My Friend Edward

"Do you know any intelligent people in this city?" Saul Bellow asked me one night in 1973, not long after I had met him. Before I could reply, he said, answering his own question, "I know three: Harold Rosenberg, David Grene, and Edward Shils." All three men, along with Bellow himself, were then members of the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Harold Rosenberg, then also the art critic for The New Yorker, invented the useful phrase "a herd of independent minds." David Grene, who has a reputation for being a spirited teacher, is the translator of Herodotus and the great Athenian playwrights. I didn't know much about Edward Shils although I had read his essays in Encounter except that he was a social scientist, and, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, he was known for being a very formidable figure, distinctly not a man to fool with. I only subsequently learned that he had had the decisive hand in designing what for me were the best courses I had taken at that school, the courses in the College called Social Science II and History. I was, then, already in debt to Edward Shils without knowing it. Over the following years, from 1973 until his death on January 23, 1995, this debt would grow beyond reckoning. Perhaps because his prose was chaste, even severe, I pictured Edward Shils as tall, slender, a bit gaunt. I couldn't have been more wrong. When Saul Bellow showed up at my apartment with Edward one night, I discovered a man of five foot eight, portly (though with no fiabbiness or anything soft about him), a paucity of rather wispy grayish hair, and the florid coloring that suggested the potential pugnacity of a former redhead. He carried, but didn't really use, a walking stick, and he wore a tweedy getup of various shades of brown with a green wool tie and an Irish hat. I took him, correctly, to be a man of good taste for whom personal vanity had a low priority. I watched his eyes roam across my living room, checking the books in my glassed-in bookcases, the prints on my walls, the plants on my windowsills. Clearly, he was, as Henry James says one must always try to be, a man on whom nothing was lost. We dined at a Korean restaurant on Clark Street, and Edward interrogated me, calling me Mr. Epstein. He wanted to know what I was writing and for whom. He asked what I was teaching (I had begun to teach at Northwestern University that year). He inquired about what I happened to be reading at the moment. When I told him that I was reading Alison