Michael Murrin, who wrote about Spenser his whole career, died late this summer. By that time Alzheimer’s had already taken away his erudition, which was formidable by any standard, together with the use of his library, which eventually filled two apartments. For weeks after the end came, I felt hollowed out.
Murrin was my teacher in the mid-1990s when my wife and I were graduate students at the University of Chicago. I wasn’t looking for a second father, but he became one. I don’t recall how I got invited to join the circle of Arthurian Romance students who had lunch with Murrin after class in the Divinity School cafeteria (where God has coffee, according to the t-shirts). But I felt like Charlie Bucket when he finds the golden ticket: “Tremendous things are in store for you!”
At some point during that first year, Murrin invited my wife and me to his apartment, where he served us a lemon cake from a local bakery and we watched Kwaidan, a movie of Japanese ghost stories. In later years he took us to dinner at Chicago restaurants we couldn’t afford. There was one glorious term when Murrin and I had lunch, just the two us, twice a week after class. Another term, Garth Bond and I persuaded Murrin to give us a tutorial on romance.
What leaves the deepest impression now was the gift of his time (which I didn’t appreciate until I became a teacher myself) and his character.
His character as a scholar was careful and precise. He liked to drop bombs, but he wanted their effect to outlast the initial shock or bemusement of an intellectual explosion. As a writer, Murrin was a minimalist: “In an age where more is published than necessary, a scholar has a practical obligation to write less and and say more,” he said in the introduction of his first book. Once, after a class on Longinus, he told us that his goal, as a stylist, was to say things in such a way that the ideas were still memorable after the words had lost their freshness.
Murrin was a Christian. I never found out why he left seminary; and, after a certain point, it didn’t seem important to ask. I knew that he prayed and attended mass, so I was surprised when he spoke (as it seemed to me then) slightingly of the scripture. I couldn’t have named it at the time, but what he was teaching me was intellectual courage. I don’t mean sticking up for your own ideas in the face of opposition. (There were lots of people to teach you that at Chicago.) Murrin’s courage consisted, rather, in seeing and naming things clearly, even when doing so threatens to disenchant the books and stories that you love.
As a traveler and reader, Murrin was alive to wonder. Eyes twinkling was a characteristic expression on his face. He relished marvels and fairy tales (including the Oz books). He could weave a spell with his voice.
But his highest devotion was reserved for truth. The critical spirit, Murrin said once in a lecture on Tasso, destroys some wonders, but if it keeps operating, it discovers new ones. Those words planted a seed in me that didn’t germinate right away. I was still laboring under the belief (silly when you say it out loud) that God, Virgil, and Spenser needed my help. Still, I started to understand how Murrin could write and speak unsparingly of things that I knew he revered. For every mystery that skepticism punctures, another is waiting to take its place, more magical because more real.
Murrin loved maps. When you encountered a place name in Milton, he implied that you should find out where it was. His interest in the eastern settings of romance goes back to his second book, The Allegorical Epic (1980), and flowered in his last book, Trade and Romance (2014). Except for his third book, History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic (1994), all of his books have chapters on The Faerie Queene. But it’s his first book, The Veil of Allegory (1969), that has most to say about Spenser, the shorter poems as well as the epic. Among other things, it tells why allegory is traditionally pictured as a veil (10ff), how to identify allegory when you are in it (141ff); why the meanings of allegory are sometimes banal (11ff); and why poets like Spenser tend to frame psychology in terms of cosmology (119ff). If you can find a copy with the dust jacket, so much the better. It’s hand-drawn, with a knight facing a dragon. The obituaries describe Murrin as an expert on dragons (which he was), but I don’t think he identified with them. Murrin was a knight of courtesy and his quest was the truth.
David Wilson-Okamura
51.3.6
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