Gordon Messing,1917-2002

Memorial Service for Gordon Myron Messing

(Music from Samuel Barber playing as people come in)

Reading from Ecclesiasticus: Let us now praise famous men

About Gordon

We are here to commemorate the life and mourn the death of Gordon Myron Messing. He leaves behind him four children, and thirteen grandchildren, many friends and colleagues, an impressive array of published works, and a splendid library. He was first and foremost an eminent scholar, a man of wit and humor, who from his earliest youth demonstrated astonishing facility with languages and literature. Like an arrow shot from the bow, he sped from his small midwestern high school to the refined atmosphere of the Harvard University classics department, and though the war took him away from classics and into another world, where his skill with languages made him invaluable to army intelligence, and subsequently the State Department, his passion for the classics never left him. He was able to step back into that world after having done his duty for his country, and enjoy a second career after his first. An indefatigable scholar, a passionate classicist, a loving husband, a dedicated father, and an excellent companion--he was a man, take him for all in all; we shall not look upon his like again.

Click here for a splendid memorial written by his colleague, Pietro Pucci.

He and his beloved wife Florence shared a rapturous and idyllic life, with years abroad and years here, surrounded always by family and friends, and good times. Her death robbed him of his happiness, and subsequent strokes robbed him of his wits. But human beings are born to trouble as the sparks fly upward, and he lived a full and rich life before he suffered these afflictions.

The poet says, No man is an island, entire of itself;any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. With the death of this dear man, we are all diminished. Something that was good and bright has vanished from the earth. Go in peace, Gordon. We whom you left behind will never forget you.

There was a poem that he often quoted, elegizing an antique poet, and let it now remind us of him, the poet and scholar.

Memorial: Remembrances from Colleagues, Friends and Family

Dear Friends,
We have gathered together testimonies from three elements of Gordon’s life: his professional life, his friends, and his family. First, we have a fine letter from a colleague. Hayden Pelliccia teaches in the classics department at Cornell, and wrote a short summary of Gordon’s career:

Gordon Messing as scholar and teacher

Gordon Messing had a remarkable academic career. The range of erudition demonstrated by the record of his teaching and of his publications would be highly impressive for any scholar. When it is taken into account, however, that the scholar in question in effect checked out of the academy for twenty years – and these were the immediate post-dissertation years that are the usual prime time for productivity in a scholarly life – then the record crosses the line from "impressive" to "somewhat amazing".

A curriculum vitae of November 1990 lists 107 publications, dating from 1942 to 1990. Early on we see an enormous 70-page article in Harvard Studies in Classical Philology entitled "Selected Studies in Indo-European Phonology"; this work, deriving from Messing's dissertation, is still cited in the linguistics bibliography, more than 50 years after its publication.

In the mid 1950s, when the professor-to-be was working full-time for the State Department, his enduring revision of Herbert Weir Smyth's Greek Grammar appeared, never to disappear: it is still in print, and is still the best Greek grammar available in English.

After retiring from teaching at Cornell, Prof. Messing brought to fruition many years' study of the language of Greek Gypsies in the book A Glossary of Greek Romany. This study is based upon field work Messing conducted himself among the Gypsies of the Agia Varvara community of Athens; it includes about 1,500 Greek-Romany terms, and a grammatical sketch of the language, as well as the texts of several stories and conversations obtained through interviews. The book succeeded in establishing what had not been known before, namely that the language of these Greek Gypsies had incorporated from Turkish not merely vocabulary, but structural patterns. This finding has significant implications for the history of the Greek gypsies – implications that Professor Messing had hoped to pursue in a subsequent book, unfortunately never completed.

These three titles stand as the most conspicuous projections of a very substantial iceberg. The range of subjects upon which Professor Messing wrote is astounding. It is clear that during his 20 years with the State Department he hit upon a device for keeping his hand in the world of scholarship: this device was the scholarly book review. For the period from 1947 when he first started in the Foreign Service, to his metamorphosis into a Cornell Classics and Linguistics Professor in 1967, I count no fewer than 38 such review articles published by him. It was no doubt this energetic linguistical moonlighting during his Foreign Service years that made possible his seamless transition back into the academy in the late 1960s.

Let me heed this cue and turn now to the subject of the teaching Messing did during his renewed academic career. Again, the range is astonishing. Examining the course catalogues for the years from 1967 to 1987 we find G. M. Messing teaching on every side of the street, from large undergraduate lecture courses on "Word Power" to highly technical graduate seminars on such topics as Vulgar Latin, Italic Dialects, or a two-term sequence on Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. Somewhere in the middle of the road he teaches the History of the Greek Language and the History of the Latin Language, while at the same time offering Beginning Sanskrit and Spoken Modern Greek.

But there are also courses here that can serve as a convenient insight into one of the most significant strands in Messing's intellectual pursuits, a strand that sets him apart from many professors of linguistics: this is his lifelong love of literature. Not only do we see this more literary Messing teaching an undergraduate course on the tormented Roman lyric poet Catullus (in Latin, of course), but we can notice him pushing literary considerations into the Linguistics department curriculum, too. The record shows him instituting two new courses (among otHers); one of these, which was cross-listed with the Comparative Literature department, was called Linguistics for Students of Literature. The opening sentence of the catalogue description gives a good sense of how Prof. Messing saw there to be a unity in his diverse studies: "Since literature is merely a highly specialized sector of language in general, the science of language has much to contribute even to humanists whose primary interest is in literary texts." For those who might wonder what was the nitty-gritty of this linguistic contribution to literary studies, the description for the other course will prove enlightening; the course is called "Style and Language", and the description reads as follows: "The many areas where linguistics impinges on style, such as sound symbolism, stylostatistics, metrics, grammaticality and deviation, speech registers, ambiguity, and context parameters are covered". These must have been exciting courses to teach and to take – "interdisciplinarity" is a cant buzz word of academic life in the young 21st century; Prof. Messing was practicing it 35 years ago.

Thank you, Mr. Pelliccia, for your generous contribution.

(Music from Gordon’s grandson Philip:Prelude V by Christopher Norton)

Gordon as a Friend

Gordon had many friends, and kept in touch with a wide variety of people all over the world. Robert Cunningham was a man he went to Harvard with, who then spent time with him in Vienna. He writes:

Dear Hope,

When I saw the envelope to your letter , my heart sank, as I guessed what you would have to tell me. Now I am no longer sad, for I know that your father is at last at peace. Perhaps--if there is a hereafter- he can meet with his beloved wife again.

Your letter was most affecting. At the age of eighty-three, I should be used to death coming for old friends, but it always still moves me. This year I have lost my brother, and three other old companions, including your father. One of them was Alan White, who served with your Dad and me in Vienna during the late 1940’s.

Your poem is lovely, and I am happy to know that your father enjoyed hearing it the night before he died. I am enclosing four lines in praise of friendship. They are from Horace’s Odes, Book 1, Number 13. Your father and I admired them once; they are carved into a panel beside one of the gates into the Harvard Yard from Massachusetts Avenue:

Felices ter et amplius
Quos irrupta tenet copula nec malis
Divulsus querimoniis
Suprema citius solvet amor die.

A translation goes as follows:

Those friends are happy and more than happy
Who are peacefully bound together in amity.
Love will not part such friends until death parts them.

This is the way I shall always think of my old friend.

(Music from Seth and Anna: Ashokan Farewell)

Gordon as Uncle and Father-Memories

From his niece Sandy:

My favorite memory of your Mom and Dad was when we were children and your family had come back to the States for an interim tour of duty after Vienna, I believe. It must have been summertime and we were all visiting Grandma Hope in the big house in Darien with the covered portico in the front, the silver ball on a pedestal in the middle of the side yard, the flower and vegetable gardens and fruit orchard in the backyard, rolling down a gentle slope to the pond and the woods and meadows beyond. And the house itself was grand ---- three stories high, a spiral staircase spilling into the entrance hall, a library with a stuffed sailfish and a wooden model of a schooner, bedrooms with vanities and elegant bathrooms with huge glassed-in showers, and an attic filled with old clothes for dress-up, family photos and love letters, and dusty furniture just right for playing house.

Every evening, Grandma Hope and my Mom and your Mom would make dinner for all of us, while the Dads took care of corralling the many young children and somehow getting them changed and combed so they were presentable for the formal dinner at the big oval dining room table. The food was always delicious, the presentation spectacular, and the conversation lively, funny and often raucous as the evening wore on. Afterwards, the little kids got scooted off for baths and bedtime stories, and your Mom and Dad always did the dishes. I had never been much of a fan of the clean-up part of dinner, but that summer changed my mind, because Florence and Gordon would SING their way through clearing, washing, drying and putting away the piles and piles of dishes. They sang folk songs, gypsy songs, pop tunes, rounds; and they sang in English, French, German, Spanish, Greek, Catalan, and other languages I could only guess at. They would laugh and wash and sing and dry and dance and put away ------ and I was in seventh heaven as I helped out in whatever ways I could just so I could be around them, soak in their joy and good cheer, and join in whenever I knew a song. I felt as if we were in a Hollywood musical extravaganza and was so happy to have a bit part. It was exhilarating!!!!!

Gordon's Children

From his daughter Faith:

I remember when in high school asking my dad some question about my homework. He answered and told me he'd check into it. Within a week, he elucidated, within 2 weeks, he further elucidated, 3 weeks, nay, yet a month he was still elucidating. My dad the consummate scholar!

Then there were the times when chuckling, he'd tell us, "and I am reminded of an old joke but it's in Greek and you wouldn't understand!" After much "tell us daddy, tell us daddy!" and such cajoling, he would finally tell us the joke--translate it and invariably, the joke would fall flat in translation. We would smile with feigned sympathetic humor, but undaunted, dad would laugh--terribly amused and obviously hugely entertained by his clever witticism--"oh, daddy!".

Finally I remember my self as a really young girl being bounced about and hugged and told I was "daddy's little angel girl" and with that comforting phrase echoing in my ears--surely "all was right with the world!"

From his son Daniel:

Not a handy man, not by any stretch. By the time I was in third or fourth grade and Mom would ask for some task (tightening a screw, stopping a squeaking door), I found that I already exceeded Dad's ability that way.

No, technology was never his strong point.

But in the world of books? that was different. In law school, when I brought someone to dinner once, she commented afterwards that Dad was, in all respects but one, a rabbi. During dinner he would often get up to consult a book to confirm a point. A highly intelligent friend, very well read, had dinner with us once and said it was so ferociously intellectual he would never do it again. It was only as we grew older and gained experience that we realized how different our family was..

Along with this high intellectualism, however, was a great sense of highly intelligent, and sometimes not so intelligent, humor. (We never did compile the "Clever Sayings of Parents" that he constantly urged on us.) Puns were a favorite (of his). His face would assume a certain look, which we learned to recognize, and we would brace ourselves..

I still remember his trying to tell us a joke at the table that was, in the end, so feeble, but we were helpless, crying with laughter, while Seth was literally rolling on the floor. His comedy routine with Seth ("Will you join me in a cup of coffee? Will there be room for both us?") might have been drawn from his father, who evidently also had a strong sense of humor. It was he who told us, when we first learned about being stationed in Iceland, about whale-blubber candy..

We never knew much about what he did at the office, but it seemed, at least in Iceland, that work consisted of telling jokes to his colleagues, which he would then tell us. Of course, he would often have to explain the jokes; recondite, often relying on knowledge of multiple languages, or drawing upon his immense knowledge of literature..

He (and we) were so fortunate in his "better half." The two, together, provided so much.

From his son Seth:

Memories of Dad are intertwined with memories of books and of reading. Dad loved books and literature and he wanted us to love them too. He carefully selected books for our birthdays and Christmas. There was always a package of books from him, each one signed by Dad. He read to us too, books that I will always love, like The Hobbit, books that moved him and moved us, as we experienced the language filtered through his own reactions. He had us memorize poetry and paid us small bribes scaled to the length of the poem..

I have many happy memories of family trips, family meals, family events. Dad is a key figure in these memories – his banter, his jokes, his favorite quotes, his pessimism, his constant reading (even in the car!). Dad loved music and loved to sing. He and Mom would sing in the car while we kids cowered in the back, begging them to stop. Sometimes, though, we all would sing together and shriek when the car went through tunnels. How often the morning wake-up for Daniel and me would include the lines from Omar Khayyam – “Awake, for morning in the bowl of night, has cast the stone that put the stars to flight”. By his example, he showed us that beautiful language wasn’t just locked inside books – you could bring it into your everyday life, for the sheer pleasure of it..

In these recent years, the Dad we knew gradually faded away and it was easy to forget the way things were when we were growing up. I recall as a teenager how odd it was to hear friends saying that they hated their parents, that they hated spending time with them. I loved my parents and my family and treasure the memories of growing up with this remarkable man as my father..

From his daughter Hope:

We lived a dream life in Greece—a charming house in the suburbs of Athens, the shining turquoise Mediterranean close by. It must have been a dream come true for my father, to live in this city so brimming with history—history that he had read and loved since childhood. One of the things that I remember with especial fondness of my dad is that despite his being a scholar and caring nothing for sports, he felt that an American father should teach his children about baseball. And so, living in this antique city, he gravely assembled his four children, provided a ball and bat, and somehow got us swinging at the ball, and even hitting it from time to time. American baseball, in the home of the Olympic Games! Riotous family fun we had, many happy times.

He loved to sing, as Sandy so vividly remembers in her reminiscence. He would sing us to us at bedtime, every night. One of the songs he sung to us was the Skye Boat Song, and it seems like a lovely song to sing together, to remember him by. (Every one sings, Seth plays accompaniment)

Speed bonny boat, like a bird on the wing,
"Onward", the sailors cry;
"Carry the lad who is born to be king,
Over the sea to Skye".
Loud the winds blow, loud the waves roar,
Thunder claps rend the air;
Baffled our foes stand by the shore,
Follow, they will not dare.
Speed bonny boat, like a bird on the wing,
"Onward", the sailors cry;
"Carry the lad who is born to be king,
Over the sea to Skye".

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