'The Evidence Givers Too Untrustworthy'

My middle son has entered his fourth year at the U.S. Naval Academy. Next spring he will be commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. One of our perks as parents is a subscription to Shipmates, the alumni magazine of the USNA, published ten times a year. I warmed up to it slowly, feeling intimidated as a non-service member and a lifelong landlubber. Now I at least skim it cover to cover, in particular the obituaries at the back of the magazine in a section titled “Last Call.” These I read word for word. The July-August issue includes fifty-one obits filling seventeen pages. They constitute personal histories, as do all obituaries, but also History. 

For instance, the first obituary in the latest issue is for Stanley Hart Brittingham. He graduated from the USNA in 1944, served in World War II and Korea, and retired from the Navy in 1965. He and his wife were married for seventy-eight years. Born in 1921, he died May 4 at age ninety-nine.

 

Now for an unexpected life. John Harty III died last December at age seventy-five. Lt. Commander Harty, USNR (Ret.), graduated from the Academy in 1968 and resigned his commission in 1973. At the request of President Carter he returned to active duty in 1977 to teach English at the Academy until 1982. Harty went on to earn his Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland in 1985. Here is the paragraph that surprised me:

 

“John was the editor of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake: A Casebook [1991] and Tom Stoppard: A Casebook [1988]. A Joyce scholar, he attended Joyce conventions world-wide. He enjoyed baseball, tennis and movies. He had recently completed a novel, Foul Weather Parade, which he had worked on for many years.”

 

I shouldn’t be surprised. The education midshipmen get at the Academy is superior, certainly by today’s standards in higher education. My son read Ulysses for the first time at the Academy, and not for a class. He majors in computer engineering and electrical engineering, but has also learned Russian. Joyce writes in the Wake:

 

“Thus, the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude, and the evidence givers too untrustworthy.”