George Panichas: Memories of a Friend

ROBERT CHAMP, a longtime contributor to Modern Age, teaches English literature at the University of Maryland University College. He has written two volumes of poetry, Blue Denim Days and The Little Wonders of the Earth; his third volume, My Mourning Turned to Laughter, is due to appear this summer.

I met George Panichas while I was a
graduate student in English at the
University of Maryland, College Park. I
had heard him speak at a local Episcopal
church and was impressed by his impassioned
delivery and his lively talk with the
audience afterwards. A week or so later,
not altogether sure how welcome I would
be since I didn’t know him, I climbed
the stairs to his office on the top floor of
Taliaferro Hall and introduced myself. He
immediately invited me in and we had a
pleasant chat. Thus, I learned an easy lesson:
Dr. Panichas was very approachable
to students, even ones he didn’t know,
and entirely lacking in the hauteur of
many academics. I was surprised, too, by
his workplace, so different from those of
his colleagues. The office was immaculate,
the bookcases polished and shining,
the papers and books stacked neatly on his
desk. A fastidious man, I decided, though I
little knew at the time how well the office
illustrated his love of order, his sense of the
correct proportion of things.

Over the years, we developed an easy
friendship. Whenever he came down from
Agawam, his Massachusetts home, to his
apartment in College Park, we would
go out to dinner together and talk, often
about the state of the world and American
civilization, which grieved him much,
but mostly about literature. Afterwards we
would often go back to his apartment to
continue our conversation and to nibble
on the Greek delicacies put out for us by
his beloved “Auntie.” Like the office, the
apartment was orderly and tastefully decorated.
The walls were filled with original
paintings and drawings, many done by
friends. In one corner was a framed letter
from a much-admired poet, Siegfried Sassoon.
In both the living room and main
bedroom, where his aunt slept, he kept
beautiful Russian Orthodox icons. The
icons were meditation aids, but he valued
their artistic qualities as well.

Dr, Panichas was, as he often told me,
a critic of the moral imagination. This did
not mean that he lacked a keen sense of the
aesthetic. I remember a trip we took to Baltimore
to see an exhibit at the Walters Art
Museum of paintings by the Impressionist
Alfred Sisley. How much he appreciated
Sisley’s colors and composition! He saw,
too, in the paintings’ celebration of the
physical life, a religious element that I had
not recognized before hearing him talk.
The plastic arts were part and parcel of
his life. He also loved music and listened
often to the classical music radio stations
in and around Washington. He admired
Satie; even more so, Sergei Rachmaninoff.
He did not, however, have a record or CD
player, at least at the College Park apartment,
so I always hesitated to give him
CDs as presents. His love of literature
was, of course, profound. He talked especially
of Henry James, Eliot, Conrad and
Lawrence, and he adored Virginia Woolf.
Among critics, he held forth on Irving
Babbitt particularly. Among men of letters,
a title he held in highest esteem, he talked
most enthusiastically of Russell Kirk: “He
was a great man,” he would say of Kirk,
and then go about showing exactly how
that greatness manifested itself in this or
that work.

He was a courteous man, very friendly
and concerned. I was never at a restaurant
with him in which he did not engage the
wait staff in talk. He would remember them
by name, by what they had said on previous
visits, and would bring up matters touching
on their lives and work. He was at his
most characteristic in such casual meetings
and in our more extended ones. Reflecting
the importance he placed on them, family
and work always came up in the course of
our talks. He never failed to ask me how
my mother and father were doing or how
my work was coming along—and by work
he meant writing as well as teaching. For
all of that, he impressed me as a lonely man
at times, one who found himself at odds
with his university colleagues and at war
with the corrupters of civilized life he saw
in the media. In this one respect at least
he reminded me of Swift. He did not look
optimistically at the world, but he looked
always—and invariably found—the goodness
in individuals.

Concerning his writing, I will not touch
on the extent of his knowledge or the fine
texture of his prose—these are transparent
enough—but confine myself to the physical
process. As a writer, he approached his
work in the old fashioned way. Everything
he produced was written in long hand.
He liked to write in University exam
booklets, always in pen. His handwriting
was elegant: the booklets, for all their
changed words and crossed-out lines, were
little examples of the calligraphic art. He
worked very hard, although at his College
Park apartment he had neither office nor
desk. I assume that he worked in the small
room at the back of the apartment, which
doubled as his library and bedroom. Often
I saw his current work laid out on the
bed, in the company of books and other
papers. He was, I should add, a dedicated
researcher and after his retirement maintained
the College Park apartment in part
because of the easy access it gave him to
the riches of the Library of Congress.

As an editor, he was very careful. He was
most often distressed at the excessive length
of the essays writers sometimes sent him
and spent a good deal of time paring their
work down. Usually he would not touch
the words but tried to bring to the essays,
in his deletions and reorderings, a sense of
succinctness and proportion. Like every
editor, he could tell horror stories, but on
the whole he enjoyed editing and was especially
proud of the work he had done for
Modern Age, which he saw as a great trust.
He searched out writers who valued, as he
did, the permanent things. No writer was
ever turned away simply because he or she
was unknown. Dr. Panichas did not much
care for “stars,” but accepted essays on their
merits, whoever the writer.

As an editor of books, usually collections
by such writers as Austen Warren
and Simone Weil, he was concerned with
best choices and with striking the proper
editorial tone. The part he would play
in a collection was of concern to him. I
remember seeing the early drafts of some
of his introductions to the various sections
of The Essential Russell Kirk. He agonized
over the proper length of these, and even
turned to me to ask if I felt they were
doing Kirk justice. Finally, he pared them
down, following his own editorial practice
with others. Some collections bemused
him. He could never quite understand, for
instance, in editing Austen Warren’s letters,
why Warren had never said anything
about the political conditions of his time.
But whatever problems arose, however
much he wrestled with the essays or letters
of others, he was as proud of these works as
he was of his own. He rejoiced especially
in the many editions of his Simone Weil
Reader that had appeared over the years.

I should mention his teaching. He was
a popular instructor, although he grew
less and less fond of the teaching profession
as he saw the decline in the quality
of his students’ preparation and as he
watched the campus at which he taught,
in its sprawling development and graceless
new architecture, grow increasingly ugly.
Some students chafed that he did not teach
according to the tenets of contemporary
criticism, which he loathed; but always the
better ones were attracted to his passion, his
mental acuity, his reverence for the canon.
Like every first-rate teacher, he gave all he
had in the classroom, even while engaged
at home in the exhausting jobs of writing
and editing. To deal with the drain on his
energies, he kept in good physical shape,
remaining trim and flexible in his movements
into his 70s. Although aware that he
had touched many lives as a teacher, he was
not unhappy to give up the profession—or
at least so he said. Actually he enjoyed the
company of young people—his apartment
was located in a building where the occupants
were mostly students; and he liked
the excitement of communicating ideas.
He was, however, anxious to complete
several books—he produced about twenty
in his lifetime—as author and editor—and
his retirement gave him a chance to round
off his career as a critic.

Toward his students Dr. Panichas was
helpful in whatever way he could be. Occasionally,
while we were in a College Park
restaurant, an old student would approach
him and comment on how much he or she
had enjoyed his courses, and thank him for
the effect he had had on his or her life. I
know of students, too, who credited him
with inspiring them to enter graduate
school. And his help extended beyond the
classroom, as I well know. He was instrumental
in my successful application for an
Earhart Fellowship, which allowed me a
year to work on my dissertation without
having to teach. He also published my
early reviews and poems in Modern Age,
giving me a confidence in my writing that
I had to that point lacked. Other former
students could tell similar stories.

Of his own days as a student I heard
little except for his experience at the University
of Nottingham, where he earned
his doctorate. His dissertation was on D.
H. Lawrence, so it is fitting that he went to
school in the city most closely connected
to Lawrence’s life and work. He spoke
often of one greatly-admired professor at
Nottingham, Vivian de Sola Pinto, the
editor of Lawrence’s poems and himself a
poet and critic. It was Sola Pinto who had
sparked his interest not only in Lawrence
but in the writers of the First World War, a
conflict that looms large in his work. Sola
Pinto was himself a veteran of the war, and
was acquainted with the poets who fought
through and wrote about it. Dr. Panichas
eventually produced his own volume
about the conflict, Promise of Greatness.

But Dr. Panichas’ interest in the city was
not only literary. He talked nostalgically
of Nottingham, its great castle and library,
its preserved nineteenth-century collieries,
and the countryside around it with its
mists and eeriness, its old houses and its
friendly folk. I had been to Nottingham
myself, and he pumped me for information
about the changes that had taken place
since his sojourn there, and whether I had
seen such and such a building or visited
Byron’s ancestral home, Newstead Abbey.

One of the more interesting elements
in his intellectual makeup was his attitude
toward politics. Dr. Panichas’ political
ideas cannot be easily categorized. He
was a tolerant man—clearly no ideologue.
He had strong views on the way the world
was headed. But there was nothing of the
hot partisan in him. He accepted the term
“conservative,” but was uncomfortable
with it just because of its political associations.
He preferred the term “conservator.”
In casting his vote, he was a registered
Independent. That “I” next to his name
gave him a good deal of latitude in his
judgments of men and events. Thus, looking
back at his youth, he praised the early
Roosevelt administration and the importance
of those Roosevelt programs that
provided food for the hungry and work
for the unemployed. At the same time, he
harshly criticized Roosevelt for his capitulation
to Stalin at Yalta. Neoconservatism
held no attractions for him. He had nothing
good to say about the administrations
of either Bush, and I have heard him utter
more than one criticism of Ronald Reagan.
There was not an ounce of jingoism
in him. He was not a supporter of the war
in Iraq or any action by the government
that entangled America in foreign wars.
Nor did this tolerance and independence
stop at the current political scene; it carried
into politics as it existed in the critical
work of colleague. We once went to a
lecture at the University given by a young
professor who had written a piece he had
accepted for Modern Age. He praised her
insight and ability, so I was a little shocked
when she mentioned, in her talk, the influence
of Raymond Williams on some of her
ideas. “But Raymond Williams is a Marxist!”
I said later, in remonstrance. He was
not impressed by the objection.

More than anything, Dr. Panichas was
concerned with the decline of values at
every level of our society. This is no revelation
to anyone who has read his work
or heard him speak. The collapse of standards
in government, the arts, and education
brought forth his deepest lamentations.
The vulgarity of the culture
distressed him, as did its rejection of religion
and its immersion in the moment at
the expense of the traditional. He found
America becoming more and more frivolous,
and often expressed his disgust at its
lack of intellectual seriousness. He was, for
instance, upset that the New York Times
would devote a lengthy obituary—long
columns—to Herbert Marcuse, a hero of
the New Left, and yet spare only a few
lines to Eric Voegelin, a much finer political
philosopher, who was not nearly as well
known. It was another example of “fads”
in thought that he saw poisoning the intellectual
streams. Our conversations dwelt
often on such incidents.

Looking back, I remember George Panichas
at his best and most relaxed sitting on
the couch in the backroom of his apartment.
Beside him would be his aunt, Niki,
for whom he would every now and then
translate our comments into Greek. On
occasion we would be joined by Mary
Slayton, his assistant in his publishing ventures,
managing editor of Modern Age, and
a poet. These were times of laughter, revelations
about the past and each other, bouts
of repartee. To drink, we had coffee or
sometimes ginger ale, which he liked very
much. He was lively in both his verbal and
facial expressions, and in his quick movements.
No subject was off limits, no disagreements
led to quarrels. He would talk
to me about his latest book; I would read
for him my new poems. It was all charming,
amusing, enlightening—and now, to
my great regret, the departure of George
Panichas has left us to wonder at his gifts
and to hope for his resurrection.