Remembrance of Calvert Watkins

Remembrances of Calvert Watkins HIS FRIENDS The 25th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference was dedicated to the memory of Calvert Watkins, who died 20 March 2013. We therefore happily embraced the suggestion of Joshua Katz that the respective tributes of friends, students, and colleagues presented at the 32nd East Coast Conference held at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań on 21 June 2013, at the celebration of his life at Harvard University on 4 October 2013, and at the start of our conference on 25 October 2013, be included in this proceedings volume. We are grateful to everyone for their contributions. The remembrances were framed in personal terms, and the largely informal tone of the oral remarks has intentionally been preserved in the printed versions. In a few cases, what appears here reflects a composite of what was presented on different occasions. For a full appreciation of Calvert Watkins’ scholarly career we refer readers to the formal obituaries, one of which has appeared in Journal of Indo-European Studies 41/2–3 (2013) 506–12, where one may also find a comprehensive list of his publications. The Editors ————— Cal Watkins in Monosyllables KATHLEEN M. COLEMAN Harvard University Question: What made Cal Watkins so lovable? Answer: Impossible question. Find monosyllables and build up from there. For one thing, there was Cal’s hat. It defined him. It made him different: a Texan in Massachusetts, a man with a sense of style, a practical man, a man you could see coming; it heralded his presence and it made you pleased, because when you saw his hat in the distance, it meant that Cal would soon be there, with his smile and his slight stammer and his instant, natural, irresistible warmth. Where there is a hat, as we all know, there will also be a cat. Cal—and Stephanie—had Fergus. Fergus was a Great Cat. He had dignity. He embodied all the characteristics that Cal—and Stephanie—ascribed to him. He was an Owner. He owned their space. It was his space, that lovely rambling house in North Cambridge where we had so many great parties in the dead of winter. There are many wonderful stories about Fergus that Cal used to tell with consummate Stephanie W. Jamison, H. Craig Melchert, and Brent Vine (eds.). 2014. Proceedings of the 25th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference. Bremen: Hempen. 1–19. 2 Friends of Calvert Watkins narrative control. My favorite is the story of the eminent French professor, very eminent and very French, très important, on whose lap Fergus jumped and into whose arm Fergus sank his teeth, a faux pas incroyable, terrible. The French professor suffered a mortal wound to his amour propre, if not to his person; and then Cal would chuckle mightily as he revealed the dénouement, quoting Stephanie’s spontaneous rebuke to the professor in defense of Fergus: “But you sat in his chair!” As well as the hat and the cat, there is another monosyllabic entity that is indissolubly associated with Cal, and that is jam. The farm in Vermont, to which he and Stephanie repaired every summer, produced jam in great quantities, delicious jam, in little jars, with the proper tops and carefully printed labels. When he and Stephanie had been to dinner, the memory of the laughter and the stimulation and the companionship flooded back into the kitchen every breakfast time until the jam was finished. Obviously, there is a further monosyllable that defines Cal, and that is “fun.” But I want to associate it not with his company over the dinner table, although of course it belongs there too, but with his scholarship. He didn’t really write articles and books; he wrote detective stories. Each unpacking of an Indo-European trope was a cliffhanger, a who-dun-it, a chase through a linguistic labyrinth. And then, by the end, it all makes crystalline sense: a zigzag tour through Hittite and Gaulish and Lithuanian and Old Irish suddenly illuminates some ritual habit of our Indo-European ancestors, as though a spotlight were trained backwards through the millennia. The learning in every sentence was in deadly earnest, but Cal’s touch was light, manifest from the get-go in his inimitable choice of titles. One thinks instantly of How to Kill a Dragon, the magnificent study of IndoEuropean poetics that won the Goodwin Prize, the highest accolade that the erstwhile American Philological Association, now the Society for Classical Studies, can bestow upon one of its members. But my personal favorite is the paper “Let Us Now Praise Famous Grains,” delivered to the American Philosophical Society in 1977 and published in their Proceedings the following year, where the formulaic phrases for various farinaceous concoctions in Homer and the Rig-Veda and elsewhere turn out to testify to a “single common Indo-European liturgical cultic practice.” Reading Cal’s reconstruction of the fears and fetishes of the first people to communicate in the syllables that have spawned our modern global language, I have the feeling that I am glimpsing something primeval and fundamental about the human psyche. Future generations of linguists may be able to demonstrate that some of the connections that Cal made won’t hold together, though I bet not many. But nobody will ever be able to deny or dismantle the Remembrances 3 grace and limpid clarity, the insight and the sympathy, with which he constructed them. Some parts of what made Cal lovable, of course, aren’t easily packed into monosyllables. He was endearingly self-deprecating. He was affectionately loyal to his mentors and fiercely proud of his students. And, perhaps because of all those decades studying ancient poetry from a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, predigital society, he knew that the secret of life lies close to the earth. After retirement, Stephanie at his side, he embraced the Californian climate with the fervor of a vegetable-gardener who has found Nirvana. I picture him in the next world, with his hat on, in feline company, cultivating the berries that will produce the next crop of jam, and having fun pondering how a Homeric hapax legomenon can be connected with a survival in Luvian. Cal Watkins was a great scholar and a treasured colleague and teacher. All languages intrigued him, perhaps especially those he didn’t know, like Shona. Hamba gashli, shamwari; go carefully, my friend. ————— Cal Watkins JAY JASANOFF Harvard University At the beginning of the Fall Term of 1962—the fall of the Cuban Missile Crisis —I was a twenty-year-old senior at Harvard. My concentration was Linguistics and Mathematics, a combination which, in the Cold War Harvard of the time, was understood to mean the problem of getting computers, still very new, to translate Russian scientific articles into English. The combined concentration was neither very demanding nor, to my taste, very interesting. So I was looking for new linguistic thrills when, on the recommendation of a Greek teacher the year before, I decided to attend the first meeting of Classical Philology 234, Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin, taught by Professor—still Assistant Professor —Calvert Watkins. The thrill was not long coming. Cal was 29 at the time, younger than many of the graduate students one met as section leaders, and still hardly more than a kid in some ways. But not like a kid in others. To those of us in the class, he seemed omniscient. He spoke with authority not only about Greek and Latin, but about Sanskrit, Hittite, Old Irish, Indo-European, and everything that had to do with language and linguistics. Within a couple of weeks I found myself, like everyone else, becoming fascinated with his mannerisms—the dramatic way he had of sweeping his hair back when it got in his eyes, his memorable pause vowel, his 4 Friends of Calvert Watkins Borsalino hat, his marked way of pronouncing Spanish, his exotic French cigarettes. Everyone wanted to imitate him. Some of us, at least, wanted to be like him. There was a final exam in the course. In those days, when you took an exam at Harvard and you wanted to know how you did on it sooner rather than later, you left a self-addressed postcard in the blue book for the instructor to send you your grade. I got an A. But more than that I got a comment: “Yours was the best exam of the lot. I suggest that you do more work in historical and comparative linguistics. CW.” If there was a moment at which I began to conceive of myself as a future Indo-Europeanist, that was it. In the next semester, my last as an undergraduate, Cal invited me to sit in on his graduate seminar in IE. Here the regular students included Gregory Nagy and Paul Kiparsky. It was all way over my head; of the topics discussed I can now only remember the voiceless aspirates, which he talked about in the spirit of Kuryłowicz, and the ending *-osyo, which he discussed in the spirit of Benveniste. These were his two great heroes at the time, of whom more in a moment. For graduate school I applied to Harvard and MIT—Harvard because it was home, and MIT because Chomsky and Halle were in the process of building a program there that was emerging as the most exciting place in the country to do linguistic theory. I initially expected to go to MIT if I got in, as I did. But in the end, after the Watkins experience, a year in Europe and some explanations at home, I decided to stay at Harvard, not for the kind of “mathematical linguistics” I had been doing, but to do Indo-European with Cal. There was probably nobody else in the world at that time who could make Indo-European look more exciting than generative grammar at MIT, but Cal did that for me and, over the years, many others. By then he had inherited the Harvard Linguistics Department. He was its chairman (as they were then called) and only tenured core faculty member. He was also my adviser, and in the fullness of time I became his first solely supervised Ph.D. in Linguistics. Cal didn’t exactly advise as an adviser; he inspired. Being himself largely self-taught as an Indo-Europeanist, he always believed that the best way to teach was by example. The way you learned the trade was by watching the best people do it. Detailed reading lists were not his thing; instead, he said things like: “you should read everything Meillet (or Benveniste or Kuryłowicz) ever wrote.” He also occasionally deployed the names of Thurneysen and Schulze in this frame. On the whole, however, he made no secret of his predilection for French and Francophone scholars. He preferred the elegance and Remembrances 5 clarity of the Saussurean tradition to the otherwise general Teutonic heaviness that he saw it as his mission to combat. Likewise not Cal’s thing were cut and dried courses that simply followed the handbooks—the format he used to refer to as “Indogermanisch a ergibt a.” Teaching by example meant solving problems, and solving them brilliantly, in the manner of a mathematical proof. He liked the Euclidean verb “demonstrate”—“as I have demonstrated,” he would say, or “as Benveniste has demonstrated,” “as Kuryłowicz has demonstrated,” and so on. Kuryłowicz, in fact, he actually brought to Harvard twice while I was a graduate student. “The man is amazing,” Cal said, “he’s almost seventy and he just keeps knocking down problems.” Cal himself was knocking down problems at a fast clip in those years. His 1963 article on the syntax of the Old Irish verbal phrase was an early example of the breathtaking ability he had to pull brilliant solutions out of a hat. Later in the decade came the book that had the greatest influence on me personally, his tour de force on the history of Indo-European verb inflection. This work, full of original ideas and productive insights, forever transformed the way we do morphological reconstruction. It is not an easy book; critics of the more plodding sort found its style of presentation unfamiliar and disorganized. But one recalls that the charge of “formlessness” was also leveled at Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. At no time in his career did Cal did enforce a party line on his students; no one was dragooned into writing a dissertation on this or that topic because it served the greater interests of the barely existent “Harvard school.” One acquired his views, of course, but the culture he created in his department placed greater emphasis on originality and creativity than on ideological correctness. Some of the problems “knocked down” at Harvard in the sixties and seventies had a way of popping up again, as problems will, in the eighties and nineties. But Cal valued getting things right above the need to be right, and he valued an elegant refutation as much as an elegant proof. His personal model encouraged the same values in those who knew him as a teacher or worked with him as a colleague—in my case both. And that’s why, in the acknowledgment section of my Hittite and the Indo-European Verb, I thanked him above all for teaching me “what constitutes a problem worth working on, and a solution worth looking for.” ————— 6 Calvert Watkins Friends of Calvert Watkins JOSHUA T. KATZ Princeton University In what I believe is the last paper he wrote, Calvert Watkins took on the matter of what he called the “expressive dimension” in Indo-European. It is vintage Calvert, moving from his intellectual great-grandfather Ferdinand de Saussure to the latest views in theoretical semantics. Along the way, inside just a few pages, he also reconstructs a Luvian word and mentions Pig Latin, cites a pile of those American cusswords, like Jiminy Cricket, that we all know he so enjoyed, describes a series of diminutives he exchanged with a barman half a century ago in Poland, a country dear to his heart, and quotes on the rhetorical power of Vedic intensives his beloved Stephanie, whom he describes as “the young Sanskritist.” The paper ends with Calvert’s plea to his fellow linguists not (and I quote) “to neglect or suppress such words and exclamations” as Yiddish oy vey, Greek οἴμοι, and the Hittite pair ain (ú)wāin ‘pain and woe’—and we are here today precisely not to neglect or suppress them. Calvert was a storyteller, a joyful storyteller, and in our business, no one was better. But of course, in our business, there was no one better at a whole lot of things. Calvert’s career began early, with authoritative studies of Gaulish, Old Irish, and Middle Welsh phonology and morphology—and if he had never written about anything other than Celtic, dayenu (it would have been enough), since this was a realm over which he held brilliant sovereignty. Adding interests and never subtracting, he then moved on to Hittite, to syntax, to Roman law, to Pindar; he brought dragons to life; he even overcame his lack of enthusiasm for Tocharian long enough to write what quickly became the article on its metrics. He was a genius but he never let his academic prowess or success define him and never wished for others to define him by it either. Like most people with an excellent sense of humor, he veered merrily into the slightly off-color and earthy, and though I hold myself back now from repeating some of his funniest comments, I am confident that he would prefer that we not sing our woe for too long but instead take time to remember with a grin and a laugh how this charismatic, photogenic, cat-loving, altogether larger-than-life man cultivated his garden, literally as well as metaphorically. While we can hardly fail to celebrate Calvert’s unparalleled power to bridge the technical and the poetic through the judicious use of asterisks, I’m pretty sure that he would want on this occasion for someone to praise the almost childish delight with which, at the annual “Dead of Winter” and other raucous parties at 10 Locke Street, he used to tell the story of “Moses and the ‘Peasle Tree’” as recorded in “Two Eye Kings.” Remembrances 7 When I was in college, I had the extraordinary fortune to be taught by five world-class Indo-Europeanists. One was Calvert’s old friend Stanley Insler. Another was Jay Jasanoff, who wrote his dissertation under Calvert’s direction in the 1960s. The third was Craig Melchert, who wrote his dissertation under the direction of Calvert and Jay in the 1970s. The fourth was Brent Vine, who likewise worked with Calvert and Jay, earning his Ph.D. in the 1980s. And the fifth— though in chronological and other terms really the first—was Stephanie Jamison, who was both Stanley’s greatest student and Calvert’s wife and muse. So when, in the 1990s, I went to Harvard to study with Calvert, my Doktorvater, my intellectual father, was already my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my “uncle.” And I bring up this tangled family tree because it is important to understand the man’s outsize effect. For more than fifty years he led the field of IndoEuropean historical and comparative linguistics—and I mean the entire field, for thanks to his extraordinary range, generosity, and curiosity, and thanks also to his disdain for the idea that people might kowtow to the “Watkins doctrine,” whatever that might be, those of us who are fortunate enough to call ourselves his students and grand-students are spread across the academic map. Some of us are linguists, others classicists, still others anthropologists; some prefer aorists, others Vergil; some teach Beowulf, others the Rigveda. The amazing thing about Calvert is that he could do everything that each of us can do—but better. For some reason, I always called him Calvert rather than Cal. And this is who he was: a man who had a thing about black-eyed peas, drank Myers’s rum with a splash of tonic and a wedge of lime, and loved to shimmy the night away; a man who was thoroughly unpretentious and yet wore and regularly consulted a pocket watch; a man who really and truly did not believe a person was educated who couldn’t read cuneiform; a man who loved life. He taught me both how to chop down a tree and how to do something with Saturnians that approximates scansion. I loved him, we had wonderful times together, and I miss him. Roman Jakobson, whom Calvert eulogized a hop and a skip from here in Memorial Church one October day 31 years ago, once said of his great student that he jumped through colors. With his dazzling smile, Liberty print ties, and panoptic talents, Calvert was our rainbow. He really did jump through colors, and —ain (ú)wāin ‘pain and woe’—that’s why we’re all now singing the blues. ————— 8 Friends of Calvert Watkins Calvert Watkins, ECIEC and “WeCIEC” H. CRAIG MELCHERT University of California, Los Angeles Calvert Watkins was one of the founding members of the East Coast IndoEuropean Conference, which was first held at Yale University in 1982. According to my documentation, he presented papers at the first eighteen annual meetings consecutively and at twenty-seven of the first thirty, having served as host or co-host for four of them. The topics of his presentations included syntax, metrics, poetic formulae, myth, comparative law, onomastics, and etymologies, the last always scrupulously including discussion of all the relevant phonological, morphological, and semantic issues. He treated problems of Luvian, Palaic, Hittite, Old Irish, Gaulish, Tocharian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Iranian, and Germanic. Virtually all of his ECIEC papers eventually appeared in print either as individual publications or as chapters in his How To Kill A Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics of 1995. Mere statistics, however, do not remotely convey the full significance of Cal’s role as a member of ECIEC. My own participation in the conference began with the second meeting at Harvard in 1983 and was due entirely to Cal’s intervention. Intervention is perhaps too mild a word. Knowing that for personal reasons I would be in the Boston area in June and being openly quite displeased that in the five years since my Ph.D. I had not presented a single paper at any conference anywhere, he let it be known that either I would present at the second ECIEC or I should not bother to show my face in the Harvard Linguistics Department ever again. My first paper was entirely forgettable, but Cal had accomplished his purpose: I had “got my feet wet,” and there was no turning back. I not only presented papers at the next eighteen consecutive meetings of ECIEC, but in fact hosted/co-hosted the event twice. It was at ECIEC that I learned how to give a scholarly paper, just as I had learned how to do historical linguistics in Cal’s classes. I heard and saw him and other senior Indo-Europeanists present papers, tried it myself, received patient and constructive criticism, tried it again the next year, and gradually improved. I am confident that other ECIEC participants of my generational cohort and later ones would attest to the same learning experience. Cal was through ECIEC able to play this invaluable mentoring role for a full three decades for junior scholars from many institutions in the U.S. and Europe. I should stress that by no means all the mentoring and learning came in the formal sessions (not that the sessions themselves were all that formal, especially in the early days of ECIEC). Much of my learning came in informal discussions Remembrances 9 during breaks, over meals, and over drinks during the evenings, and it included not just the “nuts and bolts” of Indo-European linguistics, but also what one may term the “lore” of the field, including precious anecdotes of people whom some of us had never met and of events we had not directly experienced. Cal was keenly disappointed that he was not going to be able to participate in the 32nd ECIEC in Poznań. When the topic came up on the drive home from a gathering at Jaan and Madli Puhvel’s on the last evening of his life, he wistfully remarked that he much regretted that he could not attend the ECIEC “in Poland, one of my favorite countries” and launched into happy reminiscences of his visit there more than fifty years before. The focus was on the warmth and hospitality of the Polish people, even under the quite repressive regime of the day. He recalled with special fondness and an air of amazement that even in small towns on a Friday or Saturday evening there would be at least one restaurant open, with a live orchestra of at least a violin, a piano, and one other instrument, and “there would be dancing, and despite my terrible Polish some woman would happily agree to dance with me ….” All who knew his warmth, humanity, and irrepressible joie de vivre can picture the scene. We too regret deeply that he could not be with us in Poznań. After his retirement from Harvard in 2003 and move to Los Angeles and to UCLA Classics and Indo-European Studies, Cal continued his participation in ECIEC while adding the Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, which has in recent years acquired the informal designation of “WeCIEC.” He presented papers only twice, in 2004 and 2012, but regularly took part in the meetings to review abstracts for the conference, heard all of the papers presented, and attended the associated social events. An annual highlight for all of us was the after-party for all attendees generously hosted by Cal and Stephanie at their home on Parnell Avenue (for some of us a joyous reincarnation of the Dead of Winter parties fondly remembered from Locke Street in Cambridge). The Annual UCLA IndoEuropean Conference offered still more people the opportunity to benefit from Cal’s always constructive criticism, to hear his inexhaustible repertoire of finely honed anecdotes, and partake of his companionship and zest for living. Scholarship is a collaborative enterprise, carried out by live human individuals, and personal relationships across and within academic generations are a vital part of our field. But some people indubitably have more life, humanity, and individuality than others, and Cal Watkins was for many of us at the top of the list. We will miss him sorely at both ECIEC and WeCIEC, but are most grateful for the many years that we were fortunate enough to have shared with him. 10 Friends of Calvert Watkins ————— Cal ALAN J. NUSSBAUM Cornell University The loss of a really remarkable and much loved presence like Cal Watkins, even once the initial shock has had a chance to wear off a bit, is still not only sorrowful but also severely disorienting in the manner of a rug suddenly pulled from under the feet. For those of us who have known Cal for way more than half of our lives, it was simply a given that there he was—to be called on for guidance, to be depended on to deliver it with generosity and enthusiasm, and to make everyday interactions a personal pleasure to have. In encountering Cal for the first time, nothing was more striking than the unmixed and never jaded enthusiasm he projected for the field he taught us. New data or explanations that he got from his voracious reading—not to mention new ideas of his own, which always seemed to just pour forth—would typically send him around the department in search of someone to tell about it, or into the classroom with a special spring in his step and gleam in his eye. Everyone who took his courses saw his delight in “suspending normal activities” to discuss what had him really excited on a given day. That’s not to say, though, that it didn’t also immediately dawn on a student of Cal’s that there was a phenomenal mind to go along with this. First of all, he had a jaw-droppingly impressive way of seeming never to forget anything he’d ever read in any text, so that it was almost predictable that as we read one thing, he would have a “Hey, wait a minute. Doesn’t that remind you of X?” moment, where X was something he might not have looked at for a decade (and eventually two decades, three decades, etc.) and you might never have looked at in the first place. But it wasn’t just that, of course. Cal had an uncanny knack of knowing what deserved to be compared with what and what deserved to come out of the comparison—whether it was on the nuts-and-bolts linguistic side or, needless to say, in the dictional, narrative, poetic, and broadly cultural realm. And the capitalization on this knack he raised to the level of high art. Cal was definitely a teach-by-showing and learn-by-doing kind of teacher— though there always had to be a certain amount of “tension” between this method and the real world, in which there is a distinct shortage of people who can do exactly what he did in the way he did it. But the lessons were applicable to other kinds of approaches and many sorts of problems—in Indo-European and elsewhere—too. And what was never not applicable was Cal’s insistence on the highest standards of scholarly knowledge and method—though he was also char- Remembrances 11 acteristically supportive and encouraging, not omitting to say what was good about what had been presented to him. As a pure bonus, though, Cal was a personality to be treasured outside the department and the classroom altogether. He was a terrific raconteur, a maven of many, many things, and even a bit of a prankster. I recall a dinner at his house at which he and Stephanie served what I seem to remember was a veal roast. But the source of the meat isn’t the point of the story. Its shape is, and that was distinctly tubular. Another one of the guests, who may remain nameless here, remarked on the contours of the delicious-looking and -smelling main course and asked what creature it was. Cal, deadpan and missing not a beat, replied “Stoat.” As the roast was consumed, it became evident that the diner who had raised the question of its source had also accepted Cal’s mischievous answer. For the next comment from that quarter was “I would never have believed that stoat could be so tender!” Not even then did Cal show more than just a hint of a smile. The social Cal, as vastly enjoyable as he was at a party, was fully in his element at our regular after-class sessions at Cronin’s Bar, just off Harvard Square ca. 1970. Here he would tell jokes and amusing stories of his own while hugely appreciating what we might have to offer along those lines ourselves. Never did an aspiring wiseguy have a better audience. He once told us that Joshua Whatmough had asked on an exam something like “Linguistically speaking, what would have happened if the Romans had lost the Social War?” (Or perhaps it was the Samnite Wars. No matter). Somehow, I was instantly inspired to pipe up with “Eh. Pe sarà sarà.” Cal exploded with laughter, which I report only to show that in this line of work too, he was always an unfailingly supportive and encouraging mentor. First takes are sometimes the best takes. And I suspect that in the case of Cal’s death this may be true of my own. I wrote to Stephanie in the immediate aftermath that “there really isn’t any way to say how much Cal's extraordinary mind and unusually affectionate personality will be missed by all those who were lucky enough to have known him as a teacher, mentor, and friend—and for whom the world will now be a dimmer place in so many ways.” I can’t do any better now. ————— 12 Cal Friends of Calvert Watkins HAYDEN PELLICCIA Cornell University I thought I would start where Cal and I usually started, with lunch. Meeting up at the Science Center or later Gray’s Hall Basement, we would head to the Würsthaus or whatever Asian restaurant was currently in vogue. After the beer had been served and sampled came the consultation of the menu, a rite it took me a while to learn the correct protocol for. Cal always gave this document his complete attention; no matter how many times in the past he had studied its greasy pages, its arrival never failed to transport him into a kind of revery over the proffered possibilities; if interrupted he would look up, indignant that a person accepted as a friend could be guilty of so gross a breach of good manners; he would plaintively say, gesturing with one hand at the menu held by the other: “I’m trying to look at the menu.” These were the days when Cal’s watchword, for European cuisine at least, was, “There is nothing that is not improved by the addition of butter.” At the Würsthaus we often ate at the bar, which would soon be littered with gold foil butter wrappers. Once I was on Cal’s left; to his right sat a stranger who for some reason took a disliking to me, which he showed through hostile mutterings at everything I said. After this had gone on for a while, Cal turned on his stool so that he directly faced me, and then rested his right elbow on the bar, putting his back to the disagreeable stranger. Cal started to edge his elbow across the bar until his entire upper half spanned it. I was beginning to wonder if he wasn’t about to launch his lower half up there, too, when the aggressor sensed defeat and left. Cal beamed in triumph, and if you never saw Cal beam you don't know the meaning of the word, which of course was closely associated with Cal in a different reference also. His mind contained a strong visual component. I was walking with Cal once in the garden at his Vermont house when a yellowish blur streaked by. Cal briefly hesitated and then declared “that was a Blackburnian warbler.” A while later back in the house we consulted Petersen’s field guide and decided that the identification had been correct. Now, warblers comprise the longest and most forbidding section of Petersen’s guide to Eastern birds—they're extremely hard to distinguish, and Petersen supplies a helpful appendix laying out side by side thirty “confusing fall warblers.” I said to Cal: “Is this Blackburnian warbler a regular visitor here?” “I don't know; I've never seen one before.” “Then how did you know that’s what it was?” “I’d seen it in Petersen.” “Well, what does that mean? Remembrances 13 Did you memorize the whole catalogue of ‘confusing fall warblers’?” “No, I just remembered it when it flew by.” I doubt that he ever set out to memorize anything. It just happened. The minute variations among warblers were registered with the same precision and instant retrievability as those of the Indo-European phonemes and morphemes and mythemes. As a teacher he could be inspiring, and was often awe-inspiring. He seemed uninterested in presenting a logical sequence a-b-c-d-e-f, in that order: instead, he would perhaps mention d, cryptically allude to c and b, and then wander happily off to some assortment of h-i-j-k. I often sat in on his classes and he mine. In the latter he would usually seat himself furtively somewhere on the edge of the classroom, hoping, it seemed, for total invisibility. If I happened to appeal to him for help with, say, some dialect form in Pindar, he became confused and panicky, apparently astonished that his disguise had been penetrated, and caught out by a question of insurmountable complexity. “I . . . I . . . I . . . .” he would stutter out in deer-in-the-headlights bewilderment. In his own classroom he was composed, humorous, confident, and sometimes extremely hard to follow, though in an entirely enjoyable way. Priority often seemed to be given to whatever happened to be on his mind that day. Another outsized figure who liked to divert today’s class to the subject of his last night’s reading was my undergraduate teacher, the Pindarist Elroy Bundy, who seemed to enjoy catching the class off guard with sporadic out-of-left-field Delphic pronouncements. One morning at the beginning of baby Homer class, Bundy stared soulfully off into space for a few minutes and then pronounced “It all depends on if you’re a lover or not.” Maybe he’d been reading Plato’s Phaedrus. Someone asked what it was that depended on this being a lover or not, and Bundy brightly replied, “Everything!” I never have quite figured out what Bundy meant by this pronouncement, but if the world does in fact divide into lovers and non-lovers, Cal was definitely a lover. His fundamental nature was positive: he loved food, drink, people, sex, languages, art, poetry, clothes, his children, confusing fall warblers, his house in Vermont, his house in Cambridge, his house in L.A., the gardens in all three, and Stephanie above all. He loved his friends—he loved making new ones and cherishing old ones, but an appetite for mean-spirited gossip was one of the few he didn’t have: he delighted in the telling anecdote that revealed the character of the person, or illustrated the dependable perversity of human nature. Some of his passions were oddly specific. The morning before my wedding he happened to overhear my step-mother speaking. “You never told me she was 14 Friends of Calvert Watkins Irish!” he exclaimed in a tone of wounded betrayal—as if I had selfishly kept an actual Irish person all to myself—though you’d think that somebody who’d spent most of his life in the Boston area might have been able to make up that deficiency pretty easily. Or perhaps his surprise signaled not so much betrayal as sudden insight: here was an explanation of whatever it was in my own personality that was appealing to him: I had been brought up in an environment that afforded regular exposure to that most salubrious of influences, a native of County Cork. Later in the day he staged one of his epic dance-floor performances with her. One morning a decade or so ago, while we were sitting around the kitchen in Locke Street, Cal advised me that wearing a jacket and tie, as I was then and had done the day before, represented a colossal fashion failure: “I never wear a jacket anymore,” he said; “Jay sometimes wears one to the office, but then he immediately takes it off.” Naturally I was stung at having my rustic backwardness exposed and mocked in this way. I protested that only a few months previous he had boasted that he was having two suits made for him by none other than John Finley’s old tailor, apparently the gold standard. “What about those?” I asked now. He looked a bit downcast and feebly suggested that “The suits are to wear in England.” I never happened to be in England when Cal was there, so I don’t know how this played out, but certainly the culture’s shift to more casual styles was regrettable in Cal’s case. His natural plumage was the three-piece suit, usually of an emphatic pattern, complicated by a gold watch chain and in bad weather topped by a Borsalino. Retirement to sunny L.A. suited the more casual mode. Early this year, I was visiting my daughter there and went over to Cal and Stephanie’s one day in the late morning. Cal was wheelchair-bound, and Stephanie had to teach, so I brought lunch, including what I hoped would prove to be a brilliantly successful Brunello di Montalcino. As we made our way through the meal I offered Cal several opportunities to praise the wine, but he failed to take them. I suddenly remembered that in Cal’s view for a wine to be wine it had to be French. In an effort to salvage the situation, and my honor, I said “This Brunello isn’t bad, but there’s nothing quite like a good red Burgundy.” Cal perked up. He said: “Go into the bedroom. Under the bed on the left hand side you will find a case of VERY good red burgundy. Get a bottle.” I went off, pleasantly wondering what kind of emergency celebrations under-the-bed-wine was intended for, and got the bottle. It was as good as he had said. Soon Stephanie came home, and the three of us sat at the table drinking the delicious wine and chatting. Then my daughter came and Remembrances 15 took me away. That was in January. In March, Cal died, and here we all are today, grateful and lucky to have known him. ————— Cal Watkins RICHARD THOMAS Harvard University We are gathered to celebrate the life of a remarkable man, a remarkable husband to his dear Stephanie, remarkable father to his four children Cynthia, David, Katy, and Nick—he was so proud of all of you, so full of hope and pride for the families you made—gathered also to celebrate a remarkable scholar and teacher, and a remarkable friend to all of us. Everybody in this room was touched by the genius of Cal Watkins. That is a given in our proceedings today, and we will all reflect on it in some way, others with more competence than me. But in trying to capture the essence of Cal, I choose to focus on his humanity, his deep attraction to people, to the bonds that are forged by shared intellectual interests and that were projected by his love of language, his love of poetry, music, dance, food and drink, his delight in humor, his living of life to the fullest. To have been part of Cal’s world is one of the great privileges of my life, and it is hard to accept that he is not still with us. One of Cal’s students wrote to me with a reflection I share: “What I think of most of all is Cal’s hospitality. How amazing to think that a man like him cooked for the students, proudly and generously shared his hand-raised ham and beans.” Joan and I well remember Cal and Stephanie hosting long ago a rather formal event in this very building, a Sunday evening cocktail party put on by Harvard Neighbors. They did a fine job, and I think Cal was pleased that they had been asked to host. But Cal and Stephanie preferred to have us all in their home at Locke Street, to treat us to ham, black-eyed peas, Chinese noodles, and wine. There for over twenty years there were summer nights of grilling, Thanksgivings with extended family and friends, even the family of friends, larger gatherings after visiting lectures—never in the Faculty Club—and above all up until January 2002 the Dead of Winter parties. To quote Joni Mitchell: Don’t it always seem to go That you don’t know what you’ve got Till it’s gone 16 Friends of Calvert Watkins Over the last decade I have often missed and reflected on those occasions at Locke Street. The Dead of Winter parties had witnessed the assembling of friends and family, of linguists, Indo-Europeanists, and classicists, but much more than that. Colleagues and graduate students in Celtic and Iranian, Slavic and Sanskrit, German and English to name just some, all gathered in Cal’s orbit, and we all got to know each other through him and his and Stephanie’s gatherings. His linguistic brilliance and his love of everything to do with language, with every human language, was a deep and fundamental part of his own humanity, and it is what brought us together. We in Cambridge have been infinitely the poorer for the loss of those times, so let us today enjoy the memory of them, as we gather together in memory of him. Cal was a man of impeccable taste, in the most fundamental sense, ad unguem/ factus homo, a gentleman to the fingertips, in the words of Horace. He was a man who knew how to say and to do everything in just the right way, having, as in his work in linguistics, so in all else, stripped everything down to its essential meaning and function, after which he put it together in creative ways. This he did through the poetics of gardening, the poetics of shelling peas or stirring polenta, the poetics of preparing his Vermont farm-grown lamb for the grill, or the poetics of carving into neat squares the skin of a Thanksgiving turkey. In my composite memory he does all of this casually but elegantly attired in denim shirt and sweater vest, pocket watch in place, as he adds some mint from the garden to his bourbon, crushing it in just the right way, not too firmly, not too gently. Cal was immensely proud of the generations of students he trained who now hold positions across the country and beyond. He would have appreciated some of their recollections: One—like Cal a proud Texan—recalls introductory Hittite. Cal “floated the idea of reading Palaic, and I asked whether it was a valuable language to learn. Cal gave me what we Texans call the stink-eye and said ‘Every language is valuable … by definition.’ [This] tells you everything you need to know about where his heart was. This was a man who loved languages, not just to mine them, but to cherish them as treasures, and to share his love of them.” Another on Cal’s famous expectations that students learn the facts themselves; he would focus on the other things. “The class began with Cal standing in front of our small group holding Friedrich’s Grammar. ‘This is a grammar of Hittite,’ he said. We waited. ‘Learn it,’ he concluded, looking up straight at us.” Remembrances 17 But for Cal, for all the seriousness—and he was deadly serious in such matters—the twinkle in the eye was never far off, as in the jokes with untranslated punchlines in languages the hearer might or might not know, punchlines one would more or less get because it was Cal who was telling the joke. Along similar lines another student recalls a group at the beginning of Latin 134 lamenting its attempts to learn German well enough for the exam to be held later that day. Cal was reassuring: “all we had to do was draw on our knowledge of Indo-European and when faced with an unknown German word, we ought to be able to work forward easily enough from IE to modern German. It wasn’t in fact clear that he was joking.” Another recalls, “Cal knew everything about words of course, and repeatedly asked our class questions trying to elicit some kind of glimmer of similar intelligence from us, but just as repeatedly failing. One day— apropos of what, I cannot remember—he asked: ‘What’s a tuile?’ Full of the innocent hope of people who finally see a chance of pleasing their redoubtable teacher, several hands shot up. ‘A tile!’ He looked at us with pitying scorn before saying, slowly and with the drawl accentuated: ‘No. It’s a cookie’.” Finally, another: “That’s a lot of knowledge gone from the world. I remember he used to talk about Émile Benveniste’s book on IndoEuropean institutions, saying (always with a tear in his eye) that this was the book of a man trying to write down everything he knew before he died. And I thought, that’s what he was doing in How to Kill a Dragon.” How to Kill a Dragon was the gift from Cal to those of us who, linguists or not, care about language and the poetry of language. My copy is inscribed “For Richard, with friendship and gratitude.” At first I wondered what Cal could be grateful for to me. It is the book version of those Dead of Winter parties, with something to interest each and every one of us, binding us together as no other work could do. It is written for us and in a funny way about us all, about the languages and literatures we severally work on. So to reciprocate, poorly as I can, I offer these words for Stephanie, and for Cal, with my friendship and my gratitude. ————— 18 Friends of Calvert Watkins Calvert Watkins at UCLA BRENT VINE University of California, Los Angeles There have already been many occasions to offer tributes to Calvert Watkins or to reminisce about him; and while much has been said, there is much more that could be said. But my aim here is very modest: I simply want to recall some things about Calvert Watkins during his time as Professor of Classics and IndoEuropean Studies at UCLA.1 I stand before you as a former student of Calvert Watkins, and also, I’d like to think, a friend. But about ten years ago, toward the end of a seven-year tour of duty as Head of the UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies, I found myself in the incredible position (as it seemed to me) of being, in effect, Calvert Watkins’ future employer. This, of course, struck me as preposterous, as pleasing as it was to be partly responsible for bringing Cal to UCLA, and for making sure that he had an official UCLA appointment. And for anyone familiar with the UCLA bureaucracy, it will come as no surprise that in order for Calvert Watkins to be hired by UCLA at the rank of Professor, he had to undergo a full-scale evaluation—and because of that, I had to solicit letters of support from about a dozen senior IndoEuropeanists the world over. I must say that I really enjoyed reading those letters: nearly every one of them protested that the idea of anyone’s writing a letter of recommendation for a figure like Calvert Watkins was patently absurd. Cal’s appointment as Professor-in-Residence of Classics and Indo-European Studies was eventually approved, and both departments were the richer for it. Cal made it clear that he was, after all, retired; but in fact, he was an active member of both departments: teaching occasional courses, participating in dissertation committees, attending lectures, even auditing graduate seminars—particularly in Classics, where my Classics colleagues, though perhaps a little intimidated at first, soon came to value his presence in their classes. A personal high point for me came when I audited Cal’s graduate seminar on “Greek Epigraphic Verse,” which he taught in the Spring Quarter of 2005. What I enjoyed wasn’t so much the odd situation of finding myself, as if in a time machine, transported back to Cal’s classroom (minus the Gauloise cigarettes)—because frankly, I was a little nervous that I’d get called on! Rather, it was the pleasure of seeing yet another generation of students (namely, my own graduate students in Classics and Indo1 This is a lightly revised version of remarks presented at the beginning of the 25th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference (25 October 2013). Remembrances 19 European Studies) experience and benefit from Cal’s teaching, from his immense store of knowledge, and generally from his humanity. And there were other interactions worth remembering, not least of all Cal’s regular participation, up until this year, in the review of the abstracts for this very conference; and also the fact that one of his last papers was delivered at this conference last year, now published in the proceedings volume for that conference.2 There are two other occasions that stick in my mind, both from a time shortly before his death. On March 1st of this year, when Cal was recovering from various ailments and still in some discomfort, he showed up, to my surprise and delight, at a Classics Department reception, held at the end of our visiting period for the graduate student candidates being recruited for admission to the department. Cal sat down at a table, and with a plate of hors d’oeuvres and a glass of wine within reach (which we refilled from time to time), he graciously held court and chatted amiably with one and all: with faculty and staff colleagues, and with both current and prospective graduate students. And then, about two and a half weeks later, I was delighted to see Cal at a meeting of our “Anatolian Club,” which took place at the home of Jaan Puhvel, in the company of other Indo-European colleagues. Cal passed away the following morning. Somehow, I find it comforting that I was able to spend part of his last night with him, and to see him engaging in many of the things that gave him (and us) so much pleasure: talking about Hittite and Indo-European, telling choice anecdotes (with punchlines in a variety of perfectly-accented languages), and enjoying good food and drink in the company of colleagues and friends. 2 “Aspects of the ‘Expressive Dimension’ in Indo-European: Toward a Comparative Grammar of Speech Registers,” in Stephanie W. Jamison, H. Craig Melchert, and Brent Vine (eds.), Proceedings of the 24th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference (Bremen: Hempen, 2013), 243–53.