My Summer with Archer, and Some Unfinished Business. The 1999 Archer Taylor Memorial Lecture

Abstract

Summer with Archer, and Some Unfinished Business* The 1999 Taylor Memorial Lecture I wonder how many in this audience were fortunate enough to have had a folklore class with Taylor, the scholar whose life and work we honor with this lecture series. I did have that opportunity some forty years ago, and I decided to make My Summer with Archer the subject of my talk (instead of the original topic I had in mind, `Archer Taylor and the Urban Legend). Let me take you back in my memory and your imaginations to Bloomington, Indiana, the summer of 1958, during the fifth and last session of the Folklore Institute of America before that institute became a permanent fixture on the Indiana University campus instead of a special event convened every second summer since 1950. An extraordinary group of fulltime folklore faculty and visiting lecturers were on campus that summer, and, as it turns out, the students were pretty remarkable as well. Just the autumn before, Richard M. Dorson had become chairman of the Folklore Program at IU, replacing Stith Thompson, who founded the program. I also arrived at IU in Fall 1957 after a Fulbright year in Norway; I had just changed my major from English to Folklore, and I was eager to add some credits to my skimpy record of folklore classes. The summer institute full-time faculty consisted of Professors Dorson, Warren Roberts, Edson Richmond and two visitors, Katharine Luomala from the University of Hawaii and Taylor who had just retired from the University of California, Berkeley. I took one class from each of the visitors, plus Dorson's International Relations seminar which featured visiting speakers from around the world. The brochure for the summer institute lists as visitors Stith Thompson, who had retired the year before, and twenty other notables including Ernest Baughman, Austin and Alta Fife, Melville Herskovits, Thelma James, William Jansen, Louis Jones, Vance Randolph, Charles Seeger, and D. K Wilgus; it was a veritable who's who of famous folklorists of the time. I have no idea what it cost the university to bring in these speakers as well as Luc Lacourciere from Quebec, plus a Japanese and a Polish scholar who were on visiting professorships elsewhere in the United States, but it appears that the student fees for the session could hardly have paid the bills. The brochure specifies tuition for students desiring University credit at $9.00 per credit hour while non-credit students and auditors paid $3.00. Another perk was that No charge [was] made for visitors to the Institute for a period of ten days or less, nor for auditors who already have a Ph.D. degree. In line with these modest fees, the brochure indicates that housing was available in University Halls of Residence at costs ranging from $167.50 to $210 for the entire session, meals included! It was also mentioned in the institute brochure that Taylor was past president of the Modern Language Association (1951) and author of The Proverb ( 1931) and of English Riddles from Oral Tradition (1951). Unmentioned were the facts that he had been president of the American Folklore Society in 1935-36 and editor of the Journal of American Folklore in 1941. To put this in some perspective, Taylor had published his classic book on proverbs two years before I was born; he was president of AFS when I was two years old, and he was MLA president the year I entered college. In the summer of 1958, Taylor turned 68 years old, and I was just 25. The class I took from Taylor that summer was a graduate course in the proverb and the riddle, thus described: The varieties of traditional gnomic and enigmatic expression with special reference to their origins, dissemination, stylistic peculiarities, and uses in social situations and literature. Students will be urged to make a collection of proverbs used by an Indiana writer and to investigate a particular text with regard to one of these aspects. …