Prop up the front, the back falls down
All around the canyons of L.A. town—J.J. Cale, “Downtown L.A.” (1982)
It was a warm Tuesday in January 2012 when I introduced myself to John. He was lying on his side along a semicircular concrete bench in the undercroft of Bunche Hall at UCLA, his head propped up on his right arm, looking every bit the Greek philosopher as he peered into Stefan Collini’s book Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. He had a gray, turf-like mustache and tobacco-stained fingertips. One pouch of Bugler was stuffed in his pants and another poked out of his breast pocket. I approached cautiously. Squinting through thick glasses, he asked for my first and last name, twice. After a pause, he wondered about the latter, “Is it English? German?” When I said my family was from Lithuania, John’s face puckered. “Were they involved in the fascist occupation?” he asked pointedly.
It was my first year of graduate studies in history, and I had noticed John hanging around the department. He was sparsely toothed, with stringy white hair and mismatched old clothes that hung off his body—not out of place in LA, but an exception among the clean-cut professors and their mentee imitators. John attended talks and could often be seen carrying a book while shuffling in untied boots between the North Campus sculpture garden and a stand of jacarandas, or ruminating in the pink shade of an open Financial Times near the library. We rode the same bus and I wondered who he was.
John, it turned out, had a PhD from my department. This produced mixed emotions in me. On the one hand, he served as a cautionary tale about life after the degree, a future whose dim prospects I was already being inured to. Years after defending his dissertation, perhaps unable to adapt or evolve, he appeared stuck in an eternal limbo that would give any student the night sweats. On the other hand, John seemed an extreme version of a kind of intellectual ideal. Wasn’t the freedom to read for much of the day one of the draws of graduate school, after all? Over time, I came to see John in the tradition of other universities’ great unofficial scholars, like novelist, Paris Review cofounder, and cannabis advocate “Doc” Humes, who developed cult followings at Harvard and Columbia, where he held extracurricular seminars; Berkeley’s “Holy” Hubert, who preached for decades on Sproul Plaza; and “Doctor” Tom Jeffries, a Wake Forest employee born into slavery who audited classes and is remembered on his gravestone as “Campus Philosopher and Janitor.”
From the bench that day, the first of many conversations over the years, John railed against “lightweight” French intellectuals like Sartre and Camus, declared his support for Tony Judt’s argument that the French were complicit with the Nazis, and admonished Picasso for only joining “the Party” in the 1950s. Students left a pile of shit on Sartre’s doorstep, he told me. “French intellectuals were bullshit. Being and Nothingness was crap compared to Being and Time.” He was prone to amusing free associations like this and I decided to always hear him out.
It came up that I was taking a class with Russell Jacoby. Jacoby’s best-known book, about how the academy defanged American social critics, helped popularize the term “public intellectual.” Slaying sacred cows such as tenure and diversity made him a kind of pariah in the field, and the department. John lit up and said Jacoby was a great guy, and smart, and had been victimized for his leftist views: “Anyone who writes a book called The Last Intellectuals . . .”
But, John added grimly, “We have our differences.”
Then he delivered an impromptu lecture on pastoralism, the lyceum in Italy, and the French versus the English education systems. “Do you find it challenging here?” he asked me. “I mean do you really find it intellectually challenging at UCLA?”
A man sweeping pine needles and eucalyptus bark came close to our feet. John barked, “Excuse me! We’re trying to have a conversation here!” The man replied, in a Spanish accent, that he was working. John looked at me and said, “Working. And what are we doing?” and laughed, wheezing.
The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg was on the department faculty at the time and would give a couple of talks per year. Once, I saw John when I walked into a conference room to hear Ginzburg’s presentation, “Scheme and Bias: A Historian’s Reflection on Double-Blind Experiments.” We sat near each other in hard plastic chairs by the door. John was reading stories by Mark Twain. “A friend who’s a writer told me to read it,” he said matter-of-factly. He asked what I was reading and I pulled a volume of Henry James’s stories out of the backpack between my feet. He took the book from me and perused its contents. “My father made a movie based on The Aspern Papers,” he said with a pause, and then added, “My stepfather.”
When Ginzburg walked in, John greeted him like an old friend. Ginzburg seemed happy to see him. Sitting down again, John said that James thought of himself as a European, “and Europe ultimately consumed him, of course.” His favorite James book, he offered, was The Ambassadors. As people filed past us to take seats for the lecture, he animatedly described the plot in detail. “That happened to me,” John said. “I used to get involved with older women . . . a professor, a girl who was eight years older than me, and I got myself into these situations where my dad had to get me out.”
Like a lot of people you see in LA in various states of lucidity, John seemed to be living in an eternal present. But he had a history. He was born in 1951 in Los Angeles and raised in a family of cosmopolitan Jewish writers. The patriarch of the family, Joseph Bercovici, was born in 1879 in Galați, a city on the Danube today in Eastern Romania, and raised in nearby Brăila. A wave of pogroms drove Joseph’s socialist-leaning brother, Konrad, to denounce the antisemitic violence from a soapbox, and subsequent police interest in him impelled the whole family to flee to Paris. Konrad later became a prolific writer, Romalogist, and socialite in America. He also claimed to have conceptualized The Great Dictator and successfully sued Charlie Chaplin for royalties. In his memoirs, Konrad wrote that his brother Joseph was “mother’s favorite, hewed the line . . . and spent his evenings reading and writing letters to his inamorata, letters which he kept in the drawer of his table.” Joseph, for his part, immigrated to New York as the twentieth century approached, working odd jobs and reporting for the New York World.
Joseph’s eldest son, Leonardo, born in Brooklyn in 1908, became a successful Hollywood writer. He cowrote the screenplay for Racket Busters (1938), starring Humphrey Bogart, and The Bishop’s Wife (1948), which featured Cary Grant and Loretta Young and was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It won an Oscar for Best Sound and was remade in 1996 as The Preacher’s Wife with Denzel Washington and Whitney Houston. Leonardo’s adaptation of The Aspern Papers, The Lost Moment (1947), starred Susan Hayward. At the same time that he was receiving advances of hundreds of thousands of dollars, “Nardo,” as he was known, became a Communist, joining the Beverly Hills branch of the Party along with Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner. In 1951, he fled to Mexico to avoid a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee. Later named and forced to testify, he refused to incriminate himself and was blacklisted, spending twelve years in exile in Italy.
A week after Leonardo’s HUAC testimony, his first wife, Frances, was found dead in the couple’s “liquor closet,” as a headline put it. He later married the Swedish actress Märta Torén, who herself died tragically at age thirty-one in 1957. In 1959, on a trip to the United States, Leonardo married John’s mother, Antonia, and took the family, including young John, back to Europe, where Leonardo worked for legendary film producer Dino De Laurentiis before returning to LA. Antonia would go on to serve as president of the Los Angeles County Psychological Association. “While they may not have been descended directly from Leonardo, John [and his sister have] been Bercovicis in name and spirit ever since,” Leonardo’s grandson, Luca—the director of campy horror films like Ghoulies (1984)—wrote to me in an email from Doha, where he lives.
John attended Palisades High School, on a track for gifted children. Joseph was still around, doting on his grandchildren and “admonishing them to think clearly, speak properly, and above all, to ‘stand straight.’” John found himself at UC Santa Cruz at the height of the ’60s, graduating in 1972. That year, he and fourteen other anti-war protesters spent two days in jail for blocking Highway 1. The rumor around the UCLA History Department was that John had come down to LA for graduate school, suffered a nervous breakdown, and returned years later to finish. He received an MA in History in 1984, filed his dissertation in 1996, and never left.
One day, John and I found each other in the same rickety elevator ascending Bunche Hall. He asked where I was going. “Actually,” I said, “I left my coffee mug in Professor Friedländer’s office.”
Saul Friedländer, who was born in Prague in 1932 and raised in hiding in France during the war, had spent much of his career at the center of the 20th century’s major historiographical debates about the Holocaust. His life story, which he told in a memoir, was borrowed heavily by W. G. Sebald in his novel Austerlitz. It was Friedländer’s last semester before retirement and I was doing an independent study with him.
John launched into his great laugh and said there must be a psychoanalytic reason behind me leaving my mug behind. What is it, I asked. He said, “You only want to talk to Friedländer and no one else.”
“Is it a good idea for the government to bail out the U.S. auto industry?”
John, PhD in History, UCLA alumnus:
The government gave $40 billion to AIG, the insurance giant. The auto industry only wants $25 billion. I’m in favor of bailing out the auto industry – contingent on getting rid of its CEOs. It’s not Barack Obama, it’s Bush who’s had enough of them! I don’t think Obama has the auto oligarchy’s interests at heart – that’s not the way to put America back together. I can’t imagine he’ll give $25 billion to the auto industry without making sure that they clean up their act.
The reason people are opposed to bailing out the auto industry is because they resent identifying with a product that is steeped in identity politics. Cultural politics has invaded the auto industry: White people have their car, blacks have their car, poor people have theirs and soccer moms have SUVs. Cars are sold not because they’re fuel-efficient but because they’re bought by people who support or oppose the Iraq war. The net effect is that the auto industry makes America look like a bully to the rest of the world.
—UCLA Today, November 20, 2008
John’s dissertation, called “Allegories of Mobility” (without the elaboration of a subtitle), is a meandering and exceptionally referential work of high-’90s cultural criticism, and the subject of shameless plagiarism by Fredric Jameson, according to John. In a sharp departure from the dissertation genre—John calls it an “essay”—its twenty-two chapters range from one to twenty pages in length, not separated by page breaks, with frequent first-person observations. Also, a section called “Index” appears in the middle. Although he states at the outset that the main project is to show “how the ‘Idea’ of history is represented through the theme of social mobility in the 19th-century novel,” the chapters touch on such varied topics as “Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism,” “The Romance of Science Fiction,” and “The Decline of England.” He cites films such as Alien (1979), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), and Night and Fog (1956), Alain Resnais’s documentary about the liberation of the concentration camps.
John told me that he worked with Hayden White, the philosopher of history known for his provocative theory that the literary quality of narrative, rather than factualness, is the prevailing feature of history writing. But White, who left UCLA for UC Santa Cruz in 1978, was not a member of John’s dissertation committee. This is perhaps explained by a passage on page three in which John states, “I have thus ‘stood’—as the cliché has it—Hayden White ‘on his head’ by the ‘discovery’ that tropes do indeed have a primary, social and shared meaning and do not operate, like deus ex machina, out of the ‘poet’s mind.’”
John was interested in what selected works of literature with themes of class mobility could teach us about writers’ conceptions of history. But first he had to defend the use of literature as a historical source, arguing that historical data are “encrypted” in literary tropes. In a footnote, he elaborated: “White maintains that historical narrative aspires to imitate the models provided for it by literature. I believe that precisely the reverse procedure obtains, that is to say that the fictional and fictive aspire to a supra- or non-literary status.” In what could be read as an elaborate restatement of Oscar Wilde’s 1889 pronouncement that life imitates art, John made a case that fiction approaches truth.
In the background of John’s dissertation, and his intellectual preoccupations, was a famous exchange between Hayden White and Saul Friedländer that took place at UCLA in 1990. In the 1980s, in West Germany, a public debate known as the Historikerstreit (historians’ dispute) flared over the question of how to understand the Holocaust. One discussion centered on whether, and to what, the Holocaust could be compared. Right-wing German historians questioned how bad Germany’s actions had really been, arguing for a comparison with political murders in the Soviet Union under Stalin. Meanwhile, in the United States, White and other postmodernists argued for a similar, if less politically motivated, relativization of history, which approached the denial of being able to say whether any given event had actually occurred.
After seeing White debate Ginzburg on the nature of historical truth in 1989, and growing concerned about the possible convergence of White’s theories and right-wing Holocaust denial, Friedländer organized a conference on the facticity of the Holocaust. Wouldn’t it be unethical to question whether the Holocaust, or Auschwitz—which many considered to be the 20th century’s defining event—had happened? Held at the UCLA History Department in spring of 1990, the conference, called “Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’: Probing the Limits of Representation,” featured Jacques Derrida, Perry Anderson, Christopher Browning, and other leading scholars. Faced with the challenge of applying his relativism to the Holocaust, White ultimately balked, qualifying in his talk, “Historical Emplotment and the Problem of Truth,” that there were some ethical limits to representing the Holocaust. The conference, and the volume it produced in 1992, shook the university more than the 1994 Northridge earthquake. “For most historians, the conference confirmed their ability to establish complex events as historical facts, including events best characterized as exceptional on the basis of comparative empirical analysis,” two scholars wrote in a reflection. “In essence, history could go on functioning as a discipline.”
John and I were the first to arrive at a conference on the fallout from the Occupy movement. Launched in response to tuition hikes, Occupy Cal had raged across the University of California system during my first year of graduate school. John was holding a book by Giambattista Vico, the Enlightenment-era humanist and critic of rationalism who spent his career at the University of Naples, albeit little known in his time. Vico’s proposition verum ipsum factum, “the true is the made”—that all knowledge is mediated by man and so unlike a universal or natural truth—was critical for White’s theory that historians’ writings should be treated as literature.
When he saw me, John’s greeting devolved into a ramble about Kant and the neo-Kantians. Then he said, “What are you reading?” I asked if he’d heard of Ben Hecht. He said yeah, his father used to take Hecht to a bookstore in Beverly Hills. They used to see Billy Wilder wandering a few blocks ahead.
In the spring of 2012, twenty years after the proceedings of the UCLA conference were published, the university held a follow-up event called “History Unlimited.” In response to White’s challenge in 1990, Friedländer had spent the subsequent years synthesizing the perspectives of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders into a multi-volume history of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany and the Jews, which won the Pulitzer Prize.
White opened the conference with a talk on Nazi Germany and the Jews. Titled “Truth and Disbelief,” it was later reprinted as “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief.” The talk showed that White hadn’t moved much since the 1980s. He analyzed the literary tropes used by Friedländer—fixating, for example, on his use of an epigraph—and compared him to H. G. Adler, the Prague-born novelist whose trilogy about the Holocaust was published in German between 1962 and 1989. “Friedländer and I disagree over whether Adler’s book is to be considered a ‘fiction,’” White noted. “I consider it to be a deconstruction of the fact-fiction dichotomy.” To make his position perfectly clear, that same year White published an equivocating essay called “Truth and Circumstance: What (If Anything) Can Properly Be Said about the Holocaust?”
I ran into John in the foyer of the Young Research Library, where he was standing with an open book. He said he hadn’t slept the night before—he was up all night watching the Oscars. “I get uncomfortable when they start talking about the 1920s, the 1930s. I don’t like nostalgia.” John lamented that the movie studios satirized Europe’s problems and turned Nazis into gangsters. He said he hadn’t seen Midnight inParis but noted that Woody Allen was subsidized by the Spanish government.
One November day in 2013, I saw John holding a book by the Italian philosopher of history Arnaldo Momigliano. “Great but reactionary,” John announced. “You know Carlo Ginzburg studied with him?”
Then John started in on Steve Jobs, calling him “a real radical, more than me, I’m not that radical.” Jobs rejected Western medicine, John said, and what did he do? He invented these stupid toys for young people. Jobs would rather give up his life than see a doctor. “Now people want to know if he turned,” he said bitterly, and looked at me with intensity. “These little fuckers want to know.”
My conception of death is more social than either Heidegger’s or Ricœur’s in that it implicates the historian in a radical “burial” of public time. I suggest that not only is mortality an inevitable aspect of private experience but, as Spengler suggests, whole cultures remain “buried” even in the “heart” of capitalism.
—“Allegories of Mobility,” page 7
After not seeing John for a few months, he reappeared on campus in one of his usual spots. I went over to catch up with him. He was chipper and was wearing new glasses. He said he found the glasses at Goodwill; they were broken, and had only one arm, but the prescription was perfect, he said. “At first they really hurt,” he admitted when I pressed him, “and it’s not great in one eye.”
He started to talk about Paul Ricœur. Then he said, “What was the name of that movie with Jim Carey? Truth and Consequence?”
“The Truman Show?”
“Yeah,” he said, “and that last scene when he’s there with the door in the wall and the moon is just a projection.”
John walked into the graduate student lounge, where I was sitting and writing an email beneath a mural by Terry Schoonhoven, a member of a muralist collective from the 1970s known as the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad. Like many Fine Arts Squad pieces, it depicts a postapocalyptic scene, this one looking out from the vantage point of the lounge (on the sixth floor of Bunche Hall), toward the Santa Monica Mountains; in the center, the research library lies in ruins. In the foreground, lying open on an imaginary balcony, is a book titled Ancient American Music, listing Bob Dylan and John Cage on the cover. Protected from the Southern California sun and Venice Beach overdevelopment, it is one of the few murals by the collective to have survived.
John asked me when the World War I talk would start. I told him it was tomorrow. He thought it was today. The day before, I had come to campus specifically to attend the talk, thinking it was that day.
“Have you talked to your advisor recently—Jacoby?” I told him that Jacoby wasn’t my advisor, and that I hadn’t seen him around in a while.
John picked up a book about religion that was sitting on a table and produced one of his long, wheezy laughs. “I hate religion,” he said, cackling to himself. “I hate everything about it.”
Turning to the shelf of free books overflowing with professors’ cast-offs, he picked out a copy of the Aeneid. It’s a good translation, he said, the Mandelbaum, very poetic. “This is a really nice copy,” he added, examining the noticeably beaten-up cover. “I used to have to translate this from Latin! In high school! I was the only one in Latin VIII.”
Then he sat down on the couch and sighed. “I’m exhausted. I’ve been on so many drugs.”
The table of contents of “Allegories of Mobility”:
1. Introduction
2. The Idea of History in the 19th Century
3. A Note on Genres
4. The Opposition Between Genres
5. Social Mobility
6. Criticism, Right and Left
7. A Sociology of Archetypes
8. Intellectual History or Historical Intellection
9. Modes of Production or Production of Modes
10. A Tropological Theory of Mobility
11. Index
12. The Problem of Tragic Consciousness Under Capitalist Forms of Legitimacy
13. Legitimacies of Action and of Fiction
14. Aristocracy
15. Some Empirical Examples
16. Class Moralities in Relation to Ascetic and Hedonistic Patterns
17. Double Talk or the “Collusion of Opposites”
18. The Case of Russia: Satire and the Problems
19. Some Thoughts on Psychoanalysis and Literary Criticism
20. The Romance of Science Fiction
21. The Decline of England
22. Romantic Asceticism in America
23. The “Forgotten” as the Trope of History
24. The Nineteenth Century
I ran across John while he stood by the elevators near the History Department offices, eating Doritos out of a small bag with his few teeth, the distinct note of stale tobacco emanating beneath the smell of chips. “Do you read the paper?” he asked me. Then squinting, seriously. “I mean, do you really read the paper?”
I suggested that I did. I asked if he’d been reading the Financial Times. This opened the floodgates for a speech about how no one here, at UCLA, in any department, is really Keynesian, how China holds the reins to the world’s economy, how Germany has no fiscal policy and doesn’t do anything for other EU nation states. “We’re on the brink,” he declared. “Alarms are going to sound.”
I saw John in the sculpture garden during one finals week, holding a hardcover copy of The Wall, the final installment in H. G. Adler’s trilogy. He was smoking, flouting new campus rules. When I approached, he smiled and said, “Hey, man, you’re dressed almost the same as me.” We were wearing black jeans, black shoes, and black t-shirts—the same outfit, except his shirt had the name of a tech startup on it in green letters. We chatted, and I apologized for not taking off my prescription sunglasses; I had forgotten my regular glasses at home.
Blissful is the nonbeliever who hides the future’s misfortune beneath the protective covering of the present moment, for now everything is obscured by darkness. No one seeks protection when hope and silence alone mark the passing of time and make it believable.
—H. G. Adler, The Journey (used as an epigraph by Hayden White in his 2016 essay “Historical Truth, Estrangement, and Disbelief”)
In his chapter, “The ‘Forgotten’ as the Trope of History,” John made a case for recovering history’s lost voices. “As in the slave labor that went into the building of antiquity’s ‘great monuments’—like the Pyramids—this labor remains unremembered. History is a non-record of the forgotten, it is a voice that is speechless or is at best, ‘unheard of,’ in the sense of the unspeakable crimes it suggests are the foundation for that experience which is remembered.” He was concerned that forgotten stories, those that don’t get recorded, receive no due in the worldview supported by White, which sees history as an assemblage of creatively selected evidence. How can White’s literary view account for everything else that has happened? “We come up with a standard ‘formula’: most people are, remain, and will be forgotten,” John wrote. “This essay is a history of these men and women and their secret aspirations and desires—as the vagaries of social structures reveal—to ascend and their desperate conviction that they will inevitably someday fall into oblivion.” Those who never make it to the historical record are almost unreal. John argued, about literature, “As Foucault demonstrated in relation to the ‘mad,’ it is a record of those who left no records. Thus, each of us, if we are not known or famous, are to some extent ‘fictional.’”
Reading these lines, I wondered if John was thinking about himself. He fell through the cracks, in a way. The fact that he continued to read Vico, Adler, and other important texts in the history of the debate over the limits of representation, decades after the dialogue had crested, showed that he was still working through it and deeply committed to understanding the meaning of the study of history. John embodied the task, and the urgency, in UCLA’s history department—and the field, and the world—to distinguish between fact and fiction. But he must have wondered where he fit into the grand narrative. Would he remain invisible despite his decades of intellectual labor?
The last section of John’s dissertation analyzes a memoir, Richard Henry Dana’s classic Two Years Before the Mast, from 1840. “This parable, or allegory, is about downward mobility,” John writes. “In the context of a Romance a ‘Harvard undergraduate’ sets sail with a crew of hardened sailors for the California coast. The hardships he endures teach him a lesson from the Book of Life.” The student needs to look around him, especially to people, to understand nature. “What is ‘natural,’” John continues, “as in Rousseau, is natural by virtue of its proximity to the bottom of human society itself.” John concludes, with the aplomb I appreciated so much in him, “Thus, we find the history of culture written from the point of view of nature. The sailors and their songs, habits, etc., are closest to primitivism and the unrecorded song of nature herself.” Maybe John dabbled in the patently impossible: fiction as fact, history as trope, nature offering an opinion. But it had a higher purpose. He saw his academic work as “sweeping away the dust of history and the cobwebs which have overlaid the past with our own fabricated meanings and artificial constructions” and “tear[ing] away the mask of the archetype to reveal our bankruptcy.” I decided that, ultimately, John’s work was a passionate affirmation of reality, not a rejection of it.
In a Shakespearean play about UCLA’s little historical family, John would be a central and memorable character. He was our truth-telling hermit, able to turn a mirror on historians’ follies. He was indigenous to the university, to the buildings, courtyards, and benches where history was made. Some said he also spent his time in the library working on an epic poem. There is more than a little John in every graduate student and professor, and perhaps anyone who has worked in that instantly forgotten genre, the dissertation. How many others were one bad trip away from falling into the narrow gap between fact and fiction?
Friedländer, Sebald, Adler. Ginzburg, White. Jacoby, John. Me. I feel a twinge of guilt in bringing John to life on the page. Looking back now, it all seems too neat.
Then, at some point, John disappeared. Maybe I disappeared, too. Later in graduate school, I spent more time out of town doing research, or working from public libraries or my apartment in Hollywood rather than making the traffic-burdened bus journey to UCLA’s hilltop campus. I grew a beard and began to draw wary glances from cherubic undergrads when I did visit, mostly to return library books. On one such trip, around 2018, I asked one of the several other John-like figures who took advantage of the university library’s open-door policy if he knew what happened to John.
This fellow, named Bill, had John’s stringy hair and bad shave but was lankier, with puffy cheeks partially covered with Band-Aids. Speaking in a broad Midwestern accent, he told me John didn’t go to the library anymore, not even the one near where John lived in Sawtelle. He said John had stopped coming to UCLA because they wouldn’t let him smoke on campus. Some groundskeepers took a picture of John smoking and sent it to the LAPD, who serve as campus security.
Bill asked me if I studied history. “You know, John has a PhD in history,” he said. We exchanged fond memories of him with the detached but loving tone reserved for the departed at a funeral. Bill mentioned that one of John’s father’s movies would be playing at the Hammer Museum soon.
Then Bill opened up about himself a little bit. He said he comes to the library because he loves to read. He was holding a reusable grocery bag full of books. “You can find me on the third floor,” he said. He asked what I specialize in and, when I told him, he listed several titles I’d never heard of. Then Bill disappeared into stacks.
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