Keith Botsford was an important man. If you didn’t know that, he would be sure to tell you.
The descendant of European aristocracy, he was also an accomplished man of letters. An associate of some of the most important literary luminaries of the 20th century, like Saul Bellow and Yukio Mishima, he wrote underappreciated novels and short stories and was a legendary editor and translator. He championed the work of such obscure talents as Silvio d’Arzo and eventual juggernauts as W.G. Sebald. He hung out with Muhammad Ali and heads of state, and wrote about them. There were hints of involvement in the international intelligence community. He played drunken volleyball with Raymond Chandler. He married several times, had eight children and sixteen grandchildren. He had hundreds of students who hung on his every word.
He would tell you all this, and much more, and probably correct your grammar – and tell you why your sentences run on just a few words too long to be considered good proper English language.
But… he’s not around to do so. Because Botsford died at age 90 last month, and there was a scattering of grief across social media – something he would have found both appalling and amusing, in a strange way.
Even though this nonagenarian professor is not here to convey to you, I may add: he was one of the most important people to ever guide me in my chosen avocation. He taught me probably 40 percent of everything I know, writing-wise, up to the current time (my mid-30s). What I know may not be much, but it is a testament to this man that I occasionally can string together something resembling a good story, or essay, or read a tough book now and then.
Botsford was a goddamned good teacher. He made people cry – literally – in several of the classes I took with him.
I will miss him, even though I hadn’t seen him for more than a decade at his passing.
I was first introduced to the man through Bellow’s class. It was the last class that the Nobel Laureate would ever teach at Boston University; the rumors were always that he had eaten a poisoned shellfish in Caribbean around the turn of the millennium, and never fully regained his faculties after that. For years, it was critic James Wood who would co-teach the classes with Bellow – an eclectic syllabus including Tolstoy and Aleichem and Bellow’s own writing. Wood – perhaps the foremost post-Bloom critic in America – was known for being a levelheaded and tolerant man.
But when I took the class – which turned out to be the last one Bellow would ever “teach,” in 2003 – it was instead this person they called Botsford: a gray-ponytailed, tan- and wrinkle-skinned person, a heavy smoking habit, and a transatlantic accent.
And also: a tendency to suffer no fools – with a quickness. One of my friends in the second class – a class on “the essay” held in a basement with the heavy stench of tobacco smoke – burst into tears when Botsford openly ridiculed her literacy skills. (Not literary – Literacy). She dropped the class the next day, as did several others who were ridiculed in his dank lair underneath the College of Communications on Commonwealth Avenue, circa 2002-2004. (This was my second class with him).
We all had our moments in the hot glare of his scrutiny. He was apparently having a bad day one afternoon, when he burst into the classroom, decreeing that “none of you KNOW anything any more,” before launching into a tirade about how none of us had committed to heart important literature or anything more meaningful than rap lyrics. He shot a razor stare at me, for some reason. (I guess I have that kind of face).
“Well – what do you know?” he asked.
“Romantic poetry,” I demurred.
“Really,” he said. “Do you know any of it?”
I rattled off a stanza of Wordsworth, one of the shorter Lucy poems, then hesitated, the words not coming. He seemed ready to pounce. But then I held up my finger and finished the second stanza. The full poem, eight lines, one of the few I know by heart to this day. I was in the clear.
Undeterred, Botsford then turned to one of my best friends.
“Well – what do you know?” he huffed
.
“Rock journalism,” my friend replied.
Botsford scoffed, in triumph. And continued the lesson.
There were many other moments, most hilarious. But these were some of the more precious – perhaps because I was a weird student, and I thrived on the challenge. He was never thrilled with my writing. I was too simple, and not enough flash, I think. I certainly had not read deeply enough into the 19th century Russians, beyond Chekhov and Turgenev.
But his teachings set me on a bunch of journeys, literary and otherwise. During my final years in school I embarked on a reading regimen and a constant vigilance of improving my craft. I wrote four novels by the age of thirty, all of which were smoldering garbage and lost to melted-down computers. I read a lot. Without his vigilance, I never would have read such life-changing pieces as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Lighea (about a mermaid) or Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Svjek, which is a life-affirming anti-war slapstick comedy.
After Boston University, I sent him missives occasionally. He told me my newspaper columns in my late 20s were actually halfway decent. There was a New York Times feature about a decade ago about how he was living in Costa Rica, in a house designed by his architect son, which was aswarm with monkeys and didn’t have air conditioning – but which was a kind of prelapsarian paradise.
I was surprised when he passed, because he seemed to have more lives than a litter of cats… and I was surprised to see his final place of residence – back in London.
He hadn’t taught in a while. If you look at his reviews on the website “Rate my Professor,” you’ll see a pitiful rating, and a bunch of excoriating reviews calling him “unnecessarily condescending” and even just plain “mean.” Within those reviews were the occasional rave, however. The choicest:
“okay. so he IS a total jerk and bragger. but he is perhaps my favorite professor of all time - simply because what he taught me has stuck with me and has proven handy time and time again. he's not afraid to tell you when you suck. and because he's such a **** the last thing you want to do is let him be right. he pushed and i learned. just don't be afraid of him. be a **** right back at him. he'll respect you more for it.”
Botsford leaves me and a few of us seekers with his “guide to culture” – a long document he sent us all away with in our 20s which took broad brushstrokes of world literature. They were books we all “should read” as thinking women and men of the world. He sent it with us fully expecting none of us to actually take it seriously. I did, mostly. I’ve read probably half the books he recommended. I am richer for it. I plan to read the rest as middle age rears its head.
And even as I write this rather critical essay on a person who I was only around for a few years, I know damn well that he would have it no other way. He would appreciate something a bit critical, a bit tough-love. He never liked a brown-noser who was a little too eager to seek his graces, I think. He would respect me, and his life’s work, all the more for it.
But because I can’t help it, I offer: Ave atque vale, et Resquiescat in pace, professor.