I once made collages out of things left behind in used books. Physical evidence of a human touch, glimpses into their story. Readers often forget old letters, tickets, postcards, brittle flowers, lace, and other ephemera in the pages of a book. But I didn’t expect this hobby to force me down a mysterious literary rabbit hole or to be haunted by a long-dead Oxford professor named W.P. Ker.
Over a decade ago, I was with an old friend at Oxford’s Blackwell’s Bookshop, looking for things forgotten in books. Some tell-tale signs: half-cracked spines, corners of paper sticking out, just the messy vibe of a book. Self-help books frequently have personal mantras left behind. Dense notes stuck in history books. Dog-eared travel books with flight stubs. I roamed around many bookstores like a goblin, looking through other people’s trash.
Upstairs at Blackwell’s, in a slim red book on a bottom shelf, I found a thick letter. I took it. If it were loose and not part of the book, well… I justified myself. Other people would likely throw it away, right? I found a few other bits and bobs throughout the labyrinth-like bookshop.
We left to go to a cafe. I took out the bits I stowed away in my purse. The letter felt soft to the touch, like only high-quality paper can.
When I opened it, cuttings fell out of and into my lap and onto the small table. Obituaries. About ten of them, folded irregularly and dry. And the same name kept appearing: W.P. Ker.
The Letter: A Death in Italy
The obituaries were titled, “W.P. Ker | A Master of Many Literatures”, “W.P Ker The Deeper Traits”, “Death of Professor Ker | A Distinguished Scholar”, “William Paton Ker, born in Glasgow, 1855; died on the 17th July, 1923, suddenly, of heart failure while climbing at Macugnaga, Italy”, and so forth.
Already, this find felt special. Not one to cut up, clearly. Quickly, I realized this was a first-hand account of his death in the Alps.
The letter begins:
“My dear Isabel.
Plain selfish pig! That’s what I am. I don’t know why I didn’t think of writing to you – knowing that W. P. Ker meant as much to you as to any of us.”
I ignored the bustling cafe around me and sank into this letter. The writing felt well-crafted, easily bringing me back to the 1920s, Italy. “I couldn’t convey anything of like the glory of his passing,” the writer states. I think, however, they did.
The writer and Ker spent a summer in Italy. An intellectual group seems to flit in and out around them. Ker, apparently, never seemed happier than then, reading Dante in Florence and giving lessons to his proteges.
After visiting the Ligurian coast, they meet up with Freya Stark, an Olivia, and Freya’s sister, Vera Stark. A group of hikers formed at Macugnaga. A man named Jacchini also joins them – a guide, I think.
In the Alps, Ker named the stars at night. During the day, “what we said was chiefly about flowers”. The brief descriptions turn minute. The writer dials in, even stating that it was 4:50 when they had breakfast. Ker had been writing in his diary ten minutes before his death.
W.P. Ker’s Death: A First-Hand Account
W.P. Ker begins to slow down during the hike. He loses his breath, so they rest. He journals. When the group moves on, Ker and Jacchini walk together.
Suddenly, Jacchini shouts.
The writer rushes to see what is happening, but it’s too late.
Ker dies suddenly, with “not even the pain of knowing he was leaving us.” The writer and Freya Stark wait with Ker’s body as the rest of the group goes down to the village for help.
Freya and I sat with him until about 1:30 when the men came up. I cannot tell you how beautiful it was. With Freya’s axe we made a level place so that he lay easily, his head on his rucksack (we buried it with him) + handful of alpine ranunculus on his breast. We left his face bare to the sky. […] The mist came down round us and was quite quiet except for water running in the valley. Thousands of feet below and for the sound of far off avalanches on Monte Rosa. Everything was blotted out – and now and again the mist lifted and we saw shining snowy peaks or little down to the vallley, at our feet. It was a great privlege.
This line makes my breath catch, even now: “That is how I left him – asleep in his tweeds.”
Locals retrieve his body. A ceremony happens in the village, and they bury W.P. Ker facing his favorite mountain. The writer turns to other matters, seemingly aware that the point of the letter has been achieved, and the thoughtful writing with exquisite imagery becomes quick and informal. Names appear that weren’t introduced before, a Charles, a Robert. Mutual friends, I assume. The writer asks for a job, but insists they “must stay in Glasgow and do my work like a sensible woman at sick childrens”. They wish they “may see Catherine”.
I hope she saw her. The letter is signed, “Poldores”.
The Writer and Receiver
I felt like I had just taken a trip to the Alps at a cafe in Oxford. My face was wet from tears. I don’t remember saying anything, just handing it over to my friend. What could I even say?
A few days after I returned to the US. My friend and I spent our time digging through what we could. We built trees of relationships, and our email threads became long. We called Poldores “our writer”, our parasocial relationship with her deepening.
Who was Poldores?
After researching, we identified her as Mary Poldores MacCunn. She was the daughter of William Young Sellar, a Professor of Classics at Edinburgh University. W.P. Ker edited Sellar’s work, Horace and the Elegiac Poets. Presumably, she was a godchild.
Poldores married a professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool, Aidan G. W. Thomson. The only work of hers I could find is a thesis, “The plasma proteins in the acute infective fevers” published by the University of Glasglow in 1928. An in-depth medical topic. It fits with her mention of working at a hospital.
And who did she write to? An Isabel. One obituary seemed unrelated to the others – Isabel Scott-Moncrieff. Died aged 102. She volunteered during both World Wars in Egypt, she embroidered, started societies, played violin, etc. An accomplished woman. I believe this was her father. And this could be her.
Professor W.P. Ker and His Acolytes
W.P. Ker, William Paton Ker, turned out to be your favorite writer’s favorite writer.
In short, Ker was a beloved Oxford professor from Scotland and a proto-Joseph Campbell figure. Ker had a huge part in making Anglo-Saxon and medieval writing part of the English Literature canon and regarded these tales as beautiful instead of just historical. The professor also learned endless languages so he could read stories in their native tongue. Icelandic and Scandinavian studies became a speciality.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Unsurprisingly, J.R.R. Tolkien deeply admired him.
W. P. Ker, whose name and memory I honour. He would deserve reverence, of course, even if he still lived and had not ‘ellos gehworfen on Frean waeve‘ upon a high mountain in the heart of that Europe which he loved: a great scholar, as illuminating himself as a critic, as he was often biting as a critic of the critics.
On 15 April 1953, Tolkien also delivered the W.P. Ker Memorial Lecture at the University of Glasgow on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (You can find it in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien.) Ker walked so Tolkien could run, it seems. Middle-Earth is from the Icelandic Middlorf, for one.
The poet Helen Waddell spoke about W.P. Ker’s influence on her at a W.P. Memorial lecture in the 1940s: “It was W.P. Ker’s The Dark Ages, a small book but with the quality of radium, that brought me, more than a quarter of a century ago, to Boethius.” Again, Ker paves the way for intellectuals to discover old writing anew. Other W. P. Ker Memorial lecturers included C.S. Lewis, Lord David Cecil, Gwyn Jones, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Edwin Muir, and others.
Ker also elevated 18th-century poets, completely out of fashion during his time. He praised John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Alexander Pope. (Perhaps I should blame Ker for having to read all 1,500+ pages of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.)
G. K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton remembered Ker fondly, and his love of Pope:
I am able to boast myself among the many pupils who are grateful to the extraordinarily lively and stimulating learning or Professor W. P. Ker. […] I once had the honour of constituting the whole of Professor Ker’s audience. But he gave me as thorough and thoughtful lecture as I have ever heard given, in a slightly more colloquial style; asked me some questions about my readings; and, on my mentioning on something from the poetry of Pope, said with great satisfaction, “Ah, I see you have been well brought up.”
G.K. Chesterton’s Autobiography.
Edmund Gosse, Robert W. Chambers, A.D. Godley, also cite W.P. Ker as an influence. It seemed like Ker encouraged writers across the board to dig deep and push themselves. And he did not exclude women, Irish writers, and others from his tutelage.
Freya Stark
And the other woman who sat by his body in the Italian Alps? W.P. Ker altered her entire trajectory.
Ker made her an honorary godchild and financed mountaineering. She became a famous one. In Freya Stark’s biography, the author, Jane Fletcher Geniesse, notes:
As a tribute to Professor Ker, Freya climbed the Matterhorn, and Monte Rosa from its Italian side, with its daunting wall of sheer ice and risk of avalanches. Only one woman before her had managed this ascent.
W.P. Ker also suggested that Freya push herself and try a non-European language. She was, after all, already fluent in English, French, Italian, German, and learning Spanish at the time. He put forward one of his favorite languages, Icelandic. She went with Arabic instead.
Stark used her language skills to travel across the Middle East, alone as a woman. She tried to connect with indigenous populations, going into harems and usually off-limits areas, using her womanhood as a shield.
She also became a propagandist, embroiled in the tumultuous time during and after World War II, when the British Ministry of Information used her Arabic skills.
Journey’s End
I don’t know what I expected at the end of this rabbit hole. W.P. Ker touched so many lives, including my own. I had a first-hand account of the death of this intellectual powerhouse in my hand, and no one cared. To me, he died twice – once in the Alps, and then again by being forgotten.
I tried to get the letter and obituaries into an archive, but universities ignored my emails. His books are hard to find; I had to go to university libraries and the British Library to read what he wrote. I think they’re easier to find today, at least. I found them dry, I think, without the charisma and the deep voice of Ker, they lose something. My friend and I lost touch – entirely my fault. After I wrote my paper on W.P. Ker, I moved on. What else could I do?
I think I wanted Ker to be better known, somehow. Noted. I became obsessed with this mystery and how he influenced so many. I glimpsed a personal account of a literary circle in the UK, so I thought others should care, too. Maybe I was trying to position myself close to literary giants. The thought of someone so influential being forgotten disturbed me. Then, at least, not now.
I cannot find the source again, but one of Ker’s contemporaries spoke of his legacy:
Nor will the day ever come, even if the larger world reject him, when his wisdom is not understood and his sayings are not recalled in the college which he loved.
Final Thoughts
I know we all become forgotten in the end. That’s OK.
Years later, when I lived in the UK, I returned to Blackwell’s, looking for the slim red book. I felt guilty and wanted to buy it. It wasn’t there. Of course, it wasn’t. But I found another had first encountered W.P. Ker at Blackwell’s: W.H. Auden.
But this was something which neither I not anybody else could have foreseen. Again, that what good angel lured me into Blackwell’s one afternoon and, from such a wilderness of volumes, picked out for me the essays of W. P. Ker? No other critic whom I have subsequently read could have granted me the same vision of a kind of literary All Souls Night in which the dead, the living and the unborn writers of every age and tongue were seen as engaged upon a common, noble and civilizing task. No other could have so instantaneously aroused in me a fascination with prosody, which I have never lost.
Auden, W. H. “Making, Knowing, and Judging”. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. p. 42.
“Time turns round itself in an obedient circle”, indeed.
Here’s the letter.
