I retired in 2004, partly because poor hearing had turned
me into a flabby liberal in class, giving smiling approval to
student comments I might once have dismissed with glorious
intolerance.
Since retirement I’ve published essays
on literary and political subjects in Claremont Review of
Books, Standpoint (U.K.), Society, Midstream, New England
Review, and Modern Judaism. In 2006 I published, with
Paul Bogdanor, The Jewish Divide over Israel: Accusers and
Defenders.
The year 2009 was a tumultuous mixture of good and bad. I published (with Richard Dunn and Paul Jaussen) a very long book, Robert B. Heilman: His Life in Letters (U Washington P) about the premier figure in the history of our department, and a very short book, Lionel Trilling and Irving Howe: A Literary Friendship. Routledge reissued my 1965 book Matthew Arnold and John Stuart Mill, and Transaction published a new edition of my 1988 book The Jewish Wars: Reflections By One of the Belligerents. On the negative side, I had several cancer surgeries in 2009-10.
At the risk of seeming to toot my own horn, I offer a
brief description of the book most likely to interest readers
of English Matters.
Heilman’s Life in Letters portrays the
man, the writer, the department chairman, the consummate
professional, through his correspondence from 1941, when he
was a thirty-five-year-old member of LSU’s English department,
through 2001, shortly before his death. In addition to
selecting letters that convey Heilman’s voice, we attempted
to provide some sense of changes that have taken place in
American letters and universities during that sixty-year period.
Heilman corresponded with many of the leading literary
figures in America, and their voices are also represented abundantly.
They include Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks,
Malcolm Cowley, Allen Tate, Theodore Roethke, Joseph
Epstein, Bernard Malamud, Charles Johnson. The letters
demonstrate that Samuel Johnson’s observation
that “We shall receive no letters in the
grave” was not a sigh of relief but an anticipatory
lament over the loss of a great pleasure.
