Spring 2007 Alumnae Quarterly Web Extra
The Legacies of Peter Viereck
The MHC community continues to mourn the passing of professor emeritus of history Peter Viereck. The following comments are excerpted from those given at a November 2006 campus symposium in his honor. Others who spoke about the Pulitzer Prize-winner that day included historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and poet Richard Wilbur.
Below are the complete texts of the comments by two speakers at the symposium, Joseph J. Ellis, MHC professor of History on the Ford Foundation; and Lisa A. Szefel ’88, who took five classes from Viereck, and who now teaches in Harvard’s History and Literature Department.
You can listen to an audio version of Ellis’ remarks at mtholyoke.edu/offices/comm/news/9360.shtml.
The Legacies of Peter Viereck
Remarks by Joseph J. Ellis, Professor of History on the Ford Foundation
On behalf of Mount Holyoke College, welcome to an afternoon of commentary and conversation on the life and work of Peter Viereck, who went to the hereafter last May in his eighty-ninth year. Many years before he died, Peter, always more intellectually organized than his disheveled appearance suggested, had asked me to assume responsibility for any memorial service after his passing. And so far about twenty years he sent me reprints of every poem, essay, or review he wrote, or any critical appraisal written about him. It reminded me of Thomas Jefferson’s last request to James Madison: “Take care of me when I am dead.”
I subsequently discovered that Peter, taking no chances, had made the same request to several other friends and colleagues. But somehow the honor has come to me, and this afternoon’s program is the result. In lieu of the conventional memorial service in the college chapel, which necessarily imposes a religious and funereal mood, we have opted for a secular celebration of Peter’s legacy, both intellectual and personal. If Peter were with us today, he would probably quip that we have come to praise Viereck, not to bury him.
True enough, but the praise must not be platitudinous, a posture he utterly loathed. In order to be true to his spirit, it must be resolutely irreverent, periodically comic, abidingly ironic, must forsake all dull pieties for sharp, double-edged truths. In order to establish the proper tone, let me tell you a Viereck story.
Back in the late 1970s—the precise year escapes me—an English major at the College decided to do her senior thesis on Peter’s poetry. Peter agreed to several interviews and at one of them gave her a copy of an essay he was currently working on entitled “Would Jacob Wrestle With a Flabby Angel?” The point of the piece was that the primal pulse of all poetry was the heartbeat, which meant that free verse violated the rhythmic imperative literally at the heart of all poetry. Peter then suggested that the student come to the Mount Holyoke pool to watch him swim laps—which he did five days a week then—to witness a physical demonstration of Peter’s own quest for rhythm as an integral part of his life.
Well, the student showed up one day and saw what can only be called the most awkward and unrhythmic swimming stroke on the planet. What’s more, Peter found it impossible to stay in his lane—the metaphorical possibilities here defy accounting—but rather swam diagonally across all the other swimmers’ lanes, creating havoc for all concerned, especially the lifeguards, who could not bring themselves to reprimand a local legend. When the student, somewhat bravely, confronted Peter with this rather untidy piece of evidence, Peter thought for a moment, then said: “Well, I guess your thesis should conclude that my poetry is more about paradox than rhythm.”
What he might have said was that the abiding rhythms of his own mind were inherently paradoxical. Like John Adams, one of his political heroes, Peter always expected the most blood-drenched policies to proceed from the most utopian thinkers. The holocaust and the gulag were only possible when visionaries tried to create heaven on earth. Like Edmund Burke, another hero, Peter believed that evolutions were vastly preferable to revolutions in producing lasting social progress. In poetry, the most savage thoughts could only be properly conveyed in the most disciplined verse. Thus also the title of the work-in-progress when he died, which is “Strict Wildness.”
Like Whitman, Peter contained multitudes, though in his case, the multitudes arranged themselves in juxtaposed pairs: a comic sense of human tragedy; an American mind bundled up in a European sensibility; a self-proclaimed conservative who embraced the New Deal and whose favorite presidential candidate was Adlai Stevenson; a man old beyond his years at twenty, with a preternaturally mature sense of the abyss into which the world was headed, and yet a man who remained, in several senses, a child to the end, incapable of cooking for himself, famously wandering the College dining halls with plastic baggies in his pockets, our local version of the man-child in the promised land.
As for his legacy, which we are gathered here to salute, let the facts speak for themselves. He was the author of six books of prose and eight books of poetry, though the numbers multiply if you count all the reprints and new editions. He was one of the most original and influential American thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, who predicted the Nazi horrors at a time when the Munich Treaty was being trumpeted as a triumph, who forecasted that Stalin’s Russia would be just as bad or worse than Hitler’s Germany before the Cold War began, and who condemned the scare tactics of Joseph McCarthy while McCarthy was being lionized by the American Right and tolerated by the mainstream press. In retrospect, he got all the big questions right, an achievement that very few American intellectuals of the era could claim.
If this is his national legacy, there is also a local legacy that, given our location, merits a separate salute. Peter joined the Mount Holyoke faculty in the fall of 1948 and taught his last class, which I attended, in the spring of 1997. That means he taught on this campus for forty-nine years, longer than any faculty member in recorded history. (The college archives for the nineteenth century are incomplete on this score, but my scan of the records suggests that no one else comes close.) In part because of his longevity, and in part because of the popularity of his Russian history survey, he also taught more students than any Mount Holyoke professor ever, though the incredible numbers of Vinnie Ferraro give him a shot at the title if he lasts for another decade. Six years ago, when a play based on his life was performed in the College theatre, I witnessed a current student, her mother, and her mother gather around his wheelchair to thank him for his teaching. As others also gathered around him, he said: “I can’t remember all your names, but I remember all your faces.” He was a very unlikely and highly eccentric version of Mr. Chips.
If these are the bare facts, perhaps our purpose this afternoon is to embellish them a bit, to recover somewhat more fully Peter’s legacy as a historian and public intellectual, as a poet, and as a presence. We have gathered together some informed commentators, many distinguished in their own right, to offer their thoughts. They have been asked to express themselves eloquently and irreverently, as Peter would have wished. At the end of each session, we hope to enjoy the opportunity to permit questions or comments from the audience. If not quite strict wildness, we seek to create an atmosphere of festive solemnity, or perhaps serious joy. If a fresh phrase is uttered, if a new idea slithers into the conversation, if blather suddenly ascends to eloquence, if the gods choose to speak through any of us, then we can be sure that Peter’s spirit is present in the room.
The Legacy of Peter Viereck
Remarks by Lisa A. Szefel ’88, who took five classes from Viereck, and who now teaches in Harvard’s History and Literature Department
With so many esteemed guests here today, I feel the need to present my credentials. I took five classes with Peter Viereck: both halves of the Russian history survey and the European history survey; and a senior seminar on totalitarianism. And, I am very proud to say that I received the “Most Likely to Major in Peter Viereck” award at the annual dorm conference and, in my senior year, I won the “Most Likely to Invite Peter Viereck to Dinner” prize. Whenever Peter wanted to come to dinner he would send a note to my mailbox: “Saturday, 5:45. PV” On one occasion, my sister had just had a baby, and, being a devoted aunt, and typical Mount Holyoke undergraduate (where everything you do you do with excellence as the standard), I carried not just one or two pictures of my nephew, but a whole photo album of the little guy. At dinner, I asked Peter and his wife Betty if they wanted to see some photos of my new nephew and they, unsuspectingly, said yes. I pulled out my album and they kindheartedly looked through all of the photos! I also teach in the History & Literature Department at Harvard, which is where Peter studied as an undergraduate and first taught after receiving his Ph.D. in History. My first book contains a chapter on Peter’s father, George Sylvester, who was a founder of the Poetry Society of America and instrumental in the creation of the category of Poetry for the Pulitzer Prize. Finally, Peter and I share the same birthday.
Now, I hope that the word you are all thinking is not “stalker.” I prefer to use the word “devoted” because Peter Viereck inspired devotion in his students. Whenever I meet an MHC alum, the first question I ask is whether they took classes with Viereck and, even if they did not, they knew about his legendary lectures. His lectures were so famous because of his mastery over the facts—the events, individuals, and ideas of the past—and because of the way he animated inert information with anecdotes; much of the history Peter taught he lived through himself, so he interspersed lectures with personal stories. This meant that students did not want to miss his lectures and that, today, twenty years later, I can still remember so many facts. For example: the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo signed July 29th between Germany and the Soviet Union contained secret provisions that allowed Germany to train their military on Soviet territory, in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles. I remember this because Viereck told a story about being a graduate student at Harvard in the 1930s and one of his political science professors, in 1939, was Heinrich von Brüning, the chancellor of Germany from 1930 to 1932. The Nazis had just invaded Poland. Peter was in Brüning’s office as the former chancellor was reading a newspaper account of Hitler’s ability to build such a powerful army in such a short time. Brüning was indignant and told Viereck: “I am the one responsible for rebuilding Germany’s armies, not Hitler!” And he told Peter about the secret treaty, training German soldiers in the Soviet Union. Of course, this was top secret information and had to remain so. So, Brüning had to stew in silence because what he had done was illegal.
Brüning was the kind of leader Viereck liked to focus on because he stood in between two extremes: the socialists and the communists who were too unorganized and prone to interfighting on the one hand; and Hitler’s forceful Nazi party on the other. Brüning was a member of the Catholic Center party bud didn’t know how to handle the extremes of left and right, which meant that he could not rule effectively.
Viereck also liked to tell the story of Alexander Kerensky, prime minister of the Soviet Union after the February revolution in 1917. Viereck stressed that this first revolution overthrew the tsar and instituted a democratic government with free elections; Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were not involved. In October, the Bolsheviks had another revolution and overthrew a democratically-elected government. Kerensky was blamed for not being a strong enough leader because he was too liberal: he allowed the Bolsheviks to get stronger and stronger when he should have put some of them in jail and focused on restoring order.
Again, I remember all this because Viereck talked about meeting Kerensky in the early 1940s when he was at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Kerensky used to open the newspaper each day and shake his head, and say, “What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong?”
Viereck highlighted for us what he called the “zig-zag” nature of history—countries would swing from left to right, from liberal to conservative, and he deplored the excesses and intolerance these extremes nurtured. His hero was the conservative Prince Metternich whose admittedly imperfect Council of Europe kept peace in Europe for thirty years, from 1815 to 1848.
Here is a sample test question from the Europe 257 mid-term exam in April 1986:
Time: an hour; leaving ten minutes to proof the exam for Freudian slips.
Write a dialogue in a café between F (a French middle class nationalist, supporter of the Entente alliance, avid for Alsace) and G (a German middle class nationalist, but not a Nazi, and fearing a war on two fronts). Have them argue violently but with specific concrete evidence (bring in all your specific evidence from readings in Kohn, Craig, class lectures, etc.) about causes and guilt of World War I, about the justice or injustice of the Versailles treaty and Reparations, and about Poincaré’s occupation of the Rhineland to enforce Reparations. Bring in as many different historical citations as you can, and do justice to both sides.
This question is typical because Viereck wanted us to see both sides, to understand the contingencies and complexities people in the past confronted, and it required creativity.
In addition to his lectures, Viereck taught me about the life of the mind. In our many conversations he always treated my ideas and perspectives with the utmost respect.
Now, you have to imagine what it was like for someone like me to be talking to someone like Viereck. I grew up in a working class family in Buffalo, New York and spent summers working in poultry factories cutting up chicken wings. Then, to be on this stunningly, arrestingly, gorgeous campus, and to have dinner with a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who knew a German chancellor and a Soviet leader, and who had recreated Joseph Brodsky (who won the Nobel Prize for Literature the year I took his class on modern lyric poetry) to teach here, was nothing short of miraculous.
To me, Viereck lived an ideal life: teaching; researching; and writing history books, writing poetry. His granddaughter Stephanie once told me that he had a choice to teach at either the University of Chicago or Mount Holyoke, and he chose Mount Holyoke because he “needed to be in a beautiful setting to write beautiful poetry.”
My favorite poem of his is “Incantation” from Terror and Decorum, which he inscribed to me humbly, “To Lisa, My 1st poetry book,” and contains the lines:
“Here abstractions have contours; here flesh is wraith;
On these cold and warming stones, only solidity throws
no shadow.
(Listen, when the high bells ripple the half-light:
Ideas, ideas, the tall ideas dancing.)”
That is to say: Here, ideas are real, they are elegant and playful.
This was such a far cry from my life, and the lives of everyone I knew in Buffalo. Viereck inspired in me a desire to become a history professor and to spend my life teaching at the most beautiful college in the country: Mount Holyoke.
Now, I could have, facetiously, called my talk today, “How Peter Viereck Ruined My Life,” because Viereck taught at a college devoted to undergraduate learning, and to the notion of an academic community where ideas matter urgently, where knowledge is shared, and where professors spend a lot of time, even relish, meeting with students. To my shock and dismay I discovered that this is not the case in graduate school or other universities, where politics, competition, and financial concerns too often hold sway. I had a tough time with my first Ph.D. dissertation topic and had to stop, then switched from European history to American history. I would have dropped out, but I had in my mind this image of Peter Viereck, walking through this campus, giving his lectures, and writing his books. And I wanted that with all my heart, mind, and soul. So I kept on and, after many years, finally did finish the degree.
The whole time I was an undergraduate, I imagined Viereck as this solitary figure on Silver Street, living the life of the mind. We kept in contact through letters and he would send notices of his books and ask me about my studies. Though, we did lose touch for a few years. Then, about five years ago, I was living in Rochester, New York, when a friend of mine called and said: “Guess who I met last night?” He said he had met Peter Viereck’s granddaughter, Sophia, and that she wanted to meet me. You can imagine how I reacted: for me, it was the equivalent of meeting Princess Diana! I was so excited. Sophia turned out to be as generous as Peter, and she invited me to Thanksgiving dinner in South Hadley with her grandfather and the rest of the family. To see Peter in his retirement surrounded by such warm, loving, kind people came, I must admit, as a shock to me. I had learned yet another lesson from Peter: I had thought his life was so marvelous because he got to work on history each day, but that was only the half of it. The other half, was creating, and nurturing, loving relationships, and living the values that he talked about.
So, even though I haven’t realized my dreams of teaching at Mount Holyoke, yet (I am relegated to my great chagrin to teaching at Harvard instead), I take great pride in having been accepted so warmly into Peter’s family. They, as much as Peter’s writing and inspiration to generations of Mount Holyoke students, are his legacy.
I am forever grateful to Peter—for the wisdom of choosing to teach at this amazing college in the first place—and for the intelligence and respect with which he treated the past and those lucky enough to be around him.
