Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (31 page)

Sarah’s parents struck a glamorous pose: her mother was beautiful enough to compete in pageants, and her father was dapper. Sarah’s father and uncle, business partners and best friends who took their daily stroll through Paris streets, rebuilt the family fortunes, with a special affection for the shady paths of the Bois de Boulogne and the alleys of the Quartier latin. But as war approached, Sarah’s father had a premonition; having endured pogroms and war in the Russian borderlands, he did not want to face more. In 1939, he gathered his family and belongings and set sail for New York. He loathed it from the start. All that noise and dirt! All those crowds! This was nothing like the elegance of their apartment and arrondissement in Paris. So he and his brother pulled up stakes again and headed for Californian sunshine; there they found a house large enough to accommodate two families in Beverly Hills. It also came with a swimming pool, where a future son-in-law would practice his headstands. In that quiet suburban paradise they stayed put.

In Sarah, Albert found a kindred spirit. They spoke French with each other, finding in language some refuge from a culture of which they were a part but with which they did not identify. They shared a love of French and Russian literature, and Albert was only too willing to induct her into an appreciation of “the Germans,” especially Kafka and Goethe. Between them, they could heal the dividedness of being European in America. He also found a complementary spirit. If Albert was reserved, Sarah was outgoing; if he was “a little in the clouds” (as Fry put it), she was engaged. It did not take long for them to appear as a couple, to become, as one old friend noted, “toujours les Hirschmans!”
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Within eight weeks of meeting her, Hirschman proposed marriage. She accepted. They arranged to travel to Los Angeles to meet her parents
in April. There was other business to take care of, too. Shortly before the wedding, Hirschman contacted the Rockefeller Foundation to apprise them of the news and inquiring about an additional family allowance, which yielded a further $30 monthly installment to his stipend.
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He also wrote to Ursula, with pictures of Sarah, and got her endorsement. At first, she refused. Ursula was alarmed that he should so quickly set up a home in the United States and was not just a bit suspicious about this unvetted woman. Determined, Albert sought a rapprochement, slyly observing that “you begged me not to get married with an American woman—the accent it seems to me was rather on the American woman than on married life itself.”
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Luckily, Sarah was not American, a point which he stressed. Ursula was only too pleased to appreciate her brother’s distinction: “She has a baby face of such sweetness and kindness and such a surprising grace in her composure that I felt instantly like friends and related to her, and I wish you are always good to her and never make her suffer.”
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The wedding, held on June 22, 1941, was a modest, civil ceremony. The best man was Albert’s old friend from Berlin, Peter Franck, now relocated to the Bay Area. Sarah’s parents, uncle, and aunt also attended. They all piled into several cars and headed for the Berkeley town hall. As they drove, they could see the newsstands with papers blaring the latest headlines: “GERMANY INVADES USSR!” Albert pleaded to stop the car so they could get the newspapers: “I just wanted to get out and read the news!” The wedding was suddenly a lesser detail. Sarah was more confused than upset—her parents prevailed upon Albert to focus on the ceremony. When it was over, they all went to dinner at an old inn in Oakland. The next day, Albert caught up with the events in Europe.
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Being non-American in America was bonding; their secession from Europe resolved itself not by their imagining themselves in exile, not as castaways, but rather as partners of, and in, the world, who happened to be in America. Though they stabilized and comforted each other, the question of where they belonged in the world remained an open one—and became a current of their relationship. In the meantime, marriage affected how they related to their milieu. The union of these two displaced persons who found themselves almost arbitrarily dropped down in Berkeley
reinforced the isolation that Hirschman was creating for himself. “I shut myself off from the immediate contact with the American world by becoming married to a European, and so I associated mainly with other Europeans.”
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“The first weeks of our marriage,” Albert told Ursula, “were spent in the most splendid isolation.” “With nature, Sarah, and books, I feel very autarkic.”
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One thing Albert did not do was seize upon their union to disgorge memories of the past. In their isolation, Albert chose not to share many of his trials. Sarah detected his distinct reluctance to talk about his past and quickly learned not to press him hard. One might have thought that the privacy and intimacy would give him the security to open up; he felt no such compulsion. Though Sarah remained curious and mystified, the darker parts of his past were memories he would share—if at all—only with time. Some did, in increments, come to the surface, often prompted by reminders from Europe. When Albert received his first letter from Eugenio since his arrest in September 1938, he was both euphoric and dispirited. Writing to Sarah, who was visiting her family in May 1941, he exclaimed, “What a letter!” and told her of his longing to talk with Eugenio once more: “I have the impression that his intellectual activity has recovered completely … and he is formulating his ideas in physics and is sure that he is on a fertile track.… He then writes to me about Nietzsche, Kafka, Huxley and also a book on economics [Lionel Robbins] that he wants to discuss with me! Do you understand how much this consoles me, how much this delivers me from certain anxieties and yet revives the pain I feel for being separated from them?” He confessed that he was left feeling “enraged sentimentally and depressed intellectually.”
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But if Albert was reticent to unload his personal experiences, he was not so about sharing his love of books. Sarah, who was studying philosophy, brought what she was learning to their home. And Albert—while leaving his political economy at the office and library—reciprocated with poetry. He would read or recite Goethe by heart in German and then translate it for Sarah’s benefit into French, the lingua franca of their marriage. Sarah had the distinct feeling that this was part of her preparation for being his wife, like the Russian doctor who could not find a wife and
so became a lady’s man, justifying his dalliances with nurses by claiming that he could only have affairs because none of them had read
War and Peace
. Sarah would laugh, “So Albert took a terrible chance because he got married to me and I had not read
Faust
!” Listening to his adoration of Goethe, she did, however, get the sense that he was sharing a more precious disclosure than self-centered stories of his deeds and dangers. And whether it was Gustave Flaubert’s depiction of the curves of Emma’s body, or the psychic vocabulary of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ epistolary
Dan gerous Liaisons
, she was also getting an immediate immersion in Albert’s fascination with words; not just any word, but rather the mot juste.
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Among the authors they shared, a special place belongs to Gustave Flaubert; he was in many respects,
their
author. Between the
Correspondences
and the novels, Flaubert’s psychological realism and stylistic insistence on the mot juste deepened the exilic bond between Sarah and Albert. And for bringing Flaubert back into his life, Albert was grateful to Sarah. “I acknowledge you,” he wrote to his bride on the eve of their wedding, “for having fortified in me a rationalist element … for I have returned all your books [to the library] except for Flaubert, who excites me once more.” He explained, a bit elliptically to someone reading the epistle decades later, that Flaubert had helped Albert get over a difficult past: “The subject of the eruption of irrational elements (in the form of superstition) in the life of a young man raised in a species of skeptical rationalism (a rationalism that is neither solution nor panacea but the most relatively effective way of orienting), a position towards which one returns, more or less, after the crisis.”
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Their autarky had a home. Not only did Hirschman bolt from International House, but after getting married, they found a small house on Highland Place at the foot of Charter Hill. Their backdoor gave on to fields—beyond which was the ridge where the physicist Ernest Lawrence was having his famous cyclotron built. In a tiny Arts and Crafts bungalow, edged with bamboo and with a single bedroom and a minute kitchen, they lived at the furthest edges of the Berkeley campus at a gateway to the trails into the hills. Sarah, meanwhile, took up more and more the domestic side. This did not come naturally—in a family with servants,
there had been little tutoring at home, and Albert described her labors in the kitchen as “experimental” and “original.” “Her duties as a housewife she accomplishes in an impeccable manner,” he assured Ursula. When they went to see her parents, he boasted that Sarah had managed to make homemade plum jam.
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Sarah may have been an un-American wife, but Albert was happy to have her teach him that most American of necessities: driving. This appears to have strained her composure somewhat. He was a bad driver. Worse, he liked to drive. The same dreaminess that tortured Varian Fry afflicted his skills behind the wheel. “I do it so well that each time I take the car alone as soon as I arrive at a destination I have to call her because I do not know how to put it among two other cars on the sidewalk,” he confessed. In this fashion, the experimental cook and the inattentive driver made a life together.
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The Charter Hill house was also the hub of a new social life, for neither Albert nor Sarah had roots in Berkeley. But it was very tight; they relied most of all upon each other for companionship. Among their closest friends were William and Ann Steinhoff, who lived nearby and with whom they shared many dinners and outings to concerts at Mills College, where the Budapest Quartet was in residence. That season, it performed the entire cycle of Beethoven quartets. It was the Steinhoffs who introduced the Hirschmans to the world of recorded classical music. Evenings would be spent listening to a mountain of 78-rpm albums. From there, Albert discovered the radio. He became an addict. “On the radio here you can hear every day from 8 to 10 in the evening the best concerts on records,”he exclaimed to his sister, “really excellent programs; for this reason we have abandoned the idea of having a phonograph given to us.” The radio introduced Albert to a whole world of music that had not been an important part of his cultural life in Berlin. Berkeley tranquility allowed him to “discover a bit late Tchaikovsky and especially Brahms, whose music seems to me particularly mature and conscious.” But just to be sure that his preferences were still straight, he emphasized to Ursula that they were “to be compared with Flaubert in literature, for whom I have maintained a predilection.” Indeed, what monies they squirreled away allowed
them “to reconstitute the beginnings of a library.” This rebuilding was something Albert relished as part of his new domestic stability. “It is very difficult to find books not in English, and the hunt for them is very fun.” Difficult, but not impossible, for some of San Francisco’s first department stores were founded by French owners and had leftover French library collections. Albert and Sarah would troll the secondhand book shops of San Francisco on Saturdays, picking up classics, especially nineteenth-century French literature, Goethe, Kafka—in short the bibliographic amalgamation of their readings from Berlin, Paris, and Trieste.
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Making a home together, sharing music and poetry, building a personal library—all helped Albert and Sarah create an integrated life so far from where they had come. The German philosopher, Theodor Adorno, once observed that “for a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live.” In this sense, Berkeley was not so much home as the place where Hirschman could write and thereby make a home with Sarah, a home composed of and by words.

Their assembled lives and shared passion for belle-lettriste books gave Albert an intellectual space that he had not known since his conversations with Eugenio. “You must read,” he told Sarah, “Julien Benda’s
La trahison des clercs
.”
La Trahison
—a blistering assault on French and German intellectuals who spurned (in Benda’s view) a classical heritage of dispassionate inquiry to become apologists for nationalism, jingoism, and war—struck Albert as “a contemporary document of utmost importance (and
adorable
for its partiality).” It was precisely Benda’s lament for a lost world that that reminded Albert of what, intellectually, he had left behind. What Benda thought European intellectuals had abandoned, Albert could revive in miniature, at home. In this setting, Albert began to pen his petites idées. “I have an idea (a little one, to be sure) concerning what we spoke of yesterday,” he wrote. “I am struck at the moment by certain parallelisms in modern thought in different disciplines.” People have a tendency to consider aesthetics, political economy, ethics, and philosophy as “certain aspects of each person’s acts or human behavior.” From this comes “the complete separation of the disciplines from the
ends
implied by different human activities.” Political economy, as we shall see, was
uppermost in his mind and “has no longer any purpose as the
utility
or Material Welfare but is solely concerned with applying the most rational means for ends that are imagined outside it [
désignés du dehors
].” The result was, for Albert, an “absurd” conclusion in which “we ask
politics
, the sciences of
means
par excellence to formulate the ends by which political economy, ethics, etc. will render themselves accordingly as the
serviteurs affairs
.” Which brought Albert back to Julien Benda: “Here you have the abdication, the treason of the intellectuals in a new sense, I think, and we can explain it partially by the development of this hybrid position of intellectuals in the modern world: neither masters, nor prosecuted, but technicians.” For him, the abdication, the refusal to put politics alongside other human affairs and its study integrated with other disciplines, led intellectuals to recuse themselves from asking basic questions about “the thirst for power and domination” as ends in themselves. “Fascism is
politi caillerie
on a giant scale.” “Why dominate? Fascism will not survive the moment in which we have found the leisure [
loisir
] to pose this question.” This was the fundamental question he posed to himself in the “leisure” of his marriage as he created a home for his writing.
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