Noam Chomsky (3 page)

Carol and Noam Chomsky, 1949.

Given such stellar constellations – being in love and having found a vocation – Chomsky set to work. By 1949, aged only 21, he was married to Carol (aged 19) and he had completed his
BA
honours’ thesis. From then on his life ran in three major strands: personal, professional, and political activism. To the chagrin of commentators and biographers, Chomsky maintains that these strands are independent of each other. Here we take his word and continue along these lines. Separate chapters deal with his professional life as a linguist and as a political activist.

Since Chomsky married when both he and Carol were students, there was no great plan mapped out for a secure future. Indeed, it looked anything but secure. They put off having children for seven years for this reason, but also because they became immersed in their work. Carol was later to become a linguist in her own right, working as a phonetician, mainly in Romance and acoustic phonetics. She did a few years of graduate work in these areas at Harvard, then dropped out about 1953 and didn’t go back until 1967 – when there was a serious possibility that Chomsky might be facing a prison sentence, and they had three children to worry about.

At Cape Cod, Massachusetts,
c
. 1959. From left to right: William Chomsky, Elsie Chomsky, Noam Chomsky, Milton Krauss and Sophie Krauss (Elsie’s sister).

When, in 1951, Chomsky gained a prestigious three-year Fellowship at Harvard, Boston was to be their first major residential move and, as it turned out, their last. They took up a small apartment on Commonwealth Avenue in Allston, a district just south of the Charles River (in 1965 they moved to the Lexington area, where they still live). Carol was able to transfer from the University of Pennsylvania to Radcliffe College, which was then the women’s college of Harvard (at the time Harvard was a male-only domain).

One of the great benefits of a Harvard Fellowship was a travel grant designed for young Fellows to see the world. In 1953 the Chomskys set off on their first overseas trip. The main aim was to experience life on a kibbutz in Israel, but various parts of Europe were on the itinerary as well. To travel to Europe in 1953, from the
US
, must have been a strange experience. The Second World War had left the
US
prosperous while in Europe, especially in Germany, war damage was still everywhere. The Marshall Plan had already made an economic impact, but many European cities were still bombed out and a succession of severe winters had left its toll on the working-class populations. The Chomskys travelled from England to France, and then through to Switzerland to Italy (Chomsky would in future make Italy his number one destination, both academically and personally). From there they moved to Israel, a landmark destination as far as their Jewish and Zionist (anti-state) background was concerned. While critical of the direction the state of Israel was taking, they enjoyed their stay at a left-leaning kibbutz, doing mainly hard labour. Zellig and Bruria Harris had picked the kibbutz. They themselves lived there frequently: Bruria ended up living there and in the neighbouring kibbutz all year round, while Zellig stayed for about half the year. The kibbutz belonged to Hashomer Hatzair, the further left of the two main kibbutz movements, and the centre of the kibbutz movement that shared activities with the Arab population – a residue of the old bi-nationalism. There were some misgivings, however, as Chomsky notes, in that he became uneasy with ‘the exclusiveness and racist institutional setting’.
¹⁰
He was also worried by the blind Stalinism practised there. Still, the impact was such that they seriously thought of returning for good when they were back in Boston.

Carol Chomsky in Israel in 1955.

The Chomsky family, from right to left: Noam, Carol, Aviva, Diane and Harry.

Two years later they decided that Carol should again go to Israel to check out the feasibility of living there permanently. So in 1955 she went back (Chomsky had just started his teaching position at
MIT
) but, while she again loved her time in the kibbutz, there appeared to be logistical problems, since Noam would have to work at a university during the week and return to the kibbutz on the weekends. This was not their idea of family life. Carol returned to Boston, where three children were born: Aviva
(b
. 1957), Diane
(b
. 1960) and Harry
(b
. 1967). Aviva was eventually to became an academic, specializing in Central American history and politics; Diane works for a development agency with her Nicaraguan
compañero
in Managua; Harry is a software engineer in California.

The financial worries that might result from Chomsky’s political activism (jail or worse) were allayed to a certain degree by Carol, who went back to graduate school and gained a PhD in Linguistics, specializing in child language acquisition; in 1969 she published her first book on the subject.
¹¹
She later secured a teaching position at the Harvard School of Education, working there until 1996. But when Chomsky was arrested for the first time (in October 1967, meeting Norman Mailer in the cells), and as more serious problems developed a year later, in connection with his work as one of the founders of
RESIST
, opposed to the Vietnam war, there was alarm that things could get out of hand. Thanks to the incompetence of the
FBI
, Chomsky was set free, while the authorities pursued the Boston Five (Benjamin Spock, Coffin, Raskin, Ferber and Goodman). While the subsequent trial of Dr Spock and the others was a farce in the eyes of the liberals, there were genuine fears within the extended Chomsky family that reactionary forces might stop at nothing. Carol then took to the streets herself, marching at anti-war rallies with the children in tow. She took the two girls to a women–children silent march in peaceful, dovish Concord, Massachusetts, where they were pelted with tin cans and tomatoes.

Chomsky threw himself into his work with increased vigour: by 1982 he was credited with more than 150 publications. He was now sought after as a guest speaker and lecturer, nationally and internationally. He started to collect honorary degrees and international prizes, entering a period of extensive travel. Schedules became ever tighter. As his public image increased it became a fine art to keep the family private. (It was only once Carol had retired in 1996 – and the children had grown up – that she become a regular travel companion and, indeed, Chomsky’s travel manager.)

In the 1970s and ’80s, the focus was on Noam’s working life. Remembering that he had been made tenured professor at
MIT
at the age of 33, in 1961, and appointed to the prestigious position of Institute Professor by 1976, he was at the height of his professional career as far as ordinary academics are concerned. Indeed he was very much on his way to becoming an extraordinary academic, having been awarded various honorary degrees from institutions as far as apart as the Universities of London (1967) and Delhi (1972, when he was Nehru lecturer); by 2005 he had accumulated a staggering total of about thirty honorary degrees, awards and prizes. In demand as a guest lecturer and professor in residence, his travel schedule became an international event. His publications output was at a level that few other academics in their field could match. Despite these successes, however, the academic and political activist Chomsky remained on the outer margin of acceptability. Like a latter-day Bertrand Russell, he was able to mobilize many a popular movement and thus acquire a large number of followers, while the establishment (academic and political) did its best to keep him at arm’s length, if not to ostracize him completely, for example putting him on Nixon’s infamous hit-list of enemies of the state.

Chomsky receiving an honorary degree from the University of Florence, 2004.

Chomsky’s ideas are increasingly traded by way of audio and videotapes and reach audiences far beyond the established distribution networks. One event that remained largely within the realm of the underground and popular movements was his 1970 visit to Hanoi. While everyone knows about Jane Fonda’s visit (and her subsequent apology to the American people for her so-called ‘treason’), few are familiar with Chomsky’s visit. He had been invited to lecture at the Polytechnique University in Hanoi, or what was left of it, during a bombing halt when people could come in from the countryside. Many of them hadn’t seen a book or article for years, and were desperate to catch up with what was going on in the world. Chomsky lectured for many hours on any topic he knew anything about. He also toured Laos on the way. None of his travels since has been quite so controversial, but in undertaking his visit to Turkey in 2002, he put himself at considerable risk by attending the trial of a Turkish publisher accused of treason for publishing one of Chomsky’s books. The defence had asked Chomsky to insist on being a co-defendant, and he agreed. The Security Courts, which were sham justice, dropped the prosecution on the first day, presumably because of the international publicity (mostly in Europe, not much in the
US
). While in Turkey Chomsky also visited some of the Kurdish areas and spoke up for the Kurds’ human rights.