novel. He would go on to write numerous other
important books, including well-received biographies of two giants of modern
German literature, Rilke and Hesse.
One should
insult no man by suggesting that his bibliography is his life, but in an
academic context it would be wrong to pass over its distinction. He moved to Atlanta after leaving Princeton,
and I saw him only once in the last three decades. He told me he was considering writing up his
memoirs, and I learned from some of the newspaper obituaries that he was in the
process of doing so at the time of his death.
I hope they were left in publishable form. He certainly deserves a better biographer
than I, though my own most recent days are all the richer for the intentional
remembering of him.
