Tributes and Memories
One Hundred Years
Happy Birthday, dearest Mr. Alfred, oh kind man who allowed me to pass my Latin exam (with the help of The Venerable Bede), and who taught me that it’s alright to weep when you teach a passage in a text that reminds you of your own dead father. Thank you also for giving me your copy of Elizabeth Bowen’s A House in Paris. I am happy to count myself among one of your friends. Camille Norton
"On the centennial of his birth, our whole family thanks God for all William Alfred taught us, not only by his explication of texts but even more through who he was, about what it means to be authentically, idiosyncratically, fully human. That, it turns out, is not really something you’re taught but rather something you “catch” - like a virus which continues to replicate within you. With any luck, it becomes communicable as well." Judith Mason
"He’s immortal in the best sense, of still warmly, daily loved decades after he left us" Rex Dean
"I had the privilege of taking a playwriting class from Professor William Alfred in 1972, I believe. He was the perfect teacher - brilliant, warm, open, mild-tempered and exceedingly tolerant of all of our imperfections as student-writers. He clearly inspired me as a play I penned during my days as a Harvard undergraduate was staged at the Loeb Drama Center and as, over the last several years, I have written two more dramas. All three plays have been successfully produced, again a tribute to what I learned under Professor Alfred's tutelage. As I steer ever closer to the age of three score and ten, I have two transcendent goals: to continue to build legacy and to stay relevant. The fact that so many of us continue to reflect on and continue to flourish as a result of what we learned from Professor Alfred is irrefutable testimony that he left a deep and enduring legacy and remains relevant over twenty years after his passing. (BTW, I'm also grandly appreciative of the fact that the Professor introduced me to an early heartthrob - Faye Dunaway!)" Peter Lawson Jones
A man, gentle and kind, of bottomless and endless support. I once went to his little house with a headache and he gave me an aspirin, water, and a pep talk. Both Brooklynites, we sometimes talked about the local libraries donated by Andrew Carnegie. Mr. Alfred owed a great deal to his community public library. Did you know that he was related to the great NY Giants' baseball manager, John McGraw, who led the team to three World Series championships during his long career? McGraw was also kicked out of more games for arguing with the umps than any other National League manager. That would make him the polar opposite of William Alfred in their family Tao. Mr. Alfred was unique in a department that was not known for great compassion among its faculty. True, in the later 1960s, the English Dept. was over crowded with too many grimy students. Another Professor who refused to be my thesis advisor told me to go see Bill Alfred. 'He'll take anything," I believe he said. And he did. Wearing his retro fedora and carrying his old book bag, William Alfred was a throwback to a sweeter age, whenever that might have been.
Dan Gover
I still quote him in my classes, still hold up his teaching as the gold standard, though I never took a class with him, but did do my thesis under his supervision, and listened to him lecture, thrillingly on Chaucer's "The Pardoner," and try to reproduce for classes his enactment of the first lines of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales which mesmerized me during a reading he gave in the Kirkland House Junior Common Room. His teaching of me went on long after I graduated Harvard, in long walks, in his living room, in dinners he insisted on treating me to. When students thank me after a semester, I know it is Bill they are thanking, because he instilled in me a love of teaching with the glow that his face held as he spoke about books and people.
There are debts than can never be paid--mine to Bill is one of them. "Bill," only the fact that I have reached 83 this summer gives me the temerity to drop the honorific, Professor Alfred, or William Alfred, and speak as his friend, not his student though it is in the latter role that I feel his warmth and go back in time.
Mark Mirsky
Hierarchies still obtained then in everything from hand-laundries to religious orders. Jesuits were to Brooklyn what they were to Joyce's Dublin, the major-domos of respectability, the ushers into the world of the lace curtains. I would no more have dreamed of aspiring to that world than of waltzing into the posh Flatbush Avenue Schraffts in my ripe corduroy knickers and joining some lady in her kidskin gloves over “The Tomato Surprise.” Deluded as I was about my ambition of becoming “a great American writer,” I knew I had the chances of a cockroach in the Plaza ballroom of ever being respectable. I took one look at the prim registrar behind the gleaming counter at Brooklyn Prep, turned tail and ran. (From William Alfred's Autobiography, The Duty of Delight, p.6)
FOR WILLIAM ALFRED
Robert Monroe
Books offered me their high-flown high-flowns
And communion with expressive spirits
No longer of this earth
Pages luminous with the aura of their author
But a point would come when I would say no
To all of them.
There were things I needed
That even art couldn’t offer.
That’s when I’d go to your house
The gable like a ship’s carved prow
The steps creaking in the snow
The doorknob worn by hands
Of homeless who knew you
Were a soft touch for a daily
Five or ten.
Inside, a marble fireplace
Like the ones in Dublin
And books stacked in totem poles
Of erudition reaching skies
I’d never touch.
Simple, formal things
An armchair with a high back
Tea and scones
And, “How are you?”
In a voice that didn’t care about details
But did care about how my voice sounded
When I spoke.
You looked like a slimmer, more smiling Hitchcock
In a decades-old three-piece suit with watch chain
Brown eyes lively and attentive and kind
And always behind glasses.
Down amid the towers of books
Green fronds shot out
And little globes of round and bright explosions:
An orange tree, in Cambridge, in the winter.
I think of you now
As the door of warmth and light
Opens on the cold dark stoop
Like oranges, in Cambridge, in the winter.
Robert Monroe has created a "Go Fund Me" campaign for the homeless in William Alfred's name. If you would like to contribute, please go to the "Announcements" page.