IN MEMORIAM

Richard M. Bridgman

Professor of English, Emeritus

UC Berkeley

1927 – 2005

The official version of Richard Bridgman's life and career sounds like (and was) a classic story of academic distinction and the professional rewards it garners. Born in Toledo, Ohio, on August 24, 1927, he died in Berkeley on January 17, 2005. He received his B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley (1956, 1957, 1960), and after two years at Dartmouth College came back to his alma mater, where he served from 1962 to 1989. He specialized in nineteenth and twentieth century American literature, teaching a wide range of courses at every level in that field, and trained several generations of graduate students. He chaired the graduate program of the Department of English and published a series of important critical works, each a departure from the last: The Colloquial Style in American Literature (1960); a study of Whitman's original version of Leaves of Grass (1968); Gertrude Stein in Pieces (1970); Dark Thoreau (1982); Traveling in Mark Twain (1987). He was a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Fulbright visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen (1965) and Moscow State University (1973). He played a significant role in faculty governance, most importantly on the Berkeley Division’s Committee on Budget and Interdepartmental Relations, and the University Committee on Library. On his retirement he was awarded the institution's highest honor, the Berkeley Citation. He is survived by his children, Cynthia Josayma, Joel Bridgman, and Roy Bridgman, and two grandchildren, Yiga and Kardo Josayma.

             

But there is also an unofficial, less predictable version of the story. It doesn't have the shape of a model career, and needs to be told more informally. Dick Bridgman's entirely unexpected decision to retire early—he was 61, and had taught for less than three decades—had nothing to do with the university's early retirement incentives, or with his health, which was good. He was trusted and admired; his groundbreaking work had broadened and deepened his chosen field. He cared deeply about Berkeley, where he had chosen to stay despite several appealing options; he had no plans to move. He loved the university's open, democratic spirit, its hierarchical minimalism, which mirrored something essential in his own nature: a refusal to use his position in a self-aggrandizing way. Dick could be formal, distant, severe, but never pompous or self-important. He considered himself a conduit, a sponsor, who might pass on but also help to transform a tradition that had shaped him. Why then would he want to stop so soon–to “retire,” a word for which the dictionary offers these synonyms: to give up, to go away, to go to bed, to recede or disappear, to pull back, to remove from circulation?

             

The truth is that in temperament he was simply not an institutional person and found most institutional expectations and procedures irritating. He had led an exceptionally rich and adventurous life before he settled in California, even before he finished college, and he hoped to recapture that less safe and settled state. But perhaps he had never really left it, only put it on indefinite hold.

             

When he was barely 17 (toward the end of World War II) he volunteered for the armed forces. He wanted to join the Marines, but his father thought he was more likely to survive in the Navy. He did survive, of course, mostly because he was landlocked in Stockton, mothballing ships. The decade that followed suggests a pattern of restless experimentation. He started a B.A. at Stanford University on the G.I. Bill but dropped out; he joined the merchant marine, which did send him to sea; he went to Paris, and stayed and stayed; he was a sports reporter for the Toledo Times; he moved to New York, worked at TWA, got married. In his late twenties he went back to school—not to Stanford, however, but to Berkeley, where he finished both his undergraduate and graduate work in the space of six years and began an academic career. But the restless decade of creative delay had been neither an interruption nor a waste.

             

The years he spent in Paris were more than a rite of passage. He fell in love with the language, with the literature, and with various alternatives to the straight and narrow, including a serious association with Gurdjieff’s Institute near Paris. He secured entry on easy terms to a circle of writers, actors, filmmakers. It included names that are now legendary, names Dick never dropped in his academic afterlife. His friends discovered them by chance—an intimate inscription in a book, a group photograph that included a very young Richard Bridgman among some better-known faces. In France he learned to read, without academic mentors, in an obsessive but leisurely way—Stendhal, Proust, Gide, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin—books by, about, around his favorite writers. These tastes and reading habits stayed with him, side by side with the disciplinary training that made him a first-rate scholar and specialist. His writing table looked like the exit ramp of a cornucopia of books, half a dozen of which he was reading simultaneously.

             

The anarchic freedom of the Paris years couldn't last forever but outlasted the glamour of the moment. His talent for traveling far but light was instinctive and could be recaptured. More than three decades ago he was teaching American literature courses in Moscow as one of the first Fulbright lecturers invited to Russia shortly after “the thaw,” fitting into two rooms with his three children, fluent enough in Russian, radiant with energy and delight. He was living out of a couple of suitcases, provisionally, but seemed to lack nothing. That same spirit allowed him, 20 years later, to respond to the firefighters’ order to abandon his Oakland hills house before the flames engulfed it by grabbing two objects—the manuscript he was working on, and the plans of the house—and driving off just before it caught.

             

The institutional part of his life was in constant and fruitful tension with this improvisational spirit. When he finally became a focused student at 30 he was and was not tabula rasa—not unformed, yet eager to learn from scratch. Nothing had been wasted on him; from the first he made what was on offer his own. Though he became an “Americanist,” his work was nourished by his promiscuous reading and experience, and by his need to get outside the parish. There can't be many graduate students brave or foolish enough to propose a dissertation on “The Colloquial Style in American Literature.” But the ambitious title was earned, and used when Oxford University Press published the revised thesis. He was interested both in the tangled process of composition and the finished products. His self-formed tastes and experimental style shaped all of his books—on American literature as fed from the bottom up; on Gertrude Stein far from her starting point, alone with English in Paris, producing seemingly hermetic works that might, however, be unsealed if you were patient enough to read through her papers at Yale University's Beinecke Library, puzzling over every scrap; on Thoreau the loner, composing strange sentences that resisted parsing; on Twain the travel writer, an observant innocent abroad, “lighting out” like Huck, and staying on the move; and on the original edition of Leaves of Grass, before Whitman's multiple layering had covered it over.

             

There is a sentence in Nabokov’s Lectures on Russian Literature that Dick Bridgman might have appreciated: “Readers are born free and ought to remain free.” In any case, he was; and did. The spirit of discovery and recovery never left him, even after the fire took every book he owned, and quite a lot else. It couldn't take what he valued most, though: his willingness to start over, to build and rebuild.

 

 

Alex Zwerdling