Memory Eternal

Guy Davenport. Hugh Kenner. Now, supergee informs us, Wayne Booth.

When I married into what members call the Profession, these men, among others, defined it. Now they are gone, and even before, they were pretty much forgotten by later crops of so-called theorists and critics.

Booth taught at Earlham before Chicago, and I believe wrote The Rhetoric of Fiction there. In my undergraduate days he was involved as a trustee, and I met him once when, as student body president (yeah, me), I was involved in a long range planning commission. I found him modest and charming. He was witty and erudite as well, no doubt, but not obtrusively so. A year or so later, I was knocked over by Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, one of the few intelligent responses to what was then called the "crisis of the university." (The other was College Curriculum and Student Protest by Joseph Schwab, also of Chicago, as it happens.) About the same time I discovered Kenner's Pound Era, and Davenport's specimen book of Agassiz' scientific writings unlocked one of the secrets of the intellectual development of Charles Peirce, leading me from a dissertation in the history of higher education to one more strictly philosophical.

Which, as you all know, did me no damned bit of good anyway.

Rest in peace.

All of them.

All of us.