Roger Shattuck, R.I.P.

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
December 10, 2005
Roger Shattuck, Scholar, Is Dead at 82 
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Roger Shattuck, a polyglot scholar and writer whose
many subjects ranged from the emergence of modernism
to whether some knowledge might be too dangerous to
know, died on Thursday at his home in Lincoln, Vt. He
was 82.

The cause was prostate cancer, his daughter Patricia
said.

Mr. Shattuck's scholarly contributions included
writing three books on Marcel Proust, one of which won
a National Book Award in 1975. His intellectual
journey included a groundbreaking work on the rise of
the avant-garde in France in the decades preceding
World War I and a provocative examination of the famed
"Wild Boy of Aveyron" as a study of how humans develop
intelligence. In all, he wrote 16 books, including six
translations.

In his later decades, Mr. Shattuck became a caustic,
if often witty, opponent of postmodern trends in the
study and teaching of literature, including
deconstructionism and semiotics, which he contended
stripped literature of its intellectual, moral and
human environment. In particular, he lamented that the
literary world increasingly failed to celebrate the
works of classic writers.

"Everything has been said," he said in a speech in
1994 to the first gathering of the Association of
Literary Scholars and Critics, a group he helped
found. "But nobody listens. Therefore it has to be
said all over again - only better. In order to say it
better, we have to know how it was said before."

In an interview yesterday, Harold Bloom, the author
and Yale professor, said Mr. Shattuck's own writings
exemplified these traditional ideals.

"He was an old-fashioned, in a good sense, man of
letters," he said. "He incarnated his love for
literature."

[...]

Mr. Shattuck, who also wrote poetry and short stories,
never earned a master's degree, much less a doctorate.
But he taught at Harvard, the University of Texas, the
University of Virginia and Boston University, from
which he retired in 1997. In retirement, he served for
four years on the school board of his Vermont village,
where he continued to press for a firmly
traditionalist curriculum.

Roger Whitney Shattuck was born in Manhattan on Aug.
20, 1923. His father was a successful physician with a
brownstone on the East Side. 

At Yale, he floundered in a pre-med program, then
interrupted college to enlist in the Army Air Force
and become a pilot in a combat cargo squadron in the
Pacific. He flew a B-25 over Hiroshima a few weeks
after the atomic bomb was dropped.

He ruminated about this in his 1996 book "Forbidden
Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography." He wrote
that although the bomb's ending of the war probably
saved his life, it raised the question of whether it
embodied a knowledge so horrific that it meant man no
longer controlled his fate.

[...]

In 1958, he published "The Banquet Years: The Origins
of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I." He
chose four men to represent the era: Henri Rousseau,
the painter; Erik Satie, the composer; Alfred Jarry,
the writer; and Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet and
promoter of the avant-garde. Alfred Kazin called the
book "a fascinating and brilliant account."

[...]

Mr. Shattuck, who wrote painstakingly on an old
Remington typewriter in a tiny shack with a kerosene
heater, liked to pursue the traditional way of cutting
grass in his meadow with an old-fashioned scythe. He
won hand-mowing contests at the local county fair. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/10/arts/10shattuck.html

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