Bill's Premature Obit

The University of Texas at Austin, where I taught for 30 years, has a nice recent custom: a committee of faculty colleagues writes a memorial article about a faculty member who dies. I've preempted that job.

University of Texas at Austin
Faculty Memorial Resolution
for William Merrell Stott

In place of a resolution written by his surviving colleagues, Mr. Stott requested that this be published.


The idea of writing my own obituary isn't mine. It was done by my History colleague Oliver H. Radkey, Jr. (1909-2000), as a way of celebrating those who helped his career and of settling scores with unnamed faculty who didn't. I think also that Radkey wrote it because he, like me, was a neatness freak--he carried a bar of soap in a soap dish to the men's room--and didn't want to leave loose ends around for others to muck up.

I'm happy for others to muck up my memory any way they care to. And I wasn't afraid that the colleagues who wrote my memorial would say nasty things. I knew the bad things they thought about me--easy grader, intellectual sloth, son of money, buffoon--and I knew the good. When I retired, our wonderful administrative assistant, Janice Bradley Garrett, gave a party for me and Desley Deacon, who was returning to teach in Australia. My colleagues said nice things, one of which I'll never forget. Mark Smith said, "Bill reminded us we were human." And he said no more. I should have fallen to my knees in gratitude.

But even had my colleagues taken the time to remember things I did and said (J.B. Colson might have told you of the time when he and I were circling the lectern, talking in counterpoint in our "History of Photography" class, and I whispered to him, "I wish I were dead"; Tom Cable might remember how I wept--hesitantly, my emotions strangled as so often--when I got a letter from a Polish woman saying she wouldn't join me for a new life in America), they almost certainly wouldn't have given you as much of me as I can do with my own words.

How I wish Radkey's initiative had caught on long before he died--in 1970, say, so that I'd know some of the faculty memorialized and get to hear them speak again. For example, I didn't know well my History colleague Tom McGann (1920-82), though I could tell what a nice guy he was--no trick to that--and once gave him inadequate counsel about his son's wanting to be an actor. After that, when we crossed in the hall or met in the men's room (Tom brushed his teeth after lunch--the History men had better hygiene than we in American Studies), we would smile and joke. Once, at the LBJ School, I heard him give the funniest impromptu introduction of a visiting speaker I ever heard. Nothing of his genius and charm comes across in the canned memorial one of Bill Livingston's secretaries wrote on Tom's behalf because his History colleagues let him down. As so many excellent faculty I knew are let down in their memorials.

Not me! This is going to say what I want it to. And it will be published. That's important to me because of the (I'm guessing) 300 things I've written for publication, bleeding at the knuckles to make them clear, smooth, and stirring, perhaps 50 have been published. My fault, of course. I write for an audience, General Readers like you, gentle reader, that no longer exists--the sort of weirdos who would recognize that those bleeding knuckles I spoke of were stolen from advice poet Robert Lowell gave about writing poetry (why he didn't write bleeding fingers, I can't imagine). Moreover, I took one or two turndowns as definitive. Some editors sort of liked my work. "Nice try," someone at the New York Times scrawled on an essay I'd offered to their op-ed page. "Gee, this is interesting," a few editors wrote, then added the identical, killing words, "I wonder who'd publish it." I'm gathering my short pieces, published and not, on a website I hope you'll visit, http://billstott.blogspot.com, which I'll ask my kids to keep going when I cash in if I don't gather them into a book.

As for longer pieces, I published four books I'm proud to call to your attention:

Documentary Expression and Thirties America, Oxford University Press, 1973; paperback, 1976; second edition, with retrospective afterword, University of Chicago Press, 1986 (in print)

On Broadway, performance photographs by Fred Fehl, text by William Stott and Jane Stott, The University of Texas Press, 1978; London, Thames & Hudson, 1979; paperback, Da Capo Press, 1980 (out of print)

Write to the Point: And Feel Better about Your Writing, Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984; second edition, hardback and paperback, with a foreword by Clifford Stoll, Columbia University Press, 1991 (in print)

Facing the Fire: Experiencing and Expressing Anger Appropriately, John Lee, with Bill Stott, Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1993 (in print).

The first book was my dissertation and was written in deeper version of the resigned sadness in which I'm writing this. The fourth book, the only to have been translated into another language (any guesses? German--who else acknowledges having anger problems?) was written in the heady years when my sadness was overcome.

Which leads me to what I most want to say. Some of you are like me--me as I was and me as I happened to be now because I'm recovering from having my cancerous prostate removed and have a fiendish flu. Some of you (and you know who you are) don't enjoy life enough. I had wonderful parents and sister, a world-class education, considerable talents, fascinating friends and girl friends, a fine wife, wonderful kids, a pleasant, useful job--and yet, looking back, I was generally miserable: would find myself singing, driving home, "When the rains come a pitter-patter and I'd like to be safe in bed, skies are weeping while the world is sleeping, trouble heaping on my head. It's so vain to remain enchanted and to wait for a clear, blue sky. Helter skelter, I must fly for shelter, till the clouds roll by." Besotted with the humanities, I felt everyone I admired felt like me (Melville: "That mortal man who hath more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true—not true, or undeveloped"), led lives of what Thoreau called quiet desperation.

I was 51 before I understood that I had an illness: was a lifelong, unrecognized major depressive. There followed a year and a half of counseling and trying antidepressants with a psychiatrist who believed in drug therapy until, thank God, I found an antidepressant that worked for me (Paxil; I now take Effexor). Since then, 15 years ago now, I haven't had a terrible moment. I've been sad and remorseful and nervous, but I haven't felt that total emptiness in the gut that makes living worse than death. I feel much less that I need people to validate me, tell me I'm interesting or gentlemanly or odd. I don't seek out women to admire me. On spring walks, I see the lime-green leaves shake their shadows across the dark leaves below. I live in the moment, not (as I used to) in the past, or the incredible future, when I would be happy. I'm happy now. One night, early on in being well, not really thinking what I was doing—you often don't think ahead when you're living here and now—I found I was on my knees, my palms to my eyes, saying, "Oh, Jesus, I'm so glad my pain has been taken from me and I will never know fear again!"

This is what I want to say to you: “If you’re not enjoying life much of the time--which doesn’t mean enjoying it as much as some of us oldsters say we enjoyed it at your age (life is easier in retrospect than at the moment)--if you find a drizzly November in your soul more than is normal, more than (psychologists say) two or three days out of ten, then don’t follow Melville down to the sea, see a doctor, because he or she may have a pill that will change your life as mine as been changed, to a happiness I despaired of finding. More than 80 of 100 cases of depression can be made much better; more than half can be 'cured,' as mine was, though the cure may not be as simple as a single pill."

I tell you this because it is the most important lesson life has taught me. Having recovered from mental illness, I feel a responsibility to testify to what is possible. I said this to one of my email pals, Shirley Showalter, an ex-student who was then teaching at Goshen College in Indiana (she was later its president and now works for a foundation that promotes world peace). She replied:

I think you are right to testify. I thought about your story as I read about suicide in the last Newsweek and as I listened to a young mother talk about the spot she had picked out on the L.A. freeway. She was going to arrange an accident for herself--and her little boy. The pain of such a thought is too much to bear. But there she was, a beautiful South African-American "coloured" woman able to speak of her pain in the past tense. It was just such a testimony as yours that saved her and took her to a doctor. She's on medication too and getting stronger all the time.

So I'm testifying to you, reader. If you're miserable too much, get help. Fight to make your one certain time alive worth living.

Anything else to say? The essay door is swinging shut.

Well, one thing I did well was revise--other teachers would say "grade"--student writing; I put years of my life into it. (On my website there's an unpublished article about how I did it in my last decade-plus of teaching.) My wife and children suffered from the time I gave to student writing, and I apologized to them then and apologize now. Had I been healthier and happier I wouldn't have done it. Still, let it be to my credit as a teacher.

Let it be to my credit, too, that I gave help and encouragement to such remarkable people as—just to name names that spring to my fingertips—Lisa Beyer, Greg Beal, Martha Boethel, Suzanne Shelton Buckley, Bob Byington, Christa Carvajal, Lili Corbus, Robin Cravey, Michael Eakin, Michael Erard, Mary Ford, Sandra Foster, David Gaines, Juliet George, Kerry Grombacher, Peter Hales, Benita Heiskanen, Caroline Herring, Jeff Levine, Randy Lewis, Paul Martin, Kherry McKay, Jeff Meikle, Sybil Miller, James Neff, Dean Ornish, Frances De Pontes Peebles, Lisa Rhodes, Irene Rostagno, Sheree Scarborough, Hal Sheets, Shirley Showalter, Mark Smith, Mark Singer, Beverly Spicer, Teri Tynes, Richard Trachtenberg, Qui Phiet Tran, and the following student who remembered my teaching kindly in her writing.


Gail Caldwell, the Boston Globe's chief book reviewer (her criticism won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001), was a grad student in our American Studies department in the early 1980s and portrayed our department and faculty in her memoir, A Strong West Wind (2006). To my astonishment, the longest portrait is of me. I am introduced as a "middle-aged teacher of literature . . . known to tap-dance on the seminar table to wake lethargic students"--a misremembering of what happened when one afternoon I got up on the table to do a Lindy step and show one way to put it into words ("a toe-in, ankle-out pivot").

Just as the Fool figures prominently in the tarot and Puck holds the secrets to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the tap-dancing madman of Garrison Hall would have his due in showing me the break in the hedge [to get out of grad school]. Simmons was an English professor who had wandered into American Studies because, as was the case for most of its faculty, the program’s peculiarities mirrored his own. He spoke with the melodious enthusiasms of an Elizabethan actor, but his fractured smile disguised his love of literature and made you think he was making fun of it all—the students, the novels, the entire universe—every time he spoke. His seminars were filled to capacity, both for the guaranteed knowledge within and the anticipated show, and Simmons worked this atmospheric pressure like the performer he was: He once broke into a resounding chorus from the musical Oklahoma! —“Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends!”—to make a point about de Crevecoeur’s eighteenth-century classic Letters from an American Farmer. During class he addressed each student with formalities—Mr. Peters, Ms. Miller—and yet he could make even courtesy sound ludicrous. It was hard to get and keep your footing in dialogue with the man; the uninitiated couldn’t tell if they were being praised or mocked.

My first exposure to his magniloquence came during a seminar on major American writers, with a reading list devoted entirely to novels by white men. Because it was the late 1970s, Simmon’s curriculum was still standard fare. When a female student questioned his selections at the first class meeting, he obligingly, almost theatrically, added Edith Wharton to the list. He revealed no gender affinities, though, when it came to his students, each of whom he treated, beyond the mordant veneer, with an oddly precious regard. Deviating from the coolness cultivated by most senior faculty, he insisted at the beginning of each term that his charges explain why they were in attendance; if you gave an answer deemed vague or coy, he pressed mercilessly until he got the deeper truth he sought. So it was there that I publicly muttered that I wanted to write—“Yes, Ms. Caldwell, and what, pray tell, do you wish to write?”—and there, too, that he bestowed upon us the splendor of Light in August, the cranky reveries of Flannery O’Connor, the manic labyrinths of Moby-Dick. Simmons grasped and even applauded the mad sacrifices of creative fire, and he led us through the provinces of literary history as though we were scouts on our camping expedition, with him our merry leader.

Some days this gusto could be crippling: You could summon only so much vigor about Puritan sensibility or Cooper’s Natty Bumppo. But if the class seemed indifferent, Simmons got worse, railing and insisted we share what we know or intuited. One afternoon he was half swooning in his delivery of the onslaught of modernism, assuming we would join in his homage. His students, glassy-eyed one and all, refused to budge. Where, Simmons implored, can we locate the origins of modernism in the novel? No takers, though it was a standard American Studies question. The silence grew mortifying. Finally I blurted out what half the students must have known. “Uh, Ulysses,” I said. “Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness.” Simmons, of course, had been teaching for decades, and he was hard to rattle—he knew someone would take the bait, would crumple under the discomfort he had had spawned. “Yes, Ms. Caldwell!” he cried, grateful but unbowed. “Take us there!”

For a couple of years afterward, this became a departmental refrain, the joke summoned whenever anyone needed to know anything. “Take us there, Ms. C.!” And yet I remember it now with something kinder than the amusement we shared at Simmon’s expense. He knew, with that simple navigational imperative, that in fact there was somewhere to go—knew that literature was just a world over, like Wakefield’s old neighborhood, from our own third dimension, and that it was his task and joy to show us the way.

Simmon’s reputation for class antics sometimes obscured the heartfelt teacher he was; in his commentaries on the essays we gave him, his in-class formalities gave way to more intimate monikers. He addressed me in these written notes as Clever Girl, a reversal of my initials but also his friendly nudge that facility was not the answer for a writer—that one could be clever at the expense of anything deeper. Had I any doubt of this barbed-wired-and-honey interpretation, I was reminded of it explicitly several years after I had left Texas, when he sent me a copy of his book on writing that had just been published. Buried there within his fussy discourses on usage were the exact words he had written on one of my essays. He had changed my initial for publication, but not my epithet, and he had included a passage in which he accused me of wiseacre acrobatics. “There is too much cleverness in the world,” he quoted himself telling a Ms. R., “and too little truth. Let’s try to have more truth.”

Rediscovering his advice all this time later, I didn’t know which was more impressive: that Simmons would so precisely deliver the lesson I had needed, or that he could be so maniacal in his forethought. The book was proof that he had photocopied all his handwritten responses to students for years on end. So! What we had been getting was a calculated generosity that instructed us and served him. This seemed hilariously in keeping with the tap-dancing Fool—Puck, after all, understands the power of his elixir. But it also told me something invaluable about the writer’s soul: Even when dispensing fairy dust, take notes. Clever Man.