[lit-ideas] Re: H. Stuart Hughes
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2012 18:44:53 -0700
Thanks,
I occasionally encounter an author that strikes me as so good I want to read
everything they wrote. Consciousness and Society "almost" put Hughes in
that category for me but I was turned off by what I read in Wikipedia. Even
so I decided to try one more of his books.
Which authors do I have in this category? In recent years I have
appreciated David Fromkin and Norman Davies. From the past I had Harold
Bloom and some others I can't bring to mind at the moment.
In literature (among others) I have had Kafka, Thomas Hardy, Herman
Melville, and Henry James on it. I may still try a story or two by Kafka
from time to time, but have an ongoing interest in the latter two. I have
read Moby Dick, for example, several times.
Lawrence
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of David Ritchie
Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2012 12:14 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: H. Stuart Hughes
On Apr 5, 2012, at 11:08 AM, Lawrence Helm wrote:
David,
By a similar token I would be interested in your view of H. Stuart Hughes.
I was impressed by his Consciousness and Society, bought his The Obstructed
Path but haven't gotten around to reading it yet.
He and I could not be more different: he was an East Coast Brahmin, served
during W.W.2., taught at Harvard, ran for J.F.K.'s vacated seat in the
Senate, formed a close friendship with Herbert Marcuse, developed a
systematic approach to the problem of how ideas come to be abroad in the
world. He judged that Freud's understanding of how our psyches are formed
had merit, and he believed that exchanges with one's intellectual cohort
lead to common assumptions and tempering. I do not share this background
and have nothing original to say on such subjects. His father's and my
grandfather's service in W.W.1 were an initial, if slight, common bond. He
was kind and intellectually catholic, so there was room in his universe even
for my untidy mind. (I use the adjective "untidy" because he was the
tidiest man I ever met. In his autobiography there's more about toilet
training than I cared to read.)
Among the things we shared were an interest in the French--his first wife
was French; I had spent a year on an oral history of resistance in the
Vercors--and a love of "how" questions, particularly, "How did that come to
be"? My subjects tend to be less intellectually lofty than his; I have
achieved far less. I admire "Consciousness and Society," but I have never
taught from it. In an art college one sometimes comes across students who
are sufficiently widely read to tackle the problem of where this set of
ideas sits in relation to that one, but generally it's not that kind of
place. His essay, "History as Art and as Science; Twin Vistas on the Past,"
is, by contrast, very often read.
I detect no inaccuracies in Wikipedia's entry on him. I was his penultimate
graduate student.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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