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[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 78 (Thursday, May 11, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E999-E1000]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

[[Page E999]]

               DR. CHARLES A. BRADY, A MULTI-TALENTED MAN

                                 ______

                          HON. JOHN J. LaFALCE

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                         Wednesday, May 10, 1995
  Mr. LaFALCE. Mr. Speaker, western New Yorkers and the Canisius 
College community in Buffalo this weekend mourned the passing of Dr. 
Charles A. Brady, former head of the college's English Department 
author and literary critic for the Buffalo News for more than half a 
century.
  Dr. Brady was an extremely talented, multifaceted person, as 
evidenced by the Buffalo News' obituary, which described him as: ``A 
professor, poet, novelist, critic and caricaturist * * *.''
  In addition to his voluminous literary creations, Dr. Brady will also 
be remembered fondly by the many generations of Canisius' alumni, like 
me, who were taught and influenced by him.
  Following are his obituary which appeared in the Buffalo News, and an 
insightful article by Jeff Simon, the News' book editor, which appeared 
in the paper May 9 and headlined: ``A Man of Letters, but Even More, a 
Man of Life.''
Charles A. Brady Dies; Canisius Prof., Author, Literary Critic for News 
                                 Was 83

       Charles A. Brady, former head of the English Department at 
     Canisius College, author and literary critic for The Buffalo 
     News for five decades, died Friday (May 5, 1995) in Sisters 
     Hospital, following a long illness.
       A professor, poet, novelist, critic and caricaturist, Brady 
     had used both pen and wit to illuminate even the darkest 
     recesses of literature for three generations of Western New 
     Yorkers. He was 83.
       Brady, who was born April 15, 1912, often pointed out that 
     he was born ``the day, the hour and the moment that the 
     Titantic sank.''
       It was that coincidence, he said, that gave him his ``bent 
     for epic things.''
       For more than 50 years, Brady served as an intellectual 
     beacon to students and residents of the Buffalo area and 
     beyond, contributing to and interpreting the literary scene 
     both here and abroad.
       A man of enormous enthusiasm and dauntless energy, Brady 
     since childhood defied a serious heart condition and pursued 
     an active life, often from his bedside at home, or in the 
     hospital.
       Bardy wrote four novels. One of them, ``Stage of Fools: A 
     Novel of Sir Thomas More,'' outsold any book published by E. 
     P. Dutton in 1953. It was translated into Dutch and Spanish 
     and printed in paperback as well as hard cover.
       In 1968, the Poetry Society of America gave first prize to 
     Brady's ``Keeper of the Western Gate'' and, in 1970, its 
     Cecil Hemley Memorial Award for the best poem on a 
     philosophical theme, ``Ecce Homo Ludens.''
       C.S. Lewis, the eminent British author, once called Brady's 
     critique of his work the best published in Great Britain and 
     the United States.
       Brady's literary output was voluminous--from novels, short 
     stories, poems, children's stories, holiday ``fantasies,'' to 
     critical essays and book reviews. Throughout his work ran the 
     deep vein of history.
       Son of Andrew J. Brady Sr., a former lumberman who owned 
     freighters on the Great Lakes, and Belinda Dowd of Black 
     Rock, Brady's commitment to literature began at Canisius 
     College, which he attended after graduating from Canisius 
     High School in 1929. He received his bachelor of arts degree 
     from Canisius in 1933.
       During those years, he also played championship tennis and, 
     in the spring of 1987, was named to the Canisius College All 
     Sports Hall of Fame for his undergraduate tennis prowess.
       He received a master of arts degree in English from Harvard 
     University and then returned to Canisius at age 23 as an 
     associate professor of English.
       A year later, he was promoted to professor and chairman of 
     the English Department, a position he held until 1959, when 
     he continued his professorship until retirement in 1977.
       In his more than 40 years at the college, he touched and 
     helped mold the tastes and lives of thousands of students and 
     graduate students, many from other colleges or universities, 
     who also attended his courses or sought his counsel.
       The AZUWUR, the Canisius College yearbook, was dedicated to 
     Brady in 1956 and again in 1976.
       From 1938 to 1941, Brady directed Canisius College's 
     graduate division, and during World War II, in addition to 
     his English classes, he taught the classics, French, military 
     geography and Renaissance history.
       Academically, Brady probably was best known for his 
     lectures and critical studies of Cooper, Marquand, Sigrid 
     Undset, Charles Williams, the Volsunga Saga, John Le Carre 
     and C.S. Lewis. His studies on J.R.R. Tolkien and, more 
     especially, Lewis, have been cited as ``definitive in this 
     country.''
       Copies of Lewis' original letters to Brady, embracing a 
     correspondence that the British author initiated and that 
     continued over a number of years, are in the Bodleian Library 
     at Oxford University.
       In addition to ``Stage of Fools,'' Brady's works include 
     ``Viking Summer,'' which combined Norse legend with a 
     present-day Niagara Frontier setting; ``This Land Fulfilled'' 
     and ``Crown of Grass,'' both historical novels; ``Wings Over 
     Patmos,'' a book of verse; and ``A Catholic Reader,'' a 
     personalized anthology.
       For children, he wrote ``Cat Royal,'' ``The Elephant Who 
     Wanted to Pray,'' ``The Church Mouse of St. Nicholas'' and 
     ``Sir Thomas More of London Town.''
      For older children, he wrote ``Sword of Clontart'' and ``The 
     King's Thane.''
       A short story, ``The Foot That Went Too Far,'' which he had 
     written as an undergraduate, was the origin of the griffin as 
     the Canisius College mascot.
       The capstone of his career at Canisius was writing the 
     college's centenary history, ``Canisius College: The First 
     Hundred Years.'' Written over almost five years, the book, 
     unlike most school histories, was done in an impressionistic 
     style, capturing the spirit of the college as well as that of 
     the Niagara Frontier.
       Brady wrote for national and international journals, and 
     reviewed books for other major publications, such as The New 
     York Times, the old Herald Tribune, America, Commonweal and 
     the Catholic World.
       A man of many talents, including some musical composition, 
     Brady enjoyed drawing line caricatures of authors, many of 
     which were used to illustrate his critical essays and book 
     reviews for The News. His last book review and drawing for 
     The News was printed March 12.
       In September 1986, the Burchfield Center at Buffalo State 
     College exhibited his literary caricatures in a one-man show.
       A familiar figure on the lecture platform, Brady held the 
     Candlemas Lectureship at Boston College and gave Notre Dame's 
     Summer Lectures in the humanities.
       The News named him ``an outstanding citizen'' in 1970.
       He was the recipient of the Canisius College LaSalle Medal, 
     the highest honor awarded to an alumnus. In 1970, the 
     Canisius Alumni Association presented him with its Peter 
     Canisius Medal for his ``scholarly brilliance and teaching 
     excellence that inspired and informed legions of Canisius 
     students.''
       A longtime resident of the Town of Tonawanda, he moved to 
     Buffalo's Delaware District in the early 1990s.
       Brady is survived by his wife of 57 years, the former Mary 
     Eileen Larson; four daughters, Karen Brady Borland and Moira 
     Brady Roberts, both of Buffalo, Sheila Brady Nair of New 
     Bethlehem, Pa., and Kristin M. of London, Ont.; two sons, 
     Erik L. of Arlington, Va., and Kevin C. of Buffalo and 17 
     grandchildren.
       Prayers at 11 a.m. Monday in the George J. Roberts & Sons 
     Funeral Home, 2400 Main St., will precede a Mass of Christian 
     Burial at 11:30 a.m. in Christ the King Chapel at Canisius 
     College, 2001 Main St. Burial will be in Mount Olivet 
     Cemetery in the Town of Tonawanda.
                                                                    ____

             A Man of Letters, but Even More, a Man of Life

       Charles Brady died on Friday afternoon at age 83. His loss 
     to The News' book pages is virtually incalculable. If it 
     isn't precisely accurate to say that Charles A. Brady 
     invented literary reviewing at The Buffalo News, it's 
     certainly close enough to the truth to pass. He was a 
     treasured literary voice here in five separate decades.
       I've been The News' book editor for six years and was the 
     book assignment editor for six years before that. Editing Dr. 
     Brady and finding books that I knew would stimulate him 
     provided the job's greatest pleasures.
       His latest work would appear in my mail every Friday or 
     Monday morning. Inside the envelope--impeccably typed on 
     soft, old-fashioned, khaki-colored copy paper--would be three 
     pages of crystalline prose. Accompanying it, on white paper, 
     would be one of his pen-and-ink caricatures. Even on busy 
     Mondays, I would try to save editing Dr. Brady for the last 
     work of the day--an Edwardian reward of wit, wisdom and 
     uncommon grace for dealing with all the coarse, witless 
     drudgery that almost all work requires, journalism included.
       At least half the time, there would be a word or spelling 
     in it that I'd never encountered before--some strange 
     semantic hippo-griff that Dr. Brady had captured in his 
     library and uncaged for the delight and enchantment of 
     company.
       Typically, I'd walk over to our glorious battery of 
     dictionaries in a state of bafflement or skepticism: Surely, 
     this time, it's a misspelling. And then the huge Random House 
     Dictionary, American Heritage Dictionary and Oxford English 
     Dictionary would set me straight--Dr. Brady's was very much a 
     word, even if its usage or spelling were Victorian or 
     Elizabethan.
       It's a walk I'll never make again; it's a smile of marvel 
     and appreciation I won't be smiling anymore.
       Every day that goes by brings at least one book that I 
     would automatically send to Dr. Brady in total confidence 
     that it would elicit a smile of complicity on the other end 
     of our discourse-by-mail-and-phone.
       No discussion was necessary to pick out ``Brady books.'' I 
     have been reading him since my early teens. I knew what he 
     liked or, failing that, what interested him. That was vastly 
     more than the epics or Celtic [[Page E1000]] myths or Irish 
     literature or work of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their 
     fellow Oxford Inklings that people thought of as his special 
     province. It encompassed virtually the whole of English 
     literature, early American literature (James Fenimore Cooper 
     was a Brady specialty; minor Twain was a Brady weakness), all 
     American fictional modernism and, late in life, Yiddish and 
     Jewish literature, for which he developed an entirely 
     unpredictable fondness.
       We disagreed strongly on some writers, but he was the sort 
     of man with whom disagreement was one of the friendliest 
     experiences you could have. If he never quite subscribed to 
     all the hoo-ha about Jorge Luis Borges from me and others, he 
     would, with impish geniality, point out how much he liked 
     Anthony Burgess, and what was the name Borges, after all, but 
     the Spanish version of Burgess?
       It's also true, I think, that he was doing some of the best 
     journalistic work of his life in his final decade. In the 
     place of earlier reviews that could sometimes be constricted 
     by myth (it's tempting to call such prose ``myth-begotten'' 
     and hope he'd approve), his work in the past decade was 
     informed by marvelous wit, total scholarship and a glorious 
     new clarity. I could delude myself into thinking that our 
     unspoken communication had something to do with it, but I 
     know it's not the case.
       I think what his readers read in the past decade was the 
     work of a
      man who, besides being loved at home, had finally thrown off 
     all the vestiges of professorial presentation. To be as 
     great a teacher as so many generations of Canisius College 
     students say that Charles Brady was requires a certain 
     theatricality--a well-communicated sense of literary 
     passion and identification, an exaggerated self-
     definition.
       You can't just commune with the avid young scholars in the 
     front row. If you have any honor at all, you have to 
     communicate something to the deadheads in the cheap seats. 
     Even if they don't understand a word you're saying, you have 
     to give them some sense of the bardic and of the glory of a 
     life spent in literature.
       It made some of this '70s and early '80s journalism 
     operatic in its mythology, I think. In his final decade's 
     work, he had stopped composing operatic arias and started 
     composing magnificent chamber music. It is then, I think, 
     that we heard his truest voice--just as passionate as the 
     Yeatsian visionary his students knew, but wittier, more 
     Edwardian and seemingly effortless.
       Wonderfully apropos quotes from the Alexandrian library 
     inside his head would find their way into his work, but so 
     would the damnedest, spot-on references to the society around 
     him.
       Anyone who thought that he resided in a 1940s Oxford of his 
     own devising would be disabused of that notion on 
     encountering an up-to-the-minute and unfalsified Brady take 
     on academic gender wars or a perfectly appropriate reference 
     to gangsta rap. (I must confess, the day I first encountered 
     the phrase ``gangsta rap'' in a review by the 82-year-old 
     Brady, I threw my head back and roared with pleasure.)
       He was, in that great Henry James phrase, a thoroughly 
     independent and aware man ``on whom nothing was lost.''
       I remember seeing Dr. Brady on an old '50s Buffalo 
     television show called ``The University of Buffalo 
     Roundtable.'' The subject of Beat poetry came up. The 
     acceptable cant from the Professoriat of the '50s--and 
     certainly from those on that show--was that the Beats were, 
     to a man, hairy and filthy overhyped pretenders. Brady 
     listened patiently to it all and said, ``I don't know, I 
     haven't read all of them, but I've read some (Lawrence) 
     Ferlinghetti and I think he's pretty good.''
       Lest one think that his tower was totally ivory, he was 
     also, without fail, the most journalistically current book 
     reviewer we had--right to the end. It never ceased to amaze 
     me that an old valiant man in failing health was, without 
     question, our greatest sprinter. His reviews of major books 
     would continually precede and presage major treatment in the 
     New York Times and the newsmagazines, often by several weeks. 
     In such matters, his instincts were impeccable.
       When longtime readers lose a voice like Charles Brady's it 
     is always a personal loss, even for those who never knew him. 
     But at the end of his life, I think, he was teaching us all 
     some life lessons that were infinitely greater than he ever 
     taught in the classroom--that the life of the mind can not 
     only survive intact to the very hour of our death, but can, 
     until the moment one is visited by what James called ``that 
     distinguished thing,'' actually increase in acuity, 
     understanding and grace.
       The world is full of people whom Charles A. Brady taught 
     how to read and write and think.
       At the end of his life and bedeviled by illness, he taught 
     us something even richer--how to be.
     

                          ____________________
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