DAVID RIESMAN
583
kept from your parents.
DR:
Yes, [ had to put them under the bed.
DB:
[
suppose your mother expected you to be reading Dante.
DR:
Yes, exactly. In the original.
DB:
What were you reading?
DR:
Well, detective magazines, not even detective books; magazines
which I couldn't wait for the drugstore to have. I would go out to the
drugstore and buy the detective magazines and have an ice cream soda or
a banana split. None of that fit with the Francophile cuisine at home.
DB:
You rebelled in a very small way.
DR: I
wasn't as aware as I am telling you now how rebellious I quietly
was - occasionally was. [ was the older son. My brother was much more
disobedient. My mother would sometimes tell me, "Go see what your
brother John's doing and tell him to stop."
DB:
Did your father also have these ideas of being "first-rate"?
DR:
My father had much more conven tional ideas. He was very obedient
to the dictates of his own world in not accepting my mother's verdict on
his professional work. He was a distinguished professor of medicine at the
University of Pennsylvania, and he had a private medical practice as well.
He was much older: he was forty-two when my mother was twenty-six.
My mother had won the European fellowship from Bryn Mawr, which
was intended to create an academic career for her - to begin one. But she
shied away from that. She spent some time meeting the people around
The New Republic
in New York.
DB:
Did things change after you went to Harvard? Wasn't your mother
proud of the fact that you had graduated from Harvard with honors and
then received a degree from Harvard Law School - that you were a clerk
for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis?
DR:
No. No, to her, I was doing the ordinary work of the world. I was
not one of those "creative" people.
