Eloise Knapp Hay, R.I.P

Commonweal, August 16, 1996 by Frank McConnell

Eloise Knapp Hay died at six in the evening of April 30, 1996, of inoperable brain cancer.

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. 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.

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

And of course, being perfectly innocent, she was also perfectly loony--at least by the reckoning of this world. She could drive you bloody crazy. 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. And we discovered that we could not agree about a single book, or about a single thing in a single book we both adored. 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. T.S. Eliot? Forget it. "Really, Frank," she would purr, "you can't possibly think The Waste Land is an important as Four Quartets." Well; gulp; uh, waiter, uno mas? I took to creeping into her grad seminar on James before she got there and scrawling on the blackboard "Maggie Verver Burns in Hell!" 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."

But any of her students--and there were so many--or her friends could tell you the same kind of Eloiseisms. She was opinionated, doctrinal, eccentric. 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. She was Chestertonian--if you can imagine a slim, female Chesterton with the kind of face whose beauty the passing of time only sculpts more accurately. On second thought, don't try.

The point is that her eccentricity was also her greatness. 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. But Catholicism was just the thing that formed and informed her astonishing goodness to her students, that made her such a superb teacher. 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." 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.

Her love of literature was matched by her deep care for her students. 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. So he simply left his wife, ventured out to confront the big world of "experience," and didn't look back. Everybody in the English Department clucked and shook their heads over our poor abandoned grad student. Eloise, though, had the girl move in with her; consoled her for three months, talked with the errant husband; and got them back together. They now have a two-year-old baby girl and are as happy as clams in high water. There were a number of incidents like this for Eloise, and they make the phrase, "office hours," sound pathetically inadequate.

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