The writer on Carr's Hill

Many students can claim familiarity with several items of President John T. Casteen III's curriculum vitae: new building construction, successful capital campaigns and his management of a billion-dollar budget, for example.

A few others probably have heard he taught English both at the University of California-Berkeley and here at the University, that he served as Virginia's Secretary of Education and that he was dean of admissions before his career as president began in 1990.

But few students know about Casteen's love story with English literature and language, from his master's thesis on "Wit and Humor in Romeo and Juliet," to his fondness today for contemporary African-American authors and medieval poetry. Or about his short story collection, entitled "16 stories," which garnered him the 1987 Mishima Award for fiction. It's the literary side that may be his most fascinating facet of all.

Pursuing his passion

Casteen's early background is perhaps even more obscure than his Ph.D. thesis, an analysis of the medieval story "Andreas."

Rather inauspiciously, he grew up in the blue-collar shipyard town of Portsmouth, Va. In an e-mail narrative that he wrote before his plane took off from JFK airport for London on Saturday night, Casteen recalled that during his graduate school years at the University, "I had to work to catch up. Portsmouth kids grow up knowing they have to work at it."

"No [interest in Herman] Melville in Portsmouth," he said. "But there were good teachers and preachers. I have always liked the sound of the language as it is spoken there."

If Melville didn't rock his intellectual boat, many other American and British writers did.

"I really grew up on Faulkner,Hemingway, Poe, Hawthorne, Hazlitt's Shakespeare, which my mother owned, and George Eliot, plus the King James and Latin Vulgate Bibles," Casteen said.

"Probably the King James Version of the Old Testament had the most to do with how I hear language," he said. "I'm not sure I was an aspiring writer, but I have always written. I wanted to be a naval officer growing up."

Naval officer ambitions notwithstanding, Casteen entered the University and decided to major in English soon after his matriculation.

Now-retired English Prof. Robert Kellogg said he remembered Casteen's father objecting to such an unpractical major.

"John had told [his father, John Casteen II] that he wanted to major in English and his father was a bit skeptical," Kellogg said. "He told me that it was important that John could earn a living, and I assured him that he could, in any number of ways, especially [in those days] in university teaching."

His focus was medieval literature, "the most rigorous of all fields," according to Donald Fry, an assistant professor from 1966 to 1969, who taught Casteen while he was a graduate student.

But, committing to medieval literature was no issue for Casteen.

"I like the languages and the musicality of the verse," Casteen said, "the public nature of the narration, the complexity of the subject matter, the lyrical beauty of the short verses and the grand sweep of the great narratives, (Beowulf, etc.) are especially exciting because of the intensity of portrayals of small things in grand contexts and the complex source that lies behind them."

Fry said medieval literature was a perfect foundation for Casteen's future in administrative leadership.

"Anglo-Saxon culture was a heroic culture, and the subject of his Ph.D. thesis, 'Andreas,' is one of the great heroes of the literature," Fry said. "A set of heroic values has formed his life -- to be recognized for doing things well, to have presence and self-control, are things which Casteen values very much."

It seems that Casteen's predilection for old poetics came at the right time -- he was a student at a turning point in the English department's history, when the new chairman, Fredson Bowers, was able to attract some of the top stars of the day. These new scholars would help establish the English department as one of the best in the country.

Bowers was a major influence on Casteen's master thesis on Romeo and Juliet, finished in 1966. Casteen's thesis, as stated on the paper's first pages, is that "'Romeo and Juliet' employs comic devices; that those comic devices are essential to the tragedy, and that the mixing of comedy and tragedy is justified."

Bowers, Casteen said, "put me on to the point that William Shakespeare used opposite comic forms as a means to enlarge his argument about the high cost of false strictures, such as those that kept Romeo and Juliet apart. Wit is one -- humor is the other. But the oddity is that the type of characters for each extreme, such as Juliet's nurse and Mercutio, both use comic tactics that belong to the other."

The idea was not quite his first choice.

"I did this project because Fredson Bowers felt I did not know enough to take on a similar project involving characterization and satire in Ben Johnson's plays," Casteen said. "He was probably right. No, I was not particularly pleased with or proud of the thesis."

Finding his voice

With the English department blossoming, Casteen saw no reason to plant his literary seeds in foreign graduate school ground. He entered the Ph.D. program at the University in 1967.

"Then when I started graduate school the department was streaking upward like a rocket," Casteen said. "It was simply exciting, challenging people who took us seriously and demanded performance."

Fry, who taught Casteen in a Beowulf seminar, a class on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and a course on "Andreas," had his own share of passionate praise for the future president.

"He was the best student I ever taught," Fry said. "He was stunningly intelligent, insightful and organized. Casteen was very social, an intellectual leader. He was just so damn bright. You just felt smarter talking to him."

Yet again, Casteen's praise of himself paled in comparison to what his former professors offered.

"I didn't advance much as a writer in graduate school," Casteen wrote. "I read everything I could learn about and learned also that whatever I had read was only a speck on the horizon of what was out there. I learned to focus on solving problems, and I probably said my share of dumb and misinformed things."

According to Casteen, he didn't stand out, either.

"I wasn't very different from other grad students," he added. But "they seemed all to know more than I did. "

However, Fry pointed out that Casteen broke away from the crowd in his suspicion of a popular literary movement of the time called New Criticism.

A theory popular among academics from the 1940s through the 1960s, New Criticism stressed the separateness and self-sufficiency of works of literature from the outside world, and held that the meaning of a work is to be found through analyzing how all of its paradoxes and contradictions are unified into a harmonic whole.

Casteen explained his suspicions about the ideology.

"I admired the new critics, but I wanted to know how linguistics, archaeological discoveries, parallel or source materials in other languages, and constructs -- influenced utterance, especially in Old English or Anglo-Saxon literature," he said. "In a nutshell, I guess I thought that the new critics assumed too much common culture or knowledge when they looked at earlier materials -- I thought their answers were too glib."

If New Criticism didn't interest Casteen, the medieval story "Andreas" did. After taking a class about Andreas with Fry, Casteen said, he was hooked.

Fry said he was pleased with Casteen's physical proof of his curiosity: a 200 page Ph.D. thesis, with a bibliography running 19 pages, called "Andreas and its Contexts," which Kellogg approved July 27, 1970.

But is scholarly work in esoteric texts logical preparation for a job in administration? In those days, it was, Fry said.

"People who wanted to go high in administration had to have a scholarly reputation, which is not quite so true anymore" Fry explained. "Administration is not necessarily a change in direction. It's a next step. I knew he was going to be president of the University of Virginia when he was my student."

Casteen's feeling for words took on different forms after his school years -- in 1981, he published a collection of short stories called "16 Stories," subsidized by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Some are saga imitations, some are dramatic monologues, and a few are failed romances. In Casteen's description, "the narrators in them are not me. They are made-up characters with their own histories and voices. All of my stories were intended to be read aloud."

At one point he considered writing a novel, but has postponed the project indefinitely.

"The novel is completely out of hand. I tried to pull it together and cut it down five years ago, and realized that it will take a year or more of steady work if I ever finish it," Casteen said.

A Renaissance Man for today

Casteen's close friend and senior assistant Gordon Burris says he perceives the obvious parallels between the University's first leader and its current one.

"It doesn't matter what the subject: if you asked him what his favorite in any area was, he'd tell you what and why," Burris said. "He is knowledgeable in any area that you can think of: the arts, computers, medicine -- Casteen really is a Renaissance man."

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