Remembering Erving Goffman
Elizabeth Bott Spillius:
Erving Goffman in Toronto, Chicago and London
Dr. Elizabeth Bott Spillius wrote this memoir at the request of Dr. Ruth Horowitz and approved posting the present version in the Goffman Archives. At the request of Dmitri Shalin, Elizabeth Bott Spillius expanded her memoir in several subsequent instalments reproduced below.
[Posted 03-18-10]
February 2010
Dear Dr Horowitz, I can’t discover any lost manuscripts by Erving, unfortunately. All I can do is tell you something of my experiences of knowing him.
I first met Erving in 1942 or ’43 in an anthropology class at the University of Toronto. He must have been 20 or 21 at the time, I was 2 years younger. He was from Winnipeg and most of his friends at this time were from the Canadian Film Board.
The class was being taught by an exciting young lecturer from Chicago called Ray Birdwhistell. (He was a welcome change from his predecessor, Reo Fortune.) After the lecture, which in any case was more of a free-for-all discussion than a lecture, we went to the basement bar across the street where Erving held forth on whatever topic took his fancy, usually the social behaviour of the other customers.
Birdwhistell’s approach was unprecedented. He gave us extraordinary topics to write essays on. Mine was to do a sociological analysis of the humour of New Yorker cartoons. Unfortunately I don’t remember the topic Erving was given. Erving told me what to say in my essay, I then wrote it and got A+ and Erving got a D for his. He said to me, ‘You are an exam-passer, I am a misunderstood genius!’ One never knew whether he was joking or serious – perhaps both. (But of course years later we all knew he was a genius.) After that Birdwhistell refused to give any of us any marks at all, and we heard that he was then had up before the University authorities for non-conformity.
By then Erving and I had become quite close friends. He got me to read Durkheim, Lloyd Warner and Talcott Parsons, among others. I’d already found Gregory Bateson somehow or other, even before University. (I thought Warner was superficial and Parsons was a longwinded bore. How judgemental.) We also read Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. In our last year at Toronto I got a fellowship to the University of Chicago (the exam-passer again) and went to the department of Human Development, and Erving went to the Sociology Department. I gathered that all of his professors except Everett Hughes (also a Canadian, like Erving and me) were the sort of sociologist who counts things, usually trivial things. I think one of them wrote about social thought – very rarefied and out of touch with how people live. I do remember that it wasn’t all so bad – I think there was someone who had done a study of a local community within a city, but I can’t remember who. (You’d think I would have.) Meanwhile I changed from Human Development to Anthropology, even though I had greatly liked Allison Davis at the Human Development department, for whom I had done a study of a working class family who lived near the University. I didn’t tell them I was observing them, and I decided I would never do that sort of ‘under-cover’ observation again.
At this time, about 1946 or ’47, Erving had a night job as a watchman on a building site although he spent most of his nights playing poker nearby at a friend’s
flat. I’m sure he made much more money from the poker than from watching over the building site. Various friends used to alert him when inspectors came to the site so that he could appear to be attending to his duties. But in any case I don’t think anything was ever stolen from the site.
Erving was rather difficult to have as a friend. If one took him to visit people for dinner, people he didn’t know, he would look up and down their bookcases and audibly pronounce on their social class and cultural pretensions – and then he would watch their confused response to this forbidden social infringement.
For me the change to the Anthropology Department didn’t work out very well. With the exception of Fred Eggan, all the staff were interested only in ‘culture’, not in social structure, which was what Erving and I wanted to study. I passed all their PhD exams, as of course Erving said I would, and then Fred Eggan told me that he thought I would never be happy in American anthropology and that I ought to go to England where, he said, everyone thought the way I did. And so I wrote to the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and to my amazement they offered me a teaching job. (I soon realised that there weren’t any PhD qualifying exams in the British system – a vast improvement on American procedures.) Meanwhile Erving arranged to do field work on the Shetland Islands – I don’t remember how that was arranged. It was 1949.
Every now and again Erving used to come down to London from the Shetlands to visit me and have a bit of a rest. He didn’t say much about the Shetlands except that he spent most of his time in the hotel kitchen listening to the way the staff talked about the customers. (Very Erving, of course.)
In the early 1950s I left the LSE to do research on ordinary London families at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations. (Not the Tavistock Clinic!) And there I spent the happiest 6 years of my professional life, which ended with the publication of my book, Family and Social Network. On his visits I told Erving about this work, but I don’t think he influenced it. Later on he used to tease me by comparing it with Michael Young’s Family and Kinship in East London, but for once I knew this was just teasing.
In any case by this time he was very much engrossed in writing The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Also his personal life was changing). He had met Schuyler Choate sometime earlier. I’m not sure when they married, but it must have been some time in the 1950s after his work in the Shetlands.
Meanwhile Erving presented The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life for his PhD. I heard later that the professorial head counters did not like it at all, and that it was Everett Hughes who helped him get through the ordeal successfully.
Some years later I went to visit Schuyler and Erving in Washington when he was writing Asylums. He was working on it at home in their small flat, and Schuyler and Tom used to go out – at least that’s what happened for the short time I was there. More groundbreaking work, as I knew it would be. Then they went to Berkeley and I got married (in England of course, though to a Canadian) and went to the Kingdom of Tonga doing anthropology until 1960, and then I was taken up with having a daughter in 1960, a son in 1964, and doing the training to become a psychoanalyst. (I thought that would be easier to combine with having children.) In March of 1964 a friend of Erving sent a dreadful message. Schuyler had killed herself. Erving and I had been somewhat estranged but I phoned and wrote and tried everything I could think of that I thought would help him. As if anything could. I think perhaps it was bringing up his son that saved him, but I don’t really know. How could anyone live through that. I knew how he had helped Schuyler when she had a breakdown – there is that extraordinary paper when he describes how the afflicted one enters the room and the carer (he doesn’t use that word) looks quickly around to make sure the scissors are out of sight. Oh Erving. And then there was that nasty Californian gossip that Erving had driven Schuyler mad. What nonsense. The gossips had no idea what he went through, how he cared for her and for his son. (I knew how he cared for them from mutual friends who had known us in Chicago and kept in touch with Erving and Schuyler in Berkeley.)
I saw him again later on in London – it must have been in 1972 or so, when I had left my husband and was living in an 1830s house with my two children, then 12 and 8. Erving kept telling me I should use proper candles in the chandeliers and 18th century coverings for the candlesticks. I thought his old self was still there – any minute he might start a sociological analysis of my bookshelves. But he didn’t do that. Instead he gave my 12 year old daughter an interactional analysis of the Charley Brown books. She listened carefully and then said, ‘Erving, you’ve got it all wrong!’ She ran upstairs and brought down 5 Charley Brown books and showed him: ‘The dog talked to this one and the boy can only talk to that one and as for Lucy –. Erving looked her straight in the eye and said, ‘You’re worse than your mother!’ She was immensely pleased. My son was not, needless to say. But he softened a little later when someone told him that Monty Python had used Erving’s ideas in their programmes.
I’d realised by this time that Erving had become a guru – I hadn’t kept up with his writings – I was deeply involved in Freud and Klein by this time and busy with children and earning a living, but it was always a delight when Erving visited.
I visited Erving a few years later when he was married to Gillian and living in their lovely house in Philadelphia. And he visited us in London once more, this time with Gillian and the baby. He said he had a stomach pain. The beginning.
There was a last phone call. He rang to ask me to send some silver he had bought in Portobello Market to Gillian, and of course I said I would. And then I said, ‘But that’s not the only reason you’re ringing, I think’, and he said ‘No’. So we said goodbye as best we could.
Later Gillian visited and told me of the dreadful days of Erving in hospital, and of how they would not let his little girl visit him when he was still himself, and then finally said she could come to see him when he was no longer the father she knew.
I heard a little about Gillian from time to time, and about Erving’s son with Schuyler, who, I gather, has become a talented cancer specialist.
[Posted 04-09-10]
March 25, 2010
Dear Dmitri,
I think perhaps I should call this “Installment I.”
About my background. I could go on for hours about my family’s background – incidentally when studying the families for Family and Social Network I found that it was mostly the women who knew about kinship and kept ties with relatives alive. Anyway, here goes: my mother’s family were from Scotland and Northern Ireland. Both her parents were born in Ontario, I think in the village of Harriston. I think her father’s father was probably born in the Western Isles of Scotland, and her mother’s people were from Northern Ireland, as I said, and I’m sure they were Protestants. My grandmother, whom I much disliked, was a vicious Presbyterian, always looking for sin and usually finding it, especially in me! My grandfather was quite different, a kindly and loving man, also Presbyterian, but not at all vicious. My mother once told me that in Harriston she once stood outside the Anglican church listening to the wonderful music and wishing she could be an Anglican. (I think that Presbyterians at that time didn’t allow music, not even hymns.) My grandfather was the headmaster of a high school in Harriston, my grandmother was a teacher. My mother did very well in school and when she was 18 she asked her parents if she could go to University. This would have been, I think, in 1906 or so, and my grandmother told her of course she couldn’t go to University alone among all those men, what was she thinking of! So my mother spent two years touring the small towns of Ontario teaching women how to bone chickens (before cooking them – why would anyone do this?) After dutifully doing this she approached her parents again, and this time her father succeeded in persuading his wife that their daughter should be allowed to go to University. She studied both Philosophy and History, and won the Governor General’s Gold Medal (which she was fond of telling me when she thought I was getting uppity).
My father’s ancestors were English. His father’s father was an Anglican minister who went to the West Indies with his 4 children to preach to the ‘natives’, where he soon died. The four children were then shipped up to Western Ontario (Woodstock) where there were relatives, I think brothers of my father’s grandfather. My mother told me that my father’s father rather fancied himself as a gentleman and didn’t do much work on the farm he inherited, so that the family didn’t have much money. My father, however, did well in school and set his heart and mind on going to University and studying philosophy. He and my mother met in class. At the end of the 4 year course she stood first and he stood second. I think they graduated in 1912 and married sometime slightly later. (My father knew about Ernest Jones, later the head of psychoanalysis in England for many years, and also knew that Jones had blotted his copybook somehow or other – probably by having an affair with someone he shouldn’t have, which was why he had to leave Canada. My father wasn’t given to gossip – this was the only time I remember him gossiping, and of course it was many years later, when I was already an analyst.)
Religion was quite important in my family, though not especially so to me, and no pressure was put on me (except by my grandmother, and I suspect that my father asked her to stop it). We always went to church on Sunday, and I had to go to Sunday school until I was in my early teens. We went to something called the ‘United Church’ which was composed of several varieties of Presbyterian. My grandmother would only allow my mother to marry my father if he agreed to attend this ‘United’ Church, so of course he agreed. Secretly my mother longed to be an Anglican, but she couldn’t become one until her mother had died, which happened when I was 11. (My much loved grandfather had died when I was 8.) I don’t think any of us three children, my two older sisters and I, ever had much belief in religion, though I quite liked the ritual of the services, and still do, though my church attendance is now pretty rare. My father’s belief, as I gradually learned, was quiet but deep. My mother’s was much more vocal and disturbing. Perhaps it’s worth a little further description.
My mother was very active, together with a man called ‘Blatz’ – can you imagine, ‘Blatz and Bott’ – in setting up what I think was the first nursery school in Canada. And I went to it. I think I started when I was 2, and I remember thinking that it would be better if I had been three. I remember once going up to my mother in the playground and pulling at her skirt, but she paid no attention to me. She was writing things on a clipboard and she ignored me completely. I have never forgotten it. She wrote books about childcare – Parents and the Pre-school Child being one of them. When my sisters and I were older we used to read bits of it out loud to her to tease her. My oldest sister, 6 years older than me, was very kind and had a sweet nature. As an adult she became a teacher in a school for the design of clothes. She made all her own clothes and was always elegant, although not facially pretty. Our middle sister was 4 years older than me, and was very beautiful. (Boys used to line up in cars outside our house, and whenever this sister began to go out with one of them rather often, my father would ask to interview him! Poor boys!) But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Religion was very important to my mother and therefore in our family. After her mother died, she became an adherent of something called ‘The Oxford Group’ whose head was a man called, I think, Buchan. (No, it was probably Buchman.) The belief was that one should not only pray to God, one should also listen to God for his ‘Guidance’. (My Guidance was that my pocket money should be increased.) My father insisted for a time that we should all participate in these quiet times, but that didn’t last long. What did increase is that my mother began to make long trips away from home to go on tours with the Oxford Group. She also had a falling-out with Dr Blatz, and he fired her from her position at the Nursery School. My father didn’t really object to my mother going on trips with the Oxford Group, but we knew that he didn’t like it and neither did we. He also didn’t like it when my mother wanted to give her legacy from my grandmother to the Oxford Group. My mother took my sister Barbara, the middle, beautiful sister, to England to try to convert her, but that didn’t work. Mary Louise, my oldest sister, looked after 13 year old me. At this time my father was becoming increasingly involved in devising procedures for selecting English army and air force personnel, and he asked me to type out some of what he was doing. I wasn’t much good at typing, but found it all very interesting. I once heard my mother objecting to his asking me to do this, and I heard him replying, ‘Well, she's certainly bashing it into shape!’ (Oedipus becomes Elektra.)
My mother wasn’t all bad though. When I was 15, and we were all at our beautiful summer place in Muskoka (much of which my father had built himself) I told my mother that I wanted to learn how to cook. She was a very good cook. She said she would turn it all over to me, that I should plan the menus and do the shopping at the nearby village (I could go there in our outboard motorboat) and she would be available as consultant. And so that’s what we did, and I learned a lot rather quickly. She was always very complimentary when I did things well, and never critical when things didn’t work – only told me how to do it better next time. That lovely summer came to an abrupt end when war was declared – my father was off to England at once. My sister Mary Louise joined the Canadian Air Force and ended up going to England and living, like my father, in a place called The Penn Club (for William Penn) where I later lived when I first went to England in 1949. My sister Barbara married her Captain in the Medical Corps and began having children – 5 girls. The Toronto house was sold, and my mother and I lived in a rented flat which my father returned to periodically. I finished High School, I think when I was 17, but that is another story, and enough for today.
March 31, 2010
(That was the day I first sent it, I wrote it earlier, I forget when.)
Dear Dmitri, To continue with your questions, this time No. 7, where you ask if I know about the kind of work Erving did for the Canadian Film Board, and also about Dennis Wrong. I don’t know what work, if any, Erving did for his friends in the Film Board. I don’t even know why he came to Toronto from Winnipeg. Perhaps Frances would know. I know that I met his Film Board friends, and was slightly in awe of them – they were older than I was and seemed very sophisticated. I don’t know whether or how these friends might have influenced his work. I do know a bit about Dennis Wrong. My mother said she had known his father when she was a student. He was eminent in some way – in government, I think. An ambassador, perhaps? I’m not sure. Dennis was a friend of Erving’s, more or less, but I think he felt a bit on the side. He complained about ‘anti-goyim prejudice’. I saw him here in London two or three years ago, and he gave me one of the books he’d written, The Persistence of the Particular (2005). (I thought it was interesting.) Reading the blurb reminds me of the importance of Durkheim and Max Weber in the development of my own thinking, and Erving’s, both at Toronto and in Chicago and London. Dennis is or has been professor emeritus of sociology at New York University, as you doubtless know.
About your questions 8 and 9 where you ask if I formed any impression about Erving’s Jewish roots – did he speak Yiddish, for example? What was his attitude towards Judaism and Jewish culture? Did he exhibit any political leanings when a student, and later on. Did he encounter anti-semitism? Was it a problem in Canada? etc.
I should know the answers to all this but I don’t. Erving didn’t talk about his Jewish roots much. I think he spoke Yiddish, but not to me, since I wouldn’t have understood it. He explained some words now and then. I gathered, though this may be wrong, that his father was in the clothing business. Erving spoke of Dauphin as if it was the ultimate small town, and indeed, no one that I knew had ever heard of it. The member of his family that he spoke of most often was Frances, always in a positive way. It was my guess that Erving was adored by his mother and that his father might have been rather disappointed by his choice of profession, but probably proud of him all the same. I doubt if his parents would have liked the idea that he was fraternising with a schiksa (if that’s how one spells it) but I rather imagine that he didn’t tell them. Of course there was anti-semitism in Canada, of the kind I’ve described in my family, probably worse. I don’t think any of my family ever met Erving – he wasn’t keen to meet them – but they knew about him, and later my sister Barbara read something about him somewhere and was quite surprised at how eminent he was. I think we all of us in Erving’s and my set of friends were rather left wing, but not in a hard-working or committed way, and I don’t think any of us were Communists. I’m sure that Erving was exempted from military service because of being a student. All the other people I knew were in a similar position except for my future brother-in-law who was in the Medical Corps of the Canadian Army. No one thought this was particularly noble of him.
I think Erving was surprised by what he thought of as the ‘gesellschaft’ rather than ‘gemeinschaft’ attitude of my parents to me. Years later when I came to Canada to visit my parents and then wanted to visit Erving and Schuyler in Washington, I had to borrow money from my father to make the trip. I also went to see colleagues and friends in Chicago and Boston. My father wanted to know whether the trip was for personal or professional reasons. (I said it was both.) Erving was shocked by this, and asked ‘Is he your father or your professor?’ So I was reinforced in my belief that gemeinschaft only was the rule in Erving’s family.
Your 10th question: How did we become interested in social structure (rather than culture, in my case). Same question about Erving’s interest in Freud, and his more sceptical attitude after Schuyler entered therapy. I think we were interested in social structure because that’s the way we thought. Lots of my anthropological companions in Chicago were more interested in culture, whereas I was interested in structural organisation first but also in its relation to cultural beliefs.
First, Erving and Freud: I don’t think Erving was ever interested in psychoanalysis for its own sake, or as something he would want to study or participate in. He read Freud because Freud was one of the great thinkers of the 20th century whose ideas had influenced everyone to a considerable extent. He read Marx for the same reason. In this respect he was much more conscientious than I was, and it was he who got me to read Durkheim, Marx, Weber etc. I came later on to read Melanie Klein before I read Freud, and I read Freud partly because she so admired Freud and her work depended on his. Then I too got entranced by Freud because what a mind he had – and he wrote so beautifully, which Klein did not, in spite of also being an important thinker and innovator. But also, I was interested in becoming an analyst by the time I read Klein and Freud, and Erving was never interested in becoming an analyst.
I can understand Erving’s discontent with Schuyler’s analysis. In every profession there are good and bad practitioners, and it is very possible that Schuyler had a not very good practitioner. Eminence is not necessarily closely correlated with sensitivity, emotional strength and the ability to integrate the two. I have often found the attitudes of orthodox American analysts to be somewhat rigid and unimaginative, just as many American analysts find English analysis to be weird and not strict (‘rigid’ in our view) enough. I never talked to Erving about this in any detail, especially since I wasn’t in touch with them at the time of Schuyler’s analysis, and I didn't see Erving until some considerable time after Schuyler’s death. Erving respected my choice of psychoanalysis as my eventual profession, and was interested in the little that I told him about psychoanalysis in England.
Your 11th question, about our gravitating towards anthropology. I’m not sure that I would characterise Erving as having an anthropological approach. Radcliffe Brown has a description of the anthropological approach, saying something to the effect that it involves intensive study of a group ‘of suitable size’, their environment, their economic arrangements, land tenure, kinship, and political structure, combined with a knowledge of their language, culture, and values. (Or something like that!) Erving didn’t do all this. I made an approach to it in the study of the 20 London families, but I had to take a lot of the background factors for granted. I focused a lot on relations with kin, neighbors and friends, and on the relations of these people with one another. I would say that Erving made extensive studies of the structure of social interaction. You can see this in his Shetland study, where he didn’t go round studying land tenure and kinship, he sat in the kitchen analysing the relationships of staff to ‘guests’, guests to one another, guests to kitchen staff, etc etc. I once stood with him in a large party in London and asked him to describe to me what he did, and he said, ‘You see Chipper Jeffrey over there, (Chipper being a mutual friend, also, sadly, now dead)’ and Erving described exactly the social ploys that Chipper was engaged in without being able to hear what Chipper was saying, only observing what he was doing. It was fascinating. And, knowing Chipper, accurate. I once asked Erving the name of his own specialty in sociology, and I think he said something like ‘sociolinguistics’ or perhaps it was ‘ethnolinguistics’. Stupid of me to forget. Gillian will know of course.
You ask if there is ‘cross-fertilisation’ between my own anthropological and psychoanalytic work. This is too complex and important a matter to be discussed here. I describe it in ‘Anthropology and psychoanalysis: A personal concordance’, which is the first chapter of my book Encounters with Melanie Klein (2007) published by Routledge. It should be available in the US.
Your 12th question about Erving and gambling. Erving was interested in gambling, I think, partly because he liked it and was good at it, but also particularly because it gave him a unique social setting in which to study social interaction. ‘On cooling the mark out’ is a brilliant paper, first developed in relation to gambling, but applicable to many other social situations. I think he probably got a license not primarily for his own gambling but so that he could legitimately study the role of gambling both as a social activity in itself but also as a model for other social interactions where similar considerations apply.
I think that’s enough for today. I’m tired and hungry so I’ll come back to this another day.
Sunday 28th March 2010
Your 13th question on which classes I took with Erving. I don’t think there were any, except perhaps one, very early on, where I had to present a paper and he was furious with me because I was nervous and my voice shook at first. We were in different departments so there wasn’t much overlap. I’ve no idea whether he challenged teachers, for example, and I don’t remember that he talked about them very much. He was competitive by nature, but his interactional outlook was so original that there was nobody to compete with him. I’ve no idea how other students reacted to him, or how staff reacted either.
Your 15th question, about parties. I don’t really know about parties – I wouldn’t have thought he liked them much. The gatherings I remember took place in the basement flat of Pearl and Jack Warn, who lived, I think, in the same building as Erving. I used to see them a lot too, and on Sunday morning Pearl would make a communal breakfast and we would all settle down to read the Sunday papers. The other gatherings I remember were poker games, sometimes in Pearl’s flat, sometimes in mine. I remember she and I were once sitting on the bed in the next room and Pearl said, ‘What a game! It’s not for money, it’s for blood!’ Earlier I think Erving and I lived in my flat for a little while, but not for long. I didn’t like working with someone else in the same room, and I don’t think he did either. It wasn’t till years later that I learned how to work even with my children in the same room, listening to their television or their particular sort of music – I asked them to use the headphones if it got too bad.
Your 13th question about Erving at parties, and the music he liked. I’ve told you about the ‘parties’ so-called. Erving liked classical music, and when I knew him he was very much into Beethoven quartets, which, thanks to him, I’d become fond of too. We also listened to a lot of Bach, and I listened to Mozart a lot too. I don’t think we went to concerts – too far away. I liked jazz a lot, more New Orleans than Gillespie, but Erving didn’t like it.
Your 16th question, about Schuyler. I didn’t know that she wrote about personality trends in upper class women. Dmitri, I’d very much like to have a copy of her MA thesis, and Erving’s too. I am totally useless about the Internet – absolutely can’t manage it at all. Do you think you could post me a hard copy of both their MA theses? I know it will seem stupid to you that I can’t get them from the Internet, but I really can’t, and I would very much like to read them.
Schuyler. She meant a lot to me. I first met her, I think, in Anthropology 240, a course which I taught in the last year I was at Chicago, or perhaps for the last two years. It was an odd experience, because the class was composed of brilliant cheeky kids who had just graduated from Hutchin’s programme on the 100 Great Books, combined with veterans who had just come back from the Far East. They found it difficult to tolerate each other, but I worked hard at getting each group to appreciate what the other had to offer. And, of course, I was just learning how to teach – a quick and intensive exposure! The College kids were furious with me because none of them, with the exception of Schuyler, seemed to have the faintest idea of how to write, and they were very indignant when I corrected their grammar. ‘You don’t even comment on my ideas!’, they said. ‘How can I comment on your ideas when I can’t understand them because they’re not in comprehensible English?’ I replied. So, eventually, they and I learned.
It’s now Friday April 2nd that I’m editing this yet again . . .
This April 2nd version is a bit different from the one I recently sent to you, so please could you delete the earlier one and use this one.
I liked Schuyler immediately – very intelligent, reserved, almost shy, but quick to respond when she realised I was interested in what she said and wrote. We went on seeing each other after the course was finished. I remember being driven by her all the way from Chicago to her home, in Boston, I think. By this time I knew about her upper class status and its problems. And she knew all about my middle class family and its rural origins. I think it was I who introduced her to Erving, though I’m not sure whether it was before the long drive or afterwards. Anyway, our meeting was not long before I left Chicago for home, and then for England. It was 1949.
I don’t know when Erving and Schuyler got married. I have a vague memory that she might have come to Paris when he was in the Shetlands, so perhaps they got married there, but I don’t really know.
And no, I didn’t notice anything in Schuyler’s behaviour that might have presaged her later illness. And at that time of course I wasn’t involved in working with people psychoanalytically, and even if I had been, I hope I wouldn’t have mixed up my profession and my friendships.
I never talked to Erving about Asylums or ‘The insanity of place’ and have not recently looked at either, so I don’t want to speculate about them. I imagine that from my perspective he was too much inclined in Asylums to look only at social factors, and that through his own experience he had to take on board something additional about the interaction of social factors with the particular character of the person – and of the continual interaction between social and individual factors, this interaction being immensely complex, and more important than the other factors considered separately.
Yes, Erving visited me in London when he was working in the Shetlands. I think I mentioned this in my first brief ‘memoir’.
I have no idea who was present at Erving’s presentation of his PhD thesis.
‘Parenting skills’. What an odd phrase. Do you mean what was he like as a father to Tom? I don’t know. Tom visited me in London when he was perhaps 15 or so, and seemed very pleasant, delightful in fact – even though my entire household was rather rudely involved in watching television because England was involved in the World Cup. (You might perhaps know the old joke that someone said to Alf Ramsay ‘For people like you, football is a matter or life and death.’ He replied: ‘Nonsense. It’s FAR more important than that!’) My son agreed with him, and still does. Erving was very respectful to my challenging 12 year old daughter, as I have said in my first document. (Just as well, as she was in the right! She usually still is.)
Your question 24. I don’t know what Erving was like with his students, since he didn’t have any students when we were seeing each other in Chicago or London, and he didn’t talk about it later. I didn’t know that it was his decision to run for the ASA presidency. It seems rather out of character. I’d imagined that someone else nominated him and he consented, but it’s not something I know anything about. I don’t know whether he was concerned about his intellectual and professional legacy or not. He didn’t talk to me about such things. I asked him once if he wasn’t proud of all that he’d accomplished, and he replied that personal relationships, including sexuality, were far more significant. His phrasing was pithier than my description.
25. My migration to England: Yes, it was absolutely the right thing for me, and I’m still most grateful to Fred Eggan for suggesting I come here. There is nothing I miss about the US except my friends, most of whom have now died. I used to go there quite a lot to teach, until 2006 when I got pneumonia on the plane back to London, which damaged my lungs and has stopped all plane journeys except for short ones to see my daughter and her family in Greece.
26. My years at the Tavistock Institute. I’m still grateful to Ed Shils for having suggested that I go there to see what they were doing. He said it was the only place where really creative social research was being done. There was a small professional staff, only 6 of us when I was there, and we were just throbbing with ideas. The boss, Dr A.T.M. Wilson, was mostly busy keeping us alive financially by getting grants from Rockefeller etc. Eric Trist was the chief of ideas, and what a mind! He helped all of us in many different ways, but also left us free to develop in our own way. He understood the anthropological approach, but also helped me to see that it would be possible to see how the war, the recovery from the war, the hopes for a new life – which were very strong in the 1950s in England – could shape the lives of the families whose lives, social and personal, Jim Robb and I were studying. And when I had the idea about networks Eric told me that I’d hit on something really important, and said I must think it through very carefully. There was none of that stealing of students’ ideas that you sometimes get in the academic world. There wasn’t the pettiness that I felt I encountered in my two years at the LSE. Eric taught me how to write. He said, ‘You have the makings of a strong, simple straightforward style. Now sit with me and I will show you how you might strengthen it even more’ – and he red-penciled the unnecessary repetitions, the hesitant phrases, the false apologies, the awkward phrasings. He didn’t help only me in this way – he helped us all. I never could understand Eric. He was the best thinker in the Institute, but he never did anything for himself. He helped each of us to become what we were capable of becoming, but he didn’t do it for himself. Perhaps things were better when he married Beulah and went to the US.
Of course the Tavi Institute couldn’t survive. It had no permanent endowment, no Government grants, and so it had to survive by doing industrial consultancy – I did a bit of that and quite enjoyed it, but I would never have made a career of it. And so the Institute became an industrial consultancy organisation, as I’d feared it would. Tommy Wilson died, Eric went to the US, and wrote books on organisational development – or was a co-author with others, and I, having started being psychoanalysed for personal reasons, very gradually decided to do the training and work as an analyst. I’ve got things a bit out of order, because first I got married, did a field trip with my husband in the Kingdom of Tonga, had one child in Tonga and a second in England, got divorced – though still on friendly terms – and live in a little terraced house in West Hampstead in London where I still work a bit, visit friends, cook, entertain, read novels, go to plays and exhibitions, and take my bad lungs for a walk every day. And wait for my children and grandchildren to visit from Greece and elsewhere.
On re-reading this whole document, I find I don’t like its tone and don’t much like myself. I sound rather as if everything was all right for me, and not for Erving, Schuyler, Pearl, and Jack. If that is what I am conveying, it’s not right. I think there were things about Erving that I couldn’t appreciate properly because I really didn’t know about what being an immigrant feels like, and he did, not so much for himself, perhaps, as on behalf of his family. He sometimes talked as if someone from Dauphin became an immigrant wherever he went. I didn’t know Schuyler when she was suffering the most, and her death was a great shock to me, but what she and Erving and Tom must have suffered I can only just realise, and it is partly through my own feeling and partly because, eventually, I worked as an analyst. But earlier on I too had times of misery. I felt terribly gauche and awkward when I went to Chicago – I was so inexperienced. My trip from Toronto to Chicago was the first time I had been on a train, and I was sure I would betray my utter naivety to everyone, especially the ticket collector.
Later on I felt a different sort of pain. In Chicago I eventually had a love affair which didn’t work out, which was a large part of the reason I left Chicago to come to England, though I wouldn’t have done so if Fred Eggan, the one teacher I really admired in the Chicago anthropology department, hadn’t suggested that I would find English anthropology more congenial than the American variety. My first two years in England were utterly miserable, and this in spite of the fact that I spoke the same language (after a fashion), I had a job waiting for me, I had a place to live when I arrived, and I came with a good American friend, a Fulbright scholar, in the same ship. On top of that, everyone in the LSE was very kind and welcoming, and another junior instructor lived in the Penn Club where I lived, which was where my father and eldest sister had lived during the war. I had absolutely nothing to complain about, but nevertheless it was just one long heartache for almost two years. Gradually I got to know more people, got over the failed love-affair, made very good friends at the LSE, particularly Edmund Leach and his wife Celia, was advised by Ed Shils to go to visit the Tavistock, and slowly things became better and I felt like a person again. And gradually later on, of course, I had the children, went through a bad spell realising the marriage wouldn’t work, separated, then divorced, moved, made more friends, and came to live the life I live now. But the bad times were bad enough.
I liked teaching at Chicago and was relieved to find that I could still do it when I got to the LSE. Nowadays it mostly takes the form of supervision. In the past I was quite active in devising a new curriculum for the training of psychoanalytic students, and used to do quite a lot of teaching, particularly about technique. I still do a private seminar for a small group of practising analysts.
Crypto-autobiographical. What odd phrases and words. (One thing Eric emphasised to me was that simple words and straightforward sentences are the most valuable.) Autobiographical. Of course people’s work is a part of their life. It can’t not be, though for a while I felt, Dmitri, that you were becoming intrusive and reductionist about Erving. Your recent letter has put that right. Even so, though much about the way a person thinks and works can be clarified when one knows their experience, I think there is always something mysterious in it too. Erving can’t have been the only young sociologist with something of his background and experience, but he developed a special sort of talent in sociology that very few people have. There is something about Erving that I have tried to convey in my first ‘memoir’ and in these notes, but I keep feeling that I can’t express it properly. It was something that showed in his facial expression. When he said something particularly clever, which was often at someone else’s expense, he had a curious facial expression which could have meant triumph, or it could have meant pain. In fact I think it probably meant both, meaning that he was feeling both triumph and pain, and feeling them not only on behalf of the other but also on behalf of himself. I found this exhausting, and wished sometimes that everything didn’t have to be so significant, but that was the way he was. And I imagine also that anyone watching us would have thought that I too was always trying to be ‘significant’.
This brings me to Pearl and Jack Warn, the friends who lived in the basement flat of the house Erving lived in for quite a while. Pearl was studying English literature. She was a very special sort of person, with a background similar to Erving’s, though I don’t know where her parents came from, but they were very orthodox and cut her off completely when she married Jack, who wasn’t Jewish. Jack was never in a very good state because of never having got over being a paratrooper in the war in Europe. I remember once when he and I were walking along 63rd St a car back-fired, and Jack was flat on the ground at my feet before I’d even heard it. Things didn’t get better for him. They moved to the West Coast where Pearl brought up their three delightful children, more or less on her own, for Jack went back to Idaho to his home town, where, I heard later, he had continued drinking heavily and died on a desolate road, drunk and alone. Pearl returned to Detroit where her brothers helped her. She got a job as an adviser in Detroit University and eventually married a fellow adviser, Steve, and this was a much happier marriage. I visited them at their cottage on Lake Huron, and she visited me in England and we wrote to each other. She died some time ago.
In her quiet way I think Pearl understood Erving better than anyone. I often wondered why he didn’t become more attached to her, because it was quietly obvious that she liked and admired him. Of course Jack was with her then, which would have made a closer relationship impossible. But I think it was more than that, and this is something I’ve never talked about with anyone, and hardly let myself think about explicitly, even though it’s also obvious. It’s that Pearl came from roughly the same sort of background as Erving did, and he wanted something different. Pearl’s attitude was also different from his – she rebelled in her quiet way by marrying men who weren’t Jewish and letting her parents get on with their excommunication. Pearl didn’t seem to care about the class position of her husbands, and really I think it wasn’t Jack’s class position that was difficult, it was his character and his ruin in the war. Steve seemed to be of ordinary middle class origin to me. My family was of course radically different from Erving’s not only because of religious difference or wealth – I’m sure Erving’s parents were richer, but both my parents were intellectuals. Schuyler’s parents were American aristocrats. I don’t know about Gillian’s family. I’d always thought of them as intellectuals like mine, but I really don’t know.
30. I don’t have any photographs, letters, class notes or anything of that sort, either Erving’s or mine. I must have some old essays I wrote in Chicago, but those I don’t really want to see. Anyway, I am not going to the attic to find them. The stepladder again. I’ll try to get Erving’s Freud volumes down from the top shelf when my helper Esperanza comes and she’ll have a go at the stepladder. (Oh, Esperanza did the stepladder bit, and found that the volumes on the highest shelf were not Freud, they were the first 10 vols of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. Some were signed ‘Choate’, one was signed ‘Goffman’, so it looks as if they belonged to Schuyler, though it was certainly Erving who gave them to me. There don’t appear to be any notes in them.)
As you can see, I got a little cross with you in the last few questions – I felt you were starting to get intrusive and reductionist, as I’ve said above, and I’m sorry about that. Also, I know quite a lot about being addicted to an Archive, being in that state of mind over the Melanie Klein Archive.
So there we are, and I’m pleased though also sad to have been thinking so intensely about Erving. As ever, Elizabeth
Monday 29th March 2010
Dear Dmitri, I thought I was finished but I’m not – I thought of something else about Erving that I half-knew long ago but couldn’t get into coherent thought, and now it has made itself known, so to speak. And I have to thank you for your questions, because without having to think about them I don’t think I’d have reached this idea. But I can’t write today because I’ve got worsening arthritis in one of my fingers so I’ll see how things are tomorrow, although I have a few supervisions to attend to.
Wednesday 31st March 2010
Dear Dmitri, I still can’t type because of my finger, but I will try to send this so far, though it may not get through because it’s a new computer and I hardly know how to use it properly as yet. As ever, Elizabeth
Thursday 1st April, 2010
Through thinking so much about Erving (and also myself and my family of course) I think I have been able to clarify for myself something that led to – I was going to say ‘discord’ between Erving and me. But that word isn’t right because the feeling that slightly put me off Erving wasn’t formulated enough to lead to discord.
Erving believed most fervently in the ultimate coercive force of ‘Society’ and its control over individuals. He thought it was the height of vanity and self-deception for anyone, including himself, to believe that he had a mind of his own. Hence his delight in showing people the falseness of their belief that their literary taste or their choice of stylish kitchen equipment was their own idea. Everyone, including himself, was deluding themselves into thinking they were free when in fact they were slaves. I think he thought, though I don’t remember his saying so, that the coercive force of Society was comparable to Freud’s belief that the unconscious mind of the individual determined the individual's thoughts and beliefs.
I think Erving felt a certain moral superiority because he had divined this truth about Society being the ultimate social controller, and in a more intense and complete way than other sociologists had thought. It was this moral superiority that I didn’t like. I shared Erving’s view about the coercive power of Society, but not his belief that he (or I, or anyone) was morally superior because of having discovered the intense truth of it and, in his case, having described it so convincingly.
Erving didn’t believe that Society could be made better. He wasn’t a Communist or even a socialist, those being the ways out of slavery for many people of our generation in the 1940s. Like Erving, I too believed in the coercive power of Society, and I didn’t think that socialism would necessarily be a successful way out. But I did feel, even in the 1940s, that one should be a bit more compassionate not only to individuals but also to Society. Erving’s attitude made me uncomfortable. I couldn’t out-argue him, but I did think that there was something wrong with his moral superiority. It came into everything.
I think it probable that although Erving’s convictions remained the same, his moral superiority diminished. I don’t know why, of course, but it seems likely that the change came about through time, ageing, and perhaps particularly through the intense suffering he must have gone through over Schuyler’s mental state and her suicide. His feelings for Tom, Gillian and Frances must have been important too. In retrospect the ‘mature’ Erving seems to me to have become kinder, more forgiving, more sensitive to the feelings of others and perhaps to Society and to himself.
The Erving who so kindly told my young daughter that she was worse than her mother was not quite the same Erving as the one who used to delight in showing semi-strangers that their choice of books was determined by social forces, while he, on the contrary, was tacitly showing that he was freer of such social conformity because he was able to break a social code by the very act of pointing this out to them.
I think that’s it, Dmitri.
I am sending this version because I think I’ve put everything in it that I want to include, and I am now in a state of overwhelming muddle about all the other versions. Most of them turn out to be ‘read only’ and I hope this one will let me send it with the additions and changes I’ve made. As ever, Elizabeth