Trevor Howard-Hill: A Personal Memorial

"A spectator, not a player". This was how Trevor Howard-Hill saw himself in our correspondence just before the 2011 STS conference at Penn State: his last, though we did not expect it. It was challenging to imagine how this self-characterization would work out at the conference. Trevor had indeed been an occasionally bemused "spectator" to some of the intellectual and impassioned debates that had dominated textual studies in the last few decades: conservatives v. conjecturalists, intentionalists v. social textuists, fragmentalists v. devotees of the "well-wrought urn", modernists v. postmodernists. But his ability to "observe" and comment, drawn from a long career in which he had seen so many fashions come and go, was never to be taken for indifference. At that last STS conference, he did indeed carry out the role of a wry and ironic spectator, but at each of the sessions I attended with him, he was always the first with his hand up, directing some pointed and percipient question (or sometimes a question disguised as an observation) at an otherwise learned speaker who had perhaps not previously couched the issue in the context that Trevor now presented. The line between "spectator" and "player" became blurred, just as we might have expected it would.

And despite his determined role as "spectator", there were moments when a lifetime's hard (and very productive) work in bibliography in its various manifestations would produce an animated, not to say enthusiastic response. Over the years, Trevor and I had often sat next to each other at the STS banquets and had thus been joint witnesses to most of the major players in these spirited debates: Tanselle, Bowers, Kristeller, Gossett, McGann, Hill, Boydston, Bornstein, Oberg, and others had represented the long march of textuality from 1981 to 2009. But then in 2011 came what some might regard as an overdue reminder of the accomplishments of an earlier era and some as a clarion call laying out what our future should be: Peter Shillingsburg's STS Presidential Address. Peter has always had a Janus-like ability to speak for both past and future, and his theme—a provocative repudiation of much of the 1980s-1990s work of the "social" tex-tuists, and a reminder of the ongoing value of the Greg-Bowers-Tanselle triumvirate that appeared to have been displaced by the social orientation, was a rhetorical move he could carry off with particular verve. But at that moment, and now in retrospect, I am more concerned with the effect Peter's after-dinner talk had on my table-companion. During those previous banquets and addresses, Trevor's attention had occasionally been diverted, perhaps assisted by the generous supplies of wine and victuals beforehand, and to tell truth, I had even detected the beginnings of a very decorous snore. But in 2011, he was riveted throughout, joined in the various moments of popular applause, and at the end of Peter's speech, rose with a roar of not just approval but clearly of some deep emotional (and personal) validation. It was a rewarding moment for a man who had held fast to the old verities through several decades of sometimes acrimonious contestation; and while we are of course all sad to see Trevor depart from our society, 2011 and Peter's address must surely have provided a sense of "look, we have come through".

This response was, I think, of a piece with his reaction as editor of Papers of the Bibliographical Sosciety of America to the review I had done for that journal of Matt Kirschenbaum's Mechanisms, in which I drew particular attention to Matt's recognition that some of the basic principles of Greg-Bowers-Tanselle bibliographical analysis had continued relevance to electronic texts and to his own specialty, the potential corruption (and salvaging) of those texts in a digital environment. On receiving the review, Trevor e-mailed me: "I greatly enjoyed your review of Kirschenbaum's book, of which I had not known. Very informative. It was interesting to see from your review that Tanselle was right about the reconciliation of bibliographical theory across media. Text...