John David Moore, i.m.

Elaine and I learned over the weekend that our friend John David Moore has died. John David and I shared an office in our early years on the tenure track: two desks, and a massive file-cabinet/bookcase unit dividing the room in two. We would trade observations about local inanities across an imaginary transom. At that time we both smoked cigarettes, and I once joked that I might have been hired only because they needed another smoker to go in that office.

John David’s thing was Ruskin, but he was hired to teach children’s literature, which education majors tended to regard as a course in kiddie lit, easy reading. With John David it became a course in which all manner of cultural and psychological analysis was brought to bear on the literature of childhood, past and present. He did get to teach Shakespeare and the Victorians too — thank goodness.

John David was an unbelievably erudite man. In later years, when we each had our own office (his with a rug, floor lamp, wing chair, and ancient bookcases), I might drop in, say hello, and mention something I was reading. And he might begin “Oddly enough,” and it would turn out, say, that he had a complete set of whatever it was on his shelves. I’m making up that example because I cannot recall a real one. But they would begin “Oddly enough.” I should mention that his erudition extended well beyond literature: he was a brilliant pianist and an expert mycologist.

When I retired from teaching, John David agreed to talk about me at the end-of-year department party, which he did, in ways both funny and kind. He gave me a watch with broken hands (no more deadlines) and a Webb Young tie (“Hand woven by the mountain people of New Mexico”) that I’m going to wear when we see friends for dinner this weekend. When John David retired a year after me, I agreed to do the talking about him. Due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control, he missed that year’s party, but I did right by him. I later gave him a large number of vintage pencils that I had bought for him at Phil’s Stationery in Manhattan. He later gave me a C. & E.I. Railroad pencil.

Elaine, who played countless violin/viola and piano recitals with John David over the past twenty years, was very close to him. She has written about him here: Saying goodbye to John David Moore.