Tribute to Barbara Waswo, 1940 - 2020

Ann grew up on the West Coast of the United States with her brother Peter and their mother Silvia. Her father and mine, Ring Lardner Jr., moved east with a second wife and set of children, after his movie-writing career had run up against the Hollywood blacklist.
In my childhood, visits from Ann and Peter were a summertime treat. Ann came with a suntan and a cheerful air that I associated with Southern California, and a sardonic streak that she inherited from her mother. I was the youngest and dumbest of five siblings and half-siblings, picked on by everybody. Except for Ann, who, out of reflexive contrariness, stuck up for me. I had developed a well-deserved reputation for not telling the truth. Ann took me aside, and, in a conversation I remember very fondly, advised me to tell lies I would have a better chance of getting away with.

Her study of Japan and Japanese history came about, to hear Ann tell it, through a chance conversation with a professor who was setting up a Stanford program in Tokyo. Going to Japan sounded more interesting to her than Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which another professor had her reading at the time. But that self-deprecating explanation does not capture the largeness of her desire to know the world beyond an America that, she rightly sensed, was getting way too content with itself.
One of the best of all my times with Ann was in Japan in the summer of 1986. I got to see how much she was at home there. She took me on a drive in the hinterlands with an overnight stay at a Ryokan, or country inn, where I acquired the lifelong habit of taking baths so super-hot you have to lower yourself in an inch at a time.

I was in Japan as a journalist working on an article that involved Sony and Matsushita and the development of a now-forgotten miracle device called the videocassette recorder. Ann was an invaluable counselor, training me to understand, for example, when a yes answer could be taken seriously, and when it reflected only an extreme national reluctance to say no. One day I showed up to interview a couple of corporate executives with Ann as my translator. They were bowled over by her facility with the language. Me too -- bowled over, and proud as hell.


One of the last times I saw Ann was on the happy occasion of our father's 80th birthday. By then, she was firmly settled at Oxford and in her identity as an expat. But when email came along, we made frequent use of it to commiserate about the state of American culture and democracy, exchange reading tips, and lay plans for transatlantic visits that, alas, one after another, failed to happen.

I have been reading back over our correspondence. It reminds me that Ann had formed a rather dark view of Anglo-American civilization. That made her, I am sorry to say, a savvy commentator on our times. Here are a few samples:
May 2012 (after I had referred to something posted on Facebook): “[If there was some way of preventing Facebook, Twitter and/or Linkedin from bombarding me with new contacts raided from my address book and the address books of others, I might consider rejoining."

October 2016 (a month before the U.S. presidential election of that year): “I do hope that recent press reports are right that Trump now cannot possibly win, but somehow I think the outcome is not going to be pleasant however it turns out."
Feb 2020: "I have a hunch that a Covid-19 pandemic will be declared soon, and foreign travel of any sort this spring and summer will be challenging."

That last remark was not an idle generalization; it had specific reference to a plan we had worked out together. My son Nick and I were going to meet Ann in England and France. Ann, as I’m sure others can testify, was a terrific host and a thorough, bordering on obsessive, travel planner. I offer in evidence this email dated February 17th:

“Your BA flight will be arriving at Heathrow Terminal 5, and you should be through customs, baggage reclaim by 8.30 or thereabouts/ What happens next depends on you and Nick and your susceptibility to jet lag. 1) You may want to sleep for a few hours, in which case you could take the Heathrow Express to London Paddington and check in at the Mercure Hotel at 10am for a modest additional fee. The standard check-in time at almost all London hotels is 2pm.  2) Or if you're sure you'll be perky enough you could head off on the somewhat longer tube journey from Heathrow to London Victoria and from there to Elephant and Castle, and either the considerably cheaper Bridge or Westpoint Hotel, within easy walking distance of the Imperial War Museum, Southwark Cathedral and the River Thames  -  and on a direct line to St Pancras, for Eurostar trains to France. Like most hotels, these will store your luggage until checking in time.

“I'm happy to make hotel bookings for you, and for me as I would plan to meet up with you at either option 1 or 2. Indeed, I could meet you at the Costa coffee shop in the Terminal 5 arrivals hall and accompany you to either 1 or 2. It is incredibly easy for me to get to terminal 5, as there is a coach going there at regular intervals from the top of my street here in Oxford and arriving in an hour. You've missed the 90-day deadline for cheap Heathrow Express tickets, but you can still get a modest discount by ordering soon online, if you go for that option. The tube to Victoria and beyond costs next to nothing.”

I curse the coronavirus pandemic for up-ending our trip and making it too easy for Ann to isolate herself in a time of physical and emotional trial. And I throw in more curses for Donald Trump and Boris Johnson and their ilk for making a natural disaster so much worse than it had to be. I know Ann would heartily join me in that sentiment.

Ann Waswo, together with Jenny Corbett and myself, worked together to establish the Nissan Institute on a firm footing in its early years, beginning in 1982 (Jenny joining us in 1983). In those years we developed a close rapport, excited and challenged by our task of developing a new institute of Japanese studies within the University of Oxford, closely associated with St Antony’s College.

For Ann’s family background, I am indebted to Jim Lardner, her half-brother, and I quote him verbatim as follows:  “Ann was born in southern California to Silvia Schulman Lardner, and Ring Lardner Jr, who had met while working for the same Hollywood producer, David O. Selznick, of “Gone with the Wind” fame. Silvia went on to co-write a wonderful comic novel drawing on her time with Selznick: a novel called “I lost my girlish laughter”, recently republished to Ann’s great satisfaction. Ring Lardner Jr became a successful screenwriter, but his career collided with the post-war Red Scare, and he was blacklisted for refusing to tell a congressional committee if he had been a member of the Communist Party, or who else might have been, He would not answer, he memorably explained, because ‘if I did I would hate myself in the morning’. Fifteen years passed before Ann’s father was able to write movies under his own name, though among those blacklisted he had the rare satisfaction – to Ann and the rest of the family – of winning an academy award for one of his later efforts: “MASH” in 1970.” (That is the end of Jim Lardner’s contribution). Ann’s mother Silvia, later in life, went into real estate and became a building contractor, and it is from her that Ann may have derived her interest in buildings.  

Ann’s early years were spent in Southern California, in an area where anti-Japanese sentiment was especially strong, both during and after the war. Naturally critical of orthodoxy, she became curious about the nature of the erstwhile enemy. Enrolling later at Stanford University she studied American history, but she was persuaded to shift to Japan and concentrate on that area of historical studies. According to her own account, she was turned off the history of Western countries by Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which she found boring, so that she came to regard the history of Japan as much more exciting and challenging.

In 1961 she visited Japan for the first time (just a year before I did), enrolling at the IUC (Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies) in Tokyo, at a time when Americans and others around the world were beginning to perceive that the rapidly developing Japanese economy, together with its society so different from that of the United States, were worth studying and might even have lessons to teach Western countries. There is a nice story about Ann at this period in her life. The IUC students were taken to meet the Prime Minister of the time, Mr Ikeda, whose number one policy priority was to promote rapid economic development. The students were permitted to ask him questions in a Q and A session. Ann put her hand up and asked the Prime Minister what he thought about ‘Taisho Democracy’ – that decade or so in Japan after the First World War when the prospects for democratic development seemed promising. Mr Ikeda replied that he hadn’t heard of ‘Taisho Democracy’: did she mean the universal suffrage law of 1925? – That encompassed exclusively male suffrage, as Ann would have been acutely aware. Politicians are not necessarily good historians, even if they are useful economists. Ann was later embarrassed when this incident was taken up in the Japanese press.

She later took a PhD at Stanford under the supervision of Professor Thomas C. Smith, who as Director of the IUC had been partly responsible for nudging her towards the study of Japan. In exploring possible career paths, she considered diplomacy, but was advised that speaking Japanese and understanding Japan would disqualify her from ever becoming US Ambassador, whose main task was to represent American interests. She later taught at Stanford, the University of Virginia and Princeton, before crossing the Atlantic to Oxford, where she remained for the rest of her life. I met her at Heathrow Airport two weeks after my own arrival in January 1982, and took her to Oxford in a ramshackle and malfunctioning car belonging to my mother. If Ann was unimpressed by this example of 1970s British technology, she was polite enough not to say so.  

Ann’s first book, derived from her PhD thesis, concerned Japanese landlords in the pre-war period. She later wrote a seminal work on modern Japanese society, a closely argued study of housing in post-war Japan, as well as editing, and writing much of, a work on farmers and village life in twentieth century Japan. Her guiding principle in writing books was “short and succinct”, “don’t waste words”, “come straight to the point”. She was also wary of writing that was primarily motivated by a desire to demonstrate a theory, or was more concerned with theory than with reality on the ground – a lesson that she taught to her students as well as embedding it in her own writing. This connected with a focus on common people rather than with elites. Once in back- blocks Japan she discovered a women-only fire brigade, of which she sent photos back to us in Oxford. This was hardly an earth-shattering discovery, but for Ann it was significant as showing what was possible for women. She also translated a novel about rural life written in 1910, entitled “The Soil”. She was intrigued by it because instead of statistics about plant yields, it gave a flavour of rural life at the time. Let me quote you one sentence from it:
            “Drinking steadily the men now began to talk about horses. Someone mentioned that even the wildest horse could be calmed down by forcing it to swallow a little sake. Then it could be handed over to an unsuspecting buyer.” (p. 108)
I will also give you a short quotation from Ann’s book Modern Japanese Society 1868-1994: “(t)he end result [of a focus on elites] has been only a partial, and at times a highly misleading, explication of Japanese historical experience. It is not just that the common man and woman have been ignored. Both have been portrayed, implicitly as well as explicitly, as passive and docile beings who would do as, and only as, their superiors commanded. I will attempt to demonstrate that this has not generally been the case”. I think that what she wrote there might constitute the basis for a powerful intellectual manifesto. In retirement, she took to writing a detective novel Damaged Goods, with a Japanese theme and the serious purpose of criticising aspects of university bureaucracy.

After her retirement in 2007 Ann bought a house in the village of Villerest, near the town of Roanne in south-central France, where she then spent a good deal of her time. I visited here there once and found her actively renovating the house, as well pondering how to shore up the ruin next to it, also part of her property but gutted by fire several decades before. She also revelled in her beautiful garden. She had also made friends locally and had definite opinions about the local government authorities.

Finally, I want to say something about Ann’s contribution to the life of St Antony’s College and the Nissan Institute. Ann had a hands-on concern with many practical matters of administration and the smooth working of complex university buildings. When the present Nissan Institute building was opened, it became evident that the system of keys and locks had been badly designed. She spent hours working on this problem and eventually the whole system was replaced. She devoted a great deal of energy to revising the statutes of St Antony’s College. She was for a term sub-warden of St Antony’s and more than once Director of the Nissan Institute. Many academics can see the broad picture but neglect the detail. Some do the reverse. Ann saw both the broad picture and the detail, and efficiently dealt with both. People saw her as “feisty”, and that indeed she was; she would place peremptory notices on doors, such as “TURN OFF THE LIGHT!!!”, that would frighten visitors to do just that; but she was also kind and caring, a fine teacher, subtly humorous and great company when it was time to relax, preferably over a dish of sushi. We shall miss her.                                       

I’m Kate Lardner. My real father was David Lardner, a war correspondent for the New Yorker who was killed, and my mother remarried. She married his brother Ring, who had been married before and had two children—Peter and Ann (my two cousins/soon to become stepsiblings). Our brother Jim came later. Ann would have preferred that I call her my sister.

When we got the message that Ann had fallen and was found  barely breathing and taken to John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, we asked the doctor to tell her we loved her and that we knew… I dearly hope she got this message.

For a while Ann taught in the U.S. and before that there were visits to our father in California, Connecticut and New York City which often included us. I like thinking about the overnight campout while living on Granny’s farm. When we lived with my paternal granny in the ‘50s. It took place on the hill above the brook where it leaves Mike Smiersky’s field and enters the woods. Ann was visiting, it was her idea. All my brother Joe remembers about the overnight is where it was and using toilet paper to keep a fire going. The point is Ann was very enterprising in a organized way. He thinks we barely made it through the night and went back later in the morning to clean up. I’m not sure about this, I remember our brother Jim joining us for breakfast.

On this same visit to New Milford, Ann was instrumental—the main force behind—initiating a newspaper utilizing my new printing press. Joe remembers the newspaper vaguely. But he remembers putting butterflies under glass—the wings, with something like a magic marker line for the body. I wish she could have stayed with us longer. That newspaper would have prospered.  She was adventurous and fun.  And a curvaceous babe that summer at Candlewood Lake, a manmade lake located in Fairfield and Litchfield counties of Western Connecticut. Or maybe it was the summer after. We went there to swim when our pond was too cold. She was drawing a lot of attention from the boys at the lake and I proudly watched. 

An earlier time, comes to mind. Back in Santa Monica before the blacklist took hold, before Ring went to jail, before we moved to Mexico City because our dad couldn’t get hired in Hollywood anymore. Peter and Ann were living with us while their mother Silvia was readying their home in Newport Beach. I was about six. Hard to forget this story. The two of them entered my bedroom and inquired which I preferred, hot water or cold. Cold I innocently remarked. They proceeded to dump water on my head. A lousy thing to do but had to hand it to them for considering my preference.

I was older when Ann visited in New York after the family settled there. Our father wrote for television on the blacklist. It was his main source of income during the fifties.

In 1959 the Italian producer Carlo Ponti and his partner, Marcello Gerosi, summoned our father to Hollywood to talk about rewriting a script for Ponti’s wife, Sophia Loren who was about to launch an American career at Paramount. Ponti, like other Europeans, found  the blacklist mystifying. It  was collapsing at this point  but our father was still required to take certain precautions. One was to register in a hotel under a false name so that the producers could speak to him through the Paramount switchboard without “violating security.”  He chose the name Rick, so that if his own name were used by mistake it might pass as a bit of carelessness, and the last name Spencer for no particular reason. When Ann, then a student at Stanford, came to visit and share his quarters,  a decent respect to the opinions of the day required that she should register as Miss Spencer rather than Miss Lardner. I’ve always liked this story. She was up close and personal to mystery and intrigue.

We all three experienced dining out with Ann at Japanese restaurants in New York City. She ordered for us off the menu.  I love and still have the beautiful kimono she gave me.

Ann had opinions. In the early sixties, I was torn between two beaus. There was like a family consideration. Or vote. I don’t remember what the others said but Ann was voting for Michael over John.
I wish we hadn’t lived so far apart.

None of us were in close contact, mainly because of distance. Ann constructed a new  family for herself when she moved to Oxford in 1982. From every indication, a very good one. We’ve learned that she was taking an increasing dim view of her own health. That she was struggling. I wish I’d been able to help her with some of her recent battles. Thank you, Catherine Forsyth in Geneva for alerting Roger Goodman of your concerns and thank you, Roger, for finding her. I’m glad my sister is no longer struggling.  I’m glad that when she was found she seemed at peace. Thank you to her Oxford friends for the care that has been put into the celebration of her life and achievements.