By Margaret Leonard
Editor, Florida State Times
If the church, the arts and academia stand firm, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
said 200 years ago, then values will endure, and there is hope for the world.
For 88 years, so far, Lucyle Thomas Werkmeister - a small, unpretentious
woman with a wonderful sense of humor - has stood firm in all three of Coleridge's
essentials.
In the church, she evolved from a faithful but maybe too placid Christian
to a determined servant and student of a Christian God.
In the arts, she mastered the piano so thoroughly that Paderewski, who heard
her play, said she could go as far as she wanted.
In academia, she has given her life to ideas and scholarship. And now she
has given her fortune - a $100,000 inheritance that multiplied many times
because her husband had a knack for investing - to help Florida State University
stand firm against mediocrity and commercialism.
Before he died in 1994, Werkmeister's husband (Wilhelm Heinrich Gustav,
most often called Werkie) had concluded with her that values throughout
the world were disintegrating.
"The only values we seem to recognize now are sex and violence,"
she said. "The arts have failed. Look at the kind of painting we're
getting today. Look at what's coming out of Hollywood and going on the stage.
"The great music we used to have in the past just isn't there. Now
we have hard rock and country."
Academia?
"Philosophy is in a very sad state now. So are all the humanities."
The church?
"The one that's growing fastest is the Baptist Church. They stand pat."
"Although we could do nothing about the arts and churches," she
said, "we could perhaps do something about the universities, where
the impact of sciences and electronics, which themselves have no values,
has almost demolished the humanities, which can hardly exist without value
inferences."
The Werkmeisters endowed a chair in value theory in FSU's department of
philosophy. Then, after her husband's death, Werkmeister gave the university
an additional $100,000 to set up a Center for Value Inquiry.
Both gifts will be devoted to the three questions of Kant that Werkie Werkmeister
often quoted: What can we know? (philosophy); What ought we to do? (ethics);
and What can we hope for? (religion).
Though Werkmeister may say that she expects to have little influence in
the church or the arts, she has been an uncompromising figure in both.
Born in Oklahoma City, Lucille Thomas (she changed the spelling to Lucyle
in high school) was the eldest child of an engineer in a family she thought
of as "the Brontes without Emily." (Lucille was Charlotte.)
Reuben Thomas was no ordinary father to a girl born in 1908. He told her
he was happy she wasn't pretty because if she were, she would just get married,
and that would be the end of her.
Instead of encouraging her to be beautiful and flirtatious, her feminist
father taught her to love ideas.
"It's a miracle that anybody invented the logarithm," the engineer
told his daughter, as he explained it to her. "Tell me how many strokes
of the razor it takes to shave a man's face," he challenged when she
watched him shave.
Thus was born an intellectual curiosity that went far beyond logarithms.
"I majored in everything," she recalls of an academic career that
took her through music, zoology, philosophy and, finally, literary criticism.
As she talks about ideas - scientific, literary, philosophical or religious
- she interrupts herself repeatedly to ask, "isn't that fascinating?"
Encouraged by Paderewski, she almost became a concert pianist.
But later, when she heard Horowitz, she realized that while she might play
as well as he did - and this innately modest woman believed that she did
- she would never have his strength. She gave up the five to six hours a
day of practice and turned to literary criticism.
But first she made her living in the arts for a few years.
In the age of flappers, gin and the Charleston, the young scholar - an independent
and intellectual woman - had many adventures, all born of intellectual or
artistic pursuits.
She lived in New York, where she "hung out with an arty crowd"
and arranged Gilbert and Sullivan for the Aborn Opera Co.
She turned down an offer by entrepreneur Daniel Frohman to sponsor her concert
career.
She lived in Miami, where she played last row, second violin ("I was
an excellent pianist but a horrible violinist").
She dated men, but in the innocent way of the 1920s.
"I was very naive," she remembers. "I had no idea where babies
came from."
Naive, maybe, but never conventional.
She met her husband-to-be in a class he was teaching at the University of
Nebraska. Lucyle Thomas got the attention of Werkmeister, head of the philosophy
department, when she interrupted his lesson on Newton.
Werkmeister was telling the class that he was going to put Newton out on
a limb and then cut off the limb (demolish Newtonian physics to make way
for Einstein).
But Lucille Thomas insisted on being heard.
"So Newton will fall on the apple?" she guessed.
Werkmeister, who acquired a sense of humor after his marriage, was only
puzzled, she says. But he didn't forget her.
Later, when he asked her to marry him, she was full of conditions. Remembering
her father's warning that she would never be heard from again after she
was married, the 30-year-old scholar and musician was not an easy catch
for the philosophy professor.
But finally, he prevailed, with the help of an aunt of hers who said she
would marry him herself if Lucyle wouldn't.
Once married, the new Mrs. Werkmeister made it clear that she would not
be smothered.
And Werkmeister was generally an enthusiastic supporter of his wife's pursuits.
He encouraged her to go for a Ph.D., and she did, writing a dissertation
on Coleridge.
Later, she searched old newspapers for Coleridge poems that were not known
in the 20th century. She found about a dozen, and acquired another interest,
newspapers, which led to two books on history as it was recorded in the
daily papers of late 18th century England.
In 1966, when Werkie Werk-meister retired from the University of Southern
California, he came to FSU and began a new career.
It was the beginning of an extremely difficult period for his wife. Ulcers,
and surgery that didn't work, destroyed the very pleasant life she had had.
"I had always got on mighty well with God," she says of the years
before her surgery. "I told Him what I expected of Him, and I did what
I thought I should do. By the very act of being born, I had caused a lot
of trouble. I took a lot out of the world. I would try to repay it at the
highest level I could. I told God, and He seemed to be very pleased about
this."
As it turned out, she says, He wasn't.
Weighing 72 pounds and unable to work, she put herself through a cathartic
self-analysis that brought her back to the church.
She asked her husband to go with her to the Episcopal Church of the Advent
in Tallahassee. He went, at first only to help his greatly weakened wife,
who couldn't walk without assistance. (She picked the Episcopal church,
she said, because an Episcopal church had offered her $10 to play the piano
when she was eight years old, $5 more than the Methodists were paying at
the time.)
Both Werkmeisters became devoted parishioners.
"It cost me 30 years of my life," she says of her illness, "but
I came out of it a Christian.
And she acquired a new intellectual passion.
She began a new book, her fifth, The Making of a Savior: A Literary Criticism
of Genesis, now being read by a publisher in London.
While publishers are looking at her book on Genesis, Werkmeister hardly
pauses. She is studying the rest of the Pentateuch (the first five books
of the Bible). She plays the piano ("I wouldn't have gotten through
Werkie's death without it"). She drives a 1970 Monte Carlo, which accidentally
became an antique while she was simply not trading in a car she loved. She
has an old dog named Bernie and a large, well-kept but ordinary brick house
among the lawns and pine trees of Lakeshore Drive.
And she thinks.
Increasingly, she thinks about the loss of values when the arts, the church
and academia are swept away by the love of science, technology and money.
"Coleridge was terribly concerned in his time about the rise of the
middle class and the emphasis on money, but he said as long as the church,
the arts and academia stand firm ...."
So she gave what she had, almost a million dollars and 88 years of ideas,
to help them stand firm.
A humanities reading room in Dodd Hall,
named for Lucyle and William Werkmeister,
was dedicated Feb. 27.