Stuart Malcolm Tave, a renowned scholar of British literature, comedy and satire, died Jan. 6 at the age of 102.
For nearly 50 years, Tave, the William Rainey Harper Professor Emeritus, served the University of Chicago community as a devoted teacher and administrator. Throughout his tenure, Tave held several roles, including dean of the Division of Humanities and chairman of the English Department.
As a scholar, Tave’s work focused on writers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, from Burke to Dickens. A lover of language and words, Tave paid particular attention to the “lovely, witty women” of Austen and Molière, whom he called “mistresses of words.”
Some of his best-known books include The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (1960) and Some Words of Jane Austen (1973), which was awarded the Laing Prize by the University of Chicago Press.
“Extraordinarily alive to the tones and meanings of words, he could be disconcertingly laconic, yet one came to understand that the deliberate and demanding economies of language he practiced came from a great respect for its psychological, dramatic, and yes, moral possibilities,” said colleague Elizabeth Helsinger, the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor Emerita. “We all—students and colleagues—learned from his example.”
‘A gentleman and scholar’
Tave was born April 10, 1923, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother, a “ferocious reader” and “carnivore of crossword puzzles,” instilled in him a deep love of language from an early age.
“I found that words were mixed, playful, serious, dangerous, filled with uncertain powers, interacting strangely, a delight,” Tave said in his Ryerson Lecture entitled “Words, Universities, and Other Odd Mixtures.”
Tave received his undergraduate degree from Columbia University in 1943. From 1943 to 1946, he served in the United States Navy as a Japanese language officer in the Pacific. On his final voyage, Tave helped ferry the Japanese battleship Nagato to the Bikini Atoll, where it was blown up in an atomic test.
“Here would be my grand climax to a miscellaneous career,” Tave wrote in a 1998 article about his time on the Nagato.
After his discharge, Tave earned a master's degree at Harvard University in 1947 and completed a D. Phil in 1950 at the University of Oxford, where he studied under a Fulbright fellowship.
After teaching at Columbia for a year, Tave joined the English Department at UChicago in 1951, where New York Giant Bobby Thompson's “shot heard ‘round the world” was all anyone could talk about during his job interview.
At UChicago, Tave found himself quickly immersed in an intense intellectual environment.
“There is an intellectual turmoil at the University which is the normal element in which people here live and breathe,” Tave said in a 1966 interview with the University Magazine. “I’m enormously impressed by the inventiveness of people here … I’ve had the experience of being annoyed—sometimes appalled—by some ideas, and later being semi-converted.”
As a scholar, Tave was interested in the literary history of humor during the French Revolution, a time of rapid political, religious and social change.
“Studying humor was one very useful way of grasping a whole complex of ideas,” Tave said in the same interview.
Tave’s other notable works include New Essays by De Quincy (1966); Robert Bage's Hermsprong (1982); and Lovers, Clowns, and Fairies: An Essay on Comedies (1993).
In 1959, Tave received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was named a National Endowment of the Humanities fellow in 1978. From UChicago, he received the honor of “Best Friend of the Library,” an award he greatly prized.
At UChicago, Tave served as master of the Humanities Collegiate Division from 1966 to 1970, acting dean of the College in 1969, chairman of the English Department from 1972 to 1973, and dean of the Division of Humanities from 1984 to 1989.
Upon Tave’s appointment as dean, then University President Hanna Holborn Gray said: “Stuart Tave represents what is best about this University, scholars committed to the highest standards of research and the dissemination of their work through teaching. I am delighted he has agreed to serve.”
Among his colleagues, he was known for his gentle kindness and sharp wit, many noting the aptness of the title of his best-known book, The Amiable Humorist.
Prof. Richard Strier immediately recognized Tave’s “humanity and sense of humor” during his hiring process. When Tave learned Strier had won $1.60 at a department poker game, Tave “was prompt to say that I clearly did not need my salary,” recalled the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus. “He loved that kind of mischief. He was, as my grandmother would have said in Yiddish, a mensch.”
Prof. W. J. T. Mitchell recalled inviting Tave to a New Year’s Eve party in the early 1980s: the theme was “Counterculture through the Ages.” While others showed up as hippies, witches and protestors, Tave arrived wearing a tuxedo.
“When I asked him the meaning of his costume, he said, ‘I came as a gentleman, Mitchell. That is surely counterculture as far as you are concerned,’” recalled the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor. “He was truly a gentleman and scholar, much loved and admired by his students and colleagues. And by me.”
‘What I feel I can do best’
In his Ryerson lecture, Tave argued that effective teaching could not happen through “panicky hand wringing” or “foul-tempered squawking,” but by being “humanly persuasive” and “interesting.”
This approach had a profound effect on his students. In 1958, he received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.
“He listened to each of us with a focus, a concern, a depth of what I can only call intense intellectual interest, which I will never forget,” recalled an alum in 2000. “He made each of us believe that what we said was of such substance, that it was worth no less than the greatest attention he could give.”
Even after his retirement in 1993, Tave continued to teach.
In 2000, Tave received the Norman Maclean Faculty Award, which recognizes emeritus or senior faculty members who have made outstanding contributions to teaching and the student-life experience on campus.
“[Teaching] is what I have been, what I conceive myself to have been trained for, and what I feel I can do best,” Tave said in 1966.
Upon his retirement, the university established a teaching fellowship named in Tave’s honor, recognizing his influence as an educator. The Stuart Tave Teaching Fellowships give promising Ph.D. candidates a chance to teach undergraduate courses on topics related to their dissertations. Today, the Stuart Tave Course Design Awards honor graduate students for exemplary course design.
According to Tave’s son, Douglas, he was an avid sportsman, ranking throwing a no-hitter during a faculty-student softball game among his proudest accomplishments. He played handball and swam in Bartlett Gym, baffled at why he was required to wear a bathing cap on his hairless head. In the winter, Tave would ice skate below the stands of Stagg Field, where his quick laps on long, speed skating blades made the attendants nervous.
“He loved life, was a great dad, and a wonderful role model,” said Douglas.
Tave was predeceased by Edel, his wife of 75 years. He is survived by his children Douglas, Niels, Karen and Janice, and 5 grandchildren.
