"Beef to the Heel".
Maureen Dowd's column tomorrow made me remember the luxury of a Northwestern journalism and humanities education. Senior year, with my electives, I took a JAMES JOYCE class, back in the years when they didn't really brand market class names, just had you study works of an author for the academic quarter. Not very well versed in Shakespeare but I liked CHARLES DICKENS and DOSTOEVSKY (w/Irvin Weil.)
Aside: many of my friends were pre-med or engineering, and when we talked about our day, I guess I was always mentioning my JAMES JOYCE class. (Classes read in all CAPS on the registration forms, and paperwork, grade reports, etc. back in those pre-computer days...)
I just remember, weeks into the quarter, senior year in 1989, when my now-doctor friend Lisa revealed she thought I was going to a class taught by a professor named James Joyce and wondered whey I kept referring to my class that way. Had never heard of the writer before then, and fairly well educated she was. Italian, but still... We all had a good laugh. STEM majors. haha.
My professor was a classic old-time old-world academic, I caught the tail-end of those quality years of education, in many classes. He was a renowned Joyce scholar at Northwestern, but was old when I took him, and made no efforts to hide his drinking. Some days, there would just be an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper tacked to the door that he had called and wouldn't be in that day. He wasn't in good health either, and died a few years later, I think.
It was a small seminar; we were all just glad to have him as a guide when he was there. You really can't read Joyce and self-educate, too much Irish history and reference dropping that someone has to point out. His works are known for that stream-of-consciousness, but you need to be educated to catch the references.
Our professor -- I still remember his voice you had to strain to hear, even in the small classroom in the old building with radiators -- was straight with us from the start. We'd all be getting C's, he told us that first day, at best. Nobody was going to be above average reading Joyce, he knew, and he told us if we were worried about gpa hits or getting a better grade, maybe we should take another class. A few students looked alarmed, then talked about the pass-fail option, but most of us just took the C. We weren't really thinking about futures and gpa's and career choices, I don't think.
Just wanted his help in understanding Joyce. The final was "take home" back in a time that was very rare. We had the weekend, I think, to use whatever aids we wanted (again, pre-Internet) to complete about three essay questions, and... a list of about 20 phrases and words culled from the texts.
"Beef to the Heel", I remember...
Some of them, even sitting in the library with reference books, I still never got, without his guidance to educate me. I don't really re-read my Joyce, except for Dubliners and passages from Portrait occasionally, but who can forget Molly's concluding "Yes" to life, and to Bloom, in the final passage?
We're poorer for not having time to study our humanities, but one day America's Joyce will turn a mirror on the more interesting parts of our country where everyday people say yes to life everyday, and see where it takes them.
He was part of the group of English professors in the 1960s who made Northwestern an informal but flourishing center for the study of Irish literature, and he was an undisputed authority on the life and times of Yeats, writing in the 1960s the definitive work on the period, "W.B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland."
"He brought a kind of seriousness to this, paired with a kind of impatience for careless scholarship," said Susan Fisher Miller, a former doctoral student of Mr. Torchiana's and an adjunct English professor at North Park University. "He had an eye and an ear for nonsense, whether in somebody's conversation or in other writing about literature."
Read the whole thing:
DONALD T. TORCHIANA, 77,
Donald T. Torchiana, 77, an expert on Irish literature and poetry who brought the writings of William Butler Yeats, James Joyce and other authors of the Georgian period to life for Northwestern University students from the 1950s until the 1980s, died of a heart attack Wednesday, May 9, in a Wilton, Conn., assisted-living facility.
The forces that shaped the writings of Yeats and the others were in place more than 200 years before Mr. Torchiana began studying them academically, but the tenets that influenced them--regularity, order and a healthy appreciation for ceremony--were enthusiastically passed along by Mr. Torchiana to his students.
He was part of the group of English professors in the 1960s who made Northwestern an informal but flourishing center for the study of Irish literature, and he was an undisputed authority on the life and times of Yeats, writing in the 1960s the definitive work on the period, "W.B. Yeats and Georgian Ireland."
"He brought a kind of seriousness to this, paired with a kind of impatience for careless scholarship," said Susan Fisher Miller, a former doctoral student of Mr. Torchiana's and an adjunct English professor at North Park University. "He had an eye and an ear for nonsense, whether in somebody's conversation or in other writing about literature."
Hale, bluff and showing by turns a lacerating wit and gracious hospitality, Mr. Torchiana held a nearly legendary stature at Northwestern. He could sonorously recite memorized and lengthy passages of 19th Century Irish literature, and he hosted the kind of end-of-semester lawn parties at his Evanston home that featured a harpist in the background and Mr. Torchiana circulating in a blazer and straw boater.
Born in Swarthmore, Pa., he was a bomber pilot in the U.S. Army Air Forces stationed in England during World War II. He received a bachelor's degree in English literature from DePauw University in 1947 and a master's from the University of Iowa in 1949. In 1953, he received his PhD in English language and literature from the University of Iowa and began teaching at Northwestern.During summers, Mr. Torchiana lectured at the Yeats International Summer School in County Sligo, Ireland, and at other times at University College in Galway and Trinity College in Dublin. In addition to his affiliations with Irish literary study groups, he was a seasoned traveler to Ireland with a first-hand knowledge of its theaters, writers and cultural figures.
"He was a fairly outspoken and colorful character," said his son William D. "He had a broad range of interests, was sort of a larger-than-life individual."
By the time he retired in 1989, he was among the longest-serving professors at Northwestern and--though too genial to seem stodgy--had a reputation as a traditionalist who eschewed trends both academic and social.
"He had both a gruff side and a sort of hearty, carefree, uproarious side," Fisher Miller said. "He was a disarming combination of the traditional and the rakish."
In his retirement, Mr. Torchiana taught night and summer classes at Northwestern and continued doing research.
He also is survived by another son, David F.; a daughter, Katherine T. Grenier; a brother, Jack; eight grandchildren; and his former wife, Margarida LeSueur.
A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. June 2 in the Alice Millar Chapel on the Northwestern campus.
ADDED: And here's Bob Greene's memory of taking the professor in earlier years. Again, he was diminished when he was teaching at the end, but the knowledge was still there, and I didn't take the class to drink with the professor, but just to listen and learn...
Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down...'
By Bob Greene
Chicago Tribune
•
Well, by the time young men and women arrive at college, they are often either in a hurry to get on with real life, or are so involved with their friends and their freedom that the people who teach them form a different kind of backdrop. It's just the way the world works.
About 15 years after I was out of college, I was working on a newspaper story and I remembered, from somewhere, that there was a beautiful quotation that summed up what it is like for a person to reach the heights, to lose everything, and then to have to start over. I thought it might have been written by William Butler Yeats.
I called Northwestern University; I was told that the man I should speak with was professor Donald Torchiana. He would know, the person on the phone said.
So I called him. I said: "There's this line I'm looking for, I think it's from Yeats. It has something to do with a ladder and starting over. . . ."
Torchiana interrupted me. He said:
"`Now that my ladder's gone, I must lie down where all the ladders start, in the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.'"
I said to him: "I think that sounds right."
There was silence on the other end of the phone.
"I want it to be exact," I said. "Do you want to look it up or something?"
"It's correct the way I gave it to you," Torchiana said.
After we got off the phone, I found myself thinking about him -- the seriousness with which he obviously approached his work, the academic discipline it must take to be a superlative university professor, the way students -- students who are just passing through -- sometimes barely pay attention. A man's life's work. . . .
Several months later I went up to Evanston to sit in on a night class Torchiana was teaching. I wasn't certain why I was there; I just wanted to see him teach again.
There were 10 students in the room: 9 women, one man. Torchiana had a cold; he was coughing and sniffling. He was reading aloud from W.H. Auden. Then he switched to Wallace Stevens; he read from Stevens and asked the class:
"Now, what does he mean by `the barrenness of the fertile thing'?"
When no one answered, Torchiana said, softly:
"Ultimately our world is barren."
I sat through the class, and when it was over I introduced myself. I asked if he had some time; he said we could go have a drink. We walked through the snow.
At the bar where we ended up, he told me about his life. He had been a B-17 pilot in World War II, flying 24 missions over Germany and Austria. He had come home to go to college, then had been hired -- as an instructor, initially -- at Northwestern.
He had read the poetry aloud with such energy and care, I said -- both on this night, and when I had been one of his students 15 years earlier. Where did he find the inspiration to give each word meaning?
"It's a performance," he said. "It doesn't matter if it's the thousandth time or the 10th time. The kids are out there. They've paid their money." He said he worked constantly on writing poetry of his own: "I don't go to the movies. I don't own a TV or a radio. They don't interest me." When I asked him who got to read or hear his poems, he said: "Nobody." I asked if he ever read them to his students. "No," he said. "They're not paying for that. They're there for Joyce and Auden and Yeats and Stevens . . . they're there for the curriculum. They're there in good faith."
I'm writing this today because Donald Torchiana died this month at the age of 77 in an assisted-living facility in Connecticut. A memorial service will be held for him at 3 p.m. next Saturday in the Alice Millar Chapel at Northwestern.
I remember two things especially from that night. One was what he said to the class about Wallace Stevens: "In a funny way, Stevens is telling us that we love living in a world of illusion. It is an illusion that we were ever alive."
But the other thing was what he said about poetry itself. He had quoted from Auden: ". . . for poetry makes nothing happen."
I asked him if he really believed that.
"If it doesn't make anything happen, then at least it teaches man how to praise," Torchiana said. "Maybe that's enough."
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