Eugene Goodheart died on April 9th. Some First readers came to know his lucid voice through the many pieces he published here over the past ten years, but Gene had established himself as a penetrating literary and cultural critic long before he began writing for First.
I want to thank Gene’s widow, Joan Bamburger, his daughter, Jessica, and his son, Eric, for helping gather the tributes to him posted below. I should add there was at least one friend of Gene’s who wanted to contribute but couldn’t due to his own serious health issues. This comrade was “crushed” by the news of Gene’s death. It wasn’t easy for any of us to write about Gene. A couple of our contributors had trouble with their final sentences. I’m guessing that was a sign of how much they wished (like all of us) to keep the conversation with Gene going. Maybe we can draw hope on that score from one of Gene’s guides. He was a Proustian, after all, and I’m just now reminded of the moment in Remembrance of Things Past when Marcel wonders at that marvelous new invention, the telephone. His beloved grandmother’s disembodied voice at the end of the phone gives him a clue about what it might be like to connect with her once she makes her final departure. No way to call Gene now (and, on the real side, I never felt he liked hanging on the telephone), but maybe we can keep talking to him in our heads even though he’s no longer here striving with us. B.D.
The Good Fight
By Leslie Epstein
I came to Boston University in the semester that began in September, 1978. By October or maybe November, Eugene, the new English Department Chari, and I found ourselves in the Arlington Theater for a showing of Animal House. I don’t quite know how we got there. We took to each other, I guess. He’d regularly ask me, Ed Koch style, “How am I doing?” And I’d give the old thumbs us, even though, I, the freshly minted director of the Creative Writing Program, didn’t know how I was doing myself. But there we were, half way through the film, when an actress leaned over and a boob (pace, MeToo, pace) fell out. Before I could elbow him, he elbowed me. Hmmm, I thought, this BU thing is going to work out…
It didn’t really work out for Gene, however. John Silber’s university challenged his conscience and so did a good swath of those in his department, even though he did everything in his power to defend them and their colleagues. Once, in a parking lot outside of 236 Bay State Road, the two of them ran into each other. Silber, as was his wont, began to shout and so did Gene, the two of them growing more heated, each giving as good as he got, until suddenly John cried, “Oh, my God!” and looked down at his breast pocket, where the heat of his passion had caused his fountain pen to burst. Covered with black or blue ink, he trotted off to his office down the road. Victory for the home team.
I mention these two anecdotes in tandem because they reveal two sides of Gene: the playful and the moral. When people think of him they think of the scrupulous gaze he would cast about him, as that great mind measured and weighed and then determined what he would write and what he would say. But the humor, the child in him, the delight in the running gag (some of them between us, going on forty years) were as ingrained in him as—what to call it? Not rectitude, not righteousness, far from it, something more active, a constant struggle to figure out how to live one’s life. And the liveliness, the comedy of things was part of that weighing; it was the part that made him, in judging others, laugh at himself. Not long ago he told me, “You know, I could shake the hand of an old Communist but not that of an old Fascist.” You know where that fine distinction came from—and it didn’t come easily but from his appreciation of the need to balance, to compromise (he was proudly a trimmer and urged others to be as well) and to struggle to a livable answer.
Gene was a noble human being. He spent the last two years dealing with his afflictions with the same reasonableness and dignity that his great mind applied to the questions that vexed him and vex us still. He knew what the physical, personal answer would ultimately be, and he accepted it. And to the end he was seeking the answers to the more political and public questions that he knew would confront us always. He was a fighter. I have lost the needle of my moral compass and without him I fear the prospect of having to find my way.
World of Our Fathers’ Sons
By Bert Silverman
We shared a childhood experience of Yiddishkeit. We grew up, in different parts of New York, in Yiddish-speaking families, each determined to provide their children with a set of humane principles. We met as teenagers in the Yiddishe Shulehs where, together, we absorbed not only the language, but the ideals and ethics of a displaced immigrant community with broadly socialist, sometimes communist, leanings. Shuleh introduced us to the larger social and political visions of the good connected to a particular secular Jewish tradition.
Yiddishkeit was a way of life that connected us. It captured a sense of obligation, a deep caring for the dispossessed, an effort to improve the conditions of life for all. It provided a moral foundation–we called it menschlichkeit—to make the world a better place. Irving Howe described this as “a readiness to live for ideals beyond the clamor of self…to forge a community of moral order even while remaining subject to a society of social disorder.” In our later years, Yiddishkeit became a code word that enabled us to recognize ourselves in others. It offered a path through the loneliness endemic in the modern world. To paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, we shared a common past, common feelings and language. We engaged in intimate communication.
When Gene broke away from the politics of our youth, he carried with him the values in which he had been raised. Disillusioned by Stalinism and the infighting of the forties and fifties, he grounded himself in a “skeptical disposition” that became the hallmark of his work. He became a trimmer—trying always to adjust his political stance to changing historical and political circumstance. Moving across and beyond disciplinary lines, Gene sought to understand the tension between tradition and change. Fearlessly, sometimes stubbornly, he provoked and engaged those who disagreed with him. This got him into trouble, but it also provided him with enormous pleasure.
Weekly, sometimes daily, we shared our most intimate feelings. We disagreed about political choices and strategies more often than we agreed. It did not matter. Our dialogue built on a shared sense of the need for communication, we pursued a common goal. Gene, more than anyone I know, had absorbed the code of menschlichkeit, He understood: “that human existence is a deeply serious matter which all of us are finally accountable.” With whom shall I now talk?
Common Core & Contrarieties
By Alvin Kibel
Gene was my closest friend, intellectually. Although we managed to disagree about almost everything, we always started from some common ground about what made an intellectual life worth pursuing. Our friendship went back sixty-four years, to the outset of my first year as a graduate student in English at Columbia University. Gene was sitting at a window-table of a coffee-shop on Broadway (the shop featured in the Seinfeld show), and as we sauntered by my companion offered to introduce me to him as someone worth knowing, because he had “actually published an article in a professional journal” (emphasis his). Gene explained how the trick had been done. He had submitted one of his grad-student essays to several journals and had been rejected by all, but one editor had been kind enough to explain his misgivings; the essay, he said, was weakly introduced and confusing in its conclusions. Gene simply swapped the first and last paragraphs and resubmitted; the essay was published in the next issue.
This was the beginning of a near-prodigious output of books on various literary or near-literary topics, each a set of random essays that he worked into a unified exposition. Writing was not a labor for him but a kind of therapy, which kept him going on a daily basis and to which he had recourse in times of unhappiness or struggle. His field of expertise was of a kind easy to recognize but not easy to expound; it might be characterized as “literary study as the production of knowledge about culture”—an extravagant claim, when you think about it, which puts literary study right up there with anthropology, sociology, political science, and psychology, as a key to understanding the human condition. It was this sort of claim that led Gene to present himself as others had done, not only as an academic scholar but also as a kind of public intellectual, concerned with the relevance of ideas and their history to political life.
His parents, Russian immigrants, were modest fellow-travelers convinced that talk about Stalin’s purges relayed hoaxes got up by a capitalist press and who chose Yiddish rather than Russian as their second household language. Versed in the language of diaspora, Gene was dismayed when the newly-formed state of Israel chose Hebrew, with its archaic lexicon, as the national language for what he considered to be ideological reasons, consigning to oblivion the sense that Yiddish was a viable language with a distinguished tradition of literature and not just a pidgin of ungrammatical Germanic locutions. The inevitable disillusion with Stalinism was, of course, a greater shock and left Gene markedly cautious about any large-scale transformation of existing institutions by political means. He regularly invoked the spirit of Edmund Burke and Burke’s turn from liberal to conservative in his book on the French Revolution, to justify his position. Gene would not identify himself as a political conservative, of course. As with his Judaism—he thought of himself as without any trace of connection to its Scriptures or religious practices but nonetheless Jewish to the core—so he thought of his political identity as free-lance, non-programmatic, and he tried to rescue the word “trimmer” from its use as a term of derogation to describe it.
Another influence was the undergraduate curriculum at Columbia University, which required of every student a year-long study of the so-called Great Books—part of the then-accepted canon of literary and philosophical texts representing “the best that has been thought and said”—and a parallel year-long study of the history of European political thought and the political and social realities that went with it. During the years that Gene established himself as a writer, both the canon and the history came increasingly under attack as ideological fabrications and Gene devoted much of his work defending them.
Gene’s life and mine have been inextricably connected during the years since I met him. We knew each other’s parents, had offspring who were each other’s childhood friends, spent family vacations together, and managed twice to teach at the same schools in the same department. Unhappily, during the last two years of his life a stroke reduced Gene to infirmity and continual pain. Mostly overcome by exhaustion, he nevertheless continued to read seriously and even to write and publish, poking with one finger at a computer keyboard. His intellectual spirit never wavered.
I still wake up to the thought that I haven’t spoken to him recently and owe him a telephone call.
Stung
By Stephen Whitfield
I knew of Gene Goodheart before I knew him, having admired his incisive criticism years before he became a cherished friend. Born a generation after the first cohort of New York intellectuals, Gene survived as one of their very last representatives—as a corresponding editor and frequent contributor to Partisan Review, and as a prolific commentator on American culture in general and on modern fiction in particular. A student of Lionel Trilling, a close friend of Saul Bellow, an adornment of university faculties from Chicago to MIT to Brandeis, Gene moved from a first book—a monograph on D. H. Lawrence — to wide-ranging essays on nineteenth and twentieth century novels, and then ascended to books of acute observations on academic fashions and national politics. His legacy includes a dozen volumes that reflected wide reading and thoughtful analyses. A vigorous though civil polemicist, Gene was most engaged when he was most critical. Friction proved congenial. In fact, he exhibited a special aptitude for locating the limits of other authors, for identifying the delusions that marred the cultural conversation, and perhaps above all for warning against the dangers of excess—in theories that are too ambitious, and in generalizations that ignore common-sense explanations. When Gene came to write almost exclusively about politics, beginning about fifteen years ago, he scorned the purism of those to his left, though he remained a liberal Democrat. I became a beneficiary of his capacity for friendship. He took its demands seriously but unpretentiously. His loyalty, whether to boyhood pals or to latecomers like myself, was abiding, which is why the remorseless unfairness of life finds such ready proof in Gene’s final years. They were grim. Whether visiting at his home or phoning, I usually managed to stick to topics that had animated his life—books and ideas. He welcomed such distractions from his pain and immobility; and despite his suffering, Gene’s mind and memory were fully intact, virtually till the end. I take solace in recalling that he did not abandon his knack for piquant perceptions into human folly, nor did he bank his anger at the injustices that representative government inflicts or allows. Although I was braced for the news of his death, its sting is palpable.
d
Father, After the Blizzard
…………(For Eugene Goodheart, 1931-2020)
Every weekend, you came for us,
leaning on your horn,
as if that sound could pry us from
our mother’s house,
into your tan sedan. Every weekend,
you rolled up to our door, waited
not patient, but persistent until we emerged
hair uncombed, laces trailing
and with what time there was
you fed us egg rolls, Bond movies.
Every weekend, you brought
wrought sentences and interrogations—
“20 questions” you called it,
a grilling that could never fill in
for the in-between of rushed mornings,
and school-day afternoons. Every weekend,
you fetched us, two borrowed parcels,
until one February a storm
unlike any other lashed our city,
stranded cars, caved in roofs,
shuttered schools. I knew
only that a glitter box of white dazzle
had been dumped on my street,
that the pine trees dripped with it,
and for once, you did not come.
I lay down in the powder
and made angels with my arms.
***
Ten days after the blizzard, you—
a man not known for feats of endurance—
set out
trekking down Centre Street
the drifts towering on either side of you
rounding Newton Corner
single-minded in your quest.
I imagine you arriving in the blinding
white of noon, squinting, sweaty,
your socks damp, the cuffs of your pants frozen.
Did you enter the house that was ours and not yours,
your fatigue draining you of impatience?
Did we run into your arms?
The long shadow of the afternoon
must have followed your solitary march home.
***
Forty some years later,
we are again hunkered in separate homes.
Again the distance.
Again a city’s glittering silence.
This time the miles cannot be breached.
In this year of the plague,
as you nurse a hurt lodged deep in your chest
that no doctor can heal,
I wish I could don my galoshes and set out
to find you,
or better yet, that I could see you once again,
dusted with snow,
and striding toward me.
—Jessica Goodheart
x
Nomen Est Omen
By Benj DeMott
Eugene Goodheart typed his last few First of the Month pieces in all caps with one finger. Looking back on his First archive, I noticed his first piece here seemed to presage his own post-stroke fortitude since it began with his evocation of Tony Judt’s courageous battle with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Gene imaged Judt “strapped to a chair, speaking through an enabling device with astonishing force and clarity on a wide range of subjects. I can’t imagine anyone, whether critic or admirer, unmoved by the scene.” Gene’s last painful years weren’t as constrained as Judt’s but this editor felt graced to be in Gene’s corner as he fought to keep writing.
First thought, best thought wasn’t Gene’s credo. He didn’t resist the idea of revising his prose, but he trusted himself. He knew real writers play solitaire. “You are your own audience,” he once mused. And he didn’t cheat for cheers. He wouldn’t lie on you or himself to win an argument. That’s why his judgments seemed close to the last word. Even when you disagreed with Gene, you knew you were thinking against a writer who was trying to give it to you straight. And unlike, say, Tony Judt (per Gene’s fair critique) he never, ever sacrificed moral clarity to make a forceful gesture on the page. His refusal to go over the top enhanced the authority of his voice.
Gene didn’t rage on when he wrote, but he wasn’t king of cool in daily life. One of his most winning pieces was his funny (if rueful) essay on his own hot temper, “The Fiery Lieutenant,” where he compared himself to an absurd character in Crime and Punishment—an officer permanently on the verge of blowing up at real or imagined slights. Gene copped to the fact he was often at the mercy of his own temper, which led him into numerous battles “on the telephone with indifferent receptionists, inattentive clerks, uncomprehending customer relations specialists, my voice steadily rising in indignation at their stupidity and callousness.” He confessed his wife Joan, “whose self-possession I admire but cannot emulate,” found his temper the least tolerable attribute of his personality. Yet he didn’t rush to her side of the argument. Gene knew “human beings are born…screaming.” He treated the emotion of indignation with dignity: “without it we would be no more than sheep. Aristotle defined man as a rational animal; a good case could be made for him as an indignant one. Without indignation and the rebellion it breeds, you’re not human.” (See Truffaut’s case study, The Wild Child, which links the humanization of a feral child with nurture of a capacity for just rage.) Gene didn’t advise readers to give up (what another writer once called) “the saving right to reprove.” And anyone who has read his First pieces on Trump (or Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign) knows he was down by law with that right. “The Fiery Lieutenant,” though, ended up implying anger is more of an indulgence than a useful energy.
On the way toward a conclusive statement about his own wish to avoid “disfigurements of indignation,” Gene recalled his face-offs with a petty, tyrannical college president—face-offs that had him worrying his own fury had turned him into his enemy’s secret sharer. Not that he equated himself with his foe who was a genuine human horror as Gene sussed during their first face-to-face meeting: “He listened to what I said like a predator ready to pounce upon my every utterance…When his wide thin lips smiled, apparently with pleasure at what was being said, the smile was indistinguishable from a sneer.” Gene’s antagonist was a power-monger who was always bashing his subordinates. Under the president’s sway, cowed faculty acted like cult members. He took a wide stance on a small stage, yet he had “unrealized dreams of action on a larger stage” and years later tried to get into politics.
Gene didn’t reveal the name of his enemy. It wasn’t really on point for his purposes since “The Fiery Lieutenant” was an essay in self-criticism not a piece of payback or investigative journalism. But that detail about the political aspirations of the beast in his Ivory Tower indicated the mad president was the late John Silber, longtime head of Boston University (who once ran for Governor of Massachusetts). Gene published “The Fiery Lieutenant” in 1997 but when I re-read his riffs on Silber’s caprices—“If you want or love power for its own sake, you flaunt its arbitrariness”—I flash on Trump.
Gene took on the Don directly in his last essays and he didn’t exempt Trump’s base from his writ:
They, after all, are responsible for imposing his rule on us…The reasons for not applying the same judgment to his supporters as to Trump are strategic and pragmatic. The political opposition wants to be able to change minds, knowing that this will occur only if it can be shown that the Trump supporters’ own interests will be negatively affected by his actions. The press, from a democratic reflex, needs to show respect for those who elected him. But this doesn’t excuse the inexcusable. Can 60 million be profoundly and dangerously wrong in their political behavior? The answer is Yes. See the French film, “The Sorrow and the Pity” for an accurate representation of the widespread support of the Vichy regime during World War II. I’m not saying that Trump is a fascist. He is too ignorant, incoherent and unprincipled to subscribe to any ideology. He is not outside the mainstream, a plausible place to be in a democracy; he is beyond the pale.
Gene’s turn toward political commentary, after a career devoted chiefly to literary and cultural criticism, was sparked by Obama’s presidency and Republican subversion. His books on the Obama era, Holding the Center: In Defense of Political Trimming and State of Our Disunion: The Obama Years, are short but they’re not thin. Down the line, readers will need other texts (such as Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power) to comprehend Obama’s complex relations with his African American base. OTOH, there’s something bracing (as well as illuminating) about Gene’s refusal to reduce Obama’s legacy to identity politics—a refusal that ends up amping up Obama’s own exemplary resistance to this country’s twisted history of racecraft.
Gene placed Obama in the tradition of political trimmers:
The trimmer tries to find common ground between extremes not for the sake of compromise but because reason does not have a single location on the political spectrum. The great modern philosophical avatars of trimming are Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stewart Mill, Mathew Arnold and Walter Bagehot, and in our own time Isaiah Berlin and Lionel Trilling…The historian Jacques Barzun speaks of Bagehot’s “double vision,” which perfectly expresses the visual character of trimming. “In any conflict of persons or ideas he was always able to see that neither side was perverse or stupid, but had reasons for militancy; and he entered not only into these reasons, but also the feelings attached. This is a rare gift, especially when it does not lead to shilly-shallying in the double-viewer’s own course of action. Bagehot could always state the reasons for his choice with the utmost clarity.” In politics, the principled trimmers are, surprisingly, Lincoln, less surprisingly FDR, and in our present moment, Barack Obama.
Gene realized there are times when political trimmers are out of time. (His book ends with a brief appendix on the struggle over how to respond to the Nazi threat between Churchill and an English trimmer, Lord Halifax, whose temporizing instincts “did not serve him or his country well.”) Gene’s own double-vision would’ve been enhanced if he’d gone beyond official democratic processes and taken up the role played by trimmers in people’s movements. I wished he’d included, say, Fredrick Douglass or Martin Luther King or Bayard Rustin (not to mention Shirley and Charles Sherrod!) in his pantheon. And I doubt Isaiah Berlin belongs, given that Berlin avoided contentious current affairs and engaged in a foul down low campaign against a sharp critic who gave one of his books a bad review. What really counts, though, is that Gene caught Obama’s liberal-minded essence in the stormy moment, defining the president as the canny navigator of America’s leaky ship of state. Gene saw through mutineers on the Right and the Left’s plaints that Obama was a fool or to-the-Vineyard-born tool.
Gene’s reading of Obama’s radical centrism felt at once new and homey to me since my own dad had once made a case for trimming. (Benjamin DeMott tried back in the 60s to teach readers “to use their imaginations more,” though he knew this idea lacked charm for hard leftists who were done with what they regarded as siren songs of compromise solutions. My pop’s case for constructive imagination, like Gene’s, wasn’t informed by an impulse to quash radical energies:
…the right use of the constructive imagination increases the effectiveness of those energies, enables people to anticipate moves and countermoves, prevents them from becoming frozen into postures of intransigence or martyrdom which, though possessing a “terrible beauty,” have as their main consequence the stiffening of resistance and the slowing of change.)
I wish to hell my dad had been around to commune with Gene during Obamatime. I’m sure he’d’ve hailed Gene’s spin on trimmers. I’ll allow there were times I was on the phone with Gene when it occurred to me he really should’ve been talking with my dad, though I don’t want to overstate how much they might’ve shared. While they belonged to the same generation and came down on the same side of many political and cultural divides, Gene’s roots were distant from my WASPy pop’s.
Gene grew up in the secular, Jewish leftist nexus that Bert Silverman evokes beautifully in his tribute. In an odd conjuncture Gene’s secular voice of conscience went silent at a moment when another Jewish cultural avatar, whose voice often takes on religious tones, concentrated public attention by releasing a protest song about JFK’s assassination. When I tried to take in the apocalyptic side of Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” last month, Gene’s skepticism of certain doomy tropes seemed on point:
apocalypse may be the dominant trope of our time: its endless replay has inured us to the real suffering it may entail. We repeatedly witness the assassination of Kennedy, the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, the disintegration of the Challenger space shuttle in the sky. Repetition wears away the pain. It also perfects the image of our experiencing it. By isolating the event and repeating it, its content, its horror evaporates. What we have before us is its form and the rhythm. The event becomes aesthetic and the effect upon us an anesthetic. The phenomenon is sometimes called kitsch.
Thankfully, though, there’s more to “Murder Most Foul” than whiffs of, ah, karmageddon. And, as it happens, Gene’s back pages also speak to what’s best in Dylan’s pop opus. This song rises above nada Americana due to the precision of Dylan’s ear. (Start with all the melodious l’s in “play ‘Stella by Starlight’ for Lady Macbeth” or the Larkinesque ender: “play ‘Love Me or Leave Me’ by the great Bud Powell.”) Dylan’s lines on what abides testify to his feeling for the best that’s been heard and played in America, which, in turn, brings us to Gene who once lamented college teachers’ failure to cultivate students’ authentic responses to art. Gene tried to make his own case for nurturing an individuated sense of taste by commending Cardinal Newman’s nod to “the illative sense”—that inward faculty for “concluding and judging.” Gene realized profs on both sides of academic culture wars have tended to be anti-illative. Neither scholars of everyday life nor conservatives locked on high art have cared to model how cultural becomes personal. Most students don’t have a clue if their teachers have private canons of the sort that Dylan has been showing out in public lately. And Gene knew each student needs to own his/her taste. Minus soul-deep links, classics (or fake books) aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.
Gene replayed passages in great works that had broken him down, yet he didn’t teach students to bow and scrape in the presence of genius. He wasn’t overawed by his literary masters. Not that Gene assumed “relevance” was all—he remained a bookman rather than a pop lifer—but he grasped the point of art was to get you going not lock you into stock takes or someone else’s standards. Gene lived to tell the tale on one of the Academy’s wannabe hierophants:
A student at Columbia College age nineteen or twenty, I was interviewed for admittance to an advanced colloquium in literature at Columbia. One of the interviewers, Quentin Anderson, a Jamesian friend and disciple of Trilling, asked me to name a book I particularly admired. I said An American Tragedy. Dreiser’s novel was iconic in the Marxist environment in which I had grown up. It also had a reputation for bad prose among admirers of James. Anderson invited me into his office afterwards, informed me that I was admitted to the colloquium and then told me the crushing news: I was an intelligent and serious student, but would never experience the higher triumphs of the imagination (for example, James’s novels), if I remained an admirer of Dreiser.
James’ fiction wasn’t lost on Gene—Isabel Archer’s devastation in Portrait of Lady upon learning her marriage was a prison moved him to tears—but he didn’t come to disdain Dreiser. Decades after he was offered that chump’s choice, he was struck by a conversation recounted by another critic in which Saul Bellow praised Dreiser’s work. Gene regretted never asking Bellow what he meant when he talked up “the right places where Dreiser was strong.”
Gene had his chances since Bellow became his friend when they taught together at Bard College in the early 60s. Gene didn’t trade on his intimacy with the famous writer nor did he suck up to him. To Gene, Bellow was a fellow worker with words not a bossman of letters. No doubt, Gene’s better-than-nobody, nobody-better-attitude appealed to his echt American friend. They also shared a taste for jokes like the one Gene told (in the introduction to his last essay collection, Mostly Grave Thoughts) about an…
age-defying eighty-five year old—the age varies depending on the auditor—who enters an old age home and puts a sigm on the door of his new room: STUD. Shortly afterwards, a little old lady knocks on the door and is let in by the old geezer, who gives her the options: twenty-five dollars on the linoleum, fifty dollars on the sofa, and one hundred dollars on the bed. The little old lady extricates a hundred dollar bill from her purse. The old man understands, “On the bed?” “No,” the old lady say, “four times on the linoleum.”
Exit laughing? Not so fast. Bellow wasn’t clowning when he opened his eyes on his death bed and, seeing Gene, asked: “Was I a man or was I a jerk?” By “man,” according to Bellow’s biographer, Bellow meant mensch—a good human being. Nobody lucky enough to know Gene would’ve been surprised Bellow trusted his mensch of a friend to render that last judgment. You didn’t have to be a novelist to realize Gene Goodheart’s character was written in his name.
c
Limning Gene
My sweet friend, Gene Goodheart
Was well
Named to start,
His Shortness of breath
Hid the depth of his heart.
A Dysfunctional arm, yes, but also great charm
His growing
Fatigue obscured his real calm.
Ignoring his Pain
As a strain on the brain.
A spirit played hookie,
A rookie turned bookie
Oh, how much we will miss him,
Not here to kiss him.
—Robert Brustein
Gene’s colleague, John Burt, sent in this tribute a couple days after the others were posted…
Unrepressive Tolerance
By John Burt
Gene Goodheart and I started work at Brandeis at the same time in 1983; indeed, the announcement that he had accepted Brandeis’s offer to be the Edytha Macy Gross professor of Humanities came while I was having lunch with the department during my own campus visit searching for an assistant professor position. We had offices very near each other, and Gene became immediately my friend and mentor, since we were both a little puzzled by the institution we had just become part of, and since we shared the same mainstream liberal politics and the same wariness of high skepticism in literary theory.
Gene had come to Brandeis from Boston University on condition that he never would have to chair the Department of English. He had been chair at Boston University, where he had had his share of high-voltage clashes with John Silber, BU’s controversial president from the 1970s to the 1990s. As punishment for his sins Gene served repeatedly as chair at Brandeis, and along with Susan Staves and Timo Gilmore he kept the Department and its graduate program afloat during the turbulent years of the Handler and Reinharz presidencies, and shepherded the next generation to tenure. As chair he fostered an intellectually tolerant department in which different kinds of criticism could flourish without seeking to drive each other from the field. During the years of the culture wars, when different methodical traditions strove for dominance and treated other approaches as not only intellectual backward but morally reprobate, a time in which each school strove for conquest without and conformity within, Gene made it possible for people of different views to understand the insights and possibilities of different approaches, and, what is more valuable, and encouraged the faculty to develop their ideas in idiosyncratic and unpredictable ways. Brandeis offered a kind of intellectual freedom which allowed its faculty to follow their interests wherever they led, with no particular fastidiousness about what is or is not in one’s field and what is or is not an orthodox or even respectable way of approaching it. This nurturing and tolerant intellectual culture gave Brandeis’s graduate students the reputation of being free from programmatic thinking, of never sounding like each other or like their advisors.
During the eighties and nineties Gene convened an ongoing Faculty Humanities Seminar, in which faculty would read theoretical works together and invite speakers to visit. Usually there was an overarching theme to a year’s meetings. One year I remember we devoted to reconsidering the thought of the Frankfurt School. We spent the bicentennial of the French Revolution tanking about the different political and cultural legacies of that period.
As a literary scholar, he was a deep student of Lawrence, of Conrad, of Hardy and of Roth. He also was well noted as a skeptical but not completely dismissive critic of some broader trends in literary scholarship, criticizing the romanticism of the counterculture in his 1972 Culture and Radical Conscience, the pyrrhonism of high theory in his 1984 The Skeptic Disposition in Contemporary Criticism, and, in his 1991 Desire and its Discontents, chiding contemporary criticism’s unambivalent embrace of transgressive forms of desire that seem to liberate and annihilate at the same time. In his 1997 The Reign of Ideology he sought, while rejecting the neo-conservative critique of political interpretations of literature, to argue that the focus on the concept of ideology, shared by Foucauldians, neo-Marxists and New Historicists, falsified the complexity of actual political thinking and blinded critics to everything except which side the work might be taken to embrace in the ongoing culture war. (This he did while co-teaching a course about literature and politics with his political opposite number Timo Gilmore, a course which itself embodied that open-mindedness he – and Timo — valued so deeply.) As a critic and as a public intellectual Goodheart testified to the ongoing relevance of the New York intellectuals, who embraced art and politics as expressions of a contested social vision appropriate to a democratic society under threat. In his literary criticism and political writing, Gene brought to bear on the contemporary world the habits of mind of writers like Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, not to mention his Brandeis predecessors Irving Howe and Philip Rahv.
After his retirement, Gene had a second career as an essayist. His essays were both public and personal in the way Montaigne’s essays were, and had the wide-ranging and undogmatic curiosity Montaigne sought after. In essays about what it was to be a secular Jew at midcentury (and now), he reflected about how his Stalinist parents had brought him as a youth to see Itzik Feffer, who was touring the US during World War II to raise money for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. With fanfare, he recited one of Feffer’s poems for the visiting poet, who was later murdered by Stalin during the anti-Jewish purges in the last years of his regime. In another essay, he wrote how, as a student in Paris in the early 1950’s his Communist girlfriend shocked him by casually remarking that she regretted that Hitler had not killed many more Jews than he did. He wrote also about why “trimming” is not always a political vice but sometimes a virtue, since it at least pays attention to the crosscurrents and nuances of this-worldly politics, and understands that politics can never be much more than the art of the possible. And he wrote movingly and authentically about the prospect of his own death.
Gene was a mensch. But he was also a public man, a citizen. When Rome ran out of citizens like Gene it became an empire.