Recollections of Reeve Parker by Neil Hertz

A. Reeve Parker, professor emeritus of Literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), died Sept. 16 in Ithaca, New York, at age 89. Read more about his life and achievements here. His long-time colleague and friend, Neil Hertz, memorializes him further below:

It was natural that Reeve and I would have met soon after his arrival in the English Department in the summer of 1967. Both of us had, as grad students at Harvard, worked as TAs in Reuben Brower’s “pioneering” close-reading course, Humanities 6. Both of us were interested in British Romanticism. Reeve had just published a prize-winning essay on Coleridge; I was writing about Wordsworth. The Department figured we’d have lots to talk about, so we were assigned an office high up under the gables of Lincoln Hall. They were right: our conversations—and our friendship—continued for almost 60 years, first in Rockefeller, then in a slightly larger office under the gables of Goldwin Smith, up among the philosophers, later still in letters, when we were apart.

In 1971 we team-taught one of Telluride Association’s summer seminars for bright seventeen-year-olds, reading Rousseau and Dostoevsky and Joyce and Mann and encouraging our students to keep journals (a 70-ish touch!). Reeve was a wonderful teaching partner—soft-spoken, a witty interlocutor, lover of puns and odd turns of language, casual yet determined in his conduct of the class’s conversation. That quality—determination—influenced his posture, I noticed, best seen when he was at the wheel of one or another of the Volvos he owned over the years—a kind of forward leaning hunch.

We also participated in some local politics. In 1970, when Black students had occupied Willard Straight Hall, we, along with several others in the Department—Dan McCall, Jonathan Bishop, Scott McMillin, Pete Wetherbee-- formed a support group (with the slightly comical, faux-modest name of “Concerned Faculty”). Anticipating that the occupiers would face charges at some point, we began collecting money for legal fees. A “Defense Fund”, we called it. Reeve and I were co-treasurers. Some of the funds, we later learned, were spent to provide the weapons and bandoleers so prominent in the famous photo of the culmination of the Occupation, not exactly what we’d had in mind.

In all of these contexts, with his colleagues and friends and his students, Reeve came across as a soft-spoken, witty interlocutor, a lover of high literary invention, but also of puns, of limericks, of odd turns of language. His own writing was forceful, cogent and elegant. His presence in the Department—as colleague, as Chair-- made a difference. The other day, Pete Wetherbee described him to me as “the most decent—[he stressed the word]—man I’d ever met.”