Remembrances of
Larry Hoey
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Larry Hoey in Memoriam

James Soderholm - Brno, Czech Republic
jsoderholm@hotmail.com

     I never really danced with Larry, but I did regularly take turns with his mind. Afterwards I found my intellectual muscles aching.   We were positively peripatetic, walking and talking like ancient Greeks, drifting in dialogue towards laughter, insight, and the love of language for its own sake.   I often could not keep up with Larry and probably disappointed him because I was not his equal.  But we spent so many hours together during my last years in Milwaukee that I have partly inherited some of his energy for the life of the mind no less than the life of the body.   My words of tribute to him rest on particular memories of our friendship but I also wish to offer certain larger observations about a pilgrim soul in which body and mind capered together as dancer and dance.

        More than anyone I know, Larry lived in and for Art, and not merely Art History.  I think Larry understood that Art, life, and scholarship involve an  attentiveness to small things, to the strange decorations of medieval churches or the precise angle of a ballerina's arm as it echoes, for the arc of a moment, a lower limb.  Larry wrote me often and lavishly of his adventures among masterpieces, usually balletic ones but, as we all know, his range of interests was as large as his mind.  His attention to details spilled over into ordinary experiences in such a way as to color them with intense appreciations.  One moment he would write feverishly of some coyly-nested anomaly in a romanesque church, and the next he would tell me about the particularly fetching glance of a gorgeous redhead who just strolled passed the window of the pub in which he was lifting pints.  He brought buildings to life and he turned certain human beings into works of art.  One time, in a restaurant in Milwaukee, he noticed the acute angle at which a woman's arm was bent as she sat slowly nursing a cigarette. 

        Remarking the angle to me, he asked:  "Do you see that incredible arm?"  I've never known anyone who found ways immediately to see at once the formal beauty and the empirical richness of the visible world.   His description of Natalie Dessay's soprano excursions made me run out to buy one of her CDs, and I am forever grateful for this and his many other recommendations.   To spend any time with Larry was to be awakened to many kinds of beauty.   So many evenings he allowed the beauty of his complex soul to overlap with the various intoxications he had in store for me.

        Larry introduced me to scotch, blended and single malt, and simultaneously to ballet, classical and modern.  He had bottles.  He had video-tapes.   Blended scotch corresponded to classical ballet, but Larry reserved the subtle single malts to match the strenuous abstractions of  Ballanchine.  "The Four Temperaments" particularly thrilled him and eventually I began to see what so he found so perfectly agitating.  A modern architect of human motion, Ballanchine gave Larry that blend of simplicity and ornamentation, of abstraction and embodiment, he found so compelling in all structures, the structure of sentences no less than the structure of his favorite buildings.

       Once again, he taught me how to pay attention to details, to what he called "power with precision."   In ballet, Larry found the quintessence of dance.  And in Tanny Le Clerq he found some element beyond the stars.  He even wrote the long-immobilized ballerina a long, appreciative, indeed a loving letter, to which she did not reply.  That hurt him.  But the letter itself is a brilliant gem very few people have seen.  One of Larry's last e-mail messages to me was yet another ornate description of his most recent 'discovery'-- a ballerina with the Bolshoi who bid fair to replace Tanny in his balletic heart.   As we watched his tapes of various dancers, he would alert me to their different styles and to the great choreography of desire of which he formed an important part.  For him, a limb delicately poised was both a remarkable detail and a metaphor for the tapered loveliness of details themselves.   When he wrote about his favorite ballets and ballerinas, he let the pen dance.  And when I told him what a marvelous writer he was, he smiled, and sometimes he even laughed, not incredulously, but with a kind of happy gratitude because I think he wanted to think of himself as not merely a good writer, but perhaps a great one.

        Larry was one of the very few people I've known who had a big, healthy laugh.   He laughed so often and so heartily that I began to have my suspicions if he really were a specimen of Homo academicus.   He gave himself to laughter often and made his friends feel happy in his presence.  Almost all of my bad puns and egregious one-liners made him laugh.  My ideas sometimes made him laugh.  My personal life made him howl.  He made me feel as if I were one of the funniest people on earth, and yet I never felt myself a figure of fun in his eyes, although I had given him plenty of reason for judging me.  I think Larry's laughter was part of his vitality and his talent for enjoying almost everything that crossed his path.  In discussing Joyce or Yeats or Dante, or in meditating with me about the impossible vagaries of romance, he would suddenly let go with one of his raucous laughs.  His laughter released my own until we worked ourselves into a duettino of laughter and pushed away Milwaukee's long darkness.  That laughter composed itself as a self-delighting, yet pensive smile when he sat at the piano.

        I knew that Larry was permanently, blessedly odd when he took his life savings and bought a piano to fill half his living room.  I accompanied him in his quest to find the piano to answer his touch, and saw his pleasure when the gleaming instrument predominated his apartment. But what living, what actual respiration, inspiration, and perspiration took place in that living room.  Many people resemble the over-upholstered furniture they squat upon in these badly-named rooms.  When Larry offered a recital, or even when he was playing more or less impromptu, he poured all his terrific vitality and concentration into his hands, his beautifully agile, powerful hands.  One time, at a smallish party, I turned the pages for him but after a while he waved me off to the sofa.  I could not keep up with him. His face changed when he played.  It became a little dreamier and he often wore a Cheshire smile as hard-won contentment rested on his soul. Sometimes I thought he played too feverishly and too loudly.  From my sofa I would think, but never say, "it's a piano, Larry."  He seemed to like the big, boistrous, fearfully complicated pieces that let his hands race up and down the keyboard--Rachmaninov's works, for example.   And yet in his last recital for me before I left Milwaukee for good, he played "Clair de lune" and my favorite piece by Satie as his hands stroked the piano for its phrases. 
Larry had music at the tips of his fingers, just as he had fingers at the tips of his words.

        As I composed this memorial piece I could hear Larry chiding me, reading over my shoulder, and crying out for more details.  Here, the accent would go where it should-- on the second syllable.  With "ballet" it would go on the first syllable.  He cared about those little things, too.   I don't know how many people really knew what an exceptional writer he was, but it should come as no surprise given his volubility as a speaker and--as we all know--Larry could hold forth like Socrates himself.  He loved professing, in the classroom or over supper or over Guinness.  I know he had at least four books in his head because I heard verbal dissertations about all of them.  He also wrote poems, usually inspired doggerel, though Larry knew the difference between high and low styles.  In his many e-mail communiques to me, he wrote what were essentially prose-poems, most of them about concerts or ballets he had just witnessed.  These pieces, I kept telling him, were not just impressionistic apercu: they were lovely, ingenious, and ingenuous-- art criticism and silvery nocturnes recalling the writings of 
Pater, Ruskin, and Wilde.  But Larry's genius for luminous details combined with an existential brio make these pieces his own.  I think they were written mostly for himself, although I and perhaps a few others were their grateful recipients.  I know that being articulate, in speech and in writing, gave him pleasure.  I hope that someone will take the time to read all his journals and think about editing and publishing his work.  We must not let his idiosyncratic passions escape us.

        A lot of Larry's idiosyncracies were folded into one his favorite movies; it is also one of the weirdest movies ever made.  It is called  "Time of the Gypsies."  It's about nomadism, Eastern European folk life, frustrated love, and the supernatural abilities of its adolescent protagonist.  It turns out he is a sort of cross between Young Werther and Harry Potter.  Larry adored this movie, I believe, for its sheer oddity, its emotional subtlety, and its absolutely non-Western idioms and humor.  Larry and I often saw and discussed movies, particularly "Chariots of Fire," Branaugh's "Henry V," Olivier's "Hamlet," "Zorba the Greek" and of course one his all-time favorites, "Lawrence of Arabia."  "Lawrence" (pronounced as his Bedouin 
followers chanted it--"Or-awnce") was one of my playful monikers for him.  When I would call and he picked up the phone, I would bellow "Orrr-awwwnce!!" and his big laugh instantly erupted through the wire.  Like Peter O'Toole, he loved the role, for I think partly fancied himself a nomad: an intellectual gypsy set loose to make the world a more interesting place.

      For he was a great wanderer and as much a citizen of the world as an American.  One of my last memories of Larry was having him once again serve as tour guide for my parents and me in London.  He seemed to know London as well as he knew his beloved Chicago.    Hardly a tourist, Larry was a traveller and his wanderlust was keen.   It brought him to Texas, which is where I enjoyed his company for the last time.    I saw Larry only a few months ago when he came to visit me in Texas.  This is also when I first met his brother Tom.  Larry spent several days with me and my fiancee before heading off to hike and camp in Big Bend.  Larry was so eager to have adventures that they seemed to follow him around.  I gave him a tour of historic places in Waco--in Waco for god's sake--and he of course ended up giving me the tour, walking me through historic landmarks and houses that seemed to throw open their doors for him.  In one memorable case, this actually happened.  During the tour of one house, Larry displayed for our guides so much intelligence and energy about their own site that one of the curators invited us to her own, far more splendid house that was unaccountably not on the map.  And off we went, Larry grinning wildly the whole time, knowing that I was once again astonished at his ability to transmute lead into gold.  He captured the entire experience on film (how many thousands of photographs did he take in the last twenty years?  Will someone collect these and organize them for us?).

        The four of us--Larry, Tom, my fiancee Whitney, and I--spent a day in Austin, where brother Tom was to meet an old acquaintance at a music festival downtown.   Of course there was dancing and Larry once again tried to teach me a few basic steps.  When my club feet would not cooperate, Whitney stepped in and Larry happily exchanged me for her and I watched with great appreciation as he danced with her, his feet light on the damp grass.  He was always looking for dance partners and delighted in teaching.  It was one of the few forms of intimacy he allowed himself and he made the most of every encounter.

       The next day Larry and I strolled around the campus at Baylor University, where I taught for three years.  Although I was supposed to be giving the tour, he grabbed the reins and forced me to pay attention to my surroundings.  Trees, people, buildings, even birds and squirrels-- all became remarkable in his eyes.  When he stopped in front of the main library I made the horrible mistake of saying something bland about how soulless and unappealing I found most buildings designed after 1960.  Larry seized the bait and produced a thirty minute 'close reading' of the rear entrance of the library, instructing me about its history, style, and use of materials.  When he was done I was fairly exhausted.  But we walked around the building and then Larry cried out, "My god, it has a portico too!"  And the lesson continued, as the elder Greek kept his junior partner in tow.

        My last memory of consequence involves a final walk I took with Larry at twilight through a neighborhood of aggressively middle-class houses.  Larry patiently explained why some of these houses were aesthetically salvagable, and we discussed my various intellectual and psychological obsessions.   A great friend, he was both perfect concert hall and sounding board for my ideas.  Before long we were completely lost, Larry matching my rhapsodies with his prolixity, even as he punctuated our talk with a strolling commentary on the houses, flora, and fauna on our path.   After a few hours we sort of careened our way home, our Platonic dialogue concluded on my back porch as we drained many beers and glasses of Tom's homemade, rhubarb wine.

      The other stories of endearment that I know must be consigned to night and to the grave, beyond all reckoning.   A man with a giant soul, Larry was, as A. E. Housman put it, "handsome of heart."  We shall not look upon his like again.  But all those who spent much time with him may have learned to listen, to see, and to think with more precision, energy, and care.   In this sense he stays fiercely alive not so much in our memories of him, but in our quickened abilities for noticing those sensuous or intellectual miracles Larry pulled out of the world at every turn and that he loved to tell us about.  Larry Hoey is dead.  But I hope some of us have inherited elements of his quick eyes, his expressive hands, his frisky feet, or his lively mind. If we remember what he taught us, if we pay careful attention to the details of structure and the structure of details, then we walk into the cathedral of Larry's soul.

      This is a qualified immortality that does little to fill in the hole in our hearts or to restore him to his eyes, hands, feet, mind.  For we want all of him back, and badly.  Many nights since his death I have called out "Or-awnce, Or-awnce!" in the hopes of being haunted.  Those who loved him will have their own conjuring words.

James Soderholm - Brno, Czech Republic
jsoderholm@hotmail.com
 


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