My old man made the effort to smile. He returned the salute with the closest thing to jauntiness he could muster, like a man on his deathbed trying to go through the motions of the Charleston or the Suzie-Q. I got his message—carry on, trooper. He on his fronts would do his level best to carry on. He was issuing orders to me to keep the battle going on as many fronts as I could get to, and to make sure none of them was anywhere around his.
Sometime after this the psychiatrists at the Institute decided they’d exhausted all the interesting aspects of my old man’s case and he was accordingly transferred to the state mental hospital in Middletown. You can see what’s coming, you’ve watched enough television dramas to know all the plot twists, the crazy crossings of paths, the O. Henry surprises that life dishes out so much more ingeniously than do the television dramatists and the O. Henrys in general.
It was arranged for our class in abnormal psychology to make a field hip to Middletown to observe some of the more interesting cases they had up there. In anticipation of that outing, I suddenly recall after a lapse of 37 years, I sat down and wrote a short story, not exactly light-handed, about a college student whose class in abnormal psychology visits a mental hospital to have some of the weirder cases trotted out for their inspection, and one of them turns out to be his father.
It was a failure of my dreamery centers. Life is not that cliché-ridden. It simply has more imagination and far subtler turnings than television will ever have the good grace to acknowledge. When life decides to write a soap opera, as it does over and over, the thing may turn into grand opera, and not a posy, swoony one either.
My father was not one of the shells of human beings dragged into that amphitheater for the edification of Yale students in between weekends at Vassar. My father made no appearance in that vaudeville at all. But after the show, as we were walking back to our cars, I spotted him on a bench on the grounds, with his violin case across his knees. I went over and sat down.
“How you doing, Pop. Get to play the violin much.”
“Plenty, son. I keep busy here, don’t you worry about me. I’m even giving lessons, I’ve got five patients signed up already. One’s a very interesting man, he used to be an engineer and he has a plan to float icebergs down from the North Pole and melt them to make more water, he says the reason for the Depression is too damn many frozen assets and this is his scheme for straightening things out, unfreeze the water assets. He’s got a real knack for the fiddle, he’s already playing Schubert’s Serenade.”
“It sounds like he’s got talent, you teach them good, Pop.”
Pretty soon I caught up with our party in the parking lot. One of my classmates—his first name was Clay, he was from Grosse Point and his father was something big in the diplomatic service—was curious about my going off like that.
He said, “Who was that you were talking to?”
I said, “He’s my father.”
He said, “Come on, I don’t think that’s funny, you’ve got a warped sense of humor.”
Life is a very good writer. I’d give anything to be able to write dialogue like that. What an imagination.
Irving Fisher! Ever hear of him? The name doesn’t mean much nowadays but it was once to be reckoned with. He was for many years Yale’s most eminent economist. One study he put a lot of time into was ways and means to control the economic cycle, an undertaking at which, as revealed in the newspapers if not the history books, he was not conspicuously successful.
He did something to straighten out my personal economic cycle, though—my one-man economic cycle. It was Prof. Irving Fisher who created a job for me on my last visit to New Haven.
It’s very hard to figure out what you’re doing hanging around a college town when you’re no longer in college. The place where they catered to your head is best left far behind when you step into the world to do some paid-for work, otherwise all our categories, compartments for thinking over here, ones for doing over there, melt together, and you know what that can lead to—thoughtful action, activist thought, town-gown merger, the sort of thing that can get Mr. Agnew to seeing red in many more places than are so colored. There could even come out of the blending, the mind-body reconciliation, some worker-student joint ventures. Those aloof spires might eventually flop sideways and drop their frozen frills and inch into the spurned ghettos, metamorphosing into mobile libraries and medical checkup vans and consumer armories and strike headquarters and community action centers. Brain and brawn might get to belong to the same union and in fact talk face to face, exchange notes, listen hard. Finally, finally, people in the University might stop going on with their nonstop wind about alienation, and making it their field of expertise, and writing their doctoral dissertations on it, and moving on to other universities to teach it to other candidate-scholars of alienation, a thing more to be dodged than majored and lectured in. . . . Well.
Where was I. The next best thing to going to the college that rules the municipal roost is to work for it, especially since it hands out most of the jobs in the area. So I went to see one of the officials of the Sterling Library who’d been helpful to me when I was a student, Donald Wing. (I’d always had the utopian hope that one day they might build an annex to the Library and name it after him so it could be called the Wing Wing.) Donald said there was a parttime job open on the staff, that somebody was needed to come in and make order out of and catalogue all the Irving Fisher papers and memorabilia. Five mornings a week, 60 cents an hour, 12 bucks a week.
I took it. Next to nothing was in those days a lot better than nothing. On that kind of pay you could cough up three bucks for a furnished room and have enough left over for the 35¢ breaded veal cutlets at the Greek’s or the pork-chop sandwiches in the Dixwell Avenue greasy spoons.
Irving Fisher was an expert on tax structuring, fiduciary policy, how to keep inflation and deflation in line, interest rates, cash flows, balance of trade, what the Federal Reserve should reserve, and the like. He was forever going down to Washington to testify before Senate committees or act as consultant to government agencies, and often his services were called upon by foreign governments too. Then he began to be consulted less and less, and after a while not at all, and you could understand why.
The Great Crash and Panic of 1929 happened. For all his scholarly investigations into the reasons why boom economies go bust with such regularity, Fisher had never suggested to anybody that anything remotely like 1929 could or would happen. He had, in fact, ruled out any such possibility. After all, the Hoover people down in Washington were handling the system pretty much as he’d advised them to. His policies were specifically designed to keep us from going into decline.
Irving Fisher all his life considered himself the architect of prosperity, though it turned out he was more its wistful camp follower. It followed that any nation that used his blueprints would stay rattlingly prosperous. That’s the kind of thing that happens when gown gets such a swelled head as to imagine that it doesn’t have to go into town, just look it over from the highest University tower and through a bullhorn inform it what’s what.
Fisher wanted very much to know what had brought about the catastrophe all his ideas had been designed to prevent. He began to look about for etiological variables he might have neglected or underestimated. He found some dillies. Sunspots. It appeared that just before the Stock Market Crash there’d been significantly increased activity on the sun, where there had been spots were larger ones and where there hadn’t been any some showed up.
Looking over the terrestrial canvas more broadly, Fisher found other matters that seemed to rise and fall with the waxing and waning of solar spots, among them pregnancy rates, the incidence of coronary thrombosis, the number of highschool dropouts, crimes of violence, abortions, strikes, small-business failures, automobile purchases, gang wars, home foreclosures, divorces, any number of things. Prof. Fisher had hit late in life on the cosmic-cyclical theory of history and the cycles he suddenly turned up everywhere in human affairs he traced directly to the periodic variations in the sun’s acne. Again, that’s the sort of thing you see