This conversation with Elizabeth Pochoda was recorded by Dmitri Shalin on August 2, 2022. Ms. Pochoda, who holds a Ph.D. in Medieval and Renaissance literature from the University of Pennsylvania, spent her formative years in journalism as the Books and the Arts editor of The Nation magazine where she is now on the editorial board. Other magazines and newspapers followed The Nation, most recently The Magazine Antiques where she was the editor from 2008-2016. After Ms. Pochoda edited the transcripts, she approved posting this interview in the Goffman Archives. In the transcript below, breaks in the conversation flow are indicated by ellipses. Supplementary information and additional materials inserted during the editing process appear in square brackets. Undecipherable words, unclear passages and comments are identified in square brackets. Questions of the interviewer are shortened in places.
[Posted 08.05.2022]
Shalin: As we agreed, I will record our conversation and then send you the transcripts so you can redact and edit the text.
Today is August 2, 2022. I like to memorialize the date because it's easy to forget. How do you prefer to be addressed – Elizabeth or Betsy.
Pochoda: It doesn't matter.
Shalin: OK, I'll call you Elizabeth.
Pochoda: That's fine.
Shalin: I appreciate your willingness to talk and share your reminiscences. I understand you have seen some of the interviews, so you are familiar with the general conversation flow. I don't have any special system, just let people lead the exchange. You can start, let's say, with how you met Erving, and then go in whichever direction you wish.
Pochoda: Before I get to that, let me say that I read your paper about Erving and [Las Vegas] casinos. I thought it was wonderful. I hope you can send me a hard copy of it.
Shalin: I certainly will.
Pochoda: You know, I don't find much that's written about him pertinent, but I was impressed by your article. Having said that, I did read the other interviews. They are by his students and colleagues mostly but I see that you talked with his son, Tom Goffman, right?
Shalin: We communicated through email.
Pochoda: Is he still around? I [thought] he died a couple of years ago.
Shalin: More like 9-10 years ago.
Pochoda: What did he die from?
Shalin: Well, it's a sensitive story. Officially, it was an accident. He fell at his home in Virginia Beach. His son came in and found his father's body. It was traumatic, as you can imagine. What exactly happened, whether it was an accident, what was found in Tom's bloodstream, is open to question. There might be echoes of his mother's experience here. You didn't know that?
Pochoda: No, Philip Pochoda and I wrote an obituary for Erving in the Nation magazine in 1982, and Tom sent me a nice note. I knew him when he was a teenager. He was a wonderful kid. Really wonderful, with a difficult relationship with Erving. But they were also very close…
I watched a documentary the other day about Oliver Sacks that stressed the way he'd inspired so many people to go into the field of neurology. It reminded me that Erving has inspired so many people to do his kind of social anthropology, if that is what it should be called. And yet, like Oliver Sacks, you really have to be Erving to do what he did. No one else can do it.
Anyway, we met when he came to the University of Pennsylvania, in1968 I think. My husband, Philip, was in the sociology department and so we spent a lot of time with Erving. I think the first time we went out in the city – I don't remember where we had gone for the first part of the evening, but we finished the night at Dewey's, a hamburger and milkshake place that advertised "No finer food at any price." Erving was amused by that. It was really late, maybe 12:00 or 1:00 AM, and suddenly a group of extravagantly dressed mute transvestites arrived. Erving couldn't believe it. He thought we'd staged it.
That was one of our first encounters. The next summer, when my husband was on sabbatical I began spending a lot of time with Erving. Of course he asked me to have more than a friendship and I declined. He then said the nicest thing: "I understand. I don't have anything that you don't have a better version of." Such a nice compliment to my husband. We continued to spend a great deal of time together.
Shalin: If I could interrupt you for a second – I jot down some questions as I listen to you, hoping we can revisit certain issues. So just keep at it…
Pochoda: Of course. I'll be happy to. I have read some interviews and I was surprised that people did not seem to know him very well, some even described his height as 5'6 or 5'7!
Shalin: There are people who put him at 5'8.
Pochoda: One important part of Erving's presence, of the way he was in the world, had to do with height. He was maybe 5'3 or so. He talked a lot about growing up in rural Canada and I got the sense that in some ways he was acutely self conscious…about being short and being Jewish.
Shalin: That was in Dauphin.
Pochoda: Dauphin, that's right. He talked a lot about that but almost never about Winnipeg where they moved later when they were prosperous. I think he had a lot of anxiety and self consciousness but I also think he was proud of his family, especially his father. One time we went to a farmers market and I asked a farmer if he had any crab apples. He replied that he did but they were in the back of the truck so if I came back in a couple of hours he'd get them. Erving looked at me and said, "If a woman rang our doorbell at eleven o'clock at night and wanted a pair of stockings, my father would come down and sell her what she wanted." One other thing he said about his father during the Dauphin years was that he could deal with great many communities [from Eastern Europe] and speak each of their languages, an accomplishment Erving admired and felt went unappreciated.
We also talked about the school, his being small and Jewish, his being self-conscious about something like an embarrassing haircut, that sort of thing. You know, his early experience was far from unimportant, if that's of any interest to you.
Shalin: So, he was aware of his stigma. Which means he might have been theorizing his own experience and predicament. In Stigma, there is a passage about the only red-blooded American free of stigma, the one who is tall, athletic, married... I am reading this passage and thinking half of those traits are [missing in] Erving.
Pochoda: I am 5 foot 6, and he was significantly shorter than I am. He talked once or twice about infrequent pairings of tall women and short men. He had interesting observations about that, but it was pretty obvious that he was short and it mattered.
Shalin: I know the answer to the query [about Erving's height]. He pegged himself at 5'4 when he applied for a student visa to enter the United States.
Pochoda: So, 5'4, yes. If you didn't stop and think of it, you missed the whole point of his shortness.
Shalin: I have a photograph of his sister's wedding where the two look like they are almost the same height, and Frances told me her driver's license says she is 5'2.
Shalin: I have talked to people who knew him in Dauphin, and there was a perception that Erving's father made real money not through selling haberdashery but by investing in stocks. He was spending more and more time in Winnipeg and eventually moved his family there to be closer to this line of work.
Pochoda: I know nothing about that.
Shalin: Yes, in the beginning his parents lived in Manville where the father took a loan, couldn't pay it, and the family had to decamp to save their face. But then he did well, they were comfortable during the depression and beyond. The relatives would come to Max Goffman when they needed a loan.
Pochoda: Yes, I'm sure that's true. Erving played the market as well.
Shalin: Yes, he held stock, along with other things, in a casino.
Pochoda: Playing the market was not something my husband and I had any interest in.
Shalin: You didn't have this in common [with Erving].
Pochoda: No, but we did talk about money, about capitalism. And he said he'd gone through every political system and decided that capitalism was the only viable one. He also explained short selling to me. He was interested in the market, no doubt about it.
Shalin: You might have seen a story about the day when John F. Kennedy died, with Erving jumping off his seat and shouting, "My god, what happened to the stock market?"
Pochoda: I've heard that, yes, but it might have been a frame-breaking performance deliberately disorienting everyone in the room. He did a lot of that, cutting through expected behavior though he was probably also concerned about the market.
Shalin: There is a story about Erving breaking his leg on a bicycle
Pochoda: Yes, that was partly my doing. He got interested in cycling; I let him borrow my bike but when he wasn't satisfied with two wheels he bought a unicycle. He was practicing in his house on Second Street and he asked me if I wanted to try, and I just said I'm sure I can't do it. He just kept messing with the unicycle inside the house and eventually he broke his leg.
Shalin: You said it was on Second Street – on Rittenhouse Square?
Pochoda: No, Rittenhouse was much later, and by the way he never lived on Rittenhouse Square but on a side street in the area that may have been called Rittenhouse Street. At the time we are discussing Erving was renting a house in Society Hill, a big handsome eighteenth-century place. He liked old things, antiques, old houses, and he was a demon about authenticity though I'm now not sure he knew as much as he thought he did…but few people do. We often went to Freeman's auction house together and he studied their offerings quickly but carefully.
Shalin: Why was he taken with bicycling? Did he just want to keep up with you? Was it his athletic pride? Some people tell me Erving was quite athletic [in early years].
Pochoda: I think it was just fun, right? No special agenda. I just was passionate about it, and he got interested in that. I don't know why he went from that to the unicycle, but he loved a challenge.
You do know that he was very knowledgeable about wine, right?
Shalin: Oh, yes, I have a number of stories of how some people just don't get it. The thing [for Erving] was to get wine as cheap as possible and as high quality as you can get.
Pochoda: One day he called me up – insisting I meet him at the State Store on Walnut Street. In those days alcohol sales were restricted to state run stores in Pennsylvania, and these were very bare bones operations. He said, "Get over here right away." So, I got over there. They'd taken a case of a superb burgundy, possibly a Vergeless, off the shelf, marked it for sale, and put it out front in a shopping cart. When he asked the clerk why it was on sale the fellow told him it was because they'd just received the new shipment. We had a good laugh about that after we bought the case. We split it, but I since I didn't have enough money for my half Erving paid and I promised to pay him back…eventually. Not long later he called in the loan: "You have to pay me back." He was meticulous about money.
Shalin: You didn't share the same attitude to capitalism.
Pochoda: No, not that it mattered. The thing to understand about Erving is that he was always working so I'm sure he had an interesting take on that encounter in the state liquor store as he did on even the most casual of occasions.
We once walked from Society Hill to Center City and stopped into a shop on Jewelry Row. I don't remember why, perhaps it had to do with fixing a watch, something inconsequential. There was a young couple in the shop talking to the clerk about purchasing an engagement ring. It was obviously going to be a long conversation so I headed for the door but Erving just milled about; he didn't look like he was listening but he wanted to stay. And when we eventually left the shop, he told me everything that went on between those people and the clerk – their status, the power dynamic of the interaction, even her family background and so much more. It went on for a good bit of our walk to Center City and none of it was the expected sociological information about class, status etc. I was astonished. While we were in the shop Erving looked like nothing more than a guy wasting his time but that's exactly how he got the goods. If you've ever wondered why he never wanted to be photographed, that's why. He wanted to hang out, he wanted to be someone too short and miscellaneous to be noticed.
Shalin: I heard many stores of this kind. Elizabeth Bott – did you hear about her?
Pochoda: No.
Shalin: Liz Bott, his one-time girlfriend, told me a similar story about a party she attended with Erving where he gave her account of everybody's [self-presentational shtick]. It was amazing, just like you said, and how true too.
Pochoda: It was revelatory. It was part of his genius. It could be painful too… In the late sixties, early seventies, academic couples engaged in a kind of competitive cooking and entertaining. You'd go to someone's house and they'd cook a version of cassoulet and serve a wine from the state store. Upon one occasion Erving uncorked a spiel about being stuck at certain socio-economic level where you have this not very interesting wine paired with not very interesting food.
Shalin: That could be painful to hear.
Pochoda: Yes, the woman was in tears. It was awful but there was a way in which what he saw he often couldn't forbear from saying.
At another occasion, Philip Rieff was standing by a fireplace in his Saville row suit leaning on the mantel and discoursing in his invented mid Atlantic accent. Erving sidled up to the fireplace made a few verbal and physical moves and before long Rieff moved away. Erving then looked over at us and said, "See a short Canadian Jew can edge a fake Englishman off the mantel anytime he wants." It was great…
Shalin: I spotted somewhere that you oversaw an auction of Philip Roth's memorabilia. He is an interesting character who managed to fold into his novels part if his own life.
Pochoda: He was a very good friend of mine. Yes, the person who made me a journalist. I was an academic with tenure, and I didn't want to be an academic. The Nation magazine was looking for editor for their books in the arts, and he recommended me. He was the most generous person I have known.
Shalin: [Are you talking about Philip Rieff?].
Pochoda: NO!!! Please make sure that that anecdote I told you was about Philip Roth. You asked me about Philip Roth.
Shalin: Okay. I'll be careful.
Pochoda: As for Philip Rieff, I never cared for him.
Shalin: For a moment, I mixed up two Philips.
Pochoda: OK.
I looked through a lot of your interviews, and there were questions about women. He told me once what it was like to be married when he was teaching at Berkeley. His comment was… In those days there was nothing more important than what an assistant professor was doing so his wife took on everything else. He said that in a spirit of dismay and chagrin. His wife would drive up the hill to their house with a car full of groceries, honk once, and if he felt like it, he would come down and help her empty the car. "That's all I ever did," he said.
Shalin: I want to make sure I understand, for I'm not quite clear. You said his wife did everything – you mean around the house?
Pochoda: That is what he was saying, yes. He couldn't be interrupted because nothing was more important than what an assistant professor was doing. He had begun to reflect on those times, you know, and he did get the point about women – very much so.
Shalin: I wrote about Erving and his first wife, how she was ready to go back to Chicago to finish her Ph.D., and how his views on mental illness changed after Sky's suicide…
Pochoda: You have in [the Archives] that photograph of Erving sitting at his desk with a tie on. You know how that came about?
Shalin: Please tell me. I was trying to find the date and I couldn't.
Pochoda: I'll tell you what he told me. He agreed to have an article about him in Time magazine but he said he didn't want a photograph. No magazine, especially not Time, would agree to do a profile without a photograph. I guess Erving wanted the profile to run so he told me, "I dressed in a way that I never dress, put my hands on the desk and looked up. I just wanted it to [look] noncommittal." In this photograph, he is, he hoped, unrecognizable: "I still do field work. I don't want to be recognized everywhere." That's what he told me at the time. He staged that magazine photo as much as he could to be as unrecognizable as possible. I also think he had a lot to say about photo portraits, the confection of self and so forth; there is no way he wanted to participate in something so reductive.
Shalin: Did the magazine run the photo? I thought they didn't.
Pochoda: [They did] and I guess that is how it got around.
Shalin: Okay, that helps locate this photo in time. You know, he was giving a speech at the University of Manitoba which gave him high honors, and he refused to go on with his speech unless the photographer would leave the hall. Could you tell me why you think Erving [hated being photographed?]
Pochoda: The reason he gave me was that he still did fieldwork, and he didn't want to be recognized. That's what he told me but as I've said he knew too much about the photo portrait to participate.
Shalin: That's very interesting. I never heard this.
Pochoda: I don't know what else you want to know. He was very pleased when he got a National Book Award or a Book Critics Award for Gender Advertisements. I was on the committee of both and don't remember which one gave him the award. I did not propose his book or push for it once it was nominated because he was my friend. Other people did. He called me sort of to thank me and I said I didn't do it. He was very pleased by the award, and I wasn't surprised that he was.
Shalin: He kind of affected indifference to such things. So, it's interesting that you've noticed he felt honored.
Pochoda: I might have missed it, but I haven't seen in any of the interviews references to his posthumous ASA talk, his presidential address that he never delivered because he'd died by the time he was to give it.
Shalin: The Archives have over 100 interviews and memoirs. It is easy to miss stuff. Do you have a story of that? Because there's some vagueness about that.
Pochoda: Well, all I know is that at that time is that I was an editor at Vanity Fair and my husband Phil Pochoda was a head of nonfiction at Doubleday. Erving called me and said, "I want you and Phil to come to the ASA meeting. I will give my address." I thought this was the most un-Erving thing he'd ever done. And I said, "We will be there!" I was thrilled and honored. And of course, he died right before he gave it. It's such a brilliant statement. He knew he was going to be dead. I mention that in conjunction with Gender Advertisements – he was not immune to praise and honor.
Shalin: Some people I talked to sensed just that, but you seem to know this for a fact. Erving amazed some people when he agreed to run, or rather be drafted, as a candidate for the election of ASA president. I believe this meeting was supposed to be in San Francisco, or was it in New York?
Pochoda: I don't remember, honestly.
Shalin: You were willing to go all the way?
Pochoda: Oh yes, we were going to [have] a babysitter, and we were ready to go. I guess Alice was just a newborn.
Shalin: Alice was born in December of 1981.
Pochoda: Do people admire his ASA speech?
Shalin: His speech on "Interaction Order"? It was published in 1983 in the American Sociological Review. I wouldn't say this is the most important statement of Erving's, but he made a valiant attempt to put his entire intellectual life in perspective, linked it to his dissertation. There is a disagreement on whether he succeeded, but it certainly is an important document.
Pochoda: Yes, and it is also a kind of reflection on the fact that he was dying.
Shalin: That's right, he says it right in the beginning – by the time you hear it, I won't be around.
Pochoda: Did you ever talk to Labov?
Shalin: I did not. He helped me connect with Hymes.
Pochoda: Dell? Is he still around?
Shalin: I don't believe so. Some 10 years ago he had certain mental health issues.
Pochoda: Dell Hymes? That's a shame
Shalin: So, there was not possible to arrange a talk. I don't have it at the top of my head as to when or even whether he died, but 10 years ago he was not available. Bill Labov helped me to find his email address, but I was not comfortable asking him about Erving.
Pochoda: You should talk to Labov. Erving really admired him.
Shalin: Oh, yes, I know that, and it would be terrific. Yes. I read in the Hymes-Goffman correspondence that the two plotted to arrange Labov's move from Columbia to Penn, working on a package that would be attractive to him. And eventually Labov moved to Penn.
Pochoda: Yes, Erving was very high on his work. So, you can't talk to Gillian?
Shalin: I [met her at Erving's sister's birthday party], communicated with her about some memoirs. Elizbeth Bott asked me to show her story to Gillian. But I never asked her to talk. I
know some other scholars did, and she told them that Erving wanted to be known to the public through his works. You know that Erving sealed his archives before he died. He had those enormous cabinets holding his fieldnotes, clippings, and so on, as some people who saw them report. But his personal archives are sealed.
Pochoda: Well, after he died, Gillian called me, and she was lovely. So, I just thought maybe she would talk to you at some point. He really kept everything. One day I was looking at his desk, and he looked at all these books and said, "These books are all dead." I said, "What do you mean?" And he said, "Well, these books were important in the field and now they're dead." I said, "Well, doesn't that happen in every field?" He said, "It might." Anyway, he found it disturbing.
He and my husband were walking down the hall at the University of Pennsylvania, and a group of people came towards them. They were on their way to lunch, but none of them invited Phil or Erving to join them. And Erving said to Phil, "You have to understand why that happened. This group constitutes 'a with.' And no one in 'a with' can speak for 'a with,' even though everyone probably wanted to."
[Laughter]
Shalin: His library would be interesting to go through. Just to know what is on his bookshelves would be great, to see if there are markings on the pages. By the way, you know Alice is a sociologist, right?
Pochoda: Oh, boy. Yes, she's great. If he had a real student [it would be] Alice.
Shalin: That's right. That's right. And she likes to hear stories about her father, Fran told me. Her mother could share memoires with her if she wants to. Hope she does.
Pochoda: I once looked at books in his library and I said, "You have a set of Freud."
Shalin: A set of…?
Pochoda: Freud. And I expressed surprise. He said, "Well, among other things, I examined the way he managed his encounters, the way he got people to believe in the treatment."
Shalin: He was quite a Freudian at the beginning, then he cooled toward Freud. In the Goffman Archives, there is note from Ann Goffman, I think, a close relative, who says Erving got it right, not Freud. And Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is modelled in some ways on the Psychopathology in Everyday Life. Except that the unconscious for Goffman is a repository of society.
Pochoda: He did talk to me quite a lot about Las Vegas. I know that you have written about that.
Shalin: There is a mystery I never was able to solve – which casino he worked in as a dealer? Anything you know from your conversation with Erving about his exploits in the part of the world where I'm residing? Being born in Leningrad, Russia, then migrating...
Pochoda: Your article is good. I don't have anything to say. He was very interested in how you withstand the pressure of the casino when you are counting cards. He tried to convince me to go there and work as a cocktail waitress or something. Just to kind of pose as a hidden participant observer. I actually was part way down road to doing it, really.
Shalin: Doing it in Vegas?
Pochoda: Yes, I started making plans and then just decided not to. He thought I could do something interesting if I went out there and became a cocktail waitress.
One thing I talked to him about was television. You know, of course, he never had a television, wouldn't have one. There was an early reality television show, An American Family, six months in the life of the Loud family from somewhere in California. I thought, "Erving should watch this." So, I called him and he said, "I'm not going to do that. If I had a television, I would never turn it off."
Shalin: He didn't have a television?
Pochoda: No. Yes, he was probably right that he wouldn't turn it off, but he would be fascinated by how things are confected for television, how you couldn't get the spontaneous stuff that you got hanging around in a jewelry store and watching people who don't know they're being watched.
Shalin: Well, you can gauge where he was heading from his late publications. Forms of Talk where he examined radio bloopers, conversation analysis type studies. Frame Analysis was published a few years after Garfinkel put out Studies in Ethnomethodology. For Erving, it was time to provide a systematic theoretical framework for his line of inquiry. [There might have been a bit of competition going on between Goffman and ethnomethodologists].
Pochoda: Did you talk to my former husband?
Shalin: Uh, briefly. The main thing he said, "You really should get in touch with my wife." I am grateful to your husband, so please send him my gratitude for bringing us together. If you are on speaking terms.
Pochoda: Of course, we are.
Shalin: If he is interested, by all means. I have a bunch of questions if you don't mind. Some are about the tail end of Erving's life. And then, we can circle back to earlier years.
When did you learn about his illness and what do you know about it? I know his son's side of the story. Tom told me about his father's cancer, how he examined his conditions. Do you recall when you learned about it?
Pochoda: It wasn't very long before he died.
Shalin: In the summer of 1982, he was traveling in Europe, met some people there, attended a conference. But he might have felt some stomachache at the beginning of the year. He thought it was an ulcer, turned out to be cancer.
Pochoda: You did tell me that it was inoperable. He called me and told me that.
Shalin: Would you say it was in the summer of '82?
Pochoda: It would be hard to locate. I remember where I was. Yes, in my office at Vanity Fair. We were just launching the magazine. I can't remember exactly. Next time I heard from him… I don't know. It's hard to tell
Shalin: Did you communicate with him after that call?
Pochoda: Well, yes, because there was this business of wanting us to come to [the ASA meeting].
Shalin: That means he still thought he might be able to attend and give a talk.
Pochoda: Right, yes, he did think that until he [was working on] the piece that he wrote.
Shalin: He was writing it literally until the very end. When he invited you and your husband, he definitely thought he was going to give it.
Pochoda: Oh, he definitely did. It was so unlike him.
Shalin: And another thing – did you see him evolving over the course of years? Getting less combative and softer?
Pochoda: I am thinking of a last walk we took when I visited him and Gillian in Philadelphia. Yes, he was much softer and Alice's birth was a big part of that; he told me he held her finger at night until she fell asleep. When it came to his illness, he delivered the news and I never mentioned it again.
Shalin: Erving told some of his students that he had things under control. To others, he said, "Never bring it up. We can talk about other things if you want. We can talk about your work."
Pochoda: I never mentioned it again because I knew him well enough to know if he tells me something like that, which is unlike him, he wants it to end it right there. Of course, if he wanted something from me, he would ask. But he never asked people for anything. That's an important thing to know about him.
Shalin: Do you know when Erving met Gillian?
Pochoda: No.
Shalin: Maybe we could cycle back, although I know it must be tiresome. We can end it any time if you had enough. How do you feel?
Pochoda: Maybe about 15 more minutes. I have to walk my dog.
Shalin: Okay, and maybe we could reconnect again some time.
Pochoda: Yes, maybe we'll reconnect. [Coming back to Erving's son], Tom said this, and I think it's true, that he had a lot of guilt about his first wife's suicide. It was something he never got over.
Shalin: That's what Tom told to me: "It hit him real hard."
Pochoda: Tom said to him once in my presence, "You go to bed with guilt every night and you get up with it too." I was going to mention that before, and then I thought, no, but it is important he felt that very deeply.
Shalin: I will send you my paper about Erving and Sky, and the issues of mental illness. The two were separated for a while. In her last letter, Sky indicated that she was going back to Chicago to finish he Ph.D., and in her will written two months before she died, there were some indications that things were rough between them. Tom corroborated what you've just told me…
Okay, can you tell me a bit more about the relationship between Tom and Erving?
Pochoda: They were in that big house on Second Street together, and they were like pals in a way. But they also had conflicts. Erving was a good father to him. I never saw anything out of the ordinary. I thought he adored Tom. One weekend they both had girlfriends there. And there was a big fight. Erving was meticulous about the kitchen. He always wanted everything to be perfect. I guess he planned some kind of a drink for him and his girlfriend that involved ice cubes but Tom had used the ice cube trays for some kind of fruity popsicle-like confection that he and his girlfriend wanted. Erving lost it over that.
Shalin: Something as trivial as there.
Pochoda: I asked Tom, "What the hell went on?" And he said, "Oh, my God. He was on edge all weekend and he lost it. Yes, it was sort of like that between them, but you know I love the idea of both of them having girlfriends there.
Shalin: Tom told me, "My father did a pretty good job raising me."
Pochoda: Well, that's what I saw.
Shalin: There were also stories about wine that Tom and his friends consumed in quantities that Erving did not appreciate.
Pochoda: That would set him off for sure.
Shalin: Do you know anything about the Guggenheim grant Erving got in the late 1970s to continue his work on Las Vegas casinos?
Pochoda: No, all I can say, he referred to Vegas frequently when I was hanging out with him.
He never got away from that somehow. I also think that because his first wife had been so intimately involved in the Las Vegas experience that it was hard for him to go back.
Shalin: I hope Alice can continue his work.
Pochoda: Who knows. Alice is Erving's greatest student. She never met him, but she's just like him in some important ways. You haven't met Alice, right?
Shalin: That's right.
Pochoda: I really admire her work.
Shalin: I know you have to run shortly. Do you have 3 or 4 more minutes, or should we stop right here?
Pochoda: OK.
Shalin: I want to make sure I understood you correctly, and feel free to ignore my question. Did Erving think at some point that you are dating material, or I misunderstood you?
Pochoda: You better get this right, Dimitri. Yes, he wanted to have something beyond friendship. Definitely. He tried hard… What he said to me was very respectful, and I said, "No." You know, a lot of guys once you say no don't want to have anything [to do with you.] Our friendship really blossomed after that. He asked me once more, or more than once, but…he said, "I understand." He referred to my husband, he said, I can't give you anything you don't have a better version of okay. Yes, he went out with a lot of different women.
Shalin: This is what Tom told me on the subject – and you can take it as a compliment – "Erving was always looking for the smartest woman around." That is pretty much an exact quotation. Surely, there is more to it than just smarts, but still.
You know Erving and I share Russian Jewish roots, which is one reason I got interested in Goffman's work. And I traced Erving's [directness and no-nonsense ways] to Russian culture. Are you familiar with the metaphor of Potemkin portable villages?
Pochoda: Yes.
Shalin: Anyway, I found in Asylums direct reference to Potemkin villages when he describes a team of inmates who are paraded before visitors whenever there's an inspection or something. Team work to show the right fronts. Russia is all about facades, putting the show on. I thought here might be the roots of his sociological imagination.
Let's stop here, though I have more questions. I will send you the transcript, you will check it up and make corrections, additions. Later on we might revisit some of this territory.
Pochoda: I have a little time this week, and after this week, I don't have time. So why don't you send it in if you prefer to have it done quickly.
Shalin: Oh, there is no rush.
Pochoda: I mean, a couple of days is fine.
Shalin: Well, we can come back to it in a few weeks. Elizabeth, thank you so much. Okay, I will transcribe the conversation, send you the transcripts. You can go over them, and if something jogs your memory, please, put it in.
Pochoda: Why don't you edit it, put it in the form you like and then I'll look at it from there.
Shalin: OK, you can indicate what should remain confidential.
Pochoda: Well, what I am saying is that you're going to have a version you're comfortable with. Are you going to publish it?
Shalin: No, this is just for the Archives, for Goffman scholars
Pochoda: Okay, I'll do that.
Shalin: I can't tell how much I appreciate that.
Pochoda: I'm sure I was no help at all, but then I just loved the guy.
Shalin: All right, take care.
Pochoda: Okay. Bye.