March 21 ,
2007: ‘To meet your father when
you’re 82 …’ A son is touched by a Class
of 1907 alumnus, after 75 years
By Richard Schwarzchild
I haven’t had any contact with my father for more than 75 years, and
the truth is I
never wanted it. Why would I, when he died when I was 7 and left me alone to
deal with a mother and older sister who excluded me from their naturally cliquish
relationship? No one told me that he had a kidney problem or that he had been
hospitalized, so when he suddenly died in the hospital, I had no inkling of why
he abandoned me.
To get even, my mind erected an impenetrable barrier to prevent any memory
of him from ever passing through. “You abandon me, I’ll abandon you” was
the perfectly balanced equation. But in spite of my irrational anger and all
of the years that have
intervened, a few week ago my father and I met – and I couldn’t be
more happy that
we finally did. However, it couldn’t have occurred unless my father, a
Princeton graduate (Class of 1907) and attorney, hadn’t been a prolific
writer.
Although I’m not really sure how it happened, I believe that as I was emptying
out my mother’s apartment after she died in 1980, I came across a six-inch
pile of my father’s writings. Noting the contents, I took the pile home
with me, but, with all that I was involved with at the time, immediately forgot
about it. Seventeen years later (while my wife and I were traveling in Asia),
the furnace in our home mysteriously shut down, causing the pipes in our attic
to freeze and rupture. According to the bill we received from the water company
after the pipes thawed, 64,000 gallons of water poured down into the house. Although
it was impossible to remove any of the swollen volumes from the bookcases in
our den, somehow my father’s writings escaped being damaged by the deluge.
Along with whatever else we salvaged from the disaster, his creative efforts,
still unread, eventually found their way to our new home.
Unread, that is, until a few weeks ago, when I happened to come across the
well-traveled pile on the bottom shelf of an upstairs bookcase. At the precise
moment that I began to read the first page of a “Nonsense Operetta” he
had written, I met my father. Not only did we meet, but as my hands slowly turned
the pages that his hands had pulled from his typewriter so many years ago, we
literally touched each other.
Aside from the incredible number of years involved, which certainly can’t
be minimized, what else made our meeting so memorable? Along with being amazed
by the spectrum of interests, I was stunned by the clarity of a mind that had
the ability to reduce human problems to their most basic elements. For example,
in a 34-page essay on “Logic” (that predates by 70 or 80 years Time Magazine’s recent cover story on “God vs. Science”), my father
had this to say: “The theologian had a difficult struggle before him in
preaching man’s creation in the image of God to the same ear which was
listening to man’s creation in the image of a monkey.”
Tackling the subject of “equal representation,” in the early 1920s,
my father analyzed the complexity of the problem in a letter mailed to the editor
of The Standard. “The
social-groups system must therefore deal with organized groups, but with which?
With the cubist group of artists or with the impressionists?With the cotton farmer
of the South, or the cattle raiser of the West? With the coal miner of Pennsylvania
or with the copper miner of Nevada? With the teacher of athletics or the teacher
of ethics? Whatever the final choice, the representation will not be of teachers,
or miners, but of a definite SET of teachers and miners, which may or may not
represent the ideals of the social group, and which is furthermore in such constant
flux that representation becomes a physical impossibility.”
Concerned that his convoluted logic was confusing the readers of a long scholarly
treatise on “The Truth,” two-thirds of the way through his analysis,
in an action most unusual for any author, he interrupted his presentation to
openly discuss the problem with them.
"By this time, the outraged reader who has been patient enough to follow
me to this point is ready to slam down this book in disgust. ‘The idea!’ I
can hear him exclaim. ‘Here is an author starting out with fine phrases
of showing me a glimpse of the Truth, and after I take him at his word and wade
through the first chapter I find that he turns around and deliberately calls
himself five different kinds of liar, and then has the presumption, in addition,
to carefully analyze each lie and to give it a queer name. Eccentricity is a
mild name for this author. He should thank his stars that we are not living in
the dark ages of the Inquisition, or in the more enlightened days of the future,
where Literary Perjury will mean a long prison sentence. I wash my hands of him.’ ”
In addition to his more erudite writings, I also came across two books for
children.
In “What Makes Grown-Ups Behave – or – Law for the Little,” he
concluded his
introduction by explaining, “Jack was wrong – the grown-ups may not
do what they like any more than children, and as a matter of fact there are a
great many more ways a grown-up can get into trouble than a child. This is a
thing that very few children know, and here we will explain just how and why
this is so; in other words, we will study law.”
However, it was his second book for youngsters, titled “The Wonder Story
of the Earth – A History for Very Little Men and Women,” that appealed
to me more than anything else in the pile. In it his broad knowledge of history,
his humor, his sense of ethics and morality, and his ability to translate and
express the thought-process of his far-ranging mind into words and ideas that
any youngster could easily understand were all on display. For example (and I’m
sure that I’m not the only one who never conceived of this), in it he pointed
out that the Crusades could be most easily explained by realizing that they took
place solely because of the difference between two books, the Koran and the Christian
Bible.
Obviously, the true measure of anyone’s father is not to found in just
a six-inch pile of his writings. But to meet your father unexpectedly when you’re
82 and suddenly hold in your hands evidence of his genetic contribution to the
manner in which you’ve approached life – to your personality, your
logic, your humor, morality, sensitivity, and interests – is a concept
so remote that it’s almost impossible to conceive of. For me, especially
at my age, it was more than enough to make me mourn for the momentous loss it
was not to have known him … as well as for not having been able to express
my love to the incredible human being that he most certainly was.
Since he referred to Tennyson in his essay on logic, I can imagine how pleased
he would when I, who hadn’t met him until a few weeks ago, follow his lead.
Tennyson wrote, “I am a part of all that I have met,” and of course
he was right. I am a part of all that I’ve met – and most fortunately,
without the remotest possibility of it ever happening, I just met my father.
