In Memoriam: John Jay Allen (1932-2019)

It was in the evening of Saturday, August 17, that my wife Nancy and I heard that Jay Allen had died and that a graveside memorial service for him was to be held the next day, Sunday, in Danville, Kentucky, where he lived with his wife Patricia. We knew we had to be there, so we hurriedly made a few phone calls to family and friends to tell them that we would be out of town for a couple of days. The affair was a simple one, as Jay would have wanted: about fifty family members, friends, former colleagues, and former students were in attendance. In a solemn program—sprinkled with moments of laughter—presided over by Jay's son John Patrick, a few persons from these groups spoke briefly about their relationship to Jay through the years, the profound influence he had on their lives, and the sort of person he had been and would remain in their memories.

In my own comments, I recalled that I had met Jay in the fall of 1963 when, as a young, naïve, and woefully underprepared student, I began my graduate studies at the University of Florida. I think I took just about every class Jay taught over the next few years and I can honestly say that no one had a greater or more profound intellectual impact on my life. For one thing, he taught me how to read and understand poems, opened up to me the marvelous world of the way metrics and rhyme, image and symbol, function in great Renaissance poetry. I think it was in the first class I took with him that Jay made a comment about how and why he dedicated his life to the teaching and study of literature. The comment went something like this: "When I read a novel, a play, or a poem, I have a reaction—a feeling, an emotion, a thought—and then I try to understand what it was that the author did to make me have that feeling, to want to go back over the text and see where and how what I had just read elicited those reactions—and then to write about it."

It was during his masterful class on Don Quijote that I decided to change the course of my career. Until that time I had intended to work in the great field of the Latin American novel, but after beginning to glimpse the world of Cervantes and his masterpiece, I knew there was no alternative for me. The (pitifully simplistic) paper I wrote for that class contained the seed of my doctoral dissertation, which in turn became the springboard for my first book. And Jay was an exemplary dissertation director, criticizing and correcting my work, but always in the gentlest and most encouraging terms. I had the honor of being the first of Jay's students to complete a doctorate under his direction; he sometimes referred to me as "his oldest living graduate student," perhaps a mixed compliment but an honor I cherish.

But what he meant to me went well beyond our relationship in graduate school. As we met more and more often at professional meetings and almost every year in Madrid, I realized that at certain crucial moments in my life I would stop and ask myself, "What would Jay do in this situation?" I didn't always take what I thought would be his advice, but the model he provided always influenced my thinking. I specifically recall that during the long, hot summer of 1974, when Jay and I were both participants in the Southeastern Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Duke University, in the seminar taught by Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Jay once said that if he could choose his own epitaph it would be, "He gave more than he took." You can't do much better than that. Overall, Jay ranks as one of the six most important mentors and guides I have had throughout my life. The others are my father, Miss Maxine Waters (my first Spanish teacher in high school), Miguel de...