17
Like a President Should

The Chicago of the 1930s was something Hutchins had never known or imagined ever having to know. It was rough, with a rough, tough elite that managed men, not (as New York, Boston, Philadelphia did) money; a pig-and-pig-iron elite up from nowhere fast and a dozen First Families (i.e., second generation) of bankers and lawyers. The old, old families (i.e., third generation), the Palmers, Fields, Pullmans, Ogdens, Wentworths, had gone to New York or London. (All five of Julius Rosenwald's children left Chicago.) Chicago's was an operating, not an investing, aristocracy, "democratic" with the drawback of democracy: the highest denominator wasn't that much higher than the lowest, and the values, the tastes, and the manner were according. The Chicago rich were as hard-driven as the Chicago poor.

Even the University Club on Michigan Avenue—a considerable cut beneath the Chicago Club down the street—accepted some university men and not others. It went without saying that no Negro, let him have a string of degrees as long as your arm, would ever pass through its portals. And it went without saying—until Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch said it—that no Jew would. On the occasion of a civic committee luncheon Rabbi Hirsch was in the club's dining room, whose walls were hung with the shields of the country's universities. The luncheoners were looking at the shields, most of whose mottoes were in Latin but one of which was in a strange calligraphy. Somebody asked the learned rabbi if he knew what the language was, and he said it was Hebrew. "And what does it say?" said someone politely. "It says," said Rabbi Hirsch, "We don't take Jews."

It would be downright hyperbolic, but, still, suggestive, to say that there is an absolute correlation between a university's eminence and its ability to pay its faculty—but it would be as downright hyperbolic to say that there

is a downright dichotomy. Chicago was a very expensive university. It was a very expensive university because it did proportionately more graduate work and more research than any other university in America. (Its astronomy department had as many professors as students.) Compared to the national average, Chicago's salaries were high and, if the faculty level was to be maintained, had to go higher.

A university president, then as now, was supposed to go downtown and get the money. (The money, in those days, was downtown, not in Washington.) Most of the money would build stadiums, administration buildings, dormitories, and laboratories, in that order (and, in those days, chapels). What was needed, of course, was general purpose funds to repair the heating plant, shovel the snow, provide more scholarships, and raise the starvation wages of junior faculty; but there is no immortality in such mortal odds and ends. (In the decade preceding Hutchins' appointment, less than one-sixth of what Chicago received in benefactions was unrestricted, and the percentage was falling steadily. Vice-president (and pal) Munnecke: "I've got to see you about the coal contract"—a $500,000 item. President Hutchins: "Don't bother me. I've got to convince an assistant professor that he doesn't want to be an associate professor."

He was not a jolly good fellow. He never slapped a back, or guffawed. He never played golf. He never told an off- or on-color story to break the ice. He could kill a cocktail conversation by entering the room or (having done his painful duty) by leaving it, or ignite a dinner table at forty feet—if he could be got to the dinner table. (On one of the few occasions when he was, shortly after he became president, he was introduced to the handsome wife of a colleague named Wright and said, "I would rather be Wright than president.") He could be got to the luncheon table at the Chicago Club downtown, and he was, almost every day for twenty years; but at 5:00 P.M. the door of his office shut behind him and at 5:05 the door of his house shut behind him and, unless he had an evening lecture, he did not emerge until six the next morning. His tall wife was seen walking her Great Dane—never her small daughters—in the daytime, but at night the only lights in the president's house were upstairs. He never spoke of his domestic difficulties, only raising an eyebrow when an intimate asked how things were at home—and thus it was known that the difficulties were chronic and acute. But he exploited them to decline social invitations or, at the last moment, break them without an explanation.

Though the Crash had so shattered the rich that they had lost their faith in the sales pitch and would not buy the hard sell or the soft sell, they fell so hard for the antisell that by the time the War Deal (not the New Deal) got the country "going" again, circa 1940, Hutchins had talked them out

of more than fifty million dollars. Nobody who went by the book ever understood how he did it. He did it by being sassy.

It wasn't tempered to the time or the place; it was the quintessence of the man, wherever, whenever, however. In the washroom of the Chicago Faculty Club, a colleague at the next basin says to Professor of Philosophy Charles Hartshorn, "Are you still working on God?" and a voice from the gentleman's stalls is heard: "He ought to let God work on him."

The fractious donor of $25,000 who was told that "anybody who gives us less than $50,000 is not allowed to open his head," was, as Hutchins knew he'd be, tickled; he doubled his money (and still wasn't allowed to open his head). When a promotional brochure called "Great Men" went out, with studio photographs, on opposing pages, of the donor of each $250,000 chair and the incumbent of the chair, Hutchins got a note from a jocular prospect: "If I give you $250,000, will it make me Great?"—"Give us the $250,000 and it will make you feel Great." Old money, too, east of Chicago, needed different kinds of nursing. You could tell Ray Fosdick, the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, that the money he was sitting on was burning a hole in his soul, but you couldn't talk that way to John D., Jr., whose money it was.

There was a fine irony in Hutchins' grandee courtesy, the irony of the one-way window. Its object must not get the point; if he does he takes his money elsewhere. The trick is to offend without being offensive. The man would never know that he had been had on, any more than the questioner who, having asked an unintelligent question which was in fact an oration and not a question at all, would be asked if he would be so kind as to repeat the question. The self-compounding insult rebuffs its object for a fool and then rebuffs him properly for not knowing he's a fool. To be a fool is nothing much; to suspect, vaguely or sharply, that one is being made a fool of is something considerable.

Sometimes early in life, and oftentimes later, a man is simply too tired and testy to suffer fools at all, much less gladly; so tired that the artful shaft emerges artless. Fortunate the man who in such circumstances lets go at a friend. Having to perform at a testimonial dinner, and in pain, Hutchins winced to hear his friend Bill Benton, owner of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, say, "Bob Hutchins has been a lucky man—the luckiest man in the world." Pulling himself painfully to his feet, the chairman of Britannica's editorial board said, "I am the second luckiest man in the world. The first is the previous speaker—he has never had to work for Bill Benton."

Somewhere down the line he had acquired the perfectly preposterous aplomb that can get away with it at home or abroad.

He was meeting Harvey Wheeler at the Waldorf Men's Bar—there were men's bars then, in the 1950s. Robert M. Hutchins was accustomed to being patient with the rich; that was what he had always been paid for. But the staff at the Waldorf were not the rich, and Hutchins was impatient. He kept beckoning to the waiters as they went hurrying past his table, but none of them stopped. Then he turned his chair around and beckoned to the waiters' captain. The captain didn't, or wouldn't, meet his eye. He turned his chair back to the table and picked up the silver with both hands and threw it over his shoulder. The captain and all the lower ranks came running to the table, and he placidly placed his order. "It never fails," he said to Wheeler.

Abroad he was required to preside over a banquet in London celebrating the bicentennial of Encyclopaedia Britannica. There were too many speeches and they were all too long. It got to be past his bedtime and he was very tired, but the prime minister and the lord mayor were there, and there was nothing to do about it; nothing, that is, that anyone but Hutchins could think of. When he could bear it no longer and concluded that the other guests shouldn't bear it any longer, whether or not they could, he rose and lifted his glass and said, "The Queen." The ritual toast always ended the evening in England, but it had never before, in such company, and so prematurely, been called for by an American.

Precisely what it is—the art of getting away with it—is hard to say, and how it is come by harder still. It goes by a variety of names—"presence," say. It has nothing to do with popularity. It neither seeks nor finds a following. It is not an entertainer's, a politician's, or an athlete's projection of himself. Its authority doesn't soar and plummet with its office or its victories or defeats; it is immanent and independent of the circumstances. "I think," said Archibald MacLeish, and he said it thoughtfully, "that I never knew another man like him." It began (but only began) with the towering figure, the figure that in any room, at any table, was the cynosure.

He had to be conscious of always being watched. A hard thing to carry, and probably unbearable without an immense substructure of vanity. What I could see was the man who led a small group of friends into the Biltmore dining room, found the table reserved too close to other tables for his liking, said to the maitre d', "We'll take that one," indicating a corner table reserved for another party, and led his party to it and seated them. What I could see was the man who walked into a florist's on his wedding anniversary, selected a plant, rejected the clerk's offer to wrap it, and picked it up and walked out with it. (Clerk to manager: "That man just walked out with that plant." Manager: "That's all right. That's Dr. Hutchins.")

Arch. And what is the way to be arch ? He and I hove into Palm Springs one evening to attend a rich woman's soiree. The purpose of the soiree was to enable him to make a genteel pitch for money for the Great Books Foundation. The big money. He thought it would be nice if I went along. The rich woman's place was California Trianon, and the rich woman's friends were all there to meet the great man. A maid opened the door, with the hostess behind her. "Ah, Reverend Hutchings"—so help me—"how nice of you to come." "I want you," said the Reverend Hutchings, "to meet my friend, Rabbi Meyers." The hostess would never know; only the Reverend Hutchings and Rabbi Meyers would know. That is the way to be arch.

For all his having been brought up to be polite, the patrician made could not quite repress the unconscious insolence of the (amused and, to his aficionados, amusing) monosyllabic answer to the foolish question in the question period after a lecture, the abrupt departure from the platform when he had had enough of it, the interjected "I'm sorry, but it's past my bedtime" at a dinner party. The hauteur was drawn from a world that revolved around him everywhere: a peremptory manner with servants, speaking in front of them as if they weren't there, as if they would never repeat what they'd overheard (or as if it wouldn't matter if they did). But subalterns—secretaries, assistants, and always students—were charmed.

The non-hail-fellow met at the subtle distance that kept you from taking more time than you needed. The distance still conveyed itself when people who were prepared to be awed were put at their ease by a pleasantry and still remained uneasy. It was all very engaging; it wasn't all to the good. Distance breeds distance, and deference deprives the deferred-to. The distance was not engendered by any indication to his associates that he was above them. It was engendered by their taking themselves to be beneath him. He didn't fend off argument, rebuke, or admonition; he just didn't get it, and he didn't get it when he needed it. The little placard he pulled out of his desk drawer, only in the presence of friends—Don't Tell the President Things He Already Knows—would have done him some good if it had read: What Is It That Keeps You from Telling the President the Things He Ought to Know? Engaging, when an appointee went sour and he said, "And I appointed him, I appointed them all"; less engaging, but more useful if, before the appointment, he had found a way to be told the things he needed to know.

Somebody might have told him that the reason the Socratic dialogue at the center in Santa Barbara wasn't Socratic (or even dialogic) was that, unlike the gadfly of Athens, he simply sat there at the head of the table and let his associates ride their hobby-horses, and never gadflew at anybody.

He was beset by age and illness and responsibilities, yes. He was tired. And he was Bob; and Bob, even when he asked to be told, didn't know how to ask. So nobody ever told him. And if anyone had? Then he'd have pulled out the placard: Don't Tell the President Things He Already Knows, and everybody would have had a good laugh. When Hutchins was seventy-five, one of the rising stars in the academic firmament joined the group at the center in Santa Barbara. Asked how his conversations with Hutchins went, the rising star said, "Every time I say something, I have the feeling he already knows it." "How can that be? You've got an original mind." "He knows all the original stuff, too."

In the whole course of his speaking and writing career he appears to have relied on specialist friends for substantial specialized help in only two or three instances. His Aquinas Lecture at Marquette University in 1949, "St. Thomas and the World State," though the style of the paper was unmistakably Hutchins', must have been as much Adler's work as his own; it was a philosophically radical statement that had to undergo the close (and in some cases hostile) scrutiny of Catholic scholars, and Hutchins certainly hadn't the ready command of the whole of the Aquinas corpus necessary to the presentation.

In an Atlantic Monthly article in 1936 he interrupted his controversy with John Dewey to take philosophical issue with Alfred North Whitehead.^[1] Hutchins drafted his article and sent it on to Richard McKeon to make sure "that I have been fair to Whitehead." McKeon suggested several serious emendations, and Hutchins, having adopted them, acknowledged his indebtedness in his monkeyshine manner: "Your article has gone to the Atlantic . It is a much better article than the one I sent you. It is so much better that I am afraid my friends, to say nothing of my enemies, will recognize that it is ghost-written. There are a couple of pages of frank plagiarism; the rest is plagiarized, but not so frankly. I have striven to protect myself by omitting your brightest remarks. This leads to a certain incoherence and lack of continuity which will remind my readers of my original works."^[2]

He knew his philosophical limitations, and he knew that he would never have the opportunity to overcome them. He understood Whitehead. He understood Aquinas. But he could not be sure that his understanding of them was foolproof against their professional interpreters and commentators. He had to seem to know more than he possibly could have known. He did what generalists commonly do, in and out of scholarship: he asked collegial specialists to advise him and check his work, leaving him open to attack only by rabid partisans.

The only Hutchins offspring of obviously illegitimate paternity was

legitimated by respectable practice. In his lectures after Hiroshima he invariably advanced the thesis that science is international; nearly all of the men who made the bomb in America were eminent before they came to America; scientific secrecy is a myth; the USSR and other countries will have the bomb within a few years.^[3] He supported his thesis with a detailed delineation of the scientific considerations bearing on foreign policy, and offered a recital that simply could not have been prepared by a busy layman: "The hypothesis of a violent splitting of the uranium nucleus, based on the work of Hahn and Strassman in Germany, was independently proposed and verified at the same time by Frisch in Copenhagen and Joliot in Paris. The suggestion that plutonium would be a suitable explosive for an atomic bomb was made independently at the same time by Turner in America, Cockcroft in England, and von Halban in France."^[4]

He did not have an original mind. His originality lay in the kind of mind he had: deft, epitomic, telegraphic. He was born able to do what he said a general education (which he hadn't got) should enable a man to do: operate in any field. How well such a man is able to operate is something else again. He is skating on thin ice, and the thinner the ice the faster he has to skate. The lesson Hutchins learned teaching evidence at Yale—that everything is related to everything else—determined his intellectual attitude for the rest of his life.

"Bob's singular gift," said Richard McKeon, "is what the Greeks—in Greek, of course—called wit. It hasn't anything to do with being witty in our sense. It means what we call 'getting the idea.'" Again and again, in his writings, in his speeches, and in conference, he would ask, "What are we trying to do?" His instinct for the important cut through the incidental and the conditional, through the immediate and the immaterial, to the heart of the matter. "In apprehension," said a Shakespearean of him, "how like an X ray." He was first and last an apprehender.

Lucidity is the mark of the best of lawyers. But it is not the lawyer's lucidity that asserts that "modern medicine has done almost as much to lengthen life as modern physics has done to shorten it." Mere lucidity isn't the mark of a lawyer eulogizing another lawyer by saying, "Laird Bell said that he always agreed with the last man he talked to. This was not true, as I often found out when I was the last man."

We all write, and some of us write well, but there are individuals whose voices are inimitably their own. They alone are writers. Hutchins was a writer. His writing was undeviating and undeviable. His ideal was Aristotle's definition of art as that from which nothing can be taken and to which nothing can be added. But lucid writing does not have to be wooden: "When we remember that only a little more than 1500 years ago

the ancestors of most of us, many of them painted blue, were roaming the trackless forests of Transalpine Gaul, despised by the civilized citizens of Rome and Antioch, interested, in the intervals of rapine, only in deep drinking and high gaming, savage, barbarous, cruel, and illiterate, we may reflect with awe and expectation on the potentialities of our race."^[5]

It is hard to be terse and charming. It is not impossible:

"Dear Central Administration: By God I am. Sincerely yours."

"Dear Pomp: I'll be sure to do it. Ever yours."

"Dear Willie: No, if you will spell accommodations with two m's. Sincerely yours."

"Dear Reuben: 1. No. Ever yours."

"Dear Flash: I do. Sincerely yours."^[6]

Once in a while he lost his hold on concision and waxed garrulous: To Felix Frankfurter (in 1933): "I understand that you are to be Attorney General. I hope that this is not the case. You are the person who tells Attorneys General what to do; why should you bother to do it yourself? You are my candidate for any vacancy that may occur in the Holy Trinity; if none occurs, you should stay in legal scholarship." To Chairman William O. Douglas of the Securities and Exchange Commission, who wanted to know what he should talk about at the University of Chicago: "How about, 'My Ten Years at Yale with Robert Maynard Hutchins'?" To Adlai Stevenson, who had heard that Hutchins was going to take the presidency of Harvard: "All reports that I am going to be president of another university originate in this one." To Dean Edward H. Levi of the University of Chicago Law School: "This fellow D——— is a dope. I suppose he represents the vanguard of our profession." And to publisher Henry R. Luce of Time , who wrote him that "my paper did not convey seriously enough my admiration for you": "I shall pass your letter on to my heirs so that they can see you for my obituary."^[7]

To Milton Mayer: "Dear (in the sense of expensive) Mr. M. Will you take less? How much less?" "It's o.k. Your every word is a pearl." "Come along. There is a cross for everyone, and you are the cross for me."

He seemed never to have understood how the simple declarative sentence—his great gift to educational discourse—could be misunderstood. And it wasn't. It was mistaken. His lucidity was refreshing in the peculiarly obscurantist world of the higher learning. No one else had it. It read beautifully; it never palled. But it cut—"cut" is the word—two ways. He knew he was riling up the animals by calling them rational and insisting that "the purpose of education is to make rational animals more perfectly rational"; driven to irrationality, they took him to be saying that the adjective, instead of modifying the noun, defined it and excluded the emo-

tions. (He called them by their outmoded name from antiquity, "the passions.") He riled the animals up by his employment of archaic terms like "the virtues" and his hope that "the University of Chicago can make a civilization in the Twentieth Century as the University of Paris molded the civilization of the Middle Age"—as if the medieval (i.e., Catholic) university could be a model for anything but prescientific authoritarianism, as if diversity, and not unity, were not the glory of the modern university, as if there were such a thing as metaphysics. He riled them up by saying that "every great change in American education has been secured over the dead bodies of countless professors," by saying that "the function of the American college is adolescent-sitting," by saying that "American education is anti-intellectual."

He didn't have to say these things or to say them the way he said them. But he plainly calculated that the animals could not be brought out of their year-round hibernation with anything less than a little riling. His rhetoric was inflammatory, and outrageous. It was not designed to make friends, but to influence people. The enemies it made would, most of them, have been enemies whatever the rhetoric. He was attacking American education, which needed to be attacked precisely on the grounds he attacked it. The end of the 1960s confirmed all of his direct jeremiads and produced the frantic discovery, in the mid 1970s, that there simply had to be a restoration of the general education—the "basic studies"—for which he had fought for fifty years.

His prose owed almost nothing to the time and place he lived in. (When his opponents in education called him a nineteenth-century man, he defended himself by saying, "I am an eighteenth-century man.") Though he was all too well acquainted with the jargons of the social sciences, he never used them except in mockery. (Arguing with a friendly dean about a sociologist he wanted to get rid of: "One more peep out of you and I'll extrapolate you out the window.")

He rarely employed the contemporary idiom, never the contemporary vernacular or the perennial cliché. (He could no more say than be "visibly shaken.") As the culture degenerated, and the mother tongue with it, the country was swept by suddenly epidemic expressions, banal or pretentious (or both), like "have a nice day" or "at this point in time." Among friends he was given to saying "ain't," "don't" (as in "he don't"), "got" (for "have"), and "he writes pretty good"—affectations of the literate. But in writing and in formal discussion he never used an expression with a limited life expectancy.

He may or may not have written for the ages, but he wrote in them, shunning every first and last linguistic atrocity that popped up in the popu-

lar -eses—sociologese, psychologese, technologese, legalese, bureaucratese, and Pentagonese—meant to mark the user as a specialist and to give him authority. From his hand, or (as far as anyone recalls) his lips, Hutchins never let escape words or phrases like interface, finalize , or input ; never -wise as a suffix, except in "likewise" and "otherwise"; never behavior modification, conflict resolution , or any other such.

We all have to fool around to divert ourselves. He did it deriding the rhetorical fatuities of others. It would have been cruel if the others had been unlettered, making unlettered mistakes, but he picked on boys his own size who, though they certainly resented the punishment, could hardly cry foul. They, too, were men of words, none of them wordier than President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, the great platitudinist of stand-pat Republicanism. The polite way for one university president to call another foolish is to rib him in passing: "The identification of freedom with lack of discipline is, in the somewhat lurid language of Mr. Butler of Columbia, the 'rabbit theory' of education, according to which, he says, 'any infant is encouraged to roam about an enclosed field, nibbling here and there at whatever root or flower or weed may, for the moment, attract his attention or tempt his appetite.' Mr. Butler adds, varying the figure slightly, 'Those who call this type of schoolwork progressive reveal themselves as afloat on a sea of inexperience without chart or compass or even rudder.' Obviously we should not look to rudderless rabbits to lead us through the mazes of the modern world."^[8]

And his victims were almost invariably highly placed persons who could properly be held accountable for their absurdities. A professor at Yale was given anonymous credit for "the chiropractic approach to literature" when he told his students that a work of art could be measured by the thrill it sent down your spine. The president of the United States was invariably cited as the source of the most excessive imaginable enthusiasm: "I am for it one thousand percent, as Mr. Roosevelt would say."

When at a press conference President Kennedy was asked whether in his crusade against racial discrimination he was going to attack state laws prohibiting racial intermarriage, he answered: "Well, I, the law would, if there was a marriage of the kind you described, I would assume that, and if any legal action was taken against the party then I, they would have a relief, it would seem to me, in the courts, and it would be carried, I presume, to the higher courts depending on the judgment, so that the laws themselves would be affected by the ultimate decision of the Supreme Court. So that I think that there are legal remedies for any abuses in this field now available." Careful reading convinced Hutchins that "what he meant was, 'I don't have to attack the laws against miscegenation, because

the courts will hold them unconstitutional.' At least I think that's what he meant. And I hope his prophecy comes true."^[9]

The man who calls general attention to the bumbles of others has to be bumble-proof himself. Once—and it need only be once—he lays himself open to the same sort of genteel savaging, his game is up. As an intellectual addressing himself to intellectual issues before an audience which acknowledged intellectuality alone, Hutchins was foreclosed the possibility of overt preaching. But he had sprung from a line of preachers. The faculty of the University of Chicago was not in the least surprised when he told them that "we are called to a moral, spiritual, and intellectual revolution." They detected the Calvinist man in this juvenile patriarch. They had the secular distaste for the summons to salvation, and the scientific resistance to being hurried into anything. His aphoristic moralizing, cloaked in cool litany, was the ultimate condescension. There was no mistaking that black-and-white approach, and no bearing it by men whose own calling was peculiarly committed to seeing shades of gray. There was no mistaking the over-simplification of matters whose complexities had consumed generations and ages of research. There was the moralist for you, flaunting the selected superficialities that a man might get away with in the pulpit on a Sunday morning—but not in a university weekdays. The most offensive thing about the superficialities—in or out of the pulpit—was their employment as the answers to the most fundamental of questions. The weekday moralist would not, of course, address his congregation as "my children"—but he would think of them as children, and recalcitrant children at that.

He wouldn't have had to sit at their feet and drink in their wisdom. It would have been enough if he had associated with them or found a way to indicate that he only wished he were able to keep their company. But he didn't. He seemed to hold himself aloof and his colleagues at a distance. He hid himself assiduously and disclosed himself warily.

"People say," said Archibald MacLeish, "that Bob never had an intimate friend, that he was too formal—too bashful, at bottom—for intimacy. There was a time when I'd have said it myself and, you know, I never really knew him well. But I'd see him after a long separation and he'd suddenly recall something I'd said in passing a year or two earlier, and I'd realize that we really were intimate in the sense of a meaningful relationship."

It would seem that meaningful relationships between persons whose business is words would involve a great many words. Not so. The intimacy of meaningfulness does not depend very much on either separation or contact. There was a middle period of a few years, after he left Chicago westbound to the Ford Foundation in 1950, when I didn't see him for six

months at a time. An occasional one-liner, dictated: "Mr. M: I am a great admirer of your work. Are you doing any? Sincerely yours, Mr. H." (Underneath the handwritten "Mr. H," "Robert Maynard Hutchins" is typed, and the "Maynard" is crossed out by hand and replaced by "Mayer.") And when he left the Ford Foundation in 1952 and took over the Fund for the Republic to fight McCarthyism I don't suppose I saw him ten times in five years. I was working long stretches in central Europe. "Mr. H: Why don't you come to the Alps?—Mr. M." "Mr. M: The mountain comes to Mohammed.—Mr. H." However brisk or infrequent your exchanges with him, they picked up where they had left off as if the interval between them had been an hour or a day instead of a year or a decade.

Stripped of all decor, of all salutations and complimentary closes, of all circumbendibus ambiguous efflorescence and—in a word—of necessity to sound out the other man, communication can be close to instantaneous. You pass in the hall and one of you says, "Is Jones any good?" and the other says, "No." Or, "Can you talk to the freshmen Wednesday at ten o'clock?" and the other says, "Yes, for ten minutes." Or, "Do you know anything about Augustine's brother?" and the other says, "I'll let you know tomorrow." Or (head in his door): "There were these two Irishmen . . ." (and head out—a half-minute by the clock). On the way home from his office (his head in the door): "Wanna walk?"—three minutes by the clock, and no standing around outside his house where a faculty member will buttonhole him. At five of twelve: "Wanna ride downtown?"—twenty minutes by the clock, eighteen to read something he'd hand you, and two to speak your piece about it. Conversations were all snatches that never began or ended, only resumed. All possible assumptions mutually assumed, a relationship maintained by intermittent rapid fire.

Most of his academic colleagues were easygoing men who liked to sit around and talk. They were not characteristically glib. His dry playfulness did not really amuse them; it had what could be taken for a touch of amiable contempt. Of course he wasn't disagreeable, but of course he wasn't agreeable. When he lectured the medical men on Galen—whom they hadn't read and didn't need to read—and told them "where Galen does not agree with me, I shall suppress the fact, in the hope that you will not be aware of it,"^[10] they knew he was having them on. They resented his know-it-all the more because they recognized that he really knew some of it.

"The facts," in his rhetoric, was code for what most of his colleagues were concerned with most of the time. He was telling them that their learning and their teaching were devoted to triviality, except in so far as they illuminated theories which themselves did not arise from fact-gathering.

"Vatt," said the great physiologist Anton Carlson, who wasn't above exaggerating his Swedish accent, "iss de effidence?"

His trouble—that is, the trouble he got into—arose from his intuitive grasp. He didn't need the fact. He would seize one from out of the welter of the world and cite it as sufficient support for the principle he was arguing. The fact is that the casually introduced fact was not intended to support the principle, but simply to illustrate it. All the worse. His airiness was an assault on the very idea of scholarship; he was arguing (if it could be said to be arguing) from the indemonstrables that nobody knew and the undemonstrated that nobody had proved. He was arguing from "common sense" and "common knowledge," which it was scholarship's business to explode as common error. When he said, "The experience of the race indicates . . ." or, "As every fairly mature infant knows . . ." he was deprecating the only principle that scientific investigation maintained, the principle that the experience of the race and the knowledge that every fairly mature infant drew from it were, unless they were documented, so much folk-myth.

A little generosity, a little more interrogative and little less declarative—a little give and a little take, a little you-know-and-I-know à la FDR, a quip instead of a dig, and—who knows where a man might not go (or have gone)? And be what when he got there? And have been what when he started?