by Jack Neely
We have heard that at a house near Boston on Sunday night, a candlelit coffin was adorned with a hand-lettered sign. The sign said, "Chicken Thieves! Death awaits you in this henhouse!"
The coffin belonged to author and teacher Richard Marius, who died of cancer on Friday. The sign was the work of his father, a farmer who had used it in his Dixie Lee Junction chicken coop.
A generation of Knoxvillians pronounce the name Richard Marius with a smile, a glimmer, some sort of audible kick to denote the name of someone who is not ordinary. He leapt onto our stage about 35 years ago, first as a remarkable UT professor. On paper alone, Marius had few academic peers; while here, he published an internationally significant biography of Martin Luther.
He was also one of those rare history teachers whose lectures were so entertaining that unregistered students would try to sneak in, then quote him for weeks afterward. He claimed to have given the first anti-Vietnam war speech in Tennessee (in 1966). Merciless toward popular icons, he called Billy Graham a fraud during his 1970 crusade. Vols fans had even more trouble with Marius' blasphemy that Coach Neyland was overrated and had chalked up impressive records by larding the schedule with puny opponents. An angry editor at the News-Sentinel once declared they'd never allow Marius a column inch. Over the years they allowed him several yards. They couldn't help it; Marius was news.
Added to his notoriety was the extra sheen that comes with being a successful novelist. His first book was a novel, The Coming of Rain, a vivid historical drama set in 1880s East Tennessee. Marius wrote in a style almost of the 19th century: graceful, formal and disarmingly easy to read—considering the large and complicated issues and relationships his words introduced. Rain made some reviewers' best-of-the-year lists.
He wrote more novels: Bound For the Promised Land and After the War. All were historically based, and all were set here, especially in and around Lenoir City, which he called Bourbonville.
It was his home. His father was a Greek immigrant (full name Henri Marius Panayotis Kephalopoulos) who found work as a foundryman and farmer in post World War I Loudon County. He married a fundamentalist Tennessee girl who wrote for the old Knoxville News. Marius described his rural childhood as isolated, as his family closed ranks to protect his brother, a victim of Down's Syndrome.
A bright student, Marius attended Farragut Elementary and Lenoir City High, then UT, from which he graduated summa cum laude in 1954. In what has been described as an attempt to recover the shaken fundamentalism of his youth, he attended Southern Baptist seminaries, emerging with the conviction that they were "stupid, hateful places." He went on to Yale, where he earned a Ph.D. in church history.
After two years teaching history at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, Marius came to UT in 1964. For the next 14 years he would be the star of UT's College of Liberal Arts.
Part of his charm was his flair for the dramatic. A dapper dresser, often seen in his bow tie and tweed jacket, his mid-life mustache made him look something like Robert Redford playing Mark Twain. His memorable voice earned him a role as the Voice of God in a theater production at the Unitarian Church. Some recall he was well cast.
Marius was attracted to unspoken ideas, and sometimes carried them farther than others dared. He was in more than one respect a Renaissance Man; he wrote a landmark biography of the original Renaissance Man, Sir Thomas More.
He left UT in 1978, professing frustration with the administration. At his alma mater, he said, "the athletic department wags the university" and "if you have a good idea, somebody will always think of a reason not to do it."
Harvard recruited Marius to become Director of Expository Writing. Even at Harvard, he reveled in his Tennessee heritage. He cooked biscuits and country ham, and despite his skepticism about Neyland's sainthood, hosted parties for every Vols bowl game. He insisted his guests sing UT's alma mater at half-time.
He tried to keep things stirring here at home. Failing in an effort to save an ancient tree in Farragut, in a 1986 essay Marius mourned that "The monstrous ugliness of West Knoxville has eaten up the green land." In spite of his harsh criticisms of UT, his alma mater invited him home to be commencement speaker in 1992.
Controversy chased Marius throughout his career, even in his later, mellower years. In 1995, when Marius was 62, Vice President Gore hired him to be his speechwriter. Writing for Gore, 15 years Marius' junior, may have seemed an unlikely choice for a novelist and tenured Harvard professor—but, Marius said, his fellow Tennessean was the only honest politician in Washington, and Al clearly needed help presenting himself.
Correspondent Bob Zelnick describes the strange episode in his new book, Gore: A Political Life. After Marius wrote Gore a moving speech on the holocaust, Gore advisor Martin Peretz objected, claiming that Marius was an anti-Semite. He cited a 1992 Marius article which compared Israel's secret police to the Gestapo. Marius was in Knoxville for a seminar when Gore's assistant called to demote Marius. Zelnick assesses Gore's firing of Marius as "a crude act of betrayal."
Marius once said that he wrote because "I am going to die, and I don't want to perish completely from this earth."
His last book was Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death, published earlier this year. It raises questions about whether Luther even believed in God. He describes Luther as a skeptic who hated skepticism; you wonder whether Marius was describing himself, as well.
Though often included in anthologies of "Southern writers," Marius said the label made him "bristle." Descended from an East Tennessee Union soldier, he was a writer, he said, of the border.
Marius once said his fiction was most inspired by his memories of his Tennessee childhood and by his study of history.
"Any historian is perhaps nothing more than a weaver of glittering illusion as fragile as light," he wrote, "and as dangerous as poison."
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