Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies is housed in a brightly modern building topped with a curving glass wall that glitters over the street. The architecture seems to announce that what goes on inside the Center—the debates on policy and diplomacy, the provocative points made in its glass-panelled rooms—is as new and polished as the building itself.
George Scialabba is neither new nor polished. Now sixty-seven, he’s balding and bespectacled and often wears a look of sorrowful intelligence. In conversation, he sometimes trails off mid-sentence into a reflective silence. He served as the room scheduler for the Center from the time it was built, ten years ago; he began working in its previous incarnation, a drably converted old hotel, in 1980. For thirty-five years he busied himself with clerical duties—room assignments, maintenance, and so on—while also, after work, writing his commanding, philosophical essays.
He is a master of the book review, and his brilliant pieces recall intellectuals of an older vintage—Dwight Macdonald, maybe, or Edmund Wilson. Like them, Scialabba is a generalist, a man of letters and a man of the Left, surprisingly unaffiliated and dauntingly well read, a man who has spent his writing life paddling against the currents of political orthodoxy and academic specialization. (A few years ago, on this Web site, James Wood described him as “a shrewd, learned, undogmatic guide to contemporary debates about theology and postmodernity.”) His idols are Noam Chomsky, Richard Rorty, and Christopher Lasch; Scialabba’s book “What Are Intellectuals Good For?” is dedicated to them. He has also, it’s worth noting, written about feminism—in essays on Ellen Willis and Vivian Gornick, for example—with a sympathetic self-awareness rare among men. He has published three collections and about four hundred pieces, sustaining a life of freelance criticism with years of punching the clock. On August 31st, he retired from the day job.
A week and a half later, the magazine The Baffler threw him a campy retirement party, “Three Cheers for George Scialabba,” at the Brattle Theatre, in Cambridge. There were toasts by Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, Rick Perlstein, and Nikil Saval. The Cambridge City Council had just passed Resolution 658, making that day, September 10, 2015, George Scialabba Day. The whole idea was a cackling jab at the pomp and officiousness Scialabba himself so utterly lacks. The City Council’s resolution noted that Scialabba had “diligently fulfilled the room scheduling needs of overpaid professors for 35 years” and asked Cambridge residents “who still practice the habit of reading to place their collective tongues in their collective cheeks” and celebrate his marvelous deeds.
“I really don’t see any justification for it,” he’d told me the day before. To his admirers, Scialabba is something of a literary monk, shuffling virtuously in the background, spurning public attention. His writing completes the portrait: his measured essays generally concern better-known thinkers, more roaring, titanic writers whose own work stomps imperiously down the page. “As far as I know, I’ve never had a genuinely original idea,” he told me. He promised that this wasn’t a boast.
Scialabba’s monastic reputation may stem in part from his personal history. At the end of high school, he joined Opus Dei, an extreme Catholic prelature. He wore a hair shirt, spent some nights sleeping on the floor, and devoted hours to silent prayer. He forswore, as he later put it, the “delicious excesses” then being touted by his generational cohort. (This was the nineteen-sixties.) Scialabba grew up in East Boston, in a working-class, Italian family; then he went to Harvard. There, he submitted some of his syllabi to the local chapter of Opus Dei to be inspected for heresy. (He dropped a few courses deemed unacceptable.) But the split between his orthodoxy and his burgeoning interest in European philosophy became unbearable. He broke down, then burst out, abandoning the Church with a flourish of uncharacteristic theatricality: just after graduation, he marched into a meeting of his chapter of Opus Dei and announced that he no longer believed, that he was through with the whole medieval, benighted Church. Then he clammed up, frozen and flabbergasted by his own outburst. He was led gently out of the room. Modernity had claimed another soul. “Voltaire and Rousseau have corrupted better men than me,” he said.
What followed was a crushing depression that forced him to drop out of graduate school, at Columbia, and blocked his intellectual labor for about a decade. “I couldn’t sit reading a book for more than ten minutes,” he told me. The first depression was followed by others, and the academic career that the he had fantasized about ended before it began. He became a social worker, which, in his case, largely amounted to processing monotonous paperwork in the Boston suburbs. He did it for six years, then he got the job at Harvard, seeing to the clerical needs of academics whose ranks he would never join.
Last year, The Baffler, where Scialabba is now a contributing editor—a paying, part-time gig—published his essay “The Endlessly Examined Life,” which compiled over forty years’ worth of notes from his therapists. It’s a sad, stirring document that comes prefaced with Scialabba’s compulsive modesty. “Why publish them now?” Scialabba asks. “Certainly not because I think these extracts from my treatment notes display any special literary facility or reveal an exceptionally interesting psyche.” The piece comprises a nattering catalogue of tiny comments on Scialabba’s demeanor and style of dress, his responses to medication, his philosophical crises, his sexual malfunctions, his howling relapses into paralyzing depression, his cousin’s suicide, his obsessive compulsions, and his skepticism regarding the whole psychiatric enterprise:
These days he is grateful, he said, for never having endured tenure committees, never having had to bow before the academic job market or the feudalism and hypocrisy of professionalized intellect. He tried to remember a line from the end of “Middlemarch,” but couldn’t, something about how some lives will never see the light, graveyards being full of the forgotten—I didn’t remember it either—but the gist of it, he told me, was that it was right, even good, to be someone obscure for whom the world was in some small way better. The virtue of public intellectuals, he once wrote, is that they “hemmed in everyday barbarism a little.”
Scialabba’s retirement party was quaint but also extravagant; at the end, two brass bands took the stage and charged down the aisles, a conga line snaking behind them as chants and cheers mingled with the honk of instruments. Chomsky gave a long speech, and Thomas Frank poured malt liquor into his champagne flute, which he then thrust upward in an irreverent toast.
The next day I flipped to the end of my copy of “Middlemarch” for the quote that Scialabba had forgotten. He was thinking of the very last line. It’s about Dorothea, and how “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” Scialabba is no Dorothea, though, not really—his life, if this raucous celebration is any indication, isn’t quite as hidden as he thinks it is, or might like it to be.
