John Herman Randall III
Surveyor of the moral landscape in modern literature
“John Herman Randall III, 82, died Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2006, in Newton, after a long illness. At the time of his death, Mr. Randall, Professor Emeritus of English at Boston College, and his wife, Lois (McConnell) Randall, were living at the Stone Institute, a nursing home in Newton Lower Falls. He was the son of the late John Herman Randall Jr. and Mercedes Randall.
Mr. Randall graduated from Columbia University in 1944, and received an M.A. degree from the University of California, Berkeley. A version of his University of Minnesota doctoral dissertation, "The Landscape and the Looking Glass: Willa Cather’s Search for Value," was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1960. His first academic appointment was at Wellesley College, and he joined the Boston College faculty in 1961. After his retirement from full-time teaching in 1989, he continued to teach part time at Boston College until 1998.
Publishing throughout his career, at the time of his retirement he was writing an account of the "Voodoo Macbeth," Orson Welles’s all-black version of Shakespeare’s play, set in Haiti.
Mr. Randall’s politics were progressive always, and he was an ardent and lifelong supporter of liberal causes. He cherished his years at Boston College, which honored him with The John H. Randall III Award, a gift from his colleagues in the English Department, and presented annually to the undergraduate student judged to have written the best essay on some aspect of American literature or culture during the academic year. A kind and gentle man, he greatly appreciated the kindnesses of others. "
Francis Ballard Randall’s memorial statement for his brother John Randall is:
“I had the privilege of knowing John before any of you, so I shall concentrate on that early period. My brother John, my only sibling, was eight years older than me, so he was a kind of third parent to me, and also an intermediary between me and our parents. John took his instructional duties seriously. He involved me in his parody songs, disruptive shoutings and general hi jinx, and also restrained my too childish efforts at them. He showed me how to assemble the toys and play the games I’d been given as presents. He walked me all around the Manhattan neighborhood before I was allowed to cross streets by myself, and, in summers, all over the roads and farms in Peacham, Vermont. He explained to me all the less obvious cartoons in The New Yorker. He took me to most of the good movies I saw in my young life, at the Thalia Theater at Broadway and 95th St., including “Grand Illusion,” “Henry V,” “The Oxbow Incident” and “Les enfants du paradis.” He would whisper in my ear, when necessary in those days of the Code, “That means she’s pregnant,” and “That means he’s a homosexual,” etc. He nobly allowed me to tag along with him, at times when he’d much rather have gone alone.
A serious student of the piano, John had to play the bass violin in concert classes in the first years of Music and Arts High School. His judgment: “The bass is vile and the viol is base.” A serious student of German, he explained to me much of the wit in the lines of Mephistopheles, in meaning, and in German puns, so much more lively than the lines of Faust.
He went to Columbia College, and won the first John Jay Coss Prize for excellence in humanist studies, which he modestly discounted as being favoritism to our father on the Columbia Faculty. Our mother said that John looked like the Hermes of Praxiteles. I looked up a picture and judged it true. (She never said that about me.) A few times he told me, “It’s too bad you’re not a girl; then I could really bring you up.”
It was John, more than anyone, who persuaded me at length when I was on the brink of adolescence, that girls were not inferior but interesting, fully human, beings. John helped form a very close set of half a dozen friends. In their wartime-abridged senior year, 1943, they applied to Columbia’s medical school. All were admitted save the Japanese-American, who had somewhat better grades than any of them. Stricken, they waited as a group on the dean of the medical school, and presented their case quietly, non-confrontationally. He, too, was then admitted. I’ve heard John say, more than once, that this was the action in his life that he was proudest of.
In the event, John did not become a physician. After a troubled period, he turned to literature, which became his true calling. He went to the University of California at Berkeley. There he came to specialize in American literature and American Studies. He liked to tease colleagues in English departments by saying, “Oh, you’re in British literature.”
And there, of course, he met Lois. His Californian period came to an end when the state imposed a loyalty oath on all teachers, including graduate assistants at the University. John was not intensely political, but along with 400 or so others he refused to sign the loyalty oath, which in those now remote times was a cutting edge of liberal resistance (the liberalism of Roosevelt and Truman) to the then resurgent reaction of the House Un-American Activities Committee and McCarthy.
From the time my brother John left New York for California in the late 1940s, he always lived in a different city and state from me, a sundering that has been my very great loss. His teaching career, his writing, the long rest of his life, will surely be discussed here by others. We all know that his life and activities were periodically darkened, tragically, by depressions. Through all this, in better times and worse, he was sustained, magnificently and uniquely, by Lois, his wife of more than fifty five years.”
Paul Doherty’s memorial statement for John Randall is:
“Gail and I met John and Lois, shortly after we moved to Boston and I began teaching at Boston College. They in turn had just returned from John’s Fulbright year in Brussels. They had us over to their home on Orange Street in Roslindale This was in the fall of 1964. And so began our friendship of 42 years. We went to plays and films as couples, and we regularly celebrated holidays— Thanksgiving and Christmas—together. We enjoyed one another’s company. John was a fund of information—he had a photographic memory--and was quite clever too. Last night Gail reminded me of “the wittiest thing” she had ever heard. John had asked her the name of our daughter, who had just been born. “Ann,” Gail answered. “One ‘n’ or two,” he asked next.
At Boston College in those early days John was a rising star in the English Department. A version of his Northwestern Ph.D. dissertation on Willa Cather had been published a couple of years earlier. Willa Cather: "The Landscape and the Looking Glass" was its title.
John published regularly, but most frequently early in his career. Whether because he found the task unnourishing or because his field was moving in directions of less interest to him—or for some other reason(s)—he wrote less in his last years. Still, when he left the English Department in the spring of 1998, he was working on an article about an all black production of Macbeth, Orson Welles’s Voodoo Macbeth, which he had seen in Harlem with his parents as a young boy.
John’s field was twentieth century American literature. I would characterize his teaching as part historical, part ethical. Historical. He was interested in the lives and in the cultural significance of the writers whom he regularly taught—Willa Cather, Henry James, Edith Wharton, John Dos Passos, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, and especially Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
But he was at least as interested in the moral issues that he found in stories they told. Once, in our early years at Boston College, John asked me what I was teaching. An anthology of short stories I told him. John was interested. How did I go about teaching them? I told him how I went about teaching them. What I like to do, I said, was to break down a story into its parts, to learn how they fit together, observing the smallest of details, the contradictions and the ambiguities, before putting the parts back together again, presumably all of us wiser for the experience. This method was known at the time as the New Criticism. I remember John wondering aloud —for my benefit, I suppose— whether this procedure, which must have seemed to him rather arid, prevented me (and my students) from experiencing what literature was really all about.
What literature was really all about for John was its special ability to describe how life might be lived--lived well or lived badly—that, and its ability to present the social and political forces that support or discourage a full human life. Moral criticism, as I am calling this, was important to John.
In his last years though John gradually lost his appetite for this kind of literature. His reading was mostly history, contemporary American history, and biography—FDR, Truman, the Kennedys, Bing Crosby. A few years ago John’s health, which had never been robust, began to fail. After two very unsuccessful knee transplants, he was con- fined first to a sofa and walker, later to bed. And he was less and less able to sustain any great interest in life. He was often depressed, a disease that had haunted him for much of his life. It was sad to see.
What made these last months even bearable was Lois’s constant care and great affection for her suffering husband. Towards the end, John wanted mostly to sleep. You would visit and after a short time, John would say--politely, as always,--something like. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I hope you don’t mind if I go to sleep now. I need to do that.”
But one time, an afternoon this past fall, John surprised us—and surprised Lois too I think—by singing. I knew that he was a fine piano player, and that he loved music—but I had never known him to sing. In a soft and sweet voice—you’ll have to take my word for it—we heard this:
Very soon you’ll be leaving the valley. Do not hasten to bid me adieu, But remember the Red River Valley And the cowboy whose love was so true.
“Cowboy John.”
Cowboy John? In one sense the nickname I just gave him is wildly inappropriate, John may have been the most sedentary person I have ever known. Example. He had a key, the only key that I knew to exist, which allowed him to ride the McElroy elevator up one floor to the Faculty Dining Room. But in another, and much more important sense, it does please me to link John with that most American of icons the cowboy, the strong isolate figure in the landscape living a different and authentically American life. His own urban heroes were like that—Sacco and Vanzetti, Edith and Julius Rosenberg, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. Bill Clinton.
John wished the best for our nation, which provided him, as it had Jay Gatsby, with something commensurate with his capacity for wonder. He celebrated our national progress and opportunities —the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Movement and was saddened by our national failures--witch-hunts, blacklisting, the erosion of civil liberties, and especially by the Vietnam War.
Three years ago, when John and Lois were moving from their home on Roundwood Road in Newton to Spring House in Jamaica Plain, I came upon a letter John had written, addressed to an American soldier overseas. The occasion was the first Gulf War, 1991. John’s point in the letter was to make a clear distinction between his support of the young soldier to whom he was writing on the one hand and on the other hand his absolute abhorrence of the government’s acts which had instigated that war. One could hold both positions, John wrote.
He recalled the way in which returning servicemen from Vietnam had been vilified, as if that misguided war had been their doing, and he hoped that a similar return did not await this young soldier and his comrades. In the letter he recalled his own disappointment—the greatest of his life, he wrote--at not being able to serve his country in World War II. He had been classified 4 F by his New York City draft board. “Bad heart.,” he wrote. “The cowboy whose love was so true.” Whose love was so true."
That clause requires very little explanation. John’s love for all of us was great and freely given, though I think he had difficulty expressing his emotions. That was not one of his gifts. But it was palpable I think, his general embrace. He saw only the best in us, and wanted only the best for us. He welcomed, he encouraged, he listened. He was slow to anger—his heart had no place for pettiness or meanness— His love was so true. So--- So long, Cowboy John, whose love was so true--it’s been good to know you.”
Education: Columbia University, BA, pre-med, 1943; medical studies at Columbia University, 1943-46; University of California, Berkeley, MA, 1950; Yale University, 1950-51; University of Minnesota, PhD, between 1953-1957[?]. Publications: The landscape and the looking glass: Willa Cather’s search for value (1960). Lois McConnell Randall is the daughter of Ralph Edward McConnell (born August 13, 1895 in Missouri, died January 11, 1982 in San Bernardino, San Bernardino County, California, buried in Mountain View Cemetery, San Bernardino, San Bernardino County, California: Lawn 4, Spaces 786-87) and Laura George Knoles (born August 20, 1900, in San Bernardino, San Bernardino County, California, died December 28, 1982 in San Bernardino, San Bernardino County, California, buried in Mountain View Cemetery, San Bernardino, San Bernardino County, California: Lawn 4, Spaces 786-87), who married in 1917 in San Bernardino, San Bernardino County, California. Her parents are buried at the Mountain View Cemetery, in or around San Bernardino, San Bernardino County, California. She worked at the San Bernardino Army Air Base, 1942-45. She was a copy editor at the Beacon Press for thirteen years and at Houghton Mifflin for twelve years. Education: San Bernardino Valley Junior College, 1939-1942; Associate of Arts, 1943; University of California, Berkeley, BA, 1946-1948.