--- Begin Forwarded Message ---
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 16:31:20 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
From: "Slive, Daniel J." <djslive@library.ucla.edu>
Subject: John Espey
Sender: "Slive, Daniel J." <djslive@library.ucla.edu>
To: "Slive, Daniel J." <djslive@library.ucla.edu>
Reply-To: "Slive, Daniel J." <djslive@library.ucla.edu>
Message-ID: <SIMEON.10009301620.D@yrl-s-spc002.library.ucla.edu>
I am sorry to report to the book community the death of John Espey,
UCLA English professor. Among his many publications was his work with
Charles Gullans entitled:
Margaret Armstrong and American Trade Bindings, with a checklist of her
designed bindings and covers. UCLA University Research Library.
Department of Special Collections. Occasional Paper 6.
Los Angeles, 1991.
(Out of print)
For a complete obituary, see:
http://www.latimes.com/print/metro/20000930/t000092841.html
To those who can't access this website, I have reproduced the text
below:
*****
John Espey; Author, UCLA English
Professor
By MYRNA OLIVER, Times
Staff Writer
John Espey, the
Shanghai-born son of a missionary who
became a scholarly author and UCLA English professor but also
wrote delightfully about his upbringing and collaborated on such
popular epic novels as "Lotus Land," has died. He was 87.
Espey, who often wrote with his longtime companion, Carolyn
See, and her daughter, Lisa See Kendall, under the joint
pseudonym Monica Highland, died Tuesday of congestive heart
failure at their Pacific Palisades home, See said.
"His interests were wide, his mind amazing," See said
Wednesday. "But what made him unique was his giddy love of life,
which approached heedlessness at times, and the high esteem in
which he was held by his family, friends and students."
The son of a severe, strict Presbyterian minister who forbade
strong drink and language or talk of sex, Espey devoted a
much-loved chunk of his eclectic writing to witty memories of his
unusual childhood. His affection for the man he called "Father" was
as clear in his writing as his reasons for choosing a freer lifestyle
in Los Angeles.
"I loved this man," he
told The Times in 1991, at the same time
conceding that he had often required a courage-bolstering snort
from his whiskey bottle before entering his parents' retirement home
in Pasadena. "I felt greatly hurt that, even at the end of his life, we
didn't communicate. He felt that my work was frivolous. I really
should have been out there converting souls."
Espey first came to Los Angeles in 1930 to study at Occidental
College, and returned after his Rhodes Scholar years at England's
Oxford University to teach English at Occidental from 1938 to
1948 and then, for the next 25 years, at UCLA.
Espey first set his childhood recollections to paper in a series of
articles for the New Yorker, which were collected in three books
published by Knopf, "Minor Heresies" in 1945, "Tales Out of
School" in 1947 and "The Other City" in 1950.
When "Espeyites" tired of combing used-book stores for the
long out-of-print volumes that one 1990s Times reviewer still
considered "highly polished gems," Espey collected "all the chapters
I wish to preserve" from the trio and recycled them. The resulting
volume, "Minor Heresies, Major Departures," was published by the
University of California Press in 1994.
His musings had weathered the intervening half-century quite
satisfactorily. A Washington Post reviewer praised the renewed
"beautifully written memoir," citing "two distinctive qualities of this
quite remarkable book . . . the elegance of Espey's stately,
self-confident prose . . . [and] the delicate balance he strikes . . .
between the voice of the mature memoirist and the viewpoint of the
boy whom he is recalling."
That essential balance, the reviewer added, "is so difficult that
only the rarest writer achieves it; Espey is that writer."
Rare, yes, and prodigious. Espey waited more than two
decades after his parents died to write two stronger memoirs, the
nonfiction "Strong Drink, Strong Language" in 1990 and the
sequel-type novel "Winter Return" in 1992.
His father the minister, Espey told The Times in 1991, "simply
would not have liked to have anything personal about his life
mentioned." Espey had already "embarrassed" his parents, they told
him, with one of the New Yorker articles revealing that he had gone
to a Shanghai nightspot as a teenager.
He also wrote scholarly tomes, including "Ezra Pound's
'Mauberley': A Study in Composition" in 1955; with his friend
Charles Gullans, "A Checklist of Trade Bindings Designed by
Margaret Armstrong" in 1958 and "The Decorative Designers" in
1970; and, with Richard Ellmann, "Oscar Wilde: Two Approaches"
in 1977. See said that at the time of Espey's death, he had been
working on a bibliography of American publishers Stone &
Kimball.
Espey wrote two California novels, "The Anniversary" in 1963
about a 19th century Pasadena patriarch, which a Times reviewer
then called "first-rate reading," and "An Observer" in 1965 about a
college professor that another Times reviewer called "fine fiction"
with a "beautifully limpid and lucid" style.
In 1980, Espey published a diverting satirical series of haiku
poems, complete with tongue-in-cheek academic commentary,
titled "The Empty Box Haiku." See said later that the whimsical
book was simply Espey's gift to a depressed colleague.
And Espey wrote with See, with whom he lived after the 1973
death of his wife of 35 years, Alice Martha Rideout. In 1991, they
wrote what one reviewer rated a "touching, hilarious book" outlining
their disparate perspectives on their mature relationship: "Two
Schools of Thought: Some Tales of Learning and Romance."
And then there were the Monica books, written with See and
her author daughter--historical novels that the trio came to view as
"airplane literature for smart people." They got the idea after
watching a television mini-series and figuring they could do better.
Monica, Espey once told Washington Post Book World, "uses
more and different adjectives than either of us might use
individually, but she has her own voice. That's the fun of it."
The three writers and Monica published the novels "Lotus Land"
in 1983 and "110 Shanghai Road" in 1986 and the nonfiction
"Greetings From Southern California" in 1988. The novels were
duly optioned for television miniseries.
Espey also developed a reputation during his 35-year teaching
career as the students' ideal professor. He "never really told his
writing students what to do in the way of storytelling. He simply
demonstrated," one of them, Schuyler Ingle, wrote in an article
for The Times in 1994. Espey did that by telling,
in what Ingle characterized as a "rumbling bass tone and
slow, mellifluous cadence," stories much as he wrote them. His tales
wove in and out of his China childhood, missionary parents, life
at Oxford under C.S. Lewis, his certain taste for gin while
grading papers. If that didn't keep
students awake while he lectured on arcane facts about Pound or
T.S. Eliot, he would reduce them to gales of laughter by teaching
them to sing "Green Grow the Rushes, Oh!" He loaned them money,
and when he felt they needed a little encouragement, bought
them chocolates and champagne. Espey is survived by
See; two daughters from his marriage, Susan and Alice;
See's daughters, Lisa and Clara; and a grandson. The family has
asked that any memorial contributions be sent to the UCLA Foundation
for the John Espey Fund, in care of Victoria Steele, Department of
Special Collections, Room A1713, YRL, Box 951575, Los Angeles, CA
90095-1575.
*****
Daniel J. Slive
Rare Books Librarian
Department of Special Collections
UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library
Postal address:
Room A1713, YRL
Box 951575
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575
Telephone: (310) 206-0568
FAX: (310) 206-1864
E-MAIL: djslive@library.ucla.edu
Department of Special Collections Website:
http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special/scweb/
--- End Forwarded Message ---
Daniel J. Slive
Rare Books Librarian
Department of Special Collections
UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library
Postal address:
Room A1713, YRL
Box 951575
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1575
Telephone: (310) 206-0568
FAX: (310) 206-1864
E-MAIL: djslive@library.ucla.edu
Department of Special Collections Website:
http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/special/scweb/