Gerald Myers (1924–2009)

Born in Central City, Nebraska, Gerald Myers attended Haverford College and took his PhD in philosophy at Brown University in 1954, as a student of Roderick Chisholm. Subsequently he taught philosophy at Smith, Williams, Kenyon, C. W. Post College, and Queens College of the City University of New York. I recruited him to Queens College. While at Queens College he became director of the doctoral program at the Graduate Center of CUNY.

For many years, Myers published essays on the emotions, introspection, memory, perception, the will, and vagaries of the “Self.” Written in the analytic mode, these essays were capacious, well-wrought, and philosophically sophisticated. The thought of William James often served as a backdrop, a foil, or an adumbration during this period of Myers’s published work.

It is indeed fortunate that the backdrop became the forecourt as Myers set out to render William James: His Life and Thought in a full-dress study (Yale UP, 1986). As I wrote on the book jacket, “Myers’ weaving of the life, writings, activities, and private and public thought of James is extraordinarily well done. His work on James will take its place as the premier study, superseding its only worthy predecessor, the Pulitzer Prize volumes of Ralph Barton Perry in 1935.” This book was extolled by many, inclusive of Abraham Edel, Frederick Burkhardt, Martin Gardner, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. It remains an oft-cited taproot for most contemporary writings on William James. For more than a decade, I spent many hours discussing this project with Myers, and I can say that for him, the attempt to unravel the philosophical complexities in the philosophy of William James as striated by the personal complexities in his life, constituted a mission, both haunting and fascinating. Some twenty-three years later, I can say that Myers on William James remains fetching, prosaically limpid, and smart, very smart.

In the last years of his life, Gerald Myers became a major figure in the world of dance. In concert with his wife, Martha Coleman Myers, a dancer with a heritage dating to Martha Graham and who was a notable, distinguished teacher of dance, Gerald Myers became philosopher-in-residence at the American Dance Festival. He was especially influential in assisting the African-American dance tradition and was instrumental in arranging the Free-to-Dance documentary on PBS in 2001. Gerald Myers also published several books on dance, including one in 2008, Who’s Not Afraid of Martha Graham?, a vintage Gerald Myers remark as a title.

I speak now as one of Gerald Myers’s dearest and deepest friends of more than forty years. When I was callow and uninitiated, he took me by the hand and taught me how to negotiate the treacherous wiles of professional philosophy, for which I am ever grateful. You cannot catch his marvelous persona by hearing about him. One had to be with him to be awash in his utterly systemic affability, a quality he sustained in the face of personal demons, overcome only after a long, arduous struggle. The philosophers of Myers’s generation, many of them World War II and Korean War veterans, were a raucous, rollicking crowd whose brilliance was matched only by their superb comedic antics. Gerald Myers was a cardinal presence in those after-hours symposia, often lasting until 5 a.m. The stories, the banter, the asides, and always, the philosophical wisdom filtered through the prism of the “absurd,” the haplessness of being smart. The actors and actresses in the stories are fast disappearing. Gerald Myers is dead, but for me, at least, he was always larger than life. And so, he is still with me. If you want to hear some stories, I have them. Gerry Myers would be pleased, were I to tell them!

Requiescat in pace,
John J. McDermott