Robert N. Wilson '48 recently sent us this essay on his friendship with Alan G. Gowman
'50; we think readers will find it a moving commentary on friendship. Wilson taught at Harvard and Yale
before becoming a professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina. He lives in Carrboro, N.C.
In his charming, haunting short story, “Your Obituary, Well-Written”, the poet Conrad Aiken poses the question of how a life might be summed up, how one might wish to be remembered. He argues that the conventional catalogue of dates, schools, marriages, and careers fails to capture the essence of the deceased. He suggests that a better approach might be to select a single episode or relationship, perhaps a sequence of events focused on one theme.
I think we might readily agree that a vignette of the person-in-action is likely to afford a more telling picture, and I should like to speak of one person whose fate intersected with mine-one man with whom I passed hundreds of hours in an idiosyncratic compact of spirits.
In the autumn of 1946, I had returned to college after a three-year wartime hiatus. Since my sole means of support was the most welcome but not overly generous allowance provided by the G.I. Bill, I sought gainful part-time employment. I chanced upon a bulletin-board notice that a blind student needed someone to serve as his eyes for several hours a week, reading his class assignments aloud.
At eighty cents per hour, this sounded like easy work: educational, white collar, free of stain and sweat. So I applied and began a rare adventure in intellectual companionship, friendship, and helping.
Alan Gowman, blinded by shrapnel at Anzio Beachhead, was a slim/handsome young man who had come to Union from another world than mine. My father and grandfather were factory workers, and I had grown up in the straitened blue-collar world of the Great Depression. Alan, the son of an architect, had spent his youth in Chappaqua, N.Y., an upper middle-class bastion in Westchester County. Alan had been blithely unscholarly until his wounding.
Then, in his convalescence at Valley Forge, people read to him,
and he began to develop a taste for literature.
I think it fair to say that I served as more than a reader to Alan. I was no smarter than he but had read more and knew more. Thus I was able to go beyond the recording voice, to be in part his teacher, interpreting, analyzing, helping him to articulate his ideas and to write. I here encountered one of the first rewards of my later vocation as a teacher: to see a mind come alive with intellectual vibrancy, to sense a growing awareness of the great world of ideas, to realize that I could make a difference in someone else's lived experience.
The relationship with Alan also educated me. I was introduced to
the blind world, learned the modalities of helping and the equally important lessons of when not to help. Alan taught me how to walk the streets with him, how to deal candidly with his capacities and incapacities, not glossing over the brute fact of his sightlessness with evasion or euphemism. He instructed me how to arrange the currency in his billfold in sequence of value, so that he might be less vulnerable to be cheated in transactions with seeing people; how too to position the objects in his room in a pattern recoverable to his memory.
There was also a shaking routine observed when we parted at night, an action I could never get comfortable with even after decades of friendship. Before closing the door on his lonely figure, I was to turn off all the lights. Alan plainly didn't need them burning, but I found the thought of his not needing them almost unbearable.
Vignettes of Alan's fortitude, his gallows humor and distaste for mincing words, are lodged in memory. He told of being visited by Helen Keller as he lay helpless in the early days of rehabilitation at Valley Forge and whispering to her, “Protect me from mercy killers!” And of how the sociologist George Homans, in a conversation at Harvard, used the expression, “Do you see?” (understand) and then blurted awkwardly that he shouldn't have said that.
I am proud of the years with Alan. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Union the year after I was, then followed me to Harvard where he earned a Ph.D. in sociology. I like to think I had something to do with these successes. One of his first professional articles was based in part on our time together-an analysis of how a companion to a blind person may be appropriately educated into suitable behaviors. I helped him write his dissertation, later to become a book, The War Blind in American Social Structure.
Upon his untimely death in the 1980s, Alan willed me his library,
and I look this moment at the ranks of his collection on my study bookshelves. Their titles summon his voice and presence.
I have always been at least as selfish as the average human being. But in this one instance, I like to imagine I achieved a modicum of genuine altruism. I got much more from Alan than I gave, however: the satisfactions of being needed and able to help are among the sweetest bounties.
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