Ten years ago, I was trying to decide how to replot my life after Columbia decided that it would not be a part of my future. I had decided to write the second dissertation that would qualify me to be a professor of American Studies in Germany, but hadn't yet settled on a subject for this new project. Carolyn suggested vigorously that I work on Nathaniel Hawthorne. This puzzled me. Yes, I understood, given our history, the wisdom of working on a canonical, nineteenth-century, male novelist who was not Henry James (I seem to remember that she told me to "cover [my] ass"). But why Hawthorne? Although I appreciated this advice, I did not go with it, and ended up writing, as always, about Henry James.

But the story of Carolyn's advice doesn't end there. Now, ten years later and having survived the rite de passage that qualifies me to be a professor of American Studies in Germany, I am again being admonished (by a friend and mentor who, in her wonderfully relentless, opinionated, and inexplicable championing of my career has always reminded me of Carolyn) to work on Nathaniel Hawthorne, that canonical, nineteenth-century male novelist who was not Henry James.

And this time 'round, I'm heeding the advice. I wish Carolyn were here to appreciate the irony, and I wish I could ask her why, exactly, she had suggested this coupling in the first place. At the time, I hadn't read Hawthorne recently enough - or ever, to be honest, with enough interest - even to consider such a project. And now that I am, as they put it, "working on Hawthorne" without entirely understanding, beyond its strategic relevance, why, I'd love to know what Carolyn saw in this juxtaposition.

Either Carolyn would help me to understand something about myself by elucidating a relation to Hawthorne that continues to elude me, or she would help me to understand something about herself, about her way of seeing and interacting with the world, that would help me, in turn, to elucidate some things about Carolyn that continue to elude me. In her absence, Hawthorne - or, more precisely, Carolyn's puzzling reading of The Scarlet Letter - suggests something I/we might have missed about how she construed her interactions with her world.

In Writing a Woman's Life, Carolyn comments on The Scarlet Letter as follows:

[Hester Prynne] had lived through her special destiny but left no path behind for future women, had lived with no community of women, no sense of bonding with other women. Not only had [she] no stories other than [her] refusal of the plot in which most women lived, and no women with whom to talk of what [she] had [herself] learned, but [she] would have been hard put to answer the inevitable question asked of unhappy women: "What do you want?" (43)

This passage sent me back to the end of The Scarlet Letter, where I read that, upon her voluntary return to New England, Hester Prynne finds "toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted" fulfillment at the center of a community of women:

... people brought their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially, - in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion, - or with the dread burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought, - came to Hester's cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief that, at some brighter period, when the world should have been ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. (344)

Hawthorne's account of Hester's profession recalls one's own endless office hours, their frustrations and deep satisfactions. Her vision of a "new truth" that would "establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness" reminds me of the most optimistic moments in Carolyn's writings. For Hester, as for so many of us teaching Women's and Feminist Studies in hostile surroundings, it often seems that solace in the present and faith in a better future are all we have to offer those who seek our "comfort and counsel." But haven't we also set our sights on - and, to some extent, realized - a "brighter period," when the intellectual and political passions that seemed "wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful" in the institutional context of 1980s and early 90s have achieved a platform, and sometimes even a mandate?

Because they were miserable but also heady times, when the dream of something like an institutional revision of what Hawthorne calls the "whole relation between man and woman" seemed neither entirely naive nor entirely out of reach. However embattled we felt on the sixth floor of Philosophy Hall, we also felt ready for battle. My junior colleagues and I were able to challenge the department's traditionalist policies because we knew that Carolyn would back us up. We did manage to revise the Lit Hum syllabus so that it included the works of women and minorities; the Institute for Research on Women and Gender did come into being; the number of female faculty members (and eventually, even tenured female faculty members) did grow. Carolyn's presence inspired and sustained a feminist community whose energy and substance more than compensated for the well-documented frustrations of being at Columbia. And with her public act of resignation, it became unfashionable - at least in departments less insensitive to public opinion than the English department - to deny tenure to qualified women and feminists.

On two occasions, Carolyn's accomplishments were honored by the communities she catalyzed: her Lionel Trilling Lecture in 1986 and the 1992 CUNY symposium, "Out of the Academy and into the World with Carolyn Heilbrun," with which we celebrated Carolyn's career and self-liberation from Columbia. I must admit to having no recollection of what Carolyn's Trilling Lecture was about; the occasion was so overwhelming and the stakes so high that I had difficulty concentrating on what she was saying. I do remember that the lecture and the reception that followed it amounted to the one occasion - other than its yearly "statutory" meetings and reluctant parties convened for the sake of graduate students - on which the English department celebrated anything together. Both Carolyn's family and the department were there in something close to full force, and, in a splendid, carnevaleque reversal, the celebration of Carolyn, her career, and the circumstances under which she had accomplished it, turned into something that could have been the department's celebration of itself. Of course, this mood was fleeting and deceptive - to use Hawthorne's description of the Roman carneval in The Marble Faun, "a narrow stream of merriment, noisy of set purpose, running . . . through the solemn heart of the decayed city, without extending its shallow influence on either side" (1216) - but it demonstrated how, under other circumstances, Carolyn's "influence" at Columbia, deepened and extended, could indeed have rejuvenated the "heart of the decayed city."

There was nothing fleeting or deceptive about the community that convened at the CUNY symposium. Both the podium and the overflow audience were filled with people for whom Carolyn had made a difference: those few of her generation with whom she'd engineered the first feminist inroads; the larger cohort of my generation whom she'd mentored and championed; and the truly substantial contingent of our students, whose feminist and academic self-confidence is, perhaps, her greatest legacy. As many of the panelists documented, Carolyn's personal and academic example had set a standard that was daunting, but, with hard work and some luck, realizable. (If she could raise three children, stay married, and write all those books, then so, with the requisite brains and discipline and the willingness to tolerate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, could we.)

Yet - and this occurred to me only after Carolyn's death - while her presence may have inspired and sustained us, it was not always exactly "presence." She may have been, nominally, "at Columbia," and she was certainly "there" whenever crisis required, but she was not very often "present" with us. The force of her passion and her authority made it difficult for us - all so much younger and so full of respect - to see her isolation as anything other than the desire of a senior person to remain aloof from the déjà-vu all over again of academic daily life. Now, I would call this isolation "disconnection."

Yes, like Hester Prynne, Carolyn was someone to whom "people brought their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially . . .." That, in her reading of The Scarlet Letter, Carolyn missed - or undervalued - this final turn of Hester Prynne's plot tells me something of what she remained unable to reap from her own labors and perhaps of the contours of a despair that she repeatedly called "solitude." Her writings are punctuated by the leitmotif of this self-proclaimed and self-enforced solitude. She often spoke of refusing to "mother" her students, of her impatience with those "sorrows and perplexities" that weren't immediately related to the substance of their work. Missing from her final PMLA essay, "From Rereading to Reading," is any allusion to the stimulation and challenge of the community she was so instrumental in creating and with which she remained in contact even after her retirement. And I'm told that after the memorial service, a community of sorts emerged among the many people with whom Carolyn had met often, regularly, but always singly, over the years and who had never, before that sad and puzzling day, met each other. So I wonder about the strength and substance of the connection, or what seemed to be the connection. I'm thus both intrigued and dismayed when I read that her son, Robert, discerns the same disconnection in her relations with her family: "Her connection to her kids and husband was not enough to keep her in the game, as I think it is for most people. There was always a loneliness, a sense of isolation. . . . No matter how many friends or people who wanted to talk to her, she was alone. She didn't get great pleasure out of the kind of socializing that is the stuff of existence for most of us" (http://www.holtuncensored.com/members/column385.html).

There was a hiatus in our relationship, initiated by Carolyn, whose reasons and timing - in the midst of scheduling the dissertation defense of a student we continued to advise after we'd both left Columbia - I never entirely understood and never pursued. Was her abrupt silence due to her feelings of responsibility for the way my career had been derailed by my tenure decision? To what extent was the fact that I was - by virtue of having a child and no job - an unemployed mother responsible for the discontinuation of our correspondence? I suspect now that the long silence was due, quite simply, to her having, for several years, nothing to say to someone who, living on another continent and writing a book that wasn't about Hawthorne, had no perceptible connection with the parameters of her own world. The silence was terminated one day by an email that began, "This is Carolyn Heilbrun. Remember me?" Only the "remember me" suggested that she, too, realized how long the silence had been; the rest of the message casually detailed plans for a trip to Berlin on which she was hoping I could accompany her. I couldn't. But we did meet in New York later that summer.

We met near the Museum of Natural History, in an Italian restaurant where we'd had many fine dinners together. The geographical connection to the past made it clear that the affection was there, the desire to (re)connect. And to some extent we did. I think she wanted to be persuaded that neither Germany nor motherhood had changed me, that I was the same person I had been when we were colleagues at Columbia. I think I was able to reassure her. But, at the same time, I think she came to realize that I had never been the person she'd thought I was: the evening (our last together) was punctuated with her remark that she had "never met anyone who was so different from [herself]." But she refused to specify the nature of the difference. I suspect she was referring to several things: what she took to be my casual sociability; my apparent ability to survive what can only be called an asymptotic relation to the plot of academic success; whatever my 'Europeanness' meant to her. But what puzzles me more than what the substance of this difference might have been is what the point of this preoccupation with "difference" was, since it seems to have been a hallmark of her relations with others as well. (Mary Ann Caws writes, "She liked walking with me, she said, because my mind was so different from hers, my readings different, my attitudes different. You like the complex, she would say; I like the straightforward. But reading her straightforwardness was never an easy affair . . ..") To me, it seemed as though Carolyn was erecting a barrier where none needed to exist. The gesture first, of reinitiating contact and then calling the terms of that contact into question seems, in sad retrospect, a deliberate (although perhaps not conscious) emptying out of a vessel that one has lovingly filled with a precious substance. (That she considered the substance to be precious became clear when, a week later, I received a copy of The Last Gift of Time whose inscription I cherish.) Did she try on connection, only to discover that it too uncomfortable a fit?

This pattern of approach and retreat is, of course, consummated in suicide; through her act of self-removal, Carolyn created a community of grief and anger. Had she rehearsed this gesture with the public act of leaving Columbia? At the time, it seemed a brilliant move, through which Carolyn wrested control of a situation that had mandated her powerlessness. She claimed to thrive "in the world" outside the academy and must have been aware of how her leaving academia revised the script for our community. With the liberation, however, came the potential for isolation - the other side of her much-cherished solitude - whose fearsomeness she documents in the tale of Jim's arrival on that bleak first night in the new house. I know that she thrived on her regular, appointments with her dear friends, but perhaps the rest of connection - people at large - became more difficult.

When I first introduced Carolyn to my late, wonderful dog, Mats, she spent long enough for us to miss our restaurant reservation throwing what she dubbed his "fucking rag" and applauding the inveteracy with which he brought it back to her. I'd seldom seen Carolyn so relaxed and elated as in this stupid but endlessly gratifying game of canine "fort da." I thus rejoiced when Carolyn adopted Bianca; the dogged affection she describes in The Last Gift of Time is the perfect accompaniment to solitude, the antidote to isolation: one is never alone when one is alone. When, at our last meeting, Carolyn told me of Bianca's death, I sensed her loss of a unique and magical connection. Something more than a dog had been lost. Perhaps it was, already, Carolyn.

Works Cited

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels. Ed. Millicent Bell. New York: Library of America, 1983. 115-346.

--------. The Marble Faun in Nathaniel Hawthorne: Collected Novels. Ed. Millicent Bell. New York: Library of America, 1983. 849-1242.

Heilbrun, Carolyn. The Last Gift of Time: Life beyond Sixty. New York: Ballantine, 1998.