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William Speed Hill
A. Norman Jeffares
William Speed Hill, January 19, 1935 - May 7, 2007
Chair of the International Committee, 2001-04.
W. SPEED HILL WAS BORN in Louisville, Kentucky, on January 19, 1935, the third son of Eugene DuBose Hill and Lila Robinson Hill. He graduated from Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia and received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his Ph. D. from Harvard. He was a Professor of English at Lehman College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he specialized in English literature of the Renaissance and in textual studies, teaching several generations of young scholars and directing many doctoral dissertations. He was the general editor of the Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, a multi-volume, monumental scholarly edition of the writings of the English Renaissance theologian. The edition was published initially by Harvard University Press and completed by the Medieval and Renaissance Text Society. He was co-founder of the interdisciplinary Society for Textual Scholarship and co-editor of its publication Text (now Textual Cultures), and also served as President of the Society. In addition, he edited three volumes for the Renaissance English Text Society under the general title of New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, and contributed essays to several other collections, including Margins of the Text and Scholarly Editing: A Guide to Research. After his retirement from teaching, he continued to be very active on the academic circuit, often giving papers under the auspices of such professional organizations as the Modern Language Association of America and the International Association of Professors of English. He served as advisor to numerous scholarly institutions, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Committee on Scholarly Editions of the MLA. He was devoted to his wife, Linda, to whom he was married for 23 years. He was a devoted father, grandfather and uncle. He taught and mentored countless students and colleagues. He will be sorely missed by family, his colleagues, his former students, and his many friends.
[“God is no captious sophister, eager to trip us up whenever we say amiss, but a courteous tutor, ready to amend what, in our weakness or our ignorance, we say ill, and to make the most of what we say aright.” Richard Hooker]
Professor A. Norman Jeffares
At 16, Alexander Norman Jeffares solicited a poem for the school magazine which he was editing, from a fellow Dubliner, William Butler Yeats. The Nobel Laureate demurred, but was eventually persuaded into submitting the poem whose refrain runs "What then, sang Plato's ghost, What then?" Editing, initiative and persuasion were things that Jeffares, known as Derry, was very good at, together with finding and making the fun in life. He and his wife Jeanne lived latterly a few miles from St Andrews, at Craighead Cottages, Fife Ness, in Scotland. These were a converted set of labourers' cottages, and latterly a piggery, so Yeats's line about love and his mansion was quoted at them. Theirs was a welcoming and a prodigally hospitable house.
When Ian Kirby proposed that IAUPE should honour the half-century of Professor Jeffares' membership, he contacted me, as the IAUPE member living nearest to Fife Ness, and kindly invited me and my wife Mary to be there at the presentation of IAUPE's memento of so long a membership. I was glad to accept, as I had known and worked with Derry since 1970. The presentation took place on August 15, 2001. President and Mrs Viereck and Professors Kirby and Rehder flew over and stayed at Crail; Mary and I drove from St Andrews. It was a fine evening when we rolled up, and were made most welcome. The presentation of a memento, a simple wooden shield suitably inscribed, was a happy occasion, and the wine, talk and laughter flowed, easily and naturally, as usual at that table. It was one of many such evenings, and I have sat at that table several times since, and looked at the shield.
Jeffares probably did more for more people than any other professor of English of his day, and widened the subject more than any other person who professed it, notably in the fields of Anglo-Irish literature and of what was called Commonwealth literature. He was a patron who did not patronise. His joy in living, social energy and sense of fun (and his effortless stream of books and editions) were scarcely diminished almost to the end, which came rather suddenly on June 1, 2005. This was a very complete life.
There was much more to Derry Jeffares than universities and literature, but neither this nor his extraordinary contributions to the profession can be acknowledged here. It was an imaginative gesture for the international professoriate of English to celebrate its last living founder member in this social and simple way. We were lucky to be there.
Derry was survived by his wife Jeanne, who made us equally welcome in 2001; and we were saddened to learn of her death, also suddenly, on July 21, 2006. In the history of IAUPE, a page has turned.
Michael Alexander.
The official obituaries are best left to other writers who know better than I the details of his career as scholar and poet. Nor do I want to praise Derry— as many of us knew him— with the kind of feelings often expressed about the deceased. He lives still in his family’s and his friends’ memories. I am also well aware of Pope’s famous caveat:
A vile encomium doubly ridicules;
There’s nothing blackens like the ink of fools.
I am simply offering some very personal memories of a man whom I respected and liked because of his treatment of me, a mere graduate student. As a sixth former and undergraduate I had read A. Norman Jeffares with enthusiasm and, I hope, understanding, for he wrote in an engaging style far removed from the jargon-filled pages of many another critic. When I went to London for the oral defence of my Ph. D. dissertation on Yeats I was alarmed at the prospect of meeting face to face, across an office table, A. Norman Jeffares in person. I had driven from Bristol in a mini car, trying to recall my main arguments and various scraps of Yeats I had by heart. By chance, after parking the car I passed by a shop window with a photograph of W.B. Yeats staring at me. This was in fact Woburn Building, Yeats's lodgings for about twenty-five years. I took this coincidence to be a good omen. It was.
My examination started with a surprise. Professor Jeffares opened the proceedings by saying: "No point in messing about. You've passed. Now let's have a conversation about Yeats". Immediately at ease, I told the examiners what I thought I was doing in the dissertation: discovering Yeats the playwright ahead of his times and not confined to lyric poetry. I was regaled with the detailed knowledge of my chief examiner through perceptive little additions to what I said. At the end he gave me a wad of notes with which to revise my work and said that if I made an essay from what I had written about Yeats and Beckett he would publish it. He was fascinated by the fact that I had already been to Japan to see Noh, Kabuki, and Bunraku forms of theatre.
A week or two later I sent him the required article and a group of short poems I had written about Zeami, the early master of Noh theatre and my friend, Makio Umewaka and his father who performed Noh at the Aldwych Theatre for the World Theatre Season. I got a letter back accepting both the article and the poems for publication. A couple of years later I was working as an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia and trying hard to cut my unwieldy two volume dissertation to make a publishable book. Professor Jeffares turned up as a visiting speaker and, friendly and informal as ever, spent some time with me talking about Willie Yeats. I asked his advice on my book project. I was now thinking of not simply cutting the dissertation but using parts of it for a different book about Yeats. I explained what I had in mind. He responded with characteristic brevity and infectious enthusasm: "Do it! I look forward to seeing it." He then added, "By the way, write to me as Derry. That's what my friends call me." I was moved at the time, and still am, by his warmth and generosity to a novice.
Some years later, I attended a conference of the Canadian Association for Irish Studies in Toronto. I had wandered into a sort of open space like a balcony overlooking the hall where Derry was chairing a session with Conor Cruise O'Brien and a younger Irish scholar. When they had finished speaking, the session was open to questions from members of the audience. There was the usual number of real questions and some which were posed as questions but were in reality statements dear to the questioner's heart. Suddenly, there was a question that was in reality an harangue of a political nature. Derry listened intently. From my perch above the proceedings I saw quite plainly the younger official speaker make to stand to answer the activist's harangue. In a flash Derry's left hand gripped the arm of the young speaker, keeping him from standing up; simultaneously his right hand found unerringly the Cruiser's elbow and gently pushed upwards. Conor Cruise was on his feet in a trice and answering the harangue in masterly fashion in full flush.
I met Derry and Jeanne later in Ireland, when he told me he had bought an old pig sty in the little Scottish village of Crail. This he would convert and refashion as a retirement house. I immediately thought of the Swineherd in the dance play, A Full Moon in March. Derry asked if I knew Scotland. I had been on holiday there when I was sixteen but I caught his interest with the information that I had consumed many a beer in a village pub when I was stationed at the Joint Services School for Linguists in Crail doing Russian. We didn't speak much about that, because it was still a matter for the Official Secrets Act. Only recently has a book appeared, Secret Classrooms, giving many details about the classes and teachers at both Bodmin and Crail.
In Kyoto I spent some time with Derry's son-in-law, Masaru Sekine. He gave me news of the family. In Monaco I met Derry and Jeanne again for the conference on Yeats the European. This was an elegant affair and its great piece of scandal was the Irish Times article declaring that the Irish government had taken not Yeats's remains but the bones of someone else to be buried in Drumcliff churchyard. Derry, Ann Saddlemyer and others went to examine the archives of Roquebrune and were convinced that it was indeed Yeats who was re-interred in Ireland.
When I had moved from my chair in Canada to become Professor and Head of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a letter from Derry arrived, urging me to visit him and Jeanne in Crail. I was alas unable to do so. And now it is too late.
Andrew Parkin
For Derry Jeffares
He knew Yeats the man, alive,
And later knew the life
And all the Works.
His youthful mastery of Classics
Formed the base from which to trace
His culture’s history, its tragedy, its grace.
His learning and his energy rubbed off on us,
Enabled voyages and scholarship around the world.
He inspired the young, scholars and writers,
Encouraging and helping, ever-generous
With practical advice, a helping hand.
He gave us faith in what we did and planned.
He was the maestro, unique yet not alone,
Guest conductor of the fresh young choir
Of newer writers making Englishes their own.
A.P.