Duhamel in the Honors Program Seminar Room, in the mid-1980s. Photograph: Lee Pellegrini

P. Albert Duhamel, professor of English at Boston College from 1949 to 1998, died on October 1, 2006, at the age of 86, of a blood infection. His immediate survivors are his wife, Helen, his daughter, Mary, and two grandchildren, Susan and Jason. At his request there was no funeral service. “Father was opposed to fuss and feathers,” Mary said.

Al was born in Putnam, Connecticut. His ancestry was Canadian; his home language, French. He was a stellar schoolboy. Bought my first Jowett Plato as a high school soph and won prizes my junior and senior years for philosophical essays. He graduated from Holy Cross, in 1941.

Following an MA in English from Boston College, he received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1945 (dissertation subject: Elizabethan rhetoric).

His first teaching post was at the University of Chicago, whose young president, Robert Hutchins, was in the process of eliminating football, instituting a general education (“great books”) curriculum, and hiring young and enthusiastic faculty. Al approved of all three efforts, especially the third, since he was one of the “whiz kids,” as those new faculty were known. My happiest moments at Chicago were teaching philosophy—in a staff course which included Adler at meetings. “Adler” was Mortimer Adler, the eminent intellectual historian and a key influence on Al.

Al returned to Boston College to teach in 1949. Along with Ed Hirsh, he set up the English major and taught the whole range of graduate courses. In 1958, he founded the College of Arts and Sciences Honors Program. The curriculum was (and continues to be) the “great books.”

In the English Department, “Duhamel’s Shakespeare” was a must-take. Through intellectual history, he unlocked the emotions, ideas, and conventions in the plays—matters strange and wonderful today.

For a time, Al published regularly (often in the Journal of the History of Ideas) and was cited regularly by other scholars. The idea he studied most closely was rhetoric. Then, who can say why, he shut down his active scholarly life and became, for want of a better description, a man of letters. (He would wince at that characterization, but in fact it’s pretty accurate.)

He was reading just about everything. He had a show on public television, I’ve Been Reading, in which he interviewed authors of recently published books. He became the book-review editor of the Boston Herald. He was invited to join venerable downtown eating clubs. Forgive me, but I surfaced where BC never went—WGBH, Somerset, Tavern. He served on Pulitzer Prize committees for several years. In 1980, a series of lectures he delivered at the Boston Public Library was published entitled After Strange Fruit: Changing Literary Taste in Post–World War II Boston (the last book to be banned in Boston had been Lillian Smith’s novel Strange Fruit, in 1945). Al cheered the end of censorship. “No longer can a small group, representing a segment of the community taste prevent the circulation of a book they find offensive,” he said. But he worried too. The first two decades of freedom for readers had provided much evidence of the public’s appalling lack of taste. Al’s instincts were conservative; he prefered cultural practices that survived by altering slowly over time, rather than new and sudden enthusiasms.

Al’s bearing was formal and not notably cheerful. Dark-suited dignity. Even as he embraced you, he kept you at arm’s length. French Canadians are boorish, broody, and never comfortable except when “en famille.” His own rhetoric was not the public kind he wrote about, the kind that argues strenuously for or against this or that, all brass and clanging cymbal. It was softer, the kind that listens, that holds persons more dear than opinions or even ideas. He heeded, as Lear should have but didn’t, Fool’s advice:

Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest.

“Duke” was a name that students had for him. “Prince Albert” was another. Royal nicknames. Not bad.

Boston College understood his importance. He held BC’s first endowed chair, as Philomatheia Professor of English. In 1984, President J. Donald Monan, SJ, chose him to be the faculty speaker at the dedication of O’Neill Library. And in 1987, the English department sponsored a symposium to honor the 25th anniversary of the publication of Rhetoric: Principles and Usage, which he wrote with department colleague Dick Hughes. (Al did his best to nix the event.) Speakers praised the book as a breakthrough, as the first textbook to propose that the least prestigious course of all, freshman composition, had, in classical rhetoric, a distinguished tradition.

When Al retired from the English department in 1990, he returned part-time to the Honors Program. Once again he taught the first year course—from the Old Testament and the Greek philosophers to Shakespeare. After eight years, he had to quit; his eyesight was failing. He and Helen moved to a retirement community close to their daughter’s home. He disliked the dimming of life, this gray capsule to which I am now consigned, but he took what pleasures he could. Still swim and lift weights. Have to listen to audiotapes from Perkins Institute because reading via Optalex machine is too much of a strain, too artificial.

A late letter. His eyesight all but gone, he pecked at his old Royal desk typewriter, no longer able to read what he typed, and with only a memory of the keyboard. With your knowledge of “The Gold Bug” you ought to –e able to work out—decrypt—the mussing letters.

Man of letters.

Diverted locals with a bit of nostalgis on why my grandfather hated me.–lived a block from his shop, forge etc/ So very time he saw me coing he had to hide the hardp tools, douse the forge fire, make sure the horse he was shoeing was [Here the sentence runs off the edge of the paper.] All those days 1929 to 1933 we spoke French because grandparents couldn’t handle English, and we founf it more comfortable like odl clothes. No I find myselkf in my reminiscences thinking and dreaming in “Joual” French-Canadian and wishing there was someone–or some tape–that I could use to summon up familiar sounds.

Paul Doherty is an associate professor of English at Boston College.

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