In Memoriam Herbert Paul Varley 1931-2015
Ross Bender
In Memoriam Herbert Paul Varley 1931-2015
Paul Varley was my MA thesis and PhD dissertation advisor at Columbia University during the 1970s. When I started out as a graduate student in 1971 he had just published Imperial Restoration in Medieval Japan, the first study in English of the Kenmu Restoration. It included an introduction to the Jinnō Shōtōki of Kitabatake Chikafusa, which Varley was to translate and publish in 1980. In the introduction to The Ōnin War: History of its Origins and Background With a Selective Translation of the Chronicle of Ōnin (1967) Varley noted that "…very little specialized research has been undertaken [by Western scholars] in recent years on pre-Tokugawa affairs." He cited Minoru Shinoda’s The Founding of the Kamakura Shogunate (1960), Ivan Morris’ The World of the Shining Prince (1964), and John Whitney Hall’s Government and Local Power in Japan (1966). It is difficult for today’s students to realize that a half-century ago the field of premodern Japanese studies in the West simply did not exist. There was at that time, for example, only one translation of the Tale of Genji, that of Arthur Waley. Columbia University Press published Helen Craig McCullough’s Taiheiki translation in 1959, and her Yoshitsune appeared in1966. Ivan Morris’ translation of The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon appeared in 1967.
At Columbia University Donald Keene had, during the decade of the 1950s, embarked on his lifelong project of introducing the glories of premodern Japanese writing to the West. Grove Press, an avant-garde outfit down in Greenwich Village that published Samuel Beckett and the Beats, brought out his Japanese Literature: An Introduction for Western Readers in 1955. This slim volume surveyed the classical Japanese novel, theater and poetry collections, and opened the doors to the great tsunami of subsequent English translations of Japanese literature. Keene and Morris were Varley’s teachers at Columbia. Paul told me many years later that Keene was teaching Japanese history at the time and suggested that he translate the Chronicle of Ōnin. In collaboration with Ivan and Nobuko Morris, Varley published The Samurai in 1970. This diminutive intro presaged the enormous Western interest in these medieval warriors that plagues us to this day, such that when I diffidently inform a stranger at a party that I study Japanese history, their second query, after asking whether I speak Japanese, is always, "Oh, so do you know all about the samurai?" Or martial arts, or the geisha. (Nobody asks about Zen or the tea ceremony anymore.)
The first paper I wrote for Varley was a disaster. I had just come from college where I had absorbed Hegel, Marx and Arnold Toynbee, and for the class in Medieval Japanese History I penned a monstrous essay explaining in ostentatious detail the true meaning of the shugo daimyō in world history. My grade for the course was a gentleman’s B+, as low as you could go in grad school in those days. Varley’s only comment was "grandiose," and he was kind enough never to mention it again. A few weeks before Columbia commencement in 1974 I handed him my MA thesis, “The Hachiman Cult and the Dōkyō Incident” and promptly suffered a nervous breakdown. Varley visited me in the psych ward on the ninth floor of St. Luke’s Hospital and reassured me that my thesis had been accepted and that I had received my Master’s degree.
That summer I was exiled to the midwestern hellhole I thought I had escaped upon moving to the glittering city, then still in all its bohemian glory. Varley kept in touch with my father and through him urged me to return to New York. I had won a Mombushō scholarship to study at Kokugakuin University that fall, but because of my condition was not able to take it up. Instead I returned to Columbia, to a very small room in 70 Morningside Drive, an old tenement no longer standing that then served as a men’s dormitory. I enrolled in only one course, Fifth Year Modern Japanese, which Varley taught that year. In those days pipe and cigarette smoking was still common in the classroom. I found myself in a deep funk at one end of a long seminar table chain-smoking Marlboros. It must have annoyed the other students, but Varley graciously suffered my loathsome habit without comment. My profound depression gradually wore off and in the spring term I took Varley’s course on Wayō Kanbun. We read through parts of Azuma Kagami and some of the writings of Nichiren. With Varley’s encouragement I applied and won a Japan Foundation scholarship to study at the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies in Tokyo that September.
My eminent New York psychiatrist, a Columbia man and an unreconstructed Freudian, cleared me to go to Japan, and I flew into Tokyo with great anticipation. One of my first stops was at Yoyogi Hachiman, where I embarrassed myself by trying to impress the priest with my knowledge of the deity. After preliminary exams at the Center, I began to fall apart. Back on the ICU campus where I had a room I stayed up past midnight, imagining that I was flying to the moon. To make a long story short my friends eventually conducted me to an old stone house on Yokohama Bluff, which served as a sort of hospice for ailing foreign seamen.
Back in my midwestern hellhole I attempted suicide. Several friends from New York came to visit me. Again, Varley was in touch with my father through that infernal period, and again encouraged me to return to Columbia to take my oral PhD exams. Again, the depression gradually passed off and I passed the exams and won a dissertation grant to attend Kokugakuin. My shrink contacted a psychiatrist in Tokyo who agreed to treat me. To make a long story short I wound up again at Yamate Bluff.
I was ready to throw up my hands and give up Japanese studies, but once more Varley persuaded me to come back to Columbia and finish my dissertation. He patiently read and commented on each chapter. In addition, he asked me to read the manuscript for his translation of Jinnō Shōtoki. I felt a deep sense of worth, and struggled through the thesis, which I defended in 1980. Then I swore I would never go to Japan or study Japanese again, and tried to forget the last decade.
Paul Varley was a plainspoken and rather diffident man, a striking contrast to the peacocks and prima donnas of the EALAC department at Columbia. I term them peacocks and prima donnas proudly and affectionately; it was a great honor to study with them, but it was Varley who pulled me through the worst of my illness. But on one occasion Varley was the undisputed star. Katy Sparling held a poetry meeting in her apartment, where we were to drink, drink, drink and compose renga. But first there was a magic show. Varley explained that while stationed in Japan during the Korean war he had learned to assemble and disassemble a gas mask in the total darkness, and this had led to a hobby as an amateur magician. The formidable Hans Bielenstein, Professor of Chinese History and a student of Bernhard Karlgren, sat up quite close, a monocle screwed in his right eye, determined to catch him out. After a series of elegantly performed rope, card and cloth tricks, and amid much enthusiastic applause, Hans exclaimed loudly, "I don’t see how he does it!" High praise, coming from the late Dr. Bielenstein, a grand professor who also passed away this year.
After graduate school I did not see Paul again until December of 2004, when I stopped over in Honolulu en route to Japan. He took me for breakfast at the Hau Tree on Waikiki Beach, then spent several hours driving me around the island, to the university campus, Diamond Head and the Punch Bowl. At the cemetery there was an exhibit of maps depicting WWII naval encounters between the US and Japan, in which he was quite interested at the time. In January of 2006 during another stopover in Honolulu he kindly invited Wayne Farris to come along to breakfast at the Hau Tree. Both men strongly encouraged me to return to my studies of ancient Japan, from which I had taken a long hiatus.
It was not until this summer that I again reconnected with Paul, who had since moved back to New Jersey to be with family. I obtained his email and wrote asking him for his mailing address, so that I could send him the first volume of my Shoku Nihongi translation. He gave it to me, and inquired after Cappy Hurst. I sent him the first volume, and in October the second, dedicated to him, but had no response. I vaguely wondered how he was doing, but had no idea of his health situation. He was about the age of my father, who had passed away in 2011 at the age of 81. So it was a shock to hear of his death from Janet Goodwin’s message to the H-Net list.
Looking back at some of Varley’s work, I was struck once again by the pioneering steps he took. His "Note on Primary Sources" in The Ōnin War discussed the great numbers of diaries, war tales and the komonjo available for the study of medieval Japan. Many of these have since been studied or translated by Western scholars. In summer of 1973 an academic conference was held in Kyoto, and the result was the magnificent volume Japan in the Muromachi Age (1977), edited by John Whitney Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Part Five of the book, "Cultural Life" was headed by Varley’s essay on Ashikaga Yoshimitsu and the world of Kitayama. The other contributors were luminaries like John Rosenfield, Donald Keene, and Barbara Ruch. The chapter on shoin-style architecture was written by Itō Teiji with Paul Novograd, who was at that time a graduate student of Varley’s at Columbia. I never met Novograd, but I recall hearing Varley mention him at times with great pleasure as a "mercurial personality." Novograd at that time owned a riding stable in Central Park and was studying Japanese gardens.
In later years Paul became greatly interested in the culture of tea and edited, with Kumakura Isao, the volume Tea in Japan: Essays on the History of Chanoyu. Upon his retirement from Hawai’i in 2008 he held the Sen XV Soshitsu Chair in cultural history. The last time I saw my old professor, in 2006, he remarked with some satisfaction that his Japanese Culture, then in its fourth edition, was selling about four thousand copies a year. I consider it a great honor to have studied under one of the eminent pioneers in pre-modern Japanese studies in America. But most of all, I am profoundly indebted to him for helping me through the difficult years, for persuading me that my thesis was worth completing, and for encouraging me many years later to return to my own study of ancient Japan.
December 20, 2015
Keller Kimbrough
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Cynthea Bogel
Cynthea
Cynthea J. Bogel
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