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BIOGRAPHY
I grew up in Three Oaks, Michigan, a typical Midwestern small town, but I spent summers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where my father, a commission merchant with a seasonal business, handled produce that was shipped there from what was then the world's largest farmers market, in Benton Harbor, Michigan. The men who worked for my father were almost all Italians, and in retrospect I see that this is how I got my first sense of Italy as something opposed to small-town Midwestern Protestant culture—a theme that has shaped a lot of my writing, including Philosophy Made Simple. My wife (Virginia) and I met at the University of Michigan, spent the first year of our marriage in Belfast, Northern Ireland, spent a year in North Carolina, and started having children when I was in gradate school at Princeton. I’ve taught English literature at Knox College, in Galesburg, IL, since 1968. During my tenure at Knox I have directed two programs for the Associated Colleges of the Midwest, one at the Newberry Library in Chicago and one in Florence, Italy, and I’ve spent a year at the University of Chicago on a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship. We've spent quite a bit of time in Florence and Bologna, and in 2009 we spent six weeks in Verona, where I was a visiting writer at the university. I started writing fiction at Knox, which has a strong creative writing program, published my first story in 1973 and my first novel (after 39 rejections) in 1994. Snakewoman of Little Egypt will be my sixth novel. The first five are: The Sixteen Pleasures, The Fall of a Sparrow, Blues Lessons, Philosophy Made Simple, and The Italian Lover. I have three daughters, like King Lear, but unlike the Lears, we all get along. Rachel is the Director of Museum Exhibits and Eduction at the Holocaust Museum in Skokie, IL; Heather teaches fifth grade in Galesburg, IL; and Caitrine is a veterinarian in Glen Carbon, IL. My wife has recently retired from teaching Latin at Monmouth College. |
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Rudy thought of the first Christmas they’d spent in this house, after his father’s death, and of Mr. Ballard, the previous owner, whose downstate paving-brick business had fallen into the hands of the receivers, and who had driven off to California with his whole family in a broken-down Pierce-Arrow. And he thought of the French dollhouse and the steamer trunks that the Ballards had left in the attic, and the letter that Ballard had sent him about a year later, telling him about the house, how Harold Kreutzberg, the famous German dancer, had been entertained there, and Cornelia Otis Skinner, and Matthew Arnold, and Aleka Rostislav, who was Princess Galitzina and whose husband’s father was the brother of the last czar, and many other famous people. Rudy kept the letter in a fireproof box on the shelf on top of the big desk, along with Helen’s will and her other papers and the girls’ school records. —Philosophy Made Simple |
| “Stop that,” I said. The sound attracted the bats, which swooped around our heads. I could feel air from their wings on my hands, which were covering my face. I held on to Daddy, but Ludi stood up and walked right into the center of the whirlpool, holding her paper bag of bugs. I held my breath. I closed my eyes too, but not all the way. I had to see. I was expecting the bats to fly right into Ludi, to get tangled in her hair, bite her neck, all the things I was afraid of. When she put her hand in her sack of insects and held it out, palm up, I almost screamed. There was a dark blur of wings and the insect was gone. She took another out of the sack and did it again. Another dark blur of wings. And then something happened that frightened even Ludi. Without warning a bat began to circle the electric fan. Ludi let out a scream. “O no. Turn the god damn fan off. Daddy, turn it off. Pull out the plug. Do something.” —The Fall of a Sparrow |
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| The vet was going to come from Brownsville as soon as he got off work at the zoo, but the waiting was hard. Rudy’d always had dogs when he was a boy, and when they got so old they couldn’t get up and walk around, his dad had taken them out in the woods and shot them. The hardest thing, he thought, was that he hadn’t been able to talk to them—to Buster or Jack or Buckle—hadn’t been able to explain. And now he wanted to explain to Narmada-Jai, to explain what had happened and what was going to happen, but he couldn’t explain to himself what had happened. The Russian was right: You can’t understand it without vodka. —Philosophy Made Simple | ||
| He wrote slowly and
carefully with his Parker Duofold fountain pen in the italic
handwriting that he used to make out the place cards for the annual Phi
Beta Kappa banquet, or to write the letters that the college presented
to visiting dignitaries. —The Fall of a Sparrow Words poured out of me onto a large yellow pad of legal-sized paper. I wrote with the Waterman fountain pen that my mother had given me for my seventeenth birthday, wrote till I ran out of ink. My hands were shaking and I almost knocked over the bottle of ink when I refilled the pen. —Blues Lessons |
 "It will last a lifetime," I told the clerk, as if I were trying to sell it to him. "Everyone should have a good fountain pen. And besides, I need something to write with." "It's the finest writing instrument in the world," he said. —The Sixteen Pleasures |
Sometimes after lunch, while Norma Jean was snoozing, Rudy’d read
Philosophy Made Simple out in the barn. He read and
reread the chapters on Berkeley and Hume, underlining key passages with
Helen’s fountain pen till there were no more passages left to
underline. —Philosophy Made Simple The chapter ended with a long discussion of a famous cave that Plato wrote about in his book The Republic. It was hard to figure out at first. Rudy got a piece of typing paper and tried to sketch the cave with his fountain pen, Helen’s old green-and-black striped Pelikan with an inscription on the black cap: una cosa di bellezza. Rudy was sure it had been a present from Bruno Bruni, but he carried it with him at all times because even though the hand that once held it had long ago been reduced to ashes at the North Shore Crematorium, it seemed to him to contain—like a powerful totem—something of Helen’s spirit. —Philosophy Made Simple |
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Reading Philosophy Made Simple, Rudy made
another discovery that was perhaps equally important. He may have been
a Platonist, but Helen, he realized, had been an Aristotelian. —Philosophy Made Simple |
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Teaching
had
been his vocation. He had never tired of it, had never became cynical
about students, or about the power of great books to inform and
enlighten. But you had to open yourself to them. That’s what he
tried
to teach his students. Not to do things to the books, but to let the
books do things to you. To fill you, to change you. This
is what he had
stood for at St. Clair. This is what he had fought to hang onto in the
Classics program. —The Fall of a Sparrow |
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A man with three daughters will never run out of stories. —Philosophy Made Simple |
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Goethe was 37 years old when he arrived
in Verona on 14 September 1786 and he already felt at home in Italy: "I
feel at home at last, and not as though I were in hiding or exile. I
pretend that I was born and raised here, and have now returned from a
trip to Greenland, catching whales." I was 67 years old when I arrived in Verona on 2 March 2009, but I felt like an adolescent–insecure, anxious, inadequate, disoriented, unable to make a simple phone call from the airport because we didn't have a cell phone, unable to master the cell phone that our landlady gave us to use, constantly reminded of the limitations of my Italian, reminded every time we passed a news stand that the global financial market was collapsing, taking our retirement savings with it, reminded every time I glanced at a restaurant menu that the dollar was weak and Verona a very expensive city. Fortunately my wife was with me, and she tends to take these things in stride. Looking back I realize that I always feel this way when I come to Italy, and I'm happy to report that even the great Goethe was sufficiently concerned about fitting in that he stopped wearing his high boots in Verona when he noticed people staring; he was also concerned about the rate of exchange, about changing money, about paying bills, and even about finding a bathroom. |
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The Italian Lover | Philosophy Made Simple | Blues
Lessons |
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