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The rest of the world thinks of April 15, 1912, as the day the Titanic sank. Here at Canisius, we remember it for more. bY E rik B rady ’ 76
Charles A. Brady ’33, HON ’87 — late professor and poet, novelist and essayist, caricaturist and critic — was born at the very hour that the great boat went under. As he would write one day: “It would be Horatian, if not precisely flattering, to say that a whale groaned in mid-Atlantic and, on the American side of Lake Erie, a minnow was born.” Brady grew into a big fish in Canisius annals. Add it all up and his influence on alma mater is nothing short of, well, titanic. His erudition as a student led to graduate school at Harvard, and his talent for tennis to the college’s Athletics Hall of Fame.
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He was a much-loved professor of English for 42 years, teaching
˚ an ever-changing array of courses and disciplines.
He even wrote the book on Canisius, 1970’s centennial history.
˚ As if that weren’t enough, Brady coaxed the Griffin to campus ˚ from the prow of LaSalle’s doomed ship and that high-flying
beast remains our golden totem. (Le Griffon, as it happens, sank 233 years before the unsinkable Titanic.) Brady’s minnow line appears in an autobiographical sketch for his entry in the Book of Catholic Authors, published in 1960. He always quibbled with the designation, preferring to say he was an author who happened to be Catholic. “Scratch an Irishman,” he’d add, “and you have a Bronze Age savage.” His father emigrated from Ireland and Brady writes in that sketch: “I grew up thinking that ants were called ‘pismires’ and that ‘michers’ was the normal term for troublemaking boys.” His mind and will “received what discipline they could” from the Jesuits at Canisius — high school and college — but his imagination was set ablaze first This literary caricature of C.S. Lewis is one of hundreds sketched by Charles Brady to accompany his book reviews in The Buffalo News.
by a doting mother who gave him “the great hero-tales, always in splendid editions.” His interest in the Norse hero-tales deepened with his marriage to Mary Eileen Larson, now nearing 98. They had six children, including the late Kristin More Brady ’70, who followed him into academe, as a world authority on Thomas Hardy. The award for best thesis in the Canisius Honors Program is named for her. She was born as her father was writing Stage of Fools, his novel of St. Thomas More, a best-seller still easily found on Amazon in its hardcover and paperback iterations. Four of Brady’s books for young readers are newly returned to print, including St. Thomas More of London Town just this year. Brady’s name turns up frequently on the Internet he never knew. When The Atlantic wrote of novelist John Marquand in 2004, it credited its headline “Martini-Age Victorian” to “the critic Charles Brady.” The definition for bravura on Dictionary.com offers an example of Brady usage from a 1960 New York Times book review of Evelyn Waugh’s Monsignor Ronald Knox. When G. K. Chesterton arrived for a Canisius-sponsored lecture in the 1930s, it was Brady who picked him up at a Buffalo train station. When the Marx Brothers crashed a Canisius dance at the Statler (they had appeared at Shea’s), Groucho cut in on him, a tale that brought down the house when Brady spoke at a DiGamma dinner in the same ballroom in 1975. And when C.S. Lewis sent Brady a letter in 1944, he described Brady as his most perceptive critic. Oxford’s Bodleian Library owns the original. The Depression wiped out a fortune from his late father’s former North Tonawanda lumber business and so the Jesuits made Brady a bargain: They would help pay his way to Harvard if he agreed to return to teach at the college for seven years. He completed that term six times over. Brady’s love for the written word did not end until he did. From his deathbed at Sisters Hospital in 1995 he could see the house on Humboldt Parkway where he grew up and the golden dome of the college to which he would devote his life. Brady’s colleagues sent a letter suggesting 1976’s Azuwur yearbook be dedicated to him. “His imprint,” they wrote, “is lastingly upon the best elements in Canisius and in Buffalo.” The letter recounted Brady’s career as teacher and writer: “All of this leaves out the most important fact about him, which is that his is one of the richest human spirits of our place and time.” Not bad for a baby born in Buffalo 100 years ago as a pinkeen. As his father could have told you, that’s Irish for minnow.
* Erik Brady ’76 is a sports reporter for USA Today and fifth of the six children of Charles and Eileen Brady.
C ANISIUS COLLEGE M AGA ZINE • WINTER/SPRING 2012 |
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