WILLIAM G. BOWEN: A REMEBRANCE
It was in September 1956 or maybe 1957 on the shore of Lake Michigan that Bill Bowen and I first met. The Danforth Foundation had given us each a fellowship for graduate education and brought all the recipients to a camp for what turned out to be a hybrid of boot camp, religious revival, and academic conference. All I remember is that one crisp night I lay on a dune watching the most spectacular northern lights I have ever seen, before or since. I wonder now if Bill Bowen saw them too. I emailed him to ask him that qestion a few days ago. For the first time in my remembrance no answer came back. Bill died last night.
Bill and I both went to Princeton for graduate work, he in Economics, while I tried to master Greek. He was married to Mary Ellen; I lived in monastic splendor in the Graduate College. We saw each other once in a while, often enough for me to begin to grasp that I was getting to know someone who would do so much to strengthen American higher education –and transform Princeton along the way. Later, when I was a faculty member and he Provost and then President, I came to understand his secret – insistence on the absolutely highest level of academic excellence in every appointment and every decision he made. He did many other good things as well, of course, but that was the core of it, and the gold standard that let a small institution hold its own with the giants.
When Bill went on to head the Mellon Foundation and I was at the National Humanities Center, I saw him with some frequency, usually with my hat in hand, asking for his support. That Center might not exist today, at least not as a flourishing, independent institution, without that support and that of other leaders of the Mellon Foundation. Many institutions crucial to the humanities could tell a similar story – an economist made all the difference for us humanists.
Then came September 11, 2001. I wandered through the streets of New York, trying to find a hospital that would take my blood. None was needed. I found myself walking past the Mellon Foundation on 61st Street, went in, sat with Bill. Did I have a place to stay? “Yes, I can stay on at the Princeton Club.” Did I have diner plans? “I hadn’t even though about it.” He knew an Italian place nearby that might stay open. We met there that evening, staff and guests bonded together in the overwhelming grief
Later, looking back on that evening, I thought of another September night, one W. H. Auden wrote about:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
...
And at the ending of his poem, September 1 1939, Auden wrote lines that come to mind now when I think of Bill:
Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
--
October 21, 2016