here to start? I first met George and Ruth when I was a new grad student at Columbia in the fall of 1966, when George was beginning his teaching career. But I had been hearing about him ever since meeting my now husband Howard in Paris the year before. They first met at Princeton, Howie recounted, in the English department reading room, where George was the one laughing out loud over Tristram Shandy. Later, he remembered, while they were sharing an upstairs apartment in a house owned by an Italian family who simmered home-grown tomatoes into sauce, delectable odors drifting upstairs, the two of them read Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings out loud to each other to perfect the practice for their future students. And indeed, George’s voice and laugh were things that everyone remembers – outward and audible signs of his unexpected combination of a deep seriousness with a wry sense of humor.
My first encounter with those talisman attributes took place in George and Ruth’s small Columbia-owned apartment, already furnished in what became the distinctive Landow style – there were red and white Marimekko prints, many modernist shiny surfaces, and already a few choice objects displayed, acquired from Peyton Skipwith at the Fine Arts Society in London (whom I’d also met for the first time a few months before). Ruth offered tea (was it tea?) and enthusiasm, while George carefully walked me through the faculty I should meet and courses I should take, before the two of them left for a year at the Cornell Society for the Humanities where George would finish his first book on Ruskin. And George, without making a fuss about it, became my unofficial mentor and sponsor, recommending me for jobs and meticulously commenting on my own first book, not coincidentally also on Ruskin, as he helped get it published. But that was in the as-yet-unsuspected future of a long friendship.
George with his camera (and in tux as best man) at our wedding in August 1967.
A year later George was best man and unofficial photographer (much better than the official one!) at our wedding. (And decades later, he filled the same role at our grandchildren’s B’nai Mitzvah dinner.) Our four lives and families became intertwined, even though we never lived in the same city at the same time. (Mostly we seemed to follow them around, arriving just as they were leaving!) But there were many, many visits: in Cambridge and Jamaica Plain when Howie was teaching medieval English at Boston University; in Providence, where George and Ruth settled near her parents and George began teaching at Brown; in Ithaca, where we house-sat while they were away in England (and I began my dissertation, using George’s Cook and Wedderburn with his beautifully calligraphed notes in spidery black ink); then in Chicago, where George spent a year as visitor at the university I would join a year later; and most exotically, in Singapore, where George had started an American-style liberal arts program at the National University of Singapore. Each time we met we shared notes on the achievements of our children (their Noah the same age as our Aaron, Shoshana the big sister whose red curls matched our Alex’s) and listened in awe to the expanding list of George’s interests and Ruth’s activities before getting down to the easy comradeship of just being together – exploring foods (especially Indian), discussing the people and books we’d encountered, visiting landscapes or art objects wherever we found ourselves. George always had his eyes open and camera at the ready. And always the energy and curiosity of both George and Ruth would put ordinary slow mortals to shame. Soon George was busy acquiring a second PhD in art history, while Ruth became the Rhetoric Analyst of the Supreme Court of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations; George began building model railroads in the basement, ostensibly for Noah, and Ruth added a foster child to their own two. Together they became avid zydecko dancers, then karate students. George embarked on his second and parallel career (really the third!) in hypermedia, lecturing round the world before the rest of us had ever heard of such a thing. And the Victorian Web was born.
Left: Howie, Beth, Ruth, George in Providence, 2015. Right: George and Howie in Providence, June 2021. By now, George was undergoing chemotherapy.
There were also visits fitted in when we ended up at the same conferences. Three stand out in memory. For the San Francisco MLA in December 1975 George had organized a panel on Victorian autobiography at which both Howie and I were due to present. It was to be a chance for the two of them to do something professionally together. (Howie had been working on Augustine’s Confessions and grew interested in Victorian autobiography). Ruth was home with the kids this time, and alas, at the last minute our 2 year old came down with scarlet fever and Howie (who by then was about to trade teaching medieval studies for law) generously stayed behind. But the book that came out of that panel (Approaches to Victorian Autobiography), indefatigably edited by George, allowed for a virtual (old style) togetherness, after all.
Another memorable occasion: in August 1995 the Santa Fé opera staged a new opera about Ruskin (Modern Painters, music by David Lang, libretto by Manuela Hoelterhoff, directed by Francesca Zambello). Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, then a young Ruskin scholar, organized a symposium on Ruskin and persuaded the opera to support it. The opera world being what it is, they decided that George was the diva (with perks he generously shared with us), while the younger participants were labeled Cast: George and Ruth got a hotel room, Howie and I had our air fares paid, and we all four hobnobbed with the director and her partner the librettist, had breakfast with the stars, and performed for donors at dinner. George gave one of his own stellar performances at the symposium, speaking completely without text, as he always preferred (others are rarely so brave). In between opera performances the four of us spent three happy days exploring galleries, buying cowboy boots (for zydecko) and in the evenings, watching Ruskin’s fireflies rise into the darkening sky over the Santa Fe mountains when the back of the stage lifted at the opera’s close.
Left: George in Santa Fé in 1995. Note the cowboy boots. Middle: With Ruth in Marlborough in 2019. Right: George giving the keynote at the conference.
In September 2019 the four of us were together again, this time at a conference on "Ruskin and Visual Theology" held at Marlborough College, UK. Howie went off to watch the witches dance at the equinox in Avebury while the other three of us (Ruth expertly managing George’s slides) sat for hours in the beautiful chapel with its Pre-Raphaelite windows and very hard seats. The echo-y acoustics were tricky to master, but George (after all that practice with Tolkein!) knew just how to do it: speaking slowly and informally, projecting in that full rich voice, he held everyone’s attention – and of course they were all in awe of him as the pioneering author of The Critical and Aesthetic Theories of John Ruskin, that stellar first book. When we dissected the conference over Indian food afterwards, George and Ruth were both in fine form, thinking about where and when we four might next meet (in London again, another dinner together at his club, The Athenaeum), none of us suspecting this conference would be George’s last. The book that Madeleine Thiele and Sheona Beaumont, conference organizers, put together (John Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Religious Imagination: Sacre Conversazioni), delayed by the pandemic, came out too late for the closing comments George had promised to contribute, but is dedicated to his memory. As if one would ever forget GPL!
Created 15 November 2023