Retirement is something you have to
feel your way into. It took me about a
decade to realize its principal point for my life: that there is precious
little that I am actually obliged to
do. I realize that I spent a
professional career largely defined by deadlines, due dates, and the prompt
appearance at duly scheduled meetings.
Furthermore, I felt obliged, in order to “keep up” with my field to read
a lot of poorly conceived and poorly written scholarship that dispirited rather
than enlightened me. Just as I shall
never have to grade another final examination, I shall never have to read
another book on Queering the Quest or
Questing the Queer? Artistic Obfuscation
of the Sexual Subject in the “Chivalric” Poems of Reinhardt von Eisenbach. I can spend my time reading Longfellow’s
“Song of Hiawatha,” which is how I spent some happy hours during the last
week. Talk about multicultural! Anyway, the
unfortunate feeling of pressing obligation made its unwelcome though thankfully
brief return last week. This is how it
came about.
Ten years ago I published a book, The Anti-Communist Manifestos, in which
I studied the political and cultural impact in the United States and in France
of four best-selling books of anti-Communist tendency. Probably the least known of the four—although
it had been the best-selling book in America in 1941—was Out of the Night by Jan Valtin (the pseudonym of a German sailor
named Richard Krebs). I hope it is not
immodest to say that my book has played a role in animating a certain scholarly
interest in Valtin/Krebs, a rather mysterious figure who claimed to have been a
Communist espionage agent and who was accused by some enemies of being a
Gestapo agent. Together with one of the
leading French historians of Communism, Guillaume Bourgeois of the University
of Poitiers, I had planned to help organize an international scholarly
conference devoted to him. Serious
illness has for the last year somewhat curtailed my activities, however, and I
am unable just for the moment to travel to France to participate in my “own”
conference. Bummer.
But Guillaume had the idea that I
might at least be present as some kind of spectral presence on a screen; I
could send a short contribution by video. In my professorial life I had naturally given
video-recorded lectures many times. But
always I had behind me the technical resources of a university’s Audio-Visual
Department or of the private corporation that was paying for the lectures. Now I had to try to come up with something on
very short notice. I didn’t think my
phone, even if I could miraculously learn how to use it, was the right tool for
the right job. How fortunate for me then
that my elder son Richard is a sound-recording engineer, and indeed one of the
best in the trade. Sound engineers are
not of course the same as videographers, but the two work together and
complement each other. As luck would
have it Rich was briefly between assignments in distant parts and proved his
filial affection by agreeing to help me out even at the expense of upending his
family plans. So I am grateful not only
to him, but to a wonderful daughter-in-law and granddaughter, who tolerated the
disturbance.
So on Monday afternoon Rich arrived
at my house lugging a large, heavy, stoutly built box containing the state-of-the-art
video camera he had borrowed from a brother in the trade. Taken from this box and assembled, it was one
of the most magnificent pieces of techie equipment I had ever seen. Rich told me that it costs $50,000, of which
the lens accounts for four-fifths. I
hope that this was hyperbole, but fear it probably wasn’t. When it comes to a borrower or a lender
being, I am a flat-out Polonian. My mind
was haunted by memories of the Maupassant short story of the lost borrowed
necklace. I was glad to get definitive
word that Rich got the precious instrument safely back to Brooklyn.
I had spent so much energy fretting
about how it might be possible to produce a video in forty-eight hours that I
had given practically no thought to what I would actually say should we be able
to find the necessary equipment. But I
did have a couple of hours to sit and think about it, and I was able to jot
down a few notes, gather a few show-and-tell items, and stretch out a rather minimalist youtube presentation to nearly half an hour. The big question about Out of the Night, which must remain the fundamental written text
for any study of Krebs, involves its historical reliability. It was presented to the public as straight
autobiography, but I have had to conclude that it is largely a work of
fiction. Like many novels it is enriched
by the author’s personal experience, but as an “historical document”—the
category to which its author and publisher assigned it in 1940—it doesn’t come
close to passing the smell test. One of
the Irish bishops is supposed to have remarked of Gulliver’s Travels, at the time of its publication, that there were
parts of the work he could not fully credit.
Let us say I have a similar reaction to Valtin’s book, though that is
far from the reaction of many of its readers.
I pursued this theme, along with a couple of others, in my little talk;
and although in the video my son Rich was not able to transform his paternal
pig’s ear into a silk purse, he did come up with something surprisingly
plausible. What a great guy!
