¹ For this beginning I rely on a letter from Bernard Bloch's distant cousin Herman Salinger, Professor of German at Duke University, whom I met at the University of Wisconsin fifteen years after hearing of him from Bernard. Other friends and acquaintances have supplemented the public records and my memories beyond what I can acknowledge here; my own acquaintance with Bernard Bloch began with June of 1931, and without a break from the first hour I was proud of being his friend.

² Albert's sketch in Who's who characteristically omits mention of his marriage and children, for he was an intensely private man; and it includes the equally characteristic warning 'exhibits only on invitation and never competes for prizes or submits pictures for the approval of juries.' He was 'associated with' the Blauer Reiter group that included Klee and Kandinsky—he would not have said that he ‘belonged to’ any group—and we can guess that he had a voice in settling upon the title of the Berlin Secession, it is so consonant with his character. As in painting, so also in writing he was an extreme antiphilistine and thus inevitably an admirer of Karl Kraus. To Albert Bloch's strong and sober manner in writing and in painting, with its vigorous strains of passion and wit, another trait was joined which Bernard also inherited: his autonomy was so strong that after reaching maturity as an artist he had no need for further uncertainty but settled down to styles which remained consistent thereafter—a sort of personal academicism, a solid footing from which he could both produce and teach art and also project his critical essays and verses. His strongest word of condemnation was Kitsch.

³ Bernard's brother Walter, the younger by nine years, began his career as an actor and is established as a television script writer; his professional name is Walter Black. Albert Bloch sent his wife and the two boys to St. Louis early in 1919, but remained in Europe, mostly in Paris, until 1922, returning then to a year of teaching in the Chicago Institute of Fine Arts. In 1923 he took his family to Lawrence, where he spent the rest of his active life on the faculty of the University.

⁴ He had been on the Honor Roll continuously and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa early. Thereafter he wore its key almost constantly, even after watch chains were long out of style. When I twitted him once on that, he gave me to understand—rather curtly, for I had not let him choose his own time for revealing it—that he did it because his father valued that key so highly that leaving it off in public (especially when at a great distance from his father) would have felt unfilial to Bernard. Neither of them was a practitioner of religion, but both had strong private pieties; both despised superstition, but these pieties were radically different: they were autonomous.

⁵ Also, in his father's courses, one semester of freehand drawing and three of the history of painting. Bernard was not active in painting, partly because of diffidence about competing with his father as a colorist, partly (and characteristically) because the techniques leave hardly any middle ground between mastery and muddling. Line drawing was different. For the rest of his life he remained able to produce without erasure a swift line portrait worth keeping; his doodling was an artist's doodling; he made caricatures on tempting occasions, and when a companion was in a cheerful mood, he liked to horrify him with profiles of human faces lacking some essential feature: no eyes, no nose, or no mouth, but otherwise idealized and never based on the portrait of a friend or worthy acquaintance.

⁶ His M.A. thesis title was ‘The Old Irish saga-romance of Deirdre,‘ and its preface (kindly copied for me by Frances Ingemann) is worth quoting for more than one reason:

It was my original intention, when I began the work on this study, to include not only the old Irish versions of the saga-romance of Deirdre, but all available modern adaptations in English by the writers of the Celtic Revival; indeed, these adaptations were to be the chief subject-matter, the remarks on the source-material simply an introduction to the main body of the paper. Very soon, however, I found that this preliminary matter must inevitably grow beyond the bounds I had thought to set it; and eventually, realizing that my original field of investigation was much too large for the intensive method of study into which I had allowed myself to drift, I put aside all my notes on the Modern Versions for possible later use, and in this paper confined myself to the old saga …

My unfamiliarity with the field of Celtic scholarship, especially during the early stages of the work, deprived me of the service of many valuable books which would have made this paper more complete and more accurate, but which came to my notice too late …

The purpose of this elementary study is not to add another volume to the vast but still-growing library of Celtic philology, but only to furnish a background, slight though it may be, for those who read the dramas, prose-tales and poems of modern Irish writers: to supply these readers with some knowledge of the old romance, for the sake of its own great beauty and for the sake of the beauty it has called forth in our own day, that they may read more perfectly the meaning of these modern poets, and see ‘beyond the shaken reeds of the mind the depth-held star of the old passion of beauty, the old longing, the old enchantment.‘

⁷ He thought of his own interest in languages as literary rather than technically linguistic: for him their intricacies were modes of thought and means of expression, especially expression of passion and of beauty. The old Irish language was reputed to be ferociously difficult; all the greater, he felt, would be the rewards for his efforts, and he felt able to conquer any difficulties the language might offer. At the same time, paradoxically, he called himself a drifter, and one ambitious only to become a flaneur. He knew his own talents as he knew his face in a mirror, perceiving that his sensitivity for and knowledge of literature were outstanding, and that he was already writing both prose and verse with a facility that was astonishing when one realized that the product was uniformly of high quality: his strong points were clarity and frankness of both thought and feeling, and his weakness was that he could not write obscurely or bring himself to use a word that missed the exact message. He knew, finally, that there was a good deal of arrogance in this self-estimation, but felt that if he made sufficiently arrogant demands upon himself the social consequences would be justified.

⁸ Phonetics was prominent in Leopold's treatment; Bernard set to work to edit and systematize what he was learning, and encapsulated the result in a tabulation which filled in the deficiencies of the IPA and added hitherto disregarded details. Because he showed it to me in June of 1931, and we discussed it, I can report at least these three ultimate effects: (1) he insinuated much of it into the Atlas alphabet developed that summer; (2) it contributed strongly to the 1940 Tables he published with George L. Trager; (3) he led me to reconsider apical and predorsal (his 'laminal') [s] and thus provided a crucial source for my paper 'The medieval sibilants' twenty years later. It was characteristic of Bernard Bloch to remember Leopold's helping him specifically with that tabulation when Leopold himself has forgotten it: 'Bloch showed up in my phonetics course,' Leopold has written to me; 'I remember him definitely, sitting opposite me across a long seminar table, looking haggard and semi-starved like a typical graduate student. I soon discovered that he knew a good deal about phonetics—why and how I do not know—and had a remarkably good sense for things phonetic. That Christmas I sat next to Miles Hanley at some group meeting of the MLA or LSA and mentioned to him that I had a very good candidate for field work on the Linguistic Atlas, which was then in its preparatory stages. Hanley took me up, and this led to Bloch's appointment on the Atlas staff and at Brown U. For many years Bloch often acknowledged to me that I had given him a start in his linguistic career, meekly and gratefully—until I finally told him to relegate that fact to history and not talk about it any more.'

⁹ In those Northwestern years he invested a great deal in a campaign to make himself a normally social person. He had never learned to drive a car or to dance, strange as that obviously is for a Kansas background; his extreme nearsightedness and shyness had kept him out of boyhood group sports and thus closed to him the usual path to general sociability. Now he set about training himself socially, starting out, of course, by way of his knowledge and talents in language, art, and music. On the Northwestern campus he met William Keith (Bill) Lenihan, M.A. (Trinity College, Dublin), who was also there on a fellowship, and they became boon companions: Lenihan was almost a Buck Mulligan to Bernard's Stephen Dedalus, and together they plunged into the evening life of the artists, musicians, and literary people who were developing Chicago's Near North Side into a counterpart of Greenwich Village only twenty minutes away from the Northwestern campus. Orange Blossoms made with bathtub gin were an essential ingredient, word games and poker were alternative amusements; there was dissipation in it (no wonder he looked ‘haggard and semi-starved’ to Leopold), but Bernard's powerful fastidiousness kept him out of the occasional debauchery: he would depart with one companion, very likely a girl, perhaps to a concert or a long walk. (Three years later than that, I sought out Lenihan and found him far gone in drink and exhaustion from his volunteer work in the Chicago slums: in two or three years more he was dead, a victim of his compassions.) From those two years Bernard took away what he could use, if not entirely what the others may have said he needed. Certainly he felt no need for what most of them were looking for, and especially he did not need escape. He gained experiences, and memories, and a precious sheaf of writing: more triolets, more ballades and sonnets, and that remarkable prose poem ‘Orpheus and Eurydice,‘ which he later used to read aloud to a favored few. Lenihan had taught him how to read Synge's Deirdre aloud; and thereafter, whether Bernard was reading that aloud or his own prose poem, there was in his voice more than an echo of Bill Lenihan's voice, that sonorous and passionate voice which convinced one that educated Irish English was the best possible way to pronounce our language.

¹⁰ When Jakob Jud had returned to his home he soon received a letter from Bernard Bloch, expressing appreciation and including a technical remark intended to elicit a more than pro-forma reply. The answer came after a delay which Jud explained by saying that his proofreading work, normally a half-time occupation, had been accumulating for three months and that he had cleaned it up before answering the letter: 'Drei Wochen hartnäckigen Durchstosses hat es gekostet, aber jetzt ist es fertig.' In showing me the letter, Bernard asked whether I was particularly struck by one line in it; and when I quoted that one, he said, 'That's the line I mean. Drei Wochen hartnäckigen Durchstosses—what a man!' He must have returned to it in conversation with me three or more times that winter, and in later years used to refer to it every half dozen years or so.

¹¹ My beat was just across the river, and we met frequently. He had known Julia McDonnell (M.A. in English, quietly maintaining the household for her widowed father and younger sister and brother, and most at home on the Mount Holyoke campus where she had studied) only a couple of weeks when he drove with her to my lodgings one evening in October and said he wanted me to come out and meet someone and spend the evening with them. I was captivated, as anyone who knew her would expect; Julia told me much later that for some months she thought Bernard was no more attached to her than I was, and that she took neither attachment at all seriously. In fact he had made up his mind very early, and within days told me that he would have to conceal his intent through a very long campaign. He recognized in this scholarly, warm, and witty Irish Catholic lady a family piety as strong as his own—but she was fond of Deirdre too. I was at their wedding just before I returned to Wisconsin from my year of fieldwork.

Bernard Bloch and Julia Evelyn McDonnell were married 3 September 1932; their son Walter was born 15 July 1942; she died 22 October 1960 of a malady which they knew to be fatal some ten years before they let any friend or acquaintance suspect it. Among many casual observers their marriage was reputed to be stormy and even strained; that notion is categorically false. Julia's unwavering devotion was clear at a second glance; but Bernard's absolute enthrallment was hidden from all but the very keenest observers by that smokescreen of flippancy which he kept ready for all but professional concerns and which he here employed continuously. It was only when he had become convinced that they were eventually to be parted by her death that he began to let down his guard a little. He could not (and therefore she could not) disclose the secret by name to anyone whatever, and this was his way of appealing for the good wishes of their closest friends without admitting that he had communicated anything.

The Julia Bloch Memorial Scholarship Fund which friends within the Society promptly instituted has now been renamed the Bernard and Julia Bloch Memorial Fund. This means far more than any but their closest friends within the Linguistic Society can know.

¹² That was the year when our correspondence was voluminous: a letter each way every week or two, running from three to thirty-odd pages each. For one professional result, see Lg. 36.256-62 (1960); but for me the essential thing is that those letters kept me afloat, so that eventually other people could consider me worth saving for a professional career. What he was doing for me was the sine qua non, and he suspected as much; I was his friend, and he made this his commitment, writing about everything under the sun—life and music and literature and etymologies until it was enough.

¹³ At the banquet of the Ninth Congress held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 1962, he was invited to speak ex tempore about the 1936 Congress, and surprised many by the deep emotion with which he spoke of its great significance for him, especially the social contacts with European linguists whom he named. The banquet audience had mostly thought of him as always grey-haired; now they were hearing what an intellectual honeymoon was like, and few of them could know what the constant presence of Julia Bloch in the picture meant to it, now that she had been dead for two years.

Bernard Bloch retained all his life a vivid sense of what it meant to be a young beginner in our science. For example, David DeCamp was at the University of California at Berkeley in the summer of 1951 when Bloch was there for the Linguistic Institute, and was nibbling at the problem of a dialect survey for California. He happened to have a New England field-record in his hands when they met in a corridor, and impulsively he handed it to Bernard, who opened it in the middle and saw again, for the first time in more than a decade, his own calligraphic phonetic script of twenty years earlier. Unable to speak at first ('Taken aback,' DeCamp says), he finally said, 'Voices from the dead!' and fell silent again. Then he said, 'As you are now, so was I then,' and presently added, 'Some of us are having some drinks at half past four,' and told DeCamp where. 'Why don't you join us?'—'If I were asked to say when I became a linguist,' DeCamp says now, 'I would answer that it was then and there, in that corridor.'

¹⁴ Ultimately there were twelve dissertations completed under Bloch's supervision, and at least five of them have been published.

¹⁵ For a systematic presentation of details, and something that might be called Bernard Bloch's Articles of Faith as Editor, see his report at the end of his twenty-fifth year, Bulletin No. 38, 22-6 (1965), to which at least this much should be added: his policy of inviting reviews both from established experts and from beginners, and his way of making the invitation a challenge for both categories, made the reviews in Language an individual experience and a contribution to linguistic science that must compel the highest admiration.

¹⁶ After a closing paragraph, the eulogy ends with the eighteen lines by T. S. Eliot, from ‘Little Gidding’ in Four quartets, that run: 'What we call the beginning … See, they return, and bring us with them.' Dr. Goldin must have especially valued the long parenthesis in the middle, 'where every word is at home …'