Two historians married to each other seems an instant opportunity for caricature, an invitation to disciplinary and institutional clichés.
They didn’t swear, “I do!,” you imagine, but “I do — notwithstanding a variety of complicating factors that bear mentioning.” Amorous instincts possibly play second fiddle to archival impulses. The union’s stability may depend on adequate supportive evidence, rather than faith, loyalty, passion, or love.
Normally our ability to peer into the wedded bliss or agony of such a couple comes in snapshots at department receptions, or in the Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? bond we form with a particular kindred pair. Unlike literati and show-biz folk, historians, for all their aspirations to create a scholarly record, do not typically leave us memoirs of their marriages.
Yet think how appealing such an agenda would be. Instead of a publishing landscape littered with “crime by memoir” — everything from the thousand shattered pieces of James Frey’s purported life story to the mystifications of Nasdijj, the non-Navajo Navajo — we’d have experts on the job who know the differences among true, false, suspected, established, substantiated, and so on. They’d start with unlimited access to primary sources — themselves — and a virtually exclusive angle on intimate knowledge. Their credentials on the subject would be so authoritative that not even ideological enemies could object.
Does Eugene D. Genovese’s Miss Betsey: A Memoir of Marriage (ISI Books) set such a standard, or live up to such expectations? Short answer: Not really, despite its pleasures. Nor do we mind. Even a historian’s autobiographical musings exhibit the form’s inevitable characteristics: an exaltation, however wry, of self; the presumption that one’s view of the world, as an individual or couple, accurately captures that world; and, most important, that how you feel about where you’ve been matters more than an unimpeachable scientific picture.
Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox met in 1968. He, a twice-divorced, 38-year-old professor of history at Montreal’s Sir George Williams University, fancied himself a swinger. After a long day’s work, Genovese writes, he “enjoyed the company of one or another pretty, charming, bright young lady who dropped by for a nightcap.” Fox, a 27-year-old teaching fellow at Harvard and daughter of the Cornell history professor Edward Whiting Fox, was writing her dissertation on the Physiocrats, those pro-agriculture political economists of 18th-century France.
A married colleague kept praising Elizabeth and persuaded Genovese to call her for a blind date during a visit to Boston. She accepted. He handed her a dozen long-stemmed roses at her apartment door, but his first impression was “Death Warmed Over ... not slender as I had been led to believe ... emaciated, yellowish green skin taut on her sunken face.”
“Betsey” could plead guilty with an explanation: Her future husband had arrived in the midst of her recovery from hepatitis and anorexia. They talked “history for hours,” agreeing positively on Eric Hobsbawm, clashing on George Duby and Marc Bloch. In a paragraph that warrants quotation in full, Genovese telescopes his changing opinions that night, with a coda that takes him to just two years ago:
“When I arrived at five p.m., Betsey looked terrible. At six or so, she wasn’t all that bad. At seven she had become sort of nice-looking. By eight, sitting across a table at Restaurant le Maître Jacques, she had blossomed into lovely. When I left her at one a.m., she was radiantly beautiful. Almost 40 years later, she was in immeasurably worse shape than when I first laid eyes on her. Physically broken and fighting for life, she was unable to get out of bed by herself; barely able to walk; wracked by relentless, searing pain. Still radiantly beautiful.”
Genovese, now 79, signals the reader straight off that he writes about his wife of 37 years as celebrant, not dispassionate assessor. In a rare nod to the Southern history for which both became famous, Genovese cites, as a model for his sentiments, a love letter from the 19th-century Georgia politician Benjamin H. Hill to his wife, Caroline, composed as the Confederacy sank under Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s assault:
“You are so much better than I that I often feel humbled,” Hill wrote. “In qualities that elevate and dignify; in virtues that are pure, sincere and steadfast. I never saw the equal of my wife. ... Whether I have a country or not, even a home or not, I expect to die as I have lived — my wife’s worshiper.”
Genovese’s paean to Elizabeth proves equally moving. They married at New York’s Harvard Club in 1969, lived and worked at campuses in Rochester, Atlanta, and elsewhere, and her practical wisdom and solid common sense shine through in his reflections. Elizabeth, early in her career, learned that there were “probably no men readier but less competent at approaching women at inappropriate times and places than college professors.” She treated them kindly all the same, believing that “a great many professors, being little boys, are not quite housebroken.”
They never had children, despite Elizabeth’s once telling her husband that she wanted “a lot — about 10.” A few years after they wed, Genovese got tested and discovered he was sterile. Her response when he told her? “Well, we’ll have to reorient our life together.” According to him, Elizabeth “simply closed the books” on the issue.
They believed, Genovese explains, that “courtesy is the first rule of marriage.” Their understanding of that virtue amounted to a rejection of his and his wife’s stock in trade: “Neither Betsey nor I ever got historical. When we quarreled, we settled the issue within hours and left it there. I do not recall our carrying a quarrel into the next morning, much less dredging it up at a later date.” Harold Nicolson, the English diplomat and diarist who expertly maintained his odd marriage to Vita Sackville-West through thick and thin, once articulated the point adroitly, observing that the secret of successful marriage is “to treat all disasters as incidents, and none of the incidents as disasters.”
Every memoirist decides alone what will make it to the page. One marvel of Genovese’s slim work is its folding of almost all of his and his wife’s shared scholarly life — one in which they “team-taught college courses, co-authored books and articles, and shared platforms at professional meetings” — under that principle of courtesy.
Though both were Marxists who journeyed toward (and, in Eugene’s case, returned to) Catholicism, they sometimes disagreed about “interpretation of data,” as in such coproductions as Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (1983). In those cases, they “went back to the sources, read them together, and exchanged versions of their meaning. Usually, it did not take long to arrive at a common judgment.” In professional matters — when he chaired the University of Rochester’s history department, or she directed women’s studies at Emory — they would “use each other as sounding boards for possible risky actions.”
Is it wrong to be so agreeable in marriage? Apparently not. She had “the temperament of a moderate,” he the “shoot from the hip” attitude that made him a teenage Stalinist and later the first Marxist elected president of the Organization of American Historians, beating Oscar Handlin. Somehow it worked. She once told him, “If I had to struggle with you, it would not be worth it. I’d rather live alone. I waited to marry a man with whom I could share a life without serious domestic struggle.” Nietzsche counseled in Human, All Too Human, “If you are considering marriage, ask yourself one question: Will I still enjoy talking with her when I’m old?” Eugene Genovese and Elizabeth Fox never lost that joy. They loved to shop together, and “dressed to please the other.” In part to end confusion about their names caused by computers and even university staffers, she eventually put a hyphen between her name and his.
Having gained most of her academic renown as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, this daughter of a secular, materialist historian converted full-heartedly to Catholicism in 1994, at the age of 53. Genovese followed her a year later, returning to his religious roots. Their decisions emerged from a lifelong conversation about Southern religious history and Christian theology. Elizabeth’s anti-abortion stance in later decades, founded in what she saw as proper rejection of anyone’s having an absolute property right in anyone else (including a mother and her unborn child), stirred furious opposition from former colleagues and allies. Though she had established the first American doctoral program in women’s studies — the Institute for Women’s Studies, at Emory — she found that the animus intensified as multiple sclerosis took her into the final debilitating years of her life.
Genovese does not much illuminate his wife’s turn to the church. The best places to find answers are in her own work: through such candid books as Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (1991) and Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life (1996), and more directly in two essays, “Caught in the Web of Grace” and “A Conversion Story.” Genovese’s choices here make narrative sense. The merging of the two of them on so many matters of doctrine leaves the story of their 37-year marriage a poor forum in which to debate ideological positions. George Eliot observed that to have “a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.” It’s doubtful that either of these devoted partners experienced that kind of exasperation very often.
“If you want a good marriage,” opined Ovid, “marry your equal.” The author did. It’s quite obvious that the young man he derides as “the politically notorious and womanizing Gene Genovese” also figured out, along the way, the “love and cherish” part.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 37, Page B4