American Philosophy (22 page)

I walked to the center of the library and looked up at the portraits I'd encountered on my first visit to West Wind. Ernest and Agnes faced each other from across the foyer. They weren't looking down at me at all. They were looking at each other.

I shifted past the table where Carol was working and returned to my desk. I could barely see her where she sat behind the piles of philosophy, but I could see that she and I were of one mind about this place. It was our library now—we could be kicked out, it could be sold or destroyed or forever lost, but it would remain ours. As she shifted the books from one shelf to another, I was moved to believe that a person, even a philosopher, could, in the words of Gabriel Marcel, “surmount solipsism.” Carol had rearranged the library, and it, in turn, continued to rearrange me. I agreed with Hocking: “The lover widens his experience as the non-lover cannot. He adds to the mass of his idea-world, and acquires thereby enhanced power to appreciate all things.” There was a reason why Dante didn't make the long journey toward salvation all by himself, why Virgil and Beatrice had to accompany the poet. It's because salvation can't be accomplished in isolation.

 

ON THE STEPS

Writing
The Meaning of God
was not a solitary project. Agnes had helped her husband draft it and often referred to the chapter on prayer as “my chapter.” It was the last one, and I was now ashamed to admit I'd only skimmed it. In fact, it wasn't just about prayer, but about “prayer
and its answer
,” prayer being the active and deliberate form of worship, its answer being the passive, effortless reception of the divine. “The best known of all experiences of [this] mystic type is that of discovering the individuality of another person.” The basis of prayer had nothing to do with folding your hands and speaking into the void. It had to do with falling in love. “At times,” Agnes wrote, “we are granted something like a mystic vision: it seems that we come into the presence of the individual and have seen the miracle as such.” It was absolutely quiet in the library, save for the occasional sound of Carol turning her pages of Kant. I didn't look up, but I could picture her with a vividness that the rest of life somehow lacked: “The vision in fact begins to work upon us,” the Hockings explained. “We cannot forget it: we no longer attend to it with voluntary effort, but it forms a part of our consciousness and begins to make us over after its own pattern, as if it were active and we were plastic before it.”

I flipped to the end of the book: 586 pages. It took a lot of words to overcome solipsism. The volume barely fit in the desk drawer. I was about to put it back, but before I did, I performed a ritual I'd learned during my time at West Wind: I grabbed
The Meaning of God
gently by the spine, turned it over, and shook it in case something was left or intentionally tucked inside. A carbon copy, folded in quarters, slipped out of the back. It wasn't an original letter, but Hocking, or perhaps his son Richard, had taken the time to duplicate it before shipping it off to the archives at Harvard. It was from Robert Frost.

Frost had visited the Hockings in April 1915 and had at that point picked up a copy of Hocking's magnum opus, which he called a “feat of poetry.” And he gives a suitably poetic comparison: “Let me say,” Frost began, “in Tennyson's poetry what it reminds me of:
‘A ninth wave gathering all the deep / And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged / Roaring, and all the wave was in a flame: / And down the wave and in the flame was borne'
Well. Something Incarnate. It is the humanity of it all—the insight.” Incarnate. Like freedom, togetherness, happiness incarnate. At the end of the letter Frost ribbed Hocking for the weightiness of
The Meaning of God
, writing, “Let me thank you for so
much
book … You mustn't smile when you see the size of the book I am sending in return.”

There was really only one book that Frost could have sent in 1915, the one Yeats had called “the best poetry written in America in a long time.”
A Boy's Will
, Frost's first collection of poetry. It had been published in Britain in 1913 and in the States two years later. It had to be here. I called out to Carol, and we looked for it everywhere. Behind file cabinets, in the eaves, under the stairs. After an hour we gave up and she went back to her Kant. The Frost wasn't in the library. It also, to my dismay, was not in the inventory of stolen books that the FBI had compiled upon arresting the man from Berkeley. I flopped down on the chesterfield to mourn the loss of a masterpiece, when I realized it must be in the house.

I was out the door before Carol could ask where I was going. There were bookcases on the first floor of West Wind; they were reserved for family heirlooms and poetry. By now I'd been given keys and free rein over large parts of the estate, but entering an empty house that was not my own still evoked the strange sensation of trespassing. I entered slowly and moved through a surprisingly small kitchen into the two large sitting rooms that overlooked the mountains. The spaces were magnificent, beautifully proportioned. And nothing had been moved in a century. A grand piano loomed in the darkness. From the library, I'd heard Penny's husband playing Chopin many afternoons. The rooms smelled a bit like cool old leather.

The books were tucked behind the French doors that separated the two parlors—two narrow built-ins, stuffed with poetry. I scanned slowly, but found nothing. I'd worked through the second shelf and got to the bottom one when I found what I was looking for in blue cloth, gilt.
A Boy's Will
. I flipped to the flyleaf: “Prof. & Mrs. Hocking from Robert Frost with thanks for their book.” Frost's words are famous for their understated power, their ability to convey a great deal in a mere gesture. I'd never thought that the word “their” could mean so much.
The Meaning of God
had been “their” book, “their” task. I later found out that Agnes had insisted that her husband rewrite the introduction a dozen times. She probably wrote much of the conclusion. The Hockings' book was not an argument against solipsism. It was a demonstration, a performance of intersubjectivity, one that I now desperately wanted to try. I sat down on the tight spiral staircase Hocking had designed and built. I opened up to Frost's “Revelation,” a little poem that echoed the basic message of Hocking's massive philosophical project:

We make ourselves a place apart

Behind light words that tease and flout,

But oh, the agitated heart

Till someone find us really out.

Most cloistered misanthropes have the secret desire to be heard. We keep it secret out of fear or anger or anxiety, but it bothers us no end. We want to be found out, even, and perhaps especially, when we're most hidden. Frost, another American thinker plagued by depression, knew this all too well. He closed “Revelation” with two seemingly optimistic couplets:

But so with all, from babes that play

At hide-and-seek to God afar,

So all who hide too well away

Must speak and tell us where they are.

The words seemed hopeful—too hopeful—for Frost. He had eventually come out of emotional hiding and, in 1895, proposed to Elinor Miriam White. She accepted, which initiated a series of events that showed how tragedy can occur even on the path of revelation. The Frosts' first son, Elliot, died of cholera in 1904, at the age of seven; they buried their infant daughter, Elinor, three years later. Their daughter Marjorie caught puerperal fever after childbirth, and died at the age of twenty-nine. Carol, their remaining son, killed himself in 1940. Frost, who lived until 1963, endured all of this. I'd heard that Frost was hard to get along with. At least he had a good excuse. Sometimes the best-intentioned revelations can lead to the most disastrous consequences.

I looked down at the page and saw something very strange. I hadn't turned on a light after letting myself in, and I had struggled to scan the shelves, but I was somehow able to read Frost. The staircase was the brightest spot in the house; the stairs curled around and ended on the second-floor landing. But it didn't look that way. From where I sat, they appeared to go straight up to heaven. Hocking had designed the staircase around an oval skylight. It opened up and out and had no end.

 

WOMEN IN THE ATTIC

In
Waiting for Godot
, one of Samuel Beckett's characters blurts out something that had haunted me since I was a child: “Nothing is certain.” For a long time, I thought that marriage was supposed to be the exception, but I was wrong. It is, at best, an adamant hope—a hope against hope—that two people can weather the tumultuous uncertainties of life without killing or leaving each other. At some point in the spring of 2011 Carol and I began to hope.

The snow melted, the books thawed out, and we moved in together. My thoughts no longer gravitated toward William James's chloral hydrate or broken tire irons or my ex-wife, who was now apparently happily married in Minot, North Dakota. But as Carol and I began our new life in Boston, our work at West Wind temporarily stalled. The trustees of the Hocking estate—like the members of any large family—didn't agree on everything. They couldn't settle on a plan for the books, much less the entire estate. Six months passed. All the while, the family seemed to hemorrhage money, and the principal of their trust dwindled. When the books were mentioned at all, they were described as a potential source of revenue. The thought of the library being scattered to the wind, to auction houses around the country, made us ill—so Carol and I reconnected with the Hockings and resumed our efforts to get the books valued and donated to the University of Massachusetts Lowell. We hired an appraiser, a quiet Vermonter who had devoted his life to rescuing literary remains.

It was the end of summer, months since our last trip. Carol reminded me of finding the Frost, and we spent a number of days sifting through the books in the main house before making a final pass at the attic of the library. We wanted to make sure that the appraiser had all the valuable books at hand. Carol insisted on going through everything again, even the boxes shoved way back in the eaves. It was in the attic, under the rafters, that I learned something about redemption: Not all people get a first chance, much less a second, and the proper response to the chance of redemption is unadulterated gratitude.

*   *   *

We started early on an August morning before the sun was up. We climbed the stairs together and donned the requisite headlamps. “You know what this place is missing?” Carol said as she reached the top. “Women,” she jabbed. “There aren't any women on the shelves down there. They're all up here.” It was true. I remembered the sad, dark evening I'd spent with Whitman and John Boyle O'Reilly. At the time, I'd wholly overlooked the women who had been banished to the attic.

I'd picked up my share of Hocking family lore over the years, much of which suggested that Agnes Hocking had regarded her husband as a demigod, or at least God's gift to philosophy. When they were in public, Agnes would refer to him deferentially as “Ernest Hocking.” One evening on her way back from Cambridge, legend has it, she forgot her train fare. Sailing through the turnstile, she breezily told the guard, “Ernest Hocking will give you the five cents tomorrow.”

West Wind was there to keep him happy, to shield him from the mundane affairs of everyday life. It was a library of his books. I'd been right to think that the library was a sacred space. It was sacred because he worked there. Hocking's granddaughters, well into middle age, called him Grandfather in a manner suggesting that he was still alive and ruling West Wind. Now an anecdote from Marian Cannon Schlesinger (Arthur's first wife and an acquaintance of the Hockings) struck me. According to Marian, Agnes attended her husband's graduate seminars at Harvard, but not as a student. Later in life Hocking took up painting, and Agnes, “ever a worshipper at his shrine,” would bring his paintings to class. “She would creep,” in Schlesinger's words, “silently across the platform in front of the lectern where he stood speaking, doubled over in order not to interfere with his flow of words, with one of his paintings clasped to her bosom. Having reached the other side, she would snatch up another painting in exchange, and noiselessly repeat the exhibition.” According to onlookers, Professor Hocking scarcely noticed and “carried on the discussion of the evening as though it were the most natural happening in the world.” Schlesinger was obviously being a bit harsh, but even for the 1920s this was, at least from the outside, weird: a husband holding forth at the front of a lecture hall while his fawning wife shuffled back and forth across the stage showcasing his artistic side projects. As if the conventional format of a lecture alone couldn't express his genius.

I'd never given any real thought to Schlesinger's story of idol worship. Instead, I'd fixated on the abstract concepts Hocking had developed over the course of his lengthy career. When I eventually focused on the biographical tidbits of the Hocking legacy, I found that they were usually the parts that fit perfectly with the subtle chauvinism of a professed liberal. But as Carol and I had discussed West Wind over the previous six months, she'd made me see what a mistake that was. Philosophy shouldn't stem from the theories of others or from a collection of convenient facts, but from a careful evaluation of the widest range of experience. This pragmatic method sometimes forces one to have unpleasant thoughts—for instance, that Ernest had allowed, even encouraged, his wife to humiliate herself—but it was precisely these unsettling possibilities that deserved our attention. Unpleasantness can be instructive, something Royce recognized in
The Sources of Religious Insight
: “Those who, like Dante, have looked upon hell, sometimes have, indeed, wonders to tell us.” Hocking himself had a name for this philosophical method of trial and error: “negative pragmatism.” He didn't buy the pragmatic idea that truth was that which works, but he did endorse the converse, that untruth or falsity is that which doesn't. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, yet another of Hocking's many famous friends, resuscitated the idea in his Cornell lectures from 1964. “We never are definitely right,” said Feynman, “we can only be sure we are wrong.” The story of Agnes and Ernest was wrong, one of thousands of examples of the sexism that plagues American philosophy. And yet their life together lasted a long time and, for the most part, happily so.