News: Tributes and Memorials
Jerrold E. Levy, 1930-2002
- Stephen J. Kunitz, March 2, 2002
It is difficult for me to eulogize Jerry both because my experience as a eulogist has so far been limited, and because although he was a close friend and collaborator for 35 years, and I feel bereft now that he is gone, saying all that I believe should be said about such a complex person is beyond my abilities. I was never blind to elements in Jerry's personality that were less than endearing, and I do not think it appropriate - nor would he have wanted me -- to gloss over some of the characteristics that made him sometimes difficult and prickly. Anyone who knew Jerry for any time at all will have almost certainly experienced his sarcasm, his condescension, and his arrogance.
He did not suffer fools gladly, and he had a keen eye and ear for charlatanism, cant, incompetence and dishonesty. But all sensitive diagnostic instruments are prone to discovering false positives, and he was sometime ungenerous in his assessment of who was and who was not a fool, and he was not always as reticent as he might have been in expressing himself on the subject. Moreover, he had trouble apologizing when he knew he had been unkind or ungenerous. Typically he would go out of his way to be kind or helpful to people he had hurt the next time he encountered them. And he was able to tell third parties how highly he thought of someone, but he found it very difficult to actually say to that person, "I'm sorry" or "I was wrong" or "I think well of you and your work." His affection and good opinion would ultimately become clear through his behavior, but for someone so introspective, insightful, and articulate it was surprisingly hard for him to actually express himself on such topics. Indeed, in our very last conversation the day he died he said as much.
Some people never were able to get beyond Jerry's sometimes formidable and forbidding persona. For those of us who were, however, the rewards were great. Jerry was a wonderful companion and very funny. But he was far more than that. He was endlessly curious, widely read, brilliant, and closer to being a real intellectual and scholar than virtually anyone I have known, certainly than almost any academic I have known. His books on frenzy witchcraft, on Oraibi, and on the historical sociology of the Navajo creation myth all testify to the breadth of learning, the integrative intelligence, and the deep immersion in actual data that he brought to his research.
All three of those books, as well as the work in which he and I collaborated, were infused with his awareness of intellectual history, the history of debates within anthropology, and the history of the people with whom he was concerned. He regarded his work as part of a conversation with his predecessors, and hopefully with his successors as well. And much of his disappointment with contemporary anthropology stemmed from his feeling that younger scholars were for the most part ahistorical in all those ways in which he was not. They seemed to him to lack both intellectual and methodological rigor and to be uninterested in the problems that fascinated him and were, he thought, central to the discipline he loved.
Jerry's intellectual gifts were both an inspiration and a source of disappointment to me. They were an inspiration because his example encouraged me in the belief that it was possible to be both a scientist and an intellectual.
They were a disappointment because when I first met Jerry, I was still practicing medicine but had been thinking for some time of going on to do a Ph.D. in sociology. At just about that time I also met David Aberle, and I thought if these are the kind of people with whom I could spend my life as an academic, then becoming a social scientist was clearly the right choice. Of course I was destined for disappointment, for when you start from such an elevated baseline, there is only one direction possible, and it isn't up.
I have said that Jerry could be arrogant. That made him hard to take at times, but his arrogance was bound up with characteristics that I found admirable and that are all too rare. For he was ruthlessly honest, incapable of sycophancy, and therefore not much of a politician, which may be one reason he never was accorded the professional recognition his intellectual gifts and accomplishments deserved.
And finally, he was a good friend in countless ways, usually expressed through support and generous deeds rather than words. For he found it as difficult to express affection as he did to apologize. I visited with Jerry several times just before he died, and in one of our last conversations I told him how much I had learned working with him, and how much I had enjoyed and appreciated the opportunity I had been given. To such an unseemly, but I hope gratifying, admission he merely said, "Yes, writing books no one ever reads."
In our last conversation we also talked about a few of the topics that continued to absorb him: the Arab-Israeli conflict, about which he felt increasing despair; about our last study, which he said had surprised him by showing how much life on the Navajo Reservation had changed in the forty years since he had first worked there; and about a question that had perplexed him greatly and about which he had been reading until he could no longer concentrate: why didn't the French speak German? After all, with all those German-speaking barbarians over-running the Roman Empire, surely everyone should have become a German speaker. I had a plane to catch so I couldn't linger to tell him the answer. I intended to do so on my next visit. But he died shortly after I had gone, and there won't ever be another opportunity to talk with him about French-speaking Germans or anything else.
I miss him enormously, and I always will. For it is a rare privilege to have worked for virtually all of a professional lifetime with someone who never missed a deadline, and who was so smart, so dedicated to his craft, so decent, and so worthy of love and admiration.
