Dear Professor Trafton

I am deeply saddened to report that Professor Dain Trafton died yesterday in Exeter, New Hampshire. Professor Trafton’s wife, Vera Trafton, wrote me from the hospital earlier this week and alluded to his health challenges. She thought hearing from a few of his former students might help bring him back.

Over the course of my four years at Dartmouth I got close to Professor Trafton in a variety of ways that a small undergraduate institution facilitates. When I brought in Garry Wills to lecture on the upcoming presidential election in 1972, for example, Professor Trafton was there. He and Vera had me over for dinner along with Dain’s English Department colleague, the poet Robert Siegel. We read poetry aloud late into the evening.

Professor Trafton moved on from Dartmouth to Rockford College in 1974. I’m sure Vera reached out to his former Rockford students as well. The home page of Professor Trafton’s site has some of his professional background.

Professor Trafton wrote his dissertation on Shakespeare at Berkeley. He loved Renaissance literature in general and Italian literature of the Renaissance in particular. In 1982 he translated and annotated Tasso’s Dialogues: A Selection, with the Discourse on the Art of the Dialogue with Carnes (Carrie) Lord, whom I had met at Professor Trafton’s home before Carrie left Dartmouth to get a second Ph.D., in classics at Yale.

I thought I would take the liberty of posting the two messages I wrote for Vera to read to him before I received news of his death yesterday.

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Dear Professor Trafton: Vera updated me on your current challenges and let me know it would be okay to write you. She even gave me your home address to send a letter — but I don’t have any stationery and am headed to Milwaukee for the GOP candidates debate first thing in the morning. I want to get this out before I leave tomorrow.

I work surrounded by my books and accordingly think about you every day. As I turn the corner to go upstairs, I have all my classics of the Renaissance we studied in your seminar. What a great class.

I returned to Montaigne in a big way in the past few years and actually studied “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.” I could see Montaigne writing esoterically in that essay in a way I was never able to perceive among the other writers we studied [in whom he always pointed out their “politic and pedagogic irony”]. It brought me back to Comp. Lit. 22 (as I have it marked in my copy of The Book of the Courtier) and your efforts to get us underneath the text.

I am so grateful to have been your student. You changed my life entirely for the better when you recommended I take a look at Harry Jaffa’s Crisis of the House Divided just before I started my junior year. It’s been a long trip down that road.

I feel so close to you and Vera and your family despite my disappearance for nearly 50 years. You came from Rockford [to visit us in Minneapolis for a weekend]. I think we caught up a little bit, but I still remember your kids as “Stevie” and “Moonie.” I know I’m behind.

You and your family are in my thoughts and prayers.

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Dear Professor Trafton: I hope to stay in touch with you via email while you are recovering. I hope you will indulge my happy memories of being your student 50-plus years ago. That’s all I have to work with (but it’s a lot of material)! I want to spread them over several emails.

As I think back, I don’t think I ever took a Shakespeare course with you, but we talked about Shakespeare all the time. You never failed to make me understand I wasn’t getting past the conventional wisdom of whatever we discussed — I’m thinking of Falstaff and Hal, to take just one example.

I took only two only classes with you, and yet before long we had all but become friends. You were incredibly generous with your time and your observations and your hospitality. I am overflowing with gratitude. I think I remember just about everything you said, except for how to read Rabelais.

The second of the two classes I took with you was Milton. We read the great short poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. What a great course. You had us write a paper with a close analysis of a short passage of Paradise Lost. I enjoyed the other poems more than Paradise Lost. I got familiar enough with Milton’s style that I could see some humor in Paradise Regained. I loved Samson Agonistes. In retrospect, I see it was a tribute to you that you attracted enough students to be able to give a seminar on Milton.

By the spring of my senior year, you met me for lunch once a week at one of the restaurants on Main Street. You tried to disabuse me of my immature relativism. I think you may have sent me to Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History. That really did the trick.

I am counting on Vera to keep me posted on your recovery. I want you to know that you and your family are in my thoughts and prayers. As I mentioned in my earlier message, because I work with my Comp. Lit. 22 books in sight, I think about you with gratitude almost every day.