Bunch of Amateurs (37 page)

laude-Anne Kirshen, who would grow up to become one of America’s more innovative scholars, was a beautiful, smart seventeen-year-old in Brussels in 1940. She’d taken the vocational test that would set her on a path to becoming a high school teacher. She had a yellow Citroen car, a handsome boyfriend named René, and a new job just a few doors down from the house of Jacques Brel, the internationally famous songwriter.

“So that was my outlook at the moment,” she told me one night over dinner. “Final exams were to be in June as always, and I was sure that I had already won the teaching competition and I was sure I would get this job.” Then, a slight hitch.

“Hitler invaded in May,” she noted. Suddenly young Kirshen felt
that every solid thing she knew to be true had become unmoored. “The Nazis took the country in ten minutes.”

From her balcony, she watched the bombs drop. And then a few metaphorical ones fell. She had taken a long walk with her brother and told him of a Spanish novel she had read. “I said that the Jews, they seemed awful, and he took a breath and said, ‘You know that our grandfather was Jewish.…’ ” Then she learned that both her mother’s parents were Jewish and that the reason her father could not practice law in Romania in those days was
because
he was Jewish. Overnight, she was a Jew. “It hit me like a bomb, I had to start rethinking everything,” she said. “Who was Jewish? Who was not? One girl, Irene Rosenfeld—she is still alive and living in this country—she said to me, ‘We should be friends, we should stick together,’ and I said, ‘Why?’—
She
knew.” Claude-Anne’s parents had decided long ago to suppress their religious background and now, as she was about to turn eighteen, she discovered she was precisely the enemy Adolf Hitler intended to pursue and destroy.

“I was a total innocent and an idiot,” she said. Her boyfriend, she discovered, was “very anti-Semitic.” When she told him that she was Jewish, she was stunned to learn that he knew too. And, “it was the usual story: ‘I hate the Jews, but not in your case.’ ”

Her brother sent news that he had moved the family’s funds to America and suggested that they flee to France. Claude-Anne’s mother was not merely a Jewish woman somewhat in denial, but insisted upon keeping up with her bridge games in Brussels in the hopes that the life of leisure she once led would return. But pretty quickly the unavoidable became obvious. They loaded up their clothes, an Irish nanny, and their dog, and headed for France. The decision was to go to Bordeaux. A family friend got them as far as the French border, after which a series of cabs got them from one town to the next. Claude-Anne’s new life as a Jew really began the day she and her mother pulled into a small hotel in France.

“So we were in France and we went to a hotel,” she said. “The
woman saw our luggage, our nanny, my mother and me, and the dog. She asked if we wanted accommodations out back or a choice of rooms and just as we were about to go up, a whole family entered the hotel and the woman’s face changed. The hotel keeper immediately said, ‘We are booked up.’ They pleaded and said they had children and they could stay anywhere, they would stay in the lobby. She said, ‘We are all full.’ They asked if she could call another hotel that might have space. ‘No,’ she said, ‘all the hotels I know are booked up.’ After they left, she turned to us and she said, ‘It’s a good thing that God gave them a nose to be recognized by.’ And that was my first brush with French anti-Semitism and it was really a blow.”

They were in France for a year, often on the move. In the town of Argenton-sur-Creuse, she took the dog out for a walk one day. She had met an American there, who accompanied her down by the river. “His name was Roode, a Dutch name. And he begins by telling me the schools he went to. I understood that’s how Americans introduced themselves—what schools did you go to? His school was something that sounded like a brothel to me: Groton.

“So we walked and we got along with his dismal French and my English and, at a certain point, there was a river and a little peasant’s house and a man opens the door and says that there is going to be an attack, a bombing. ‘Come into the house and take shelter,’ and the American said, ‘Those French are hysterical.’ And I thought, ‘How can
hysterical
apply to a man?’ We took three more steps and the bomb exploded in front of me. The first one had fallen in the water. I had heard a big noise, a big splash. I was about to explain to Roode that you don’t use the word
hysterical
for a man and then a second bomb exploded. I felt the leash go, a burning in my hand, and the dog ran away. I saw blood on the dog and I slowly sank to the ground. I was bleeding and the American was beside me. It was shrapnel. It had entered my leg under the knee and went out the side. Went right through me. It didn’t fracture any bone. And to this day, I have these two scars on my legs and the exit scar is the worst, like a hole. I used to charge ten cents to see the scars on my knee.”

The people in the house took her in, but she was bleeding profusely. “Then the door opens and there enters a soldier of the Foreign Legion—tall, blond, and strong. I remember there was a song by Edith Piaf and it went,
‘Il était jeune, il était beau, Mon legionnaire!’
” She remembered how odd it was that so many of the soldiers in the French Foreign Legion were young Germans. He scooped her up in his arms. When he stopped a motorist to get her to the hospital, the French driver declined, saying he didn’t want any blood in his car. “Then freeing one of his hands, he pulls out his revolver and said in perfect French,
‘Je te fais sauter la cervelle’
—I will blow your brains out. They put us in the car—that did it.”

She wound up lost in a hospital hallway until her mother—accompanied by the dog, who had walked home—got her out of there. They fled to America, where she got a job in New York as a translator, working for the war effort. She eventually met an academic, an Italian professor of the Middle Ages, whose Spanish surname derived from a long-ago suppression of the Jews: Roberto Sabatini Lopez. Soon enough, he got an appointment at Yale University. By the end of the war, they moved to New Haven, where the local professors’ wives explained to her the rest of her life—maintain a nice home and advance her husband’s career. It was that much-earlier time. Feminism was a generation away.

“I was desperately frustrated. There was nothing to do but be a housewife. And Roberto was paid $3,700 year. It was 1946.

“Apartments were hard to find because veterans were coming back and they got priority. The guy took us around and said, ‘If you don’t take this one, you are on your own.’ We opened the door, and wallpaper detached and flew onto my face—909 Howard Avenue—and I said, ‘How come this wallpaper is free?’ He said that the owner was in jail because he killed his wife. The man said, ‘Don’t take it if you don’t want, but it is the only apartment.’ ” Soon, she’d bought some paint and struggled to fix up the place.

“I got a visit from the Yale welcoming committee one day. We
didn’t have a telephone and so, all of a sudden, two or three well-dressed women walked up, and the place smelled of cabbage and these elegant ladies said, ‘How are you?’ and we hadn’t even unpacked. I was miserable. I had never painted a wall. I was barefooted when they arrived and the paint had dripped all on me. I was a sight.”

So, Claude-Anne Lopez, once on track to be a schoolteacher in Brussels, was now an all-American housewife. Her future in 1946 was a kind of prison—one of petits fours, cocktails, and a lot of small talk, in a dump on Howard Avenue, a depressing little street near the New Haven train yards.

Fraudulence always seems to lie at the heart of amateur pursuits. Maybe you don’t have the right credentials, or background, or something else—other people’s presumptions—keeps you from doing what you want, so you just pretend. It’s a kind of prison break. The culture around you won’t let you
out
of where you are or
into
where you want to go. So, you pretend to be someone else, and make your move.

I first realized how liberating it was to pretend to be something you’re not when I infiltrated a secret weekend convocation of geniuses. Every so often the MacArthur Foundation flies all the previous fellowship winners to an undisclosed location for an unpublicized meeting of talks and socializing. A friend who was a winner from a while back told me about it, and so I figured the best way to go (on a magazine assignment) was to pretend to be one of them.

As I moved among this crowd at receptions and late-night parties
at the Hotel Nikko in Chicago, I was surprised and gratified at how easy it was to pass myself off as a genius. I never did get caught, unless you count getting spotted in the bar one night by an acquaintance, Stanley Crouch (genius, ’93):

During this long and boozy weekend, I discovered that the group broke into two natural constituencies: those who were highly credentialed and believed they clearly deserved this honor and those self-invented types who felt like they’d had an incredible stroke of luck. For three days, I watched the collision of the institutionally credentialed and the improvisational outsider. It turns out they don’t get along that well, and their differences are conspicuous. The pros had a drink and went to bed; the amateurs stayed up all night and got drunk. Amateurs prefer wonder to certainty, invention to knowledge, freedom to security, beer to wine. The credentialed pros at the MacArthur conclave solemnly accepted their new celebrity as Fellows. The amateurs wore the title “genius” like a funny hat at a New Year’s Eve party.

The thrill I felt being undercover in the Nikko, I discovered, is a common sensation among amateurs. They feel like frauds, like fakes, like someone might discover that they are not who they pretend to be.
Now
they were being honored, but once, a while back, they simply assumed a role for which they were never credentialed.

The paleontologist Jack Horner is one of those. A college dropout, he taught himself an entire discipline, in this case paleontology, and just became one of the country’s greatest dinosaur theorists. He looks like an American rebel. He’s a long drink of water in jeans and a work shirt—a handsome hippie with a Ben Franklin mane. When he talks, he walks—bobbing back and forth in front of the room like a slacker looking for his bong. It’s an ironic tic, since his work is anything but laid back. At the genius convention, he gave a talk one morning
about his most radical idea. Horner is the guy who overthrew the single most accepted dinosaur fact in history: that Tyrannosaurus rex was a vicious predator.

Watching Horner in action, you realize you are seeing something deeply American. He’s part evangelical, part stand-up comic. Horner’s talk was packed with his groundbreaking ideas but carried the dopey title “Would Tyrannosaurus Rex Really Eat a Lawyer?” The room was crowded with other geniuses and their kids. Horner started off by asking if anyone could remember where they saw T. rex eat a lawyer. Of course, all the kids knew.

“
Jurassic Park
!” they screamed.

“How many people think T. rex would eat a lawyer?” he asked. The room became a forest of upraised hands. “I wish you were right,” he said, to uncomfortable laughter. Horner began loping back and forth. He casually shook loose some old assumptions. He brought up Henry Fairfield Osborn, the most famous paleontologist of the early twentieth century. Osborn made it onto the cover of
Time
magazine. The Museum of Natural History in New York is dedicated to him. He was a man of great repute whose hint at archness was summed up in his rakish fedora, a symbol so potent it survived into our time … on Indiana Jones’s head. Osborn is the quintessential American expert.

“Now, here was a man who liked himself more than dinosaurs,” Horner said. He was “one of those guys who believed that if he said something, everyone should believe it.” Having softened up his audience’s faith in authority and conventional wisdom, Horner plowed into arguments that were like set pieces of T. rex schtick—ideas with punch lines.