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Identifier
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BaileyMarianne
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Title
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Marianne Bailey Oral History Interview
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Date
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2 November 2021
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6 November 2021
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8 February 2022
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Creator
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Marianne Bailey
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Contributor
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Bob Haft
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extracted text
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Marianne Bailey
Interviewed by Bob Haft
The Evergreen State College oral history project
November 2, 2021
FINAL
Haft: This is November 2, 2021, and I’m with Marianne Bailey, and we’re going to talk about her
experiences before, during and after Evergreen. Let’s just start with your background, your family
history.
Bailey: Sure, that we can do. I was born in New Jersey, and relatively not rural exactly, but not far from
the fields and thoroughbred horse farms and things like that, so it was pretty. In my grandparents’
home—and my grandparents cared for me a lot my first year; they were both immigrants in their youth,
and they met literally on the docks, one from Ireland—my grandmother—and one from Germany, my
grandfather.
Haft: I didn’t know your grandmother was Irish. I’d never heard that. And?
Bailey: And they married, and my father—he had a younger brother, and my Aunt Anne was their sister.
There were three children. Aunt Anne married very late in life, so I knew her mainly when I was a little
girl as an interesting woman who worked in New York City and had her own apartment, and I stayed
with her for a couple of weeks every summer.
Haft: What did your folks do? What did your dad do?
Bailey: My dad was a lawyer. My grandfather became the postmaster in the town where I lived as a
child.
Haft: What was the town?
Bailey: It’s Little Silver, New Jersey, in the middle rural part of New Jersey. That’s where I grew up.
Haft: Your grandparents were living nearby as well?
Bailey: In the same house when I was a baby. During the war, my mother lived in the old Wichmann
(my grandparent’s) house with her mother-in-law and father-in-law. They all took care of me. I was a
spoiled brat, I’m sure. Four people to fuss over me.
I was in New Jersey until my parents divorced, and when they divorced, I was in, I think, third or
fourth grade. My mother moved back to Utah where she was born. She came from an old Mormon
family. She met my dad at Hillfield, an Air Force base in Utah where he was stationed during the war
and where she worked and had won a bathing suit competition and been chosen to be “Miss Hillfield.”
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That’s how they got together. Otherwise, you can’t imagine. He was a good, Catholic boy and not
particularly religious, but his family was, so he was brought up a Catholic. Mom was brought up in this
little Mormon town in the mountains in Utah.
Haft: What a switch that was for you as a kid, though.
Bailey: Yes, it was a hard switch. I was there until, like I said, third or fourth grade. Then I moved with
Mom back to Utah, to a tiny town where her older sister lived. That’s the little town where I lived
through junior high and high school, finished elementary school.
That was weird. It was a big shift. There wasn’t another Catholic in the county. [laughter]
People looked at me. Are there horns? That’s what Mom said they did with her just because she’d been
married to a Catholic. She doesn’t seem to have horns. [laughing]
Haft: What was the school like that you went to in Utah?
Bailey: There was a school bus, and the school bus picked us up from the little, tiny town, with a store
in it and a post office, run by my aunt, Mom’s sister, in the town. The ranch was just outside that town.
There were two other little towns, and those three or four towns sent their kids to a bigger town
called Delta, and that’s where the high school was, so we rode the bus.
Haft: Were you pretty isolated as a kid?
Bailey: Yeah, pretty isolated, both physically and psychologically. The ranch was outside even these
little, tiny towns. My stepfather was very private; one had best not be found poaching on the ranch,
and the word got around and that’s how he liked it. He was known for patrolling the ranch with is guns
at night. Boy, if he saw car lights somewhere in his fields within sight of the house, he was out of there
on a motorcycle or a Jeep with guns. People came and hunted and stuff, and he was afraid they’d end
up shooting one of his black Angus.
Mom, recently divorced, moved to this little town with me and my tiny sister to live with her
sister, the postmistress, who was a lovely, kind lady, and that’s how she met this guy who was 6’6” or
something.
Haft: You’re kidding.
Bailey: She fell in love with him and married him, and so we moved from staying with my Aunt Clee in
the tiny town to the ranch house. It was great. He had cowboys there who came in for meals, and a
cook that cooked the meals for the cowboys.
Haft: What was your relationship with him? Was it a good one? Were you afraid of him?
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Bailey: A little bit. You didn’t want to screw up and have him get mad at you. Once, I left my bicycle
lying in the front porch, between his office, which attached only by a roof to the house, and the house. I
think he stumbled on it once and the bike ended up in the river that flowed by the ranch.
Actually, he was really kind to me. He said, “M.A., why don’t you take some flying lessons?
C’mon, let’s go get you some flying lessons.” Me. He called me M.A., Marianne. I said, “Sure,” and so
he and I began every Saturday to drive up north near Salt Lake City. It was a good drive—took a couple
hours—but the man who had taught him to fly relatively recently taught me, too. That was extremely
kind of him, and I got to know him better on those drives up and back.
Haft: Was your father a pilot for crop dusting, or just to move from one place to another?
Bailey: You mean my stepfather.
Haft: Yeah, your stepfather.
Bailey: No, just for the pure fun of it, and because the ranch was so big. It was a big, old family ranch.
Lots of property, stretching way into the desert out toward Nevada. To keep track of stray cattle and
that, he had a little plane and he’d fly over and look for cows.
Haft: He has his own plane?
Bailey: He had his own plane, yeah, so I went flying with him sometimes, and I took lessons. But I was a
junior in high school, and when you’re that age, you’re so preoccupied with your friends, things like that.
I didn’t take full advantage of it. I wish I had.
Haft: What was the school like? Was it all a Mormon school?
Bailey: Everyone in the school except me and two girls who lived way out on the desert and wore
clothes like Quaker children. Their hair was very long. Maybe they didn’t believe in cutting hair. I don’t
know if they were Seventh-Day Adventists or Quaker or what their little—it was some little village in the
desert all by itself, and the kids must have had a parent who drove them in and stayed with some
friends in town during the school. But those girls and I were the only weird, demonic creatures
[laughing] in that Mormon town.
Haft: Was there pressure for you to convert?
Bailey: Oh, yeah. Something simple in high school. Remember how in high school, you had assemblies,
or once a week, someone would perform something? Students who sang or danced or whatever.
Everyone would assemble in the auditorium for those things. They always started them with a prayer.
A teacher would come stand near me to see if I was bowing my head and being prayerful. [laughter]
Haft: Wow.
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Bailey: I had a couple times a principal insist that I come to his office and that I kneel and pray. The
kneeling part made me really uncomfortable, so I told my mother and she told Bill and it never
happened again. [laughter]
Haft: What were your interests academically as a kid?
Bailey: I was in love with literature. I remember reading Lord Byron and just couldn’t believe how
wonderful it was. Odd that I ended up with French, in a way, but not that I ended up with literature and
poetry. I was editor of the literary magazine of this little, tiny high school and wrote poems. I was a
dancer, and that was extremely important to me until I got arthritis.
Haft: When did you start dancing? When you were in New Jersey, or only when you moved to Utah?
Bailey: Only when I moved to Utah. When I was in the 5th grade I made the acquaintance of an older
lady who had taught ballet and still did, and used her children, whom she tutored all their lives, to
demonstrate because she could no longer dance. She was arthritic. So, I took ballet lessons. That was
an important part of growing up. I loved dance. And to show off at assemblies.
Haft: Did you have good teachers, do you think, at that time?
Bailey: Most teachers were farmers first, teachers second. In high school, I had one good teacher. She
was an English teacher, luckily for me.
Haft: Same with me. Two great ones.
Bailey: Yeah, it’s funny how it’s so clear who’s a decent teacher and who isn’t, when you’re a kid even.
Haft: It seemed to me that the English teachers that I had were always so much more liberal than
everybody else.
Bailey: Mm-hm.
Haft: Maybe because they were more literate. I don’t know.
Bailey: Maybe. I don’t know what that is, but I had the same experience. For example, I had migraines
through my teens and twenties and early thirties. As I got older, they went away. But it was a problem,
and I had teachers who reduced my grade because I’d just have to leave classes. But the English teacher
always took my side. She was very kind about that.
Haft: When did the migraines start? When you were in Utah?
Bailey: They started when I was in Utah, and they went away completely with menopause.
Haft: That’s a long time.
Bailey: That’s a long time, but they lessened as I got older.
Haft: When did you first take French? Was that in high school?
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Bailey: In this weird little town—and the ranch was outside three or four miles of this town, and then
spread out into the desert—my mother made friends. My mother had some hard times because she
had been divorced, and then she married Bill, who was as much an atheist as you can conceivably be,
and he had nothing to do with the town.
Haft: He wasn’t Mormon at all?
Bailey: Not at all. He despised it, really. He wasn’t religious. I think his parents were Episcopalian or
some extremely liberal religion like that.
Haft: Your mother must have suffered from that, too, then.
Bailey: My mother was born a Mormon and born in Utah, but she had seemed to more or less satisfy
people if she went to church, and she did that and Bill didn’t begrudge her that for sure if it kept the
peace. It was mostly for us, for my sisters and me, so that we weren’t shunned entirely by the kids in
town.
Haft: But there was a stigma of divorce?
Bailey: There was a stigma of divorce, a serious one. But once she married Bill, people were afraid of
him, too, and a lot of the men in the little town worked for him as cowboys. He grew his own grain and
corn and things like that, so he could hire some of the people who did farming. That helped, I think.
Haft: Did you have chores to do on the ranch?
Bailey: No, I didn’t ever. The only thing we did, my mother and I and my younger sisters as they got
older, took care of taking milk to the little doggies because they didn’t have their mothers and they
needed to be bottle fed for a while. That’s the only thing we did.
And Bill had a couple gentle horses that we could ride if we wanted. I didn’t do that as much as I
wish I had, but I enjoyed it when I did.
Haft: When did the idea of going to college hit you? At the moment you arrived?
Bailey: I always knew I’d go to college from the time I was old enough to understand it. At first, I
wanted to be a lawyer like Daddy, but he didn’t want me to. When I was young enough to conceive this
idea of going to law school, he didn’t think women should be lawyers. Period. After that, when I chose
to go on and study the things I did, he was happy and proud of my degrees from France and all, but he
regretted a lot that he had discouraged law school. I don’t. I wouldn’t have liked it.
Haft: But you maintained a good relationship with him.
Bailey: With my dad, yes, I did. I didn’t say, but I spent every summer after the divorce with him in New
Jersey.
Haft: His parents were still around so you had those grandparents there, too?
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Bailey: No. Sadly, those parents—who had brought me up as a baby, took care of me because my mom
was working and my father was working and in law school—they were quite elderly, and they died when
I was just six or seven.
Haft: You spent three months of every year in New Jersey?
Bailey: At my father’s, yes.
Haft: What a switch.
Bailey: It was a big switch. I got used to flying and I just would go alone until my younger sister was old
enough to come along. She never really liked being in New Jersey as much as I did, but I liked it a lot.
My stepmother—who broke up my parents [and] was considerably younger and quite pretty—took me
to the beach almost every day. We lived relatively close to the Atlantic shore.
Haft: You told me once about a nanny you had. That must have been when you were still in New
Jersey.
Bailey: That was when I was still in New Jersey in my youngest years, like from birth up until . . . let’s see
. . . probably seven or so. We were in New Jersey, and my grandparents had become—I think my
grandmother had died and my grandfather was very weak and not doing well. Mother was working.
She was modeling. She was having fun.
My dad had some legal work for a lady. Maybe one of her children had had some trouble with
the law or something. I think it was along those lines. She was such a lovely woman. Her name was
Myrtle Basie, an aunt of Count Basie. She brought him up at her house with her kids, so Dad knew her
well. She came and was my nanny for years. I can remember being in a little-kid fight with a neighbor
and running to her, and she’d put her arms around me. It was like the world was good again. [laughter]
She was such a lovely person.
Haft: Count Basie’s aunt. How wonderful is that?
Bailey: Yeah, it was cool. And I saw him and his friends when I’d go down to her place sometimes, like if
Mom couldn’t be home. I remember one time I’d gotten a tooth pulled and Mom didn’t want me to be
home alone, so she took me to Myrtle’s. The young Count Basie and some other guys in his band were
visiting at her house. It was really exciting. It was fun. I knew they were famous and that they were
musicians, but that’s all I knew. Yeah, I had some interesting experiences as a kid.
Haft: Jumping ahead then to when you were thinking about going to college, what did you imagine?
Did you want to get out of Utah?
Bailey: Oh, I wanted to get out of Utah for sure. Originally, I wanted to be a lawyer like Daddy, and he
discouraged me at first, and afterward, he apologized to me. He was also not real happy that I got
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married really young. I got married just out of high school, so I didn’t go back East. He had all kinds of
connections. You can go to this school. You can go to this school back East, and I said, “No, I’m going to
get married, but I’m going to school.” I think that he didn’t believe me at first. You know how, as a
father, you would feel, but I did, so it satisfied him when I went to the Sorbonne, I think.
Haft: Where did you go first?
Bailey: I went to the University of Nevada, Reno. Bud was working in those days in Reno, Nevada.
Haft: The college was in Nevada?
Bailey: In Reno, Nevada, and that’s where he had been living and working since he graduated high
school. He’s three years older than I. I got my undergrad degree in Reno, Nevada, and I finished my
master’s degree in French there, working two years as a T.A.
Haft: Your undergraduate degree was in literature?
Bailey: It was in French. It really was. Oddly, enough, there were several French professors who were
French, and I got on really well with them, so I was able to do a degree. I learned the language.
Haft: Native French living in Reno?
Bailey: Yeah, living in Reno. Hard to imagine, isn’t it, in Reno of all places. But I learned the language
well enough that I was accepted at the University of Washington with a T.A. and came up here. Bud
grew up here in Washington.
Haft: You got into the UW, so you had to relocate.
Bailey: I got into the UW. I got a job as a teaching assistant, which you know how that is. It’s extremely
helpful, and it’s something that is available, especially to students of languages because they need lots
of tutors and lots of teachers. If you’re good enough, you teach beginning French.
Haft: What year was this? What year did you start at the UW?
Bailey: I don’t think I can do years.
Haft: What year did you graduate from high school? That was ’67 or something, wasn’t it?
Bailey: Yeah, it would be the same as you, Bob. That would be ’67. I started maybe in winter of that
year, not in fall. I was getting married and such in Nevada. I did that until I graduated. We were there
through four years, and we both graduated. Both of us worked. I worked mostly teaching beginners. I
also worked in a drugstore all through that time and Bud worked in heavy equipment.
Haft: Bud left a really good job, it sounds like, in Reno.
Bailey: Yes, he did.
Haft: He went to UW.
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Bailey: He came to UW to study philosophy, and I came to UW and kept up with my French. I met the
two people, a married couple, who invited me to come to Europe and offered me a job.
Haft: When you were a graduate student?
Bailey: I was a graduate student in Seattle.
Haft: Where did you live in Seattle? Do you remember?
Bailey: Yes, in Ballard. It was pretty nice. Ballard was real tame. Lots of elderly people with very wellkept Scandinavia-looking houses.
Haft: You and I and Debbie were all at the University of Washington at the same time.
Bailey: You’re kidding me.
Haft: No.
Bailey: But you were doing art history.
Haft: I was doing physics.
Bailey: No, you were doing physics.
Haft: I was trying to get into medical school.
Bailey: Oh, you were?
Haft: But Debbie took French from some Egyptian woman.
Bailey: Yeah, one of the TAs. Yeah, I was in the TA room with a couple kids from Africa, a couple Near
Eastern people, and a few other Americans, a couple French. There was a big crew of TAs at UW.
Haft: Tell me the story of this couple and their offer to go to Europe.
Bailey: Sure, I will. There was something I was going to tell you that I thought would amuse you and I
can’t remember what it was.
This couple had worked at UW for several years before. I don’t know how they ended up there
except that the Dean of Humanities or something had made friends with them in Europe and invited
them. “Wouldn’t you like to come to the US for a few years and teach?” They both did French and
literature. I think the man’s name was Constantine Christofides.
Haft: I know Christofides because he was an art historian.
Bailey: He was the art historian, right. They were friends with Christofides and he said, “C’mon, we’ll
get you a job there. Why don’t you just try the US out for a while?” Because she was French, and he
was German. Which country are we going to work in? They enjoyed the US, and that’s where I met
them. I liked them a lot, and I guess they liked me okay.
Haft: They invited you to Europe. I think they liked you a lot, too. [laughter]
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Bailey: And he, Dr. Leiner—he was German and she was French and she ran things—he was very
efficient and smart, and he was invited to take charge of the French Literature Department at the
university in Tübingen in Germany. So he essentially had a department to fill up of his own and a crop of
students to teach. She was also invited to work at the Sorbonne when she wanted to work in Paris.
That’s how they left and wrote back and then they wrote back and invited me to join Herr Leiner
in Germany in this town, Tübingen, at the university that celebrated its 500th year that year. Five
hundred years. That’s something.
Haft: Wow.
Bailey: Bud agreed to go and study philosophy. I thought it sounded fun. I had a German grandfather.
Why not go? But I didn’t know German yet. Lucky for me, I learn languages pretty fast.
Haft: Let’s hop momentarily back to your childhood. Was there no German spoken either by your
parents or grandparents when you were growing up?
Bailey: My grandparents spoke some German, yes, but I don’t know how much I actually learned,
though. I spent a lot of time with them because Mother was working, and Father was in law school or
working.
Haft: You were at the UW to do a doctoral degree?
Bailey: Yes. I did a year and then got that invitation and said, “I’d like to go to Europe.”
Haft: What an opportunity.
Bailey: Yeah, it was really just luck. I guess the gods. I was serving the gods even then.
Haft: It was more than just luck.
Bailey: I don’t know, but it worked out, and they weren’t exactly the easiest people, but they took to
me. I became a child of the household, I guess.
Haft: Did you live with them?
Bailey: No. Bud and I went and got an apartment in a little village to the south of this university town
called Tübingen with a charming, elderly woman, Frau Link, who had lost her husband when she was
quite young. When we met her, I think it was very close to her 80th birthday. When I last saw her, it was
after her 90th. She had a house with an upstairs that she rented to us. I was so fortunate, as it turned
out, as she became so much more than our landlady. A former school teacher, who each morning sat
the her little table and corrected any errors she found in the daily newspaper. She took us by the hand
and introduced us to all the merchants, the Metzger (butcher), the baker, the general store owner, the
beer delivery man. What a special day that was! Each day when I got home she greeted me and
conversed with me in German. That helped so much in learning the language.
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Haft: Did Bud speak French or German?
Bailey: Some French. He studied French. In those days, a lot of colleges made you learn one language
beyond your own. He had French, but he didn’t have German—that was hard—but he picked it up
pretty well.
Haft: What a leap of faith for you to go to a school in Germany when you were expected to learn in
German.
Bailey: To speak German. And on top of that, this Dr. Leiner, who had a department to fill with
assistant professors, TAs and so forth, said I had to teach. Teaching in French was fine when I taught the
upper division students French Literature. But then, after a year or so, they assigned me classes that
were lower division studying French but taught in German. That was hard.
Haft: I’ll bet. How long did it take you, do you think, to become fluent in German?
Bailey: Living there is different than studying it. I got by perfectly fine after about six months.
However, I was extremely fortunate; besides Fra Link’s tutorials, the secretary in the University
Department where I worked was a very kind lady and became a very good friend. She insisted that each
noon hour we sat and talked; this helped so much in my German vocabulary and fluency. Beyond that,
in our “department” enclave of offices at the University, at any moment at least three languages were
being spoken. We were all fluent in all three and that offered the perfect way to keep all the languages
alive and improve our fluency.
Haft: Wow. How long were you there then?
Bailey: Let’s see. I should know that. I believe it was six, maybe seven, years.
Haft: Really? Did you get a degree out of that experience?
Bailey: I had the choice. At first, I was enrolled to take a degree from Tübingen, from this German
university. The husband, Dr. Leiner, who’d given me this job—I had the job as an assistant to him and I
taught lit classes, one in German and one in French—wanted me to take my degree from there, but his
wife, Jaqueline, the French woman, said, “I want her to go to the Sorbonne,” and she won. In the end, I
really did want my degree in French and from the Sorbonne.
Haft: But Bud got his degree from Tübingen in philosophy.
Bailey: No, he did graduate work at the U.W. and took classes in Tubingen but quit to take a much
needed job at IBM teaching English.
Haft: How did you finally make your way to the Sorbonne?
Bailey: The wife of the man who ran this department at the German university was Jaqueline, who was
a professor of French, and who had a job at the Sorbonne after they moved back to Europe. She had
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taught me French lit when I was at the University of Washington. She just took over and said, “All right,
you’re going to go here. You’re going to talk to this man. You’re going to be enrolled here.” She made
it really easy for me.
Haft: But she knew everybody at the Sorbonne, as her husband had known everybody in Tübingen.
Bailey: Yes, and so I had both these universities as options. It wasn’t my own brilliance or anything. It
was just I happened to know these two people who thought I had some promise.
Haft: I think they chose you for a reason, Marianne. You can’t deny it. You can’t be so humble about
some of these things. You’re a brilliant person. So, you both moved to Paris. Or did you?
Bailey: We didn’t officially move, but there was an apartment there. We were so lucky. Jaqueline had
owned an apartment in Paris for decades which she stared with us.
Haft: Why don’t we take a break?
Bailey: Yeah, okay.
11
Marianne Bailey
Interviewed by Bob Haft
The Evergreen State College oral history project
November 6, 2021
FINAL
Haft: This is November 6, 2021, and I’m here with Marianne Bailey again. When we ended last time,
you were just about to enter the Sorbonne. The couple that had induced you to come to Tübingen, the
wife had been a faculty at the Sorbonne?
Bailey: She had, yes. She’d been faculty there. That was after she taught at the University of
Washington. She came back to France and taught at the Sorbonne until she decided to retire. She had
an apartment there in Paris that she’d had. I guess people who have old Paris apartments never, ever
sell them, because they have a fixed rent. They’re worth a lot, but to get something else would cost you
a real fortune, so she’d stay in it when she was working there, or when she wanted to be in Paris to see
people or something. Or he would stay in it when he was taking the text of his literary journal to the
publisher in Paris, different things like that. I would stay in it when I was studying, or when I wanted to
work in the library.
Haft: Did you and Bud move together to Paris, or did he stay in Tübingen for a while?
Bailey: No, we kept our apartment in Tübingen because we lived there most of the time and only went
to Paris when I had to, mostly for my dissertation research at the National Library. By then, I had to take
a couple classes, and I did that when I first got enrolled at the Sorbonne. We stayed mainly in the
German apartment, but we traveled to Paris a lot. I’d go to Paris to hear special lectures and things like
that.
But when you get past the master’s degree there, it’s mainly an issue of writing your
dissertation, just like it is here. It was more important for me to go to the library, the main Parisian
library.
Haft: You never really moved to Paris.
Bailey: No, we never lived there. I’d have to go nearly every month, but sometimes just for a few days,
sometimes longer.
Haft: What kind of a commute was it?
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Bailey: You could take the train and sleep overnight and get there at 6:30 in the morning, or you could
go during the day and arrive at a more normal time. I’d stay at Jacqueline’s apartment, and I could go
out from there, just take a bus or a Metro.
Haft: What were the classes that you had to take? You said you were required to take a couple at the
Sorbonne.
Bailey: Yeah, I had to go. I had to go to things that prepared you to pass a particular exam that I had to
take. I studied when Jacqueline was teaching. I heard her lectures on authors of West Africa. I also . . .
what were the classes I was supposed to take? There was another one. I think it was in 20th Century
contemporary writers. I should say “lectures” rather than “classes.” I was a doctoral candidate and my
degree at this point was a matter of research and measuring up to the expectations and tasks which the
supervising Sorbonne Professor laid out: her lectures and suggestions, her critiques of my dissertation
along the way. There was one that was interesting that had to do with—it helped me understand a bit
what they expected in terms of dissertation, so since I was in the dissertation writing stage, just starting
it, that was helpful. But beyond that, if I was in town and someone was giving an interesting lecture, I’d
go. It’s surprising, the amount of free play and do what you want, go to what you think will help you
once you’re at that level. It isn’t as if these are all required. You go to school or the library every day. It
was more to go to things that were relevant to your dissertation.
Haft: Your dissertation was on Aimé Césaire?
Bailey: Yes.
Haft: Where did that inspiration come from?
Bailey: I have to give credit to a class Jacqueline taught. That was a class I took when I was still here at
the University of Washington, and she was teaching there. I was just fascinated by his poetry. I think
that’s why.
Haft: You carried that inspiration for quite a while, actually. When you went to Tübingen, had you—
Bailey: I had had that class. She took me to visit with him because he had an apartment in Paris, too.
Césaire had his work as a poet and a writer, but his real job was as senator, like a senator, in the French
Legislature, so he was in Paris quite regularly for a few months a year at least, so we went over and
visited with him. I got to spend more time with him in Martinique, but this was in Paris, to see his
apartment. It was fascinating because I had such awe of him, and he and Jacqueline were good friends.
His apartment was very simple, very, very. He lived there with his grandson who was going to
school at the Sorbonne, was just starting, and Césaire cooked for him. There was nothing fancy or
2
impressive. It was just an apartment, except he had gorgeous African art on the walls, gorgeous masks.
That was interesting.
Haft: I know when you and I taught together, Césaire was always a staple of the program. But so was
Nietzsche. Where did he come in to play?
Bailey: I was interested in Nietzsche from way back in my undergrad days. I think Bud had studied
Nietzsche in a philosophy class. It was before we went to Washington, so it was when he was an
undergraduate. He was really interested in Nietzsche. Then he took another class on Nietzsche at
Seattle.
I decided to do my dissertation on Césaire’s theater. Jacqueline convinced me that there was
not any really good writings on that part of his works. People knew him as a poet, and there were some
good books written on that aspect. That’s how, really, because I was interested in what Nietzsche wrote
about theater, that first work on theater that he wrote, The Birth of Tragedy. That interested me.
Haft: Okay, so what year are we now? When did you enter the Sorbonne and how long were you
there?
Bailey: I was enrolled there over the dissertation writing period.
Haft: In the ‘70s, though?
Bailey: Yeah. I graduated from Nevada as an undergrad in ’72 maybe. I went directly to the University
of Washington and that was for a year. I’m thinking it might have been a little bit later. Maybe I
graduated as an undergrad in ’72, and then as a grad student in ’74, and then ’74-’75 at UW, and then
around ’76 probably moved to Europe. I think that’s closer.
Haft: You said you were in Germany for seven years.
Bailey: Yes.
Haft: When you finished your degree, and the dissertation was on Césaire, were you offered jobs in
Europe at all, or were you looking for jobs in Europe at all?
Bailey: I still had a really good job. I did a professor’s work in Tübingen. We’d call it professor’s stages
of prestige and money. But I taught like any young professor in Germany would and got paid well at the
German university. I hated to leave because I knew probably finding a job in the US wouldn’t be as easy
as that had been. [laughter]
Haft: Did you come directly to Evergreen from there, or did you teach somewhere else before?
Bailey: No. We went back to Reno for just a few years because Bud’s family all lived all around there,
and he wanted to go there for a little while. As it turned out, I knew I could get a position at the
University of Nevada, Reno, in French or German and Bud could find word there also. I wrote a letter to
3
someone in a department in Reno. I wrote to this fellow Grotegut and said that we were going to be in
Nevada for a while and did they need someone? He said, “Yes, come.” He was chair of the department
then, this German professor.
Haft: Were you teaching in Reno?
Bailey: Yes, I went back to Reno and the department chair was German also. He was a professor of
German. I had always gotten on well with him, and I went there just to see the old place, and it was fun.
I went up to say “hi” to him and tell him what I’d been up to, and he said, “Won’t you come teach? We
really need someone in German.” I said, “Teach German?” And he said, “Yeah, the language and
whatever you want.” I said, “Sure! We’ll be here for a while. I don’t know how long.”
He did that, and I taught an advanced French language class, too, as I recall. Because he
remembered me, and we were friends. He couldn’t believe I could then teach German already. I said, “I
lived there. When you live there, you learn pretty fast. You have to.”
Haft: How did you hear about Evergreen? How did that all come about?
Bailey: Let me think. But had enough with living as an expatriate, and he announced that he was
leaving his rather good position at IBM and returning home. I could have stayed in in Europe forever.
But I didn’t. I came back with him but I had promised Dr. Leiner I would return to Germany for one
more teaching semester. He was very disappointed that after all those years I was leaving.
Bud stayed on Hood’s Canal while was away in Germany and when I returned we both looked
for work here in Washington. On one occasion we had heard of Evergreen and drove over to get a look.
There I met Barbara Smith. We visited briefly and I described my time in Europe and my educational
background. She suggested I keep in touch, and she called me once about a job that wasn’t quite right
for me. But after two years there in Reno, I got a second notification from Barbara Smith regarding a
position in French Literature and German at Evergreen.
4
Marianne Bailey
Interviewed by Bob Haft
The Evergreen State College oral history project
February 8, 2022
FINAL
Bailey: The time with Professor Leiner and his wife in Tübingen was really important because I saw how
big, traditional universities operated up close. At the Sorbonne, Jacqueline, the wife of Herr Professor
Leiner, was teaching also in Paris, so Bud and I were able to get in a Volkswagen and just drive to France
at any time, so I could meet with her, and be able to take Bibliothèque Nationale and get any books that
I needed, and also meet other people.
Through her, I met Simone de Beauvoir. We were in a lingerie shop. Simone de Beauvoir in a
lingerie shop. I thought it was probably an unusual occurrence.
Haft: That’s great.
Bailey: But there they were, the two of them, and they knew each other, and were hugging and
laughing and talking, and “How’s Sartre these days?” It was amazing to go around in Paris with
Jacqueline because she knew everybody.
The other thing was part of my job in Germany with her husband that he edited two well-known
and respected scholarly journals, one on the 17th Century—that was his century that he had specialized
in—and the other on . . . how to put it? . . . it was about critiquing the critics of literature; critiquing how
this or that person wrote about this or that book. It was real interesting, too.
I was his assistant in putting these two scholarly journals together. They were very well-known
and appreciated journals. I had scholars—professors from the US and other places—who would send in
articles, and it was my job to read them, and judge them. I couldn’t quite believe he let me. [laughter]
Because it was easier for me to do the English than anybody else working for him.
Haft: You were alluding to the fact that working in both of those ancient universities had a profound
effect on the way you think, and the way you subsequently taught? Is that true?
Bailey: I’d say that it did. You’ll probably agree from knowing Italy like you do that there was a great
respect and reverence in this old university time, where Hagel went to school, or a number of great
poets. I think, even though I was only in it a few years, and still had my doctorate to finish, that people
in our village were so respectful. Our landlady—fräulein—was really bound and determined that I finish,
1
and she was real helpful. I don’t think if you go to Olympia, you’ll run into anybody who’s impressed or
respectful of the fact that you teach at the university. Right?
Haft: Yeah.
Bailey: It’s very different, that old respect for knowledge is still very alive.
Haft: How difficult was it, then, to come back to the States?
Bailey: It was difficult. It really was. I think Bud more than I—he can tell you if this is true—missed the
American West, the wide-open spaces, not having everybody know what you’re doing every minute. He
enjoyed it a lot in the time he was there, and did well with it, but I think that was mainly why we came
back. I could have probably stayed and just visited my family in [unintelligible 00:05:08].
Haft: When you did come back, you said that you first came back to the Northwest and stayed a while,
or first went back to Nevada?
Bailey: In the time between my return from Europe and starting to teach here, we were here for a
while. Right? Were we in Reno first, or here? I’m trying to remember. I can’t remember.
BUD: We landed in San Francisco, and then we bought the Volkswagen bus in Reno, and then we
traveled, and then we ended up at the canal. That’s when you met [in?] Victoria. You met her in grad
school at the UW.
Haft: Barbara Smith?
BUD: Yes, that’s when you ran into her.
Bailey: Part of the time, we were out on Hood Canal at Victoria and George Bridges’s family cabin.
Haft: Oh, I didn’t know that.
Bailey: Oh, yeah. We stayed there several times. Before we went to Europe we were there.
Haft: There’s a connection that’s really roundabout because George becomes the President of
Evergreen later. Wow. So, you lived there, and then you must have heard about Evergreen because you
said you came and talked to Barbara Smith?
Bailey: We did, a few years before I was ever hired here. But we drove by, I think it was, and we
wondered what it was, so we went in and just wandered into the deans’ area and asked who I should
talk to about the school, and I was directed to Barbara. She was, I think, a head dean.
I talked to her for a while and told her that I’d just gotten back from Europe and that I wanted to
work in both French and German. What was available? She said, “I don’t think there’s anything right
now, but give me your number where I can reach you.” And then some years went by in between.
Haft: I’m so impressed by that. Then you moved back down to . . .
2
Bailey: . . . Reno, Nevada, where previously, we’d been undergrads, and Bud could always, if we needed
money, get a good job in operating engineers.
Haft: You were teaching parttime at the university?
Bailey: No, I taught fulltime. I went in and talked to a guy who I’d always liked. He was German and
head of the German Department, and at that moment, he was the department head of all the
languages, the whole thing. His name was [Unintelligible 00:08:25]. He said, “Sure. We need somebody
to teach the German language, and there will be some French classes, too, if you want to.” The other
people in the French Department, there was only one who I knew from the old days. He was a lovely old
man, [Bertolo? 00:08:50], who herded sheep.
Haft: But you must have had a lot of street credibility with the German guy because of your time in
Tübingen.
Bailey: I did. And because I could speak German with him. He had a lot of respect for European
universities, probably more than maybe some younger department heads they had had. But it was
something to do for two or three years.
Bailey: You said during that time, you got at least one call from Barbara about a job that wasn’t
appropriate or just didn’t seem to fit?
Bailey: This job had come up, but it wasn’t. It was what Doranne . . .
Haft: . . . Crable later taught.
Bailey: Yes.
Haft: When she finally did call with a job, it was just the French language job?
Bailey: Yeah. Not just language, it was the French Department job, which was essentially what I was
hired for.
Haft: Okay.
Bailey: I guess.
Haft: Do you remember who your faculty buddy was, or anything about that first year?
Bailey: I do. I wanted to be sure and talk to you because we shared Paul Mott.
Haft: Oh, yes. He was mine, too. That’s right.
Bailey: He’s such a lovely person. Before I got to know him, there was one of those godawful sleepaway at some . . .
Haft: . . . faculty retreat. [laughing]
Bailey: Yeah. That almost ended it right there. Seriously. I couldn’t believe they were that rustic.
3
Haft: Hiro said pretty much the same thing. When they made him go on some camping trip, he was
ready to pull the plug.
Bailey: I had heels.
BUD: She’d just gotten a new suit.
Bailey: And a new suit for, I figured, an interview to talk to Barbara.
Haft: One of the things that Paul Mott said to me, which I thought was pretty interesting, dealt with just
what we were talking about earlier. The idea that there are these old universities that have wellestablished everything—curriculum and faculty and everything—and they also have traditions that are
time honored, and some of them are quite good. It’s like a rite of passage or something. Because he
was at Penn State, or one of those, I know.
Bailey: Big, big old school.
Haft: Old university. He was lamenting the fact that at Evergreen, there wasn’t anything like that.
There wasn’t anything.
Bailey: No tradition.
Haft: And yet, he liked teaching at Evergreen, I know he did, because when you came, and you had that
first experience of having to go on a faculty retreat, that was more like a Boy Scout camping trip almost.
Bailey: It was. What I learned was that I’d never do it again. Ever. [laughter]
Haft: What was the first program that you had to teach? Was it a core program, do you know?
Bailey: No, it wasn’t. The interview to see if they want to hire you or not was Andrew Hanfman and a
couple of others. Hanfman, and in art, who was your mentor the Art Department? And you’re friends
with his son?
Haft: Bill Winden maybe?
Bailey: No, not Winden.
Haft: Oh, Gordon Beck. He wasn’t in art. He was in theater originally.
Bailey: I see. He and Hanfman, and there were a couple of other people there—I think Susan sat in—
were obviously in charge of the interview. I got to speak at some length with both of them. They
convinced me that it wasn’t just a would-be college. It gave me a positive sense of what Evergreen
could be, and what I could do here.
Haft: Andrew Hanfman was world class, I thought. He could have taught anywhere. It’s good that he
was on the committee and gave you that insight.
Bailey: It was good.
Haft: Did he make you speak German at all?
4
Bailey: We only conversed in German. I could speak in French with Susan, obviously, but also . . . who
was that fellow?
Haft: Who also spoke French?
Bailey: Yeah, there was another one who spoke French. I’ve forgotten.
Haft: Boy, I don’t know who that would have been.
Bailey: I don’t think he was in the French Department, but he knew some French.
Haft: They converted you, sort of, at that interview. [laughing]
Bailey: I can’t say they converted me, but I’d say that I realized it was serious, and it had the advantage
of being able to cross disciplines—in fact, being expected to—and that I could do German things and
French things. That was important.
Haft: When I think of you as a teacher, French comes to mind, but I also think of world literature. You
really are as well versed in foreign literature as anybody on the faculty. Was that something that you
were interested in teaching as well, or was it primarily language?
Bailey: It wasn’t language. I never was crazy about teaching languages. It’s fun now and then, but
mostly literature, and through Bud, because he always had philosophy stuff around.
Haft: What was the first French program that you taught? Do you remember that?
Bailey: I believe the first year I taught here, right after being hired, was one of the incarnations of the
French program, and I taught it with Susan Fiksdal. She had been teaching it alone a lot, so she had her
way of doing it. That was good. I got to see the structure that she had inaugurated. But it was the last
time she did most of the lecturing, I have to say, because I knew I should lecture on literature.
Haft: Was anybody else involved in that? Judy or Billy?
Bailey: Let me think. I believe Judy [Gabriele] was. I believe Judy taught French language already, and
that’s when I met her.
Haft: Judy Gabriele.
Bailey: Yes.
Haft: She’s still there teaching.
Bailey: She’s still there.
Haft: [Whispering 00:16:48].
Bailey: Yeah, she really deserves more credit.
Haft: Oh, I know.
Bailey: You know how hard it is for adjunct people. It’s infuriating. But she said she’s not going to
retire quite yet. I think [unintelligible 00:17:11].
5
Haft: I did a guest lecture for [Judy’s French class] a few weeks ago.
Bailey: Good for you.
Haft: On Lartigue photography. Judy looks so cute nowadays. She’s got a great haircut. [laughing] But
she has never changed in the 20 or 30 years I’ve known her.
Bailey: Can you believe it? You’ve known her probably longer than I. Well, maybe not, but I’ve known
her for 30, from the first year I taught.
Haft: I knew her when she was married to this doctor.
Bailey: Oh, the doctor. He was so . . .
Haft: He was just awful.
Bailey: Just awful.
Haft: He really was.
Bailey: Was he just awful as a person in a broad sense, not just to her?
Haft: Yeah, he was just awful. We should go into that some other time, but it was great that she got
away from that character.
Bailey: I know. Alonzo [last name? 00:18:10] is a perfect partner for her. He’s a very good person.
BUD: He’s quite interesting in his own right.
Haft: Did you take a group to France that first year?
Bailey: Let me think. I think I did. I think I took a group to France, because Susan, her kids were small,
and it wasn’t convenient for her to do it. That’s how, I think, she managed to convince Evergreen to
make a hire, because she had these little children and she’d been trying to take students over and over.
She just said, “No, you’ve got to hire somebody.”
Haft: Good for her.
Bailey: It was pleasant to meet Susan, and it was really nice to meet Hanfman and Gordon Beck. I liked
him a lot, and it was fun. The interview was fun. I appreciated being able to be interviewed in French
and German with Hanfman. Those things convinced me that it was a serious place. Right? Didn’t you
say I gave you a phone call about, what was it about that goofy sleepover thing?
BUD: I did.
Bailey: And that my heels sunk in the mud, and I was furious. [laughter]
Haft: What else then did you teach? As I said, comparative lit was what I would have called it.
Bailey: Comparative lit. Yeah.
Haft: Were you ever forced into a program that just wasn’t right for you?
BUD: Almost, right?
6
Bailey: Almost, but I refused. In the beginning, right before the French program, in those days—
BUD: Some older people asked you, and you’d make Hanfman a promise . . .
Bailey: . . . to keep the languages alive, the German and the French.
BUD: And they refused to talk to you for a couple of years.
Bailey: They wanted to throw me into some team. I remember, it had . . . who was the guy, kind of a
big guy, really pushy . . . I forget his name.
Haft: Do you remember what he taught at all, because maybe I could pull it out. He wasn’t an architect,
was he?
Bailey: No, it wasn’t architecture. I think he taught literature generally, but I don’t know his main field.
BUD: He did a production with some other guy about love, and the love of education, and that was a
kind of platonic thing.
Bailey: I could probably figure it out.
BUD: Chuck somebody, wasn’t it?
Bailey: It wasn’t Pailthorp. He was a bit of an egotist. [laughing]
Haft: Were you ever given the opportunity to teach German? Because I don’t remember that
happening until pretty late.
BUD: She had a fun class in German.
Bailey: I taught two, maybe three, times German. [Mariana sp and last name? 00:22:00] taught
language. I did it once with Charlie Teske and I did it once or maybe twice alone, except for Mariana.
The year that the wall came down in Berlin was a German program, so it was great.
Haft: Did Charlie speak German?
Bailey: Yeah.
Haft: Wow.
Bailey: He could speak German. I think he had a little resistance, but he went ahead and spoke German
with us.
BUD: Wasn’t he married to a German woman?
Bailey: And he’s married to a German woman.
Haft: He was.
BUD: We have to have video here. Body language tells so much. [laughter]
Bailey: That was fun.
Haft: The French program has become your legacy, really, because you really fleshed it out. I know
Susan started it.
7
Bailey: But she did mostly French history. That was her thing.
Haft: When we talked the last time, I remember me broaching the subject of teaching in the program
with you and Susan—the French program—because I had been a student in Avignon in 1969.
Bailey: For your junior year abroad?
Haft: Yeah. And I had a French family that I’d been communicating with for 25 years.
Bailey: Really? Did you get to see them again?
Haft: I kept saying, “I’m coming back,” and every year, my French got less and less.
Bailey: That happens to everyone.
Haft: I know I went to you guys with the prospect, and I can just remember, both you and Susan, were a
little stand-offish, and you said, “Well, I don’t know about this guy.” But thankfully, you took a chance,
because that was the most fun I’d had in decades was teaching that program.
BUD: For her, too.
Bailey: It was fun for me.
Haft: When you and I went to spend a week in Paris together—
Bailey: That was really fun, wasn’t it?
BUD: I wondered what was going on. [laughter]
Bailey: But the thing was, almost every trip you go alone. It’s always nice to be in France. It was always
nice for me to go back and be able to touch bases with Europeans who were important to me. I knew
the city pretty well, but it’s just lonely. It wasn’t that much fun. Poor Bud. I’d call him every day. He
had to listen to me go on and on about this or that student who didn’t show up on time.
Haft: Yeah, but when you and I went together, you introduced me to all these places in Paris that I had
never imagined.
Bailey: It’s my favorite place.
Haft: The best ice cream. The best bread. The hotel we stayed at. Do you remember that?
Bailey: Yes.
Haft: [Unintelligible 00:25:23]. Is that correct?
Bailey: Yeah, that area was right by the Sorbonne there, so that became my most familiar place.
Haft: [Unintelligible 00:25:30].
Bailey: It was. That’s a [unintelligible 00:25:38].
Haft: You introduced me to all the vices that I should have known by then, I guess. Ice cream especially.
Bailey: Ice cream and [unintelligible 00:25:47].
8
BUD: In a relationship with Victoria, they separated, and so they were never together, and Victoria
Bridges is very academic and very serious, and she ended up in Paris and lived all that time through
George, and then Marianne made another connection when they met.
Bailey: There was a really good reason for George to be there. It was to get me back together with
Victoria. We were close in grad school.
Haft: That was the woman you went to see when you and I were there in 2017.
Bailey: Yeah.
Haft: Okay, now the puzzle fits together.
Bailey: In Paris.
Haft: Yeah, I remember one day you went to visit her. You said it had been years.
Bailey: Years and years.
BUD: I know she mentioned at least one or two places not well known, art places.
Bailey: Oh, in the African Museum, I met her once.
BUD: She wasn’t even aware of having been there that long.
Bailey: That’s right. I met her another time at a café near the Sorbonne.
Haft: In addition to what else you brought to the French program, there was always Aimé Césaire, who
was an integral part of that, and in French in the Caribbean world.
Bailey: Yeah, I was happy to get that. I remember how Césaire was so surprised when I told him that
students up a little college in the Northwest—because he asked about the Northwest. I told him we had
rainforests. “What are they like? What are the species?” He wanted the Latin names of the trees, and I
had to just be a dummy. But I told him that he had a following in the Northwest. I made sure of it.
Haft: Was he a friend of Wilfredo Lam? How did you get interested in him?
Bailey: They were close, he and Lam.
Haft: I know that was one of the things I especially loved about teaching with you is being introduced to
his work, and the Haitians as well. Where did that come from?
Bailey: Césaire himself admired the Haitians because, though they’d had the whole slavery thing, it
hadn’t knocked all the artistic gumption out of them. They had kept their art going, even if their
drawings were on shacks or barn doors. You know how they do. They didn’t have a lot of paints, they
didn’t have canvases, but they always made images. He had been there a number of times, and had
come to admire them greatly, so you couldn’t know Césaire—and I knew Césaire because Jacqueline and
he were friends—without knowing that the Haitians were very important to him; that in spite of
colonization, they hadn’t been able to shut down their artistic impulse.
9
Haft: Had you studied vodun before?
Bailey: No, I only got into it through that interest and talking to Césaire a couple times. I met with him a
few times in Paris because of Jacqueline, because she was officially my doctor mother, as the Germans
would say. She introduced me to people and took me along as she was meeting people like that. That’s
how it was I got to know him over time. Then a couple times with Jacqueline trips down there to
Martinique. That really opened the door to me to a number of artists.
Haft: You had traveled to Martinique with Jacqueline?
Bailey: Yes.
Haft: When you were still at the Sorbonne, or after?
Bailey: It was . . . let’s see . . . once while I was still there, and then after also.
Haft: I know when you were here you went a couple of times for his some special . . .
Bailey: Was it his 90th birthday? Yeah. The odd thing is that Jacqueline opened all these doors for me,
but it was her husband, who had hired me from a class at UW when he was teaching there. I had a
couple classes from her, too, but it’s just that sometimes fate works out in positive ways. That was the
case there.
Haft: What was your most favorite program that you ever taught at Evergreen? [Unintelligible
00:31:18] if there is such a thing.
Bailey: Oh, wow. The most fun was when we taught Surrealism. It wasn’t stressful. It was a lot of fun.
Haft: The program that you and I and Hiro taught, Classical Legacy, I thought that was—
Bailey: Oh, right. Was it an incarnation of the French program?
Haft: Not really.
Bailey: No, it was Classical Legacy on its own.
Haft: It was my interest in Greece and Italy, but France was a part of it, I remember. There must have
been a language component to it.
Bailey: I think there was one. I think we talked a lot about how the Greeks had been in southern
France.
Haft: Yeah, but also how they passed on this artistic legacy and philosophical legacy that wasn’t always
the best thing for the Western world. I still think there are plenty of things wrong with what the Greeks’
aesthetic was like. This idealization of the human body, for instance. It makes us all ashamed of the
bodies we have. [laughing]
Bailey: Yeah, few people look like the Greek statues.
Haft: Right.
10
BUD: Why were you looking at me when you said that? [laughter]
Bailey: Because you’re the incarnation.
Haft: You have made it, Bud. When you took a sabbatical, what did you do at that time? Did you go
back to France, or did you write?
Bailey: I didn’t go back to France. I rested, and I worked on an article.
Haft: About Césaire?
Bailey: Yes. It was about Césaire and theater. It was shortly before . . . what was it now? Oh, there was
a kind of Césaire theater festival thing, so I got to work on a little talk for that. Then that became an
article on Césaire and Césaire’s theater.
Haft: I want to jump back a minute to the serialization program, because there were two things in that
program that, again, I credit you with turning me on to. One was [Javi and something? 00:33:59], and
the other is [Le Comte? 00:34:03]. Were those things that you had studied when you were at the
Sorbonne?
Bailey: No, they’re just things I encountered somehow along the way that I thought were really
interesting.
Haft: They are. Both of those things have colored my life, in a way, for the better, especially [Ubu?
00:34:30].
Bailey: The theater thing, I think mostly through Jacqueline, I got introduced to all the theater that’s
available in Paris when you’re there. There was a troupe, the [Ubu?] troupe—and Mr. Leiner, my boss
over the years, and who gave me a good salary; Bud and I both worked in Germany, and we had enough
money to travel to France often, or to travel elsewhere—the [Ubu?] company was known to Mr. Leiner,
and he had invited them to Tübingen to perform one of the [Ubu?] plays there. I remember that well
because I did whatever he wanted me to, and that included things like taking manuscripts to his
publisher in Paris, or going with this important person, or this artist in walking around and showing
Tübingen.
BUD: [UNESCO?].
Bailey: Oh, yeah. [UNESCO?] and I spent a day together. [laughter]
BUD: That would have been hell.
Bailey: It was funny. Anyway, Leiner was busy, and, of course, when the big, elegant dinner was offered
to [UNESCO?], Professor Leiner was there to greet him and introduce him to who’s who in that
university town. But who goes down to the train station and meets him and shows him the town?
That’s my job as the assistant. He was fun.
11
Haft: That brings up the point. One of the things that I always admired and worried about you at
Evergreen, you took on so many individual contracts above and beyond what you were teaching.
Bailey: I did.
Haft: We would have 25 students and then Marianne would have 15 contracts.
Bailey: I know. I did too much.
Haft: Do you think that came from that whole idea of mentoring that you got in Europe, working one on
one with a student rather than—
Bailey: Yeah, I suppose so. I could see that it was a good thing for students, but I kind of burned out.
Haft: I don’t know how you couldn’t.
Bailey: I got tired.
Haft: But you’re right. For some students . . .
Bailey: . . . it’s what they need.
Haft: Exactly. I remember Matt Smith talking about lost souls, and I thought that was a really apt
description of a number of students at Evergreen who couldn’t fit into a regular university, and they
probably couldn’t have fit into Evergreen very well either, except they could latch onto somebody like
you and say, “Would you do this with me for a quarter or two, or a year?”
Bailey: Yeah, I think our Surrealism class—did we do it only once?
Haft: No, we did it, I think, three times.
Bailey: Those were the kind of students. We got some really good ones, but we also got students who
had a certain amount of cleverness, but they weren’t academic types.
Haft: We had one student—probably this won’t be included—I remember she was from Utah, and you
understood she was a Mormon who was trying to . . .
Bailey: . . . get away.
Haft: She literally had to break this chain that was around her. Her performance was exactly that. It
was frightening to watch, to tell you the truth.
Bailey: That’s right. I don’t remember her name, but I remember that act.
Haft: Let’s talk about [Mark] Levinsky for a little bit. How did you come to teach with him?
Bailey: It was weird. He’s an imposing figure, and he had the office right next to where the secretary is
now in the building. I was down the hall, and I didn’t know him. I’d never been introduced to him, but I
went to a meeting of the humanities group, and afterward, he came up and said, “I’d like to talk to you.”
“All right.” He had a really brusque manner, but he was polite. He introduced himself and shook my
hand and he said he’d like to talk to me.
12
My impression was that he was a smart man. There are people around Evergreen who are not
what I think of as university professor material, but I could see that he was interesting, and I was
interested in philosophy, probably because of Bud having studied it.
So, I just said, “Sure. What did you want to talk about?” He was just really brusque, in his way,
and he said, “I think that we should teach together.” I said, “Oh, well, okay. Every other year, I’m busy
with the French program, but if we can fit that in, that’s all right.”
Haft: Do you have any idea what the impetus was from that meeting? You must have said something
that piqued his interest.
Bailey: I don’t think so, but he talked to people, I guess. He must have had some sense of what I taught.
We didn’t end up doing—what did I teach with him? A couple strange things.
Haft: Could it have been Nature? Because that’s another thing that you introduced [me to]. Nietzsche.
Bailey: Oh, Nietzsche. Maybe it was Nietzsche, and he didn’t respect Nietzsche.
Haft: Oh, he didn’t?
Bailey: He’d read Nietzsche, but he wasn’t a fan. I think it might have been Nietzsche. At least he knew
that I had interest in philosophy.
Haft: Let’s go back to Nietzsche because that was one thing that always ended up in whatever
curriculum you were teaching. [laughing]
Bailey: It always got in.
Haft: You could rope him into anything and make it relevant. That was pretty amazing.
Bailey: I know.
BUD: He’s so misunderstood.
Bailey: Yeah.
Haft: Were you introduced to him when you were in or Tübingen, or was that prior to that?
Bailey: No, it was prior. From the first year either of us went to grad school, way back in Reno.
BUD: No, at the UW.
Bailey: At the UW I mean.
BUD: [Unintelligible 00:42:26].
Bailey: He had enjoyed a lot. I’d say he was already Bud’s favorite philosophy, so we talked about it,
and I was aware.
BUD: The Genealogy of Morals [On the Genealogy of Morality] was the starter.
Bailey: Yeah. I thought it would be fun to teach a philosophy class, but not just any. Nietzsche was an
odd uncle that was in our family.
13
BUD: Also, literary characters that you could . . .
Bailey: Yeah. Because he was important for literature, too.
Haft: Yeah, when you and I first taught together and you introduced me to Nietzsche, my impression of
him at that time—and I think I wasn’t alone in this—I think it was the general impression that he was
enfant terrible. He was persona non grata in the United States. Somehow, he was associated with
fascism or something? And after reading him—
Bailey: Yeah, some people did that, but he didn’t have any relation to—
BUD: “God is dead” was the [unintelligible 00:43:42].
Bailey: That made people who were highly religious anti-Nietzsche.
BUD: I can’t think of the word now, but nihilism—those two things were what people would use to—
Haft: Yeah, but there was such a misunderstanding and misapprehension of who and what he was and
what he said.
Bailey: Yeah.
Haft: Again, I credit you with teaching me and everybody—all the students you subsequently worked
with—that that was just false. It was so, so wrong.
Bailey: Yeah.
Haft: He was the dancing philosopher.
Bailey: Yeah. Another thing that’s a downer about him, he couldn’t afford to wake up in the morning
and say, “The hell with things,” because his health was giving him such trouble. He had very few friends.
He had very little money, and his life wasn’t easy. He had to be life-affirming, as he would put it, or else
he wouldn’t have lasted very long. I just admired him, and everything I learned from Bud and from his
classes in Nietzsche, and I started reading.
BUD: He was a good antidote for what was all the rage in American universities at the time, which is
basically philosophy turned into mathematics. It was a mathematical game [unintelligible 00:45:36].
Haft: I can’t remember if I asked you. Did you teach with Andrew Hanfman ever, the German program?
Bailey: No.
Haft: That’s too bad.
Bailey: He didn’t teach after I was hired. I taught with Charlie Teske, the German program. And
Marianna, who taught the language. What else did I teach?
Haft: You taught with a number of people that I was impressed when I looked over the range of folks
that you taught with. It’s impressive. From Paul Sparks to Charlie Teske. [laughter] And Paul is, I’ve got
14
to tell you, one of my favorite people. He and I have taught together 20-some times. We didn’t agree
on much, but I just liked teaching with him because he was . . .
Bailey: . . . so weird?
Haft: . . . such a good teacher. He was weird, but he could get a lot out of students. I think he shared
that with you. You could get students to do stuff that I wouldn’t have had the courage to say—
Bailey: Tell them to do it? [laughter]
BUD: I didn’t know Paul until we went to that one—when it was early on, there was a deal in [what is]
now, I guess, on top of the Library Building.
Haft: Oh, yes, that big fourth floor.
BUD: There was a big deal, and they had a dance going on and I saw Paul Sparks doing the mashed
potato.
Bailey: Oh, yeah. That was a sight. [laughter]
Haft: Who was somebody that you wished you had taught with? Is there anybody? Like Andrew, who
might have retired right after you got there?
Bailey: That would have been nice to have a chance to teach with him, because we had fun speaking
French and German together, and switching back—English, French, German. It would have kind of fun. I
have no idea, though, what he was like as a professor.
Haft: Did you know Rainer Hasenstab?
Bailey: No, I didn’t.
Haft: He was German.
Bailey: What field was he in, do you remember?
Haft: I couldn’t tell you. I want to say geology or something.
Bailey: I see.
Haft: But he was a real sweetheart. A really great guy.
Bailey: I could get the idea of interdisciplinary when it was art and literature and, say, philosophy. That
made sense for me. But to go farther afield, I just thought, this is getting kind of weird. We’re
stretching things in all directions to try and make it work. I never did teach with a scientist, for example.
Haft: Are there particular students that stand out in your mind? Kathy?
Bailey: Gosh, my memory has gotten so bad.
Haft: Kathy Smith, for instance.
Bailey: Is she still around here?
Haft: I have no clue. I imagine she might still be [in Haiti? 00:49:03].
15
Bailey: She and her boyfriend. Her boyfriend, we saw once, Bud and I. We ran into him working at . . .
it was a shop on that Mud Bay Road there. I think there’s a kind of junkshop with all sorts of different
things. One of those little stores that’s not exactly an antique shop, but he worked there for a while.
But Kathy was a very bright woman, and she ended up keeping her interest in [voodoo? Vodun?
00:49:59], and she traveled to Haiti.
Haft: I know, yeah.
Bailey: She went down to—was it Florida, or Louisiana?
Haft: I think it was.
Bailey: And stayed in the South. Took a job down there. And I’d be surprised if [you? 00:50:20] weren’t
still teaching down there. It’s where she can go travel into the Caribbean without too much trouble.
She was close.
Haft: I ask this question of all the people that I’ve interviewed, and that is, if you were to give advice to
somebody who’s just joining the Evergreen faculty, what might that be? You might have to think about
it.
Bailey: I think one thing is to accept the fact that there will be a number of students in your class who
are very bright, though you may not think that at first glimpse.
Haft: Yeah, yeah.
Bailey: So, it’s important to have a certain flexibility maybe in how a paper is written. But on the other
hand, there will be people who really shouldn’t be at a university, and you have to just accept that and
live with it.
Haft: You told me you always taught for the top 10 percent of the class.
Bailey: I still think that, teaching to the top 10 percent.
Haft: I think that’s good advice. Rachel Corrie was one of our students in the Surrealism program.
Bailey: Yes, that’s right.
Haft: Do you know her at all?
BUD: I don’t think so.
Haft: She’s this young woman who was killed by Israel with a bulldozer.
BUD: Yeah, I know that. She was a friend of Jade’s.
Bailey: She was friends with her.
Haft: She was brilliant. She really was.
BUD: Was she?
16
Haft: Yeah. What would you tell students coming to Evergreen? As you say, some students shouldn’t
be at a university.
Bailey: Their parents want them to go to college, so they send them there. I think you have to be
careful not to accept something that really isn’t university quality, because there are aspects of
Evergreen that push you to accept that, and to give the student all their credits. I don’t think you should
be really stiff-necked about what you consider to be university work, but you have to find a median
place where they’re working to a standard that you’re not embarrassed of.
Haft: Yeah. There were faculty, I know, when I began, for whom it was all or nothing. Either a student
got all credit, or they got no credit. They might have been in a program for a whole year and that was it.
BUD: Wow.
Bailey: Really? Rather than giving reduced credit?
Haft: Yes.
Bailey: I don’t believe in that. If they do some aspects of the program really well, it doesn’t mean they
should get full credit, but they should get some. At least that’s how I saw it.
Haft: With your job editing those papers for Professor Leiner, that must have been great training for
reading student papers.
Bailey: It was. I used to know all the marks you make for a publisher, because his publisher was in Paris,
and the marking up of the paper or newspaper had to be done according to the international [standard].
I learned to do that, but I can’t remember now. It had to be that because you’d take once or twice
sometimes, I would just mail them for him. Often, he’d take the night train to Paris and give them to the
publisher, but I had to be sure that it was clearly marked.
BUD: You did student papers, too.
Bailey: And the student papers, when I was in Tübingen, yeah, the master’s exams were part of my task.
Reading the master’s exams for literature.
Haft: Wow.
Bailey: For French literature.
Haft: This is probably my final question. What program do you think pushed you outside your comfort
zone the most? What program maybe did you think you learned the most from that you were surprised
at?
Bailey: That’s a hard one. One thing, Bob, from teaching in art classes with you, I learned way more
about art than I ever knew, because I really had never studied it. Ever. Not taken a class in art. Had
we? Had you ever?
17
BUD: I took one early on, but I don’t think you did.
Bailey: It’s just something that a person with my interests should know, and I didn’t know it. I was
really glad that I learned more about it.
BUD: You talked about that.
Bailey: Yeah, for sure. Jacqueline had friends who were artists, and one time in Martinique, we went to
some art galleries with friends of Césaire’s, who were friends of Césaire, and that was really interesting.
At least I had a way of understanding them a little bit, knew how to look at them.
Haft: Living in Germany and in France, it struck me when I lived abroad that the Europeans assimilate
art like they do their mother’s milk practically. It’s everywhere.
Bailey: They’re around it. It’s everywhere.
Haft: It’s just such an integral part of their heritage. That was a difficult thing for me as an American the
first time I went abroad. Young kids could talk about art in ways that graduate students talk about it
here.
Bailey: Yeah. I think it’s part of their schooling. Both the German and the French students. It’s
expected of them to pass their first exam to leave what Germans call gymnasium, and for the French, it’s
the first eight grades or so. Art is a significant part of that.
Haft: Anything else that you want to add that you’ve thought about since your retirement?
Bailey: I’m still adapting to retirement. It’s kind of . . . it’s been a good rest for me, for sure. I sleep too
much. But I often don’t know what to do with myself also. But I’m happy I don’t have to get up and try
to give a lecture or something because my memory is not at all good.
Haft: That’s another thing I should mention. Your lectures were stunning. They really were.
Bailey: That’s sweet of you to say. Performance—I wasn’t a ballet dancer anymore, but by gawd, I had
an audience, and I used it. [laughter]
Haft: I guess that’s it. They were like a performance. You could enthrall an audience, and I think, what
better way to grab a student’s attention. Right? No matter who they were. What was the word I used?
[Insortulation? 00:59:34], I think. [laughter]
BUD: Mark Levinsky said, after one of her lectures, “I don’t believe a word she said, or understand it,
but that was one hell of a lecture.” [laughter]
Haft: We’ll end on that note. Thanks a lot, Marianne. This was great fun.
Bailey: It was fun.
18
