Excerpts from O.W. Riegel's Works

Quotes Excerpted from the Works of O.W. (Tom) Riegel

On the occasion of his 90th birthday:

I enrolled in the course in journalism because I had newspaper experience and could think no other career in which I could write and get paid for it. Journalism was the least of evils because it was easy and kept my options open. I was in no hurry.

*****

To my grandmother Wetherhold I wrote: "At times I think I am quite grownup, and I believe that I make other people think that, but to tell the truth I am a great fraud. If one took away my bold front, he would find a most forlorn object, a poor thing buffeted this way and that by all sorts of winds and wondering all the time where and what he is...."

*****

Mencken's bellowing wasn't dampened by the timidity that obliged Ross, I judged, to temper his words for the critical approval of his academic peers. The lesson was clear: Be bold. L'audace, toujours l'audace!

*****

To prepare my mother for my first semester grades, I wrote: "I am at best a black sheep, and I marvel at your patience and sacrifice. Some day, perhaps, shall I not bring back to the nest, if not fame and wealth, at least a rich, full life? Haven't we but one aim, my mother -- to grow and help grow?"

*****

The walk was a long one. Like Rousseau, I stopped to rest, sitting at a sidewalk table of a small cafe and ordering a beer. Like Rousseau, I had a revelation, but of a different sort.

Two horse-drawn carts stood in tandem at the curb in front of me. I became aware that the penis of the rear horse was extended. As I watched, the shaft, black as a turtle's neck, stretched out incredibly farther and farther until it swung within an inch of the ground. I had never seen a stallion's erection before and I was astounded. Dragging his cart, the stallion began to climb the forward cart to mount the mare, resulting in a dreadful melee of tipping carts, squealing wood and frenzied horses.

A red-faced driver ran out of the cafe. He pulled back the stallion, then turned to me and grumbled, "What do you expect?"

I expected no less from any creature under the Paris sky, a reflection less profound than Rousseau's.

*****

Robert was straight. He did everything by the book: Master's degree, Doctor's degree, publications in learned journals, scholarly books, tenure, Cadillacs, golf, bridge and conservatism. I admired his diligence and singleness of purpose, and did not want to be like him.

*****

It occurred to me then, as it has before and since, that my life has been a succession of confrontations with bureaucracies -- and that bureaucracies were organizers of power, and that organized power was by its nature oppressive, and that it was therefore my duty as a free man to regard all organizations -- all bureaucracies -- with mistrust.

*****

To be a true revolutionary you had to have enthusiasm for a cause greater than yourself, so much enthusiasm that you could work with other revolutionaries and accept the authority of a leader and the discipline of an ideological scripture. That kind of enthusiasm was incomprehensible to me.

*****

He described her as "a peach."

I was unprepared for the shy, friendly young girl who opened the door and invited me into the parlor. I had sense enough to realize that I had no experience with a bashful young girl like this one and that all of the old rules of the game had to be thrown away.

She had a quick girlish laugh that broke into an irrepressible giggle. Bashful, modest about her knowledge of the affairs of the world, she was at the same time open, generous and sensitive, without a trace of guile or meanness. To me she had the freshness, sweetness and innocence of first spring.

If these sound like the words of a man still in love, they are, but they are also true.

*****

On the long train ride back to New York I tried to sort out a jumble of impressions. I felt like a traveler to a foreign land. I knew nothing about the South. I could think of nothing I had in common with Robert E. Lee.

The day after I returned to New York I received a telegram offering me an assistant professorship at $2,400 for a nine-month year. I accepted at once by telegram.

*****

Every great city encountered for the first time already has a mystique that is a mixture of fragments of knowledge of its history and monuments, and of the attitudes one brings to it. If the mixture is harmonious, as it was for me in the case of Paris, the first encounter with the city is a happy fulfillment of expectations.

*****

From a courtroom divorce proceeding: "He loved to read and write and do things that didn't amount to anything. He would sit around composing plays and things. He wouldn't earn money like I wanted him to, he simply wouldn't do it."

*****

"Ne touchez pas!" she cried. "C'est pour regarder seulement!"

*****

I had barely started when a woman, obviously a house detective, hurried toward us, gave us a quick sidelong glance and, without stopping, hissed, "Change your positions!"

We sat on the warm grass and I read her poetry, which had to be the Rubaiyat because I read the Rubaiyat every spring as an annual rite celebrating the revival of old desires in the Fire of Spring, and finally it was time. The moment could be delayed no longer.

I put the book down. "If the Rubaiyat doesn't do it," I said in self-mockery, "nothing will. What do you think, about us?"

"Yes," she said. She said it simply and sweetly, without hesitation.

*****

The suspension of disbelief in my own play-acting may be self-deception, but there is a great difference in credibility between reacting to a role created by others and living a role you have created for yourself.

*****

Always in the back of my mind lurked the possibility that some day a student would jump to his feet and denounce me as an imposter. What gives you the right to stand there and tell me these things, and why should I have to listen to you?

*****

The main function of the college was to provide a pleasant environment in which young men, as they grew older, would also, we hoped, grow more "civilized" in the pattern of ourselves.

*****

When we retired to our vast chamber in our hotel I noticed, high above my wife's bed, a large tarantula clinging to the ceiling, its long, hairy legs raying out in a sinister corona. A problem. My wife doesn't seem to have noticed. Shall I sound the alarm and have the tarantula removed? If I do, won't my wife have a bad night, haunted by the image of the great spider and of others that doubtless lurked nearby? I turned out the light. I didn't sleep well.

In the morning the tarantula was gone. Several days later my wife told me that she had seen the tarantula but said nothing because I hadn't seemed to have noticed it, and calling it to my attention might have given me a bad night. She hadn't slept well, she confessed.

This was a tale of the ironic contradictions of loving and caring. I thought of O Henry.

*****

To be a successful teacher you had to be credible, and to be credible you had to project an image that was a convincing combination of intelligence, sensitivity, skepticism, self-mockery and humor, with no parading of knowledge and no pretense of infallibility. According to my theory, if the teacher was a credible model, the student would reason that any work worth such a teacher's time and attention would also be worth the time and attention of the student.

*****

"Insofar as self-censorship restricts the range of news and opinion available to the public," I said, "it is a grave danger to a free press and to the democratic system."

Afterward, sipping cool mint juleps with other Institute guests beside the swimming pool at the Farmington Country Club, I was satisfied with what I had said, and at the same time aware of my opportunism in singling out the press as an easy target of my frustration. I forgave myself for my sin.

*****

As a university professor I was, by conventional definition, an "intellectual"; that is, a person of presumed superior intelligence who coolly analyzed and reflected on large subjects and issues without emotional personal bias or prejudice. To define me as an "intellectual" in that sense was a joke. I was, and always had been, an "anti-intellectual" in the sense that my judgments, whatever the appearance of intellectualism in the style of my professional performances, were ultimately determined by my simplistic division of the world into good and evil. Generally speaking, the good, in my view, was everything that enhanced the freedom and dignity of the human spirit. The evil was everything that did the contrary.

*****

Perfectly happy, comfortable, well-adapted people aren't inclined, according to my theory, to expend their energy in self-expression. The urge to speak out, "to yell the truth" about things as they are, to create a world of imagination or the heart's desire, is fired, not necessarily by any specific pain, but by some degree of discontent and frustration, ranging from mild disappointment to a rage of resentment. Possibly the secretion of energizing glands is stimulated.

*****

The ethical problem of accepting patronage, perks and favors is a prickly one. I rationalize that in hiring myself to others and accepting patronage I am selling a service, teaching in the case of my employer, promised projects completed in the case of foundations, and reviews in the case of film festivals. This is also the rationale of prostitutes. I am an Honest Whore.

*****

In my personal vision of the Apocalypse the people of the world are on their knees in prayer, like Margaret McCormick in Santa Maria Maggiore, praising and imploring an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving God, while a nuclear holocaust incinerates them and life disappears from earth. Until then, I wish for all my believing brothers and sisters that they go and live in peace. I also wish them to show the same respect and tolerance for me, as I am sure that most of them will not.

*****

During the desegregation crisis in Virginia in the late 1950s, the state offered tuition subsidies to parents who chose to send their children to segregated private schools, including the all-white "Christian" schools that sprang up all over the Commonwealth. We happily took the money to help pay the tuition of two of our children attending private integrated schools in the North.

We were criticized by some for having dishonestly subverted the purpose of the subsidies for personal gain. Actually, we were pleased and proud of having made a contribution to the cause of desegregation. If the legislature was foolish enough to give the subsidies, anything we could add to the burden on the taxpayers would more quickly make them realize the folly of the policy and hasten its demise, which soon occurred.

*****

I heard Shattuck praise me. "I wish," he said, "that everyone knew God's word as well as Oscar."

*****

Our children were another cause of unavoidable brushes with religion. This is sad because children in a Bible society are innocent hostages of an ideological conflict for which they are in no way responsible.

*****

Shortly after our arrival in Lexington we were visited by James J. Murray, for many years pastor of the Lexington Presbyterian Church, who had heard that I was a Presbyterian. I sat uneasily during the conversation, preparing my defenses, but Murray, after identifying himself, said not a word about religion or his church. I was so startled and relieved by this that when he left I was overwhelmed by a feeling of friendly gratitude. In later years I met him often outside the church. Never once did he mention church or religion, and for this reason I developed an inordinate admiration for him, considering him the finest churchman I have ever known.

*****

Literature has little value unless it relates to the environment and to inner perceptions, which in my case are everything I am thinking and feeling in a room at Gulchleigh, Rockbridge County, at 8:23 p.m. EST on a winter day in 1992.

Additional excerpts from "Hacking It", a memoir:

On Teaching:

"The tricks of pedagogy (teaching is full of them) I seemed to understand instinctively. The tricks were mostly a matter of style; you could get away with almost anything with a light touch, candor and self-mockery, and if you never humiliated a student before his peers. I learned an important lesson the first time a student asked me a question I couldn't answer. "I don't know," I said. "I will try to find out." No waffling, no double talk, no Socratic counter-questions to try to throw the questioner off balance. I have never found that simple honesty in such a case (but not every case!) lowers student respect."

_______________________________________

"Always in the back of my mind lurked the possibility that some day a student would jump to his feet and denounce me as an imposter. What gives you the right to stand there and tell me these things, and why should I have to listen to you? ... Wouldn't it be embarrassing ... if a student should get up in a composition class and say, 'what do you know about it anyway?' ...but they never do."

_______________________________________

"The classroom is authoritarian. The relationship between teacher and student is arbitrary and unjust. The teacher stands above rows of docile and deferential students, his grade book in his pocket or on the podium, his authority unchallenged. He is always in danger of being seduced by vanity and delusions of power. Surely students will realize sooner or later that the setting is contrived and the teacher is an actor playing a role. I have never been denounced, thank God, but all my life I have been nervous when I entered the classroom. What teacher with a conscience and a perspective on himself could be otherwise?"

_______________________________________

On Hypocrisy:

"In fact, Eleanor's taboos included copulation, all bodily functions, pain, disease, blood and death. I thought this remarkable in a doctor's daughter ...
Artemas was describing an accident he had seen that afternoon. A workman had fallen off a scaffold and landed on his head, which split open and "swelled this big." He made a circle with his arms the size of a medicine ball.

Eleanor dropped her fork and left the table. I don't know where Eleanor went, but she wasn't gone long. When she returned I observed that she ate a dish of peaches and two pieces of cake.

I should have known better than to mention the coital explicitness of the 'Liebestod', the surging waves of Wagner's music to climax, the spurt of semen in a cluster of high cadenzas, and the dying away of sound into untroubled sleep.

"How disgusting!" Eleanor said and ignored me for twenty minutes.

She did make you want to talk dirty."

_______________________________________

On Arrogance at Dartmouth:

"The height of arrogance, in my opinion, was achieved by McCallum. I was in his office one day when a student brought in a sheaf of poems for McCallum's opinion. The grand rouge scanned the poems and, while the student and I watched, dropped them in his wastebasket. I was appalled.

I would never have dreamt of showing my writing to anyone on the English faculty. I saw them as a circle of closed minds, too opinionated to ever accept or even understand any writing that didn't conform to their standards. No wonder I agonized over criticizing my students' themes.

What were the credentials for belonging to this elite brotherhood of arbiters of taste? I had no confidence in my own credentials. Were those of my brothers any better?"

_______________________________________

On the Humanities:

"Cynicism reflected my belief that the motivation of most students was desire for money and status, and that to them the humanities were mostly irrelevant and little more than a traditional rite of passage for the acquisition of a cultural veneer. I also doubted the importance of the college compared with the impact of business, industrial and religious institutions. In a broad view, between colleges and universities on the one hand and, on the other hand, the great commercial, industrial and financial corporations (which gave alms to colleges in return for flattery), which better served the material and emotional needs of people, had more say in who would win wealth and power, and had greater influence on the course of the nation? The ultimate test of the nation's power was its ability to make war. What had the humanities to contribute to the art of killing?"

_______________________________________

"I thought colleges were wonderful. The dubious utility of the humanities was their greatest virtue. The opportunities to read, think and speak freely, to indulge whims of curiosity, to dream, dally and postpone were benefits beyond price. This was to respire the exhilarating air of liberty, a defiance of the status quo, a nonviolent form of sabotage."

_______________________________________

On Suicide:

"A few years later, at Washington and Lee University, I had a student, Joe Ford, who was brilliant (he had entered the university at 15) and beautiful, literally, with fine features, brooding dark eyes and a sweet smile. Joe often came to see me to talk about poetry and life. Why me? He told me once that it was because I looked so self-sufficient.

I liked Joe, but I knew he had a dark side and I was cautious. His poems were obsessed with melancholy and death.

Let no man shed a tear!
Gone I am -- or so I hope --
To weep no more
To die no more,
And sweetest --
Live no more!

One day in early spring, Joe went to Washington, D.C., rented a room at the Capitol Hotel, and put a pistol bullet through his head. He was 18.

In my shock I wondered whether I could have stopped him. I think not, but I never tried, which was entirely my fault, and I had feelings of guilt.

The real reason ... Joe Ford upset me is that I recognized in (him) so much of myself, the part I never admitted was there, except to myself."

_______________________________________

The French:

"Behind thick glasses, Eleanor's pale eyes looked at me reprovingly.

"Why do you so often talk about the French as if they were fools?"

"Because they often are. They are Cartesian thinkers. One logical step follows another logical step until they arrive finally at an absurdity. People who think they can arrive at truth by logic are foolish."

_______________________________________

Sincerity:

"My habit of facetiousness, which was a stratagem to conceal my shyness, ignorance and emotion, often sounded like sarcasm. Insincere in my public behavior, I doubted the sincerity of others. Cynical about my own intellectualism, I was cynical about all intellectuals.

Did I believe in anything? Of course. I was a passionate believer. I believed in spontaneity, in everything that was naive, artless and disingenuous, the wind, moving water, silence, color and light, animals, desire, sweet and bitter memory, women who laughed naturally, and the candor of innocence. I believed in compassion for the deformed, the crippled and all victims of injustice, who reminded me of my humanity. I believed in myself."

_______________________________________

On Equal Justice:

"One night after work, having drunk too much whiskey on Cherry Street, walking it off on the deserted streets, I was overcome by an irresistable desire for sleep. I lay down in the dark vestibule of an apartment house on South Fifth street.

I was awakened by blows on the soles of my shoes.

I looked up at a uniformed patrolman. The face wasn't familiar.

"I'm Riegel of the Tribune," I said, getting up. "I guess I must have dozed off."

"This isn't a good place to sleep," he said. "Don't you think you ought to go home?"

We walked together to the corner chatting amiably. I wondered whether he would have been as gentle if I had been a wino from Shantytown and not a Tribune reporter. And did he know that I was a grandson of Councilman Wetherhold of the Reading City Council?"

_______________________________________

Some Poetry:

"Not long after that my little dog Bopo fell ill with distemper and Bebe sent him a bag of fresh bones and some sticks of hard candy with best wishes for his recovery. Bopo died the next day.

To Bebe I wrote, 'I wish to thank you on behalf of Bopo, deceased, for the sweets and bundle of bones. He enjoyed the gift immensely, wagging his tail with delight. If he had been in better health I am sure he would have barked his thanks.

A manuscript was found among Bopo's posthumous works which must have been written during his last hours and which he evidently intended to send to you. I enclose a copy of the original. Naturally it is doggerel:

Thank you for your kindly words
In oh such gentle tones,
Thank you for the candy sticks
And also for the bones.
Bopo' "

_______________________________________

On Capital Punishment:

"My objection is that capital punishment legitimizes murder, which is unacceptable in any society that pretends to have risen above savagery...
Murder is murder. The horror lies in the power of the state, by naked force and self-righteous claims of morality, religion, law, patriotism or racial cleansing, to make its crimes appear honorable. I detest the hypocrisy of those who weep for stray dogs and unwanted fetuses and pray to the Christ of peace and mercy and in the next breath send men to the electric chair and their sons to war. I detest those who pull the switches and fire the rifles and drop the bombs with the excuse that "they have a job to do," proving that they are servile hirelings with neither mind nor heart."

_______________________________________

An Early Draft:

"I, Oscar Riegel, being of sound mind and body according to popular notions, and wishing to fling a final, good-natured taunt into the inscrutable face of Oblivion, do hereby confess to error and colossal conceit by deposing and setting forth this, my last will and testament:

"1. I desire that the payment of all funeral expenses be avoided if possible. For sentimental reasons and the confusion of all undertakers (although I shall not be in a position to enjoy it) I ask that my dust be scattered to the four winds. Let obsequies be limited to this chant:

There is strength in life
And there is strength in dust:
May the heart and brain of Man,
Whose flesh is never still,
Learn to live more gracefully
For having attended the beginning and the end
Of one amazed, ever-curious guest."

_______________________________________

Finding Himself Part of a Trend:

"I had no idea that, because I was going to Paris on that brilliant, exquisite morning in the fall of 1925, I belonged to the Lost Generation."

_______________________________________

In Germany during the Rise of Hitler:

"I awoke in a panic of realization that the helmeted Starnberg police weren't protectors of my safety but accomplices of the enemy. Nor could I turn to the courts for protection. Starnberg's judges and lawyers were lackies of the NSDAP. Nor could I turn to the press, champion of justice, to stir the public in my defense. The editor of the Starnberg newspaper was a craven propagandist for the Nazis. The church then; could I look to the church for aid, comfort and sanctuary? The priests and pastors of Starnberg were in shackles. Finally there was simple human decency. The Nazis reached for their revolvers.

Nowhere to turn. No place to hide.

I tasted the fear.

I tasted the fear, but not the ultimate, hopeless fear of the Eberts of Germany. I was a foreigner and I could appeal for protection to an ambassador in distant Berlin. How much greater must be the fear and despair of those for whom there was no escape."

_______________________________________

On 'Un-Americanism':

"During my absence the building's security guards had entered the news room, told two of our best writers, Josephine Herbst and Ruth Olds, that their employment was terminated, and ordered them to pack up their belongings and leave the building immediately. No explanation was given. The guards watched the writers pack and rifled through their handbags when they left.

I stared at the empty desks with disbelief. That morning I had stopped at Josephine's desk to laugh with her at a passage in a Henry Wallace speech. Now suddenly she was gone, a victim of the political police.

I knew that such outrages had occurred before, as the Civil Service, under pressure from the FBI and Dies Committee, attempted to cleanse the government of "Leftists," but the victims had been distant and unknown to me. This was different. The political police had violated my work place and struck down two talented writers I knew and admired.

Why? The most plausible explanation was that they had joined and paid dues to anti-Fascist organizations and their names appeared on some list circulating among the sleazy vigilantes on Capitol Hill. I was unlikely to be on any list because I was stingy with money and unable to march in step with any organization and especially political organizations whose politics were invariably less radical in some respect than my own.

I was vulnerable, nevertheless. I wondered what J. Edgar Hoover's dossier on me had culled from the "full field" investigation by the FBI, and why my clearance by the FBI had been delayed until May.

The expulsion of Herbst and Olds shocked the staff, but I cannot say that everyone shared my anger, although surely many of them did. I sensed a mood of resignation, as if the actions of the political police, right or wrong, could not or should not be challenged.

What could we do? Most of us signed a petition of protest, but nothing came of it. Attorney General Francis Biddle, brother of George Biddle, set up a committee to investigate cases of expelled government employees, but nothing came of that either.

I felt a chill, such as the sudden chill I had felt in Nazi Starnberg in 1933, when I realized for the first time what it meant to be utterly defenseless, when those to whom the persecuted have been taught to turn for protestation and justice, the government, the police, the priests, and the politicians, were all enemies. This was the defenselessness of Herbst and Olds at Foggy Bottom in 1942, and the way I remember my anger and frustration."

_______________________________________

Patriotism:

"An instructive example of the paradoxes of patriotism and disloyalty was the visit to Lexington, in the early 1950s, of Piragov and Barzov, Soviet Air Force officers who stole a plane and flew to Vienna to defect to the Americans. The defections were hailed as a great propaganda coup by the Department of State, which paraded the defectors around the United States the way Caesars proudly paraded captive Frankish chieftains through the streets of Rome. I helped entertain the Russians in Lexington.

Were Piragov and Barzov heroes or traitors? The answer depended upon geography and point of view. They were traitors east of the Elbe. Across town in Lexington, at the Virginia Military Institute, they were coldly received. They were, in fact, guilty of a heinous, if not the most heinous, crime against a sacred code universally honored by the military --they were guilty of insubordination, theft of military property, and desertion. Heroes? To the military, their conduct was reprehensible and, by example, a threat to the military system everywhere.

Barzov, a simple peasant who thought the candles on our hors d'oeuvres table were a sign of great wealth, didn't like the United States and later recanted and returned to the Soviet Union. Was he twice a traitor?"

_______________________________________

A good case can be made for patriotism as pride in one's community (not necessarily a national one) for its accomplishments in making the world a better, happier and safer place in which to live. This kind of patriotism, however, is subordinate in the modern state to a manipulated and enforced patriotism whose ultimate purpose ("the bottom line") is to assure the state, or more accurately its leaders and ruling classes, the mindless obedience essential for the waging of war.

_______________________________________

German Insults and Women:

"Frau Ozius thought the joke delicious. She began to laugh at our mistakes, She parodied our halting speech.

We were furious. Elsewhere when we tried to speak the national language, in France and Italy, the response was invariably smiling encouragement. Never before had we been ridiculed.

Frau Ozius disgusted me. I am a lover of women, and their praise has always meant more to me than the praise of men. Likewise, humiliation by a woman is more intolerable than humiliation by any man. I hated one other woman as much as I hated Frau Ozius, a woman in St. Thomas who, when we returned late with her son from a sailing trip, delayed by a dying wind, accused me of trying to drown him. I hope both of these ladies are frying in hell."

_______________________________________

Words vs Action:

I often wonder at the equanimity of my deportment with people whose ideas I detest. I have been courteous and friendly with such people in Germany, in Hungary, in government, in the newspaper and broadcasting industries, and in academic life. This is the "common courtesy" and tolerance of civilized men, which I attribute not to any nobility of character but to a simple pragmatic equation that requires me to show as much courtesy to others as I ask for myself.

Despicable ideas are tolerable, however, only as long as they remain merely words. When words and thoughts become actions, my equanimity vanishes. A character in a Czech film, I think 'The Shop on the High Street', sticks in my memory because I recognize in him something of myself. He is friendly, humane, even-handedly courteous to all, and indifferent to political fanaticism, which he brushes aside with jokes. That is his downfall. In the totalitarian state, anyone who is not with us, even if he is a good and decent man, is against us. One night the fascists take him away and the next morning dump him on the village square, terribly beaten. His fault was not anticipating the transition of words into action.

I am sure there were good and decent people in Starnberg. Their fault was not recognizing, somewhere along the line, the human capacity for evil, and not opposing the transformation of words and thought into action, until it was too late.

_______________________________________

Good and Evil:

The effect of my experience with the French, beginning with Paris in the 1920s, was to sharpen my awareness of universal paradox of good and evil in the human character. There was nothing basically wrong with my habit of categorizing people in two groups, those who were sons-of-bitches and those who were not, a judgment based upon elementary standards of decency. I was told that I was simplistic and that my categories were epistemologically unsound. As a foreigner in France, I saw with greater clarity than I could in the familiar environment of my own country the specific signs and attributes of a son-of-a-bitch. This was the advantage of being an outsider, with no personal stake at risk. There was some switching -- decent people could become opportunistic sons-of-bitches under the pressures of fear and greed -- but at any given moment it wasn't difficult to tell the difference between those who manipulated, exploited and abused their fellow man for private gain or ideological domination, and those who believed in justice and the dignity of all mankind.