Every now and again I am reminded, directly or indirectly, of a very great privilege I enjoyed during a long professional life. Indeed, I continue to enjoy it still. I refer to the circumstances of being placed in a professional setting in which I was surrounded by a large number of colleagues of talent and well deserved distinction. If you have the privilege of teaching at a great university, you are automatically surrounded by such colleagues. I was reminded of this fact vividly during the last week or so when in an op ed by David Brooks I came upon a reference to the “great historian James McPherson”. McPherson is indeed a great historian, though he is categorized in my own mind as Jim. The quirks of the human mind are such that it can all too easily transform the extraordinary into the ordinary. A random sentence in an op ed by David Brooks set me on the road to a meditation upon scholarly friendships.
Over a professional association of decades, one has memorable experiences with dozens of colleagues. Many, many years ago I was appointed to a term as chairman of the University Committee on Public Lectures. There are probably ten or twenty public lectures a week on our campus, but there is one official big-deal series called simply “The Public Lectures.” They are organized a year in advance, and they cover a wide range of scientific, humanistic, and social science topics, but they have at least a factitious coherence of theme. They command a certain prestige. The year I inherited the committee the organizing theme had already been set: “Origins.” A historian who had agreed to talk about the origins of something or another was for one reason or another forced to withdraw at relatively short notice. I was left with an “origin gap” that needed filling. Indeed, I needed an historical origin on preposterously short notice. “How about ‘The Origins of the American Civil War?’” I presumptuously asked Professor McPherson, an affable colleague who had a legendary reputation as a lecturer among some undergraduates I knew, whether he would leap into a breach at insultingly short notice. I hoped that the emergent circumstances might almost justify the cliché of breach-leaping.
In any university, perhaps in any joint enterprise of any kind, roughly twenty percent of the people do roughly eighty percent of the work. McPherson already had a full teaching load. He certainly didn’t need to find an opportunity to reshape an academic lecture for a general educated town/gown audience. But when I explained the difficulty, he barely hesitated. He gave a dynamite lecture on “The Origins of the Civil War.” The lecture itself was quite impressive; but what dazzled me most was the Q and A session that followed. Around the edges of his answers, it became apparent to me that McPherson knew the names and political inclinations of every member of Congress (both houses) at least since the time of the Missouri Compromise of 1820 until the election of 1868 and the presidency of Grant. This vast command of relevant knowledge was not a bravura knowledge dump, just appropriately deployed “background”. If you read even part of his synoptic general history of the Civil War* for the “Oxford History of the United States” you will marvel at his ability to marshal the disparate evidence of military statistics and the analysis of personal human capacity and characteristics within the context of an overarching, fast-moving narrative.
The joy of an academic career, at least of mine, was having casual, cordial relations with literally dozens of remarkable scholars and teachers in many disparate fields. I am not speaking here of intimate friendships. One has only a few truly close friends in a lifetime. The closest of my own friends have now themselves passed on. But there can be a much larger circle of valued and admired colleagues and associates with whom from time to time one interacts with pleasure and often enough intellectual gain. Many such people are witty and engaging conversationalists. Others are brimming with good social works and community contributions. Our late neighbor just up the road, Bart Hoebel, was an experimental psychologist of eminence who in his spare time built a steam calliope out of an old fire engine and drove it in the annual whingding alumni parade at class reunions. For a while on my little suburban street (perhaps a thousand yards long) there lived in their separate modest domiciles two Nobel Prize winning physicists. Various other neighbors were or are the kinds of people who are used to seeing their names show up in the New York Times. It was my good luck to know several of them personally. One enjoys basking even in reflected glory.
In the meantime this week the Flemings quietly celebrated their sixty-third wedding anniversary over spaghetti in the company of an old friend.
*James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Pp. 904.