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To Make a Long Story Short: In Memoriam Bernard Benstock, 1930-1994

My last memories of Berni Benstock are from June 1994 at the Hotel Melia Sevilla, where we were staying for the Fourteenth International James Joyce Symposium. Perversely, these memories arc inextricably linked to coverage of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, a story that broke at the conference's start. As we discussed the bizarre narrative at breakfast (some of the night owls in our group had, nine time zones away, actually seen the infamous Bronco chase live on CNN, one of two English cable stations to which we had access), it was impossible for me to imagine that this grotesque tale of celebrity carnage would be with us more than two years later, while Berni would be with us for a little more than a month. Perhaps I should begin at the beginning. I first met Berni Benstock in the early 1980s, when I started attending James Joyce conferences and symposia. I was a graduate student with one article to my name, while Berni was one of those towering figures in every bibliography I had ever written or read. I think everyone who has ever embarked on the literary conference circuit so accurately captured in David Lodge's Small World (indeed, a novel with a chapter at the 1979 Joyce Symposium in Zurich; identifying Lodge's Joyceans-a-clef is still a a major postmodernist winter sport) can remember the jolt of meeting one's "Works Cited" in person. I remember believing that the business of scholarly publishing was so laborious and time-consuming that any author whose works I had read must, ipso facto, be superannuated, retired, or otherwise existentially challenged. Then one goes to an academic conference, only to learn that many of the eminences grises of one's profession ain't so grise after all -- and, indeed, that many of them are more vigorous, more productive, and better looking than a given year's crop of graduate students combined. Such was the case with Berni Benstock, who -- from our first meeting through 1994, when I saw him for the last time -- was in all respects a dynamo: ebullient, energetic, feisty, a world-class "wise ass" (by his own admission), a gourmet chef, an expert in haberdashery, and a scholar of everything from detective fiction to the "greats" of literature, ancient through post-postmodern. My first impression of him, however, was based on one fact: when Berni was introduced to me, he immediately delivered, in one breath, a precis, critique, and encomium on the one article I had published in my entire life -- all before I could stammer out an appreciation of the dozens of Berni Benstock books and articles I had read in my undergraduate and graduate studies. I could not comprehend how a prolific author like Berni could possibly have read my one published effort while thousands of students struggled to keep up with a fraction of the Benstock oeuvre. The answer to my bewilderment lay in Berni's extraordinary energy, insatiable intellectual curiosity, encyclopedic mind, and generosity of spirit. I soon learned that his kindness to me was typical of his generosity to all young scholars. Berni served as an outside member of Susan Swartzlander's dissertation committee at Penn State; I am therefore pleased that Susan's essay on "The Sisters" is among those that follow. Indeed, at least three of the following essays are written by former students of Berni Benstock's (and one contributor, Sean Murphy, is a former student of one of Berni's former students, Dr. Claire Culleton). So there are several respects in which this issue is an outgrowth of Berni's work (beyond the more obvious bibliographic debts, directly manifest in most of the volume's essays). I have no idea how many books Berni published: at least 21 are listed in the current online Books in Print. In this issue I review Berni's most recent book (which, I am given to understand, will not be his last), Narrative Con/Texts in Dubliners (497-500, below), and there I comment at greater length on Berni's published contributions to literary and cultural studies. …