[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 163 (Friday, October 20, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1985-E1987]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             DR. CHARLES A. BRADY--THE NAME BURNS BRIGHTLY

                                 ______


                          HON. JOHN J. LaFALCE

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, October 19, 1995

  Mr. LaFALCE. Mr. Speaker,

     Gold passes.
     Kinsmen die.
     Die we, too, in the end.
     One thing only dies never--
     The bright name one wins for oneself.

  Thorvald Erikson, brother of Leif Erikson, sings this verse as he 
dies following an epic battle in ``This Land Fulfilled.''
  Mr. Speaker, this past spring I included in the Congressional Record 
the obituary and a related article on the passing of Dr. Charles Brady, 
a native western New Yorker and one of this country's brightest 
intellectual beacons.
  Today I submit the following eulogy of Dr. Brady which was delivered 
by his son Erik. Dr. Brady left us with volumes of his writings, which 
include novels, short stories, poems, children's stories, critical 
essays, and reviews. This eulogy, however, helps us better understand 
why he left too a name that continues to burn so brightly.

              Charles A. Brady--April 15, 1912-May 5, 1995

       Charles A. Brady died May 5, 1995, at 12:58 p.m at Sisters 
     Hospital in Buffalo. He was 83. This eulogy was delivered by 
     his son Erik on May 8 at a Mass of Christian Burial at Christ 
     the King Chapel on the campus of Canisius College.
       Mark Twain said biographies are the clothes and buttons of 
     a man--they tell you something about him, but not nearly 
     enough. Charles Brady felt much the same about eulogies. He 
     said they too often told too much about what a man did and 
     not often enough about who he was.
       I'll try not to make that mistake today. We all know the 
     wonderful things Dad did--the books he wrote, the students he 
     taught, the literary criticism he crafted. So let's talk 
     instead about who he was.
       He was a man who loved books, to be sure. But he also loved 
     family, friends, tennis and cats--if not not always in that 
     order.
       He loved Christmas, too. Not the Christmas of colored 
     lights and shopping malls, but the real thing. The World Made 
     Flesh. Take his homemade Christmas cards from a lifetime and 
     his Christmas poems from America, the Jesuit magazine which 
     has run them since 1948, and you have a wide-ranging look not 
     at the Ghost of Christmas Past but at the essence of the 
     Christmas story--its mystery, its beauty, its strangeness.
       That he was attracted to stories of the Incarnation more 
     than of the Resurrection tells you something about him, I 
     think. Maybe it is as simple as the difference between birth 
     and death.
       He did not dwell on death, though it often seemed not far 
     off. He'd been in precarious health for more than 35 years. 
     The temptation is to say he was living on borrowed time, 
     except that would not be correct. Here is a man who hated to 
     borrow anything maybe money most of all. If you picked up a 
     quart of milk for him he wanted you to have back the $1.67 
     before you sat down. So, no, there was nothing borrowed about 
     these last decades and years. The time was all his, for which 
     we are all most grateful.
       His last first cousin on the Brady side died in 1990, 
     leaving him as an unlikely patriarch, the last of his 
     generation of 60-some Brady first cousins. The last of his 
     five beloved brothers, Joe, died in 1988. We all grieve in 
     different ways. Dad added some lines to a poem he had written 
     about Joe and himself some 40 years earlier. Among the 
     appended lines were these:

     Remember how we used to clip our scores
     Out of the sporting pages the next day?
     Today I clip your ultimate score, my brother,
     From the page they call the Irish sporting page
     In Buffalo bars--we're Irish enough for that.
     They grouse, those drinkers, if their friends' obituaries
     Run too short; the same if they run too long.
     Yours is exactly right, I think, my brother.
     It's all down here: the things that really counted. . . .
     Only one thing wrong about all this, O my brother.
     On the day they post new pairings, you'll not be around
     To clip my final score as I clip yours.

       Well, we are all around to clip Dad's final score, and his 
     is exactly right, too, for which we can thank Karen: It's all 
     there, the things that really counted, the tennis victories 
     and poetry awards, the books and book reviews.
       Take all he wrote and read across a lifetime of writing and 
     reading then consider this preposterous fact: He was allergic 
     to printer's ink! Michaelangelo may as well have been 
     allergic to paint.
       Because he wrote like an angel. And his ability to dissect 
     the writing of other literary angels was so widely known some 
     scholars consider his criticism of C.S. Lewis and Sigrid 
     Undset the definitive studies in this country. He 
     corresponded with both. Letters he received from Lewis are in 
     Oxford's Bodleian Library. And just last fall, an 

[[Page E1986]]
     Undset scholar from the University of Massachusetts came to visit with 
     him--a pilgrimmage, she called it, as he later recalled with 
     a pleased grin.
       In his 80s, when most folks have long since put away their 
     professional tools, scholars came calling; his name turned up 
     in the footnotes of books he was sent for review; and his 
     literary caricatures were sometimes requested by their 
     subjects. One was from author Louis Auchinchloss, half-
     brother of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who wrote offering to 
     pay for a caricature of him that accompanied Dad's review of 
     his book last May. Dad was delighted and sent back the 
     original as a gift. Not bad for a self-taught artist who, so 
     far as is known, was the only book critic in the country who 
     illustrated his own reviews.
       Some of the originals are held by the Burchfield Art Center 
     at Buffalo State College. Most were given to the library at 
     Canisius College, as were the manuscripts for his novels, 
     hundreds of books from his personal collection and dozens of 
     his scrapbooks containing, among many other things, 50 years 
     of his book reviews in The Buffalo News. All of which makes 
     him one of the most generous benefactors in the history of 
     the library at the college named for Peter Canisius, the 
     saint who said better a college without a chapel than a 
     college without a library.
       Charles Brady loved Canisius. But if you had looked at his 
     Bene Morenti plaque--the one he got for 40 years of 
     distinguished service that hung for many years in his 
     panelled study on Deerhurst Park--you would have seen a 
     curious thing. He taped a small scrap of paper over the part 
     that said: ``Well done, oh good and faithful servant.'' He 
     complained the tone was patronizing. ``That is a judgment 
     best left to Jehovah,'' he said. And so, on that scotchtaped 
     scrap he wrote these words, in French: ``I am not good, I am 
     not faithful, I am no man's servant.''
       And yet there are few who served Canisius better or more 
     faithfully in its history than Charles Brady. He graduated 
     from Canisius High School with highest honors in 1929 and 
     from Canisius College with highest honors in 1933. He 
     returned from graduate work at Harvard to teach for 42 years 
     at the college, retiring from the classroom at the same time 
     Kevin, his youngest, graduated in 1977. He relished that 
     symmetry, though he retired in name only. For Dad never 
     actually gave up that vital connection with the school whose 
     history was so intertwined with his. Even from his deathbed 
     he could see the college's Golden Dome, as well as the 
     rooftop of the Humboldt Avenue home where he grew up and the 
     Mediterranean-blue Delaware Avenue apartment building which 
     was his last address.
       So why the scotchtaped dissent on that plaque? Well, here 
     was a good man who saw himself as not completely good--a man 
     of high morals who fancied himself a rogue. And here was a 
     faithful man who was also fiercely independent--unflinchingly 
     loyal and yet always his own man.
       His relationship with the church was little like that, too. 
     He dissented respectfully in certain matters. I can remember 
     as a child, when we were required to stand and repeat an oath 
     from the Legion of Decency about attending movies, he stooped 
     and whispered that we should repeat nothing. More recently, 
     when he made out his church envelope each Year's Day, he 
     crossed out the designation `Feast of the Solemnity of Mary' 
     and filled in the former name, `Feast of the Circumcision.' 
     Then in his familiar, compact handwriting it would say: 
     ``There is no point in substituting a redundant piece of 
     Mariolatry for a meaningful feast attesting Christ's 
     Jewishnesss, his maleness and the beginning of His Passion.'' 
     No one ever called to wonder about the altered envelopes.
       You could say all this made him a man of contradictions, 
     but you would not be right. These things may sound like 
     contradictions, but they're not. They're who he was. like the 
     mythic griffin, who is eagle and lion in the same beast, Dad 
     was rebel and loyalist in the same man.
       He was an early critic of the Vietnam war, long before it 
     became fashionable, yet when asked years later to shut down 
     his class on a day of war protest, he refused. Some who asked 
     were students, some were colleagues. He was in sympathy with 
     their cause and held it against no one who stayed away, but 
     he was paid to teach and so, for those who wanted to come, 
     teach he did.
       And he was a most marvelous teacher. As his children, none 
     of us ever tire of hearing, as we often do, what a great 
     teacher he was. We run across his former students so often it 
     is sometimes hard to believe. But their testimony is not: 
     always we hear of his greatness in the classroom. Everyone 
     thinks his or her father is the greatest man who ever lived. 
     The six of us have had the distinct pleasure of frequently 
     running into strangers who agree with us about ours.
       It was Dad's distinct pleasure that Kristin has taken up 
     that greatness in her own classroom and in her own books. He 
     took great pleasure in all of us. Karen. Moira. Sheila. 
     Kristin. Myself. Kevin. His beloved wife of nearly 58 years, 
     Eileen. And their 17 grandchildren. It's odd, but children 
     nearby always made him both joyful and nervous--that apparent 
     contradictory nature again. He took his post as patriarch 
     joyfully, too. ``Who would have bet on that?'' he would ask, 
     shaking his head with a bemused look.
       Then again, who would have bet the lad whose first 
     published poem came at the age of 16 would still be 
     publishing 68 years later? And save for his time at Harvard, 
     all of his writing years were spent in his native Buffalo. He 
     said he had for Buffalo--and the Niagara Frontier, including 
     the Canadian shore--what the Romans called genius loci: That 
     is, love for a locality and true sense for a region's spirit 
     of place. When he won the Poetry Society of America's first 
     prize in 1968, it was for ``Keeper of the Western Gate'', a 
     poem that was a paean to this region's Seneca past.
       His love of place was exceeded only by his love of family; 
     the poem was also a tribute to the Seneca blood of the family 
     of John Roberts, Moira's late husband. In Dad's final days, 
     he thought of John--and of many of our family's other Absent 
     Friends. His voice cut off by a tracheotomy, he penned his 
     thoughts in a kind of poetic shorthand. Of beloved brother 
     Fran: ``Unique.'' Of Joe: ``War hero.'' Of Jack: ``Our 
     best.'' Of his parents: ``I can see them.'' His images of 
     long-gone loved ones grew clearer as his own end drew nearer.
       Seven years ago, my wife Carol's grandmother died while we 
     were on a visit to Buffalo. My son Steven was three at the 
     time. Carol tried to explain to Steve what death was. She 
     told him it's when you go to live with God. Steve thought 
     about that a bit and announced somberly: ``Well, I don't want 
     to go to live with God.''
       ``A very sensible reaction,'' Dad said. ``I don't want to 
     go to live with God either. Who does?'' He said all this with 
     that mischievous grin most of you remember so well, the one 
     that flashed across his face when he was saying something 
     mildly naughty, which was often.
       Though he didn't talk much about death until these recent 
     weeks, the theme figured prominently in his writing. As 
     Thorvald Erikson, brother of Leif Erikson, dies after an epic 
     battle in ``This Land Fulfilled,'' he sings this verse (for 
     Thorvald was a skaid, the name for a viking poet):

     Gold passes.
     Kinsmen die.
     Die we, too, in the end.
     One thing only dies never--
     The bright name one wins for oneself.

       The name Charles Andrew Brady burns bright. Karen often 
     called him The Great Man; when she wrote a Buffalo News 
     Sunday magazine piece last summer on soul searching, the 
     internal world of belief, she asked The Great Man about his 
     beliefs.
       ``Belief is a gift,'' he said. ``It comes from the Anglo 
     Saxon gelefan. A cognate word from the same root, lief, means 
     dear or beloved. Another cognate is love--and the simplest 
     thought about God is `God is love.'''
       And what of the Afterlife. ``A mystery,'' he said. What did 
     he think it will be? His answer. ``I don't think about it.''
       But he did write about it. In ``Viking Summer,'' he cast 
     himself as Professor John C. Desmond. And in one passage, 
     inspired by the death of his mother, he wrote about his own 
     doubts about eternal life:
       ``Death, thought Professor Desmond, wasn't a very 
     progressive idea. It was the most stubbornly reactionary fact 
     man ever came up against. He often wondered if, in the end, 
     one didn't just go down into a great darkness. To gain 
     salvation, they said, one had to believe as a child. The 
     trouble was that, even as a child, he had not been able to 
     believe as a child. The difference between him and most who 
     disbelieved was that, as a Catholic, he was committed to 
     belief. As a result, he simultaneously believed and 
     disbelieved. He believed with the top of his mind. He doubted 
     with his blood. . . .
       ``The idea of God was by no means dead in the 20th century. 
     In some ways, it was actually more alive than it had been in 
     the preceding 100 years. But the idea of personal 
     immortality, of survival of the individual human personality 
     after death, was definitely less vivid. It has never actually 
     been as strong as the idea of God. Intimations of deity 
     pressed one about on every side. One did not have the same 
     imaginative conviction about the resurrection of the body. 
     One believed, perhaps. If one was lucky. One never felt sure 
     in one's bones. Not even the ancient Hebrews. Not even the 
     old Egyptians, really. Not even the people of the high 
     Christian ages. Only that strange people, the Irish, the 
     people of the dead. The people to whom his mother had 
     belonged. Even in Druidic days, the Irish had been confident 
     that they should live again.''
       Charles Brady was Irish, and in the end he put all doubt 
     aside. He was utterly sure he would live again. he underwent 
     a terrible ordeal in his final weeks at Sisters Hospital. At 
     one point early in this last hospitalization he came back 
     from a painful bronchoscopy and nurses told us he was 
     muttering gibberish. Jeanne d'Arc, Jeanne d'Arc, he said over 
     and over. A nurse asked if it meant anything. Shella 
     explained it meant everything: He was saying Joan of Arc. And 
     the rest of it was not gibberish. He was praying--in French.
       Moments later he said goodbye, without ever using the word, 
     in a most remarkable death bed scene. He expressed his love 
     for each of us in a moving soliloquy that was equal parts 
     instruction, benediction and farewell. Most moving was his 
     salute to our Mom, his Norwegian wife. He called her his 
     soulmate. Most of what he said is private. But this much I 
     can add. He said he felt no fear.
       That ought to be a consolation for those of us here--to 
     know he had no fear to know of his final confidence in the 
     Afterlife. It ought to be, but of course it's not. Because we 
     will 

[[Page E1987]]
     all miss him here so terribly much--his knowledge, his wit, his 
     writing, his counsel, his love.
       We will have him always, in our hearts, and on our shelves, 
     as he ambles the cat-lines byways of heaven with his 
     brothers--holding aloft the black-thorn cane their father 
     brought from Ireland much more than a century ago.
       It that really what heaven will be like? Remember, Dad 
     called it a mystery. It is a concept beyond our mortal grasp. 
     But I know how I'd like to think of it. I imagine that as 
     Charles Andrew Brady entered the Light, he heard the sweet 
     baritone of Jehovah say, ``Well done, oh good and faithful 
     servant.''

                          ____________________