I passed an enjoyable evening last night holding my 3-week-old in one arm while employing the other to burrow around in the 900 pages of Edmund Wilson's The Sixties, which I had checked out of the library in order to track down the details of the incident I described in "Chapman on Emerson," posted on February 17. The name of the Harvard professor that stuck in my mind, you might recall, was Arthur Darby Vance. My first move, therefore, was to check the index for a reference to that name. Nothing. I was almost resigned to trying to locate in the sprawl of The Sixties this single incident when I spied the 32-page "Biographical Notes" at the end of the volume. Starting with the A's, I began going through these notes, trying to match the brief biographical descriptions of people referred to in the journal with the characteristics of the mis-remembered Arthur Darby Vance. My progress was retarded by curiosity about what Wilson might have said about people whose alphabetized names came before "Arthur Darby Nock (1902-1963): Classicist and professor of the history of religion at Harvard." These forays never failed to be rewarding. For example, I have for years been a subscriber to The New Yorker, and have enjoyed among many other things Roger Angell's baseball writing. So, upon coming in the Biographical Notes to
Roger Angell (1920-- ): Writer on baseball and fiction editor at The New Yorker. Son of Katharine S. White.
I found in the index the single reference to him and was soon reading, with relish, on page 437:
[Brendan Gill] was told by Roger Angell, Katharine's son by her first husband, that he had met his mother for lunch and she had greeted him triumphantly with "I've just found blood in my urine!" Roger hadn't known how to reply and had simply said, "What shall we have?"--Her letter of condolence to Jean Stafford after Joe Liebling's death is probably the prize of all the White stories. After expressing her sympathy and sorrow, she went on to say that she and Andy had also been ill--"I have a rash all around my rectum."
Anyway, concerning Arthur Darby Nock, classicist, professor of the history of religion, and the learned, eccentric celibate who was evidently God's gift to Harvard raconteurs: the index gave two references, several hundred pages apart, which, taken together, show that Wilson's memory was as imperfect as mine. The first (pp. 184-90) is Wilson's fond, ruminative recollections on the occasion of Nock's death, in 1963. Here is the part that relates to the anecdote I tried to relate in "Chapman on Emerson":
When he was at our house, we had been joking about the stories told about him--"All of these untrue!" he exclaimed. When some naval officers had arrived at his rooms--the house during the last war having been taken over by the navy--they are supposed to have found him sitting on the floor in a state of partial undress studying a classical manuscript. One of the officers said, "Jesus Christ!" and Nock is supposed to have corrected him: "Arthur Darby Nock."
Nock's other appearance in The Sixties is about five years and 560 pages later. Wilson's earlier recollection has been forgotten and the details have changed.
[Richard Pipes] says that a sure social resource at Harvard, when other topics fail momentarily, is stories about Arthur Nock. I couldn't remember having heard any of these. His maid is supposed to have entered his rooms and found him stark naked standing on his head. She exclaimed, "Oh, my God," and he said, "No, Arthur Darby Nock."
On the theory that I had conflated the Nock stories with Wilson's opposition to the Vietnam war, a recurring theme in The Sixties, I looked up "Vietnam" in the index and began reading the referenced pages. My efforts were again repaid--for example, by this:
In the course of the after-dinner conversation, the war in Vietnam came up, and the businessman took a line like John Gaus's. Dorothea Straus said she did not want to talk about it because she felt too strongly about it. The businessman told her that her attitude was due to the fact that she was Jewish. Dwight Macdonald came out on her side with his usual pugnacity and vehemence. He said that he was an old anarchist, and that only an old anarchist could understand how to deal with this problem. The businessman threatened to punch him in the jaw; but, as Roger said, "more moderate counsels prevailed." Later Roger asked Dwight how, as a pacifistic anarchist, he would have dealt with the situation if the man had punched him in the jaw. Dwight said, "I'd have fallen down."
The very considerable pleasures of Edmund Wilson's journals are, I think, of a kind with those afforded The LIfe of Johnson, which were admirably summarized by Samuel Holt Monk of the University of Minnesota. The reader is proffered vicarious membership in a society of men, says Monk,
who have experienced broadly, read widely, observed and reflected on their observations, whose ideas are constantly brought to the test of experience, and whose experience is habitually transmuted into ideas. The book is as large as life and as human as its central character.
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