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A Memorial Service
Quentin Anderson
Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities, Emeritus
July 21, 1912 - February 18, 2003
St. Paul's Chapel
Columbia University
March 22, 2003
PROGRAM
Carl Hovde
John Hollander
Michael Rosenthal
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J.S. Bach
Suite No. 4 in Eb Major
Sarabande
Iris Jortner, Cello
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Alan H. Anderson
Abraham B. Anderson
Maxwell L. Anderson
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J.S. Bach
Suite No. 4 in Eb Major
Allemande
Iris Jortner, Cello
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Carl F. Hovde
I had the great good fortune to know Quentin Anderson for many years, first as a student and later as a colleague. My earliest memory goes back fifty-five years, to my freshman year in college. I entered his course in advanced composition, and to this day I remember vividly something that happened in that first class.
For us, of course, he was Professor Anderson. He entered the room and said that he would expect a paper a week, the subject up to us. Then asked a question, though I don't recall what it was, nor the response, which eventually came. I say "eventually" because after he asked the question, no one had anything to say. Professor Anderson looked out the window and waited. The silence became more and more terrible, and must have lasted well over a minute. By then, we were gripped by a kind of ontological terror.
Finally, to our infinite relief, someone said something, and the hour proceeded. I have told this story a few times, and I used to say that I never again saw anyone use silence as teaching technique. But that's not quite right: it was not a strategy, but an aspect of Quentin's temperament. He was teaching a course in composition, to be sure, but he was expecting his students to think, and he was waiting for us to do it.
There were two qualities that drew students to him: a powerful intelligence hard at work, and an integrity so transparent that it was impossible to imagine him as other than forthright and direct. And then there was that fine baritone voice, with the power and flexibility of an actor's voice; he read aloud beautifully, and enjoyed doing so.
Quentin was a wonderful teacher, drawing the best from his students by both example and encouragement. He was also a formidable one, insisting on the best, and he did not mince words when something was wrong. It was also true that for undergraduates especially, there was an austerity about him, a result of the way his mind worked. Both in conversation and in his prose, Quentin often thought in images and metaphors, and if this was a manner one found hard to follow-and some found it so-it could make his arguments seem oblique. But this complexity of style was not because of a lack of clarity; it was because he was thinking not only about the matter at hand, but also about some implication that had not occurred to others.
What some students and adult readers felt to be an unduly difficult style was in fact nuanced, carefully wrought, and charged with meaning. Sensing this, the best students gravitated to him, fascinated by the richness of his mind. It was not surprising that Quentin's first book was on Henry James, that master of subtlety and artistic control. At the end of his career, after he had written about other figures, he returned to James in his last article, which was published only some months ago. It is not initially about James but about the critic R. P. Blackmur, who had done important early work on James, and who was, incidentally, notorious for the density of his language. So in his last essay we have Anderson on Blackmur on late James - that is a mix of complexity indeed. The piece says something significant about all three figures, and it is very interesting as Quentin's work has always been.
As a scholar Quentin's work was important. At the center of his mind, I think, was the idea of community - the desire for, and a sense of the threats to, a social context in which individuals are encouraged, but must also be restrained, in the service of humane life. He treated these issues as reflected primarily in nineteenth century American texts, though his range was much larger than that. As a young man, for example, he wrote a brilliant article about George Eliot's novel Middlemarch ; that essay became a classic of Eliot criticism, and was anthologized. In our literature, the figures to whom he gave most attention were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry James, and he was particularly concerned with what he saw as the stress on an individual and nearly autonomous self.
He looked at the conditions which underlie the powerful assertions of self in Emerson and Whitman, and saw that in part as a reaction to the materialism of their contemporaries; they looked out on an America which they saw as conventional and imitative - it was in need of reform, and in different ways they offered fresh cultural possibilities that were associated with the cultivation of individual consciousness. He admired their push for change and he loved the best of their work. At the same time he was acutely aware of what he considered the extremity of their views, the degree to which they over-corrected, so to speak, for what they felt were the problems of their America. He felt that they pressed individualism so far that they risked the fragmentation of the very culture which they sought to bring about.
Quentin's mind was bold and subtle. Bold because of the originality and force of his arguments. Subtle because he had a superb feel for language. The originality and even radicality of his arguments made him controversial, but even those who quarreled with him acknowledged the power of an intelligence forcing them to think about their own views. I once arranged a luncheon with Quentin and an Emerson scholar who disagreed strongly with Quentin's view of Emerson. I did so because she had told me that despite their differences, she had learned more from reading him that she had from many who were closer to her own opinions.
Much of the force of Quentin's generalizations came from his close analysis of significant passages to support his arguments. Finely, responsive as he was to the rhythms and imagery of major literary styles, it was natural that the figures he wrote about were among the greatest in our literature. He could sort out the implications of a major style as few could do, and even if one came to disagree about something, it was clear that he had earned the right to his views.
Just as much as his work was important, he was personally an engaging and generous man. He had a quiet but very good sense of humor and was a fine companion and a warm host. Deeply loyal to the university where he had spent so much of his life, he did not shrink for the unexciting work necessary to keep it going. For many years he managed the College wing of the English Department when there still was one, and during the campus troubles of 1968 and after, he gave enormous time to the reconstruction of university governance necessary to restore a level of trust.
This local social concern, and his professional interests were cut from the same cloth. Both as a scholar and as a citizen he aimed for a social setting in which one can be fulfilled in a culture where mutual relationships both enrich the self, and make that possible for others. Even those in this community who did not know Quentin personally are fortunate that he was here for so long, and for those of us who did, there are a great many more reasons to celebrate his life.
John Hollander
Learning of Quentin's death made me aware of an ancillary personal misfortune in that I had managed to spend less time in his actual company over the past half century than with any other of the few former teachers about whom I'd cared so much. But a compensation was a kind of lifeline made of the intertwined strands of teaching writing and periodically renewed assurance of his presence that bound so many of his students in such debt to, and affection for, him over all those years.
There are teachers and there are teachers; a few of them form not just a chronological cohort, but an intellectual generation, and for a young thinking person, joining the generation of one's teachers can be a wonderful rite de passage. Quentin Anderson was my teacher who gradually became a friend and a colleague--not in the more parochial sense, but as a confrère in a community of discourse.
But such relations often have modest beginnings. I initially encountered Quentin on my first day of classes as a freshman at Columbia, having spent two days in his Humanities A (now called Lit. Hum.) section before a schedule change moved me out of it--although he did teach me Cervantes, Spinoza, Moilere and Candide in Humanities A-2 the following semester. I remember now his being sharply unimpressed with a silly question I asked; nevertheless, those two days encouraged me to sign up belatedly for his quite advanced course on nineteenth-century American literature--Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, James. For a sixteen-year-old just out of high school, going to college in a group made up mostly of WWII veterans-- (it was like being surrounded by older brothers), the first weeks of this class were a great enigma. Aside from a few Modern Library prefaces and Harry Levin's little book on Joyce, I had read no serious criticism, and the kind of analytic seriousness with which Quentin was discussing these writers--let alone his idiosyncratic critical vocabulary--was puzzling, a little scary and ultimately quite exciting.
Particularly striking--and subsequently deeply affecting--was what was in fact a sort of non-violent deconstruction of Whitman's figures of inclusiveness: it caused me to rethink, as it were, my feelings. Reading The Imperial Self when it first appeared I felt I'd been taught some of its language early on. And then there were diagrams on the blackboard whose legends were "self" and "society"--and a curved arrow projecting Hester Prynne out of the circle of the second of these: I had never heard a work of fiction talked about in this way before, let alone heard such terms as "whore-madonna" albeit having dimly grasped the unnamed concept of same from some of the modern fiction read while in high-school. The quiet animation of his lecturing on "The Beast in the Jungle" returned to me a few years ago on reading through again his preface to his selection of James stories for a Riverside edition.
Long before most of us had read Shelley's "Defense of Poetry" Quentin's teaching--introduced us to a notion of moral imagination that has always remained crucial --although in my case its fabling and parabolic form eventually put me more among what he later called in The Imperial Self the camp of incorporation rather than the one of agency. So much of what he was doing in that splendid book still feels like not-affectionate rebuke. It seemed a fulfillment of the enigmatic ambivalence in the treatment of some of the writers which I felt in that first course in freshman year. And for many decades, the direction my work had taken led me to an understanding of and re-engagement with much of what I could not understand in what he'd been saying back then. Familiar to most teachers who have been at it for a good while is the experience of re-encountering a student from the past one may barely remember and hearing that a casual observation--some pedagogical or even rhetorical throwaway--was had been seized upon and mulled over as if it were a fragment of scripture.
Quentin was a tremendously important teacher for me in several ways. And yet it is seemingly irrelevant bits of discourse that return now. I can remember him genially remarking on "the verbal shocks" of the Gertrude Stein-Virgil Thompson opera, The Mother of Us All, at its premiere in what used to be Brander Mathews Theater. And in that same familiar voice, framing the same casual and amused mode of observation, he commented years later on the sociological ironies attendant upon his buying and enjoying--for driving to New City, I think it was--a large second-hand Cadillac, in which he delightedly drove me down Broadway once. I've always remembered, too, encountering his in the old Lion's Den--this must have been in the fall of 1948--and thrilled that he asked me to join him for coffee, heard him on a variety of subjects I don't recall now. But he then started to comment on the case of Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers, which was hot news at the moment, and I was perplexed anew. Quentin was talking as if it were quite possible that Hiss--not Chambers--had been lying. But Quentin, I knew, was one of the good people; and the good people weren't supposed to think like that. I hid my startled sentiments at the time, but brooded on the inadvertently presented lesson for years thereafter.
I can still see Quentin standing in this very space almost exactly thirty years ago--at a memorial service for Mark Van Doren, and hear him observe with a familiar touch of obliquity that "Mark was an unedited text". Brooding subsequently about all of what he might have meant kept making me recall more things about both Mark and Quentin--whom I hadn't seen for some time--than I'd thought I'd remembered. Quentin's own mode of rhetorical skepticism baffles any attempt to propound an analogous trope about himself today. Even more, the literal sound of his own speaking voice overwhelms us with the peculiar resonance of a remembered voice that we know we will never hear save in the frozen echoes of acoustical reproduction. One can still hear what Robert Frost called "the sentence sound" of his thought, coming off the page or otherwise recalled--that quiet reflective tone, almost ponderous for being heavily pensive but so often lightened by laughter.
Michael Rosenthal
For young preceptors and instructors in the College English Department in the mid-sixties, there were few things more terrifying than Quentin Anderson. The grounds for our terror were many. In the first place, he appeared physically immense, a formidable, unapproachable bastion of seriousness. And then there was the marvelous, stentorian voice. Quentin never seemed simply to speak. He pronounced, he declaimed, he uttered-truths of such an elusive, complex sort that we would struggle mightily to interpret them. Quentin, let's be frank, did not excel at small talk. Meeting him on the street or in the hallway would invariably trigger crises of confidence about the appropriateness of an academic career for ourselves: how can we think about being professors if we can't understand what Quentin is saying? Developing a workable Quentinian hermeneutics became a necessary Hamilton Hall survival skill. What was it he meant, and how could we be so slow to grasp its meaning? In my own case, I remember a year or two into my analysis telling my analyst, as I lay on the couch, that I had just gotten a phone call from Professor Anderson in which I thought he had offered me a position as a preceptor, but I wasn't sure. I could feel the analyst's pleasure at discovering the neurotic block, which effectively prevented me from accepting my own success. "What did Professor Anderson say?" he gently asked, eager to demonstrate the distorting mechanisms at work in my pathology. I quoted the entire conversation to him exactly as it had occurred. He was silent. I felt affirmed. He had no idea if I had gotten the job either.
Years later, long after fear had turned to love and Quentin had become someone I revered, I confessed to him-in fact, only several years ago-that as fledgling members of the Department we had all been scared of him. He chortled at the news, and along with the twinkle, which I am quite certain that I detected in his eyes, made me certain that he had always suspected as much, even if he would never have admitted knowing. He responded that he had learned early the impression that a powerful, well-modulated voice could create. He then conferred upon me a precious gift, the revelation that he had always been scared silly of Marjorie Hope Nicholson, the feisty English Department chairman known as "Miss Nicky". Suddenly, part of the psychic baggage I had always carried with me vanished: if Quentin could be scared, it was all right for the rest of us to be as well.
Myths abounded, of course. My personal favorite was Quentin, puffing his pipe in a Humanities class, delivering himself of a particularly profound assessment of Oedipus-or was it Lear? -and then disappearing in a cloud of tobacco smoke. But behind the formidable, occasionally enigmatic exterior, we soon came to understand, lurked the nourishing presence of an even more formidable mensch , who always understood more than he let on and was always willing to be there for you. We all learned rapidly that Quentin was someone you could trust. I recall a particularly dicey time Peter Pouncey and I were having as College deans in the early 70s. A professor in the English Department had gone off his medication and was terrorizing the students in his classes. They came to us in search of a remedy, which did not appear forthcoming from anywhere else. After some effort, we managed, while keeping him on salary, to remove him temporarily from the classroom. Needless to say, we were reviled by the faculty for infringing on the rights of a professor (no one seeming particularly exercised about the rights of the students). Statements of censure and cries for deanly heads were being readied at an English Department meeting when Quentin rose to speak. No one else could have managed his magisterial formulation, and it has remained with me ever since, "I invite a moment's compassion," he said, putting an end to the Departmental frenzy, "for two young Deans trying to do what they conceive of as their duty." Its genius, of course, lay in its ability to deflect the assault on us without revealing his own judgment of what we had done.
Quentin always struck me as a man who had an unerring ability to see life steadily and see it whole. He exuded a moral authority one rarely encounters-which is no doubt why he was picked to be on every conceivable college and university committee. Whether the issue was university discipline or co-education, you wanted to be sure, as you went into administrative battle, that you had Anderson's integrity and courage on your side.
Quentin never resented the University's exploitation of his time and energy because he understood it as the price one had to pay for membership in a community. He wrote passionately about the dangers of that imperial self which sought, in his words, to 'withdraw affect from the collective life" in the interests of all-consuming individual consciousness. In Quentin's life, as in his thought, he rejected all temptation to flee social and moral complexity for a comforting narcissism. Exploring writers with large egos, he certainly had a healthy one himself. But from the time I first knew Quentin, he made me feel that as teachers and scholars we were engaged in an enterprise larger that any one of us, and more important than any kudos we might earn in our careers. As a man I always thought had his priorities on straight, Quentin helped me shape mine as well.
Quentin once told me that he had a sign affixed in his study-"Keep it big"-as he worked on one of his books. I always took it to mean that he should avoid the inconsequential and petty, take risks, stay focused on what is important, remain open to complicating ideas, no matter how inconvenient they might be. I think Quentin succeeded in following his exhortation. He was a big man who lived a big life. The world seems smaller to me for his absence.
Alan H. Anderson
A span of ninety years is a lot to boil down to a few minutes. At least I can spare you the first five and a half years before I was born and a couple more until I was big enough to run around and get in his way. At that point, when I was two and a half, my big brother had an awful accident that was to affect the rest of his life. Reconstructed from the tales I heard later on, it happened in the summer of 1919.
We were living in a rented house in Grand View on the Hudson on the steep western shore of the river. Q was a strong, happy, seven year old, running through the woods playing cowboys and Indians with a couple of pals - brandishing a knife he found in the kitchen drawer. He tripped on the rough ground and fell on the knife which plunged into his thigh.
Mother and Dad were at home when the scream shattered their quiet Sunday. Our next-door neighbor had a car and they helped get Q to the Nyack Hospital. The wound was so deep in the thigh that it threatened his leg. When they managed to get the bleeding under control, the surgeon pulled Dad away from mother's ears and said he was terribly sorry, but the damage was so bad, he could not save the leg. Evidently the doctor didn't know who he dealing with. My father stared at him and said you get back in there and save his leg and don't waste another minute talking. It made a good story and it certainly fits our old man. When he was aroused, he was - how should I say it - adamant. And they did save Q's leg. It was never as big and strong as the other one but it was blessed far cry from the alternative.
Q had to spend weeks in the hospital and mother was with him most of the time. She found books in the Nyack Library to read to him or that he could read which he did more and more. Reading got to be a habit with Q. Many of the hours he used to spend running and playing were now used for reading.
That winter, we moved to Greenwich Village but we still spent summer in Grand View. Our family grew and Q now had two little brothers. Terence was born in 1921. In the spring, we bought a house in Rockland County with a brook and we piled stones across the stream to make a tiny pond and Quentin started swimming. It was good for the healing leg and swimming was to be, from then on, his best and favorite exercise.
Two years later Dad wrote What Price Glory?, which was an instant Broadway hit. He enlarged the house and put in a real cement dam and the Anderson pond became the neighborhood favorite for everyone, big and little - most of all, for Q. He became an excellent swimmer. Little brothers love to tease big brothers and then scamper off. I soon learned better than to tease my big, genial brother when we were swimming. I had no trouble out-running him on land. But in the pool he caught me easily and gave me a good dunking.
Q kept running out of reading material and the library was ten miles away. Mother suggested he walk the quarter mile up to Amy Murray's house. Amy was a dear, elderly Scottish poet that mother and dad knew from Greenwich Village. She welcomed Q and pointed him at all the bookcases and piles of magazines in her living room. Q started visiting Amy regularly that summer and spent hours every day, lying on the floor, books and magazines all around him.
When Quentin discovered trout in the stream that ran through our valley he became an avid fly fisherman - and found many companions and kept up the sport until recent years when it was hard for him to walk the rough stream beds.
In his last high school years, Q discovered young and beautiful 18-year-old Margaret Pickett and they fell in love. She was very sweet to Q's younger brothers and she became a fixture in our lives. A couple of years later, in February 1931, our mother died of a stroke and Dad remarried and built another house in the woods behind the pond, and moved into it with his new wife. Dad suggested to Quentin that if he and Meg were to marry, there was a house waiting for them to live in that happened to have a swimming pond and two younger brothers to keep him company. It was hard for Quentin and Meg to refuse a house. They were promptly married, underrating what was involved in being surrogate parents. I'm sure that they tried very hard. I'm also sure that Terry and I were what you might call - a handful. Q and Meg struggled along with the arrangements. Dad was thoroughly distracted by his new wife and his playwriting career. It wasn't good for the marriage of Q and Meg. It wasn't particularly good for Terry and Alan. The war interrupted everything finally.
I received my draft notice, Q and Meg had a daughter, Nancy and I married, I left for the Army, and Nancy and I had our first son, Alan Jr. Then I was away in the Army until November, 1945. So I lost sight of Q. I heard long distance of his divorce and the beginning of his career at Columbia.
Looking back on it, that hunger for reading that began in the hospital when he was seven, I think it must have started Q on a journey which dominated the rest of his life - through Lincoln School, Dartmouth, Harvard and Columbia. Of Quentin's career as teacher and writer, you will already have heard richly this morning.
By the time I caught up with Q again, the war had ended; it was the winter of 1945. We were living on South Mountain Road and I was looking for work. Q had had another accident that summer, when I was still in the Pacific. This was a happy accident.
Q had taken a bus to Cape Cod. When he reached Orleans, he went into a bar next door to make a phone call when a young woman drew him into a discussion about which bus to take from there to wherever they wanted to go. When they boarded the bus to their destination, lo and behold, the young lady sat right next to him and engaged him in conversation. At least, that's her story. They have quarreled ever since about what really happened. My dear sister-in-law, then known as Thelma Ehrlich, insists that it was she who picked him up and not the other way around. The fact that they each claim credit for the meeting is less important than the outcome - a love affair and a superb marriage just two years later. Thelma gave Q something which had disappeared from his life-the whole sense of family. In her family he saw mothers and fathers and children and uncles and cousins with loving interdependence that was nurturing beyond anything he had experienced.
Nancy and I had bought the old family house; Quentin and Thelma built a house across the road from where Amy Murray once lived; Terry and his wife and sons were living in a house near Dad and his wife and his daughter, Hesper. We were all close neighbors.
Q and Thelma had a joyous life together. It was with her that his life at Columbia grew stronger and stronger, generating the enormous respect, admiration, and affection of his students and colleagues.
The next glorious thing that Thelma did was to give Q two wonderful sons who grew up in the same beautiful valley Dad and Mother had discovered in 1921.
The lives we had - three boys - three families - in that valley - were precious. Our closeness to Q and Thel grew constantly through the years. Increasingly so when he retired and they lived between the city comfort of Claremont Avenue and their house - close to us in the woods on South Mountain Road. Whenever we greeted each other - Q with his beautiful rumbling - Hi, Al - with his big hand taking mine - his smile and special way of saying Nancy - which seemed to say - how pretty you are - there was a secure feeling among us - of contentment. And when I heard Quentin say "Thel" it was full of his devotion - their shared love and mutual dependence - the flowering of
their life - their two sons and the joy of a grandson, and his mother - Jacquie.
All of it was a miracle to my dear Big Brother Q.
Abraham B. Anderson
I don't have much to say about Dad in my own person right now. Instead I thought I'd read you some extracts from some reminiscences he wrote in the early nineties. The first is a portrait of a neighbor and friend, Millia Davenport, whom we spoke of by her married name and nickname, as Billy Harkavy. The second is a story from Dad's adolescence about bootleggers and gambling in the town of Haverstraw in the thirties.
Billy Davenport
"A face broad and open, a body stocky and flat-chested, a countenance fully attentive, which was yet without expressive force; a welcoming greeting was not a prelude to personal address but introductory to what was being done, seen, tasted, discovered in a world shared with you and others. Supreme mistress of appearances; if she spoke of characters they were at one remove from both of you; she had a naturalist's eye for oddities and took pleasure in them as she did in everything that manifested itself with salience. A woman, yes, but I found myself unable to think of her as somebody's deeply committed lover, since that would entail a capacity for variability of which she gave no sign though it was easy to imagine that she showed her gusto in making love as she did in everything else, flowers, good cooking, clothes--she was author of the most heavily-thumbed book on costume the Metropolitan Museum offered its readers. An extraordinarily even temperament without a shade of malignity. I never encountered exaltation or distress, which doesn't of course mean that her way of being herself never varied, but only that if it did she didn't want it to show.
"What a vade mecum she was! I couldn't carry her about like a book but when I saw her or telephoned, she unfolded resources I found staggering, ranging from plumbers to phlox, to say nothing of a fund of recollection fascinating to a youngster absorbed in books. Calder's famous circus of wire and cloth was something she had seen in Paris when newly made; Isadora Duncan's brother Dougie was a presence on her terrace, togged out in a brown robe and sandals. The woman who figured as Lady Brett in The Sun also Rises had been a daily afternoon visitor, come for the tot of Scotch she couldn't provide for herself. I came to regret many questions I hadn't asked Billy, as she was known to us. Questions, say, about the Provincetown Theatre for which she had designed sets and costumes, questions about her childhood and the human geneticist, her father Davenport, who worked in the period of the Jukes and Kallikaks, and was all for breeding to improve the human race, a tall and imposing bearded man whom I had once met as a child.
"What I often recall about her talk is her accounts of the people who worked for her about the place. The tall white-bearded handyman, with the face of a defeated nobleman, who was often seen doing nothing in particular on the streets of New City was one of these. One day she told me that he lived in a shack next to a large pile of beer bottles which he never bothered to return. How had he become addicted to alcohol? Billy's account was brief and vivid. As an adolescent youngster he had contracted pneumonia, and one of the Roberts boys had given him a drink of whisky in what was believed to be a curative effort. Billy described this as the fatal moment in Johnny's life: 'He just loved it,' she said, and drink became Johnny's fate, although he was happy to work for her in order to obtain more of those big green bottles which rose ever higher beside his shack."
Discovering Politics
"Waldemar Juers and I were adolescents at liberty in the depths of the depression. The chestnut trees still standing as skeleton relics of the blight in the woods made good firewood, and our one work venture was to cut a number for sale. Waldy had some training as a chemist; he built a still, and we combined sugar and raisins to make an unholy brew. We also visited a little saloon in Haverstraw, whose chatty owner cum bartender gave us a good glimpse of the goings on in this old river town in which the principal industry was brick making. Many blacks had been drawn north to work in the brickyards. The industry was declining and the town was correspondingly shabby and run down.
"The gossip I remember gave us some glimpses of local life. Jim Farley, Roosevelt's Postmaster General and political fixer, was the great man of the neighborhood. His brother was County Sheriff, and we learned from our mentor that Rockland's hundreds of illegal slot machines had his protection. There were occasional incursions from New Jersey and the saloonkeeper told us of one such attempt to lift one of his machines by invading Jerseymen. Notified that one of his machines had been picked up by a car with Jersey plates, he had stopped mowing his lawn, strapped on a gun, and driven by a likely short cut to try to head off the hijackers. Succeeding, he pulled his gun and ordered them to turn around. Where did he take them? Why to the Haverstraw police station, not to be charged but to get an appropriate beating and let go with a warning.
"Another anecdote had a fairy tale ring. A local bootlegger, hauled in for questioning in a Manhattan revenue bureau, had a piece of unusual good luck. In the momentary absence of the official who was dealing with him, he glimpsed an order on his interrogator's desk to knock off a carload of beer from Canada which was due to be delivered to a railroad siding in Haverstraw on that very evening. When two revenue agents stepped off the train they were firmly invited to remain in the locked station while all the suitable vehicles in town, including a hearse, were employed to unload the beer- laden car in a hurry and dispose of the contents in a secure location."
Maxwell L. Anderson
I will always think of my father as a Mountain Man, happiest in the woods and in his chair by the fireplace after a day of clearing brush and splitting wood. It's hard to match the imposing, cerebral professor who had a similar chair on Claremont Avenue with a kid born in North Dakota in 1912, but he was of course a product of that time and place. For my sister Martha, my brother Brom and me, born into stable middle-class comfort, the tales of his volatile Depression-era life, with a tangle of privations and luxuries, were exotic and abstract.
For my wife Jacqueline and our son Chase, the man whose basso profundo voice echoed around us was a tender, caring family man. And for all of us today, he was a man whose accomplishments are clear, but whose personal modesty took turns with strong views on life and literature.
For his sons, he was the bear of a man who valiantly struggled to read us, in French, the Adventures of Tintin, while our mother toiled in a Toulouse kitchen to clean up after dinner. He was the stay-at-home dad making meatloaf sandwiches when we returned Stateside in the early 60's and my mother went back to work as a specialist in the field of market research and advertising, filling Quentin's ample chest with pride. His successive book-lined studies, two on Morningside Drive and the third and last on Claremont Avenue, were pipe-smoke-filled retreats, where he read and wrote. But our country home in Rockland County was in truth his preferred locale.
There my brother and I dutifully and grudgingly undertook the many projects that he designed to fill our summers and build our character. With sledgehammers we smashed red rock to shore up the long driveway from South Mountain Road into the woods. He had us help lay culvert to drain the plateau our house was on. Under his watchful eye, we felled trees, pruned branches, cleared the woods with our Gravely tractor, dug ditches, shoveled gravel, split wood, house-painted, and earned our stripes as mountain boys in training.
Occasionally he would roust one or both of us at 4:30, with a thermos of hot chocolate, and we would set out for a day of trout fishing upstate on Cranberry Lake. We would tie the LL Bean wooden canoe on the roof of his beloved Peugeot, and set off in the darkness. These were the happiest times of my childhood, and my mother still delights in recounting how with a trout rod I haplessly snagged a snapping turtle masquerading as a fish.
When we were little, we thought it was exotic to have a privy in the woods and summer in a tent from an Army-Navy store, adjacent to the house bought right out of a Macy's toy department. It would be remodeled and added to over the years, but that early experience was romantic and exciting. The privy became the Tool Shed, one of my father's favorite haunts, filled with rasps, saws, hammers, and machines devoted to taming the same nature he reveled in through the writings of Thoreau. The tool shed was beside the garbage pails where raccoons had their nightly contest with my dad's skills at securing the lids. When the coons prevailed, the next morning you could hear his curses a mile away.
The 4th of July brought magical moments year in year out. We made ice cream and lemon ice by hand, turning the crank of a wooden bucket. A dash of bourbon was reserved for the lemon ice of the grown-ups who wanted it. The culmination was, in the summer sun, to hear Quentin read the Declaration of Independence from the back of The New York Times, as bees buzzed around us and all present sat in silent wonder at his passionate evocation of this two-century-old document.
But even in the woods, my father would spend ample time in a very modest cabin. There I would come padding down the path to steal him back to the house for lunch, past his beloved ice-cold spring brimming with watercress. I miss those walks with him--often in silence, but always filled with love.
There are too many anecdotes in a life of ninety years for today. Quentin loved tennis, even with a game leg from a childhood accident, and relished playing with his brother Alan, whom you've met, and with us. During the first weekend in May, we would have a dozen family friends join in a hunt for morels that grew wild in our seven acres of woods, and after basketfuls were brought back to the house, the mushrooms were sautéed and served up with chilled wine. Every Christmas for over twenty years some thirty members of our family came to Rockland County for dinner, feasting on Thelma's goose, ham, and pies.
As I grew up, and my friends including Oliver Conant and Fred Smoler would be welcomed into this rustic setting, I came to realize how lucky we were. Even when Oliver and I broke a bottle of home-made punch in a rucksack and pulled a small sink off the wall while trying to rinse out the odor of alcohol, my dad quietly made room for adolescence. For me the greatest comfort is that his grandson Chase got to know and love his Poppy, and that his daughter-in-law Jacqueline brought him hope for the future. Which I know he would want all of us to have.
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Ushers
Peter Clark
Oliver Conant
Abraham Ehrlich
Alina Hamza
Onwuchekwa Jemie
Fredric P. Smoler
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