What a Wonderful Insight: David Bailey on Henry May and a life well lived

By David Bailey

One lovely late summer afternoon, I sat happily drinking a scotch on Henry May’s back deck in Kensington, just north of Berkeley. Nearby was the house where J. Robert Oppenheimer had attended parties hosted by Haaken Chevalier, and where Oppenheimer may or may not have listened to discussions of communism.  Next door was the house where Timothy Leary had lived in the 50s and where the sausage king of the East Bay now called home.  Deer regularly wandered by, to the delight of my young daughters. The house stood perched on the side of a steep hill, and because the trees had been carefully trimmed, I could leave the conversation from time to time to stare out at the three-bridge view—San Rafael to the north, the Golden Gate straight ahead, the Bay Bridge to the south.  And probably there was fog just beginning to creep across the bay.

I had just begun to do a bit of work on Alfred North Whitehead, and I discovered that Henry had been at Harvard when Whitehead taught there.  “Henry,” I asked, “did you ever see Whitehead at Harvard?” “Oh, yes,” he said, “I briefly went out with his daughter.” Now, I was by this point accustomed to his casual references to Perry (Miller) and Matty (F. O. Matthiessen), to Mr. Schlesinger and Mr. Merk. But something bugged me about the casual way he talked about Whitehead, and I muttered, somewhat snappishly, “I suppose you’ll tell me that you knew his collaborator as well.” He smiled, his eyes twinkled, and he simply nodded.

Now, here’s the thing—Henry was quick, and he expected others to be quick.  He hardly needed me to explain my admittedly indirect way of asking him about Lord Russell.  “I used to sit up on the long train rides from Oakland to Boston,” he said.  “I was an awful insomniac in those days.  So I went to the club car, and there was Russell.  My friend and I sat up all night talking to him about everything.  He asked us to come see him in Cambridge, but we never did.”

This was but one of thousands of conversations where I was reminded that, in this relationship, I was destined to be Boswell, to accept the status of the second-smartest, second-best-informed, second-quickest person in the relationship.  This is not, of course, something academics enjoy, but for the just under forty years of our friendship, it was a status I came to accept. The reward, definitely a profound reward, was that I could say with some confidence that we were awfully good and close friends across a fair distance in age and, for much of our relationship, across much of the continent as well. He was, after all, Henry F. May, the author of some great books, a thinker, writer and scholar of unequalled talents, and it was a hell of a thing to be his friend.

In the early days of our relationship, when I was trying to figure out what the project of intellectual history was all about, and when I still called him Professor May, I tried to become quick on the uptake.  The first meeting of his seminar, in my first year of graduate school, he told us that we should read a book and think about how it could shape our understanding of the transition between the Enlightenment and Romanticism, which was the overarching theme of the seminar.  The one problem is that he never actually told us the name of the book.  The author, as best I could understand, was Olivay.  After twenty-four hours of anxiety, I finally went to his office and confessed I was too slow.  Could he please tell me who Olivay might be?  I thought of this today as I moved the copy of England in 1815 that I had found at Moe’s books after Henry scribbled out “Elie Halevy” on one of the 3 by 5 cards that covered his desk.

After the first session in Dwinelle Hall, the seminar met in his living room in that house on Coventry, where I came to see how much he depended upon his remarkable wife, Jean.  She dealt with the scruffy, ill-mannered, nervous graduate students with extraordinary grace.  Ever generous (and even affectionate) with his young and uncertain students, she struck me as revelatory of a status and category I had never thought of before—the Berkeley faculty wife.  I came to understand that much of Berkeley depended on the interests of these women.  Esther Gulick (the wife of my girlfriend’s mentor) and Kay Kerr (the wife of that dominant figure in Berkeley, Clark Kerr) had founded the Save the Bay Association.  Beverly Bouwsma (whose husband Bill became important in my education and in my life) was a key figure in the various projects to deal with the health of the army of street people in Berkeley.  Jean was involved with the Creative Living Center, a project trying to deal with the many mentally ill folks who wandered the south side of campus.  I had begun to audit lecture classes, hoping to fill in the enormous gaps in my historical knowledge, and I discovered that Jean was also a sometime auditor.  We sat together and became friendly, although she was aware that there always had to be some barrier between the students and the faculty.

Henry invited his students to meet with visiting scholars, which would have been more intimidating had I known how nervous I should have felt.  Instead, I tried to read at least one book by each visitor before I had to meet him (yes, all were men).  Alan Heimert and Sidney Mead sat in that living room and held court.  Henry expected us to ask intelligent questions, and there were some graduate students who came perhaps a bit too well-prepared, wanting to go through details of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” with Heimert.  Henry had little use for such showing-off, and he always steered the conversation toward something surprising.  He had a habit of listening to some not terribly well-formed argument and saying, casually, “Isn’t it rather the opposite”? I listened and tried to learn. The only time I saw him defer to the guest was when he had a party for his colleague from Harvard and from Berkeley, Henry Nash Smith, who was working on his last book, Democracy and the Novel. By this point, I knew enough to be quite nervous.  I didn’t quite get why Henry May seemed to let Henry Smith direct the conversation. It was only later I came to understand that Smith was, beyond Miller, beyond Matthiessen, beyond Schlesinger, the person Henry considered his true mentor. 

I passed my orals, a two-and-half hour ordeal where the faculty members often forgot what you had read and asked you anything that popped into their heads.  Ken Stampp asked me a series of detailed questions about immigration, because he was, that week, revising his section of The National Experience. For my answers, I had to depend on my good high school history classes, because at that moment the issue of immigration was in eclipse. Tom Barnes asked me why the Church of England in the eighteenth century was “the whore with a heart of gold.”  I’m sure Henry asked me something difficult, but I was by this point so rattled that I was answering from some inner resources that did not include my conscious mind.  Next week he asked me to lunch, at Kip’s, his favorite joint near campus, and casually said to me, on the walk over, that he thought it would be better if I began to call him by his first name.

Although he continued to take my work terrifyingly seriously (writing sometimes indecipherable comments all over my dissertation chapters), our relationship had begun, in a number of subtle ways, to change.  He and Jean had just taken up bridge, and my wife and I began to play cards with them once a week.  Henry enjoyed our now regular lunches, and the conversation was almost never predictable.  I was reading through Henry James for the first time, and he loved nothing better than to talk about The Portrait of a Lady or, his favorite at the time, The Golden Bowl. We talked politics, and his politics were seldom conventional.  We discussed religion, and he found my rather simple faith fascinating, because, although he was now regularly attending St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Bancroft, he couldn’t make his way through the creed without reservations and stipulations.  Like many intellectuals of his era, he considered Niebuhr an essential part of his religious thinking.  His Niebuhr was largely a combination of The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness and The Irony of American History. My Niebuhr was the younger, more radical man of Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic and Moral Man and Immoral Society, chunks of which I had almost committed to heart. Of course, Henry always knew more than I did.  He had thought much more deeply about most of the topics we talked about, he could leap from idea to idea with casual facility. I think I largely held my own, but I wondered if I would ever feel in control of the conversation.  One of his habits, when he was concentrating on an idea, was to rub his very high forehead, as if to massage out some clever point.  It was hard not to feel just a bit stupid, sometimes.  And, more, it was impossible not to feel that I was dealing with the smartest man I had ever met.  It came as a relief to discover that Bill Bouwsma, the brilliant early-modernist, and Bob Brentano, the glorious medievalist, felt much the same. 

By some miracle, I was hired by Michigan State, during the grim era when none of Henry’s students managed to land a solid post.  (Even Charlie Capper had to cobble together short-term gigs until North Carolina recognized his remarkable talents.)  For the first few years Henry tried to get me to write letters, but as my wife’s health deteriorated and my daughters required much of my time, dedicating a few hours to a carefully crafted letter seemed less efficient than calling him.  For over three decades, we talked once a week, for an hour or so, about his work, about mine, about family and, always, about politics and the state of the world.   We spent most summers in Berkeley, and my daughters grew up loving Jean and Henry, although he always engaged them in serious conversations, which they found at first scary and eventually important in shaping the way they viewed the world of ideas. When my wife Mary died, he said, “I was proud to have known her,” which made it impossible for me to speak for a few moments.  When Jean died, I told him she was one of the kindest human beings I had ever known, and he had some trouble speaking after that.  Soon after Jean died, he moved into Piedmont Gardens, a high-rise senior apartment complex, where he met Louise Brown, courted her in almost Jamesian fashion, and their late-in-life marriage gave him great happiness.

Throughout all of the changes in our lives, we almost never missed one of our weekly conversations.  I confess that I hoped, at some point, the tables might turn.  I have read an enormous amount, won a few awards, taught well, written some decent stuff.  In the last couple of decades of his very long life, he was less and less engaged in academics. Surely at some point his powerful intellect would begin to fade.  This is what is known as false hope.  Only a few months before he died at 97, he finished reading the Gaddis biography of Kennan, a book he admired enormously.  “I don’t think Kennan ever trusted democracy,” Henry said.  Oh my, I thought.  What a wonderful insight.  How typical of Henry.

Henry May in His Times by Charles Capper

Henry May in His Times 

by Charles Capper 

In 1966 I went to graduate school at UC Berkeley for two reasons: the campus was ground zero for radical student politics and Henry May taught in its history department. The two were not such an odd coupling as they probably now seem. Henry had been a man of the left and a Communist fellow traveler since the 1930s. After World War II like many thirties intellectuals, former CP sympathizers anti-Stalinists alike, Henry was deeply influenced by the former Marxist and Neo-orthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whose stance of chastened irony, which infected a whole generation of religious and secular intellectuals, also served as a template for Henry’s politics and academic career. The central theme in his first “breakout” book, The End of American Innocence (1959), was thoroughly steeped, if not so portentously expressed, in this ironic sensibility: how pre-World War I cultural radicals revolted against the easy optimism of their Victorian forefathers only to replicate it in an edgier but still “innocent” form. But the book also contained a second irony. Probably its best part was his section on the Victorians whose moral certainty, genteel culture, and progressivist uplift he had, like their radical parricides (and Niebuhr himself), formally deprecated. Indeed, the entire book deserves to be read not only as an unsurpassed history of “the revolt of the intellectuals” in these decades but also as an intellectual document of (in the words of his subtitle) his “own time.”



By the time I arrived at Berkeley, Henry had left the twentieth century far behind. Instead he was deeply engaged in what would become his next book,The Enlightenment in America (1976). This topic too, though, was an extension of his 1950s Niebuhrian preoccupations but now pushed backward into the eighteenth century. The organization of the book largely replicated the same sort of taxonomical structure he had used in his End of American Innocence, although with a much longer chronology. For some readers his four Enlightenments—Moderate, Skeptical, Revolutionary, and Didactic—may seem a little over-defined, but they effectively mapped his large terrain while he regularly opened sluices to allow crosscurrents to flow through his categories’ walls. The Enlightenment in Americawas also, like his previous book, a timely one on a couple of levels. In scholarship, it served as a powerful riposte to all three of the dominant interpretations of this long historical moment—Peter Gay’s made-in-Europe-practiced-in-America Enlightenment, the almost exclusively secular republican synthesis of John Pocock and Bernard Bailyn, and Alan Heimert’s overdrawn identification of Enlightenment liberalism and revivalist Calvinism with political conservatism and radicalism respectively. For May, on the contrary, the defining characteristic of the American Enlightenment was its oppositional but symbiotic rivalry with Reformed Protestantism, which he implicitly offered as a master pattern for American history as a whole. Yet even here his longtime fascination with the tensions of religion and secularism and intellectual mindsets and disillusioned idealism remained very much in play. Indeed, these themes played against the even more timely backdrop of student radical turbulence at UC Berkeley (toward which May characteristically was deeply ambivalent). I vividly recall the response of May, earlier a strong supporter of the Free Speech Movement, to a student leader of a university strike, standing up in a lecture class on Jonathan Edwards and demanding that it be canceled because what was important was the napalming of peasants in Vietnam: “Wrong—what is important at thishour in this room is Edwards!” He did cancel his graduate seminar during a strike for a Black Studies department when news reached us that a bullet was fired by someone through the card catalogue in Doe Memorial Library.)

Having come to Berkeley to study the twentieth century, I myself, however, was unprepared to follow Henry’s chronological leap into the eighteenth. So after absorbing a good deal of the American Enlightenment in his seminars, in perhaps a perversely Oedipal revolt of my own, I decided to write on the only period in American intellectual history he had notwritten a book on—the antebellum era. Henry was not a great fan of that period in American history, which I of course knew and which he would make clear in his later essay “After the Enlightenment.” There with doubly dark irony, he in my opinion a little hastily insisted that very little of the Age of Reason had survived in the Age of Democracy and Romanticism. To be sure, he honored the American Renaissance’s great literary products, but as he remarked, the period’s heated perfectionist spirit—very much like the that of the 1960s, he once told me—made him thankful the Moderate Enlightenment’s great product, the American Constitution, remained as a bulwark against a radical antinomianism that he thought was more deeply ingrained in American culture than intellectuals and intellectual historians cared to admit. It was very different with me: how could it not be for someone coming of intellectual age in the most antinomian-minded time in America since the antebellum period. In fact, I myself was soon beset by my own ambivalences about radical intellectuals and American democracy that I soon had to come to terms with. But that’s another story.

As a scholar, Henry’s influence on me and others of his students was of course historiographic in the widest sense. First, even before I got to Berkeley, I knew of him as the virtual founder of the field of American intellectual history within the historical discipline. Almost all work that we would today identify by this label had been done since the time of Vernon Parrington (as is still the case on the Continent) in nonhistory departments, especially, in the U.S., as with Parrington, in literature studies. Besides Ralph Gabriel, the major exception was Merle Curti. But Henry deliberately defined the field against Curti’s hybrid “social intellectual history.” Almost as much as the Harvard English department’s intellectual historian Perry Miller, Henry regarded Curti’s approach as insufficiently sensitive to the complexities of texts and the peculiar roles, sensibilities, and practices of intellectuals or “second-order” thinkers. At the same time, more than most of his later highly “contextualist”-minded students and successors, Henry regarded what he called the “general ideas” of a culture as important constructing an intellectual history as fine-grained analyses of thinkers’ individual works. To be sure, he was no stereotypical Lovejoyan history-of-ideas man (although he did respect Lovejoy’s emphasis on the interdisciplinarity of intellectual history). Indeed, in The End of American Innocence, Henry sometimes sounded almost martial in his metaphors (“insurgents” who “placed dynamite in cracks in the wall”), which he once conceded probably reflected his eagerness to make intellectual history seem, especially to political historians, every bit as tough-minded as histories of wars and elections. Certainly his capacious inclusion of texts, publishers, and periodicals in his books would be recognizable to many cultural historians today even if they couldn’t appreciate his persistent focus on “ideas” and intellectuals.

Finally, no tribute to Henry would be adequate that didn’t take into account his writing. He once told me, speaking of another major American intellectual historian a little younger than he, that his colleague cared too much what other historians thought. I don’t think this somewhat uncharacteristically invidious aside reflected so much his detachment from academic historiography. After all he wrote two collections of mostly historiographic essays, which included his ground-breaking “Recovery of American Religious History” (1964), which legitimized and inspired, along with US intellectual history, a second historical subfield. Rather, I took this remark to reflect his sense of himself as a certain kind of literary intellectual—a sort of hybrid of the “outsider” radical class of pre-World War II America and an older type of ethically conscious Victorian man of letters. It’s always seemed to me that his subtle injection of these two identities into his historical scholarship has given his histories something of their peculiar literary power. I should add that his concern, if not obsession, with good writing in history also made him a terrific and, in my case, lifelong editor. Into his nineties, he not only read my second Margaret Fuller volume line-by-line but asked for more to red-pencil even as my manuscript grew to gigantesque proportions (a tendency he rightly admonished me to rein in). Not surprisingly, he was most alert to any lapse into the prose style of the Romantics I wrote about whom he only slowly began to appreciate. With sturdy structures, minimalist syntax, concrete diction, and a subtlety that belies the sweeping force of his narratives, Henry’s writing may be his greatest gift to another generation of historians. It may also be, at least in part, what he would have liked to have been remembered for.

These Historians' Deaths

By Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn

Over the past few days I have followed, with so many others, the commentary on the lives of not one or two but an entire trio of eminent historians: Eugene Genovese, Eric Hobsbawm, and Henry May. I admire the care that has gone into reflections that have appeared elsewhere as well as on this blog, including those of Leo Ribuffo on Genovese, Andrew Hartman on Hobsbawm, and Ray Haberski on May. For myself, I can only offer something along the lines of a blogger's equivalent to a moment of silence in honor of their memory, and that of the others we have already lost from their remarkable generation.

I knew only one of these three men personally. Eugene Genovese's life was intertwined with my family's at key points, a story some readers here no doubt know much better than I, and for almost as long as I can remember, his name has been a household word. I met him when we moved to Rochester in 1970 and again a few years ago when he invited me to participate in the early planning meetings for the Historical Society, including a memorable one at the New York City apartment of intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins, who died in 2009.  After learning second hand over the intervening decades of Genovese's reputation as firebrand, which in other settings he of course earned, I found his tremendous personal warmth and charm truly disarming. And enlightening.

As Genovese goes from man to a legend to many, albeit one who has erred (is there any other kind, of either?), there is genuine pathos in this moment when a soldier--for he certainly fought passionately for causes he believed in--lays down sword and shield for the final time. His life is complete now, but perhaps it is my long-term awareness of him, directly and indirectly through his best written words, as in his amazing Roll, Jordan, Roll, as someone of such presence that makes it difficult for me to believe he can no longer be living--at least not yet.