The black page in Tristram Shandy
On the evening of July 22 I learned that Dick Macksey had died earlier that day. He was a Hopkins legend. Everyone had said so for decades, and Everyone was now saying it again. The thing about legends is that they are based in fact, but are also used to distance the facts they’re based on.I worked with Macksey for seven years between 1966, the spring of my freshman year at Johns Hopkins, and the fall 1973, when I went to SUNY Buffalo to get a doctorate in English lit. I have had occasional contact with him since then. I knew the legend. I would also like to think I glimpsed something of the man.
Progression through digression
I don’t know why I took Prof. Macksey’s course, The Autobiographical Novel, in the spring of 1966. Sure, I liked to read. But there must have been other literature courses I could have taken – for all I know, maybe I took one of them. That was a long time ago, over half a century. If I told you what I remembered of Macksey at that time would I be reporting my memories, shaky as they are, or simply giving you the legend as it has been passed down and embroidered?
Truth is, I probably took the course in part because I HAD heard the legend, about this cool professor who spoke a zillion languages, had read everything and owned half of it, could talk his way from Baltimore to Towson (just north of Baltimore for those who don’t know the area) by way of Lubbock, Timbuktu, Paris, Moscow, and Dublin, and who smoked a pipe. What’s to tell, strictly from memory?
I more or less forget what we read, but I’ve been reconstructing the list. Gradually. Likely St. Augustine’s Confessions, for sure Remembrance of Things Past (I’d never heard of Proust), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (nor Joyce either), Slaughterhouse Five, Tristes Tropiques, an abridged translation – my introduction to Lévi-Strauss, The End of the Road – I believe that Barth had left Hopkins for Buffalo by that time. And for sure Tristram Shandy. Now there’s a Macksey novel, progression by digression, Laurence Stern’s method and Macksey’s too. I remember he brought a first edition to class – a little stack of smallish books.
And he would hand out a chronology for each author. Each one. All the time.
The Idea of the Theater – took that in the fall of ‘66. Did a paper on Oedipus at Colonus; used a chart in that paper. I got the idea from Lévi-Strauss’s 1955 essay, “The Structural Study of Myth”. When did I learn about Roman Jakobson’s poetic function? The Idea of the Picaro (Lazarillo, Simplicius, Moll Flanders, Felix Krull, Gully Jimson, Gnossus Pappadopoulis, who else?) – forget just when I took that one. Which course had Naked Lunch? Northrup Frye’s Anatomy? I may have taken another course with Macksey, in fact I did, a history of literary criticism – is that where we read Longinus? For sure I did an independent study, but I don’t remember the rationale, as if it mattered. It was with Macksey.
Somewhere during that time there was a visit to his house where I saw Whitehead and Russell’s three-volume Principia Mathematica stacked on a chair. My audiophile friends were impressed with the Macintosh tube amplifier. I was impressed by the oriental carpets.
To be honest – dare I admit this? – every once in awhile the intellectual virtuosity was more annoying than dazzling. For one thing after a few years I’d heard some of the riffs before. And sometimes you just wanted a drink of water, not the whole damn reservoir sluiced at you through a fire hose – to invoke the Milton Eisenhower line that’s one of the keys to the legend. I mean, come on Prof. Macksey, just get to the point.
By that time, though, I was hooked. One summer I was writing long letters, often very long letters. And I decided to insert digressions within digressions and to mark the embedding with parentheses (like this). I must have rambled some of those sentences out for half a page or more and five levels deep. It was fun. It has only just occurred to me that I must have absorbed that from Tristram Shandy via Macksey (or vice versa). But at the time I certainly did not think that’s what I was doing – at least I don’t think so. Remember, that was a loooong time ago. I was just playing around. Progression through digression.
Anyhow, I got my undergraduate degree (in philosophy) on time, the spring of 1969, and stuck around for a couple of years to get a master’s degree in the Humanities Center. This was during the Vietnam era and I’d drawn a 12 in the draft lottery. It was pretty clear that I was going to be called up. I applied for conscientious objector status and got it. I did my alternative service in the Chaplain’s Office at Johns Hopkins while writing a long and somewhat shocking thesis on “Kubla Khan”, shocking in that it was a rather inventive structuralist analysis at a time when structuralism was on its deathbed. Macksey directed the thesis and sent me off to Buffalo for a doctorate. I visited Macksey two or three times after that when I was visiting Hopkins and have had some phone calls with Dick now and then.
Mary Douglas on Tristram Shandy
One of them was late in 2003. Most likely I’d called him to talk about anime, which I’d just discovered. I don’t have any explicit record of the call, no notes, no phone bill. But I know I talked with him about anime and judging from some emails I’d sent, that must have been when I made the call.
While Dick may have seen Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, which had played in theaters in the States, he was not acquainted with anime. For that matter, I don’t really know how much I knew at the time, but certainly Spirited Away, a couple other Miyazaki films, My Neighbor Totoro, probably Princess Mononoke, and anime by others as well, Ninja Scroll, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, perhaps Card Captor Sakura. I was excited. He was interested.
He suggested I read The Electric Animal, by Akira Lippit – a friend, former student? I forget. It was indeed useful, about just why animals-as-people seemed to dominate cartoons early in the 20th century (flight from the country to the city left us hungry for contact with animals), and about one particularly gruesome episode in early cinema, the electrocution of the elephant Topsy in 1903 – Google it to see a clip – which proved suggestive in thinking about those electric elephants in the “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence of Dumbo.
Somehow we got to talking about Mary Douglas, the anthropologist who was, in some ways, the British counterpart to Lévi-Strauss. Perhaps I’d mentioned her simply because I’d been corresponding with her subsequent to the publication of my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, which she had been kind enough to blurb. Or perhaps because she and I had talked about anime and manga when I visited her at Yale, where she was in residence to deliver the Tanner Lectures. One of those lectures was to be about Tristram Shandy, and she’d sent me a draft.
It turned out that Dick needed to fill a slot in the issue of MLN which had been due at the press yesterday, if not before. Perhaps she’d be interested in publishing her Tristram Shandy paper with MLN? I asked her. A bunch of emails, a few late night phone calls. Yes-no maybe sorta’. It was just a little complicated and a little frantic, by my standards if not by Dick’s. It didn’t take all that much time, it was just the pace and timing of it. The issue needed to go to press and it would be really nice to have an essay by Mary Douglas. Alas no.
I came away with the impression that the Macksey-behind-the-curtain worked really hard. Of course, anyone who knows him knew that he worked hard. How else could he get it all done, teaching four, five, six courses – and on two campuses (Arts and Sciences at Homewood, the Medical School in East Baltimore), advising the Chaplain’s Office on films (not to mention hosting discussions of them in his library screening room), the editing, the correspondence, the guests, and who knows what else? His family, Catherine and Alan! But here I’d been in the middle of the maelstrom. I’m tempted to say that I felt just a bit like Mickey Mouse drowning in that whirlpool of freely associating brooms in “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”. But it was Macksey himself who was riding the waves and there was no sorcerer to calm the waves. He just had to ride it out.
A call from a graduate student
A couple of years later I got a call out of the blue. It was a graduate student at Ohio State doing an intellectual history dissertation that involved the 1966 structuralism conference at Hopkins. He was going through the final report in the archives of the Ford Foundation and came across my name. I was mentioned as an undergraduate who had been particularly affected by the conference. The caller – I forget his name – wanted me to elaborate.
Yikes! thought I to myself, what do I say? You see, I hadn’t attended the conference. But I wasn’t particularly surprised that Macksey would have mentioned me in the report. Should I correct the record? That was one issue. There was another. As the conversation developed it seemed to me that my interlocutor had gotten it wrong.
As I said, I hadn’t actually attended the conference. If you are familiar with the conference proceedings (The Structuralist Controversy) you might wonder how that could be, as I’m there on pages 244-245 with a comment on the paper Neville Dyson-Hudson had delivered, “Lévi-Strauss and Radcliffe-Brown.” If I wasn’t at the conference then how come I’m in the proceedings commenting on one of the papers?
Slight-of-hand, charitable subterfuge. Macksey was being kind, not so much to me – though it certainly was that – but to Dyson-Hudson. There had been discussion after every presentation, lively and even contentious discussion so I’ve read, but not after Dyson-Hudson’s. I forget why – Macksey explained it to me, perhaps it was late at night and the French were argued out? – but he thought it would be odd, if not embarrassing, to publish the proceedings and include discussion after every paper except Dyson-Hudson’s. So Macksey asked me to write a comment. After all I’d studied Radcliffe-Brown in a course I’d taken with Dyson-Hudson and I was quite familiar with Lévi-Strauss – if anyone was my main man, it was Lévi-Strauss. Of course I was pleased and flattered by the request and agreed. That’s how I ended up in the proceedings of a conference I hadn’t attended.
Was I going to tell that to this Ohio State graduate student who’d just read the official report of that conference? I thought about it for a second or two and decided that no good purpose would be served by running that down. Too much time, a little too complicated. Yes, Macksey had fudged the proceedings and apparently he’d fudged the final report as well, but he wanted his friend Neville to be properly represented. And, for that matter, it was certainly true that the conference had affected me even though I hadn’t attended it. I’d spent several years swimming in structuralism and semiotics more or less as a consequence, not so much of the conference itself, but of the intellectual currents that had dumped the French ashore in Baltimore harbor in October 1966. And I’d marked up the translation of Derrida’s paper, which Macksey had distributed in class, in three colors of ink! (BTW, Derrida got Lévi-Strauss wrong, but that’s irrelevant here.)
At the same time you can see, can’t you? why I wasn’t at all surprised that Macksey had mentioned me the report.
OK, so I’m not going to tell this guy what really happened. What do I say in answer to his question?
Here’s where he’d gotten it wrong. I wish I could remember his exact wording, as I’ve got a sense that it matters. Alas, I can’t. What it comes down to is that he wanted to know how the conference, its interdisciplinary nature in particular, changed my sense of the humanities. What do you mean, changed? I tried to tell him. Johns Hopkins was all I knew about the humanities in the American academy. Remember, I’d arrived at Hopkins from a decent high school in small city in the coal and steel country of western Pennsylvania. Sure, I heard talk from Macksey and others that Hopkins was different, but that’s all it was to me, just talk about things I’d never experienced. Hearsay. So, while yes the conference had been important to me, it didn’t change my perception of the academy. It was my baseline, my point of departure, my ground zero.
I don’t think the guy got my point.
I wonder if he ever published his dissertation?
A six year old on the moon
Now we’re back at the beginning. On the evening of July 22nd I learned that Macksey had died. What did I do? I searched the web. I found Cynthia Haven’s piece, “Farewell Richard Macksey, legendary polymath and “the jewel in the Hopkins crown” (1931-2019)”, and Kate Dwyer’s, “Meet the Man Who Introduced Jacques Derrida to America”, and I found some oral history material at the Hopkins Library dating from 1999 when one Mame Warren had interviewed him.
Hot damn! thought I to myself, the Macksey story from Macksey hisownbadself. But it was mostly about the history of Johns Hopkins, founding years and then mid 20th century. Here’s Macksey on Charles Sanders Pierce (from the transcript, p. 5):
The appointment of Charles Peirce came two years later-I lose track-and Peirce was, again, a profoundly eccentric person who was here five years and I think you could make a pretty good case that Peirce was the most broad-gauged and creative mind that the American Academy had in the nineteenth century, but this was the only formal academic appointment he ever held. He had grown up at Harvard, and his father, Benjamin Peirce, was a great mathematician of the preceding generation. President Elliott couldn't stand him, so he was not welcome around the precinct.Macksey taught Pierce when he taught semiotics. I think, though I’m not sure at this point, that he believed Pierce’s account of sign to be superior to Saussure’s much better known account.
He had worked for the Geodetic Survey, did important work there, and presented himself as really almost a university in and of himself and, of course, long term we look to Peirce as the sort of-if not the father, the grandfather of semiotics, modem semiotics. Semiology, he called it. His work in mathematics was, I think, both profound and important, but because he published very little, much of this material doesn't appear. The only monograph he published in his lifetime was a pendulum-swinging affair. But he was the candidate for professor of philosophy, which wasn't an appointment that was made immediately.
But there was some autobiography (p. 16):
Warren: What attracted you here in the first place? Macksey: Fort Holabird. This is during the Korean War, so I didn't know Baltimore well. When I was in college—I was an undergraduate at Princeton-I had been down to visit Baltimore, and it was very, to me, exotic and Southern town, but they were doing interesting things in sciences, and originally I was interested in sciences. They had just started a Department of Biophysics, Detlev Bronk, and they had a medical school and interesting things going on in the pure sciences. So these are things that looked real good to me.That explains why the Tudor and Stuart Club was so important to Macksey. It was a literary society with monthly meetings on the Homewood campus that been founded, however, through an endowment from Sir William Osler, one of the founders of The Johns Hopkins Hospital. The speakers were chosen alternatively to represent the arts and sciences one month and medicine the next. Again, bridges between the disciplines, those pesky “two cultures”.
And I had thought of Hopkins all my life, because when I was very, very little, about six or seven, I sort of solved some problems by saying I wanted to be a doctor. “Where are you going to go?” Well, it was always Hopkins. So there was an unexamined kind of Hopkins connection.
But after I got here, I then sort of drifted over into literary things. This is no great loss to the sciences, to be sure, but it was partly possible because it was such a small place.
Now, let’s run through that again, in a different version, but also from 1999. This is from an article that had appeared in the Hopkins Gazette:
“You needed a profession, and we didn’t have any medical people in my family, so I said, sure, I’m going into medicine,” Macksey says. “It got adults off your back when you said you were going to study medicine. And then I gradually realized that it was a way to give meaning to your life—or at least to make a plausible story.”Bingo! “It got adults off your back.”
And he’s been doing it all his life. It’s the “adults” who insist that knowledge be divided into discipline, each carefully insulated from one another. It’s the inner six-year-old who insists that the world isn’t like that, so inquiry shouldn’t be like that either. It was the inner six-year-old piloting those flights of intellectual fancy Macksey was famous for, demonstrating that it’s the knowledge that matters, not you or me or Milton Eisenhower. He’s got the chops to fly us to the moon and back.
So there.
Certainly that’s what so many of his students needed from him. We were quite serious about whatever it is – truth, beauty? – Hopkins could offer us. We just didn’t like the strictures that came with the offering. Macksey gave us room to breathe, to explore, to grow.
Of course you didn’t actually have to study with him to benefit from his generosity. Knowing that Macksey held the work of Samuel Delany in highest regard, I mentioned his death to Delany on Facebook. He responded:
He was very kind to me on a number of occasions although I only met him once when he came to write a review of my department when I first started teaching in the Comparative Literature Dept. of the University of Mass. at Amherst. In fact, possibly I wouldn’t have had my entire academic career.Think about that. Samuel Delany is one of the best and best-known science fiction writers in the world. Richard Macksey was...what? “Fan” isn’t quite right, we're talking about a grown man, but...why not? This particular adult is a six-year old who rode his 70,000 book library to infinity and beyond. Yes, a fan, Macksey was a fan of Chip Delany.
Now conjure me this: A course taught by Delany and Macksey in which each picks half the texts.
Beam me up!