Remarks at Paul Woodruff Memorial Symposium

Paul Woodruff was my thesis advisor, my mentor, my boss, and my friend. Thank you all for being here to remember him. Thank you Alex, David, and Rich for facilitating this event. And thank you to Plan II alumna Lucinda Bartley for reading a draft of these remarks and helping me improve them.

Last July, Paul asked me to make him a bookcase. He had the dimensions measured out, which he sent me in an email. “Ok to use standard pine,” he wrote, “and to just nail it up.” He said he’d use it for “about a month.”

This was worrisome. Paul had already announced to the world, in an essay he’d written for the Washington Post, that death was close at hand. Really, though—pine and nails? In our years working together in his woodshop, Paul had conveyed to me an appreciation (let’s not call it snobbery) for certain wood species (cherry, oak, walnut) and an appreciation especially for joinery—the elegant dovetail, the simple dado, the deceptively sturdy dowel, the mechanical mortise and tenon. We were seldom so crass as to merely nail one thing to another.

I made the bookcase—of birch, rather than pine—and delivered it to his home on Cherry Lane. I was very familiar with the home, though I hadn’t spent much time there recently. I’m ashamed to admit it, but as I’d grown older, I tended to avoid my mentor more and more. I worried that I had disappointed him. That I had fallen short of his expectations.

You see, apart from an interest in carpentry, my relationship with Paul had started with mutual admiration for each other’s writing. He used to give me his book manuscripts, coil bound, for comment. In exchange I would give him drafts of my fictional short stories. He used to say to me, admiringly, “you are a writer.” (In retrospect I wonder: If he had said instead “you are a leader” or “you are a scholar” might I have pursued an entirely different career path? I don’t know.)

In any case, it had been some time since I’d heard those affirming words from Paul, for the simple reason that I had not been doing much writing, or at least not much of the sort I thought he’d be proud of. I had little writing to share with him, and so I felt I didn’t deserve to see him. 

Perhaps some of you might have felt, for whatever reason, similarly unworthy of Dr. Woodruff’s attention or undeserving of his time. Here we are, many of us, living more-or-less normal lives, whereas he had once nourished in us a pursuit of the extraordinary. I had yet to write the novel Paul believed I could. And yet here he was, in the last weeks of his remarkable life, reaching out.

More projects followed: Next, Paul said he could use a small shelf in the bathroom for his medications, with a lip around the edges so that nothing could fall off. Again, he stressed that it needn’t be fancy, just sturdy and customized to fit the space.

***

I let myself into the woodshop in Paul’s backyard shed. I’m enveloped by the familiar scents of tung oil and sawdust.

***

It’s 1998. I’m twenty years old and Professor Woodruff has asked me to help him turn a pair of maces for the first-ever independent graduation ceremony for the Plan II Program. “For the commencement marshals,” Paul explains. I don’t yet know what a commencement marshal is, or why they would carry a ceremonial mace. I barely know how to use a lathe, but I roll with it. I’ve known Paul a few years at this point, and I’m comfortable being ignorant around him. I trust that he will teach me what I need to know when I need to know it.

The lathe has a pleasing rumble as it starts up, accelerating quickly to a whirr. Paul presses the roughing gouge into the spinning cherry dowel and ribbons of wood fly like confetti streamers. Soon the wood shavings cover his hands, his feet, his clothes.

There are to be two maces: one representing the Liberal Arts and one representing the Natural Sciences, the Plan II Program being situated at the intersection of disciplines. Paul has assigned himself, quite appropriately, the task of designing the liberal arts mace. Leaving to me—less appropriately—the design of the mace for natural sciences.

After I have watched Paul rough out his mace, it’s my turn. With Dr. Woodruff watching over my shoulder, I take a parting tool and cut a channel into the spinning wood. There’s magic in this. The wood forms new shapes under the touch of my blade. It happens quickly—it can only happen quickly. The wood must be moving quickly, and I must be moving slightly. It’s like playing music or enlarging a photograph in a darkroom. Each step measured in duration and intensity.

It occurs to me now that Paul could have just as easily—more easily, really—made both maces himself. Why complicate the task by involving a student—someone who would need to be taught and supervised and who might not do the job very well?

What I eventually realized about Paul is that it increased his joy to share the things that brought him joy. This is why, after loving a book, he would immediately lend it. This is why, when he attended a play, he would bring guests. This is why he sought out collaborators for so many of the projects that excited him.

In 2020, at the height of the pandemic, Paul sent me an email. The Miró quartet would be performing a series of Beethoven sonatas via livestream. He told me specifically which performance to watch (Opus 132). In this way, even in isolation, we could share something.

***

In 2004, while Paul was serving as director, the Plan II Program received a bequest from an alumna, Mary Lu Joynes. Dr. Joynes had left her entire estate to the university, with the intention that the funds should be used to create a reading room under the auspices of Plan II. (Now, if any of you want to leave your entire estate to UT, there are convenient QR codes, located at the back of the room…)

Following this unexpected gift, Paul invited me to participate in a committee to plan the creation of the Joynes Reading Room. Among other tasks, we had the opportunity to propose thousands of books and hundreds of movies for the permanent collection. Paul imagined a browsing library where students might sample anything at random from the shelves and be rewarded with art and substance. The committee also realized that someone would need to be hired to supervise the Reading Room and coordinate the endowed lecture series it would host. I was interested in this job.

“There will have to be a hiring committee. The job will have to be posted and we’ll have to interview candidates. It can’t be my decision to hire you,” Paul said. “You’re like a son to me.”

I let those words hang awkwardly in the air, unanswered. My relationship with Paul was special and significant, but distinct. For one thing, I felt fealty to my own dear father; no surrogate was needed. The affection I felt for Paul was perhaps more like the regard a sailor might feel for his captain. A gratitude. A pride at being recognized and valued by such a man. The comfort of trust in his stewardship.

I was hired. And as it happened, my father would die in a car accident during my second year supervising the Joynes Reading Room. Before I left town for the funeral, Paul called me into his office in Flawn. He gave me a book of poetry by William Meredith. It opened in my hands to the page he had bookmarked, a poem entitled “Parents,” which includes these lines:

…Everything

they do is wrong, and the worst thing,

they all do it, is to die,

taking with them the last explanation…

***

When I presented Paul with the shelf I’d made for his medicines, he examined it for a long moment and then handed it back. He collected the strength to say a few words, paced to the mechanical rhythm of his respirator. “You need… to lacquer this,” he said.

Once the shelf was lacquered and installed, Paul asked for one more woodworking favor. He was by this point sleeping by necessity upright, in a seated position. He wanted a footstool with a large surface, exactly five inches high, to support his legs while he slept. This for me was an easy ask. It was essentially a miniature table, and Paul had taught me already how to make tables on a grand scale.

Within the library space of the Joynes Room are two smaller classrooms, where Plan II hosts many of its seminar-format courses, such as World Literature and the Freshman- and Junior-level tutorial courses. Paul envisioned a space in which everyone—each student and their instructor—had not just a seat at the table, but an opportunity to be seen and heard. King Arthur had the right idea: a circle (being a type of ellipse) would allow anyone seated at it to have a direct line of sight to anyone else. Our ellipse was elongated, with a great oaken trestle spanning the long dimension.

Working weekends, and with help from Plan II student Daniel Kievlan, Paul and I constructed the table in that same backyard workshop on Cherry Lane. It was a trick, since the table was much larger than the workshop. We built it in segments, mainly using wood from a single Texas oak from Granbury, then assembled it in situ in the Carothers building, where it remains in daily use by students and their professors. 

Like the maces, the table was something Paul was excited to share. Building it was an act of joyful service. Talking to my classmates in advance of this memorial, I heard many recollections that reflected that dimension of Paul’s leadership. He contributed. He made time. He showed up. Not just in the classroom or at the office, but also for student plays. For book launches. For weddings. For funerals. He built things—physical objects, institutions, and relationships—with the intention that they would endure.

I used to think that my connection with Paul was predicated on the notion that I would be—must be—an accomplished writer. That I would achieve the extraordinary. As time went on, I wrote, I taught, I built, I became a father; there were publications—stories, essays, articles, interviews—but not the celebrated debut novel that Paul and I had anticipated. As his illness progressed, I realized that I would not have the opportunity to show Paul that I could be that writer. There was not enough time left.

But these small, final projects Paul assigned to me in the last weeks of his life represented a different opportunity: the opportunity to be of service. To be a friend. He asked me to create, to demonstrate what I had learned, to find joy in sharing the product of my own hands and mind.

I completed the footstool on September 16th, 2023, exactly one week before Paul died. Our last communication was via text message:

“The stool is gorgeous,” Paul wrote. “Thanks so much.”

“Glad you like it!” I replied.

“You are an artist,” he concluded.

Philosopher, translator and scholar Paul Woodruff, photographed by Matt Valentine