"I'm of an age where I can say pretty much anything and not get arrested for it."

Barry Menikoff.

After five years away, Island Idylls returns with "This Mortal Coil," and for the first time Aaron Menikoff and Barry Menikoff are recording in the same room. Barry is 87. He grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, "before everyone wanted to go to Brooklyn." He chose graduate school at Wisconsin over Iowa because his sister said Iowa "sounds like hogs" and Wisconsin "sounds like cheese." He wrote his dissertation on Henry James and turned down offers from Benjamin Mays and from Leslie Fiedler's department in Montana. Instead he built a career at the University of Hawaii, where he became a leading Robert Louis Stevenson scholar, researching summers at the Huntington Library.

Barry talks frankly about chasing fame through books and about writing two memoirs, Stone Mother and Lost Embers: Madison Remembered. He also describes his recent fight with cancer, which took him to Portland for treatment. When his son Aaron, an evangelical pastor, asks a secular Jewish academic what he wants younger people to know about mortality, Barry draws on Shakespeare, Keats, Hemingway and Graham Greene, then lands on the advice Henry James and Stevenson gave: "Be kind."

The episode is a moving father-and-son conversation about legacy, family and the randomness of life. It ends with a great-grandson named Henry on the way.

Do you have questions for us? Email us at islandidylls@gmail.com

🎙️🎙️🎙️

Podcast production by FullCast