BaileyMarianne_20220208Part3_Transcript.pdf

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Part of Marianne Bailey Oral History Interview

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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,

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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 . . .

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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.

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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?
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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].
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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?
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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.
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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].

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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

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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].
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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?

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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.

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