My brother and colleague, Scott Spires, has abandoned his old Lakefront Linguist blog for a Substack called Lakefront Review of Books.
A couple years ago he lent me his copy of the Wyndham Lewis book Self Condemned. I never got around to reading it so I gave it back to him, and now he’s written a review of it that makes me want to read it after all, darn it.
The world recently lost an inspiring teacher and all-round excellent person: Prof. Raymond Furness of the University of St. Andrews.
He was the first German tutor I met at St. Andrews, at a reception for overseas students. I saw “German” on his name tag and said, “Oh!” but when he turned my way I came over all skittish and bolted across the room. Luckily our paths crossed again and he asked me in his usual booming voice what I was studying — he was of course very happy to hear (faintly) that it was German. He asked me about myself and I mentioned my Shetland sheepdog; in every significant conversation we had over the next 6 years, he would ask, “How is your little dog, Tuppence?”
He was our tutor for first-year literature and I’ll never forget the day when, about 10 minutes into class, he realized none of us had actually read the assigned book. He paused and looked at each of us in turn. “Yes, you’re naughty children, aren’t you?” he said, “Well, no need to waste my time with you, I’m going to the pub.” And he put his coat on and walked over to The Central, leaving us to exchange sheepish glances.
If you passed a room where he was teaching, you knew it because some over-the-top comment like “I MEAN LADIES! WOULD YOU REALLY WANT TO SHARE YOUR HUSBAND WITH A DEAD MAN??!?” would be distinctly audible through the door.
His German Expressionism class was a highlight for most honours students, who really got what they came for on the days when he read aloud from Georg Kaiser’s Gas or Arnolt Bronnen’s Vatermord.
In my third year, at a dinner for students in another tutor’s Nietzsche module, someone called him a misogynist so I popped by during his office hours soon afterwards to say, “Hi, Professor Furness, are you a misogynist?” He said he loved women and to prove it, he invited me in for several glasses of sherry and picked my brain for gossip, which was exactly what I had been hoping for.
Ray Furness was in tune with everything that was chthonic, decadent, fatalistic, grandiose, disjointed, or existentially troubling in German arts and letters. You could rely on him to know everything about every famous German or Austrian who had ever gone mad or shot himself in the head. But he was a very nice person. If there’s a heaven, I’m sure he is there playing ping-pong with Max Schreck…or something like that.
In 2007, I was a frumpy housewife in small-town Ontario with two children running in all directions and two German degrees gathering dust in the attic. My career up to that point had consisted of a couple of poems one of my professors had seen fit to publish, an annual review of the German legal market which was lengthy but posed few stylistic challenges, and a decision to move to the margins of civilization to focus on having babies, canning beets, and feeding a woodstove.
“I know you’re dreadfully busy,” wrote an old friend on Facebook, which I used to check in between changing diapers, sealing mason jars, and flinging logs onto the fire, for in those days Facebook was still fun and I was still there, “But I have this family friend who is a translator and has too much work, do you think you could possibly help her out?”
The translator was Aileen Derieg and I was delighted to heed this particular call to adventure. She sent me the first job: an earnest meditation on building bridges, literally and figuratively, and what St. John Nepomuk could teach the EU. “Aileen Derieg has drunk champagne with you!” Facebook cheerfully notified me after I sent her my translation. That was about the best feedback I could have hoped for, so our collaboration continued.
And it turned out Aileen Derieg was about the best person one could ever hope to collaborate with. Not only had she established an enviable network of clients through years of highly competent work, but she was also thoughtful, patient, rational, open-minded, gracious, helpful, and – crucially in my case – understanding about the ups and downs of childcare and their impact on deadlines.
For years, she had been converting the densest, most intricate German prose into clear and readable English. Behind her back, those of us to whom she was subcontracting would sometimes trade frustrated messages. As one of her other assistants wrote to me in 2008: “I am despairing! My text is incomprehensible! Impossible! AAAARGHARGHARGHRGHAGHGAHRGHAGRHGAAAAGH. I have given up trying to understand the text, I am just painstakingly translating every sentence word by word…” But Aileen inhabited a lofty realm where such texts were the norm, and she translated them with aplomb.
One thing that became obvious when any of us asked Aileen for help disentangling webs of critical theory was that she had the utmost respect for all her clients and never adopted a mocking or dismissive attitude towards their work. Perhaps she was merely an early adopter of the maxim, “Dance like nobody’s watching, email like it’s going to be read out in a deposition someday,” but I believe she truly was filled with saintly goodwill. No matter how complex the style of a text or how surprising its content – she handled it with a sincere desire to understand it and communicate its message in English. This attitude, along with all the specific useful feedback she gave me over the years, taught me what I needed to know to go forward.
Aileen is retired now, and I will think of her with gratitude every day. Her very talented son, Christopher Hütmannsberger, and I will be available to serve her client base. And now that she’s not drowning in book projects, I might pepper her inbox with thorny translation questions every day. Watch out, Aileen!
Recent events have inspired me to re-read Fritz Stern‘s book Five Germanys I have known (grammar nerds will note that it is “Germanys,” not “Germanies,” because the usual plural spelling rules don’t apply to proper names), specifically the middle section about nurturing, preserving, and defending liberal democracy.
Reading this book ten years ago, I skimmed that part thinking, “Yeah, mm-hmm, whatever.” But it all seems terribly relevant now. Take his comments on the student revolts of ’68, when he was teaching at Columbia University:
I was angry at the jubilant desecration of the university, and afraid that we were betraying our patrimony. […] I was afraid of the radical youths who were intoxicated by their own rhetoric, enthralled by the initial successes of violence, and convinced of their historic role as iconoclasts. […] Their disruptions were not cost-free: I feared a massive backlash, a reaction by conservative yahoos who would feel justified in their paranoid hatred of liberal (and expensive) institutions.
How relevant.
Then there was a rising desire on the right for repressive law and order, along with a “professed faith in the virtues of hard work and economic individualism, and contempt for the welfare state that ‘coddled’ the weak…a new version of Social Darwinism, bloody-minded if economically effective.” And there were advocates of la politique du pire — “that delusionary policy that holds that the worse things go, the better for radicals. I have often fought with these self-righteous ‘wreckers,’ who seldom realize how bad and irredeemable things can get.”
Ditto.
Having fled Nazi Germany for an America that was — on the whole and despite its economic woes — confident, well-meaning and optimistic, with a president who insisted the only thing to fear was Fear itself, Stern was wary of radicals on the left and right. Like G. K. Chesterton, he understood that it was worthwhile, and an adventure, to keep your horse running straight when it is tempted to veer onto the paths that lead to insane extremes.
He gave an interview to Greenpeace magazine in January 2016, a few months before his death at age 90. The interview seems to be available only in German, so I’ve taken the liberty of translating an excerpt here:
Historian Fritz Stern: “We are facing an era of fear.”
GP: Is Europe moving too far to the right?
FS: I fear it is. I believe we are facing an era of fear, widespread fear — the fear that can be exploited by the right. And you can already see in the example of Poland how fragile freedom is. It is shocking how quickly an authoritarian system is being built up in Poland. […] And as an American citizen I am also deeply concerned.
GP: About what comes after Barack Obama?
FS: Precisely. On the whole I’m an admirer of Obama and it was a great achievement on the part of this country to have elected him twice. But the current situation is so serious, so destructive, so dysfunctional, that it can only make you worry.
GP: You mean Donald Trump?
FS: Trump is the best example of the dumbing-down of the country and the appalling role of money. An absolutely amoral guy who flaunts his money and ignorance. I arrived in this country when Franklin Roosevelt was president. That someone like Trump, who is a nobody apart from money and monstrous ambition and ugliness – that he would not only put himself forward but would even be accepted by many people as a candidate, is simply beyond comprehension.
GP: What has changed in American society?
FS: I’ve already spoken of dumbing-down. That is due in large part to the media and to the fact that there are fewer and fewer objective journalists. Most people can choose the ones who preach what they want to hear. […] A certain kind of new religiosity, which has very little to do with true religiosity, is also on the rise. I believe we are facing a new illiberal age. And for someone who dedicated his life to a certain liberalism, those are sad tidings. It’s a decline.
RIP Prof. Stern. If there’s anything I can do to keep that horse on the trail, I’ll do it.