Since 1903, members of Arts and Letters have delivered commemorative tributes to fellow members who have passed away. These remarks celebrate and reflect on the lives and work of the members being honored and acknowledge their contribution to the arts. A selection of tributes is now available in the digital archive below. As we prepared this archive, we were reminded that these tributes reflect their times, and, in some instances, include terminology and social and moral judgments we do not endorse.
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It was over forty years ago that I picked up a novel—it had a red cover—and started reading it. The name of the book was Casuals of the Sea. The author's name, William McFee.
The year was 1925, a time when the appeal of the sea was romantic for a young man. Many of us dreamed of adventures in far-flung ports. We had grown up on stories of the Wild West which was no longer wild. Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling pointed to another road of adventure—the open sea.
William McFee was a ship's engineer; and he was an artist. He was aware of the motors and the machinery; he heard both the noise and the music of them. He knew the appeal of the sea. And yet William McFee was different because of the difference in the order of his perception. He could hear the roar of an ocean swell; and he could hear the motors turn. He could smell the briny air and he could smell the fumes of the acetylene torch. This gave him a range of perceptions and a body of knowledge which was his own—by education and by profession.
And the artist in him was concerned with the fiats of human destiny.
When William McFee wrote, he was still an engineer. But he was more. He was a literary artist. He enriched and enlarged the resources, the subject matter, and the contents of the English language.
Today, he has been passed by in the trivialities of fashion. But it is no more than a momentary eclipse in the continuity of life. Because William McFee was an artist in the truest sense of the word; and his books will remain with us. They must. There can be no surrender by artists to fad and fashion. There must be solidarity to preserve the continuity of mankind.
William McFee was born in the year 1881. He died in 1966 at the age of eighty-five. His was a long life. And now, he has gone to a long sleep. William McFee is no more. But there are many of us whom his books helped to awaken; and there will be more. Through his books, William McFee will continue to live.
Hail and Farewell, William McFee—your name has been implanted in the memory of mankind.