July 11 is the birthday of E.B. White, Harold Bloom, and James McNeill Whistler—respectively an essayist, a critic, and an artist. Appropriately July 11 is also the anniversary of the death of Perry Epes, who, as an essayist, a critic, and an artist, embodied the best of White, Bloom, and Whistler. Perry was an extraordinary teacher and friend to thousands of people. I was one of those thousands who learned from Perry and who enjoyed his friendship for decades, and I was one of the thousands who were shocked when his wife Gail—also a dear friend and teacher—sent word that he had died. Perry had been in and out of hospitals for so long that we were all accustomed to his recoveries. He was always pulling through, and when he didn’t this time, the shock waves registered worldwide.
I met Perry in late February or early March of 1982, when he picked me up at the Charlottesville airport and drove me to Woodberry Forest School for an interview. It was my first time on the campus, and immediately I felt at home—at one, actually—with Perry and Gail and their cottage on the edge of the golf course. He was head of the Woodberry English Department and hence my boss when I began work there in the fall. But he wasn’t bossy. He led by listening, by demonstrating a full understanding of all points of view, and then by suggesting a mutually acceptable way forward. Perry was not a painter, like Whistler, but a poet, and when I discovered his artistic output, I was intimidated. To me poets were legendary presences in anthologies, not living human beings who laughed readily and talked Civil War history and baseball. In the spring of 1983, when he directed a hugely popular production of Macbeth on the Woodberry stage, I asked the athletic director if I might be excused from assisting with the track team in order to help out with the stage show. (I was incompetent in both track and theater, but I presented a much better bet to help with the play than with anything directly connected to athletics. That spring production marked my first time dabbling in directing a show.) Soon after, Perry invited me to team-teach A.P. English with him in the fall, and immediately I was awash in Aristotelian criticism, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, and Against Deep Meaning, Perry’s own textbook designed for a trimester drama course. I had always wanted to be a writer, but it was Perry who jumpstarted that ambition into practice. I was working with somebody who actually wrote books, and I wanted to participate. When Gail was called to the Episcopal priesthood, the Epes family moved to Northern Virginia and Perry’s alma mater, Episcopal High School, where Perry and Gail won every major award and every member of the community’s love. Despite the distance, never did our friendship attenuate. We saw each other on both campuses, met for lunches in Middleburg, attended plays in Washington, and exchanged letters and phone calls regularly. I was fully up to date with them when Perry died, and thus I felt the loss as if we had been housemates.
In a more recent blow, Nat Jobe died on June 25 of this year, just a couple of weeks ago. Nat and his wife Wistie were also good friends from Woodberry, and his death from the effects of Parkinson’s disease came as both a blow and a relief after his friends had witnessed his heartbreaking decline. He’d been a beloved and brilliant teacher of history, department head, and baseball coach throughout a rich career, and when he retired to live with Wistie at an idyllic cabin on the Maury River in Rockbridge Baths, I kept in close touch and visited frequently. I’m grateful to Nat for being the kind of friend who wouldn’t hesitate to tell me the truth. When I actually began to practice the writing that Perry Epes had by example nudged me to do, Nat was one of my trusted readers. I was so grateful for the way he would tell me what didn’t work in a manuscript; when I learned of a misstep that I’d overlooked or hadn’t considered, I could correct the problem and prevent the inevitable criticism (or uproar, if I’d made an egregious enough miscalculation). We had so many memorable times—a trip to Deerfield to visit their classes and talk with our counterparts there, excursions to the Birchmere for the Seldom Scene, countless dinners at the Jobes’ house or at mine, and, most valuable for my professional development, team-teaching a class in American Studies for three glorious years, a class that ended only when I took an ill-timed sabbatical. Everybody who knew Nat can tell just as many stories. He was everybody’s best friend and every Woodberry student’s favorite teacher.
In Merrily We Roll Along, a musical that ends on a happy note only because it goes backward in time, Stephen Sondheim offers a sardonic, clinical analysis of friendship among three characters who prematurely consider their own friendship superior to the rest:
Most friends fade,
or they don’t make the grade.
New ones are quickly made,
And in a pinch, sure, they’ll do.
But us, old friends,
What’s to discuss, old friends?
Here’s to us.
Who’s like us?
Damn few.
There were damn few like Perry and Nat, and the empty spaces they left in the lives of those who survived them are not ever going to refill. Indeed, we’re going to remember both of them every day by their absence, by every moment when we want to call them, or consult them, or ask their opinion, or share a book, or pass along an article, or sit down with them for a meal. Each day offers countless reminders, and for those reminders we can be grateful. In a memorable application essay for Harvard written forty years ago, a young woman named Maeve O’Connor described her family’s quiet tribute to her late father on what would have been his 53rd birthday. At the end she mentioned the drafty house and her habit of slipping into her father’s favorite sweater, a garment so old that it was unraveling and full of holes. And yet, “I love the holes,” she wrote.
I finally understand what she meant.
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