Eric Voegelin — A Recollection 

Part 3

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.

 

VI      Visiting the Voegelins in Munich

 

In 1948 Ruth and I left for Seattle, and after that Eric and I exchanged letters regularly, if not frequently (as did our wives).^fn The correspondence continued when the Voegelins returned to Europe in 1958. Eric had accepted the directorship of the Bavarian state political science institute in Munich. This was a professional advancement, I suppose, but it never seemed to me that Eric suffered from the institutional angst so common among American professors. He thought about his work; in no way did his status, or his sense of achievement, depend upon what post he held or what university he served in. So though the Munich post may well have seemed a promotion, I imagine that his motivating influence in taking it was the strong pull of Europe after twenty years away, and of the Voegelins' native language.

 

They must have crossed the ocean about the time we were returning from a 1957-1958 sabbatical. When we returned to Europe in 1964-1965, the Voegelins generously asked us to visit. Eric invited me to speak at a seminar of his, and he also managed — against what resistance I know not — to encourage the department of English to sponsor a lecture by me. The chair of English was Wolfgang Clemen, and since we had both trafficked somewhat in Shakespearean imagery, there were grounds for our finding ourselves at least mildly simpatico.

 

Then I received a letter — a sort of warning I took it to be — from a member of the Munich faculty who had taken his Ph.D. in our department at the University of Washington, where, the gifted son of an immigrant family, he had established himself both as a superior student and as a talented one-upper.

 

The burden of his letter — we had had no prior correspondence — was that the department of English at Munich was "sophisticated," and that a visitor would want to mind his p's and q's lest he betray provincialisms that might embarrass him. Oh dear, I thought, I am in danger of disgracing not only myself but my sponsor, Eric.

 

Well, I spoke to Eric's seminar — a seminar in some phase of political science — no doubt on some aspect of tragedy, the subject of a book I was working on, and had a vague sense, not too illusory I hoped, of having got by without betraying an appalling failure of sophistication (even though I had to speak in English, as the students were more at ease in it than I would have been in German). Eric had told me that he wanted his students to see what a competent American academic looked like. There may have been an implied contrast with the Munich professoriat, our impression of whom, conveyed largely in letters from Lissy, was of complacent, humorless, domineering types, very different from the gentility the Voegelins remembered in their Vienna colleagues.

 

The story might be better if I remembered the subject of my general lecture for the department of English, but I have blacked out the formal occasion. My recollections begin with the postlecture chitchat: Professor Clemen told the Voegelins and Heilmans he had arranged no social affair, and he suggested that we take off in cars for a public park where desired refreshments could be ordered. Off we went, an unorganized and uncertain medley of faculty, students, and others; there was little or no coherence among the twenty or thirty people who made up the park delegation. Feeling ill at ease in the what-do-we-do-next air from which no one seemed exempt, I latched onto several graduate students, proposed that we sit together, and asked them to order — the bill to me — whatever beer they liked and whatever food would go with it: cheese, chips, sausages, and so on. I no longer remember whether I paid or whether Clemen stopped by to pick up the check.

 

I was trying to make conversation while observing Eric and Lissy walking around like lost souls, she looking thunderous and Eric grinning in a most singular fashion, as if this were an especially gratifying occasion. It wasn't long before Clemen stopped by to whisper a request in my ear: if I declared I was tired, this would enable him to flee, as he would like to do, because he took no pleasure in being here and could think of other things he would prefer to do.

 

By then I may have been a little annoyed, and disinclined to play further the role of idiot boy to all these "sophisticates," but all voluntary action was suddenly ruled out by the onset of a thunderstorm. We were sitting in an insubstantial enclosure, I think under a light cloth or canvas covering that temporarily resisted the downpour, but the sides were open, and the storm blew through. Retreat was mandatory, and everyone had to hurry toward parking areas that seemed some distance away. Lissy, who did all the driving, had to dash through the rain for their car. From somewhere there was an umbrella available for the other three of us as we struggled through the rain. We got back to the Voegelins' apartment and chatted and had drinks during the drying-out process.

 

Lissy's displeasure with the evening now expressed itself in denunciations of a social style she saw as a violation of all European, and especially Viennese, decencies. Eric continued to smile, delighted, it seems, by an unforeseen confirmation of his suspicions. As he put it, "I knew that something was wrong with the department of English, but it is much worse than I thought."

 

The Voegelins were wonderful hosts and took us to see everything that should be seen by visitors to Munich — museums, churches, political and historical sites, restaurants. At all such spots Eric spoke with great ease and informality, a guide in control of all pertinent information, aesthetic and historical. One occasion brought out a response I had never seen in him: anger. A doorman or waiter was either inattentive or outright rude, and Eric grew furious. He told the man off, emphatically but not coarsely, and we went on our way. But his resentment at bad style was perceptible for quite a while.

 

In time the Voegelins wearied of Munich; my impression, gained from other sources, is that the disruptiveness of dogmatic student Marxists — a boorish tactic we have seen in this country —made Eric's educational mission seem excessively difficult. I never asked about this.

 

In the late 1960s they returned to the States and made a permanent home in California. Eric was for a while a fellow of the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto. After he left the Institute, Eric told me that the officials there were overly concerned with opposition to communism; Eric felt, if my inferences are correct, that this opposition committed resources and energies against an ideology he already saw as doomed.

 

We began to see the Voegelins regularly again, for our son and his family lived in Palo Alto, and we had a pied-a-terre there. I remember well the July day in 1969 when we four were at my son's house, along with my son and his family, watching the TV broadcast of the moon landing. I had expected Eric to be uninterested or even in a skeptical or debunking frame of mind, but he seemed no less fascinated by the lunar scenes than the rest of us.

 

 

VII    Impressions and the Last Years

 

Before coming to the ending of the tale, I want to record a few impressions that may not be attached to specific events. As I have indicated more than once, I lacked the philosophical equipment to engage in activities that turned on technical consideration or application of Voegelin's thought. (In contrast, Cleanth Brooks — a friend of both of us — made use of a Voegelin idea in an essay on Walker Percy.)

 

But one kept picking up snippets that might influence one's thought or writing. I always noticed Eric's use of the word science in the general sense of "knowledge;" repeatedly he would say something like, "Don't let the lab boys get away with monopolizing that word," that is, limiting its applicability to the management of aspects of physical reality instead of to the treatment of essence by philosophy. Thus he was always providing his listener with conceptual tools that were not necessarily part of his systematic thought. His sense of the varieties of religious experience — he once spoke about "the atheist religion" — was always present to me as I was working out the implications of the picaresque heart of Thomas Mann's brilliant Felix Krull. His idea of the "deformed community" directly influenced my sense of what goes on in Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident.

 

What I was doing was picking up individual ideas from printed or spoken word and using them to enlighten artistic practices rather than ingesting a philosophical system and letting it determine point of view. ("System": my colleague Eugene Webb once told me he had given up studying Voegelin because the latter was "not a systematic philosopher." When I mentioned this to Cleanth Brooks, Cleanth replied that if Eric heard this complaint, he would say, "I'm pursuing truth, not constructing a system." Webb has, fortunately, since resumed his study of Voegelin.)

 

After leaving the Hoover Institute, Eric, needing income, took up the study of the stock market. (I am assuming this chronology; I cannot vouch for it.) He undertook this intense research in his sixties, when many people opt for retirement. Eric did very well in this new venture; he told me once that it took him about two hours a day to spot and keep up with the trends that dictated buying and selling, and after his death Lissy told me that she had been left in a very comfortable financial situation. A lifetime as a profound theorist did not diminish his awareness of how the ordinary world goes and of how to survive in it; he accepted, so to speak, the ways of the world, as long as that acceptance did not run counter to his sense of what was fitting. Once Lissy got the notion that one had to be a church member to undergo funeral rites; Eric said, matter-of-factly, "All right, we will join a church then."

 

Although he could be sharply critical of American ways of doing things, Eric did not stint on praise when he felt it was due. He thought, for example, that American medical practice was superior to European. In the late sixties or early seventies, after he and Lissy had both had major surgery in Palo Alto, he said, "If we had stayed in Vienna, we would both be dead by now." After Lissy's surgery, Eric dashed to the hospital with the most elaborate bouquet he could find; he had laid hands on it at a florist's where it was part (it was an artificial bouquet) of the shop's permanent decor. He presented it with as ardent a speech as might have been delivered to a dying spouse in a Victorian novel. His words apparently implied that her situation was terminal; Lissy made clear that she was doing quite well, thank you, and expected to be around for a while.

 

Lissy had a great sense of humor and a nice touch of American slang, which showed up charmingly, mingled with an Old World style that was more literary than epistolary, in her letters to Ruth. Those letters nearly always ended with "So long, Ruth." Lissy and Ruth had occasional phone calls, and I would always hear my wife's laughter at the jests that came over the wire.

 

In Palo Alto the Voegelins put together a home of great elegance in both furnishings and ornament. I remember especially a large Kokoschka and a Japanese screen, which I believe Eric brought back from a trip to Asia (he had become interested in Eastern philosophies, and had made some progress in learning Chinese). There were no photographs in evidence; they did not go for the American practice of devoting wall space to a photographic family history.

 

They lacked family, in the usual sense, and this was a source of some sadness. Relations with Lissy's family in Vienna were difficult, and may indeed have ended because her relatives were businesspeople who had welcomed the Nazi regime. Perhaps there were no survivors in Eric's immediate family. At one time, however, the Voegelins had welcome contact with — visited and were visited by — a niece of Eric's for whom they felt considerable affection. My notion is that the geographical separation prevented the development of an enduring relationship. The Voegelins spoke once or twice about having or adopting children, but it may be that by the time they were financially secure, age had become a bar to parenthood. They had a pair of dogs, of which they were, or at least Lissy was, very fond; these beasts seemed not to welcome our visits and adopted a frighteningly yapping and snarling style, in which they were reminiscent of the dreadful Caesar, who regularly alarmed guests at the Brooks home in Baton Rouge back in the forties.

 

The Voegelins had cars, handsome ones; and as I've said, Lissy did all the driving. Eric had driven when they first had a car, I was told, but a mishap when he was at the wheel had led to Lissy's permanent assumption of the chauffeur's duties. This was not one of those cases I have known in which an intellectual's professed inability to drive seemed less an admission of incompetence than a claim to talents that rendered him superior to such mechanical activities. (Obviously I write as one who likes to drive.)

 

When Ruth and I visited our son and his family, we regularly called on the Voegelins, sometimes to share a meal and sometimes just to talk. The last time the four of us were together was in December 1984. Eric, who had been in failing health, was bedridden. We talked with him as he lay, in pajamas and a bathrobe, on a daybed in a smaller room (not primarily a bedroom, I think) down the hall from the main living room. I remember that his white hair was unusually long. He took pleasure in biblical readings — the books were mentioned, but I can't recall them — these often done by an attendant.

 

One event during this visit stands out in my memory. Eric said, in a peaceful and unemotional way, without a hint of this-is-it heroism: "It is time to die." Lissy responded sharply, almost angrily: "But you do not think of me. What am I going to do?" We had never heard her use that tone with Eric, though she was always as independent as she was devoted.

 

Eric died about ten days later. He died on the same day as Charles Hyneman, formerly a political scientist at LSU, whom I am glad also to claim as a longtime friend. Charles was a sedulous student of practical American politics and thus presented a contrast to Eric, the theorist and philosophical historian. The American Spectator, founded by former students of Hyneman's at Indiana, remarked that the deaths of Voegelin and Hyneman had "lowered the intelligence level of the nation."

 

During visits to the Voegelins in Palo Alto we might, as I have said, dine together, or we might chat. Occasionally Eric would say, making a rare dip into colloquialism, "Bob and I must have some boy-talk." Off we would go to a restaurant, and by way of boy-talk Eric would hold forth on whatever topics he was currently exploring in his reading and writing.

 

I have already mentioned Lissy's comment that Eric "had no small talk." I had plenty of it, but it seemed too small for the occasion. So I tended to be listener only, mortified by my incapacity to deal with the subjects on which Eric spoke easily and eloquently, and mortified too by the flattering implication that I was an equal partner in the conversation. I fell into the category that Peter Shaffer, in his 1968 play The White Liars, called "Takers" (as opposed to "Givers"). I have long remembered an aphorism of Eric's at one of these occasions: "Of course there is no God. But we must believe in Him." I understood, I thought, the concept of the indispensable symbol.

 

The disparity between the Giver and the Taker roles led, as it seemed to me it must, to a thinning of our relationship. My original duties as native informant virtually disappeared as Eric came to know more and more about America. He had read widely in literature in English, and he was a more than capable critic of what he read. Listening, however enthusiastic, was not enough. I knew Eric felt pressed by the vastness of the intellectual tasks in which he was engaged, and by the sense of a rapidly diminishing time in which to carry them out. I came to feel that I could be most helpful by not taking up time he could use more profitably in his study. We gradually reduced the number of our visits to the Voegelins, but there was never any diminution of their wonderful cordiality.

 

After Eric's death the matter came up in a conversation between Lissy and me. Perhaps I brought it up, wanting to explain myself, no doubt hoping to have been seen as considerate and helpful rather than indifferent or unfriendly. Lissy's comment went something like this: "Yes, Eric noticed that you weren't coming over as much. He wondered why. He was very sad about it. He was very fond of you." I wondered whether, as often happens with good intentions, I had blown it.       

 

[This is the last of 3 Parts. Part 1 may be read HERE.]

 

 

FN   

 

See Charles R.Embry,ed.,  Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin: A Friendship in Letters-1944-1984, Columbia: The University of Missouri Press, 2004. Some consider this the unofficial 35th volume of the Collected Works because of the fascinating range and depth of discussion between the two men over four decades. —ed

Robert B. Heilman and Eric Voegelin