MEMORIES FROM FRIENDS, STUDENTS, AND COLLEAGUES
Katherine Ledford:
I only had the pleasure of knowing Chip for a few years, but in that time he impressed me with his wit, cheer, and dedication to students. As an adjunct in Appalachian studies, I witnessed how Chip interacted with, mentored, and trained graduate students in our program. I also saw how he encouraged, guided, and inspired undergraduate student to become Appalachian studies majors, a short-lived degree option that Chip was instrumental in creating on our campus.
After Chip's untimely retirement, I was hired in a full-time position as the undergraduate/graduate program director for Appalachian studies, a job Chip had been doing on a part-time basis with some release time from his duties in the English department. I don't know how he did it. He set a high bar for me! For years, graduate students sang Chip's praises to me. Through their stories about Chip, I learned what a good mentor does--listen, really listen, engage, push when necessary, and pull back when appropriate. Chip kept on teaching me, and by extension our Appalachian studies students, even as he moved on to a new phase in his life.
Not only did I step into Chip's job, I stepped into his Appalachian studies office in the Living Learning Center, and continue to do so every day, fifteen years later. I still have files in "my" office (it's really Chip's office!) in his handwriting that I stumble across from time to time with a jolt of recognition and nostalgia. I wish I had gotten to work with him and to know him for much longer. When he retired, he left a tea tin on his desk that he had repurposed as a pen holder. I use it today. The name of the tea flavor from many years ago is "Tranquility" and I think of Chip whenever I reach for a pen and read that word. A wish for me, from him, every day.
Colin Ramsey
Chip was an extraordinary scholar and teacher, as I know many will have already said. But he was also exceptionally generous in sharing his wisdom and good judgement about things. Many times, during my years coming up through the professorial ranks at App., Chip would see me confused or distressed about something that had happened on campus, and he never hesitated to then share with me his own extensive experience with, and wise judgement about such matters. These conversations never failed to provide me with a deeper and often calming perspective. I miss him very much--his warmth, his wisdom, and, of course, his sense of humor. I am better for having known him.
Bill Ward
My earliest memory involving Chip is of Daisy Eggers’ rather uncharacteristic observation on his handsomeness after he’d left the scene of his DPC job interview. While he was thoroughly deserving of notice on that score, his contributions to the department as a teacher and scholar, and no less as a colleague and friend, would prove to be the most remarkable and enduring of his virtues. Simply put, everybody liked Chip, and rightly so. I miss knowing he’s there, and I wonder whether he decommissioned his office photo of General John B. Gordon before it could fall victim to cancellation.
Sandy Ballard
Missing Chip
Chip Arnold and I met when he was new to Boone and I was an undergrad English major (taking classes with Tom McGowan, Tom McLaughlin, Mary Dunlap, Hans Heymann, Hubie Williams, Dan Hurley, Bill Ward, and Jerry Williamson). I was spending time in the Appalachian Journal office, where Chip was in and out as Assistant Editor and Associate Editor (and he liked to tease Jerry by asking him to explain the difference). He and Jerry were friends and colleagues. They laughed together as they worked, and they made reading and writing for a living look like a pretty good job. Chip was often in his Sanford Hall office, meeting with students, marking papers, preparing for classes, reading, and typing. He was a popular teacher, with lots of books, high expectations, practical advice, plenty of questions, and an eye out for the humor in a situation. I noticed that he usually listened until he had something to say, and he knew how to ask a question and wait.
Fast-forward a couple of decades to 2000 and my campus interview for the job of editing Appalachian Journal. When we had a minute to ourselves, I asked Chip why he didn’t want this job. He shrugged and said, oh, it’s a lot of work. At the end of my “jobtalk” on my experience and research projects-in-progress, Chip raised his hand and asked me, “How are you going to be able to finish all those projects and be the editor of Appalachian Journal too?” The people in that room knew something about his trips to libraries, archives, and literary conferences, his international scholarship, the books he had published. I said, “The same way you do, I guess. Nights and weekends?” The audience laughed. Chip grinned.
After I got settled in the AppalJ office, I called on him fairly often to read a manuscript, review a book, write something, help me figure something out. He was generous and kind, no matter how busy he was. He had a cheerful, calm approach to most things. When Cold Mountain was playing in theaters, I asked Chip if he would write something for a roundtable discussion in AppalJ. He had read the novel and agreed to see the film. He delivered an insightful piece (before the deadline), and made our correspondence fun, sending email messages that began with “Sandy (I at first typed Dandy—have you ever been called that?)” and ending with “Whew.” Sometimes he wrote, “They don’t pay you enough.”
Even though his campus office wasn’t far from the Journal office in the library, we mostly kept up mostly through emails. In the summer of 2006, for instance, he sent me news of two big events: the birth of his granddaughter, Ashleigh Merrow Arnold, who was soon going to meet her great-grandparents, and a forthcoming book by Cormac McCarthy, which he described to me: “By the way, McCarthy has a new book coming out in September called ‘The Road,” set in Tennessee and Georgia, but there’s not much left of either since this is after some horrible apocalypse, nuclear war, something. But the See Rock City signs survive! A father and his son are trying to make it from Knoxville to the coast. Mad Max meets On the Beach meets Outer Dark. Pretty bleak stuff.”
In addition to his McCarthy scholarship, he wrote books and articles about writers ranging from Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell, and Robert Aldrich to Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, and he interviewed a number of writers for Appalachian Journal, including John Foster West, Jim Wayne Miller, Lee Smith, Donald Harington, and Lou Crabtree. Lou Crabtree, from Abingdon, Virginia, was what any Southerner would call “a character” and an unconventional, gifted writer whose stories were published by LSU Press. After she died in 2006, Chip agreed to write a memorial piece for AppalJ. He described her quirky personality and the evidence of her borderline hoarding that confronted everyone who visited her. “But there was a seriousness to her,” he wrote, “the kind of tough focus that writers need, and also a confidence, an assuredness, that measured you as you talked to her.” I think Chip recognized that because he had it himself. Same for the “generosity of spirit” he saw in her. She was 86 when she said, “Time for me right now is a spiritual time. I pray every night; I pray for my id and ego.” Chip admitted, “I’m not sure I know what she meant by that, not entirely, but when she adds, ‘At my age, you wonder what tomorrow means. Tomorrow is a mystery. If I go tonight, it’s all right,’ that I do understand, and it recalls to me that complicated personality who wrote that magical collection of stories ….”
Chip’s own generosity of spirit led him to do many things for others, including agreeing to step in as a guest editor of Appalachian Journal so I could have my first sabbatical at Appalachian State. When we were conspiring to lure Jerry Williamson out of retirement to share the work of guest editor, we invited Jerry to go out to lunch with us in a poorly disguised plan to persuade him. But Jerry was on to us, and when he backed out of the lunch, Chip tried to cheer me up by suggesting an alternative plan: “Can’t we just blackmail him?”
Chip Arnold was a creative, generous, hardworking, fun-loving friend and colleague who helped a lot of us. It’s an understatement to say I miss him.
Kevin Young
In the spring of 2005, I was a graduate student in a course Dr. Arnold taught on early 20 th -century American literature. I always looked forward to those Tuesday evening class meetings in Sanford Hall, for he had a wonderful ability to spark thought-provoking group discussions and draw attention to specific details in the readings. A couple of weeks before the semester ended, we read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. Near the end of the novel, there’s a curious scene in which the main character attempts to perform a sporting trick on a waterboard. During a lull in the class discussion, Dr. Arnold mentioned this passage and asked what the character was attempting to do in it. The question seemed oddly innocuous and banal, very unlike the questions he typically posed, and I assumed that he was merely trying to ascertain if we had indeed done the assigned reading. A student soon replied with a brief literal description of the scene. Dr. Arnold seemed vaguely dissatisfied with the response and repeated the question, and though he slightly frowned as a second student offered another literal description, he said nothing further about it. After an awkward silence the discussion slowly resumed and moved on to other topics from the book.
Two weeks later, I sat at my desk writing a final paper on Tender Is the Night. Thinking back to the class discussion of the novel, I began to wonder about Dr. Arnold’s curious questioning of a seemingly straightforward passage, so I went back to that section of the novel and began reading it very carefully. And suddenly, in a blinding light of realization, I saw and was stunned by the obviously symbolic nature of this scene, the deeper meaning that Dr. Arnold had so subtly hinted at with his apparently innocuous question. In the classroom, if students are obtuse and fail to understand something, then there is a natural tendency for a teacher to either spoon-feed the students and explicitly explain it to them, or to emphasize that they are missing the point and to play a guessing game of what that point is. Instead of doing either of these things, Dr. Arnold had made the class curious and puzzled, and had then left each of us to think through the issue individually on our own. Pedagogically, it was the most exquisite demonstration of Socratic magic that I have ever experienced, and I am grateful to have had such a teacher.
Bruce Dick
Dear Ellen and Family:
I have very fond memories of Chip that date back to August, 1989, when I was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of English. I had just published my first refereed journal article early that fall when Chip approached me in the faculty mailroom. We’d met superficially at one of those “welcoming new faculty parties” a few weeks before. But that day in the mailroom Chip shook my hand, told me he’d read my article on Richard Wright in the Mississippi Quarterly, and thanked me for “putting the department in the pipeline.” I never forgot that moment. As a shy, intimidated fish-outta-water-assistant professor, I felt his words legitimized my position in the department.
After that I went to his office at the end of the hall on Sanford’s third floor almost once a week. It seems like I always had a question he could answer about Faulkner or some other author we shared in common. That same fall I remember bringing French scholar Michel Fabre to campus. Chip and Michel hit it off immediately because Fabre, an African Americanist, had published a Contemporary Biography piece on Richard Wright. Chip brought out his CB publication on Erskine Caldwell, which Fabre knew well. That brief encounter further legitimized my position as an assistant professor and gave me the confidence to grow as a scholar.
I knew Chip’s scholarship well, especially What Virtue There Is in Fire. I remember being at the Charlotte airport, waiting to board a plane to France. I started reading it before boarding. By the time I landed in Paris, I’d not only read the entire book but needed a few wines at the Orly airport to decompress. The book blew me away and I mentioned it several times in my classes.
Yes, as another colleague told me during a car ride, “Chip is a first-rate scholar and by far one of the best in the department.” I also read Chip’s critical work on McCarthy and Faulkner, and remember talking with him for hours about Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which had just been published the year before I arrived. I miss Chip. After my heart attack in 2011 I went through rigorous workouts at the Wellness Center. Probably the only person I knew that I saw on a regular basis was Chip. His dedication to regain some lost mobility speaks to the kind of person he was–determined, dedicated, positive, and friendly. The talks we shared on a walk around the track were never as deep as the ones we spoke in his office, but they were still worthwhile and spoke to the connection that we’d established over the years.
My sincerest apologies for not being able to attend Chip’s celebration. I’m performing a libretto I wrote at 7:00 p.m. on the 27th at St. Luke’s Episcpal Church. It’s on mass gun shootings in this country and how no one, especially politicians, seems to care or is able to do anything about them. Based on my many interactions with Chip over the years, something tells me that if he were still with us, he’d be sitting near the front row.
Tom Mc Laughlin
One of the things I admired most about Chip was that he was connected. He was at the center of the English Department for over thirty years. He knew what the issues were, what the sides were, and how to negotiate a fair solution. His opinion mattered, and he kept in touch with everyone involved in the issue. He was also connected to faculty and administrators throughout the university. He stood up for the rights of faculty and he spoke truth to power. He was also at the center of scholarly networks that spanned the globe. He knew Faulkner experts in Japan and McCarthy experts in France. He led scholarly societies, edited journals, arranged conference panels, reviewed books, all this while he was creating his own scholarship. If you went to SAMLA with Chip, it seems like he knew everybody. He once introduced me to Cleanth Brooks! It’s a testimony to his scholarly influence that the Appalachian Journal and the Cormac McCarthy society published retrospectives on his work. The fact that he lost probably ten years of his career was a loss to our department, our university, and the world of literary scholarship.
