582
PARTISAN REVIEW
vis-a-vis
my mother. She looked down on people who did the ordinary
work of the world. Since her standards were so high and I couldn't come
close to meeting them, it took Carl Friedrich and later Erich Fromm to
help me overcome my sense of inadeguacy. And both of them had this
ability because they both came from Heidelberg. So if these people of
cultivation, greater even than that of my parents, respected me , that made
an enormous difference to me.
DB:
In your autobiographical essay you wrote about your mother's con–
ception of being "first-rate."
DR:
That's right. The term "first-rate" was constantly raised by my
mother in our home. I became very allergic to it, yet I was very obedient
to the judgments of my parents. I majored in biochemistry at Harvard
because my parents said, "What's the point of studying a subj ect depend–
ing on books? You can always read books but you won't always have lab–
oratories." Yet there were certain episodes in which, though I didn't rec–
ognize it at the time, I was departing from the parental script.
DB:
So there was in your family life, in a way, an orthodoxy - a pressure
to conform and to achieve?
DR:
My parents took it for granted and did not consider it an achieve–
ment for me to graduate at the top of my class, because there was nothing
original about that. My mother was unorthodox; anti-orthodox; it meant
nothing to her that she had graduated at the top of her own Bryn Mawr
class, and it did not matter to her that my father was known beyond the
borders of this country for his work in medicine at the University of
Pennsylvania. None of us were by her definition and in her freguent term
"first-rate." I would have had to compose a sonata, paint like a latter-day
Picasso, or write like either George Eliot or
T.
S. Eliot to win approba–
tion from my mother. This is not "pressure to conform and to achieve."
Mere worldly success was not something my ascetic parents cared about.
My mother was interested only in "first-raters," truly creative people,
mostly artists, but Einstein would fall within the galaxy. She saw people
like ourselves as merely doing the work of the world. During the First
World War she joined, in a small way, a group of mothers who were
sewing or doing other war-assisting things, but that wasn't characteristic
of her. She was feminist before there were many feminists. Her closest
identification was with her alma mater, Bryn Mawr College.
DB:
You once told me that you had a secret stash of detective books you
