Women Scientists and the Men Who Screwed Them

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Beginning in 1983 and for another eleven years, a Canadian psychologist, based on Montreal, administered his Draw-a-Scientist Test to over 4000 children between the ages of five to eleven.

Not a single boy drew a woman, and very few girls did either.  Probably the results would be similar in the United States. When we think of scientists, we almost always think of a man.

This is hardly surprising, of course, given how children and teenagers learn about scientists in their schools. The list usually begins with Galileo, moves on to Newton, and then continues with such famous scientists as Faraday, Lavoisier, who unfortunately lost his head – literally – during the French Revolution, and then the roster of brilliant scientists rolls on: Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, Max Planck, Einstein of course, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and then to our own time, such icons as Steven Hawking and Richard Feynman.

It's difficult to think of a woman scientist who might belong to this passel of stellar scientists.  Oh, sure, there’s Madame Curie, I suppose, but it’s hard to think of any woman who can be listed in the same company of the famous men I have listed.

But there’s reason to think this might change in the years ahead. At least in the United States, more girls now graduate college than boys and tend to get better grades, too. And more germane is the fact that now fully a quarter of people involved in STEM work are women. We can expect that number to increase in the years to come.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. Most universities in the U.S. didn’t even accept women until the 20th century. One college of Cambridge University didn’t even allow women to matriculate until 1986, which prompted its male students to hold a funeral possession, complete with a coffin, to mark their displeasure. Male privilege! It’s sickening, isn’t it?   

Things were even worse for girls growing up in Europe well into the last century.  If you were a gifted, even a brilliant young woman, you found barriers and discrimination sufficient to “keep women in their place.”

But, as we will see, some plucky women, even in the 18th century, would not be denied. However, even then, they often had to contend with prejudice against them and be content with low wages or none at all. And, worse, some of these brilliant women, who did original work leading to Nobel Prizes, never got the credit or recognition for their critical contributions.  The prizes always were awarded to men.

In this blog, I want to tell you about some of these women, if only to honor them, however belatedly, for their invaluable contributions to science, recognition that was cruelly denied to them during their lifetimes – or only at the end of their lives, in some cases, or when it was too late to matter.

Lise Meitner

Let’s begin with the case of Lise Meitner.

Born in 1878 into a well-to-do Jewish Viennese family in a circle of lawyers, writers and intellectuals, Meitner’s remarkable intelligence was quickly recognized and encouraged by her family. At a time when most European universities were barred to women, she was one of only four girls permitted to study at the University of Vienna.  Despite her uncertainties and shyness, she was determined to become a physicist and eventually succeeded in obtaining her doctorate.

She was so gifted that in 1907, she was invited to Berlin to study under the great Max Planck, where she also met and was befriended by the chemist, Otto Hahn, who was to become a key person in her life.  They began to collaborate in the nearly emerging field of radioactivity. But even then, Meitner, who was, as Hahn soon recognized, much brighter than he, and a much better theoretician, was relegated to work in the basement for a year before being allowed into a lab. It wasn’t long, however, before Meitner’s gifts were recognized by the leaders in the field.  She could then be found sitting with Planck and Einstein in the front row at their theoretical seminars.

In this blog, I will not be able to delve into the work she and Hahn did together, which became of utmost importance in the history of physics, since I want to concentrate on their personal relationship.  But in the end, it led to Meitner’s discovery of how to split the uranium atom, which people had thought to be impossible, and which led eventually to the creation of the atomic bomb within about a half dozen years after Meitner’s discovery of what came to called nuclear fission.  Hahn had nothing to do with it, and confessed he didn’t really understand how Meitner had managed to do it.

Although they never dated, as such, Meitner was clearly attracted to Hahn, who was handsome and charming. Being shy, she kept her feelings to herself, but she never dated anyone after Hahn got married.  Their collaboration continued over many years, with interruptions during the First World War, and, later, as we will see, during the Second.  Hahn always depended on her to further his own work.

However, even though Meitner had converted to Protestantism in 1908, by the time the Nazis came into power, she was forced to leave Berlin since she was still regarded as Jewish. However, since she was Austrian by birth, she could go there to continue her work and collaboration with Hahn, even if they could not be together.

But not for long. There was the Anschluss in 1938 when the Nazis took over Australia.  But even before that, there was nasty talk by other scientists about “the Jewess endangering the institute.” When Meitner became aware of this, she asked Hahn to intervene on her behalf.  He did.

He told them to get rid of her.

Meitner was shocked at his betrayal. In her diary she wrote, “Hahn says I should not come to the institute anymore.  He has, in essence, thrown me out.” She was forced to flee to Sweden for safety to start a new life in Stockholm at the age of sixty.

It gets worse.

Fast-forward to 1944 when Hahn, not Meitner, was awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery – Meitner’s, of course – of nuclear fission.  Though a colleague of Meitner’s who also worked with her and Hahn later testified that “she was the intellectual leader of our team,” Hahn claimed full credit for “his” discovery.  According to David Bodanis, who has written extensively about Meitner and Hahn, he “as ever, seemed to have been the slowest to grasp what [Meitner had discovered] and admitted he didn’t have a clue.” And again:  “Hahn, as ever, seemed the slowest….After the outlines of fission had been worked out, he still had troubles. ‘Bohr will think I’m a cretin,’ Hahn wrote to Meitner in July, 1939….I don’t understand it.”

Here comes the worse part. After Hahn had claimed the Nobel Prize for himself. Bodanis comments:

What’s more serious – or at least seems inexplicable only by Hahn’s realizing he’d done something very wrong – was the way Hahn tried to rewrite the history of his relationship with Meitner after the war: treating her as if she had been some sort of junior assistant [in an interview just before receiving his Nobel Prize, and] later, giving mocking, almost sighing references to how foolishly misguided her attempted advice had been.

Some men are just shits, but Hahn seems to have been a real bastard.

There is, however, a happy, if belated, coda to this sad story of intellectual usurpation.

According to another author who has also written about the Meitner affair:

When the records of the Nobel Prize committee were unsealed in the 1990s, historians…excavated the true extent to which Meitner had been overlooked in the Nobel judgment.  In 1997 she was rewarded for her contributions to science with her own element: meitnerium.  

Too late for Meitner, though, since she had died in 1968 at the age of ninety.

Cecilia Payne

For a curious child, gazing at the stars, it is natural to wonder what makes them shine so brightly.  Such a child was Cecilia Payne, growing up with England. One night, when she was five years old, she was out with her mother when she saw a shooting star. She never forgot that moment.  It was a seed experience and little Cecilia always remembered being entranced by that luminous star as it tumbled down from the heavens.

That night set her on the path to become one of the pre-eminent astronomers of the 20th century, but it was not always easy for her to attain that status.  In her family, it was her brother who was given every chance to get into Oxford. His sisters, including Cecilia, were left to fend for themselves. But Cecilia, who had always yearned to go to Cambridge, found a way by winning a scholarship to Newnham College.

At that time, according to Cecilia, she was “a dowdy and studious” young woman.  She agonized over dances and other social events, and was drawn to books, not boys. She was mocked as “the girl who read Plato for pleasure.”

Cambridge turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. Women were segregated from men in lecture halls and sequestered in separate colleges. But she persevered and did well enough to be admitted to the Harvard College Observatory to pursue a doctorate in astronomy. And there, to her delight, she found that she was treated by her colleagues as a fellow scientist:  “We met as equals. We were scientists, we were scholars, and neither of these words has a gender.”

She was still focused on what caused stars to burn so brightly. It was a mystery.  Almost all astronomers in the nineteen twenties thought that they were composed mainly of iron since that metal had been found to be in asteroids, but, to Cecilia, that made no sense.  Iron does not combust into light.  For two years, she worked doggedly at this problem, and she finally found the answer.  Stars were mostly composed of hydrogen and, secondarily, of helium.  

Nobody believed her. Her thesis advisor, Henry Norris Russell, said to be a pompous know-it-all, scorned her findings, would not accept them, and decreed she delete them from her thesis. At first, Cecila refused and stood her ground.

David Bodanis, who has written about Cecilia Payne and her struggles to win acceptance takes up the story from here:

The old guard knew. Hydrogen would do nothing. It wasn’t there, it couldn’t be there; their careers – all their detailed calculations, and the power and patronage that stemmed from it – depended on iron being what was in the sun. 

Russell was adamant – retract or else! Against him, as Bodanis goes on to say, “there was very little recourse….Russell would never accept that he could be wrong – and he also controlled most grants and job appointments on the East Coast.”

Cecilia reached out to other astronomers who had befriended her in the past, but they all demurred when it came to opposing Russell’s dictum. No mere woman was going to convince him.  In the end, like a modern-day Galileo, she was forced to recant. Nevertheless, her published thesis was said by other authorities years later to be “the most brilliant thesis ever written in astronomy.” All 600 copies of the resulting monograph sold out.  As a result of her work, Cecilia was then listed as a youngest astronomer ever in Cattell’s American Men [sic] of Science.

Still, Russell insisted that she include this humiliating sentence in her thesis:  “The enormous abundance [of hydrogen]… is almost certainly not real.” 

This was 1925, and Russell never forgave Cecilia for her seeming impudence and initial defiance of his edict.  The following years were not easy for her after she began teaching at Harvard. The president of the university explicitly said she would not be appointed to an official position as long as he remained in office. Despite teaching a full course load, she was listed as a “technical assistant,” and was underpaid. “I was paid so little that I was ashamed to admit it to my relations in England,” she wrote.” They thought I was coining money in a land of millionaires.”

In the end, however, Cecilia was vindicated. We now know that our galaxy is 74% hydrogen, 24% helium, and just 2% of other elements. She went on to have a very distinguished career and ended up becoming chairman of the Department of Astronomy at Harvard while her former professors were forced to eat crow. She was right all along, and they, so sure of themselves, were dead wrong. But Russell, like Trump, was never willing to admit he had erred or had anything to apologize for. Years later he was heard to say that he had “always” known that the stars were full of hydrogen.  What he was full of is obvious.

Whether Cecilia Payne ever learned to dance is unknown.

Emmy Noether

After Emmy Noether died in her early fifties in 1935, Albert Einstein sent a letter to the New York Times about her in which he wrote the following:

In the judgment of the most competent living mathematicians, Fräulein Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.

Einstein was not alone in writing an encomium about Noether.  Hermann Weyl, who was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century and Noether’s colleague at the University of Göttingen, made this astonishing admission about her:

I was ashamed to occupy such a preferred position beside her whom I knew to be my superior as a mathematician in many respects. Tradition, prejudice, external considerations weighed the balance against her scientific merits and scientific greatness, by that time denied by no one.

When David Hilbert, who was the pre-eminent mathematician of his era and world-famous, and who also taught at Göttingen, invited her to join his team, he discovered that Noether had been toiling away for seven years in an unpaid position. Hilbert was outraged at this and was even more incensed when the university refused his request to promote her to a junior professorship, citing her gender. To this rebuff, Hilbert relied angrily:

I don’t see why the sex of the candidate is relevant. This is after all an academic institution, not a bath house.

The university administrators were adamant, however, and would not yield. And other professors objected, too, one of them protesting:  “What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?” During her 18-years at Göttingen, Noether was never officially paid as a professor, though Hilbert was able to cadge enough money to provide a small stipend for her to lecture on algebra.

Finally, following her death, she received this tribute from the leading mathematicians of the day:  “She was described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl and Norbert Wiener as the most important woman in the history of mathematics.”

So, who was this woman, Emmy Noether, this paragon of mathematical genius, whom the New York Times once described as “the mighty mathematician you’ve never heard of.”

Well, now you’ve heard of her. What you need to know next is where she came from and what – very briefly – she achieved, despite all the obstacles she faced in the halls of academe, to establish herself as one of truly outstanding mathematicians of her time in the eyes of her peers. And, finally, nearly a century after her death, where does Emmy Noether now rank in the pantheon of history’s legendary mathematicians?

Noether was born into a Jewish family in the Franconian town of Erlangen. Her father was the mathematician Max Noether. She originally planned to teach French and English after passing the required examinations but instead studied mathematics at the University of Erlangen, where her father lectured. After completing her doctorate in 1907 she worked at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen without pay for seven years. At the time, women were largely excluded from academic positions.

It was at this point that Noether came to the attention of David Hilbert who then brought her to the University of Gottingen.

When it comes to the matter of what Noether achieved during her subsequent career at Gottingen, I have to confess that as much as I have long been fascinated by mathematicians and regard the great ones as a superior species to us mere mortals, I myself have never had a head for mathematics. So, I can only briefly provide a cursory summary of just one of her monumental contributions to the field, which I have had pretty much had to take from a Wikipedia entry about her.

For example, she made major contributions to the theories of algebraic invariants and number fields. Her work on differential invariants in the calculus of variations now called Noether’s theorem has been called "one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics.” It is now taught on university campuses all over the world, and from what I have read, some scientists regard it as just as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Noether’s theorem would go on to revolutionize science. According to what I have read, “it is now woven into our understanding of everything from the orbit of the planets to the search for the Higgs boson.”

This is just one instance of the lasting importance of Noether’s work. For those of you math maniacs, you might want to read that extensive entry in Wikipedia about the full scope of her work, how much it has influenced scores of mathematicians, including many of her own students, as well as other aspects of her life. 

But now we must begin to bring this brief introduction to Noether’s importance to its sad close. Once the Nazis took over Germany in 1933, Noether, being Jewish, lost her job and in order not to lose her life as well, was forced to leave Germany.

She was able to get to the United States and found a teaching position at Bryn Mawr College. She also lectured at the Institute for Advanced Study, though she remarked that she felt quite unwelcome at Princeton University, at the time only reserved for men.  Even though by then she was an internationally celebrated mathematician, she still faced sexism in academic settings.

In 1935, she developed some tumors in her pelvis, which came to be infected, sending her temperature soaring and leading to her death at 53.  After her death, as I noted at the outset of this blog, tributes from all over the world, including from the highest ranks of mathematicians, poured in.

But that was then. Within a few years following her death, World War Two began, then the atomic bombs were dropped over Japan, and after the war was over, the Cold War began.  And the juggernaut of history rolled on to the present chaotic and worrisome era.  Would anyone remember Noether after all these years?

I was doubtful after I first discovered her in a little book called Forgotten Women: The Scientists. Lise Meitner and Cecilia Payne also appeared in that book, but I had already heard of them.  Noether’s story, however, was new to me. Had she really been forgotten?

I decided to check in one of my big books on mathematicians with the (sexist) but alliterative title of Men of Mathematics. Despite the title, the author, E. T. Bell, does discuss at some length other women mathematicians in its nearly 600 pages, but not Noether. She rates only a passing sentence, but the content of the sentence is significant for it states that she was “the leading woman mathematician of our own time” (however, it should be noted that this book was originally published two years after her death, though the copy I have was printed in 1957).  Don’t you think “the leading woman mathematician our own time” would rate more than a glancing reference and a footnote? Did sexism follow Noether even beyond the grave?

On the other hand, somebody – doubtless another mathematician who was deeply familiar with and knowledgeable about her life and work prepared that extensive Wikipedia entry about her. Someone at least remembered her.

Still, I can’t help wondering if she had been born Edward Noether whether her name might today be as familiar to us as Einstein’s is.

Rosalind Franklin

Despite having an entry devoted to her in the book Forgotten Women: The Scientists, Rosalind Franklin is by no means “a forgotten scientist.” Quite the opposite. Her role in the discovery of the double helix is well known and the controversy about it – and her --  has continued to rage like a swarm of angry bees in the history of this discovery for well over the past half century and has never been resolved.  Some of you reading this blog may well already be familiar with it, but, if not, let me take a few moments to give you a brief account of this tortured tale, which raises the question of whether Rosalind Franklin was cheated out of her share in the Nobel Prize and otherwise unjustly maligned by one the co-discoverers of the structure of the double helix, one James Watson.

The basic facts, however, are not in dispute.

In the race to discover the biological structure of life, there were two teams of researchers in the hunt: James Watson and Francis Crick at Cambridge and Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins at King’s College in London.

The relationship between Franklin and Wilkins was fraught from the start. The director of King’s Medical Research Center, John Randall, had informed Franklin, who was an expert in X-ray crystallography, that she would be the sole investigator, never mentioning to her that a molecular biologist and physicist, Maurice Wilkins, would also be working with her on this quest.

They did not get along, and didn’t relish having to work together. Wilkins was reserved and timid; Franklin, strong-willed and direct. But Franklin was not interested in winning any popularity contests; the only contest that interested her was the one to solve the biological structure of life, so despite their personal animosity toward each other, Franklin and Wilkins soon got down to work.

Assisted by a graduate student named Raymond Gosling, Franklin soon discovered through her crystallographic X-rays that there wasn’t just a single strand of the helix; there appeared to be two of them. But Franklin was a meticulous scientist; she wanted to be sure, so she did some additional analysis.  Still, she seemed to be close to identifying the double helix form of DNA.

The plot thickens, however, when Watson happened to visit Wilkins at King’s. Wilkins, in the course of a rant when he was bitching about his difficulties with Franklin, showed Watson a key photograph, taken by Gosling, and when Watson saw it, he went nuts, as he later recounted:

“The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my pulse began to race.” Photograph 51, as it was called, served to set Watson and Crick ahead of Franklin and Wilkins in the race to identify the structure of the double helix.  In addition, an unpublished paper by Franklin also “somehow” fell into the hands of Watson and Crick and provided further evidence of the breakthrough they needed to cement their lead. Watson later admitted how crucial all this was: “Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data.  For that matter, no one at King’s realized they were in our hands.”

Not long afterward, in April 1953, Watson and Crick announced their discovery – the now famous double helix, the basic structure of life.  Nine years later, they, together with Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize. By then, Rosalind Franklin had died of cancer at the age of 38, but she was not included among the Nobel Laureates. At the time, it was not possible to receive a Nobel posthumously, but my understanding is that is no longer the case.  In any event, Rosalind Franklin never received formal credit for the role she played in the discovery of the double helix.

There is a great deal of further information on this continuing controversy that you can find on the Internet. Here, for example, is a brief extract from Wikipedia that provides more background on the affair:

In a 1954 article, Watson and Crick acknowledged that, without Franklin's data, "the formulation of our structure would have been most unlikely, if not impossible." In The Double Helix, Watson later admitted that "Rosy, of course, did not directly give us her data. For that matter, no one at King's realized they were in our hands". In recent years, Watson has garnered controversy in the popular and scientific press for his "misogynist treatment" of Franklin and his failure to properly attribute her work on DNA. According to one critic, Watson's portrayal of Franklin in The Double Helix was negative, giving the impression that she was Wilkins' assistant and was unable to interpret her own DNA data.  Watson's accusation was indefensible since Franklin told Crick and Watson that the helix backbones had to be on the outside. 

Other comments dismissive of "Rosy" in Watson's book caught the attention of the emerging women's movement in the late 1960s. "Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place ... Unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot". And, "Certainly a bad way to go out into the foulness of a ... November night was to be told by a woman to refrain from venturing an opinion about a subject for which you were not trained."

******************* 

It wasn’t until the publication of Watson’s bestselling book, The Double Helix, in 1968, when he, begrudgingly and with unmistakable condescending misogyny (“Rosy”), would disclose to the world the pivotal role that Franklin had played in his and Crick’s great discovery. Ironically, his co-discoverer, Francis Crick, later remarked that he regarded Watson's book as a "contemptible pack of damned nonsense.”

Watson, who was a child prodigy and who is still alive at 96, has now compiled a long history of making controversial statements about race and gender, and a variety of other subjects. Some examples:

Watson repeatedly supported generic screening and genetic engineering in public lectures and interviews, arguing that stupidity is a disease and that "the really stupid" bottom 10% of people should be cured. He has also suggested that beauty could be genetically engineered, saying in 2003, "People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great." If you troll the Internet, you can find many more of his misogynistic and other noisome statements.

E. O. Wilson, the father of sociobiology, once described Watson as “the most unpleasant human being I have ever met.” One can understand why.

Coda

It goes without saying that many men have gone out of their way to help, support and encourage talented women scientists and mathematicians.  Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss, who taught at Gottingen for many years, and is considered one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, was known to have befriended gifted women who came to his attention.  Indeed, it would have been easy enough for me to write a blog about such exemplary and generous-hearted men. Not all men are stinkers like those I referred to in this blog. But here I was concerned to show the struggles that many women faced in earlier years to overcome the prejudices of men who often blocked their way and sometimes took the credit for the discoveries that these women had made.

And given the often vicious misogyny of the last election and the subsequent rise of a very worrisome new era of male machismo in the United States, I thought that a blog on this theme would be particularly timely. Women will still have to fight for recognition and against male privilege and domination, and good men everywhere must be prepared to do battle with and for them.

1974

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

A few weeks ago, I read a book entitled 1974 by Francine Prose, a writer I’ve admired ever since I read her marvelous book, The Lives of the Muses, in the early 2000s. But her most recent book was very different. It was a personal memoir of the time when, still in her twenties, she was just beginning to find some success as a novelist. And, as she relates, it was also when she was spending a lot of time in San Francisco, having promiscuous sex – those were the days when we were still under the influence of organizations like the Sexual Freedom League, years before the AIDS epidemic occurred. But the main story she tells in her memoir deals with her relationship with a man named Tony Russo whose name may not be familiar to you, though he was well known then. So let me fill you in about Tony Russo.

He had been a close friend with Dan Ellsberg, the man who had brought the Pentagon papers to the attention of the world in 1971 – documents that showed that President Lyndon Johnson had lied to the American public about the war in Vietnam in order to find a justification for prosecuting the Vietnam War. The exposure of these falsehoods created an uproar at the time, and Ellsberg was soon tried, but was not convicted.

Tony Russo, like Ellsberg, had spent time in Vietnam, had interrogated many Viet Cong (the North Vietnamese soldiers), and soon learned the truth about what was going on in Vietnam. Moreover, he became determined that the American public should know the truth. So, he hooked up with Ellsberg, and, according to what he later told Prose, it was he who convinced Ellsberg to spend many hours photocopying the thousands of pages comprising the Pentagon papers. But Russo was not so lucky as Ellsberg.  He was sentenced to prison for a time and was beaten while a prisoner before he was released.

So, when Prose met Tony Russo, he was a sort of cultural hero to people who had been opposed to the war.  Prose was a bit in awe of him, being just a novice author herself, and admitted she was a little star-struck when she met him. Tony took a shine to Prose and they started to hang out. 

But most of the time they spent together, which was extensive, they just drove around San Francisco late at night while Tony fascinated Prose with his tales of his experiences in Vietnam and with what had happened to him since. He was a crazy driver, making sudden abrupt turns, thinking he might be tailed by government operatives who meant to harm him. Prose had a lot of sangfroid in those days, apparently, so she literally went along for the ride. Eventually, of course, they did have sex, in Tony’s messy apartment, but it was awkward and not satisfying. But they still spent a lot of time together and – skipping ahead to the end of their relationship – Tony turned out to be a paranoid schizophrenic.  The last part of his life, by which time Prose had to disconnect from him, is very sad to read about.  Ellsberg was still a hero – I have personal friends who knew him well – but Tony Russo became a forgotten man.

Reading Prose’s book, however, brought back many memories for me. I had been born in San Francisco and spent the first years of my life there. And later, when growing up, I often went to San Francisco.  Although by 1974, I was teaching in Connecticut, but, as it happened, I also spent a good part of the summer of 1974 in the Bay Area. Just as 1974 was a pivotal year in the life of Francine Prose, so it was for me – and for the country, still riven by protests against the war, which would culminate with the Watergate scandal and, ultimately, with Nixon’s forced resignation in August of that year. 

Musing on all this caused me to recall many memories of that year, particularly that same summer when my own personal and professional life underwent some momentous changes.  So, stimulated by Prose’s book, I decided to recount some of those events in this blog.  This was my life before I became involved in my work on near-death experiences, but what occurred that year, I can now see, were the necessary precludes to and helped to shape my forthcoming career as an NDE researcher. 

To set the stage for what is to follow, I need to backtrack  a few years.  In 1971, I had my first LSD trip, which was life-changing.  I have always regarded it as the most important spiritual experience I’ve ever had. I had a second trip the next year and also swallowed a psilocybin mushroom in my continued explorations of what was then called "altered states of consciousness."  But a key turning point occurred in 1972 when I attended a conference on the then nascent field of transpersonal psychology, which had been co-founded by Abraham Maslow, who previously had been one of the fathers of humanistic psychology. Discovering transpersonal psychology and listening to some of the then luminaries in the field, whom I was later to be befriended by, was a revelation to me. Once I became familiar with transpersonal psychology, I could see that was the field for me.  I returned to the university incredibly excited and began to offer courses with a transpersonal slant and write conceptual articles for The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.

But the most important event in my early life as a transpersonal psychologist was when I was able to attend a month-long program in transpersonal psychology in Berkeley in the summer of 1974 that was co-sponsored by Esalen Institute and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.  It was then that I was able to have first-hand exposure to the leading people in the field, such as Stan Grof, another one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, his then wife, Joan Halifax, Jean Houston, Charlie Tart, Arthur Hastings, and many others. All of the people I mentioned eventually came to be my friends and helped me enormously in my career. It was also then that I fell in love with Jean Houston, a beautiful and brilliant woman whose IQ I figured must be about 200!

But in addition to hearing these people speak about their work, there were also a great many extra-curricular activities for us participants.  They included a peyote ritual, a float tank experience, a session which taught us how to massage (I found I was good at this) and an exercise involving Grof’s holotrophic breathwork, which can induce profound altered states of consciousness.

By the way, it was during this program that Nixon was forced to resign. We hardly noticed.  

Of course, I got to know a number of the other participants in the program, and became especially friendly with a Canadian artist named Kay McCullough who shared my admiration for Jean Houston.  After Jean’s talk, we both went up to her and said, “Would you marry us?” (We meant we wanted to marry Jean, not each other.) Jean roared. (Later on, as you will read, I had much more contact with Jean, though I was never able to convince her to marry me. She claimed that her husband would object.)

Joking aside, that personal initiation into the world of transpersonal psychology and getting to know many of the foremost people in the field was of inestimable importance in shaping my professional career and preparing me to do my work as a near-death researcher, which would begin two years later.

When I returned to the university for the fall semester, I was somehow able to wangle the funds to create a new interdepartmental course, which I believe I called “The Nature of Consciousness,” or something vague like that.  How I even managed to get permission for such a course is left only for the gods to know.  In any case, it was held in a large lecture hall and was packed with eager students to hear the roster of guest speakers I had lined up for the course.

Since his was now fifty years ago, I don’t remember most of them, but I do definitely recall that Stan Grof and Joan Halifax were among them.  I no longer remember anything from their lectures, but I do remember two events that I have never forgotten. One was a frolicsome snowball fight they had down by a frozen Mirror Lake. The other was a special workshop on holographic breathwork where I met a woman named Linda whom I definitely fancied. As a joke, I remember I sent her a bagel afterward along with an invitation to meet me for lunch. She didn’t consume the bagel and also resisted my amorous overtures, but she quickly became my best friend and for many years thereafter was my confidant, meeting me every few weeks for lunch and gossip.  We’ve stayed in touch all these years, and she even shared my passion for Roger Federer. 

But I digress.

Another one of the speakers was Jean Houston, and I do remember talking with her afterward. I was still keen on her, and she seemed to enjoy my company, too.  She even invited me to her Foundation for Mind Research in New York for a two week-long workshop. By then, I had read her and husband’s book on psychedelics, so she didn’t have to ask me twice.  I was thrilled to spend more time with her.  I even toyed with the idea of writing her biography. I never did, of course, but she did appreciate my interest in her.

The workshop was experiential – it featured exercises from her and husband’s book, Mind Games, which I eventually used in my own classes. I also remember that she introduced us all to a new musical discovery, Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which I have since come to hate since you can’t even enter an elevator these days without hearing it.

I left still awed by this dazzling woman, and grateful for what I was able to learn from her.

That same semester, I also taught a graduate course in transpersonal psychology. It attracted a diverse group of students as well as a philosophy professor and a Catholic priest both of whom became good friends of mine. But I also recall a rather hard-bitten phlegmatic woman who seemed out of place in that class. The reason I remember her so vividly after all these years was because of her response to some excerpts from an article I read to the class.

The article was written by a psychiatrist named Russell Noyes and was called, as I recall, "The Experience of Dying." The term near-death experience hadn’t yet been invented, but that’s what Noyes was writing about. So, as I was quoting the first of these excepts, the woman I mentioned began quietly to sob. That’s when I first realized how powerful these experiences where. That planted a seed of interest in me, and you know how that seed grew in time to lead to my life as a near-death researcher – a woman’s tears did that. 

Perhaps needless to say, my burgeoning and all-consuming involvement in the field of transpersonal psychology did not only affect my professional life – and my life in my department (it’s a good thing I was a full professor with tenure then!), but also my personal life.  Especially my marriage.

My wife had been freaked out by my psychedelic experiences and the changes it had wrought in my personality and extracurricular activities.  I was now spending a lot of my time reading spiritual books, such as the classic, The Autobiography of a Yogi, spending time in Ashrams, going to talks of Eastern gurus, and consorting with any number of souls seeking enlightenment.  I also set up a little mediation room in my house complete with incense and candles.  

All this didn’t just perplex my wife; it frightened her. She wondered what had happened to the man she married.  

She became extremely depressed, so we eventually entered couples therapy to see if we could save our marriage from disintegrating.  

That effort failed. I was not coming back. But going into therapy was fateful – I am tempted to say, fatal – for other reasons because for a concatenation of factors I won’t have the space to detail here, it led to a woman coming into my life who effectively served to break up my marriage and draw me into a relationship that I would ultimately come deeply to regret. 

At the time, I was grateful to her for rescuing me from a marriage that had been very unhappy for me, even before my years of psychedelic exploration. But over time, I realized that I had been lured away by an enchantress who had cloven feet.

But to tell that story, even briefly, we need to return to that tumultuous year, 1974.

She came with a rope. At the time, I couldn't tell if the rope was to save me or to hang me, but before long I was clinging to it as my only hope of salvation that might lift me out of my pit of marital despair. 

  

She had magical powers – indeed she was bewitching and I was enchanted by her. She was not beautiful, but she was very striking looking. She was exceptionally intelligent and her verbal fluency was so stunning, I was often in awe of her when she spoke. She was the most psychologically perceptive person I had ever met (and she had had years of psychotherapy too; she could dance rings around anyone she worked with).  She appeared to see so deeply into my soul and to be so aware of my tormented life with my wife that within an hour or so I had become completely beguiled by her. She also seemed to have occult powers and her presence was both dazzling and mesmerizing.  

I knew she was my rescuer and, within a short time, I took the rope she had extended to me and followed her.

Over the next few months, having been both captivated and captured by this woman, I made the break she had urged me to effect (“I want you to be my lover”) and started living with her in her apartment south of Hartford.  (She was then working as a TV reporter for a Hartford-based channel.). Needless to say, this tore my family apart.

I had to leave all my children behind, including my daughter, Kathryn, at least to begin with. (A few months later, I came for Kathryn – the scene was out of Dostoevsky.)  It was the biggest rupture of my entire life, a mixture of the most intense excitement and the most searing pain of loss. 

No one in my family knew my whereabouts. I lived rather like an outlaw at that time. I took the back roads into school in case my wife tried to track my movements. Meanwhile at the university rumors circulated about me. (One that got back to me, I remember, was that I was living with two 14-year-old girls! Where that one came from, God knows!)  My colleagues kept their distance — I think they were a little afraid of me.  I was a dangerous man, living out something scandalous, a subversive to the official academic culture of scholarship and professional propriety.  

What followed was two years of hell.  This period of my life is still so painful for me to recall and fills me with such shame that I will spare both you and myself from the horror of those years. Suffice it to say that eventually I had to break free of her.  I cut the rope that had bound me to her and, with my daughter, I escaped and took refuge in the home of a professor friend of mine.

Epilogue

One of the things that drew me to her was my learning how much she had suffered in life.  She evoked a tremendous sense of pity in me. 

After I was living with her, she began to disclose to me a good deal of her history of personal suffering and loss, which moved me unspeakably.  She recounted many instances of cruel mistreatment and abuse in the course of her childhood and her continuing difficulties and resultant sorrows through her many failed marriages. As a person with very permeable boundaries, her life had often been unbearable and she had already survived several nervous breakdowns.

It was only later that I came across Stefan Zweig’s novel, Beware of Pity. Had I read it before meeting her, I would have been on my guard. But only a fool would think you can save another person from their demons.  I was that fool.

A few years after I had made my escape, she sent a letter of apology to my daughter and me. She had joined A.A. and was trying to mend herself.  I don’t know if she ever did.

The last time I saw her was almost thirty-five years ago.  I was at the movies in Hartford when a woman walked up to me in the lobby smiling broadly. She was on crutches (she had broken her ankle), and I had no idea who she was. When I was with her, she was svelte, red-haired and physically very arresting.  This woman was pudgy, grey-haired and totally unprepossessing. But when she continued to smile, I knew – to my astonishment – who it was. I could hardly believe it. We had a few laughs, and she called me by one of her old favorite endearments, Uncle Dudley. After an uncomfortable moment or two, she hobbled into one of the theaters in the multiplex while I looked on before heading my way into another theater.  I never saw or heard from her or anything about her again.

I’m happy to say that after surviving that ordeal, my life definitely took an upward turn, especially after I discovered my true vocation as an NDE researcher.  I had been able to grew close to all my children again, reconciled with my now ex-wife (we were both happier when we no longer lived together) and had found my true love, a woman named Norma, with whom I came to live in what we soon dubbed our house, The Near-Death Hotel.

So, it all ended well, but as for 1974 – it was a hell of a year (double entendre intended). 

Reflections on the Divided States of America

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

I’m sure that by now, many of you share my sadness and disappointment about the results of the election. And that you’ve already listened to or read enough post-mortem commentaries from the punditocracy.  So I won’t write at length here, but do feel the need at least to contribute something to the ongoing conversation.

First, if any of you reading this supported Trump, this is not for you. You probably won’t want to read what follows. But I suspect that most of you who read my blogs will know my own sympathies and share them.  So this is for you.

Musing on the dire election returns, I don’t recognize this country anymore. Given Trump’s decisive victory, I feel that I am living in a land now dominated by yahoos, fools, crazies, and hooligans who relish and thrill to Trump’s brand of bile and vitriol. But why waste time and words on mere name-calling? It serves no purpose and is not constructive.   

I thought that Kamala would win. I think if there had been no early voting, she might have succeeded, since her support seemed to be surging toward the end, but we’ll never know. And consider: She not only had to defeat Trump, but she was also the victim of misogyny, racism and being the VP of a very unpopular President — a lot to overcome.  And, obviously, in hindsight, too much. Moreover, she had only little more than a hundred days to introduce herself to an American electorate to whom she was not well known. Had she been able to secure the nomination much earlier, she might have prevailed, but, again, that issue is moot now. What we know is that all the support she received from women, from youthful voters, and from all the celebrities who rallied to her cause was not enough. To me, Kamala was an inspiring speaker and leader, but, still, she was not enough either.

I personally don’t have faith that the Democratic party itself is enough to turn the tide. Besides, the tide has already come in and swamped those of us who supported Kamala’s candidacy.  What to do now?

To my friends, I have joked that since we are not France, a coup d’état is not likely. Any kind of insurrection would be bloody and ultimately unsuccessful.  So, I have a third option that I think is our only realistic solution and hope: Secession. California, or preferably, the entire west coast, should secede from the union. That, it seems to me, is the only way forward to spare ourselves from the autocratic and corrupt reign of Trump II.  

If only --  but of course I don’t really have any hope for that outcome, much as I personally would prefer it.

To me, what we must depend on is not politics as usual. Our politicians have failed us.  We must put our trust in and bank our hopes on the public and its power to resist, to fight against the authoritarian cruelty and viciousness we can expect from Trump and his cadre of epigones.

Robert Reich has advocated the same course, and because he is a respected public figure, I urge you to read and heed his wise words.  You can find them by going to this link:

https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/the-resistance-starts-now?r=r3468&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

Thank you for reading this.

Thoughts on Nearing 89: A Bagatelle

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

If I survive the coming election about which I have a sense of anticipatory dread and then continue to live for another month or so, I shall reach the end of my octogenarian decade and turn, unless I can find a way to turn back, the age of 89, an age that I find entirely rebarbative.  The reason it so repels me is not what you may imagine.  No, it has to do with one of my many quirks – a hatred of prime numbers ending in nine.  It’s easy to think of them – 19, 59, 79, and the worst one of all, 89.  There must be a term for this, as there is, for instance, for the fear of the number 13, which as any literate person knows is called triskaidekaphobia.  Well, my webmaster, Kevin Williams, who knows everything, just told me.  I am a primonumerophobe .

Living so long also makes me wonder what I am still doing here.  My spiritual friends, never loath to resort to the nearest cliché, keep telling me that if I’m still here, it means that “my work is not done.” To which I think, though I will rarely utter the word aloud, “balderdash.”  

For years, I have joked that I have already entered my afterlife, that my life is over, and I now exist in a kind of interminable epilogue.  I mean, consider:  I can no longer hear well, my vision is even worse, and, having been crippled for years by a progressive case of spinal stenosis, I can no longer walk either.  Well, I can.  I do totter about my house being very careful not to fall, but I can’t really go anywhere.  A trip – hoping I don’t – out to my patio is about the limit of my excursions.  I haven’t been able to travel anywhere for years, and even going out to a restaurant is fraught with risk.  

Worse in a way is that I can no longer do any meaningful work.  I published my last two books earlier this year, and my blogging life is about to come to an end.  Partly because of my bad vision, but mainly because I have run out of ideas what to write about.  It’s hard for me now to read the kind of books I used to, which would not only provide fuel for what’s left of my brain, but give me topics, such as animal cognition, I used to love to write about.  No more.  I just can’t hack it.

So, what’s the point, Alfie? From my point of view, I am just marking time, like a prisoner waiting for his sentence to end, scratching off the days on the calendar on the wall of his cell.

Some of you know that when I was in my early eighties, I wrote a little book of mostly humorous essays I whimsically entitled Waiting to Die.  The conceit of that book was my goal of living to the age of 1000 – months.  That would get me out of here at the age of 83.  No such luck.  I blew past it and just kept on keeping on.  I sometimes joked that I just didn’t have the knack for dying.  I don’t understand why it’s so easy for so many people.  But where death is concerned, I seem to be an abysmal failure.   If I were to write a sequel to that book, I would have to call it Still Waiting.

I’ve always thought about when I would die – and always found myself disappointed when I didn’t.  My father died at 41, so after I turned 40, I thought the time of my demise was might be drawing nigh.  I remember spending a lot of time listening to the late quartets of Beethoven, thinking it would be the last time I would ever hear them.  Wrong again.

After that, but still thinking I might die young, I imagined that I might die at the age of one of my literary heroes at that time, George Orwell, who had died at 46 (though I mistakenly thought his death occurred when he was 47 – another one of those primes I love to detest).  But 47 came and went, but I didn’t; I remained.  I was beginning to lose faith in my ability to forecast when I would kick the bucket.

Eventually, after many years had passed without my having done so, I thought that I might die in the year 2012, at the end of which I would be 77 – a good time to die, I thought.  I actually had many reasons to think my time would come by the end of that year.  But I left feeling somewhat crestfallen at another failure to attain death.

I was beginning to think that, in this respect at least, I was like Freud who was very superstitious about death and, like me, had kept imagining he would die much sooner than he actually did (it was he who would die at 83).  He eventually came to fear that he wouldn’t die until he reached his mother’s death age, which was 95.  Well, I won’t have to worry about living to my mother’s age if I make it to 89.  She died at 88.

With the exception of my maternal grandfather, all the men in my family (at least on my mother’s side, and, to the extent I know, also on my father’s side) died young, none of them living longer than their mid-sixties.  What’s wrong with me?

I grew up a member of a quartet of male cousins. Two of them died around the age of eighty, and the third, the cousin to whom I am closest, is now 84, but has a terminal disease.  We joke about who will be the last cousin standing.  Anyone care to bet?

Well, I’ve given up trying to predict when I’ll die.  At a prophet, I have an unblemished record of failure when it comes to my own death.  But I’m convinced that if I pray long and hard enough, God will finally grant me release, so I still have hope, it not faith, I will get there in the end.  Wish me luck!

A Letter to My Father

By Kenneth Ring, Ph.D.

Dear Dad,

It’s been seventy years since you left this world and more than eighty since you left me.  I have missed you my entire life, but for many years, as you know, I have felt your influence, indeed, your presence in my life, and I know that you have really never abandoned me.  I also know, as you are aware, that for a long time you have actually guided me and watched over me, as if you were my own guardian angel.  You know the evidence I have for that and how I learned some years ago how deeply you had loved me when I was a child.

At night, in my office, I often talk to you – actually, to the photograph I have of you that sits on my desk – and wonder where and how you now and ponder the quizzical fact that I am still here, now a very old man myself, while you were never allowed to live to reach the age of barely forty.  I hope before too long we will be together again, but for now I can only write to you and tell you more about how I have felt your presence in my life. 

I suppose I should begin by telling you about my return to California because that is when I began to feel your influence on me in an undeniable way.

However, to do that, I need to draw on some material I wrote about you in my book, My Father, Once Removed.  In that book, I tried to give an honest, but loving, portrait of you.  When I say honest, I mean to indicate that I was compelled to make some harsh judgments about your character for which I hope you’ll forgive me.  But as you will understand, some the character flaws I perceived in you I also find in myself.  Like father, like son.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote about you, Dad, after I returned to California thirty years ago….

After retiring from the university in 1994, I am no longer yoked to the academic year, so I can now undertake more extensive international lecture tours: to Germany, to Scandinavia and to Australia (twice). During my second Australian tour in March, 1996, I have a series of epiphanic experiences whose meaning gradually crystallizes for me: I must return home to California. Something is calling me there.

I heed the call. By the end of the year, I am living in California again, not far from where I grew up and went to school. Although I have visited California many times since I left it for graduate school, I have been away for almost forty years. “Forty years in the winterness,” I joke to my friends when they ask my reasons for returning to California. They wouldn’t understand the real reasons. In fact, I am not entirely clear about them myself. I only know that I needed to return. After a time, it seems I have been called back to childhood things, to those interests I had as a kid that I had to abandon when I left California and entered into the life that led to my professional career.

When I was a boy growing up during the Second World War, I discovered a book my mother had in her library that featured biographical sketches of the world great composers. I don’t remember its exact title, but I can still see the book in my mind’s eye and feel its heft. For some reason, even though I was not yet familiar with classical music, I loved reading about these composers, and since I had a head for dates, I soon memorized the years of their births and deaths. In those days, the great composers started with Bach and ended with Stravinsky (who was then listed as 1882 —), and seemingly constituted about a dozen in all. Early in my life, then, the stories of the lives of these men (and they were of course all men) impressed themselves upon me vividly. It’s odd—I don’t really remember many books I read as a child, but the memory of lying across my bed absorbed in my mother’s book about the great composers is still clear to me. From the outset, it seems, I was fascinated with the lives of composers.

The paragraph you have just read actually comes from the preface of a book I wrote some years ago that deals with three well-known composers, Leos Janacek, Peter Tchaikovsky and Edward Elgar, and the muses who inspired their work. In it, I was trying to explain to my readers how it happened that I came to write this book. I would like to quote some further passages from this preface next, even at the risk of some redundancy, because they will also serve to delineate the links in the chain of redintegration that reconnected me with you, Dad. 

At this point, I was describing my circumstances just after returning to California.

“I took some time to wind up my professional career, finishing a couple of books I had been working on, and then wondered what I would do next. I gave no conscious thought to music, but one day, during a period when I was ill for quite a while, found myself reading about Camille Saint-Saëns. In short order, I became completely engrossed in his life story about which I had not previously known much, and in my enthusiasm thought I might share a few of my thoughts about him in a little essay I would write just for the fun of it, mainly for my friends. Well, without recounting this whole improbable adventure, suffice it to say that I wound up writing an entire book about him, got it published by the sheerest fluke without even seeking a publisher, and even ended up collaborating on a screenplay about him. 

I had done all this really as something like a lark, but I found that writing about Saint-Saëns had triggered something in me— something new, and something old. I had become interested in composers again and felt a yen now not just to read about them but to write about them—despite having no professional credentials in music whatever, only the chutzpah of an academic who apparently had no qualms about venturing into territory where he had no right to tread.

There was more to it than that, however, though I did not realize at the time that these new stirrings were beginning to make themselves known to me.  To begin with, probably because of my interest in Saint-Saëns and his world, I became aware that I was now extremely curious about European history and culture, particularly in the nineteenth century—a domain that had never previously elicited any special appeal for me and that I had explored only cursorily when I had been a professor. Indeed, I had never even been to Europe until I was nearly fifty—though once I went, I found myself drawn back to it many times and came to love being there, almost no matter where in Europe I was. Now, however, I became very keen to inform myself about nineteenth-century Europe and somehow found it easy to imagine myself among the salonnières of Parisian cultural life in Saint-Saëns’ day. Doing so, I came to recognize that, despite having had a professional career as an academic psychologist, there was something in me that aspired to be identified with being an artist, especially one living in Europe—and that composers, for me, represented the very epitome of the type of artist I really longed to be and most admired.” 

It was then I thought of you again, and why you were so drawn to live and work as an artist in Europe after the war.

You see, what I haven’t told you is that when I was well into my forties, I began to have what I can only call some “intimations” of you. Not that I actually had a presentiment of your spirit, exactly, but, somehow, I felt you near to me after all this time. Despite my never having known you well when I was a little boy and having very few memorabilia of you (my mother always refused to discuss you with me and had discarded all of your paintings and destroyed virtually every photograph of you when she divorced you), I always felt that in my essence I was very like you. My mother, for example, was not at all musical, but the only artifact of yours still in my possession is a tattered copy of a piano score of Beethoven’s Rondo in G, with some annotations in your hand. Before an aunt of mine had come across it and given it to me, I had not even known that you played the piano, but obviously you did. Later, I learned that you even performed as a pianist in clubs.

In any case, as I was immersing myself in my musical researches for what turned out to be this book, I found I was having many more thoughts about you—almost as though your spirit was somehow trying to impress itself upon me. And then it hit—of course! I suddenly saw the connection.

When I had returned to California, to the area where I had grown up, and to the only place where I had actually spent time with you, I was, as it were, returning to what I loved as a child. Those composers were a part of it, you were a part of it, my artistic longings and aspirations were still in me. And you of course were an artist, had clearly loved music too, and had followed your passion for a life in Europe. The thought occurred to me that perhaps, if you had remained in my life, I would have followed an entirely different course in which art and music, not psychology, might have become my path, as it was for you, Dad. However, by returning to California, it was as if I were becoming your son again, feeling in myself your interests, having your tastes, and reconnecting to an alternative life you might have led me into. At the same time, I realized that it wasn’t too late—that I could enter into that life now, that I could still honor you, my father in me, and in that way draw close to you again. That perhaps over all these years you had been guiding me back to yourself, back to that boy who loved music and composers from the start, and, finally, back to my native soil where my soul had been forged and where I could at last resume the kind of life I had once seemingly been destined for. 

So, while it was my mother’s book I first recalled for you, it is really your world that seems to have called forth the work I have done here. In that sense, this volume is a kind of belated offering both to your spirit that still lives in me and to the life I might have been had if you and I not been parted from each other when I was young.

Before these realizations struck me, there had been other events that seemed almost “designed” to foster them. Some of them had to do with unexpected encounters with people from my past who suddenly turned up in my life again and came to play a critical role in my awakening to the more artistic side of my nature. One of these persons was a woman named Frances.

I first met Frances when I was a young professor and she was a graduate student, just a few years younger than myself. She took a course with me, and we had some very casual social contact afterward, but we had really never become friends and soon lost touch with each other. However, during the time I was working on my Saint-Saëns book, she was led to track me down, which initiated an email exchange between us. At that point, we had not had contact with each other for more than two decades. In recent years, however, Frances, who, like me, had become a professor of psychology, had developed an interest in native Americans and was spending a good deal of her time in the Southwest. Since I was now living in California, she had thought of me and had sought me out by asking my departmental chairman my whereabouts.

It turned out that Frances was extremely interested in my work about Saint-Saëns and classical music generally. She asked to read my manuscript and even other books that I had consulted in order do my research, which led to many stimulating discussions both through email and over the phone, and eventually in person, about my work and particularly about the world of Saint-Saëns and his circle. 

Like me, Frances had a deep interest in nineteenth-century French culture, and in a way we both came to live there. That is to say, we began to talk about the artists who flourished at that time almost as if they had become personal friends of ours. And for a time, we imagined ourselves as characters in that world. We would even write dialogues through email in which we had assumed distinct identities in the life of nineteenth century Parisian salons. She had become Francoise, an Irish-born Francophile, while I portrayed myself as a minor poet named Armand. We gave each of these characters a history and personality, and in our playful fashion we even inhabited them. 

Another person who had also come to play an important role in my life these days was Carolyn, my first girlfriend from more than sixty years ago when we were in high school together. Because we had not had contact with each other for so many years, much of our email was understandably devoted to trying to depict the kind of persons we had developed into since we were teenagers. At one point, I was having a very hard time getting Carolyn to understand how much I had come to identify a part of my personality with nineteenth century French artists, so I drew on my “Armand” character to try to make this clear to her:

I want to say just a little more about this artist-sensibility-in-Ken, however, just so you might understand this part of me better. First, I did not mean to imply—in fact I remember denying this explicitly in one of my letters to you—that I have any particular artistic talent. Truly, I do not feel as if I do. What I have is more of an identification with a particular type of artist. I can tell you more about him. He lives in Paris in the nineteenth century. He lives a rather dissolute life, probably as a minor poet. He has had a number of affairs, most of which have ended badly (think Musset), and, needless to say, he is very alienated from bourgeois society. He is into hashish (which, as you probably know, was the rage for a while among French intellectuals and artists of the nineteenth century), and suffers from tuberculosis from which he will die when relatively young. He is a frequent participant in the salon life of Paris, and he likes associating with the artists and philosophers of that time, as well as consorting with the denizens of the demimonde. He even has a name: it is Armand.

Now, I don’t mean that the Ken you know is this character. Of course not. Nor do I mean that I think I have been this guy in a past life. I’m not sure I even really believe in “past lives” as such. But when I read about guys like him, there is an immediate identification—I know this sort of raffish fellow and, in some way, I am like him inside.

This was something I never had to explain to Frances, however. As I was to learn, she had been aware of this side of me for a long time.

Because Frances and I were both psychologists, it was also natural that in our conversations and email correspondence, we talked a good deal about our families and our personal backgrounds—especially since we were really getting to know each other after so many years and had, in fact, never known one another well to begin with. And just as Frances had become engrossed in my nineteenth century preoccupations, she was also deeply interested in my character in this life. In this connection I vividly remember one telephone conversation we had in which she told me how she had perceived me when I was a young professor and she was my student.

What shocked me was her telling me that even then she saw me “as an artist, as a creative artist,” not a psychologist, which was to her mind just a role I had been playing as if it were a kind of performance. Therefore, it had come as no surprise to her that when I had discarded, as it were, my psychologist’s robe I had donned an artist’s smock. That’s how she had perceived me from the start, she said.

From her point of view, therefore, it was perfectly understandable—even fitting—that I had finally come to acknowledge how deep and abiding this aspect of my character was. And after I had come to tell her a good deal about you, she could see you in me, too. 

By the time I had completed my book on composers and their muses—another work in which my friend Frances had taken a great interest, so much so that she had almost become, I suppose, a muse of mine in the process—I found myself coming back to you again. Without really having been aware of it at the time of my writing that book, I had been dealing with you all the while. In a personal afterword to the book, I tried to express to my readers what I had found myself having to come to reckon with. It was not pleasant. In any event, I will let my closing words of that book conclude this blog.

“Perhaps I might be permitted one final personal reflection now that the work of this book is done. In the course of writing it, I did come to realize something about my father and how my feelings for him connect to the composers I chose to write about.

In a word, at one point I suddenly understood that in writing about them, I was actually writing about him. 

You see, from everything I have been able to learn about my father, he was in many respects like the composers I describe in this book—selfish, concerned mainly with his own work and career as an artist, a womanizer, and all in all, from what I have been told, not a very likable man. And like these men again, my father was clearly something of a Puer—intent on having his adventures and escaping as much as possible from the responsibilities of adult family life. Whether he acquired minions, as these composers all did, to help him escape from these onerous ties, I don’t know, but from all accounts I have of him, his art, his freedom and his amorous pleasures were indeed the ruling passions of his life. His proclivities remind me most of Tchaikovsky and Janacek, but there is even some suggestive resemblance to Elgar [who had in effect “married” his mother] because I understand that toward the end of my father’s life, and possibly earlier, he sought the favors of at least one older, maternal woman.

Yet, just as I am fascinated by the very artists whose lives I have researched despite, at the same time, often being repelled by their character, I feel the same ambivalence toward my father. I loved him, I’m sure, before I could know the kind of person he was. It makes me think that something of his ‘artistic personality” was imprinted on me early in my life and perhaps has led to my persisting interest in creative men who all too often turn out to be repugnant, self-seeking narcissists whose love for women is ultimately a form of ego-gratification. 

But discovering my father at the possible root of my draw to this kind of man wasn’t the only personal insight I had in the writing of this book. Ultimately, I could not avoid seeing something far more disturbing. It wasn’t just that my father was like these composers; it was that I was perhaps more like him than I had supposed, and that his effect on my life ran much deeper than simply my predilection for becoming engrossed in the lives of creative artists. So, it was not just my father’s ghost that I caught sight of here; it was my own shadow. 

Needless to say, this realization threw me into a funk for some time. But after brooding about this, I could see at least one way in which I was not merely my father’s son. However else I might be like him, I knew I wasn’t callous toward women. Indeed, I couldn’t help becoming aware that in writing this book I was no longer identifying so much with the composers themselves as with the women in their lives and with what they had suffered. After all, it is really to these women, not the artists they served, that this book is dedicated.

This gives me some hope that, notwithstanding my father’s undeniable influence on me and my nature, my search for him will serve to free me from blindly having to follow his blighted course to the end of my life. What this book ultimately was about for me personally, I now see, was not just my yearning to be reconnected with my father’s spirit but my own quest for redemption.”

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It must be said that however self-involved my father may have been, however centered on his own professional aims as he certainly was, and whatever the means he employed to reap the rewards he was able to extract from life, he was, at least toward me, a loving father. Whatever else may be said or speculated about my father, this has always been my enduring and ineradicable sense of him.  Somehow, I have always felt his love as the primordial fact of my life, even when he was forced to part from me, and even, especially, after his death.  Even now as I write these words.  And when I die, which must be soon enough now, I hope I will have my own confirmation of this when, at last, I may see him once more with his arms outstretched, waiting to welcome me home.