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).
