Tom Garbaty: Educator, Balladeer, Time Traveler
by Nate Nichols
This is the tale of a man. A good man. For when his belly is full of mead, he does not take up arms and slay his kinsmen.
Never is he assailed by curses of "false recrayed knight!" On the contrary, when a fair lady smites him with her charms, he enacts the rituals of courtly love. Inevitably, a soulful test is suffered to win her precious hand.
True to his honor in love as in war, this is Tom Garbaty, professor of medieval literature.
Modest though he is, make no mistake, Tom Garbaty's gift is profound. Who else do you know who can divide the fog of time and transport you back through the ages some thousand years and more?
And Tom does so without the spinning mandala of an H.G. Wells time machine, without reversing the Earth's orbit like Chris Reeve in Superman: The Movie (1978). No, Professor Garbaty breaks the time barrier by putting himself on the line, by sharing himself, by teaching.
A humbler man wielding the awesome power of time travel you are unlikely ever to meet. Tom's portrait anchors the home page of this tribute. Look at him, won't you? Take a moment. Allow yourself a Peter Falk-inflected "Wotta guy" or two.
Could there be a sweeter disposition? Could there be a deeper reservoir of time-honored knowledge? Could there be a medieval scholar with more mischief in his eye?
Never mind people and their pets: in academia people resemble their specialties. So now look at Professor Garbaty's photo and imagine him actually inhabiting his era of expertise. Collared by plush fur like a merchant burgher. His Eminence Tom Garbaty.
Hmm. Not really Tom's style, is it?
Perhaps we'll do better picturing him as a man of the people. A knockabout guy, with iron-studded wrist guards. A char-smudged smith fitting steeds with iron shoes in Baden Baden. First time I attended his class, I had Professor Garbaty pegged as a reincarnated blacksmith.
But the truth is, whether it is 1000 or 2000 AD, Tom is an educator.
For this tribute, let us cast him as a modest Franciscan friar. Not one of those greedy Benedictines,devious Cistercians or drunken Trappists. A simple clerical frock will suffice for Brother Garbaty's raiment. But the look in his eyes would not be altered even a thousand years displaced. And here's where I get sentimental.
Why? Because in Tom's eyes you find the one-two punch of compassion and good cheer. Together, they are the antidote to many a medieval malady. Plagues and poxes like anger, avarice and intolerance.
Compassion and good cheer, though not without a magical tincture of melancholy. A kind of soulfulness. Is it over-reaching to suppose that whether in medieval times or current events, humanity like Tom's is the most valuable technology of all?
And therein lies Tom's gift: his humanity drives his ability to teach, and his ability to teach creates the capability to travel in time. To recreate a world which had a sharp, distinct set of rules very different from our own, but direct ancestors of religious, political, romantic and family phenomena we all recognize every day.
Often we envision the middle ages as populated exclusively by cretins and lummoxes, sort of like the rogues gallery in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Sign Of The Cross" (1931).
Thanks to Professor Garbaty's instruction, it became clear that there was a lot more than just ignorance going down before modern miracles likes the Ozone Hole, Online Porn and "National Missile Defense."
The issues of hospitality and honor in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, for example. The warrior's code of Beowulf. The scatalogical slapstick and narrative wisdom of Chaucer. Whether tangling with a schope or an epic lay, Tom displayed sword-breaking strength of character in sending one clear message: By all means, there was life before the Renaissance. What a discovery! What a liberating continuity!
Two instances stand apart from all of Tom's excellent instruction. The first was his digressive recollection of being hoisted onto grown-up shoulders in the streets to wave his little flag at an ecstatic parade for Adolph Hitler.
In my recollection, note-taking stopped and confused glances were exchanged. Like, am I hearing this right? I mean, Garbaty is Garbaty, a gentle scholar, of compassion and good cheer, remember? -- not some Marathon Man-villain, God knows.
The image of Tom Garbaty as a tot, taking part in a full-on Roman Imperial-wannabe National Socialist rally in the streets of a German city was astounding enough.
That he would volunteer this cautionary snapshot fifty years later to a room full of his students, in his by-the-way manner, again with that certain soulfulness; that he would revive this rueful memory that still held the clarity of childhood, filled with color and motion and celebration, but now was transformed --Tom relaying it from a near revery-- into a Chaucerian parable of human nature and its cruel paradoxes, this was and is remarkable to me.
I've never forgotten Tom's candor and its lesson: what was there in the human heart in the Middle Ages remains and always will. There was humanity and inhumanity. In different dispersions, justifications, different disguises, but at heart equivalent to what we have today. And people can be led to celebrate their own ruin.
The second stand-out moment was of a completely different flavor. It was the moment that his students realized that for his discussion on folk ballads, Tom was not merely going to make a dry pass over transcribed lyrics, but was, with the help of a humble harmonica, was actually going to perform the ballads, complete with their odd Middle Eglish intonation.
Tom was a little shy at first. He's no Pavarotti, which made his recital all the braver. "Frankie & Johnnie were loverrrs." Everyone relaxed as Tom dusted off the classics like Trois Corbis and The Wife of Usher's Well. That a professor would put himself on the spot like this to delve into his subject was, it was agreed after class, totally endearing.
For me, Professor Garbaty stands alongside two giants in the humanities. First, Tom in his evocative powers is Ann Arbor's Fellini, specifically Amarcord-era Fellini (Amarcord, the film from 1974: "I Remember," Fellini's recollections of family life and fascist buffoonery in pre-War Italy).
Second, In his catalogue of knowledge, Garbaty is to the University of Michigan what Umberto Eco is to the University of Bologna (so vivid are Prof. Eco's recollections of the Middle Ages in novels like "The Name of the Rose" and "Foucault's Pendulum").
Fellini, Eco, Tom Garbaty. Call it an alliance of compassion and good cheer. I think it's a comparison that does justice to all three.
With love, Nate Nichols
LSA '85
copyright ©2000 by Nate Nichols
(Born in Ann Arbor, raised in Texas, recipient of a major prize in the Avery Hopwood competition, Nichols is a filmwriter working in Los Angeles.)