T HE literary critic Alfred Kazin recalled in his journals his close friendship with Hofstadter and Hofstadter's first wife, Felice Swados, a writer and editor, who died at age twenty-nine. Kazin remembered most of all Hofstadter's riotous sense of humor. During the Depression, Kazin wrote, Felice seriously tried to get Dick work in a nightclub as a stand-up comic. We all howled when he did his imitation of FDR and of the Ozark farmer whose daughter had fallen into the well. Must get her out of there one of these days.
Serious scholarship has a way of filtering out the belly laughs.
It does, however, allow for a softer kind of wit, and Hofstadter's irony in The American Political Tradition is both cutting and amusing. Like his literary gifts, Hofstadter's sardonic humor was more than adornment. He took inordinate pains to complicate every picture. But he was also a complex man, easily complex enough to know the value of his own simplicity. This sort of seesawing can seem timid, wishy-washy.