THE PAST AS PRESENT: SELECTED THOUGHTS & ESSAYS THE PAST AS PRESENT: SELECTED THOUGHTS & ESSAYS PAUL T. RUXIN COMPILED AND EDITED BY GORDON M. PRADL & SAMUEL B. ELLENPORT WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY WILLIAM H. PRITCHARD TRUSTEES OF AMHERST COLLEGE 2017 The Editors thank fellow Amherst ’65 Classmates Don MacNaughton, Bruce Wintroub, Charles Bunting, Mark W. Perry, Lew Markoff, and Paul Ehrmann for their direct financial support and encouragement. Editorial decisions were aided especially by Don MacNaughton, along with Classmates Marc Green and Jeff Titon. Various Clubs and Organizations to which Paul belonged were helpful in providing copies of his talks and various essays. The Editors also appreciate the generous cooperation received from the Ruxin family, who supplied additional materials included in the book. table of contents Introduction (William H. Pritchard) 7 part i: Paul’s Reading Pleasures One Thing Leads to Another 17 Edith Warton and Her Friends 25 The Club 49 Dorando and the Douglas Cause 64 Lord Auchinleck’s Fingal 81 An Hospitable and Well-Covered Table 95 Soft-Hearted Sam 110 Review of Boswell’s An Account of Corsica 132 Review of Johnson’s The History of Rasselas 137 How Sam and Dave Helped Save Bill 140 part ii: Paul’s Passionate Pursuit of Books The Future of Book Collecting 165 Synonymy and Satire by Association 173 Not in Fleeman: A Meditation on Collecting 183 A Serendipitous Acquisition 194 Other People’s Books 201 Eleven More Fore-edge Paintings 211 Special Collections Libraries and the Uses of the Past 217 part iii: Paul’s Legal Writing and Thoughts The Right Not to Be Modern Men: The Amish and Compulsory Education 229 Other Thoughts on the Law 268 part iv: A Miscellany of Paul Speaking His Mind Sarah Ruhl: The 2008 Robert Frost Library Fellow 283 A Fan’s Notes 286 Two Letters to Sam Ellenport 289 Beginnings of the Johnsonian News Letter 294 The Artist Known as Will 298 Joseph Epstein’s Ruminations on Our Ultimate Demise 299 Reflections on Professor Theodore Baird 300 Reflections on Amherst College 302 25th & 50th Reunion Self-Statements 343 Further Views and Opinions 348 part v: Remembering Paul (1943–2016) Adam Cohn 369 Sarah Ruxin 372 Sam Ellenport 376 Linn Raney 380 Robert Baker 383 David Spadafora 388 Jerry Morris 392 Michael Witmore 395 Lew Markoff 397 Don MacNaughton 400 Robert DeMaria, Jr. 402 Paul T. Ruxin ’65: Amherst Medal for Eminent Service 407 Michael Pohl and Bruce Wintroub (Amherst Obituary) 409 Chicago Tribune Obituary 411 Carl U. Weitman (For The Rowfant Club of Cleveland) 414 Appendix I: Terminus (Edith Wharton) 417 Appendix II: Letters to Paul from Prof. Theodore Baird 419 Introduction One of Paul Ruxin’s talks to the Rowfant Club in Cleveland was a profile of Archibald MacLeish, the poet, professor, and public man of many sorts. In it Paul quotes a letter from 1916 that MacLeish wrote to his father after he had spent a year in law school (p. 76): My two remaining free summers I intend to devote to the great mass of reading I have yet to do and for the doing of which my mind is so thirsty. Law and literature are, of course, incompatible, but I want to acquire a sufficient background so that if I am ever able to turn to the thing I most love I shall be able to undertake creative work at once. The struggle among these options—teaching, law, and litera- ture—was in MacLeish’s later life resolved into a single triple-threat identity: now Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Harvard; now Librarian of Congress; and during World War II, Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Relations. I suspect that much of Paul’s interest in and admiration for MacLeish’s multifarious activities, was his own pull toward both law and literature, the desire to show that, in the story of his own life, they were not incompatible. His passion for books, as demonstrated in the Rowfant talks and elsewhere, was both for reading them, writing about them, and collecting them. In a rash moment he once thanked me for teaching him how to read, and I accepted this over-generous salute even though it drastically simplified the complicated and ongoing story of Paul as a reader. introduction One of Paul’s law-related articles concerns the Amish and com- pulsory education. This volume’s editors point out the “very literate ability” of that essay which grew out of his concern for Energy Policy. They praise Paul for his being able “to see the value of multiple per- spectives, even as he is clear about his own vision that he brings to the situation.” I am reminded of one of William James’s early essays, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in which he acknowledges the human need and desire for “simplification,” then puts that desire up against its “sister passion . for clearness,” the desire to be “acquainted with the parts rather than comprehend the whole.” But James was clearly on the side of clearness as against simplicity. He is willing to live with “any amount of incoherence, abruptness, and fragmentariness” as long as the separate facts can be “saved,” rather than dissolved into a unitary simplification, however compelling. In one of the short e-mails to classmates dealing with Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s “originalism” in interpreting the constitution, Paul allied himself with the justice insofar as he felt that his own passion was for the close reading he learned to practice at Amherst, rather than for some recent theory about what the text “should” mean. In another, related e-mail, he notes that at Amherst he was, or was told he was, a conservative; while at law school he was deemed a lib- eral with respect to the same positions. He rejects such labeling as, in William James’s terms, the urge to simplify rather than to be clear about things. “Labels are unworthy of the education we were privi- leged to receive,” Paul wrote, and he found it crucial to acknowledge opposition views on a question, each of which has much to be said for it. He notes with regret that certain “demands” made in fall 2015 were unworthy in their fervor to embrace simplification rather than giving the patient consideration of particulars that clarity demands. One of the best of the literary essays in this volume is “Edith Whar- ton and her Friends,” delivered as a talk in 2003 to the Caxton Club in Chicago. In the essay Paul gives a sympathetic, pointed account of Edith Newbold Jones’s early life, a brief treatment of her unfortunate marriage to “Teddy” Wharton, then a glimpse into her friendship with introduction the two great Henrys, Henry James and Henry Adams. In regard to James, with whom Wharton for a time was extremely close, Paul notes that Wharton and James shared an “ironic distance” from which they watched the world. In William James’s terms, such a distance would result from attempting to see the world in its disparate particularity rather than from a single all-embracing attitude. In the cases of both Wharton and James, their ironic detachment and desire to be clear rather than simple about experience issued in “intellectual superior- ity,” a quality sometimes confused with being a snob. The remarkable thing about Paul’s essays about Wharton, and about Boswell, Johnson, and their circle, is that however much we admire their intellectual sub- stance, any accent of “superiority” on the part of the writer is absent— he is never a snob. Paul’s sense of humor was a guard against snobbery. It is of course no accident that so many of the pieces here were delivered as talks to literary clubs in Cleveland and Chicago: Rowfant, in Cleveland; the Caxton and Chicago literary clubs in Chicago. In perhaps the most entertaining of these, titled “A Hospitable and Well- Covered Table,” Paul tells the marvelous story of Boswell’s successful attempt to persuade Johnson to attend a dinner at which would be his rival and social enemy, John Wilkes. In the introductory paragraph Ruxin sets out the assumptions behind such a gathering that has as- sembled to listen to the talk: When we gather here . we bring with us certain expecta- tions—that the atmosphere will be hospitable, the table well-covered—at least with pie—that our conversations will be at least literate if not “literary.” When the evening ends, we all return home sated in our physical, our intellectual and our social appetites. These words give one a sense of the social aspect of Paul’s pleasure in literary conversation as engaged in with like-minded readers and book collectors. But it would be a mistake to overstate the clubman aspect of Paul’s literary pursuits. In the most recent issue of the Johnsonian News 9 introduction Letter, a contributor, Gordon Turnbull, describes Paul’s support for the Yale Boswell Editions, financially as well as administratively. Speaking of one of the essays collected here, “Lord Auchinleck’s Fingal ”—about Boswell’s father and the famous or infamous poem supposedly by one Ossian, discovered by James McPherson but proved to be fraudu- lent—Turnbull writes “The essay—like all his writings on Boswell, Johnson, and other members of the Johnson circle . moved with a deft blend of the lawyer’s sense of clarity and evidence-marshaling, and the energy and affection of the true amateur’s devotion.” There are no better words than energy and affection to characterize the nature of Paul’s endeavors. Graduates of Amherst will of course be especially interested in a number of recent e-mails to his classmates about the state of things at the college.