Russell Peck, My Friend and Mentor

A few days ago I heard that Russell Peck had entered hospice, but that he was still reading messages. Unsure how much time could be spared for all the words in my heart, I sent the following as quickly as I could:

Russell, my friend, my mentor … please know that the boundless love that you’re feeling from your beautiful family is just a fraction of what’s pouring out across the world from the countless lives you’ve touched. We teach as we were taught, love as we were loved, because you showed us the way. There are no words to thank you for what you’ve done for this world. Gower drew back his arrow, but you made it fly.

I was fortunate to be able to get that message to him, brief though it was. Too often we don’t get such chances. It was a rare gift atop the rare gift of being able to know him.

But it wasn’t enough.

I knew it then, and I feel it even more keenly now that word has come of the great man’s passing.

So tonight, as I continue to mourn, I want to record more words in memory of Russell Peck — a man was not only a legend, but also one of the most important people in the making of who I am today …

—

When it came time for me to apply to PhD programs, I applied to only one.

This was not, my advisors at the Medieval Institute told me, How Things Are Done.

But I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and I knew why.

Russell.

He wasn’t “Russell” at that point, of course. Not to me. He was Dr Russell Peck, the John Hall Deane Professor of English at the University of Rochester and the founding editor of the Middle English Texts Series. He was a legend in Medieval Studies and in the editing of medieval sources — fields that were then at the very center of my passions.

He was also, as I’d learn soon enough, a legend in life.

Still, as I was readying my application to Rochester, I remember having a second thought about going all-in like this. Getting into a PhD is signing up for years of working closely with someone. I knew Dr Peck’s work, but what if we didn’t get along?

I raised the question with Dr Tom Seiler, a trusted professor of mine at the Medieval Institute. “Oh, you’ll like Russell,” he replied. Then he laughed and corrected himself. “No. You’ll love Russell.”

Still, this was a big step. I decided to visit Rochester and check things out. Dr Seiler sent Dr Peck a message introducing me and telling him that I was coming to visit with my wife and father.

It was a desolate upstate winter when we arrived, but Russell — in retrospect this would be no surprise — had arranged a party. He and his beloved wife Ruth had opened their home to us and invited a handful of current graduate students and some of his fellow professors over so that we could meet and get to know each other.

A silly thing to remember, perhaps, but the wine he brought out was Borsao, a reasonably priced Garnacha that (I would later learn) he bought by the case. As I write this tonight, I’m having a glass of it again, raised to his memory.

It was a whirlwind visit, both that night and the next day when he took me first to Susan B Anthony’s grave and then to the amazing Robbins Library at the University of Rochester. There, with Dana Symons — an amazing graduate student who was unquestionably his Number One at the time — we went over my paleographical responses to a manuscript of a medieval poem called Kingis Quair.

Towards the end of the visit, he took me back into the stacks and pulled out the scans of a manuscript containing The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament, an 18,372-line biblical retelling from which he’d edited a few pieces in his book Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse (1991).

“This is an important poem,” he said, “but it’s never been edited.”

“I think you already did the good parts,” I replied.

He shook his head. His eyes seared into me with an intensity that seemed as if he was trying to channel one of the prophets in that very book. “I don’t think anyone even knows what the good parts are. So you’re going to come here. And you’re going to edit it. For your dissertation.”

I later learned the word vatic. It’s definition, for me, is the look he had in his eyes: a clarity and passionate surety that seems to predict the future — not because Russell could see the future, but because his willpower left the world no choice but to make that future a reality.

I left Rochester with a shocking clarity. Tom Seiler was right. I loved this man.

Rochester let me in — thank God, since like an idiot I had absolutely no backup plan — and I became a student of Dr Peck.

Russell, as he insisted I call him.

Over the next few years the Robbins Library would become my home as his student and as an assistant and then associate editor for the Middle English Texts Series that was housed there. Across those years, if there was a time when he and I passed two days without exchanging emails or pleasantries, I cannot remember it.

And, yes, I edited The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament for my dissertation. My edition of that beast, all 18,372 lines of it, would be the third of my twenty-some published books.

I damn sure wasn’t about to tell him no.

He was, as I said in that last message I sent him, both my mentor and my friend. He was, at every turn, what I aspired to become — as a teacher and a scholar, yes, but also as a human being. He was a fountain of energy, bouncing and beaming through life in childish wonderment at the world’s delights.

On one of our many trips to the Stratford Festival near Toronto, a group of us went to see a performance of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, which was a revision of one of Russell’s favorite medieval works, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde. Shakespeare’s Troilus is rarely performed, so this was can’t-miss theater.

I don’t know if we chose the seating, or if it was just fate, but I was seated next to him. We settled in for a theatrical performance I will never forget.

At the end, a character named Thersites stands center stage to give his final monologue and bring down the curtain. It had already been a truly powerful performance. Russell and I were captivated, I remember. A single spotlight shone down on the actor as he began his speech talking of the diseases that his own passions had wrought.

He was talking of syphilis, though when I teach the play to my own students we talk also of larger things, like the twinned diseases of blind ignorance and blind knowledge. This is the kind of pedagogical move is just one of so many lessons that Russell taught me.

But back there, at Stratford, a beat began to pound from the speakers around the stage.

I recognized the beat, though for a moment I couldn’t place it. The Shakespearean play, meant to take place during the Trojan War, was too disassociated from the music at first. But then, as Thersites intoned his final lines to the shocked audience — “[I] bequeath you my diseases,” he spits — I knew the beat for what it was.

It was a song called “Closer,” by the American rock band Nine Inch Nails. The chorus of the song — lines that rang out loud and unmistakably as the curtain came down — is this:

I wanna f*ck you like an animal

I wanna feel you from the inside

I wanna f*ck you like an animal

My whole existence is flawed

You get me closer to God

Russell leaned toward me as those words hung in the air. “That,” he whispered, “has fascinating connections to Chaucer.”

So it does, Russell. So it f*cking does.

I’m smiling and crying at the memory. He was so brilliant. So unexpected. I used to joke that Russell forgot more yesterday than I’ll ever know in my life.

It was never meant as an exaggeration.

He was a legend.

Now that he’s passed, it’s easy to brush that word off as a hint of fantasy: legend as something separate from what’s true, a memory that’s been purged of the warts and spots of the real world.

But I assure you that this isn’t the case here. Russell Peck was every bit the legend in every moment that I was blessed to share with him.

He was insatiably fascinated with knowing things, knowing people, knowing life. He loved to sing. He loved to laugh. On a few occasions — private times when no one else was around but the two of us — I saw him experience rare and fleeting moments of anger. Quite frankly, these confirmations of his humanity only served to make the rest of him more real and all the more saintly in my mind.

He was a legend in the truest meaning of the word.

I cannot think of anyone who didn’t count themselves the better for having known him.

I know I wouldn’t be who I am today — as a teacher, scholar, friend, or human being — without the patient and unflinching guidance he gave me.

But the thing about the Great Ones, I’ve learned, is how they reach far beyond their own reach. Yes, Russell directly changed me and so many others for the better. He knew and understood that, I hope. But what I don’t think he could have understood — though I know it to be true — is the indirect impact he has had. He touched so many of us, but every life that we touch in kind continues to pass his spirit on.

“We teach as we were taught, love as we were loved,” as I told him in that final note, “because you showed us the way.”

I meant it, Russell. Every word.

You made and continue to make the world a better place, my friend.

I thank you for it.

We all do.