Eric Voegelin — A Recollection 

Part 2

by Robert B. Heilman

The late Robert B. Heilman wrote many books. He was a distinguished teacher and  literary critic who flourished at Louisiana State Univeristy. It was a remarkable time and place; his colleagues included Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks and Alan Tate. He became a close friend of Eric Voegelin and nurtured his understanding of American culture and English language. This essay is taken from Professor Heilman's book, The Professor and the Profession, available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears here in three parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

 

III      Finding a Home in Baton Rouge

 

Our relations with the Voegelins took a special turn in the summer of 1944, when they were in Cambridge, Massachusetts: as in many summers, Eric was working in the library at Harvard. During their absence from Baton Rouge, the rented house in which they had been living was leased or sold out from under them, this in accordance with a wartime regulation that permitted the dispossession of occupants if the premises were then to be occupied by the owners or members of their family.

 

This must have been another severe blow to people who, after the troubles that led to their flight from Austria, might have felt they were beginning to get a foothold in America. They evidently felt that they could not contest what amounted to an eviction. It would have been costly; as "foreigners" (though naturalization was imminent, they had not yet gone through it) they would have been at a disadvantage in a legal dispute; and Eric desperately needed all the time he could get at Harvard on materials unavailable at LSU. Had they made the long and expensive trip back to Baton Rouge, they might not have been able to find other rental housing. Apparently the only solution was to buy a house, provided a suitable one could be found for sale. At this point they phoned us and asked us to buy a house for them, that is, to find one for sale, commit them to buying it, and perhaps put down (I'm not sure about this) some earnest money. This was a forbidding assignment; picking out a house for someone else could never be easy, and for people of the Voegelins' fine taste it seemed close to impossible.

 

The Voegelins could be stuck with a house of which their undying thought might be, "Couldn't Ruth and Bob do better than this?" But however it might come out, our taking the assignment must have seemed, in the exigencies of a wartime world, a lesser evil than any other course . . . and we did take it on. Although I say "we," the task fell largely to my wife, Ruth. One reason was that I was teaching full-time in summer school (fifteen hours a week then, and no trace of the cooling systems that have since become standard equipment in Baton Rouge), an annual necessity to keep us financially afloat; the more significant one was that Ruth was much better than I at amateur realty. I no longer know what her research method was, or how long she worked at it, but I do recall that she uncovered only two houses for sale. We may have looked at both houses, or it may have been, as I suspect, that one of the two was so obviously inferior that it dropped out of consideration. The remaining one was no gem, but it would do, or rather would have to do. Because it was really the only one available, we at least escaped the burden of seeming to have made a sorry choice. We signed for it and phoned the Voegelins with the news.

 

Lissy came down by train to take care of the paperwork; I believe they borrowed the money for the trip as well as for the down payment (in fleeing the Nazis, they had to leave Vienna without either possessions or cash). My impression is that the house cost six or seven thousand (for comparison: I was an associate professor then, and my salary was, I think, a little more than three thousand; Eric's was probably somewhat, but not much, more than that). Later, with a frankness in financial matters that was characteristic, Eric said he had received a loan from a relatively well-off refugee, a Jewish businessman, I believe.

 

If Lissy's heart sank when she saw their new home, she concealed the fact well (I can imagine the Voegelins having a mental picture of a modern house on a good-sized lot in an attractive neighborhood, a house such as the Heberles had by now acquired). Fortunately, the Voegelins' fine taste was balanced by a sense of reality. The house we found was roughly downtown, on a narrow street a few blocks east of the central shopping section. The names Canal and Cherry come to mind, but I would not bet on either; whatever its name, the street on which the Voegelin house stood was wiped out by the new freeway that, curving in from the north and east, took over the area. As I remember it, the area was, if not outright crummy, at least wholly undistinguished: a sequence of narrow houses on narrow lots on a narrow street.

 

But Lissy Voegelin made that house into a very charming place; we were occasional guests in it, and after we left LSU we once spent a week there. This was early one summer — in 1953, I think — after the Voegelins had left for what had become a standard summer research stay in Cambridge. We could see the works of art that were an important part of the transformation, and we could see (and use) the large tub in which, we were told, Eric sat for hours in cold water, smoking the cigars he was fond of and working with papers and books arranged on a board spanning the tub. Lissy contributed to his writing by trying to maintain favorable working conditions; she was a noise-abatement society of one, campaigning in particular against kids whose habitual hollering disturbed Eric's flow of thought. It must have seemed very odd, in a neighborhood where reading, if any, probably did not go beyond the daily papers and where books would have seemed strange objects stored in libraries, to be told that a new neighbor, suspect anyway, was actually writing a book and needed a quiet atmosphere in which to carry on this peculiar practice. You never could tell about foreigners.

 

Whatever problems there may have been — and I never heard any report of hostility (even during a war when the Voegelins' marked accents might have aroused suspicion in some segments of the American public) — they lived in that house from 1944 to 1958, when they returned to Europe for what would be a stay of some years.

 

 

 

 IV      Becoming an American Citizen

 

Aside from the housing problem, another significant event occurred in 1944: Eric's naturalization as an American citizen. I was his designated witness, the citizen whom the immigration authorities would quiz about the applicant's political and personal reliability. But before we got to the crucial moment of the hearing, there was a rather long period of preparation, during which Eric asked me some routine questions. One big issue did arise, having to do with a training booklet provided to would-be citizens by the division of naturalization. Eric would of course know its contents by heart.

 

One day he asked me, "If the answers in the handbook are wrong, should I give the right answers or say what the handbook says?" Anyone with knowledge of officialdom will know what my answer was: "You say what the book says, even though you are sure you are telling a lie. If you correct an official publication of a government bureau, they will surely take you to be an unreformed Nazi, a Communist agent, or else a professional troublemaker." The situation was this: the handbook summarized various matters the candidate was supposed to know about — the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and legislation having to do with the duties of citizenship. Eric did not rely on this secondhand version. As a political scientist, he read the originals, which of course he saw through a highly trained professional eye; hence his sense that the handbook, meant for a diverse and unread laity, fell into technical inaccuracies or at least approximations of dubious reliability.

 

I was present during part of Eric's naturalization interview, where he conducted himself in a becomingly low-key way and without bursts of learning that might alarm the board. He passed without difficulty. I also underwent a private questioning. In general it had to do with Eric's potential for good citizenship, and of course I could be enthusiastic. I recall few details, but I do remember one large and unexpected stumbling block. I was asked how long I had known Eric or, more precisely, just when our acquaintance had begun. The exchange went approximately like this:

 

RBH: Well, let's see, he came to LSU in 1942. Let's say about two years.
Naturalization Officer: You must be more specific.
RBH: Well, he came here from Alabama for our second semester. So I met him sometime in the first half of 1942.
N.O.: You must be more specific.
RBH. Since he came for the spring semester, he would have arrived in Baton Rouge in late January or early February. I met him not long after that.
N.O.: You must be more specific.
RBH: I probably met him sometime in February.
N.O.: That is too general.
RBH: Well, let's say I met him February 16.

 

The interrogator had the satisfied look of an examining attorney who has at last elicited an essential fact from a well-meaning but none-too-sharp witness. My last statement settled things. Later Eric told me that the officer had told him, "You had a very good witness. Professors usually aren't good about details. They tend to be vague, especially about dates. But Heilman really had the facts at his fingertips."

 

 

 V      Attracting the Best Students

Over time, Eric had become known as a faculty member of extraordinary knowledge, insight, and depth. But he had none of the feeling for easy or popular targets needed to create the spellbinder who elicits volumes of praise from students and garners teaching prizes. He was uniformly admired by the best students rather than being widely popular.

 

He never tried to gratify or to upset auditors; rather, he wanted to expound ideas, which might do either. His aim was understanding, not approbation or the making of converts. Once he told me of a woman student upset by his presentations of political theory; she felt that his ideas raised unnecessary difficulties and underrated a success-marked actuality. Eric gave her an opportunity to tell what she would prefer. She said she just wanted to be "happy." What, Eric asked, did it take to produce happiness? She said, "I just want to be married, and have a family and a house and a car and a radio." In reporting this to me Eric was wondering how widespread her attitude was and, if it was a sound representative of American thought, how we had managed to last as long as we had.

 

Eric was grateful for an American refuge, and he never evinced any European snobbery; but he would never hesitate to make a point that might displease chauvinists, those who took the status quo to be the ultimate social and moral achievement.

 

Eric was the ideal colleague for those special cases in which a student advisee would seek not to have his requirements met as quickly and easily as possible, but to be sent to the best minds on the faculty. That sort of thing does happen occasionally in academe, and it was wonderful to have an Eric to recommend to such seekers. He was quietly admired despite the difficulty of intricate and unfamiliar concepts. I have the impression — though I have no solid evidence on this — that when Eric offered a law school course in natural law, student responses were marked by the feeling that though these ideas had the merit of unusualness and depth, their connection with litigation was not altogether clear.

 

Eric not only attracted the best students, but he aroused the interest of townspeople drawn by the new intellectual range. Among these were my wife (who had also audited a course given by Cleanth Brooks) and Dorothy Blanchard (a sister-in-law of Mrs. Brooks), who one year sat in on Voegelin's course in Nietzsche. I got many reports on the flow of ideas, on student reactions, and occasionally on terminological problems.

 

Eric's English was fluent, but the language was highly technical, the idioms came from philosophical vocabularies, and now and then a pronunciation was European — a source of an occasional problem that was more amusing than deeply vexing. The class heard about the Greek divinities "Ahtaynah" and "Tsoiss," and from context soon identified them as the goddess of wisdom and the head Olympian. But an apparently common noun, "wahzy," remained an unsolved mystery for weeks. Puzzlement was widespread. Because "wahzy" seemed to have aquatic connotations, the semifamiliar wadi came to mind, and the association seemed fitting: the word seemed to come up in contexts of the transmission of cultural influences through desert lands. But enlightenment had to come from Eric himself, who, questioned by students, explained, "Oh, you know, a watering spot in the desert." Oasis.

 

But problems of pronunciation were transitory and minor. Eric would ask me about them occasionally, and he caught on quickly to the representations of sound, inconsistent as they are, in English orthography. We moved on quickly from such mechanical matters. My longer-term role was that of explicator of American academic English, and finally I became a sort of consultant on Eric's own formal use of English (he had started writing his books and articles in English — surely the most difficult of the leaps into the New World). In time Eric asked me to read the typescripts of articles, reviews, and the like, and finally the texts of volumes that would become parts of Order and History. He particularly wanted me to catch slips in idiom. In one book he kindly included a paragraph to the effect that my influence upon his English had been beneficent. I wished that might be true, but I tried to avoid deceiving myself.

 

Being Eric's consultant on style was flattering but difficult. My philosophical shortcomings often left me feeling insecure in suggestions I wanted to make. I would see apparent problems in idiom, phrasings not in accord with the expectations of readers in English, locutions I felt to be literal translations of German idioms that, when Englished, still did not become English; but when I broached the subject, I would find that the way he had put the matter seemed to Eric essential to the accurate communication of his thought. In such cases I was not only failing to help Eric, but also causing him the additional labor of explaining his intent to a well-meaning but philosophically defective copyeditor. What I always hoped for, of course, was conspicuous and unmistakable derangements of idiom, the correction of which would make me look competently helpful rather than conceptually hopeless. Little luck of that kind. I can still hear his "But you see, Bob . . ."

 

A reviewer of one of Eric's later books declared it a pity that Voegelin had given up writing in English. What the reviewer meant was that Eric's basic technical vocabulary and idioms were not always in line with standard academic English. I can understand this criticism, provided that it is aimed at stylistic mannerisms and is not used as a defense mechanism against his thought. For instance, "tension toward," a phrase Eric frequently used, seems to me not to work well because it runs counter to anglophone expectations with regard to "tension." But such views are not necessarily shared by readers of greater philosophical expertise.

 

I have already alluded to Eric's strong, nearly fastidious, sense of decorum. What was true of social relations was even more true of professional ones. When I dedicated a book to him--an essay on the relation of language and drama in Othello — he commented on the volume with a fullness, and with an appreciativeness of the intended honor, matched by no other dedicatee. His response took the form of a letter of two or three pages, single-spaced, which gave a handsome account of what he took the book to be doing. His reservations about my conclusions were so gracefully embedded in the descriptive text that I would have been able to ignore them had I wished to do so. I did not wish to, certainly, but by then I knew I was incapable of reshaping my critical praxis to make it less distant from the Voegelin ideal. I recognized that I instinctively fell into psychological criticism, of which — as I've said — Eric disapproved.      

 

[This is the second of 3 Parts.  Part 3 will appear next week. Part 1 may be read HERE.]