Our Mutual Friend

Just after Tob’s death, I was at an event where people were sharing their memories of him when a mutual friend (name withheld on advice of counsel) commented to me, “Jeff, they’re making him into some kind of a god-damned saint!”  We are supposed to speak of the dead with reverence but, strangely, too much reverence can also offend.  I don’t know if reverent would be the first adjective I would associate with Tob.  Impish?  Sure.  Passionate?  Without a doubt.  Reverent?  Yeah, I suppose so: reverent before beauty, transported by reverence as he contemplated the sublime.

You know, he was a kind of a saint, but not one of the pastel saints of the holy cards.  He was more like mad Saint Martin of Tours: the soldier-saint who tore his cloak in two to give half to a poor man, who liked a glass of sherry now and then; the patron saint of infantrymen, beer-brewers, and people who can’t pay their bar tab.  Tob negotiated the complexities and contradictions of his own life with grace, aplomb, and an earnest respect for others.  He could say the damndest things, and he often did.  He got away with certain things, where a lot of us probably could not.  I think the reason for this is that there was an untarnished, fundamental innocence about him.  The farm boy from Xenia, Ohio traveled around the world, fought the Nazis, came home, married, earned his PhD, all without injury to that part of him.  There was a devil about him, too, but it was a strange inversion of Goethe’s devil: a devil who could toy with naughtiness because his heart was utterly without malice.

Our backgrounds were so different that Tob’s seemed to me like something from Salinger, or maybe Willa Cather.  One of my favorite stories about his childhood on the farm concerns Tob’s reading of Charles Dickens. Apparently, he would take a book out with him while tending the cows.  (Does one watch cows?  Watch them do what?  My urban childhood did not include livestock.) It so happened that, while he was reading Our Mutual Friend or whatever, the cows would wait until he was completely engrossed, and then take the opportunity to wander off toward parts unknown.  “The cows knew Dickens’ rhythm!” he told me.

He was my friend. I remember the first time I spoke to him.  He was administering a test for his colleague Austin Flanders.  As we took our midterm, he sat contentedly, reading from a book and taking notes on a scrap of paper, the handwritten lines diverging at magnificent angles.  When I handed in my blue book, we spent a good thirteen minutes talking about what we were reading.  He was embroiled in extended flirtation with a Victorian authoress (I assume in retrospect that it was Rhoda Broughton).  I can’t recall what I was reading.  The astonishing thing, looking at it now, is that this was just like any other conversation I would ever have with him.  A bit like addicts of any stripe, we shared for part of an afternoon our passion for our dark mistress, surrounded by a bunch of people who would never have a clue how we could let something like literature consume our lives.  It occurred to me at a certain point in this exchange that I had no idea who this cat was.

“My name,” he told me canonically, “is Tobias.”

“My name is Jeff Aziz,” I told him.

“Good night!” he exclaimed.  “Are you Iranian?”

“I’m half Afghani,” I said.  In future times, he would render this troublesome adjective in a dozen different ways, of which my favorite was “Afghanistanian.”

Have I mentioned that he was tall, slim, silver-haired, and utterly charming?  Wherever you were with Tob, he would be talking to people.  He had survived a heart attack and—though I was not with him at the time—I can assure you that he asked the paramedic in the ambulance where he had been born and where he went to school, recalling his own experiences in Blawnox or Slickville.  I further assure you that the paramedic remembers this conversation.  Once, when we had lunch at the University Club, he told our waitress, a tall and stunning African-American woman, “My God! You are gorgeous!” This without a trace of guile or questionable motive. 

He owned this great big orange-brick house on Darlington Avenue in Squirrel Hill.  The house was like an extension of Tob: tall and rambling and full of books.  Even after the death of his wife, he almost never lived there alone.  I recall having lunch with him on a Sunday morning in August.  Against the wall, beneath the window sill with its houseplants, were bag after bag of green fruits in papery brown husks, some of the bags soggy on the bottom from the weight of their overripe cargo.

“Tob,” I asked him, “What the heck are you doing with all these tomatillos?”  Or maybe I didn’t say “heck.”

It emerged that a woman of his acquaintance (for reasons beyond the scope of this writing) had been hounding him at every waking hour, in person and by telephone, and plying him with produce from her garden.

“Would you like some?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “What would I do with them?”

Indeed.  What would anyone do with them?  There were more tomatillos than could be turned to any conceivable purpose, unless you could use them to shore up the levees when the river was in flood.

At a time when I was a working guy, ink under my fingernails, very unsure about my vocation as an intellectual, Tob was my teacher.  He was not the only fine teacher I had at this time in my life, but he was distinctly Tob.  Perhaps the most important thing he ever did for me as a teacher concerned my writing.  I had just written what I thought was a damned good paper.  I think it was on Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.  I swung by his office, and we were talking about it, when he made a face as if he had tasted something sour.

“What’s up?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, “It’s not that it isn’t good.  I think it’s just that I like your test essays better than your papers.”

“Shut up!”  I said.  “Don’t say another word.  I get it.”

He was right.  In my test essays, under the pressure of time, I seemed to set aside that prissy-perfect notion of university prose and write with energy, and a slightly unhinged black humor.  I took his advice, and felt liberated, crafting a prose that modulated between the ridiculous and the deadly earnest.  That semester, I wrote for Tob what I thought was firebrand of an essay.  It concerned a lecture that Samuel Taylor Coleridge had given on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  During this lecture, Coleridge wandered off into a half-hour digression on the importance of beatings in English public schools.  I argued, if memory serves, that what Coleridge was doing critically with Hamlet involved exactly the same mode of eroticized violence that was in play in the public-school spankings.  I handed in this pipe-bomb of a paper, and waited in an ecstasy of trepidation for his response.  When he returned the papers, I paged to the back for his typewritten comment:  “You say that Coleridge is a fascist.  Right.”

In a certain compartment of my brain where nostalgic memory is lodged, I am even now in Tob’s corner office on the fifth floor.  It is afternoon and, though it is early summer, the radiator is hissing away, the sun blazing through the south-facing window.  On how many afternoons did Tob and I sit there, talking about Eliot, Darwin, Omar Khayyam?  A thousand?  Not nearly enough.  One of Tob’s great gifts was his ability to enter into and share your passion for whatever it was you were revolving in your brain.  He had this way of responding to something that struck him as particularly elegant.  He would recline his lanky frame in his office chair as he said, “Yes!  Yesss.”  Breathlessly, eyes closed, his face toward heaven as he savored for a moment your brilliance.

There are so many things that should be said.  When Betsy and I were first married, for a year, he referred to her as my “bride.”  He could be angry, and often about the right things.  He fought with passion and energy to get benefits for same-sex partners in the university system.  The only thing narrow about him was his build.  Perplexed by the grading system at the university where he taught in Augsburg, Germany, he once inadvertently graded his students backwards, giving the best students the worst grades, and vice versa.  He introduced me to Jeremy Entwisle, who will forever be among my best friends.  I once made Tob promise to live to be 103.  He let me down on that one.  He used to own a yellow Studebaker.  When Troy Boone cleaned the office he had inherited from Tob, he found the butts of cigarettes Tob had smoked in the 1970s.  Computers baffled him: black holes into which valuable files would disappear, never to be seen again.  He was a great host and a heck of a dancer.

Memory is such an intangible thing.  My fear, as I too have gotten older, is that all these things, so important to me, are every day evaporating like gasoline on a summer pavement.  I know that, in talking about Tobias, I have been talking about myself.  Forgive me for that, for my reverence and irreverence.  A few summers ago, Tob and I sat in his hospital room and recited lines from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to entertain his nurses.  A few days later, he was dead.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

There are certain things that I will always associate with Tob.  “Prufrock,” and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Carrion Comfort.”  Ezra Pound’s snarky annotations to the manuscript of “The Waste Land” (“‘Perhaps’ be damned”).  Darlington Avenue in Squirrel Hill.  And there was something Tob used to say about his Romantics, about “Romantic irony”:

“We are the only creatures who can contemplate our own death.  This is romantic irony: to stare into the abyss, understand our own extinction and, from the horror of what we find there, to make art.”

Right.

-Jeff Aziz

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