My husband came home from work a couple of days ago to find me all atwitter, as they say, with excitement. Guess what? I said. I found out today that Arthur Quinn studied with Thomas Kuhn at Princeton. He smiled; I believe he was genuinely happy for me; and he was good guy enough not to feign condescending interest (...and I'm so glad you enjoyed what happened in Pine Valley today!...) nor to betray what would have been a perfectly justified shudder at the prospect of yet another new enthusiasm taking possession of his wife. The thing about these "kicks" is that I don't swap out one for another; they just accumulate merrily, one upon the other. I fully expect that in my dotage I will have the equivalent of a giant ball of saved aluminum foil consisting of the accreted remnants of infatuations lovingly lived and preserved. (Now it's my turn to shudder.)
So, yeah, I'm in an Arthur Quinn kick right now, instigated out of the blue by my delayed discovery of his Figures of Speech. I broke down and paid a rare-book premium for his The Confidence of British Philosophers, which is turning out to be well worth every penny. He died in 1997 in Berkeley, across the bay from where I was living, in San Francisco, and I missed the death notice (I wasn't keeping up much with the papers then, with a newborn in the house). He was a colleague and friend of Czeslaw Milosz. When Milosz died last month, I looked up a piece that Quinn wrote about Milosz and excerpted it on my reading blog. I wondered whether Milosz might have eulogized Quinn, but the search engines turned up nothing. I didn't think to check on Amazon.com at the time, but in doing an unrelated search later, I came across Milosz's ABC's, a book of essays organized alphabetically by topic, and I discovered that the book's chapter "Q" is devoted to Quinn, and it was in that chapter that I discovered the Kuhn connection.
Milosz's remembrance reads like the testimony of a stoic but heartbroken friend. It begins:
QUINN, Arthur. He was a Californian. He attended a Jesuit high school in San Rafael, on San Francisco Bay. Robert Hass, my co-translator and Poet Laureate of the United States (1996), and Louis Iribarne, a Polish specialist, my student at Berkeley and translator of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's novel Insatiability, later a professor at the University of Toronto, were his classmates. In school, Arthur was known for his athletic talent and it was predicted that he would have a great career as a professional baseball player. He gave up sports, however, for philosophy.And it ends:
Europeans are inclined to accuse Americans of historical naiveté. But the eradication of the Indians and the Civil War, the bloodiest war of the nineteenth century (a greater number of fatalities than in the Napoleonic wars), are ever present in the collective memory, although not many dare to step into that abyss. Arthur Quinn dared, no doubt because, for him, erudition was only a mask for the demands of his ardent heart, which loved God and hated evil.
Czeslaw Milosz. Milosz's ABC's. Translated from the Polish by Madeline G. Levine. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. ISBN 0-374-52795-4 (pbk.).
What happened to the "date of first bloom" in the sidebar? Did you get tired of maintaining it?
Posted by: Kathy | September 02, 2004 at 08:40 PM
The season's on the downswing, so there won't be much new stuff to add, and the prospect of seeing the list just get shorter and shorter is a little depressing. I'll probably do a post or two about new bloomers that are exciting (such as my Japanese anemone that just opened up today, after being bloomless last fall from first frost).
Posted by: Chan S. | September 02, 2004 at 11:02 PM
If you appreciate good writing about writing, there are not many people better than Richard Mitchell (he died some years ago). For a decade or two, he ran a newsletter called "The Underground Grammarian". It satred out (vol 1 nr 1) as a response to the terrible writing he saw in academic memos, and gradually expanded to include bureaucratese. The whole series is online at
"http://www.sourcetext.com/grammarian/"
The newsletter is linked on the left nav bar ("Underground Grammarian Newsletters")
You can dip in anywhere and not be disappointed. His style and intellect are great.
Vol 1, Nr 1 tells about him and his letter. Every one is a jewel.
But it can be habit-forming.
Posted by: Mike | September 03, 2004 at 02:41 PM
Wow. I just dipped into one of the pieces and hit his discussion of Federalist No. 10. Can you say "instantly hooked"? Thanks for the great link, Mike.
Posted by: Chan S. | September 03, 2004 at 03:19 PM