OBITUARY

John Stewart Wheatcroft
1925-2017

Poet, Novelist, Teacher

John Wheatcroft, the author of 26 books of poetry, fiction and plays and an esteemed professor of English at Bucknell University died on Tuesday March 14, 2017, at the age of 91.

A writer of distinctive sensibility, his books engaged in a wide range of subjects and forms: plays, novels, and poetry, at times surreal, poetic, satirical or comic. His poetry was characterized by self-shattering doubt, ruthless and recurring confrontations with religion, morality and redemption. For Mr. Wheatcroft the embrace of deep doubt led to a frightful engagement with nothingness. This struggle opened a limitless space for the work of imaginative language. Throughout his writing, violence, fear, isolation and doubt coexist with wonder, reverence and love.

In addition to the publication of his books, his works have been produced on Public television, at the Yale Drama Festival and included in a wide array of magazines, newspapers, literary journals and anthologies. In 1965 his play Ofoeti received the Alcoa Playwriting Award and in 1967 it was performed by the American Conservatory theater and received the National Educational Television Award for the Best Original Play of the year. It was widely distributed by NET and in 1985 it was remade as The Boy Who Loved Trolls with Sam Waterson and Susan Anton. Mr. Wheatcroft served as a juror for the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and at various times was a resident fellow at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

His first novel to receive wide recognition was Edie Tells, a comic novel detailing the evolution of middle-aged cleaning woman into a poet.  Perhaps his most widely recognized novel, Catherine, Her Book was a prequel to Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Published in 1983, Virginia Tiger in the New York Times Book Review wrote “Wheatcroft succeeds in fashioning a tale worthy of Bronte’s original having devised a style at once idiomatic and richly archaic”.

Mr. Wheatcroft was indefatigable. He served as an editor, interviewer, wrote essays, reviews, poetry, plays, short stories, and novels, as well as being widely recognized as a seminal teacher of Literature. He taught English for more than 45 years and considered the art of teaching and writing to be part of the same cloth. He earned the distinction of Presidential Professor at Bucknell in 1972 and received numerous awards for teaching including the Lindback award in 1964 and Pennsylvania Professor of the year in 1986 as well as a Gold medal for Teaching from the Carnegie Foundation.

In 1998 Professor Wheatcroft addressed the incoming class:

“ let me exhort you dear ….students, don’t merely go down to the river of learning, experiencing, appreciating, creating…..Take a deep drink, go even further. Throw yourself in, immerse yourself. You don’t have much time. More years ago than seems possible I was sitting where you now sit, able to go down to the river. Believe me you can’t go down again. And there isn’t enough time.”

Known as Jack to his friends, colleagues and students, he taught courses in English and American literature and creative writing. Many of his students went on to distinguished careers as teachers and writers. In 2015 a scholarship was established in his name at Bucknell.

 Former student and acclaimed poet Bruce Smith described “The miracle of his teaching was that it was as human and generous as it was in touch with something beyond us.”

In his tenure of 45 years Jack taught several generations of students, engaging with the children and grandchildren of his first students with the same sustained energy and commitment.

Pulitzer prize winning writer and former student, Peter Balakian writes of Jack as “an eloquent, passionate, brilliant reader of language and form, whose acute sensibility moves students from feeling to intellect to history. His visible legacy is in the impressive and still evolving body of literature but also invisible-a part of the inner lives of thousands of students who have come away from his classes in the past five decades.”

What interested him most was the practice of writing; for him a struggle to imaginatively shape language in an ongoing effort to confront fundamental fears and doubts. His efforts to bring his students face to face with contemporary practicing poets led him to found the Young Poets Seminar at Bucknell in 1984. The seminar offered a month-long scholarship to undergraduate poets to write in the ambiance of an artist colony.  The success of this innovative program led Mr. Wheatcroft to found Bucknell’s Stadler Center for Poetry in 1988, where he served as the first director. Situated in a beautiful 19th century building he oversaw the renovation of the Center that became a sanctuary for Poetry, offering programs and residencies for emerging and established writer and the national literary journal West Branch. Guests of the Center have included such influential writers as Wendell Berry, Hayden Carruth, Mary Oliver, and Josephine Jacobsen.

He was long associated with fine limited editions press, which he helped found with printer and artist Barnard Taylor — The Press on Apple Tree Alley. His collaborations with the Apple Tree Alley included editing a production of his former student and lifetime friend Philip Roth’s story “His Mistress Voice.”

Throughout much of his life, Mr. Wheatcroft immersed himself in both writing and teaching. He saw the university as a modern-day Medici, supporting practicing scholars, scientists, artists and writers in exchange for a commitment to the mission of education. It seemed a fair trade. For him it meant time to devote to the practice of writing coupled with the liberty to skirt the thorny literary market. In an interview from 1977 he said:

“Teaching at a university allows me to be free from having to market what I write, I can do what I am really driven to do.”

His commitment to education extended to full engagement in efforts to shape the University. He was insistent on preserving an institutional commitment to support of the teacher as practicing scholar or artist. To some this might seem an anachronistic view in the face of increasing commodification of higher education. This degeneration of the mission of universities is but one of a multitude of institutional failures facing us today. The explosive corruption of language that dominates our political landscape today was something Mr. Wheatcroft addressed in an essay written in 1965 “ Hey, Any Work for Poetry?” In this prescient meditation on language, modern life and the role of the creative process he notes:

 “We discover a deeply ingrained pattern of verbal activity, which sometimes through calculation sometimes through neglect, serves to render our feelings synthetic, to allow us to be manipulated, to divorce us from reality, to divide us from ourselves, even to turn us against ourselves.  The crisis of our time is a crisis in language. “Johnny can’t read” because words have no connection with reality for him.”

In his belief that “poetry is the reverent renewal of language” he notes that the work of a teacher and the role of poetry with its insistence on precise language, is to put the reader, the student, “back in touch with reality.”

John Stewart Wheatcroft was born in Philadelphia on July 24, 1925, the son of Reverend Allen S. and Laura Wheatcroft. His father, a successful entrepreneur, after suffering the death of his first wife, altered his vocation. He left business, trained for the ministry and became a Baptist clergyman. Growing up during the Depression, Mr. Wheatcroft’s early years were spent in the family parsonage. His father was struck with periodic bouts of depression; the most serious of which occurred when Mr. Wheatcroft was sixteen. For a time, Mr. Wheatcroft assumed duties as head of the household. At 16 he received a Philadelphia’s Mayor’s Scholarship and attended Temple University in 1943. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in July of 1943 at the age of 17 and served for three years in the Pacific theater on the U.S.S. Wisconsin, seeing action during the Battle of the Philippines, the South China Sea Campaign and the Battles of Iwo Jima, Okinawa and Honshu. The scars of his war experiences in the South Pacific were deep. To him modern warfare stained all participants with unavoidable complicity.

In the poem Hitting a Pheasant on The Pennsylvania Turnpike from his second volume of poetry The Prodigal Son published in 1967, he writes:

“So judge in me acquits me, with some wisdom.
Guilt is one recreation we can’t afford.
Our manufacture does the killing. Collisions
are time’s complicities, histories physics.
Only an aggrandizing super ego will
projectile causes from the unfortuitous concourse
of trajectories that claimed one female pheasant life
along the Pennsylvania Turnpike back
to Hiroshima, Bay of Pigs and momently to Hanoi.”

 Recurring in Mr. Wheatcroft’s poetry, was the conflict between his ancestral, religious and moral roots and the terrors of a modern world, invaded by destructive power and technological change.  Poet Bruce Smith wrote of the collection The Fugitive Self: New and Selected Poems published in 2009, “his historical and artistic range is enormous, tactile and accessible. It has enabled him to write a requiem for the twentieth century.” His poetry is “ruthless, discordant, self- searching, alternately harrowing and graceful.”

In the aftermath of the war, Jack found work in a machine shop, drove a taxi in Philadelphia, and worked as an inspector in a Williamsport, Pennsylvania battery factory, all while attending university, first at Temple and then transferring to Bucknell University in 1946. He graduated in 1949 with honors in English and began teaching during his senior year at Bucknell at the request of department head Mildred Martin. After graduation he spent a year at the University of Kansas before returning to Bucknell. He completed his MA in 1950 and doctorate in 1960 at Rutgers University. With the exception of a couple of years, from 1946 until his death, Mr. Wheatcroft lived in the small town of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. He felt rooted there; the historical architecture, the quiet, slower pace of a small town and the University with its accessibility to other writers and colleagues, were all sustaining.

In later decades, he traveled in England, and other parts of Europe. He was particularly drawn to the moors of the Yorkshire landscape. He was a lover of language, Dickinson, Melville, Bronte and Faulkner, music and art, magnolias and roses as well as an avid player of both chess and tennis and a lifelong Yankee’s fan. In the last several years he was slowed by dementia and Parkinson’s and yet even in the shadow of illness, he produced a final remarkable book titled I Am?.

In the final stanza of the final poem in the book, Mr. Wheatcroft writes:

“I prefer not to be a spermatozoon
with a thick little head and posterior whip
my middle crammed with the genes
of all my generations about to be shot from a cannon of flesh
with innumerable of my brothers,
through a vestibule into the reception room
of ova. I’d be insane to search for one
of the waiting to accept me, with whom
I’d be bound to begin the charade of life.
I prefer to be a rock.”