Good Night, Dear Friend

Renaissance men are a rarity these days, but I’ve been lucky enough to know one. Hallett Smith was witty, civilized and wise. For more than half a century, he was a productive scholar, restoring freshness to Renaissance literature, teaching us much of what we feel--not simply what we know--about Elizabethan poetry. He unraveled tangled texts. He tracked down the sources that inspired Shakespeare. And he did all this with the greatest pleasure, for himself, his students and countless readers.

There are few scholars like Hallett any more. Nowadays, the preferred approach is to evaluate literary works according to the critic’s own political criteria. Hallett submitted his ego to the will of the classic texts he studied and thereby took on something of their power and grace.

After a distinguished teaching career at Caltech, Hallett became a senior research fellow at the Huntington Library. By using increasingly powerful magnifying glasses, he kept working even after his eyes began to fail. But one day a decade ago, the sun blazed through a magnifier and started a small fire in his office. It was time to retire.

I met Hallett in 1969, when I was being interviewed for an assistant professorship at Caltech. It was the beginning of a long, kind friendship. He was 62, an age that seemed ancient when I was 26, and I was in awe of him. It took me several years to call him Hallett instead of Professor Smith, and during that time we were more like mentor and pupil or Prospero and Miranda than colleagues. I would stand outside the classroom where he was teaching Shakespeare and listen to the way he could get inside the characters, investing their words with life. I heard him suffer as Lear, gloat as Iago, burst out in rage as Old Capulet.

Hallett wasn’t one of your baggy-tweeds, devitalized academics. Through him, the gale of life blew high. He played tennis, the violin and, in duets with his daughter, the recorder. He was an expert judge of bourbon, chamber music, fair ladies, trout streams. He freely expressed his likes and dislikes. Over the years, I went to several Shakespeare plays with Hallett and his wife, and he declared each production “the worst” he’d ever seen.

His ironic vision of life kept Hallett from hating anyone. But he did occasionally rail against the British historian A. L. Rowse. Rowse can be waspish and malicious, but Hallett didn’t hold that against him. What he couldn’t stand was his slipshod textual scholarship. Some years ago, Rowse trumpeted to the literary world that he’d solved the mystery of the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. This was like the announcement of cold fusion to the scientific community. Just as Caltech’s physicists were immediately skeptical of the fusion flapdoodle, Hallett was dubious about the theories of the man he called “Rowse the Louse.” As it turned out, both our scientists and our humanist were right to be wary.

The last time I saw Hallett, he was blind and could barely stand. Yet his mind was sharp as a serpent’s tooth and his comic sense keen. He was full of gibes, flashes of merriment and parodies of famous poems (“Whose woods these are I think I know. He gave up golfing years ago.”) That afternoon, Hallett seemed to merge with one of his favorite characters in “Hamlet”--the old gravedigger, another great humanist-philosopher, singing a macabre song, posing riddles, calling for drink, matching wits with his visitor. I’ve never spent a sadder and happier hour.

For his birthday, I would send Hallett cards with Shakespearean quotations. We liked it best when Hallmark misquoted the Bard. This August, I couldn’t find an appropriate card. When I phoned him to wish him a happy 89th, his son Hal said he’d died minutes earlier. Hallett in his time played many parts. And like Shakespeare, he made his exit on his birthday.

I’m sorry I didn’t have one final chance to tell Hallett how much I cared for him. That he cared for me makes my heart stand still with pride.