Robert Hollander, the eminent Dante scholar, died about a week ago at the age of eighty-seven. For more than a decade he had faced with great courage a series of daunting medical challenges. His last months were spent living with his son’s family in Hawaii, and at the very end, comforted with familial love, he departed in repose and peace. I call him the Dante scholar, and that is certainly accurate enough, though wholly insufficient. With equal justice I could call him one of Princeton’s legendary scholar-teachers, one of America’s national leaders in the humanities, memorable conversationalist, amiable bon vivant, admirable husband and father in an impressive family.
Obituaries now in preparation will document Bob’s extraordinary contributions to the study of medieval Italian literature. They will include rich bibliographies and an impressive list of honors, prizes, and awards. I may well have some part in writing one of them. But the category on which I feel most moved to speak in this venue is something quite other: Hollander as friend. We were friends, close friends, for fifty years. We were also colleagues, collaborators, and occasional co-conspirators. There is no greater trial of advancing age than the capricious but inexorable disappearance of old associates. So many dear old companions of the way are gone, and I have now lost the closest of them all. Yet I had had some insulation from the bad news, having experienced its premonition two years ago in another devastating blow. That was when Bob’s wife Jean died. Bob had himself long been seriously disabled, and he and his children decided that he would leave New Jersey to live with them in the West, alternating between households in Alaska and Hawaii. Travel arrangements had already been made when a group of family and friends gathered, in what was also a farewell to their lovely house in the Hopewell countryside, for a mellow meeting in Jean’s memory. It was a lovely event, if one doubly bittersweet; for we recognized at the time the probable finality of the goodbyes.
Cicero famously defined friendship as “a complete identity of feeling about all things in heaven and earth: an identity which is strengthened by mutual goodwill and affection.” In my opinion that better defines a cult or a crush than a friendship, but it includes some of the right elements. Our friendship was certainly based in shared common interest, respect and affection; but it was also one long, continuing, and movable debate about fundamental aspects of medieval literary aesthetics. Then, again, even I can recognize that if the beef is about “fundamental aspects of medieval literary aesthetics,” it may not actually be life-threatening.
Our friendship mainly played out, naturally, in our shared professional arena of Princeton University; but many of its most memorable moments occurred far from its campus. Years ago, the university owned a magnificent white elephant of a vacation “cottage” of robber-baronial dimensions on a Maine island. Before the Administration got rid of it in a spasm of defeudalization, the Dean of the Faculty used to run an annual lottery that allowed a few interested professors to spend a week or two of the summer in this blissful place. One year very early on the Hollanders won a spot and invited us to join them. That was the beginning of periodic social interchanges for the next four decades, and the premonition of marvelous Italian adventures yet to come.
Every university has certain famous courses, and among the most famous at Princeton has been the undergraduate Dante course as established by Hollander. As notoriously demanding as notoriously rewarding, the course aspired, as Milton’s Paradise Lost had done, to a “fit audience if few.” So each year the course attracted a few of the institution’s most brilliant students, and thus, over time, developed one of its more intellectually adventurous alumni subgroups. The annual Class Reunions are a huge deal in this institution, and at some point the burgeoning body of Princeton dantisti—Hollander himself being a member of the Class of 1955—decided that the Purgatorio was preferable to blow-pong as a Reunion activity. Thus the “Dante Reunion” made its intellectual intrusion into a traditionally saturnalian weekend. Still later certain alumni, perhaps having grown somewhat thicker of wallet and possibly of girth, had a real brainwave: how about a week-long summer Dante Reunion seminar in some nice, sunny place, for example a trecento castle in Tuscany? This fabulous place is near Certaldo, home town of Boccaccio; and it was known among the elect simply as “Il Castello.” There Bob conducted alumni seminars. As a teacher he was not flamboyant, yet he was nearly magical. Teaching really difficult materials at the undergraduate level is a special art. His forte was such teaching. Italian Studies are not prominent in America, and he had few graduate students. Fortunately one of those few, the brilliant and charismatic Simone Marchesi, today continues the distinguished tradition of Italian medievalism at Princeton. Around the millennium I was lucky enough to be included as an ancillary spear-bearer in several of the Castello summer seminars. Our experiences there remain, and will continue to remain, among the happiest we have ever had. Most people who read Dante once return to read him again, and then probably yet again. I certainly do, and as I do I will always remember Bob sitting at the head of a huge mahogany table surrounded by eager students of several generations. It was through the Castello seminars that Joan and I first met some of our dearest friends.
Though I am eschewing any serious discussion of Bob’s copious publications, which would require a book chapter rather than a few blog paragraphs, I do have to make one exception. Walking on Dante (1974), one of his tomes perhaps lesser known in the scholarly world, is known intimately to me. That is because I hand-set the type for it, printed it, and bound it. This book, rather this beautiful book—if I say so myself—is a collection of twenty-two of Bob’s poems, most of them previously unpublished. Both Bob and Jean were serious poets, a fact that contributes uniquely to the excellence of their highly praised Dante translation. Jean, indeed, published several volumes of her poetry, and for many years taught courses in poetry writing. She left behind an admiring alumni body of her own in the Princeton area.
I had only the smallest role in selecting the poems to be included in Walking on Dante. There is a certain sprightliness to a few of them, as might be suggested by the flagrant musical pun in the title; but a quite serious one for which I’d like to claim some credit for its having been included is called “L’Annunziazione”. I might describe the poem’s subject as the Italian character. It reminds me rather of Auden’s famous “Musée des Beaux Arts”, as it is a poet’s reflection inspired by his viewing a painting. In this instance it was a traditional religious painting by the fifteenth-century Italian artist Marco Palmezzano. I am no expert on Palmezzano, who produced more than one “Annunciation,” but the painting Bob had in mind must surely be that most often identified as “Annunciation with seascape,” in the Vatican Museums. Not that it actually matters for the meaning of the painting or that of the poem. “Palmezzano understood / How things should be announced, / From bodiless spirit to spiritless flesh;/ And so the two become / Embodied inspirited one.” Any painting or poem about the Annunciation necessarily reenacts its theological subject even as it describes it: the subject of Incarnation, that is, the word made flesh. Bob was an agnostic, not a religious believer; but he tolerated believers like me. Indeed he knew more Catholic theology than many a seminary professor. Dante, whose aesthetics are fundamentally grounded in an incarnational vision, demands no less of his most serious students. As a dantista I am myself and will remain an amateur—a fairly knowledgeable one, I hope, but still an amateur. Like Dante the pilgrim himself I am dependent upon good guides. How lucky I have been to find one not merely in the pages of books but in the incarnation of a sustaining friendship of many decades. Robert Hollander (1933-2021): Requiescat in pace.
