Eloise Knapp Hay, R.I.P

...Eloise believed in heaven, so of course that's where she is now...

...She was opinionated, doctrinal, eccentric...

...But Catholicism was just the thing that formed and informed her astonishing goodness to her students, that made her such a superb teacher...

...She found out last summer that she was terminal, and didn't tell anybody, except her husband and her son...

...I would rave about James's The Golden Bowl, which we agreed was the greatest novel in the English language: but, she would explain to me in her modulated East Coast accent that I completely misread the character Maggie Verver, the heroine...

...There's the legend of the thirty-six tzaddiks...

...I took to creeping into her grad seminar on James before she got there and scrawling on the blackboard "Maggie Verver Burns in Hell...

...Eloise was a grateful carrier of the holy fire...

...Most of the wretched, careerist, and literature-hating weenies who currently infest the academy and cheapen the idea of the university call teaching a "profession...

...gulp...

...How she loved to quarrel-in and out of class-precisely because she believed we should take things like poetry and fiction seriously, and try to use them as a secular Scripture or as what Kenneth Burke called "equipment for living...

...And she wouldn't take calls...

...She was Chester-tonian-if you can imagine a slim, female Chesterton with the kind of face whose beauty the passing of time only sculpts more accurately...

...For weeks after her death, my office-right next to hers since I came to UCSB in 1982-was the scene of an ongoing Irish wake, complete with brandy, jokes, and tears from students and unexpectedly human faculty alike-as busy, I said, as a Greyhound bus station but not, as responded a grad student with the improbable name Benjamin Strong, as neat or as clean...

...And recently another of our mutual students, Tom Henthorne, told me that she once told him, over cocktails, with an expression of deep concern, "You know, Frank admires all the wrong Graham Greene novels...

...and got them back together...

...A few years ago, the husband of one of our mutual students decided that he hadn't "experienced enough of life"-and try not to be surprised that he was a philosophy major...

...And of course, being perfectly innocent, she was also perfectly loony-at least by the reckoning of this world...

...If I ever stumble in there, I expect to come across her, in a celestial bistro, knocking back a Manhattan and picking a fight with John Henry Cardinal Newman and- heavy sigh-T...

...But any of her students-and there were so many-or her friends could tell you the same kind of Eloiseisms...

...So he simply left his wife, ventured out to confront the big world of "experience," and didn't look back...

...For Eloise teaching was a vocation in the Catholic sense of the word-a calling to glorify her God by sharing with others her delight and rapture at the holy things that can be done with language...

...There were a number of incidents like this for Eloise, and they make the phrase, "office hours," sound pathetically inadequate...

...She was the best friend-or a best friend-to a lot of people, many of them students and colleagues in the English Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she had taught, counseled, and generally, lovingly mothered for thirty-odd years...

...S. Eliot...

...But I am sure that one of them has now left a vacancy...

...She was the only true innocent I've known: a person whose soul seemed to have been mixed or brewed or fermented-how do they make souls?- without a soupcon of malice: definitely VSOP...

...She still insisted that she would finish the term, though, and taught her last class from a wheelchair...

...Everybody in the English Department clucked and shook their heads over our poor abandoned grad student...

...And then, early April-it all came down...

...In fact, I think there are rather more than thirty-six...

...Eloise, though, had the girl move in with her...

...Like a character from Henry James, she had immense, though subtly articulated, passions, and they were her Catholic faith, her devotion to her family, her ferocious love for the written word, and her obsession with being of service to her students and friends...

...consoled her for three months, talked with the errant husband...

...Then, a precipitous decline, and ten days' worth of Vernichtung in the terminal ward...

...The point is that her eccentricity was also her greatness...

...She could drive you bloody crazy...

...Well...

...Every Friday we used to punch out for the week and hit a local bar for a nice wind-down: those were my Martini days, and Eloise liked Manhattans...

...Her love of literature was matched by her deep care for her students...

...But there are versions of her all across the country: teachers who really teach, really care and love- both the books and the kids-and live in the perpetual shock of believing they are doing something nice for (in Eloise's case) God or (in mine) for humankind...

...And we discovered that we could not agree about a single book, or about a single thing in a single book we both adored...

...On second thought, don't try...

...She got through most of the year, teaching and driving me crazy-our last fight was about the merits of Bertrand Russell, and guess which side I took-caring for her students, and, like the Spartan boy, smiling as the wolf gnawed her guts out...

...She didn't want calls or visits because she wanted all of us to remember her as she was at her best...

...She wrote a great and influential book on Joseph Conrad, and a book on Eliot, and a lot of essays, and inspired and nurtured thousands of students who will always remember her with affection as deep as my own...

...But the great thing about quarreling with Eloise was that it was always a real quarrel, and not a springtime midpas-ture butting of ego against ego...

...I'd like to say that was a rank-ordering, but in her case they all seemed to be somehow part of a single, immense urge of charity...

...T. S. Eliot...

...uh, waiter, uno mas...

...At the core of her being was her faith: I have never known anyone so maddeningly Catholic, and I've known a lot of maddening Catholics...

...She assumed that you-friend, colleague, graduate, or undergraduate, or whatever-had as much to offer as did she, and if she told you how wrong you were, she would listen as you told her how wrong she was...

...Really, Frank," she would purr, "you can't possibly think The Waste Land is as important as Four Quartets...

...There are thirty-six unknown saints, say the Hasidim, purely good people whose unrecognized goodness sustains the world...

...Forget it...

...I had to be told, because she was failing and failing badly, and I had to be prepared, along with some others, to take over her classes...

...They now have a two-year-old baby girl and are as happy as clams in high water...

...S. Eliot...

...sigh-T...

...I will never forget her, every Christmas Eve, swooping into our house in her black velvet cape and commandeering the kitchen to prepare the hors d'oeuvres, meanwhile chattering with my wife, Celeste, about the health of our cats and telling me things like I really did think too much of Albert Camus...

...It suddenly strikes me: that may be the only real teaching there really is: humans talking in trust to one another about things that matter...