Arts and Letters

Morris Bishop was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters on January 17, 1973, a belated recognition of an eminently distinguished author and scholar. His proposer E. B. White, in a brief statement to the membership, characterized him as follows:

It is hard to think of something Morris Bishop isn't: Scholar, poet, historian, satirist, linguist, teacher, biographer, wit. His biographies are distinguished for their elegance, their scholarship, their verve. Long after Lear, he wrote Limericks Long After Lear.

Morris Bishop, son of a Canadian physician, was born at Willard in upstate New York on August 15, 1893; he resided in the Finger Lakes Region throughout the greater part of his life and for almost six decades in Ithaca, the seat of Cornell University, which he entered in 1910 and from which he received the baccalaureate degree in 1913. He continued his studies there, the while he was an instructor in the Department of Romance Languages. In 1926 he earned the degree of Doctor of Philosophy after two years' interruption in his studies for service in the United States Army as a lieutenant of infantry in the First World War, 1917-1918. In 1938 he was appointed Kappa Alpha Professor of Romance Literature, a chair he held until his retirement.

In 1927 Morris Bishop and the talented artist, Alison Mason Kingsbury, were married; they established their home on the western slope of the high hill just below the Cornell University Campus overlooking the city of Ithaca with unobstructed views over woodland to Lake Cayuga, near enough to the Campus to hear the chiming of the Library Tower bells. Here this scholar pursued his work throughout the remainder of his long life with but few interruptions for European travel and study, including two years as a visiting professor at the University of Athens (1951-1952), and four years’ voluntary service to the Government of the United States during the Second World War, first in the Office of War Information, 1941-1944, and then in the Psychological Warfare Division of the U.S. Army, 1944-1945.

The list of Morris Bishop's writings is impressive and varied, too long to give an account of them all in this memorial. He wrote biographies of Pascal, Molière, La Rochefoucauld, Ronsard, Samuel de Chamberlain, and Petrarch. In Petrarch and His World, he included his own translation of the Petrarchan sonnets; this work, beautifully illustrated by his wife, is one of the most fascinating of his biographies.

His last book, The Life of St. Francis of Assisi, fortunately was completed a few weeks before his sudden death on November 20, 1973. In a letter, the last but one that this writer received from him, he wrote in part: "I'm hard at work on a biography of St. Francis of Assisi. I am very eager to get it done before my turn comes. But the blind Fury with the abhorred shears is clipping all around. Let us not attract her attention, my dear Gil."

As a diversion from his serious writing, Morris Bishop composed light verse and wrote short pieces for several magazines during the period 1927-1960. Many of his poems appeared in The New Yorker and were subsequently published in a little volume entitled, A Bowl of Bishop.

As I write, I have before me a small volume of his verse entitled Paramount Poems, published in 1929. This volume also was illustrated by his wife, as were many of his other books. These poems appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Judge, Harper's Magazine and in other magazines and newspapers of that day. The thoughts expressed in the first of the Paramount Poems, titled "Striking the Keynote," is so timely and pertinent that I set forth the first stanza:

We are the generation
That is too early wise;
We look upon creation
With clear untroubled eyes,
We see the world's illusion,
We know that we must bear,
Deep in our minds, confusion,
Deep in our hearts, despair.

The author was not satisfied in the writing of biography, history, satire, poetry, and limericks, so he turned his hand to a murder mystery, entitled The Widening Stain, under the nom de plume of W. Bolingbroke Johnson. The story's setting is in a Cornell University library. One oldster of the Faculty called it "scholarly nonsense!" Although the author tried to disguise his identity, the fact that he wrote it soon spread about, for there was no one else in Ithaca or in the surrounding region who could have fabricated such a story. Morris Bishop was the author of The Horizon Book of the Middle Ages and of four separate Story Books of the Classical, Mediaeval, Renaissance, and Romantic periods. He translated the plays of Molière and wrote a definitive History of Cornell, the only one apart from the history of the University included in President Andrew D. White's Autobiography published in 1906.

Those who knew Morris Bishop remember him as a modest, kindly and charming companion, witty on appropriate occasions, a skilled raconteur and a patient listener. How he found the hours, in addition to a full teaching schedule particularly in the years before his retirement, to write more than forty-five books with the exactitude and the delight they possessed, amazed his colleagues and his friends.

He received many honors, including Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, Officier d'Académie, the Order of the White Rose of Finland, and honorary degrees from the Universities of Laval (Quebec), Trent (Italy), Rennes (France), and from several American universities and colleges.

The 1969-1970 Annual Report of the Cornell Fund shows Morris Bishop pictured on the front page in academic regalia, the Kappa Alpha Professor of Romance Literature, Emeritus, carrying the mace and leading a commencement procession, an assignment he was called upon to perform many times in his career. Here the distinguished scholar, master of French, Spanish, Italian, German, Swedish, Greek, and Latin, with his customary dignified, majestic bearing, gives an impressive representation of the American university at its best.

On his seventy-eighth birthday he was honored by the Cornell University Library Association. A friend and former student said of him on that occasion:

The man is the very model of a modern professor emeritus. Poet, scholar, teacher, satirist, biographer, linguist—nobly constructed, elegant of speech, sober yet merry, seemingly indestructive at seventy-eight.

We are glad that Morris Bishop was elected to the ranks of the Institute. He cherished the honor but, alas, he did not live too long to enjoy the fellowship with members of this distinguished body. I shall close this altogether inadequate memorial to a friend of six decades with a few lines from the last paragraph of his Charter Day address delivered on April 27 of the centennial year of Cornell University in 1965:

There can be no great creation without a dream; giant towers rest on a foundation of visionary purpose; our realities are, at bottom, spiritual.