For more than 30 years, I have been wondering about L.R. Generson. On one of our first Christmases together, my husband gave me a complete set of Dickens. There were 20 volumes, bound in gray cloth with black corners, old but in good condition. Stamped on the flyleaf of each volume, in faded block letters, was the name of the previous owner: "L.R. Generson, M.D., Bronx, NY."That Dickens set is one of the best presents anyone has ever given me. A couple of the books are still pristine, but others—"Bleak House," "David Copperfield," and especially "Great Expectations"—have been read and re-read almost to pieces. Over the years, Pip and Estella and Magwitch have kept me company. So have Lady Dedlock, Steerforth and Peggotty, the Cratchits and the Pecksniffs and the Veneerings. And so, in his silent enigmatic way, has L.R. Generson.
Did he love the books as much as I do? Who was he? On a whim, I Googled him. There wasn ´ t much—a single mention on a veterans´ website of a World War Ⅱ captain named Leonard Generson. But I did find a Dr. Richard Generson, an oral surgeon living in New Jersey. Since Generson is not a common name, I decided to write to him.
Dr. Generson was kind enough to write back. He told me that his father, Leonard Richard Generson, was born in 1909. He lived in New York City but went to medical school in Basel, Switzerland. He spoke 10 languages fluently. As an obstetrician and gynecologist, he opened a practice in the Bronx shortly before World War Ⅱ . His son described him as "an extremely patriotic individual"; right after Pearl Harbor he closed his practice and enlisted. He served throughout the war as a general surgeon with an airborne special forces unit in Europe, where he became one of the war´s most highly decorated physicians.
The list of his decorations reflects his ordeals and his courage: multiple Purple Hearts, the Bronze Star with "V" for valor, the Silver Star, and also the Cross of War, an extremely high honor from the government of France. After the war, he remained in the Army Reserve and attained the rank of full colonel, while also continuing his medical practice in New York. "He was a very dedicated physician who had a large patient following," his son wrote.
Leonard Generson´s son didn´t remember the Dickens set, though he told me that there were always a lot of novels in the house. His mother probably "cleaned house" after his father´s death in 1977—the same year my husband bought the set in a used book store.
I found this letter very moving, with its brief portrait of an intelligent, brave man and his life of service. At the same time, it made me question my presumption that somehow L.R. Generson and I were connected because we´d owned the same set of books. The letter both told me a little about him, and told me that I would never really know anything about him—and why should I? His son must have been startled to hear from a stranger on such a fragile pretext. What had I been thinking?
One possible, and only somewhat facetious, answer is that I´ve read too much Dickens. In the world of a Dickens novel, everything is connected to everything else. Orphans find families. Lovers are joined (or parted and morally strengthened). Ancient mysteries are solved and old scores are settled. Questions are answered. Stories end.
Dickens´s cluttered network of connected lives brilliantly exaggerates something that is true of all of us. We want to impose order through telling stories, maybe because there is so much we don´t know about our own stories and the stories of those around us.
Leonard Generson´s life touched mine only lightly, through the coincidence of a set of books. But there are other lives he touched more deeply. The next time I read a Dickens novel, I will think of him and his military service and his 10 languages. And I will think of the hundreds of babies he must have delivered, who are now in the middle of their own lives and their own stories.