UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Interview #201
BREE, GERMAINE

BREE, Germaine (1907-2001)
Professor of French
At UW: 1960-1973

Interviewed: 1981	
Interviewer: Donna Hartshorne
Length: 2 hours, 51 minutes
Transcriptionist:  Premium Business Services (11/30/08)
Auditor:  Tyler C. Kennedy

00:00:00.0

[Start of tape 1]

DH:  Recorded by Donna Hartshorne in Germaine Bree’s office in the observatory on the Madison Campus for the University Archives Oral History project.  Now I suppose, Ms. 
Bree, that the, um, logical way to proceed would be to start at the beginning.  And I understand you were born in France, and I’m wondering what you could tell me about your early memories and a little bit about your family.  What stands out in your memory?
GB:  I do remember France quite well even though we left it when I was five, precisely because we left France and went to the Channel Islands.  So the memories of that particular village in which I was born are very clear.  And I know they date from that first part of my life.  We were living in a small village in the [word unclear], which my father, who was English was a minister because he had become a converted to French Protestantism.  And I remember that we lived extremely well.  We had this one street, of course, it’s the Protestant part of France, the Hugenot part.
DH:  I see.
GB:  And I remember it was at that period, they were still, they still had silk worms.  And I can remember the silk worms --
DH:  [words unclear].
GB:  -- disappear, and when we came back to the spot, of course, I came back ten years later, the [words unclear] were gone.  So that, I know is a memory, a very clear memory.  My, uh, mother was French, and I remember my grandmother, who was Swiss, who lived with us.  And my father was, of course, English citizen of French origin, being a Channel Islander.
DH:  Oh, he was a Channel Islander.
GB:  Yes, he was a gentleman, and he was naturally bilingual because of his family.  The children were sent, the boys were sent to the French lycee from Jersey, and after they had got and had studied in France, they studied in England as his fathers did, the University of London or whatnot.  And my father, therefore, had this double education.  And my mother has, had belonged to a French Protestant family and like many French Protestants, since they’re not so very numerous in France, she had, um, she was from Lorraine.  She had friends in England, and when she was about 15, she had been to England and spoke English extremely well.  
	She had a slight accent that [word unclear] all her children inherited [words unclear].  One of the first memories I have is of sitting on the floor while my mother was teaching my two eldest sisters.  They were my half sisters.  My father, there was a first marriage, and my -- she was teaching them English on the blackboard in one of her rooms.  And I was sitting on the floor, and I still remember being fascinated by this, and possibly I then began to learn English that way, which was very early.  They were both completely bilingual, but -- so I have wonderful memories, of course, of the South of France.  And always, when I came back, I recognize so many things that I have obviously taken in as a child.  
DH:  Did, um, you mentioned both parents were bilingual.  What, did they use both, uh, languages in the home?
GB:  Yes.
DH:  How did they --
GB:  Yes, they --
DH:  -- communicate to one another?
GB:  They, at first, you see, you know, when we were in France, and I was small, they used English when they wanted to speak without being understood by the children.
DH:  Oh, I see.
GB:  We were a very large family, and they used to, they would speak English.  But then the time became, one of the, one of them [words unclear] many people are bilingual.  But one of the lucky things, I think, was the fact that we were talking most in one language and then in another language and back to the other language for this period of time, so that the two languages kept, you know, we kept them going.  But as soon as we went to Channel Islands, when I was five, and I can remember, we went back to [word unclear], of course.  I can remember parts of the journey. 
0:04:36.9 
	And then I can remember getting on the boat even.  But, uh, once we started to know English, of course, they couldn’t do that, and my mother made a very valiant attempt to keep our French going by trying to have us speak French at home, which has always been a difficult thing to get children to do when they -- one environment they don’t actually want to speak the other language.  But she did manage to, uh, she did manage to keep this going in, in French while we were talking English.  And anyhow, the Channel Islands, uh, the Channel Islands at that time, I think it’s no longer true, have many, there were many people who spoke French.  There were many people of French, people of French origin.  
DH:  Well, that must have made it easier too if there was --
GB:  It made it easier.
DH:  -- French going on.
GB:  Yeah, it made it easier to insist that we would keep up with it.
DH:  It made it less artificial.
GB:  So my first five years were spent in this village in the [words unclear], which was the title of a book that came out later, not by me but by a colleague of mine.  And then my next ten years were spent in the Channel Islands with visits to England where my father’s brother lived.  One of his brothers was in Argentine.  Another one was in India.  But one was indeed in England.  And we were, we spent some time in [word unclear] and some time in Jersey.  So, but that was the next very clear slice of life because that was very particular, Channel Islands, very delightful.  And we spent the war years there, which was very lucky for us because they, in World War I, the Channel Islands were absolutely safe.  Of course, in World War II, they were occupied.  But that’s another story.
DH:  That’s another story.  We’ll get to that.  
GB:  That’s another story.  But that’s where, that’s where we spent the, uh, the next ten years, and then I went to a very good English school they called public school, one public school.  And that’s where I did all my, uh, secondary education and, uh, until I was 15 and took my senior matriculation and then went back to France.  Now the memories of the Channel Islands, of course, will have to do with the sea, swimming, and flowers.  They were full of flowers, the Channel Islands, at the time.
DH:  Oh, my.
GB:  And as you know, the great resource of the Channel Islands is also milk.  They had Jersey cows and, and I remember we used to go to a farm and get our milk warm, it was warm from the, uh, from the cow.  What do you call it, from the --
DH:  Udders?
GB:  Yes, they had just been milked, warm from the milking.
DH:  It wasn’t pasteurized or anything.
GB:  Nothing, it was --
DH:  Just milk.
GB:  Straight, uh, straight from the milking, and I can remember how extraordinary it seemed and even trying to milk a cow, which I’ve never been able to do and couldn’t do.  It’s very hard to milk a cow.  But there, in that, in that school, I did have an English education, which meant that I had a good deal more physical exercise than I would have had in the French lycee.
DH:  Oh, explain that, would you?  Why is that?
GB:  The French lycees are, I was in an English boarding school, but French lycees did very, very little physical education at the time.  You had a great deal of, the classes were very tightly scheduled.  And if you wanted to do a sport of any kind, you had to do it outside.  You don’t, it was a very, it was a very rigorous, uh, kind of education I went back to, in which, which I appreciated quite a bit.  But on the other hand, my English education was better balanced from the point of view of games, swimming, um, general freedom within the system, which we didn’t, uh, French schools, at the time, didn’t allow.  It changed in 1968.  It was one of the, one of the reasons for some of the student unrest, this rather tight, uh, and rigorous education with lots and lots of homework.
0:09:35.4
DH:  More homework than in the English school?
GB:  Oh, yes, a good deal more homework and less, less freedom in every way, I mean, you are, you are taught, uh, you had to memorize a good deal in the French system.  And you had to write, and you had to write with no kind of, uh, of leeway as to structure, development.  You, you were taught that you have to present a dissertation in this form, you know, introduction, point one, point two, point three, conclusion.  And you couldn’t stray very far.  And also, you need to have attention to text.  There was a set pattern that was transmitted to the culture, which was transmitted through the educational system.  And it was much freer in England.  In England,  this was an English school in Jersey.
DH:  Uh-huh.  Which system did you enjoy the most?
GB:  Well, in a way, I enjoyed them both.  I, uh, suffered under the French system when I came back.  I was young.  I was 15, and I had been, I was about early year ahead, almost two years ahead, largely because I had my, I had been kept going with my two elder sisters, who were three and four years older than I was.  So I had moved along the track rather, rather ahead.  And so I was put into a French school.  I was supposed to be then going onto Oxford.  But this didn’t happen because of the circumstances right after World War I.  I was born, let me see, in 1907, so it was in the mid-‘20s.  
	And that was, of course, when the [word unclear] crashed, and it was not possible for me to go back to England from, for study at the time.  But I appreciated then, I appreciated the French discipline.  They, the French were very tough and taught me how to work.  And I’ve worked every since and enjoyed it.  And I also enjoyed the rigor of it.  You would have, I wondered [words unclear] and I, very often coming from an English background, I was very ready to tell my professors that I didn’t think the way they did.  But that they soon put a stop to.  I remember one professor, who was at school with me.  Oh, I was all of 16 maybe, and I remember she raised quite an uproar.  She said I was bringing in, let me see, the habits of a foreign country, which was England, into the school.  
DH:  So she was objecting to this?
GB:  Oh, she was objecting very strongly.  She was a teacher of French rules, and we hadn’t seen eye to eye.  And I was surely probably wrong, but I was saying what I thought [Laughs], which I was more accustomed to do in my English schooling.
DH:  Okay.  Well, you didn’t go to Oxford.  What did you do then?
GB:  Then I went right to the French system, and it’s one of the things that, it was baffling because the two years I started literally back as if I were 12 years old and went through the whole system.  And I was 15.
DH:  And why did they put you back?
GB:  Well, my parents, um, had thought really that I was only here for the year and that I would be going on to England.  And so it was up, that in the process, that I took the exams.  I took the whole set of exams, the ones you take at 12, the ones that you take the [words unclear].  And I was going through the wrong track in a sense.  I was going through, they have two tracks.  They have.  They don’t overdo, the what they call the primary, which was for people who don’t go beyond a certain stage.  And the secondary, which is apparently, I was there only for a short time and would go on then, they, my parents obviously thought that I would learn French, which I did, and strictly so.  And then I would move on to England, and it was, it was awhile before I realized that I was in the wrong track.  And then I was able to move into the secondary system and because I had my English diplomas.  
DH:  Oh, I see.
GB:  Can you see, it was, it, you have to get -- I had to realize how the French system worked, which my parents, my parents weren’t too familiar with, either of them.
DH:  And you didn’t have any particular trouble shifting from one track to the other.
0:14:43.0
GB:  Not if you’ve got the right diplomas, which I had.  I had the equivalent, which gave me entry into then the university after having spent a, I forget, three, four years in, in the wrong track.  That gave me entrance into the Sorbonne.  And once I was in the university, then things went very smoothly for me.  But that took a little while.  And I loved France, of course.  I, again, I was, we were back at that time, when we came back to France, we were back in, not in the village in which I was born, but in the [word unclear], which is the Protestant center of, uh, of southern, part of southern part of -- because that is also the Alsatian Lutheran Protestant --
DH:  It sounds as though your whole family moved back to France.  Is that correct?
GB:  Yes, my father moved back to a church in France, in the south of France.
DH:  So that you all went, it, uh, wondered for a minute if you’d just gone off to school by yourself.
GB:  No, no, no, I was, they -- my parents had left me one year alone at my school at the, it was called Jersey Ladies’ College, of all things.  Now it’s called Jersey School for Girls, which is not the point.  They left me though one year of that so that I would finish my secondary school curriculum, which was very wise of them, and then take my exams at the end.  And so I was, they left me one year up there, and then I came back and joined them in the south of France.  
DH:  So all this seems to have taken a lot of time.  When did you finish your, your whole education?
GB:  Well, I really actually caught up because what I did was to -- was to, uh, concentrate on English.  Now at the Sorbonne, we would take [word unclear] at the time.  You took four certificates, and I was able to do that in two years.  And then you do a thesis, which is like an MA thesis.  And then you pass the agregacion, which is a competitive exam.  Once you’ve passed that, you’re sure of a job.  This is one of the things I have never known is job insecurity.  
DH:  That’s very nice.
GB:  It’s awfully nice, and I often think of the young people we have here, who have to worry so much and spend so much time applying for jobs.  Once you pass the [word unclear], then you, the French government has to assure you a teaching position unless you do something horrendous, terrible.  They may displace you if you have, if there’s some complaint, but they cannot, they do not find --
DH:  I see.
00:17:40
GB:  But in between, I went one year to America.  
DH:  Oh, how did that, uh, happen?
GB:  It was, well, I belong to a generation, which is the generation of Sainte Simone de Beauvoir.  I’m just three months older than Simone de Beauvoir.  And if you read her memoirs, you will find out how, I mean, you know, how the American myths, how strong it was because of the movies.  And we all dreamed of America.  America was the [word unclear], the country of our imagination.  
DH:  I see.
GB:  Today, I have, uh, grand nieces and nieces whose imagination goes the other way.  They want to go, one of them wants to go to Egypt to learn Arabic.  My niece is off to China to learn Chinese, and all the rest of it.  But, uh, for us, it was America.  And so one day, I was, I was, at the time, it was the University of Paris.  And, um, preparing for my terms, and I ran into a young boy who said to me, could you tell me where the Selkirk  Theater is because I don’t know where it is, and I’ve just come back from America.  And I said, how did you get back?
DH:  What theater?
GB:  The ampitheater, the theater where they lecture, every lecture.
DH:  Oh, yeah.
GB:  And I said, how did you get there?  She said, I applied at this, this, uh, agency, which was the, an agency, Franco-American Agency.  And I applied, and I, my application was, uh, was accepted, and Bryn Mawr offered me a fellowship [words unclear], and I was delighted.  All I wanted to do was to go to America, and I was [words unclear] for the, uh, preparation of my exams, my last exam, which was like [words unclear] ’31, ’32.  So I was not that old.
DH:  And were you studying at Bryn Mawr, or were you teaching or doing --
0:19:28.3
GB:  I was only studying.  They were, they had these fond fellowships.  They were very good fellowships, and you were entirely, um, free to study.  I can’t say they, we studied because it was so fantastic to live the campus life, which, of course, I’d never, I hadn’t lived, in a way.  And the University of Paris, I was earning my living in any case.  And I enjoyed it very much.  But for the first time in my life, you know, I enjoyed this freedom within the university structure.  You know, I had been going to lectures and then coming back and, um, and had very little time to play around with other students.  We did have a work group, which we sort of prepared that class together, but I was often too busy.
00:20:34
DH:  Uh-huh, I see.  So that was a good year.
GB:  It was a wonderful year.  And it, it changed all my life because I went back, took my exam, passed it, and was assigned a job, a post in North Africa.  I taught there for four years, and then Bryn Mawr called me back, offered me, uh, a lectureship in French, which although I had majored in English at the time.  Like always a considerable part of the, um, a part of the problem solving French literature, of course, being part.  So I had a good, solid preparation in French, which was not nearly as solid as my French colleagues because I had been brought up in England.  So that all my, all the lycee, all the lycee preparation in French literature was lacking for me.  I had only the university, and I had to make --
DH:  Gotcha.
GB:  I had to catch up quite a bit.  On the other hand, my preparation in English literature was very good.  And that’s why I think that I was lucky in a sense to have that double educational experience.  And then one year of, uh, graduate school in America, and it makes a rather pleasant kind of combination.  It’s [words unclear], at least for me.
DH:  So you didn’t really mind the shift from English literature to French.
GB:  No, I didn’t mind it.  I, um, worked very hard and probably did some very strange teaching, because I had to feel my way through some of the material particularly since Bryn Mawr is a very demanding, it’s a very good place to do one’s apprenticeship in.  Because their standards were high, the students were very good.
DH:  That’s what I understand.
GB:  And the expectations were, um, quite clear.  My chairman, the chairman of my department, who was a wonderful woman, but a firm woman, by the name of Venus Morgan Skek.  It was quite clear as to what she expected from the people in her department.  She picked you, and she followed you.  And it was a small department.  It was a small college, 800 students, I think, at the time if that.  But the standard’s very high in the graduate school, of course.  And had I not had that experience in the graduate school at Bryn Mawr, I would have been much less well prepared for teaching later on in the University of Wisconsin or NYU.  
00:23:48
DH:  What, uh, let’s backtrack a little bit to what you were doing in Africa.  
GB:  Well, in Africa, I was teaching, um, in the lycee, that is a secondary school.  And I was teaching English.  And as you know, the lycee has two years, really corresponds to the first two years of college.  The last two years of lycee corresponds to the first two years of college about.  So I was teaching, as you teach in the lycee, that is the curriculum is established, centrally established in Paris.  I think that’s something, which is changing.  So you had your syllabus.  You didn’t establish your syllabus.  You knew what you taught.  You knew that in such a class you taught the Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and then you got to [word unclear] you taught Hamlet.  After then like four years, then you’ll be at peace to get it changed, at least I was [Laughs.].
DH:  I would think so.
0:24:44.3
GB:  -- I enjoyed it.  I’ve always enjoyed teaching.  We had 40 students in a class quite often.  And I taught from the 12-year-olds up to the 18-year-olds.  
DH:  Did you have boys and girls?
GB:  Just girls.
DH:  Just girls.
GB:  Yes, and the lycees were absolutely segregated then.  I think that has changed to some extent now.  I think that everything desegregated quite a bit.  
DH:  Now where in North Africa was this?
GB:  This was in Oran, Algeria, the lycee [word unclear].  That’s where I did my first four years of teaching.  We also did a lot of traveling in North Africa at the time and, of course, a lot of swimming.  How nice to see once again, which is how I feel one of my great, uh, [words unclear], you see, and he always wanted to swim, but if I could get a chance.  
DH:  Which the [Showard?] Pool isn’t quite the sea, but it’s nice.
GB:  Yes, it’s nice.  And when I first came here, now I came here in the ‘60s, I swam in Monona Lake.
DH:  Did you?
GB:  And at the end, after I no longer did because it was no longer, it was no longer, uh, as clean.
DH:  Yes, the weed problem has gotten worse and worse.
GB:  Yes.  Weed problem had gotten, it was no longer pleasant, as pleasant.  That lake was lower I think.  I may be wrong, but I have a feeling that it was lower when sitting on the edge of Monona Lake. 
DH:  This, I, this, I don’t know.  It could have been.  I think it does fluctuate some.
GB:  It fluctuates some.  So that’s when I was, when I was teaching those four years, I did a lot of travel, traveling down to North Africa and visiting as I went down, for example, Spain and Italy, coming up again.  When you came back from the summer vacation, traveling in North Africa, Morocco, Algiers, Tunisia, we were all 24, 25, a whole bunch of us down there.  And every vacation, we would be off on our way to the South.  So I saw quite a bit of the countryside, and I’m glad I did.
DH:  Yeah, it sounds pretty exciting.  Did you have long vacations?
GB:  Just the ordinary school year of the, uh, the Christmas vacations, something like, I think, ten days and the two weeks of, uh, the Easter vacation.  I forget how long the vacations were because some vacations, we went fast, all traveling.  We didn’t stay in North Africa.  But we had also, we had, uh, we had the, we spent a lot of time during the teaching period.  We spent a lot of time on the beaches.
DH:  Oh, you did?
GB:  Yes, the beaches in North Africa are just marvelous.  I don’t know how they are now, but they were just marvelous, beautiful beaches, wonderful swimming.
DH:  Oh, great.  Well, roughly when was this?  What were these --
GB:  ’31, I went there in ’32, October ’32.  I passed my exam, my [word unclear] in the summer of ’32 and I came back from America, got through my exam, and was assigned, uh, Oran, the University of Oran, right away.  They ask you where you want to go, and I had said I wanted to go to Indochina or to, uh, to Persia as it was called then.  [Words unclear] to places like Islaham, now I was very romantic at the time, and my idea was to get a job as far out as possible, like Hanoi.  And, uh, while I was dreaming of Islaham or Tehran, Tehran, I think where the French lycee was, but they had, they had more sense.  They sent me to North Africa.  
DH:  Well, that’s too bad.  So you were there for four years, until about ’36.  And that is when you went back to Bryn Mawr?
GB:  That is when I came back to Bryn Mawr.  Bryn Mawr offered me a lectureship, and I came back to Bryn Mawr.  And at last I stayed except for the couple of years I spent in the French Army.
DH:  Well, tell me about that.  Tell me about the French Army, how did you get into that?
0:29:34.4
GB:  I volunteered.  And the, well, I don’t have to tell the story of this.  It was a miserable period for the French.  
DH:  Oh, yes, I understand that.
GB:  And the quarrels between the French were very painful, at least I felt that and a certain number of my friends, French friends thought that too.  So after the Americans got in, there were volunteer, there, they were calling for volunteers, and there was a group of ambulance, volunteer ambulance drivers that was being organized.  And I volunteered and was accepted in this group.  There were about 15 women ambulance drivers [blank spot on tape] in the United States not because of our American friends but largely because of our French compatriots.
DH:  You mean the ones here?
GB:  Yes, because, you know, the Gaullists wouldn’t speak to the Petainists and it was just so painful to have all these quarrels going on when France occupied in any case, and being cut away as we were, I had part of my family in London, which didn’t make things any better.  And, of course, I was, I was separated from my family in France.  And the only thing to do was to, it seemed to me, was to volunteer.  And once you’re in uniform, nobody asks you any questions.  You don’t have to, you don’t have to say that to take a position.  You’re just, you’re just classified.  You’re not, so we, so I volunteered, and we, we left for North Africa, which [words unclear] back to North Africa.  
	And we left, and we were assigned to the second armored division, which had just come up from the [word unclear] and [words unclear] ambulances and a whole lot of medicine so that we were rather welcome in that division.  So that is where I first, I was first assigned there.  And then I think some six months, normally about two years, some six or eight months later, the French organized the woman’s army army [words unclear].  
	And I was transferred to G2, so I was transferred, we were at [words unclear] transferred to Algiers, and then from there, I was transferred to the headquarters of the French general commanding the 8th Division, the 8th District, which was Dijon, which was close to the, which was close to the, yeah, it was just behind, the front was very safe.  I’m not pretending that there was any danger attached to it, very, very safe.  
	But I was there because the headquarters of the American, American Headquarters were there.  There was confidential advanced section in particular because we, the advanced supply base for the French 1st Army.  So I was assigned there, and then I was moved when the, when the Americans and French moved into Germany.  I was then attached to the continental advanced section.  It was moving in behind to the American’s headquarters.  
DH:  Were you still driving an ambulance?
GB:  No, no, I was INT when I went to G2, which was intelligence.
DH:  Intelligence, that’s right.
GB:  So I’m sure they could’ve done without my services perfectly happily, but that’s what I was at the time I was Mannheim [words unclear] district at the time of the [words unclear].  And we went on, we went [words unclear], traveled a lot in the army, not always comfortable, you know.
DH:  What kind of things were you doing then?
GB:  When I was with the --
DH:  In the G2?
GB:  -- G2, well, when I was in Algiers, I was with the headquarters of the French military [word unclear], and I was mostly using my English before I [Loud noise, couldn’t hear] or [Blank spot on tape] I did work with certain files, for example, files that had to do sometimes with, I remember, with certain agents that had been, for example, parachuted into France and some, I remember one file of an agent, which had come back.  He had been captured, and that kind of thing, you know.  And other things like the shunting of trains, back and forth.  They all had these numbers.  And I was supposed to try to find out what, where they, we wanted to find out where they were going to and fro from, you know, which I didn’t do very well at all.
0:34:59.6
	I didn’t make much out of that, but I had assignments of that kind, just usual assignments.  By that time, I was second lieutenant, but I had been, up to then, I had been private.  When I was an ambulance driver, I was private second class.  When the French Army organized the Women’s Corps, they promoted me to it because of my dignity as a university professor.
DH:  Oh, I can --
GB:  They promoted me to second lieutenant. 
DH:  Great.
GB:  You know what the second lieutenant can do in headquarters is really not very much.  It’s, uh, it’s routine kind of work.
DH:  Oh, well, it’s a step up from private.
GB:  And, and, you know, keeping sort of happy relations with I always got on well with the Americans.  I never had any complaints about them at all.  I could do some conversations from interpretations.
DH:  Oh, this must have been very useful to them.
GB:  Well, there were many competent people who could do it too.  But it was fun for me in a way.
DH:  So you stayed with that then until the war ended?
GB:  Then I was transferred to the, to the headquarters of the general commanding the 8th Division, in which, of course, I was much closer to the work of the confidential advanced because I was constantly, I was, in fact, the interpreter there.  There was only one.  It was me, on the French side.  I represented the French side.  So I was closer to, any kind of incidents that would occur would have to be, um, smoothed out.  I mean incidents, there were four incidents that occurred, that had to be smoothed out.
DH:  What kind are you talking about?
GB:  Well, I can remember one case that had to do with a rape of a rather elderly woman, you know, with troops around.  And another case, which was an actuallyhilarious case in which a young woman had awakened in one, it was one of those big high rise, one of those big apartments.  But I’m getting mixed up.  This was in Algiers by the, and she woke up and saw this man absolutely naked, standing there, and he was a perfectly innocent young American soldier who had got so drunk that he had come to the wrong door.  He had an apartment on the floor below and couldn’t get in and had the positive envelope, which said top secret.  At the door, he’d taken off all his clothes and got in, it was one of those very high, got in, nobody knows how, by balancing on this little edge.
DH:  While drunk?
GB:  And he was standing there, and he was trying to see, and she, of course, screamed.  He had stepped into the window, and he had no intention except he got into a lot of hot water because he had left that top secret, and this was not becoming a young captain [words unclear].  So I was in on the court martial of this poor guy, and he was very, very, he was very sorry because every time that questions were put to him, he would get up, he would answer, and he would get up and bow to the girl who was there and say, I am very sorry I inconvenienced you Madame.  
	And he was indeed, he had, this was one of these strange things, and the brother of this young woman, who was a captain of the French Army had said to me, I want you to be our interpreter in this case.  That’s how I was there.  And he would say to me, he would turn to me every time they had asked questions and indeed the young man kept saying, I don’t remember anything, and he was, he could have been dead drunk.
0:39:34.4  
	And the brother of the girl to who it happened would say to me, tell them I don’t care about that investigation, but I want to know how he got from Door A to Door B, which was a feat of, complete acrobatic feat that he had accomplished.  And this question, he appeared three or four times, and I thought, I was sorry for the guy.  But I thought I was going to laugh out loud.  
DH:  Well, it is funny.  
GB: It wasn’t funny to the boy.
DH:  Oh, I’m sure.
GB:  But he was in big trouble.  We don’t know what happened to him because after the hearing, we don’t hear, but I think probably he was sent to Viet Nam or something.  It wouldn’t be Viet Nam.  It could be in the Pacific.  He was probably sent out to the Pacific Front or something like that.  I don’t know.  So, I mean, you had all kinds of things that happened that you did.  And then after that, I was in the [word unclear] in the advanced section, but then what I did was in quite a way different because we would go back and forth between the French, see, everybody was advancing.  Everybody was moving, Patton [words unclear].  
	And the French 1st Army was moving.  And we would be sent on a very routine job, but the French Army was moving, and would be told to go to Frankfurt for this [word unclear].  So that’s why we were in Frankfurt.  Heavens knows where the French, the 1st French Army had got by then.  They headed down toward the Lake of Constance.  So we kept running after --
DH:  Yes I remember at end of the war.  Things happened very quickly
GB:  Very, very quickly, and we would see quite a lot of the countryside, with the ongoing search of our headquarters which we were supposed to be contacting about anything, about Nazi personnel.  They were counting down without the personnel, and who was in what zone, which was the question of the different zones and keeping in touch with what was happening with the different zones.  So that was it, a very good team and a job. 
DH:  And some of them were funny.
GB:  Some of them were funny, very often funny.
DH:  How, uh, how long after the war did you stay with them?
GB:  Oh, I moved as soon as I could to get back to Bryn Mawr, as you may remember, August is the time when the European front closed down, I mean, it was finished.  Do you remember, they, it was in August that they crossed the, I don’t --
DH:  No, I remember it was, it ended in the Pacific in August.
GB:  Yes, but I mean that [words unclear] it ended before, I left in August.  I could’ve stayed on, but there was nothing to do.  And I very much wanted to get back to Bryn Mawr.  So I [word unclear] made the right move and what I was told to do and took one of the boats back to, it was a sort of troop ship to, but we worked very well.  We were eight or nine in a cabin, but went in cabins [words unclear] cabin.  And it was demobilized in New York, in New York.
DH:  I thought you went to Virginia. 
GB:  We started for, we started from Camp Patrick Henry.
DH:  Where is that?
GB:  Knoxville, Virginia, and moved, that’s where we left, so Knoxville, Virginia, and we went to North Africa from there landed in Casablanca, when the 2nd Army position, when we joined the 2nd Army position.  But I came back by New York, which was convenient for Bryn Mawr too.
DH:  Did you have to go to camp there?
GB:  No, there was some, you know, there were not too many of us who had volunteered.  There were a handful, really of us who, the French have a special, some kind of special agency when we reported and where you apply.  
DH:  So it was very simple.
GB:  It was very simple.  
DH:  Well, there wasn’t any problem about Bryn Mawr accepting you back.
GB:  Well, Bryn Mawr was really very understanding.  They had held my job for me for the, two years, they had kept that for me.  In fact, they were the one who helped me get out because they put in a request to have me back.
DH:  Well, they probably wanted you back by the beginning of the teaching here.
GB:  That’s right, and I came back for the beginning of the teaching year just about, that was, say just about when I returned.  I forget the dates now.  But I came back just in the beginning of the teaching year, and what I feel to be back, I was very delighted.
0:44:53.6
DH:  Well, how long did you go on teaching at Bryn Mawr?
GB:  I went on teaching at Bryn Mawr until ’53.  
DH:  And then what happened?
GB:  And then I was offered the position of chairman of the Department of French at NYU, and the year after that, head of the Department of Romance and Slavic Languages.  I gave them, I suppose they tried me out for a year and then thought I could fill that slot.  Slavic Languages was a very small thing.  It was an administrative responsibility.  We had a small Russian section, which was delightful.  And, of course, I don’t know a word of Russian.  But I was just the administrative person there, you know, for the budget and all.
DH:  Well, this, how did you like the change?
GB:  Well, I rather liked it.  It was a bigger job than I had realized because they had two undergraduate schools at the time, one up in University Heights and one at the Square.  And they had the evening school, which was already three units, plus a graduate school, but at night.  All the graduate courses were given at night.  And that made a rather large department.  I think we were 50 or so at the time.
DH:  Oh, you had to keep track of all of that?
GB:  I had to keep track of all the sections and, it was a very different system at Bryn Mawr, which was not of the same kind, didn’t go on what I call the dollar-credit point system.
DH:  What was that?
GB:  So many credits, so many points, you know, costs so many dollars.  And you pay your dollars, and you take the course.  And people come in, and they take two courses, you know, the way it works in those big cities.  They come in at night, and they slowly build up.  And Bryn Mawr, it doesn’t work like that.  It works on a program for the year.  You come in, and you pay your fee, and then you have a program set up.  
DH:  Yes, that is a very different arrangement then.
GB:  Very different arrangement, yeah, and I had to get used to it.  And I came in the summer and worked in the summer there to get used to the system and very often was totally lost.  And then little by little, as my accounts were very, very good, and the administration was very patient.  They helped me quite a bit.
DH:  Had you done any administrative work at Bryn Mawr?
GB:  Nothing.  
DH:  So this was completely new.
GB:  It was completely new.  And certainly, the departments at Bryn Mawr, being small, worked very closely together.  I mean, people worked very closely together.  But here, the size of it was very hard [word unclear].  It was rather interesting the rest of the year so everything was developing, and possibly [word unclear] was being that at the time it appeared the university was going up.  It had grown to really improve the university and to become equal to Columbia.  It was the years of Charles [word unclear] came in, and he justified university.  And the next year, the university was making enormous strides and trying to get quality, trying to get a curriculum of a certain kind and the sort that of a student, of course.  This was after you have all these veterans, and you have --
DH:  Oh, this has been the time of the GI Bill and a lot of young people went back to college on that.
GB:  Right, we had mature people and all kinds of people, of course.  That was a force of change from Bryn Mawr, the variety of the student population was so great.  Whereas, at Bryn Mawr, you had highly selected group of both socially] speaking, in spite of the fact that they give a lot of  scholarships, that were socially selected  and, of course, is very carefully selected academically.  
DH:  Uh-huh.  Well, they have a very good reputation.
0:49:55.9
GB:  Oh, yeah, it was a good place.  But this was in a way more fun because, you know, you had to deal with all kinds of people and all kinds of students and the departments and the university and the department [Loud motor obstructs sound.]  I wouldn’t like to be chairman of a department when you have to cut down.
DH:  It wouldn’t have --
GB:  Heartbreaking.  It’s heartbreaking for a chairman of a department to have to cut down.
DH:  I’m sure it must be, and I can sense excitement when things are changing and moving ahead.
GB:  That’s right.  And I had these teaching assistants, who, see, I was able to hire teaching assistants.  And the pool in New York is very diverse, and I had one of the most wonderful teams of teaching assistants that one could hope to have in those years.  They were just wonderful.  And so all this made for excitement and a very, very busy life.  I must admit that it was, after seven years of it, it was time that I, I had to slow down.
DH:  Well, seven years of that is, takes quite a bit.  Did you do some teaching too?
GB:  Oh, my, yes.  When I first went to, uh, NYU, I was actually teaching three courses.  And then they cut that down to two.  But, of course, since I was chairman of the department, and still since the place then from 8:00 in the morning until 10:00 at night.  And the days were very, very long for the chairman or whatever they call it, head.
DH:  Did you have to stay there all that time?
GB:  No, but sometimes I had to be there early, and again, by the chances of getting an apartment, I was living near Columbia, up on [word unclear], where I had got my apartment.  I couldn’t commute back and forth.  That takes too much time in New York.
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  So I would sometimes have very long days.
DH:  Well, I can see where that might have been, what were you, again, were you teaching French literature?
GB:  I was teaching French literature, twentieth century French literature.  So that was my field, and I was teaching graduate course and, a couple undergraduate courses, at the beginning, and then I only taught one graduate and one undergraduate.  I only taught seven years.  That was plenty.
DH:  Well, I would think so with all the other activities you had to supervise.  So you were there for seven years?
GB:  I was there for seven years, yes.
DH:  As chairman that whole time?
GB:  Well, I was chairman of the French section the first year, and I was head of the whole Romance language and Slavic Language Department for the rest of the time.  But, you know, you never get to [words unclear] the chairman of the Spanish Section, you rarely take care of the Spanish section.  You have to agree on budgets and things like that.
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  So that’s, I thought I had to coordinate all of it [words unclear], but that was helped a lot.  One of the professors in the French section was also one of the administrators here in the system, assistant dean or something, I forget.  He was one of the deans, and he helped me a great deal on things like budgets.  I had never had a budget before.
DH:  That was complicated, I imagine.
GB:  Oh, my, yes.  But he really took responsibility of that.  Otherwise I’m afraid I would’ve been tremendous reduction if I had to do it by myself.  [words unclear].
DH:  Now, when did you decide to become a United States citizen?
GB:  I think it was ’52, ’52 or ’53.
DH:  And what influenced that decision?  I understand that you at one time could choose between being British or French, and you chose French.
GB:  Yeah.
0:54:45.0
DH:  Let’s start at that.  Why did you choose that?
GB:  Well, I felt very close to the French, perhaps because my mother is French, we’d been living in France, and since then, I have become much more aware of what ties I have with the village too.  But at the time, I was a little anti-English in a large part because my father’s family in England were a great deal better off than we were.  And we always had sort of role of somewhat of the poor cousins, and, you know, the English respect nobility, and the British sense of superiority and at the time of my adolescence, it annoyed me.  
	I was annoyed because they seemed to think of the French very, I think they understand the French much better now.  But at least, they always seemed to think the French were somewhat inferior.  And I was quite fascinated, of course, by France, the French.  And I had a great solidarity with the French and felt I didn’t really approve of the English attitude.  My uncle, on the other hand, my English uncle was, had had a French education and he was very open to the French.  And among my nephews, I have two, who are extremely fascinated by France.  
DH:  Do they live in France?
GB:  Oh, no, one of them is in Canada, and the other one is in England.  But they are, they are drawn to the French.  They are not, they don’t take the attitude of, you know, sometimes, well, they should, but they no longer do.  This was the British, they were working on the French.  They say they don’t do this, and they don’t do that, and they have a sense of the British.  They had, but they no longer have it.  They were far superior in all kinds of ways.  And I didn’t like that.  And then I got to very much closer to the English later on, coming through World War II on, when they went through, they had so much, you know, they went through so much.  
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  But I had, the why now, I had chosen that a couple times [words unclear], but I felt very much at home in America to begin with.  All my professional career was set in America.  And I realize that you cannot feel totally at home if you can’t participate in the political discussions.  I feel very strongly that if you’re a foreigner, you cannot, you can’t say what you think in the same way.  At least I couldn’t.  You can’t tell the Americans, if you’re an American, you can say this is what I think, and that’s why I think it.  If you’re a foreigner, you have to be very careful not to, not to impinge upon the, uh, thinking of the American citizen, after all it’s their country.  
	It isn’t yours, and you don’t participate in the same way.  And I also felt the same for the university situation.  If I was to have any kind of voice, it would have to be as part of the institution.  The Americans, I have always found extraordinarily generous in the way they deal with foreigners, and I also sometimes found problems with the way, annoyed with the way they, they, uh, keep passing judgments on the Americans while living in America.  And I don’t like that.  
	And possibly that is a big part of my English training that I have internalized.  I think the English are very sensitive to this kind of thing.  At least, it seems so.  But anyway that, those are the reasons, many of the reasons why, one of the main reasons why I decided I wanted to be an American citizen.
DH:  So when did you do this?
GB:  ’52 to ’53, ’52, I’m not sure exactly.
DH:  Uh-huh, somewhere around in there.
GB:  That’s right.  Yeah, you take it, if you [words unclear] you take the whole thing.  I don’t know if you see what I mean.
DH:  Oh, I think I --
GB:  The good and the bad.  
DH:  And it’s a very subtle distinction that you’re making I believe, that it has to do with a feeling.
GB:  With a feeling, a feeling of freedom about it, but also a feeling, as I say, you take the good with the bad.  I would no more have become an American citizen in 1940.  I would have no more thought of it than, I don’t know, jumping off a roof, because in 1940, I was a French citizen, and you had to take it.  
0:59:58.3
	You know, France was defeated.  France was in very bad depression.  But I had also benefited as a French citizen from all kinds of things, and I think there were a number of us who felt that way, that this was no time to rush off and get naturalized.  
DH:  No, I think I can follow that.
GB:  Can you follow that?
DH:  Yes, I think so, thinking back to the events of the day.
GB:  And you can’t, you know, you can’t be French in a good days and not French in bad days as you can’t be not American for certain things and benefit, I mean, from the American institutions and privileges.  And it seems to me, you’ve got to take the whole thing.
[End of Tape 1]
[Start of Tape 2]
0:00:00.0
DH:  You were talking about teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses.  Now this interests me.  Do you, did you feel that there’s a large difference in the two kinds of teaching?
GB:  Yeah, there is a difference.  And the difference, of course, is that the graduate student is more ready or should be, ready to have a wide background already, has come with a certain competence and should come with certain competence in language.  And is also specializing, and the kind of work one does in a graduate course is much more in depth.  And also the graduate student participates in the seminar.  
	I think one of the things that one has to do in a graduate seminar is to make sure that the material is presented that is new to the student, who comes already with a certain preparation, and that the student begins to participate in the development of the seminar.  And one, that is something, which is more, which requires a rather different attitude and also, which is more demanding in the sense that the graduate can raise questions that you may not be prepared for.  In other words, you are more vulnerable in the graduate, in my opinion because you don’t come with your material ready and the material, I mean, you can come with your material ready.  
	But you don’t know in, where, in what way it’s going to be taken over and in what direction the student may ask you to go.  So you have to have considerable preparation and depth as well as in scope.  Now, the undergraduate student comes with curiosity and much less knowledge.  And now there, what you have to do is what are we going to teach?  What am I going to teach the undergraduate student?  What are the important things?  
	In other words, what you have to do is to select a certain number in the, you have a reading list since this, I’m talking about literature and the language.  You have certain texts that you feel if you’re going to major in French that the department feels the undergraduate should know.  And when you begin to present and discuss those texts, you, at least I say to myself, before the hour is up, these are the points that have to come across.  You have to build, and you have to give them certain leeway.  
	But you have to keep the, keep present in mind that they have to acquire certain knowledge and a certain method.  In other words, what is venerable to the discussion, what is just gone pitting wild, and yet give them a sense that they are seeing or discovering things themselves.  Can you see the difference that I’m trying to make?
DH:  Yes, yes, I can.  
GB:  So I think that the two require a different type of preparation, a different relation with the students, and certainly a different method of conducting, on the one hand, the sense of involving the student, and on the other hand, the class.  It’s a different environment.
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  You have to be much more, you have to be much tougher, much more demanding, I think, on the graduate student in the, in the sense of precision, method, documentation.  And you have to give the undergraduate a certain feeling of participation, which the graduate student already has because he’s specializing, or she, I should say, more and more she.  She specializes, and she is a specialist already.  Whereas, you have to give the undergraduate an entrance into the subject.  And why is it, why should he take any interest whatsoever in Madame Bovary? 
0:05:02.0 
	To me, it’s a miracle that you, that you teach wherever you teach?  You know, what is extraordinary is to know that people out in Idaho are learning French, and they’re reading Madame Bovary.  Now why in heaven’s name should an American undergraduate student be interested in French literature?  I don’t start from the assumption that they have been interested in French literature in college.  
DH:  You don’t?
GB:  Nope, I don’t.  I start from the assumption that I hope that they can love out of it because I love it.  But we have to furnish the entrance into that field.  And so during the teaching hours, we are the ones that have to lead them into the understanding of what it is we’re doing, with the hope that whatever we do in French literature is going be helpful in English literature, that teaching literature is basically the same except we have a great difficulty of the language barrier.  Now, that language barrier has, is no longer so great in the graduate seminar.  The graduate already has a competence in language and can perform language.  And this is one of the great difficulties with teaching undergraduates because they want to say so many things, and they’re not equipped to say them.  
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  And the way you make the balance, and that’s why teaching literature classes in a foreign language is very difficult because it’s very hard to evaluate someone who has a very fine literary sense but no, but not a very good grasp of the language.  How do you grade them?
DH:  Oh, I see.  That would be --
GB:  How do you grade them?  Now if you grade them only on the language, then it’s a shame, it’s a pity because they, what they grasp is something about the literature.  And that is what you want them to get as well.  And you’re constantly torn between saying, oh, heavens, I mean, look at this French, it’s all full of mistakes, and sensing there is someone who has something to say about the text.  And that’s, of course, temptation is to go into English.  
	And if you go into English, and some of my colleagues do.  They say it’s the only way they can get the undergraduate graded that they’re really expressing herself or himself.  And that’s probably, but once you go to English, you miss a lot.  You have lost the student’s French. 
DH:  By going into English, do you mean reading it --
GB:  It would be with the discussion and writing of papers in English.
DH:  Oh, I see, you’d read it in French, but --
GB:  But, yes, they often discuss it, and I can understand because one is perpetually frustrated  by the fact that between you and the student communication, you’ve got that language of which they are struggling, these students, you know.  And it’s coming out full of mistakes.  And it’s discouraging for them.  And they’re saying, they don’t know what they’re saying because they don’t know what the syntax is or what the vocabulary is, the possibilities are.  
	And so the professor has to struggle through, paper after paper, trying to make out what they’re really driving at because their French, and you can’t learn a language well in, you know, after two years of elementary and intermediate French.  You cannot learn the language so that you can actually think in it and say something personally so that almost never to really translate from the English into words that have no, it’s very hard to interpret for the professor.  And that’s very difficult to the undergraduate teaching.  
	So that is, but I love to do it, and I think undergraduates are always extraordinarily stimulating.  I think you have to be a certain, I think the undergraduate teaching has to be more flexible.  And one has to be understanding in regard to that language.  Because it’s one way of grading, which is quick way, is to say so many mistakes, so many points, oh, in language.  But that is not, that is selling the student short who has struggled through the text and struggled to say something.
0:10:04.4
	And the more the students struggle to say something, the more mistakes that student is apt to make when the grasp of the language is not sufficient.  But again, you’re certainly not going to be sufficient when they begin to do literature in the third year, if they’ve just gone, you know, as I say, four semesters of preparation in language.  It’s not going to be sufficient.
DH:  No, I can see that it very well wouldn’t be.
GB:  No, language learning, is a long process.
DH:  Well, that’s where it’s so nice if a child has the opportunity to learn it very early.  
GB:  And we don’t do often what we know we ought to do.  And we all must know it, that is to say teach a language in the early stages of school.  They had begun to do that and then they stopped.  But that is where they should be learning it --  
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  -- and then keeping it up.  And it would spare a lot of anguish and dismay.
DH:  Well, I think Americans have been rather smug about this language business.  They sort of assume everyone else should learn English.  Why should we learn other languages?
GB:  Well, they come to it from a different angle because the first problem for the Americans is indeed to Americanize a great many non-American groups so that that has problems to make them speak English so that they can communicate and so that they can find their place in society.  
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  Because one of the difficulties of having a population that comes in, sometimes these people are not too literate in their own language.  And if you get a person, language studies have shown if you get people who are illiterate in two languages, it’s disaster.  They will now rarely place themselves in society.  They will be marginal in all kinds of ways, so that I think they, that is why the Americans start off with this problem.  But afterwards, they, but they do not I think quite see that language is a highly intellectual, the use of language is a highly intellectual exercise. 
	 And the passing from one language to another is a very demanding intellectual discipline.  And that is what they think, you should pick it up, you know, and they don’t, many often in the educational establishments, they say, well, why can’t they learn?  Well, let’s have a lot of machines.  That was the great thing you spent thousands of dollars in machines, and that’s not the way language is, it’s a help, it exercises, gives them exercise.  But language has to pass through the mind.  But that is difficult to, um, to explain.
DH:  Well, of course, we haven’t had in another sense, we don’t, our country is not surrounded with other countries with a lot of different languages.  It seems to me that certainly Europeans are, they sort of expect to rub elbows with other languages, and they take it more as a natural thing than we do here.
GB:  The path that anybody, the path is so small, you know, we travel faster and faster journey to Spain, to Italy, to England, you know.  But I understand that you have been versed in Wisconsin, and you teach something like 40 languages.
DH:  Is it that many? 
GB:  I may be exaggerating, but I know you teach a great many languages.
DH:  That’s true, that’s true, a great many.
GB:  And that, I think, only for very few students, and some of them, some of them, least well known languages.  They have to be highly specialized.  They’re not the --
DH:  Yes, I don’t imagine that many in some of these languages.
GB:  I think that there’s a big, a really big effort made, but it’s earlier that it should be done.  I don’t think 40 languages, but at least bilingualism should be established because then the mechanism, the passing from one to another is established.  And I think it’s easier then to learn a third language if you have to. 
0:14:50.6
DH:  Um, that interests me.  You’ve mentioned the mechanisms, but do you find this confusing, the different kinds of, you know, thinking in English and thinking in French?
GB:  Well, it’s very, it’s a curious process.  And sometimes if one is, either to absorbed in what one’s saying, one can suddenly be stopped because what’s come in the other language and since the syntax, the construction is not the same, you are stranded.  You can’t go on.  And that’s why, to a certain extent, I always write out my lecture, not for my students, but the lecture that I’m giving professionally --
DH:  A formal lecture.
GB:  -- a formal lecture, I write it out because it could easily be that I would want to say something and suddenly find unable to.  And then, you know, it’s like stuttering[word unclear], and sometimes finding people do stutter, and I can see why.  And that is a difficulty, and if you’re tired, it may be that suddenly, the two languages sort of, you no longer know which way to go.  Now it has happened to me once that I started a lecture in English and ended it in French, and I hadn’t realized it.  I had read, it was on, a lecture, an academic lecture on poetry.  I had read a poem or part of a poem in French.  And I just went on.  But these are strange, are strange experiences, when I suppose the two networks were crossed, crossing and get tangled.  Otherwise, I think that you generally start off on one track --
DH:  -- and keep going.
GB:  Keep going on that track so that the juggling between the two is not too demanding.  Plus if you’re, if I concentrating on English-speaking situation, then, of course, it’s English that comes naturally.  But the writing is another matter.
DH:  How do you mean?
GB:  Well, there are times when it’s very difficult for me to write one language.  I write in both, as you know.  I mean, this book I wrote in French.  Now, I was in America much of the time that I wrote this book.  And there were times when it seemed to me that I couldn’t go on writing in French because it was too big an effort to keep going in French.  But once you start, then it follows.  I don’t know if I make myself clear.  It seems as if you get on certain track, there are times when you balk, and you don’t want to write in that language.  
DH:  Would you have found it easier writing in French if you had been in France?
GB:  Yes, definitely, much easier.  But I started, and I’m very glad I forced myself to.  I think that’s one of the reasons that I have been able to, well, that is, I’ve got to be able to keep my two languages going is that [words unclear].  And that’s has also the danger that one, they’re very different, those two languages.  You don’t, your sentences aren’t structured the same way.  Your thought doesn’t follow the same pattern.  And it’s very easy to slip into awkward structures or what we call Anglicisms in French and naturalization of vocabulary.  
	I can take a French word, word and use it in an English sentence without realizing it, or one of these Latin constructions, which are so awful in English.  They sound so pompous.  So something with the [words unclear] patterns of French, that come from the Latin sound horrible in English.  They sound pompous, they sound, they sound pretentious, they sound stiff, and if you move from English to French, then they sound, then the English can sound, if you use the French, they seem sloppy.  The French syntax is very, very Latin and very, it’s, it’s very rigorous in certain ways.  And a lot of things, you can’t do and many things you must do.
0:19:50.1
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  And English has more flexibility.  But it’s awful when you’re writing, and you run into these sentences, and you think, my goodness, how could I have written this?  So those are some of the things that can happen.  I think you’re taught to think in the wrong language, and you have all the trouble in the world to switch, or you’re thinking in a language, and you’re taking ways of using language that don’t belong to that language.  
DH:  So it has its complications.
GB:  It has its complications, and it has its pleasures.
DH:  Have you tried to learn a third language with any --
GB:  Indeed, I have learned --
DH:  -- to any extent?
GB:  -- yes, both German and Spanish, but I’ve worked so much in English and French over here that my Spanish and my German are much in abeyance.  I could do some reading.  I couldn’t speak anymore.  That’s why I understand why people forget languages.  You do forget languages unless you use it constantly.  Yes, you use those languages constantly, and that’s why I’m very happy to have been able to keep up those two languages and not using one to the exclusion of the other, as might happen.  And to use them in the context of writing criticism and dealing with literature and not just the everyday life, because for the everyday life, there’s no problem.
DH:  I wouldn’t think so.  You don’t have to have such a command.
GB:  No, for everyday living, the exchange is easy.  But when I go to France, for a day or two, I feel very awkward, and then it picks up again.  But it’s the writing and possibly the teaching one language or the other.  I teach in French.
DH:  That was going to be my next question.  Do you do most of your teaching in French?
GB:  I do most of my teaching in French, but I teach in, a course in English at Wake Forest, one course in English.  
DH:  You teach it in English, but it’s French literature?
GB:  Oh, not always, and I do an honors course, which is not only French, which can pass, for example, it’s from the undergraduates.  We did one on myths, we do one on comedy, we do various texts that are in translation but are not necessarily French.
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  And some, and then sometimes, I’ll do an advanced course only in French literature and translation, not French theater.
DH:  In translation?
GB:  In translation, French, let’s say French Avant-Garde theater, but it’s precise and limited as that.
DH:  Which do you prefer to do, teach in French or teach in English?
GB:  Well, see the answer is, in a way, that to teach in English is more fun because the students, these undergraduate students are so much more at ease and so much freer to express the, what they’re thinking and to make the comparisons with what they know.  I have a lot of students, when I do the theater, I’m going to do it when I go back, who are majoring in theater, but not the history of theater.  And they’re actually in the theater.  They’re going to be, they’re going to be actors, they’re going to be directors, they, etc.  
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  And they, these, that was enormously, enormously satisfactory, lot of fun.  But my job, my profession is really to teach the others.  And my heart in a way is, is in that other sector, where I have fewer students and where the struggle with the languages means that my classes are much more reticent.  They don’t participate in the same way.  And I know much less about them.
DH:  It makes more demands on you, doesn’t it?
GB:  It makes more demands on me, and I’m never quite sure what I have or haven’t got across to them.  And this is always this language barrier.  But we are, in the Department of French Literature, we are teaching French.  We’re not just teaching, we’re not teaching only French literature.  We have to prepare them to teach.  They are going to have to teach too, many of the undergraduates need to in French, are headed toward teaching either in the schools or if there are any jobs with the universities, but at least in the schools.  
0:24:53.2
	And it’s totally unfair not to keep this language thing in the forefront of our minds all the time.  But it’s more fun to teach in English.
DH:  I can see from what you said that it’s, that it would be because --
GB:  Communication is faster, it’s more spontaneous, and that makes all the difference in a class.
DH:  Uh-huh, yes, I’ve been told this, and I think it’s true.  Do you have any preference for teaching graduates or undergraduates?
GB:  No, I like to do both, and I do like, this year, I was, I was for one quarter at the Ohio State University, where I taught graduates.  And I haven’t taught graduates.  I don’t teach graduates at Wake Forest because I enjoy the undergraduates very much.  But occasionally, I feel the need as I taught at Ohio State University to teach in a more in-depth way and more limited body of literature as I feel about the NEH seminar, which I have my young, you know, my colleagues, all Ph.D.s.  And this is more demanding.  One can easily, with undergraduates, one can easily become, if one is not careful, almost a superb actor and get away with, because we know so much more than they do.  Can you see what I mean? 
DH:  Yes, I think so.  I’ve heard this suggested before, that the teaching was acting in a way.
GB:  It is acting in a way.  And one can become a kind of personality, which I don’t like the cult of personality.
DH:  Well, some teachers definitely are --
GB:  Most, you have a personality, but you don’t play it.  And this is, I think, the temptation is to be a kind of superior god, you know, quote, to the undergraduate.  And this is not bad, perhaps, because, you know, it engages that interest.  On the other hand, I think it’s a very good thing to be brought up short in, with a group that is demanding, much more demanding from the other point of view and to have to, have to be very deeply prepared in depth, I mean, not just prepared in depth, but in depth on a more limited topic.  And you have to think things fresh and think things new.  I think you have to think things new all the time.  Otherwise, you get so boring.  
	But you have to think things new.  But that’s not the same kind of thinking.  So I like every now and, one of my difficulties about the graduate teaching is the practical question of will these graduate students get jobs?  Are you preparing people for noncareers?  It’s not exactly our responsibility.  It’s theirs.  But just the same, when I was doing my teaching here, there were jobs.  There was no problem.  Our Ph.D.s got jobs, and they were very good Ph.D.s.  They deserved a job.  Now they’re good, they’re very good Ph.D.s, I’m sure, and they deserve the job.  Jobs are all [word unclear].
DH:  Well, this is true in other fields too.  It isn’t  --
GB:  And so that, that, that’s, you know, that gives you a little feeling of dismay when you look at them.  You think, here they are.  They’re well prepared.  They’re brilliant.  They love the stuff.  They want to teach it, and then what are they going to have after the --
DH:  Uh-huh.  Well, you seem to be echoing what I’ve heard in other areas.  But this is one of the sad facts at the moment.
GB:  A totally sad fact, and I don’t think it’s, I think it’s, I don’t think it’s necessarily going to be a short-term thing.  I see other cycles go, but I think this one is going to be a long-term one as far as I can see.  
DH:  What makes you feel that way?
0:29:50.3
GB:  Well, the calculations they make about the population, they’re all the predictions from cycle to cycle that are being forced, you know, so much, well, you know, they make the calculation about the student population will be, what is going to happen to the humanities.  The saving grace would be if they could get interested in language, for us, which again, which I think they should.  It’s not likely that President Carter’s Commission on Foreign Languages . . .
DH:  Well, since you said last time that seven years of being an administrator in New York was enough.  Is that why you decided to come to Wisconsin?
GB:   Yes, well, um, in part, I was very fond of New York and New York University, but as I said before, it was extremely exhausting from every point of view.  Now, I was young, younger, and the offer came from Wisconsin.  I had been to Wisconsin to give a lecture, and it had never occurred to me at all that such an offer would be forthcoming.  And I had really good friends here, Julian Havis, for example.
DH:  In the French Department?
GB:  And Bill, in the French Department, and Bill [Bandy.  And particularly, I think probably Julian Havis and Betty Havis, so then, when the offer came, I had to make a very important decision.  But it was such a marvelous offer.  The institute was just starting.  I’m the second, I think, permanent member who was nominated.  Marshall Clagett was the director.
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  And the, of course, a great advantage for me was the fact that I would have no administration.  I was going to be teaching two courses, I think, then.  They then cut it down to one when I began to have a lot of, a lot of students whose dissertations I had to direct.  I think that’s how it went.  Perhaps it was only from the beginning, one course.  I don’t know.  But the situation at the institute is so exceptional from every point of view.  That is, I didn’t quite know it at the time I accepted, but I did know that it meant a much, much quieter way of living and many, many more hours for research.  
	Now, the stipulations of the Vilas professorship are excellent.  That is, for example, it was the endowment, a quite sizable amount of money for getting books.  The library, of course, was better than the NYU library.  And one says, of course, we could use the New York libraries, but if you want to use libraries outside your own library in New York, it’s always a big hassle.  You have to travel, you have to beat all that traffic, and it’s always a waste of time.  So the situation for me was exceptional.  I was interviewed by people who then became friends of mine, and they were very strong on the humanities, which, of course, is my field in the specialties form of contemporary literature.  
	And the whole atmosphere, there is no red tape in this institute.  There’s a minimum of red tape.  We have only a very few actual committee meetings, which is mostly to choose the fellows and very little interference of any kind from duties, which had been so strenuous for me at NYU, since I was a member of the administration as head of the language department.  And then the beauty of the place is go great.  It’s such an attractive place that it was for me definitive, and I took some time in turning in my decision because it was so hard for me to get out of the NYU.  I had to see the president and to explain this to him, and I could never get to see him for a while.  
	And then, of course, there was the general argument, why do you want to leave, etc., etc.  And I’m very glad the day that I made the decision and sent the telegram, I consider to be one of the best days in my career.  The next years that I was at Madison, Wisconsin was 13 years were absolutely marvelous years from the point of view of what I was able to do as research, what I was able to do too in traveling because the situation here is such that if you want to, you can leave for a semester, which I did when I went to teach in Australia.  But that was the summer, so I actually didn’t have any teaching to do in the summer here.
0:35:08.6 
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  And then the semester I spent at the University of London and the University of Cairo.  Of course, the Australian, as I said, didn’t impinge on my presence on the campus.  It was the, their winter is our summer.  And those were great opportunities.  And then there was that the students, the, this was a period of time when we had the most really excellent group of students I have ever had in the graduate school.  The undergraduates were very interesting, but undergraduates though, a big undergraduate population.  
DH:  Oh, yes.
GB:  And then, and I say, the very pleasant atmosphere of the institute with the privileges involved.  And the kind of relation with the director and with the executive secretary, Loretta Farming, and she is, she just makes life so simple for us.  All these things were for me very, very positive.  
DH:  So it was a good decision?
GB:  Oh, I think it was a marvelous decision.  I was able to do a lot of interacting, a lot of reading, and make a lot of contacts too.  I was, and I had time to think and also from the point of view of health, there is no comparison.  I had already said that if I, that when I came to Wisconsin, it would mean an extra 20 years to my life.  The strenuousness of life in New York is real.  It’s great.
DH:  I can imagine.  I have never lived there, and I don’t really want to.
GB:  No, you have to travel, first of all, to work and travel back.  And then the constant impact of the noise, the life is complicated in New York.  
DH:  Well, I can imagine it must be.  You said you had very few meetings here at the institute, and except for choosing fellows.  How is that done and how many --
GB:  Actually, occasionally had meetings that were presentations of work of the senior members who we chose.  How do we choose the fellows?  There were several kinds of fellows.  The senior professor, the Johnson professor actually, I think, the way we did it was to suggest possible names of Johnson professors.  And the idea was that you got a professor, a senior professor, mostly, we got them, at the time I was there, from abroad, from England, from France, from Germany, from, I think we had one from Denmark.  And generally, they, I think, came by contact and invitation.  
	The junior fellows, that come from outside, apply.  And we have all the list of them, and the files are at our disposal, we go through the files, and we go through the usual process of ranking them and then sitting around the table and calling our rank, what we’ve ranked them.  And first, let’s say, we only have room, I think, for two and possible occasionally three, so that generally everybody is in agreement on a couple or, then, or let’s say four or five.  Then that is a very simple process.  If there is very divergent views, then that’s difficult.  
	And if someone has, feels that there is an utterly brilliant candidate that wasn’t picked up, then you would discuss the, we discussed them all at the time I was here, the whole file.  But if the opening consensus if very, very strong, that is unanimous, it means the discussions are much shortened.
0:39:32.8
DH:  Yes, I can see that.
GB:  Since we’re in very different fields, now what helps and helps a lot is that what we tried to do was to get to, get the kind of fellows from outside who specialized somewhat in the same field as our senior, as our senior fellow, so that this would make a group of people interested in the same topic or virtually the same field.  And that would be a great benefit for the younger people and more interesting for the senior fellow.
DH:  I see, uh-huh, yes.
GB:  And then, another thing we do is to, is to, um, very often meet for lunch.  We have what they call the brown-bag lunch downstairs in the library.  And this is a very cheerful, relaxed meeting, where, you know, chat according to what comes up.  Sometimes, the topic that comes up is a topic that has to do with our work.  Sometimes, it’s a more general topic of University interest.  Sometimes, we’re just chatting, human chatting.  It’s a very, very fine formula they have here, very relaxing, and I think the man who set the tone was Marshall Clagett in the very beginning.
DH:  He’s the --
GB:  He founded it.
DH:  -- he did, he founded it.
GB:  Yes.  And then, there was Julias Weinberg, who was also in philosophy here, who was third, I think, from [word unclear] and who was also extraordinarily, extraordinarily open and always would make his, his particular knowledge, and he was very widely read, he was [word unclear], very [word unclear] and if we had to, let’s say usually in a text, the Dutch Department something that obviously came out of medieval philosophy.  
	I had one in a Becket text I was doing.  And I went to him, and I said, look, Julias.  What is this?  Where did it come from?  Samuel Becket is, did quite, you know, serious studies in philosophy, in medieval philosophy, Turner College they’re very good there.  And he found it, and where the revolution came from, and this was, there was an exchange that was very interesting.  We had then very, a very fine senior fellow from Cambridge, England, who was interested in modern French poetry.  
	And we met all of the members and discussed certain text, certain points, that really difficult point.  And Julias and Marshall and I don’t think Marshall was there then.  But Julias and anybody else who was there, Ed Bennett, for example, people who knew French, and it was very exciting.
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  Right, so this was the kind of thing, the exchange that goes on completely unstructured.  No one’s obliged to have a brown-bag lunch.  
DH:  But it sounds like a very pleasant occasion.
GB:  It’s a very pleasant occasion.  And we’re not so many, you see.
DH:  How many of you?
GB:  It depends on how many, I don’t know now how many, you know who knows?  It’s Loretta.
DH:  Yes.
GB:  But I don’t know how many there are now.  In my time, we were sometimes 10 or 12 in the institute I think, not [word unclear] from outside, and as you know, we have junior fellows from the departments who apply.  The people, it’s a very sensible arrangement.  Now these younger men have projects.  They don’t, they want to work, but, you know, if they have to move their families out to England or something, they have all the worries of traveling, of finding a school for the children, whereas, if they can come up here, their work is here, and they have the library here.  
	They can get the books they want in interlibrary loan often if they’re not in the library without all this uprooting and time that goes by, which is, it takes time to move with two little children or something like that and to get, the whole family, to get adapted to a completely different environment.  And so very often, we have two, or I think that we always have at least two people from the university who are here, and perhaps one senior one, but Loretta will tell you.  I think we have one senior one, at least we had in my time because I remember Bill Bandy, who was, who was specialist in Boudalier poetry, etc. was up here at the time when we had our visitor from Cambridge, who was interested in modern French poetry.
0:45:00.6
DH:  That sounds like a very nice group.
GB:  It’s a very, very nice group.  We had a wonderful time when you had a medievalist, De Narda, Professor De Narda, and who was a very genial kind of scholar and was working in things that interested me, for example, to not only did I like him very much, and I have met him before.  But he was working in forms narrative structures.  And narrative structures is, uh, one of the areas of research today that they call narratology, how a story is told, what are the elements in the story, how you develop the plot so that it makes sense to the reader and that kind of thing.  I mean, what it conveys to the reader, how it conveys it to the reader, so we had some very good times in those 13 years.
DH:  Do these, do fellows come, when they come from other places, do they come just for one year?
GB:  They can come for one semester.
DH:  Oh, one semester?
GB:  Yes, but they come for one year mostly, one academic year.  And I don’t know if they stay.  Some of them, I think stay over the summer, but I’m not sure.  That again, you will have to ask Loretta as to what exactly the rules are.
DH:  Well, now, when you come, you’re just here for the summer.  Had you been here other summers?
GB:  I was here two summers ago for the same thing, but since I am, now I was a permanent member Vilas professor and emeritus, when I asked, when I was asked by National Endowments for the Humanities to think of developing this, I asked here whether they would consider having me direct it from here for all kinds of reasons, one, the climate, two, the library, three, the support that you get from the community.  The Women’s Research Center is tremendously attractive to these young women, who take my [word unclear].  
	As I said, we did have two young men, we have a few man occupations, not so many.  Two very good ones, I took.  They had all the credentials.  But it’s immensely attractive to these young women because there are so many brilliant women at the University of Wisconsin that have taken responsibility for the research center, in philosophy, in biology, in medicine, in law, and the distinction of the center, the Women’s Research Center is very well established in the country.  So the support is extremely positive.  And some of these young women, who are completely isolated where they are, are so happy with this contact and these opportunities.  
	But it was, it seemed to me that it has already shown that this was the place where it should take place.  There is no other, I think, university in this country that can do for their students, they’re not students, they’re participants, those young women, what this, uh, this particular university can do for them.  So I was very happy when they said, certainly, I’m emeritus.  They could see that I have, um, an office and a director doing the secretarial work for me.  And so here I came back, since I have so many friends, it simplified my life tremendously, you know, for getting a place to live and that kind of thing and for knowing how to get along in the city.
DH:  Oh, yes.  
GB:  Then I have all the privileges of the emeritus professor.  I have parking facilities and --
DH:  Well, that’s, that’s really something.
GB:  That’s really something in this place.  I much appreciate it.
DH:  Yes, parking, a big hassle.
GB:  I found out when I was at the Ohio State University, when I didn’t have these privileges, I had faculty permit.  But this didn’t mean that I had a space.  
DH:  Oh.  
GB:  That’s right.
DH:  Find one, you had one.
0:49:48.9
GB:  Huh?
DH:  If you could find one, you had one.
GB:  If I could find one in certain areas, I had it.  But, you know, it was not so easy to find most of the time.
DH:  Well, I can appreciate that.  And I have struggles at times.
GB:  I’m sure.
DH:  Well, I’m glad to hear you say what the, uh, what you did about the Women’s Research Center, about its success.  
GB:  It’s, the center, as you know, was founded, when was it, not so long ago?
DH:  No, it was fairly recently.
GB:  And I think what it did was to bring a remarkable team of women there, not just, I’ve seen others, and I won’t say where, where they have these very enthusiastic younger women, but who do not fit into the university research, uh, activity the way these do.  And, of course, I have some particular interest in partiality because the young woman, she seems young to me, though she is in her 50’s, Elaine, she’s just under 50.  But to me, she was, Elaine Marks, I had her as a freshman in my class at Bryn Mawr College.
DH:  Oh, did you?
GB:  Yeah, she eventually did her Ph.D. with me.  
DH:  Yes, she wrote, um, an article about you for the book that the --
GB:  That’s right, that’s right, a very nice article, so I’ve known her for a long time.  And she is in her own field of French literature, she is certainly one of the higher-ranking scholars, and she keeps writing.  And she keeps writing, she keeps working at the academic at the same time.  And I think that’s absolutely central.  I think that Women’s Studies have to have this kind of mixing in with the university activities, and they have to be academically very solid and not just kind of inspirational, and that whatever the women brings to the attention of the academic world, and I think they are valid.  And I think a certain number of things had to be said and had to be looked at.  They have, this doesn’t mean that because you are a woman, you are necessarily someone who’s going to have to be respected in your scholarly field if you haven’t done the work.  I mean, it’s not sufficient to be a woman [words unclear], but if you are, then you should be.  And I think that that is what the drive has been here.  And they have, and the people who, that one finds in that center are brilliant in many, many fields, outstanding women.  And it’s so good to meet them, and they speak so much sense.
DH:  Do you have anyone particular in mind?
GB:  Well, besides Elaine Marks, she has a wonderful team, and I wouldn’t want to mention special people, but Professor Prior and [word unclear] and the people who I wouldn’t know so much because they may be in biology.  
DH:  [word unclear]
GB:  Yes, and younger women, and then there were people like Kavitch and Susan, um, oh, her husband, Lester Friedman, that I’ve met and are all publishing in their field, Diane Kavitch and Susan Friedman, who I think are the founders of this.
DH:  Hmm, yes, I think so.
GB:  And they are remarkable people.  And then, you find people, who are, who are of different origins of different, uh, I don’t know what to say, different ethnic groups.  You see people who are American Indian.  You see people who are Indian Indian.  You see, that center really draws and any woman on the faculty will find very good friends.  And what I have been most struck by is that if there rivals, and I’m sure they are, they get threshed out immediately in commitee.  But they don’t carry over, it seems to me, to the personal.  The affection and friendship is very, very evident there too.
0:54:42.8
DH:  That’s nice, that’s nice.  Of course, there are bound to be problems, I’m sure.
GB:  There are bound to be problems.  One first that I saw, two women who are not here, but who are very brilliant, I forget Evie’s name, Evie, and Susan who is now teaching at Georgetown.  But again, they were very good in their field.  One was a specialist in German literature and I think Kafka.  And the other was just Susan Lonsar finishing her Ph.D.  It was a brilliant thesis.  It was taken up by Princeton University Press.  These are the younger women, who teach there.  So that all together, I think they’ve done a wonderful job making that center.  I think they can be proud, I think the university can be proud of it, and the women can be proud of it.
DH:  Well, it’s a good thing.  One of the, uh, as long as we’re on this subject, one of the things I was going to ask you about was what you just touched on a little, how you had felt as a woman academic.
GB:  Well, I, my career was a particularly special one in that I have not felt at all imposed upon.  Perhaps a little, when I was at Bryn Mawr, and I hadn’t as yet established myself in the scholarly field.  And in France, I would not have found it easy at that time to get a, to work at a university.  There were almost no women at all.  And the women who were there generally had strong connections with universities, one university or another in France.  They all, of course, taken as you know, there were very, very few.  So I wouldn’t have had, probably had a university career.  Or if I did, I would have had to struggle a lot more.  
	But I came to Bryn Mawr, which was a women’s college and sure they were, Bryn Mawr did not discriminate against women.  It had some male faculty, and my superiors were women.  The president was a woman and the chairman of the department was a woman, who was a very strong woman.  And my students were women.  And sometimes, I got bored with that.  And I flew off to New York, but they gave me my start, and I did, you see, I was promoted from lecturer to a full professor at the Bryn Mawr.  
DH:  Oh, you were?
GB:  Now, had I come to a university, a large university, I would probably have felt the pressures much, much more.  And I probably would not have been promoted that way.  I did all my, all the steps, and they didn’t go fast in those days.  But you knew where you stood, and you knew that if you did certain things and produced certain work, you were promoted, so that I had a very good position.  And then, you see, at that particular moment when I came back from my two years in the French Army, where there were not, where there was a need of people.  They needed people, and there were not enough male candidates.  They were still, some of them, serving in Washington or elsewhere.  
	So then, that’s where I got my next invitation.  I have never applied for a job, ever.  I got my next invitation, which was at that particular moment, in the early ‘50s.  And then, Wisconsin offered me this job and the, my last job, of course, came when they had these, Wake Forest had these team professorships.  And I was very close to retirement.  They had invited me to lecture to their honors groups.  I knew the place, I knew what it was they were trying to do, and I knew what the situation was here.  In other words, I knew that there was going to be a crisis regarding students, I also knew.  But, however affectionately disposed they were, and heavens knows that they were always kindness itself to me here.  I would, they can’t keep me beyond age 70.  
DH:  That’s, that’s --
GB:  And I knew that I would get no other offer after a certain age, except for semesters, and I don’t, I didn’t want to be an itinerant professor.  I like to be nicely settled somewhere.  So that’s how my career went, and I could always say that it seemed to me, I was highly privileged.  I worked hard.
0:59:58.8
DH:  Well, yes.  
GB:  That’s a fact, you know, I didn’t waste any time, I think.  One always wastes a little time.  One has to.  But I really worked very hard in those productive years of one’s -- back when I was full of energy.  And I found that I was treated very fairly.  In fact, I found that I was really quite privileged.  And part of it’s due to the fact I can speak English.  
DH:  That certainly must, that helps.
GB:  A big part to someone who’s foreign, and you have to know in what context you are.  I think sometimes younger people don’t really cast the context in which the university works, not that one can be, I think.  One can protest if you don’t think, if you don’t think the decisions are going the right way, or you think the attitudes are wrong.  But one should know in what context you are working both financially and ideologically, so that one should know what it is one -- 
[End of Tape 2]
[Start of Tape 3]
0:00:00.0
DH:  Well, the subject of publishing or not publishing comes up frequently.
GB:  Yes, it’s puzzled me a great deal.  And I think that if you have brilliant teachers, and you’ve discussed it endless, ever since I came to America, I heard people discuss it.  And I’ve also seen brilliant teachers be promoted, but with so much pain and so much humiliation, that I think that the promotion, the slow promotion, demoralizes them, and I think if you’ve got absolutely first-rate, brilliant teacher, who isn’t sitting back, who is working all the time, but who doesn’t have that particular, you know, drive to write -- everybody doesn’t have that.  
DH:  Not everybody has that.
GB:  Who, but who is extremely valuable to the students, particularly the undergraduate students, then I think that a good deal of attention should be given that person.  Now the teacher who has set, of the teacher or the scholar, because some of them are scholars, and who has a set of notes and delivers the same set over 50 years, I would say, even if that person has 60 books on the shelf, I think we ought to look at closely too, because after all, the university lives for schooling students, particularly in the humanities.  Now, an institute like this one is very valuable because it can be a home for the 100% scholar.  We have a very fine, a very fine, very amusing, very witty man here who was director after Marshall Clagett, who was second.  And he said he couldn’t understand why anybody who didn’t have to teach taught.
DH:  Ow.
GB:  He was 100% research man, and a very good research man.  He went on to Princeton, to the Princeton institute after here and a very fine, he was a very witty person, as I said, very erudite.
DH:  True.
GB:  But he didn’t want to teach.  He just hated to teach.  So why force him to teach, you know, since he was as good a scholar as that?  But in the same way, I think there are certain people who ought to be allowed to teach, and just to teach because they do that brilliantly, and they have that particular gift, which is to get across to students.  And then, there are the people who can do both.  I like to do both.  I like to teach because I like the continual exchange.  We spoke about that last time, with students, and I find it keeps me very alert.  It also prevents you from sort of having a soliloquy of your own appear in this nice office and getting way out of the really covenant issues, which I think we ought to be aware of.  We ought to know what our students in our university are into, as they say.  Because they’re the ones coming up, and they’re the ones who are going to take our place when, I mean, time goes fast. 
DH:  Yes, it does.
GB:  Fifty years is very little in the life of an institution like this one.  So I feel that you’ve got the three classes, and I think it’s too bad when the teaching part of this, which is a part of the university, certainly a very important part, particularly in the humanities, is sort of not recognized.  Now, I don’t know if the sciences work the same way because I don’t think research is the same either in the sciences and the humanities.  I think what we call, you call research in the humanities is entirely different from what they call research in the sciences unless they’re in history of science.  It’s a different, completely different mental activity and also physical experimentation and all the rest of it, which in the humanities, of course, is not the case in the same way.
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  Though in the teaching, you experiment with new methods that have come in, and that’s in teaching.  And in research, you have new ideas, or you get new modes of analysis and things like that, which you have to evaluate if you’re doing, if you’re doing, and that is where the teaching comes in.  If you’re doing textual, if you’re doing literature, for example, and you get, it’s hard to get certain things across to freshmen, why these things are, we think these things are valuable to them.
0:04:58.1.
GB:  And that’s not easy to explain, and, um, there you try new methods.  There are new ideas that come up.  But it’s not the same activity as having the lab and experimenting in the lab, quite different.  But I liked to, I liked to write.  I like to write still, and I’ve always said that writing prevented me, at least, from getting immersed in minor politics, faculty politics, which I detested, always have detested, which I think a great many arguments get charged with emotions that, uh, are not necessarily pertinent and waste a lot of time.  
	However, that is up for everybody to judge, how you say, issues become issues when you feel strongly about them.  And if you feel strongly about them, I suppose, that they have, there’s a reason.  Most of the time, I couldn’t feel very strongly about certain issues.  I felt very troubled at the time of the Vietnam War.
DH:  Well, you weren’t alone in that.
GB:  Hmm?
DH:  You were not alone.
GB:  No, no, there were many of us, and we often discussed it up here.  One person who was terribly involved, terribly troubled was Professor Weinberg because he was a philosopher and a very high moral sensitivity and completely involved in the sort of future of those students, knowing that the issues in many ways, they were right wondering about the tactics of that kind of thing.  But humanly, so deeply involved, it was very interesting.  But I was very much, um, involved with their reactions.  After all, the war was not so far behind us and caused all kinds of, maybe it was the same kind of decision-making thing to the individual.  
	In a situation where there was a fit between what the individual reactions and the collective administrative functioning.  I’m sure administrators here were more understanding in certain cases, but the students not necessarily understanding the administrative problems.  And the administration perhaps too bothered to mend, lend an ear to them.  I do think there were many intermediaries here between the students and the administration and the administration and the Legislature.  I think that all these mediations were not always clear to the young and idealistic students.  We have all these mediations that have to work one way or another.  But I have never seen anything quite as impressive as the teaching, when we have these, I don’t know, were you here at the time?
DH:  Oh, yes, yes, I was here. 
GB:  And you had perhaps about 1,500 students who would come out, 2,000 students who would come out.  They almost didn’t mind what you said to them as long as you were there. 
DH:  Well, I’m not sure I agree with that.  They did listen to what I said.
GB:  I, I, you know, feeling always uncertain about a number of issues, what I did feel very certain about was that if you take, if you make a commitment, then you, you have to face consequences.
DH:  Well, that’s true of everything.
GB:  That’s true of everything, and, of course, in, since they often compared themselves to the resistance, when the resistance made a commitment, that commitment involved the possibility of being captured or being tortured and being killed.  You know, but that was not quite the size of their commitment.  If that had, it was not quite that kind of commitment, but they were seeing it in those terms, they really felt they were in many ways.  But so when they asked me to teach it, I did it on the different attitudes toward commitment of Sartre and Camus, two different attitudes toward commitment.  And they reacted extremely well to that.  
DH:  They did?
GB:  Oh, extremely well.  I’m not sure, as I say, it was just the fact that they were 11:00 at night carrying on this teaching, but that is not my point.  I also spoke at one time to the ones who were draft resisters.  And I have a, an emotional stake in that and a very deep, ethical feeling about draft resisters since my brother-in-law had been a conscientious objector even in World War IIhe was in no way, people called him Nazis, he was called a French Quaker.  But he had faced up, when they called him, he went up there.  But a very small group, about six, they were not called conscientious objectors on the[words unclear].  
	They were conscientious objectors on the grounds that the war settled nothing, and as my brother-in-law said, when they questioned him, that they felt, these men, that there had to some record that there were people in that particular moment, at that particular moment in that particular time, who considered that the war was a terrible error.  Whatever the origin, whatever else, and not to say that you have to go to war at that particular time, that human conscious rejected that solution.  So that was his stand, and he went to prison.  And he was very lucky in that he was let out of prison at the time of the French defeat because if the, if it hadn’t been the French, but if it had been the Germans, who opened the prison door for him, he would have been in trouble.
DH:  Well, why would that be?
GB:  They would have thought he was a collaborator, which he, indeed, was not.  
DH:  By the mere fact that he had been in prison?
GB:  He was put into prison because he wouldn’t fight.  If the Germans had been the one who let out the conscientious objectors, because they had not taken part in the fighting, this would have been a terrible, terrible thing for them.  Because the French, who let them out at the time, and that was very, very good for him and his activities.  Then during the years of war were very, were very, made it very obvious what his stand was.  He had --
DH:  What did he do?
GB:  Well, he had a couple of, um, Polish Jews, who lived with him in the house, and he, uh, he, what he did was to cultivate a plot of land and to send the food to the camp where those children [words unclear] and generally worked every way possible that could help people who were in trouble.  So I felt very, very much that if you, my brother was not a conscientious objector, but he also, when he was, when he was demobilized at the time of the French defeat, he was in a, in the chain of people who helped Jews move out of France into Spain and out of [word unclear].  But he did not feel the same way.  He did, he was in the service.  
	He, when he was called up, he went.  My other brother-in-law too, but I felt that if you did go into conscientious objection, you had to do it very seriously, and you had to know that you, um, were breaking the law of the country.  Now, I wouldn’t have given him any kind of advice as how  to do it.  And, personally, I was of, if I had been a man, I hoped that I would have done [word unclear].  I would have gone up to the recruiting officer and said, I’m sorry.  I don’t want to participate in this war and taken the consequences rather than [words unclear].  But that’s a personal choice.
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  You have to make a commitment yourself and take the consequences.  When you do this, it’s a serious thing, and they know how they did it.  They did it in the civil rights.  I greatly admire the Civil Rights Movement.  I have tremendous respect for that generation, very great respect for them.
DH:  Yes, that was a commitment.
GB:  That was a commitment, and the Vietnam War was a commitment too, as they saw it, it was a commitment.  And I think they made a difference in policy.  At least the issue was debated, it came, it was openly debated, thought about it, which was good results.
DH:  Uh-huh.  And the fact that it wasn’t just here.  It was campuses all --
0:14:57.6
GB:  It was all over the country.
DH:  Students do have an impact.
GB:  Yes, yes, the trouble comes when, when leaders come in and who are not, who do not belong to the campus.  And as I understand, agitators did come in, and some of them came from the FBI.  Some of them came from ultra-leftist groups.  And then, of course, the students don’t have the experience to find out who they are or where they came from and what they’re up to.  They use the students.
DH:  Uh-huh, although, I did an interview with one student who explained exactly how he’d go about organizing protests.  It’s very illuminating.
GB:  Yes.
DH:  But he really had it --
GB:  Yeah, it’s a, it’s a technique.  It’s a technique.
DH:  It was completely thought out.
GB:  Yes, but he was a sincere --
DH:  Yes, he was --
GB:  He was not being [words unclear].
DH:  [words unclear].
GB:  It could be done, so the techniques can be, once the movement has started, you can get some interference from outside that then swings it in ways it might not have gone.  Oh, yes, they knew, they knew what they [word unclear].  We don’t get thousands of students out without really directing the whole operation.
DH:  Yeah, I was amazed at the degree, which they planned.
GB:  Yeah, well, the students’ organization was the, the nationwide organization [word unclear] was behind this.
DH:  Oh, I suppose so.
GB:  Or were they just a tiny group?
DH:  Well, I’m really not certain.  Lee was talking about activities on this campus, but he did talk about activities in relation others.
GB:  Oh, they, yeah, they were a well-organized group here.  And some of them, well, since there are the numbers --
DH:  Oh, yeah, some of them just thought it was a farce.
GB:  Oh, yeah, banish the thought.  Well, Civil Rights, I think were, of course, there were other groups in the Civil Rights at the time who were involved as in the Vietnam, but there were some senior religious groups, who were involved.
DH:  [words unclear].
GB:  [words unclear] other people like that.  It was statesman [words unclear].
DH:  Um, [words unclear]You talked a certain amount about the institute here but how much were you involved with the French Department?
GB:  Well, I was, well, I always taught in the French Department, and I have always been on excellent terms with the French Department, so that I was, but I obviously, well, I was, I always was on good terms with them.  And they were always very understanding, um, as far as I was concerned.  I mean, they scheduled me when it was most convenient for me and things like that.  And I always worked with them, and got Ph.D. students on work that they committed.  But, of course, I was in a way closer in everyday relations with the group at the institute. 
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  That is, that is certain.  But I was on, I still am on extremely good terms with them because, of course, the field and the, in common that we had, and the major involvements in the classes and that kind of thing.  I’m very fond of the students, of course, that was where my student body came from.
DH:  Uh-huh.
GB:  But I usually had my office hours, I had my office hours up here so that they would come up here and in a way, always identified me as part of the institute even more than part of the French Department.  But it’s a very good and healthy thing to be both involved in the Department and outside the Department because, you know, there are clashes of personalities and things, and you are always outside it, which I appreciate.  
19:58.9
	I like, I like peace.  I always have.  I was born in October, and that’s under Libra.  And they say a Libra likes it well balanced, not that the French Department was in any way a department in which there were a lot of difficulties there.  They’re not, so it’s only that occasionally, as you know, departments, personalities clash, and clash but I was, they certainly had a none of these terrible fights which one hears about in legend, whether they exist or not.  
DH:  Some departments have had stormy days.
GB:  Some departments have stormy days.  Now the French Department is not one of these, really not one of these, which was very, it was very genial, very open.  And I had some very good friends there.  I still have, and I must say Bandy and Havis and, of course, Alex Kopf, who was very, we were very good friends.  I have the highest opinion of Alex.  We worked together on a book until it was -- which was an anthology of contemporary French theater.  And so our, you know, our friendship was very, very solid.  And, of course, I [words unclear], so these and then the younger ones now, I’m, I feel they have a great deal of pleasure in seeing [words unclear] and the young people.  I’ve always had a very good friendly -- eventually I have always been extremely [word unclear] as far as I’m concerned.  
	But I think, again, I think you have, you see, that’s one of the things that you don’t have to do.  I didn’t have to pick, I only went to the meetings if there was something that was of particular interest to me.  But I made up my mind, after seven years at NYU and the committees all the time, that I didn’t go to committees unless I really had an interest in the committees.  I thought I earned it.
DH:  Yes, I --
GB:  So that if there were controversial things, I didn’t have to, to wrestle with them in any kind of way.
DH:  Well, the bio said that too.  You didn’t even have to teach, unless you wanted to.
GB:  You know, I think I only ever taught one course, but I think I remember that one of the courses I taught was a, um, for the advanced undergraduates and the MAs, because I think I had 100 students in that course.
DH:  One hundred? 
GB:  Yes, and twenty, something like that.
DH:  [word unclear].
GB:  [word unclear] this was a period of time when the students were absolutely passionately interested in the French Existentialism.
DH:  Oh, yes.
GB:  It was a great, great passion for Existentialism.  And so we had, anybody who taught it, like myself, had a real clear incentive there you know questions of commitment and that sort of thing.  The whole glamour of the war, of the Second World War, for them, glamour, not to us, but to them, it was very strong.
DH:  Do you, uh, do you notice any difference in the students today?
GB:  Oh, yes.  Um, the students, that, of course, I’m inthe South now.  And the southern students that I have, and I don’t know if it’s the period or if it is actually a different kind of upending in a way.  The students are far less ready to expose their ideas to you.  They are much more reticent and very courteous.  They, their manners are very, what should I say [word unclear] in certain ways.  And they are also not interested in the same problems.  They’re not interested in politics at all.  They are very, very interested in literature, which I’m not sure here.  I think here, it seems to me they’re not interested in literature asundergraduates here anymore.  But they’ve become more interested in social science, in society, let’s say politics, economics and the humanities history, but the humanities literature, much less.  
0:24:49.6
	Now southern students are absolutely aware of the fact that they have a southern literature, that the great names of American literature, many of them come from the South.  And they, they love literature courses.  And they will participate in them and in the discussion of text.  And we have these humanities courses that I teach, in which the students, who are taking science, that very day, as you know schedules, are very oriented towards medicine, law, commerce, and they don’t want to waste too much time.  And they’re anxious about the future that they know [word unclear].  They’re less so in the South, I think, than up here because the economic situation is better, I think, in the South.
DH:  Oh, it is?
GB:  I think so because, you know, everything’s been moving there.
DH:  Oh, and so I hear.
GB:  Yes, and so there isn’t the same kind of strain, you know.  You hear about the Boston schools having to close and that kind of thing.  But the schools often [words unclear] down there.  And, of course, if the population is moving down, the financial situation in a state is better and more people are paying taxes.  So that is different.  They are very interested in running the campus and having that kind of activity.  They can be passionately interested in theater, for example, but they’re not interested in causes. 
DH:  Which is --
GB:  [words unclear].
DH:  -- certainly in the ‘60s [words unclear].
GB:  That’s the contrast between the ‘60s, and I went down there in the ‘73 too, and in the ‘73 too, there was still, in [word unclear] I still had students, who were, who’d argue forever about commitment and about politics and about Marxism.  But now Marxism for them is very like [words unclear] historical ideology.  And then, quite right, they made a difference between its implementation in the Soviet Union  and the actual ideology as structured in the mid 19th Century, [words unclear] mid 19th Century, um, system, a plot.  But they’re not just interested, I think, in ideology and, uh, in answers to certain problems and they go their ways quietly.
DH:  Well, other people live here get the, [words unclear] just is a different kind of student body today than there used to be.
GB:  It certainly, it certainly is, I hear it’s quite different and they’re so clean.  You know, they’re clean and the hair is cut, and they wear blue jeans, but the blue jeans are clean and [words unclear] fashionable.
DH:  Yeah [word unclear].
GB:  That could be.  But they’re very nice.  I have big affections for my students, and I think that students all in all are about the nicest bunch of students you could ask for.  
DH:  Well, that’s very [word unclear].
GB:  There’s no, very little hostility toward their professors, in fact, great affection, in general.
DH:  Do you feel there’s a closer relationship between student and faculty than in France?
GB:  Certainly, certainly, much closer relationship, and then it’s kind of, you know, it comes, I can say that the warmth comes from the students.  The students feel warmly towards their professors.  And, of course, the professors reciprocate too.  When someone has compliments, then you, you reciprocate naturally.  If they attack you, you defend yourself.  Occasionally there’s a disgruntled student.  But usually, they are very, very nice because the day [words unclear].
DH:  You were talking about the job situation, which I gather is not that good.
0:29:41.0
GB:  In French, you mean, the job situation in French is not good at all for the moment.  It may get better, but the, uh, the registration has gone down, and mainly the departments are fully staffed.  And they cannot take new people in.  If you take graduate students and give them Ph.D.s, then what do you do.  Yes, what do they do?  I think if people more [words unclear] take French because it shouldn’t be absolutely necessary that you, that you take a topic and push it as far as you can because you want to get a professor, a job applicant.  Though obviously, if you put that amount of energy into something and you haven’t got the money very often, I suppose that you expect a job at the end of it.  But if that [blank spot on tape.]  
DH:  [words unclear] talk about how you decided to go to Wake Forest.  Can you mention those?
GB:  Yes, quickly in passing because it was very, as I say, I was coming to the end of my career, and I could see it coming.  And also, I was pretty well aware of the situation for graduate students, since I was on a lot of committees you know [words unclear] and things like that.  So I was aware of what was shaping up, and I didn’t see anyone attempting to do anything at all to try and, you know, do something about that situation.  No one seemed to know what to do, just everybody analyzes these things and then it’s a [word unclear].  
	Well, I think that’s a big change.  I think it’s very shameful of our profession not to have, in some fashion, met this problem.  I don’t know how, but I think if they could put their heads together, they might could be able to do it.  So I knew these things were happening, and I had been down to Wake Forest, and Wake Forest was, made me a very nice offer.  And, therefore, it seemed to me that I would be able to keep on teaching.  I was teaching undergraduates in a good liberal arts college because it’s a very good liberal arts college.  I knew the best students because I had been down to talk to the other school across the --
DH:  Oh --
GB:  I had been down three, four times already in a setting, which was also pleasant as far as climate goes because less young you are, you know, the more the cold in the winter hits you.  And I could see that if I retired here, first, probably, I would not be living near in the [word unclear] at the university.  And there are all kinds of things go on, but you have to get to them, and if you want to get out at night in Madison, when that wind blows, and it’s ten degrees below zero or something, you tend not to, just not to have the energy to pick up your car and go, particularly if you don’t have a parking spot.  You know, when that wind blows over the lake?
DH:  Oh, yes.
GB:  And you’re trying to get into that theater.
DH:  Cold.
GB:  It’s cold.  My apartment I lived over at Monona, which was a little distance.  So I thought that it was a sensible thing to do, to move down, for the last part of my career, back to the liberal arts college where I had begun.  Now, as I said, Bryn Mawr had a graduate school, and I have enjoyed it very much down there.  And I’m still teaching, as you see.
DH:  Still  teaching and still writing.
GB:  Still writing, yes, because, again, I have a [words unclear] partake in any kind of committee work.  I have much more leisure.  Committee work is just, I suppose it has, we have to have committee work because of the notion of a democratic university, you see.  But it’s one of the most time-consuming activities on the campus.  It really breaks into your day [words unclear] disperse your attention.  
DH:  Yes, and it’s -- you told me the other day that you knew Camus.  I’d like to know, how did you happen to --
GB:  Well, first of all, I taught four years in Oran, Algiers, in which the family of his second wife lived, Francene.  And her sister was my colleague at the lycee.  She taught French literature, and I taught English.  So that when I, um, when I came back as a, as a volunteer in the French Army, and when I was sent to Algiers, she was also working as a volunteer with the Americans at their headquarters.
0:35:00.5
	And we met up with the [words unclear].  She was then married to Camus.  And when I went to France, I was at Dijon, I was, and with my outfit, came back to Paris, the place where I was, where I put up was in their apartment.  And that’s where, of course, I was, I got to know of his work and what he was doing and that kind of thing.  And so when I came back to America, I asked him, he was coming for his tour.  I asked him to come to Bryn Mawr and then saw them again happily, you know, when I went to France.  I mean, afternoon, had lunch with them, and offered them to the house they have in the South of France, see them there.  
	And then, when someone suggested that a book should be written to introduce Camus, because he was being read to people who knew very little about him, and a lot of legends were sort of in the air.  I think maybe it was Professor Baird, who’s a very good friend of mine, RobertBaird, who said, who suggested that I might do this book.  And so I was contacted by Rutgers University Press, that had this Romance Languages series at the time.  And I was asked if I could, if I wanted to do this book.  So I wrote to Camus and said, look, this is what they’re proposing.  Do you want to do it?  And he said, sure.  
	So then I went over  and he said, well, why don’t you stay at our apartment this summer because I’ll be down at [word unclear].  And I said, fine, you know, to think, you know, to find an apartment in Paris.  And I, he said, you could have all the manuscripts are there, and you can have them.  You can look at them.  And I would even [words unclear].  So I arrived there, at Rue Madame, and moved in and realized that evening that all the files were locked.  So I thought, well, he changed his mind.  But at 8:00 next morning, the bell rang.  And I opened the door, and there was Camus.  And he had come all the way up from the South of France quite, quite rightly because he wanted to show me where the manuscripts were and what they were --
DH:  Oh, I see. 
GB:  -- and open up the files to me, and our friendship was very, it was very pleasant.  He was like a young brother to me, in a way, being much younger than I was, at least seven years younger than I was, like my brother, who’s nine years younger than I am.  And always extremely, extremely considerate.  So I went on seeing him, and he told me before his desk, I was down at Rue Morraine and stayed there a few days.  So you see, that was a very, it was a very natural kind of, of relationship.  I knew the family, I knew the children, Yvonne and Katrine, and I still see them when I go to Paris.  
	But Francene now has died, his wife.  And I never took part in, I never was part of any of the misunderstandings that segregated them, Francine and Camus or any of the, sometimes people ganged up against her and said, oh, my, Camus is terrible.  Well, she wasn’t [words unclear].  She was a very charming, very, uh, fine sort of person.  So I never got into any difficulties in that situation. 
DH:  Why did people have that thing against her?
GB:  Well, Francine was, was a rather, she was very sensitive, not [word unclear] woman, whose husband was very famous.  And they were separated, you see, almost immediately after marriage.  When he went back to France, because he was tubercular and he went to the [words unclear] and then the invasion, our invasion of Africa separated them.  And they were separated then until the end of the war.  And he was a very much sought after, and he was not particularly, you know, he was very drawn to women.  
0:40:03.4
	He liked women, and they liked him.  And he had this, um, liaison, which everybody knew about, the [words unclear] Maria Cesares the actress, who is indeed a very remarkable person.  But at the same time, he was away from his wife.  And when she came back, he greeted her, and that’s when he, nine months after that, the twins were born, you see, so that he had, you know, he had several liaisons, as happens.  And so she had rather a hard time, and she, some people thought that she was, well, some people just thought that she was a drag on him.  But I don’t think she was.  I think he was very fond of her.  
	And I think he very often took her advice for, for, you know, when he read his work to her.  And she did, uh, his last book [word unclear] has a dedication to her, to his wife Francine [words unclear].  I think he just didn’t, I think that she just, she was delicate, and she had several breakdowns, and since he was often [words unclear] he did what, you know, what happens  under these circumstances.  He had other women in his life.  And they passed and appreciate her, and [words unclear] rather hoped that they would deal with the manuscripts.  But it was Francine, who was in charge of the manuscripts.  And I think she did a wonderful job.  
	But some people, she refused the use of the manuscripts for reasons that she had thought out.  And they were furious because she didn’t allow them access.  She didn’t allow everyone access to the manuscripts, and she was quite right.  One shouldn’t allow anyone to come in and study manuscripts.  They must have some valid reason to do so.  So then some kind of dispute involved the manner in which she carried out her task as executor.  He died without a will.
DH:  I didn’t know that.
GB:  Yeah, see [words unclear] so naturally, she was, she took over the estate and the responsibility, which was a terrible responsibility.  I hadn’t realized what it gets you into, you know, for copyrights, for the right to, the right to publish a school edition of this, for the right to quote, for the right to do this, that, and the other, consolation, dramatization, there were always -- when I went to Paris, she very often consulted me.  I don’t know if she took my advice, but she very often consulted me.  There were all these requests coming from America, wanted to do this and that and that with the, with the materials.  And they were published on --
DH:  That was a big job.
GB:  Really, really, an impossible job.
DH:  Well, I’m sort of running out of questions, so is there some area where you think we haven’t covered?
GB:  No, I think --
DH:  Well, I don’t know if, I’m running out of questions so if there is anything you think we haven’t covered.
GB:  I think the [words unclear] thanks to the institute first and then to [words unclear] in touch with the situation.  So I haven’t had this first contact with anyone else as I have with Camus.  I have been able to keep in touch from my job, you see.  If you’re in contemporary literature, you have a quite different job in research and other areas except that they too have the problem of keeping in touch with the research.  But we have to keep in touch with literature that’s coming out.  
	Because the field changes all the time, and I think that in  that way, the [words unclear] of some of the problems with the scientists because you have to know what is happening elsewhere or not.  If the writer of considerable stature is, appears on the scene, I have to know it because that means that the literature that came before, now is in a different, I must see it in a different perspective. 
0:45:00.8
	It continually transforms the field.  If there is a new movement, which [words unclear] it may not be, but I have to find out [words unclear] in the ‘50s.  If I had been content to sit here and I had not been able to go back to Paris as I did, generally I go at Christmastime because that’s when it’s going full swing, then I would have missed out on the whole new facet of what is happening in the literature, which is important for the history of ideas, which is important for the [word unclear] political scene too.  Because the understanding of our time it goes back, and it goes forward.  If you don’t have the perspective, if you haven’t got the perspective of the past, you could also go wildly wrong on what is happening in the present.  
	And that is a part of the people might think, well, why is it at all necessary to do a search in the contemporary field?  But that’s one of the most difficult because first, we don’t have the facts.  You don’t know about people’s lives.  You don’t write them all down in dictionaries, and, heavens knows, fiction can always make mistakes as you find out, as you have found out.  But you don’t have the facts.  You’ve got to get the books, and you’ve got to read a lot of second-rate stuff before you can [word unclear] there’s no one who’s alone doing this because it would be impossible.  It begins in the magazines and the reviews, then you have to keep up with what goes on. 
	 If you want to know whether a poet is, there’s anything new among, in poetry, what you have to read so much.  And then slowly, a consensus appears, and work appears, and figure appears.  And in my lifetime, which has been fairly long, after all I’ve witnessed[words unclear] emergence of Monroe, of Sacht, of Camus, of [word unclear], of someone like Saint-John Perse who got the Nobel Prize and any number of figures like that.  They weren’t on the horizon when I began.  And my course does not go at all the same way, not [word unclear] at all the same way.  You have to sift through this, and the newest movement[word unclear] , and after the, and then [words unclear] critical theory, which have been enormous.  
	But that, all of us have to do that.  We have to want to keep up, and we have to know what’s happening in [words unclear].  I also think you have to keep up with the history because, you know, historical perspectives also develop and change.  And as I said [words unclear] we are the ones who are slowly shaping all the mistakes that any [words unclear].  And that is what makes it so exciting.  It is exciting, and I love it.  
DH:  Should we stop there?
GB:  All right.
[End of Tape 3 and End of Interview #201]