[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E999-E1000]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

[[Page E999]]

DR. CHARLES A. BRADY, A MULTI-TALENTED MAN

______

HON. JOHN J. LaFALCE

of new york

in the house of representatives

Wednesday, May 10, 1995
Mr. LaFALCE. Mr. Speaker, western New Yorkers and the Canisius
College community in Buffalo this weekend mourned the passing of Dr.
Charles A. Brady, former head of the college's English Department
author and literary critic for the Buffalo News for more than half a
century.
Dr. Brady was an extremely talented, multifaceted person, as
evidenced by the Buffalo News' obituary, which described him as: ``A
professor, poet, novelist, critic and caricaturist * * *.''
In addition to his voluminous literary creations, Dr. Brady will also
be remembered fondly by the many generations of Canisius' alumni, like
me, who were taught and influenced by him.
Following are his obituary which appeared in the Buffalo News, and an
insightful article by Jeff Simon, the News' book editor, which appeared
in the paper May 9 and headlined: ``A Man of Letters, but Even More, a
Man of Life.''
Charles A. Brady Dies; Canisius Prof., Author, Literary Critic for News
Was 83

Charles A. Brady, former head of the English Department at
Canisius College, author and literary critic for The Buffalo
News for five decades, died Friday (May 5, 1995) in Sisters
Hospital, following a long illness.
A professor, poet, novelist, critic and caricaturist, Brady
had used both pen and wit to illuminate even the darkest
recesses of literature for three generations of Western New
Yorkers. He was 83.
Brady, who was born April 15, 1912, often pointed out that
he was born ``the day, the hour and the moment that the
Titantic sank.''
It was that coincidence, he said, that gave him his ``bent
for epic things.''
For more than 50 years, Brady served as an intellectual
beacon to students and residents of the Buffalo area and
beyond, contributing to and interpreting the literary scene
both here and abroad.
A man of enormous enthusiasm and dauntless energy, Brady
since childhood defied a serious heart condition and pursued
an active life, often from his bedside at home, or in the
hospital.
Bardy wrote four novels. One of them, ``Stage of Fools: A
Novel of Sir Thomas More,'' outsold any book published by E.
P. Dutton in 1953. It was translated into Dutch and Spanish
and printed in paperback as well as hard cover.
In 1968, the Poetry Society of America gave first prize to
Brady's ``Keeper of the Western Gate'' and, in 1970, its
Cecil Hemley Memorial Award for the best poem on a
philosophical theme, ``Ecce Homo Ludens.''
C.S. Lewis, the eminent British author, once called Brady's
critique of his work the best published in Great Britain and
the United States.
Brady's literary output was voluminous--from novels, short
stories, poems, children's stories, holiday ``fantasies,'' to
critical essays and book reviews. Throughout his work ran the
deep vein of history.
Son of Andrew J. Brady Sr., a former lumberman who owned
freighters on the Great Lakes, and Belinda Dowd of Black
Rock, Brady's commitment to literature began at Canisius
College, which he attended after graduating from Canisius
High School in 1929. He received his bachelor of arts degree
from Canisius in 1933.
During those years, he also played championship tennis and,
in the spring of 1987, was named to the Canisius College All
Sports Hall of Fame for his undergraduate tennis prowess.
He received a master of arts degree in English from Harvard
University and then returned to Canisius at age 23 as an
associate professor of English.
A year later, he was promoted to professor and chairman of
the English Department, a position he held until 1959, when
he continued his professorship until retirement in 1977.
In his more than 40 years at the college, he touched and
helped mold the tastes and lives of thousands of students and
graduate students, many from other colleges or universities,
who also attended his courses or sought his counsel.
The AZUWUR, the Canisius College yearbook, was dedicated to
Brady in 1956 and again in 1976.
From 1938 to 1941, Brady directed Canisius College's
graduate division, and during World War II, in addition to
his English classes, he taught the classics, French, military
geography and Renaissance history.
Academically, Brady probably was best known for his
lectures and critical studies of Cooper, Marquand, Sigrid
Undset, Charles Williams, the Volsunga Saga, John Le Carre
and C.S. Lewis. His studies on J.R.R. Tolkien and, more
especially, Lewis, have been cited as ``definitive in this
country.''
Copies of Lewis' original letters to Brady, embracing a
correspondence that the British author initiated and that
continued over a number of years, are in the Bodleian Library
at Oxford University.
In addition to ``Stage of Fools,'' Brady's works include
``Viking Summer,'' which combined Norse legend with a
present-day Niagara Frontier setting; ``This Land Fulfilled''
and ``Crown of Grass,'' both historical novels; ``Wings Over
Patmos,'' a book of verse; and ``A Catholic Reader,'' a
personalized anthology.
For children, he wrote ``Cat Royal,'' ``The Elephant Who
Wanted to Pray,'' ``The Church Mouse of St. Nicholas'' and
``Sir Thomas More of London Town.''
For older children, he wrote ``Sword of Clontart'' and ``The
King's Thane.''
A short story, ``The Foot That Went Too Far,'' which he had
written as an undergraduate, was the origin of the griffin as
the Canisius College mascot.
The capstone of his career at Canisius was writing the
college's centenary history, ``Canisius College: The First
Hundred Years.'' Written over almost five years, the book,
unlike most school histories, was done in an impressionistic
style, capturing the spirit of the college as well as that of
the Niagara Frontier.
Brady wrote for national and international journals, and
reviewed books for other major publications, such as The New
York Times, the old Herald Tribune, America, Commonweal and
the Catholic World.
A man of many talents, including some musical composition,
Brady enjoyed drawing line caricatures of authors, many of
which were used to illustrate his critical essays and book
reviews for The News. His last book review and drawing for
The News was printed March 12.
In September 1986, the Burchfield Center at Buffalo State
College exhibited his literary caricatures in a one-man show.
A familiar figure on the lecture platform, Brady held the
Candlemas Lectureship at Boston College and gave Notre Dame's
Summer Lectures in the humanities.
The News named him ``an outstanding citizen'' in 1970.
He was the recipient of the Canisius College LaSalle Medal,
the highest honor awarded to an alumnus. In 1970, the
Canisius Alumni Association presented him with its Peter
Canisius Medal for his ``scholarly brilliance and teaching
excellence that inspired and informed legions of Canisius
students.''
A longtime resident of the Town of Tonawanda, he moved to
Buffalo's Delaware District in the early 1990s.
Brady is survived by his wife of 57 years, the former Mary
Eileen Larson; four daughters, Karen Brady Borland and Moira
Brady Roberts, both of Buffalo, Sheila Brady Nair of New
Bethlehem, Pa., and Kristin M. of London, Ont.; two sons,
Erik L. of Arlington, Va., and Kevin C. of Buffalo and 17
grandchildren.
Prayers at 11 a.m. Monday in the George J. Roberts & Sons
Funeral Home, 2400 Main St., will precede a Mass of Christian
Burial at 11:30 a.m. in Christ the King Chapel at Canisius
College, 2001 Main St. Burial will be in Mount Olivet
Cemetery in the Town of Tonawanda.
____

A Man of Letters, but Even More, a Man of Life

Charles Brady died on Friday afternoon at age 83. His loss
to The News' book pages is virtually incalculable. If it
isn't precisely accurate to say that Charles A. Brady
invented literary reviewing at The Buffalo News, it's
certainly close enough to the truth to pass. He was a
treasured literary voice here in five separate decades.
I've been The News' book editor for six years and was the
book assignment editor for six years before that. Editing Dr.
Brady and finding books that I knew would stimulate him
provided the job's greatest pleasures.
His latest work would appear in my mail every Friday or
Monday morning. Inside the envelope--impeccably typed on
soft, old-fashioned, khaki-colored copy paper--would be three
pages of crystalline prose. Accompanying it, on white paper,
would be one of his pen-and-ink caricatures. Even on busy
Mondays, I would try to save editing Dr. Brady for the last
work of the day--an Edwardian reward of wit, wisdom and
uncommon grace for dealing with all the coarse, witless
drudgery that almost all work requires, journalism included.
At least half the time, there would be a word or spelling
in it that I'd never encountered before--some strange
semantic hippo-griff that Dr. Brady had captured in his
library and uncaged for the delight and enchantment of
company.
Typically, I'd walk over to our glorious battery of
dictionaries in a state of bafflement or skepticism: Surely,
this time, it's a misspelling. And then the huge Random House
Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary and Oxford English
Dictionary would set me straight--Dr. Brady's was very much a
word, even if its usage or spelling were Victorian or
Elizabethan.
It's a walk I'll never make again; it's a smile of marvel
and appreciation I won't be smiling anymore.
Every day that goes by brings at least one book that I
would automatically send to Dr. Brady in total confidence
that it would elicit a smile of complicity on the other end
of our discourse-by-mail-and-phone.
No discussion was necessary to pick out ``Brady books.'' I
have been reading him since my early teens. I knew what he
liked or, failing that, what interested him. That was vastly
more than the epics or Celtic [[Page E1000]] myths or Irish
literature or work of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their
fellow Oxford Inklings that people thought of as his special
province. It encompassed virtually the whole of English
literature, early American literature (James Fenimore Cooper
was a Brady specialty; minor Twain was a Brady weakness), all
American fictional modernism and, late in life, Yiddish and
Jewish literature, for which he developed an entirely
unpredictable fondness.
We disagreed strongly on some writers, but he was the sort
of man with whom disagreement was one of the friendliest
experiences you could have. If he never quite subscribed to
all the hoo-ha about Jorge Luis Borges from me and others, he
would, with impish geniality, point out how much he liked
Anthony Burgess, and what was the name Borges, after all, but
the Spanish version of Burgess?
It's also true, I think, that he was doing some of the best
journalistic work of his life in his final decade. In the
place of earlier reviews that could sometimes be constricted
by myth (it's tempting to call such prose ``myth-begotten''
and hope he'd approve), his work in the past decade was
informed by marvelous wit, total scholarship and a glorious
new clarity. I could delude myself into thinking that our
unspoken communication had something to do with it, but I
know it's not the case.
I think what his readers read in the past decade was the
work of a
man who, besides being loved at home, had finally thrown off
all the vestiges of professorial presentation. To be as
great a teacher as so many generations of Canisius College
students say that Charles Brady was requires a certain
theatricality--a well-communicated sense of literary
passion and identification, an exaggerated self-
definition.
You can't just commune with the avid young scholars in the
front row. If you have any honor at all, you have to
communicate something to the deadheads in the cheap seats.
Even if they don't understand a word you're saying, you have
to give them some sense of the bardic and of the glory of a
life spent in literature.
It made some of this '70s and early '80s journalism
operatic in its mythology, I think. In his final decade's
work, he had stopped composing operatic arias and started
composing magnificent chamber music. It is then, I think,
that we heard his truest voice--just as passionate as the
Yeatsian visionary his students knew, but wittier, more
Edwardian and seemingly effortless.
Wonderfully apropos quotes from the Alexandrian library
inside his head would find their way into his work, but so
would the damnedest, spot-on references to the society around
him.
Anyone who thought that he resided in a 1940s Oxford of his
own devising would be disabused of that notion on
encountering an up-to-the-minute and unfalsified Brady take
on academic gender wars or a perfectly appropriate reference
to gangsta rap. (I must confess, the day I first encountered
the phrase ``gangsta rap'' in a review by the 82-year-old
Brady, I threw my head back and roared with pleasure.)
He was, in that great Henry James phrase, a thoroughly
independent and aware man ``on whom nothing was lost.''
I remember seeing Dr. Brady on an old '50s Buffalo
television show called ``The University of Buffalo
Roundtable.'' The subject of Beat poetry came up. The
acceptable cant from the Professoriat of the '50s--and
certainly from those on that show--was that the Beats were,
to a man, hairy and filthy overhyped pretenders. Brady
listened patiently to it all and said, ``I don't know, I
haven't read all of them, but I've read some (Lawrence)
Ferlinghetti and I think he's pretty good.''
Lest one think that his tower was totally ivory, he was
also, without fail, the most journalistically current book
reviewer we had--right to the end. It never ceased to amaze
me that an old valiant man in failing health was, without
question, our greatest sprinter. His reviews of major books
would continually precede and presage major treatment in the
New York Times and the newsmagazines, often by several weeks.
In such matters, his instincts were impeccable.
When longtime readers lose a voice like Charles Brady's it
is always a personal loss, even for those who never knew him.
But at the end of his life, I think, he was teaching us all
some life lessons that were infinitely greater than he ever
taught in the classroom--that the life of the mind can not
only survive intact to the very hour of our death, but can,
until the moment one is visited by what James called ``that
distinguished thing,'' actually increase in acuity,
understanding and grace.
The world is full of people whom Charles A. Brady taught
how to read and write and think.
At the end of his life and bedeviled by illness, he taught
us something even richer--how to be.

____________________