Quilts
by Jane Springer

“Remembering Lewis”
by J. Gerald Kennedy

Little Deaths
by Barbara Lau

Remembering Lewis
    J. Gerald Kennedy

When I joined the LSU faculty in the autumn semester of 1973, Lewis Simpson seemed to me a quaint, improbable figure, someone who might have doubled in movies as a genteel southern courthouse lawyer. Now and again I saw him ambling down the hall in a pinstripe seersucker coat and often sporting a jaunty bow tie as he lugged his briefcase toward his office, entranced in thought, his glasses perched halfway down his nose. I did not quite know what to make of him. Having never set foot in Louisiana before my hiring—having, in truth, secured my post in the Deep South through the workings of the nefarious old-boy network—I was then, as a transplanted Pennsylvanian, hardly prepared to grasp all that Lewis Simpson represented.
    I only knew that my dissertation director at Duke, Arlin Turner, thought it important that I introduce myself to Mr. Simpson. And so I did, knocking somewhat apprehensively on his door one afternoon. The office was cluttered with stacks of books, and papers lay everywhere, yet Lewis seemed utterly in his element. Out of this contingent chaos, he conveyed a sense of calm and kindly interest; what I had taken for remoteness turned out to be an endearing shyness. He welcomed me, talked about his friendship with Arlin, who had once taught at LSU, and asked me about my Poe scholarship. He told a few stories about the English department and the colorful characters who had passed through Allen Hall. A few days later, I received a signed copy of his new book, The Man of Letters in New England and the South, inscribed to me “with gratitude and esteem.” I was both pleased and baffled by this rhetorical largesse that I had done nothing whatsoever to merit; it was my first lesson in the gracious generosity that defined his essential southernness.
    At my first MLA convention as an assistant professor, Lewis stood with me in the lobby of the Palmer House in Chicago, casually introducing his callow junior colleague to Henry Nash Smith, Leslie Fiedler, and other luminaries of American studies. At another meeting, he made a point of inviting me to meet a bespectacled, white-haired man who turned out to be Malcolm Cowley. Over the years Lewis performed many other acts of kindness—reading manuscripts, writing letters of recommendation, and helping me to believe that my apprentice scholarship mattered. In his quiet, humble fashion, he showed all of us, the youngsters of the seventies, how to do it: how to be a serious scholar and how to succeed—with equanimity and grace—in a sometimes bruising profession. But it did not occur to me to wonder, until much later, how Lewis Simpson became Lewis Simpson.

Continued in volume 42, issue 2, spring 2006