We were on the second floor and we each had our own room and, you know, typewriters. And then we had a kitchen in the other room and we sometimes ate together, not that often. We went to movies together and so on. The movies were just down the street because we lived just at the edge of the tough area of town there and the movies sometimes were three at a time. So we got our kicks. He was game for anything. I never felt competitive with any of them and they didn’t with me. He was very gregarious, but we could get off on moods. In fact, I described my moods as a Friday sickness.

That’s another thing. Bob and I talked about that a lot, about distance and intimacy. Well, just the tension between the two — it’s almost like you talk about the university itself, the university can be distant from society and at the same time had to be engaged. Human relations were somewhat similar. I think I felt the same way that there’s a mystery inside of me that I had to tend to and that was me. I think he didn’t want to be bitching all the time. But at the same time there was again what you call the ironical sense. Maybe I was getting to that myself. And it’s such an ironical detachment. It was appealing. But also you touched on it a while ago when you said “loner” and that probably was something Gaudino and also with me, that sort of lured him to an exaggerated sense of aloneness because he never married. I eventually did. I met Carla. That was a very important thing in my life.

I don’t know whether I should tell you this or not, but I’m going to. It was part of our growing up, I guess. Both Bob and I, we asked ourselves, do we really want to live beyond age 30? The world is a mess. And of course we wanted to. We loved life, we loved life above all, but we would impose that question to ourselves. I know we talked about suicide. What he said was the worst thing about committing suicide is that you’re responsible to the person afterwards– to other people, it’s just irresponsible.

John Resenbrink,
University of Chicago graduate school classmate and early Williams College faculty colleague