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money in my family than in Lionel's - my father had more of it. But for
my father, too, there was a contradiction between the importance he as–
cribed to money as proof of worldly success and his scorn when money
was offered in evidence of a successful life. More than Lionel's mother,
who would always maintain certain of the religious practices in which she
had been reared, my agnostic father associated idealism with religion or,
more specifically, with being Jewish. He believed that Jews were people
of especially high moral purpose, and he took pride in Jewish philan–
thropies, as in anything which transcended economic self-interest. With
this as the teaching of my childhood, it was with troubled amazement that
I read an article in
Commentary
during the Reagan years celebrating self–
interest as a step-in-progress in the moral and political evolution of the
Jews.
In December 1932 my father died, and I inherited a third of the
$200,000 insurance trust which was
all
that remained of his estate.
It
was
inviolable and had not been cashed in like his ordinary policies. The trust
was administered by the Guaranty Trust Company; after administrative
fees, my share of the principal was something over $60,000. It was a sub–
stantial sum for the time. The principal was to be distributed in four
quarters at five-year intervals. In the meanwhile, I had the income. If I
remember correctly, in the first quarter, while the principal was intact, the
income was between two and three thousand dollars, virtually the
equivalent of Lionel's salary at Columbia. Even with this boost in our
fi–
nances, we were unable to meet our expenses: in addition to our obliga–
tion to Lionel's parents, we were soon having to pay for psychoanalysis.
But now at least we could borrow more widely than before - for the du–
ration of the trust we would owe the whole of each quarterly distribution
by the time I received it. My inheritance was not salvation for us, but as I
think back upon the situation, it is hard for me to see how we could have
managed had we not had it. Lionel did everything in his power to earn
extra money, but we were never able to catch up with ourselves. Without
my inheritance, he would either have had to find a more lucrative way to
supplement his salary as a teacher than the various jobs of writing and
editing which he took on - and I cannot imagine what the way could
have been - or we would have had to live a very different kind of life, a
life of poverty. But a life of poverty is a life of despair. We lived moments
of despair but never a life of despair.
It
was painful for Lionel not to have
his mother's gratitude for the help he gave her, yet it would turn out that
he was himself unwilling to be grateful for the help we had from my fa–
ther. We were in middle age when one day we were talking with Elliot
Cohen about our early experiences, and I spoke of how important it had
been to have my inheritance, how it had given us the financial hand we
