In Conversation with Ron Grele

I am sitting with Ron on a bench in front of his small garden overlooking Morningside Park in New York City, close to Columbia University. In this late summer, the irises are all gone, but the yellow-red marigolds are still flourishing, and a gigantic sunflower has emerged by its own will in the little spot between the nasturtiums and the dwarf lantana. We are discussing various approaches to oral history research, updating our opinions on the destiny—in recent years—of the polemics in favor of or against the central role of subjectivity in the collection and interpretation of memory. The debate has widened, extending to many countries in the world besides the North Atlantic European/American original bias, but often the old positivistic attitude reappears, together with the illusion of "giving voice" to the voiceless. This is partially due to the tendency of oral history programs to diminish consideration of the theoretical and methodological implications of using memory sources and to favor a pragmatic approach. The practice of oral history has become more refined from both the technical and archival points of view, but it insists these have priority, claiming that they are more directly political and of higher relevance for activists. Thus, the critique of the sources, which has had so much impact on historiography as a whole, is abandoned or left aside.

This issue, for/over which both Ron and I fought for many years, is a challenge in which we still perceive resonances and affinities between us, even if by now we do different things than in the past. I am engaged in defining and enlarging the field of visual memory, while Ron is more interested in orality and sound, keeping high his interest in theory. I envy and admire his capacity to read very widely, establishing connections between philosophy and history and the social sciences. In any case, we are still united by the passion for memory, and memory is a constant companion in our encounters, a frequent interlocutor in our conversations. The past seems to take up life again when we are together, which does not happen often enough since we live on the opposite sides of an ocean. Our conversations include silences, not in the sense that we remain silent (Ron very rarely does), but rather in the sense that we can take for granted many things because of implicit convergences of mind, although not always in agreement.

There is a background to this mutual understanding. Ron and I met in March 1979, at the first International Oral History Conference at the University of Essex. I remember that I gave a paper on the memory of fascism among the working class in Turin—my first public presentation of that research—and when the floor opened to debate, I saw a man getting up from the back of the room, a large amphitheater, to give a vibrant and encouraging response to my talk, in refined theoretical terms. Years later, Ron told me that while I was speaking he kept saying to his colleague: "That's it! She has got it!" At the end of the session, we actually met and exchanged more ideas and feelings. An intense conversation between the two of us continued during the whole conference. I remember especially our dialogue on the train to Swansea, where the whole conference went to visit the miners' library.

In the following years, we kept in contact through letters; it was a paper correspondence at the time, which Ron has saved, and we hope to make something out of it sooner or later. We also resumed our exchange in the course of the two following international oral history conferences, in Amsterdam in 1980 and Aix-en-Provence in 1982. In 1983 we met in New York, and then at later international conferences, which took place between 1987 and 2004 in Oxford, Essen, Siena, and Rome, among other places. In my repeated visits to New York, I was most often Ron's guest in his home on Morningside Drive.

Using the past tense in this evocation is grammatically and syntactically correct, although I feel it...