Marianne Gingher
I had two mothers, a biological one and a literary one, who, born a few months apart, came of age during the Great Depression after both their fathers lost everything. My biological mother had read Daphne’s Entering Ephesus in a whoosh, as had I, after meeting her around 1974 at a Carolina Quarterly party. She was the only English department faculty member who showed up. The party was for the writer Ishmael Reed, and all the graduate students in attendance were terrified to speak with him. He sat in an armchair looking as growly as a panther, but Daphne decided he was simply bored and dared me to go sit on one arm of the chair and cheer him up with small talk. It was the first of many dares she dispensed over our long friendship, and because I never said no to a one of them, I am no longer a mouse.
For twenty years, until she stopped driving on interstates, Daphne drove from Carrboro to my house in Greensboro for Thanksgiving, toting home-made cranberry sauce in her little green bowl. Mother was there, too, and she and Daphne enjoyed animated conversations about their similar histories. My mother wasn’t book smart in the way Daphne was, but she had humor and intuition and bright-eyed curiosity that Daphne doted on. Mother instructed my heart; Daphne, less guardian than goader, waved her bedazzling wand over my mind.
Ask any of us who loved her and were mesmerized by the nearly extraterrestrial pleasures of her cosmic company—ask former students Alane Mason, Lydia Millet, Michael Parker, Mark Meares, Randall Kenan (if only we could ask him)—how she did it: her spell-binding trick of ravenous listening combined with marathon disquisitions that darted from the sublime to the ridiculous. She was a scholar of the world, disliked ignoramuses, delighted in enthusiasts, and had a soft spot for goofballs.
She left us July 28, 2020, exactly one month to the day before Randall. Ask anyone who knew and loved them both: Chapel Hill will never feel the same. We go on, of course, create new, less glamorous idols and myths, but something like the last leaf of innocence has left the tree of knowledge that the two of them planted and grew for us (and one another) to dance around, celebrating its everlasting radiance.
She called Randall “The Prince of Hillsborough.” She called me “Magnetessa” and sometime “Magnet” for short. She cared more about striving than triumph. She thought self-doubt, like shyness, was silly and self-indulgent in adults. There were far more inventive ways to be silly, like writing nonsense poems, like pontificating on everything from voles to politicians (similar animals in her view), or bouncing on grammar rules to see how much like a trampoline the English language could be. How about bursting into song, anywhere, any time, and harmonizing? She loved collaborative glee. Often, in the middle of the crosswalk in front of the Jade Palace restaurant in Carrboro, she’d hoist her cane, do a little soft-shoe number, and belt forth a song. Of course I joined in, and we’d carry on as if we were in a musical– until some car came along. We crashed a big party once because I wanted to meet Eudora Welty and we hadn’t been invited and Daphne knew the hostess. We travelled to Greece together and sat on the beach in Kamares on the island of Sifnos eating lunch in the raggedy shade of cypress trees, our feet in the sand, drinking Mythos beer and philosophizing all afternoon before our evening swim. In Athens, she led me up what seemed to be Sisyphus’s hill to the funicular at Mount Lycabettus from which you can see all of Athens. Then, because there were no more taxis, back down the hill in the dark we trudged to our hotel—she was an inexhaustible 83 years old.
She hitchhiked across Egypt, spent summers in Greece (her father was an immigrant from Pylos), taught as a Fulbright in Tehran, was thrilled, after she smashed her bike in a traffic accident, that the EMT who scraped her off the sidewalk had read Tolstoy. They talked literature all the way to the hospital. There will only ever be the singular and distinctive her which makes one feel all the more lucky to have known her both as an elder oracle (she hated being called an oracle) and in her heyday, the 1970s and 80s, when she and Doris Betts rocked Greenlaw with their conspiratorial cackling. They gave readings together, Doris wearing dramatic scarlet and Daphne in her regal purple tunic. Iconic-looking as they strode to the podium, it seemed as if statues of Liberty and Athena had come to life. With pluck, brains, ferocious confidence, and charm, they were in the vanguard of feminist awakenings at this university. Daphne, who was 96 when she died, taught at UNC until she was 85—from 1968 until 2009.
We who loved her have stashes of photos, piles of her loquacious letters, and the elegant, funny, playfully subversive books she wrote. Future students will meet her through the course she invented as Glossolalia that we now call Gram-o-rama, a legacy course that turns the grammar lesson into performance art and celebrates the goofball in us all. She lives on, the way Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, Dickens, Aesop, Socrates, Aristotle, and Tolstoy live on. The way the ocean lives on, the moon and stars, riddles, music, hope, absurdity, sorrow, joy, and Mother Goose.