| IN MEMORIAM
CLARENCE LEE CLINE
Clarence Lee Cline, longtime professor of
English, died July 19, 1998, at age 93. The future teacher, scholar,
administrator, philanthropist was born January 6, 1905, the son
of Permilla and William Edwin Cline, pharmacist in Belton, Texas.
He graduated from Belton High School in 1922 and from Baylor University
in 1926. He later entered The University of Texas as a graduate
student in English and history. Within a month he was appointed
as a part-time teacher in the Department of English, then as always
in need of teachers of composition. When he earned his PhD in 1938
he received a full-time appointment. It was still depression time,
and Clarence Cline began – or rather continued – the
long, slow, ill-paid but ultimately successful climb up the steep
academic stairway of the university, a notable achievement for
a graduate of his own school. Except for one summer as a visiting
professor at Harvard, he was to remain a faithful member of this
university for the rest of his life. He was not only a faithful
but a grateful member who always felt that he owed the institution
the old values of loyalty and hard work and service.
In service, he taught a variety of courses
and continued voluntarily to teach freshman composition even after
reaching seniority. Particularly noteworthy was a course in Russian
Literature in Translation, to prepare for which he taught himself
to read Russian so that he could study the texts in their original
language. Like all professors he served his time on many departmental
and university committees. But his influence was especially felt
in his service as chairman of the Department of English, 1949-52
and 1962-68. The second period was a challenging one: the university
as well as the larger society was undergoing wrenching changes,
although the university, in part through the efforts of its leadership,
and in part through the commonsense of its students and faculty,
avoided the sometimes riotous and destructive behavior of the sixties.
But in a more deliberative fashion, the university and the Department
of English under the Cline chairmanship began their transition
from enjoying a first-rate regional reputation to enjoying a first-rate
national reputation, without losing their strong roots in the state
and the region. In the transition, Clarence Cline’s long-range
thinking and planning were influential and are still having their
effects. They did not, of course, always make him popular, either
with a few of the older faculty or with some of the new young whiz
kids that he helped to bring in from outside.
Some did not quite know what to make of his
strong personality, his conservatism as well as his openness to
the new, his insistence on the old standards, and his sometimes
sardonic wit (it is revealing that he admired the writing of Benjamin
D’Israeli and George Meredith and edited three volumes of
Meredith’s letters). But to get to know the department better,
he often invited members to evening occasions at his home – today
that would be the "one-on-one personal communication" that
is supposed to lead to peace and understanding. He even accepted
several times the daunting challenge of inviting the entire department,
including wives and husbands, to an evening party. Sometimes these
social interactions worked, sometimes they did not. One younger
faculty member later published a novel, a roman á clef,
in which Cline’s evening entertainment offered an easily recognized
satiric target. Cline was not a bland and forgettable man.
His achievements were not simply those of
an administrator or a departmental mentor. He was a scholar in
his own right, as the list of his publications at the end of this
memorial will attest. And those publications were produced while
meeting the demands of a busy professional and administrative life.
In recognition in part of his scholarly achievements, in 1971 he
was appointed Ashbel H. Smith Professor of English, and in 1974-75
he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1975 the Department
of English and the Humanities Research Center published a festschrift
for Cline, Sources for Reinterpretation: The Use of Nineteenth-Century
Literary Documents, derived from a symposium held in his honor
in October.
He took pride in these honors but that was
a part of his pride in the university itself and his relationship
to it. For outside of his immediate family – his wife Henriette,
their two daughters Patricia and Judith, and the children of those
daughters – his greatest affection was for his University
of Texas and the future it held out for other students and scholars
of the sort he himself had been and was.
The affection was more than sentimental.
In his later years the Clines had become people of means, and he
used those means generously with the university. Friends who knew
him well knew that for years he had given financial support to
individual students who needed it to continue in their studies.
He never spoke of the support publicly. But as he was able he began
a more public generosity with the university itself, making gifts
that he hoped would be of future academic benefit. He and his wife
Henriette funded the C. L. and Henriette F. Cline Centennial Visiting
Professorship in the Humanities. When Dr. H. H. Ransom began the
establishment of what came to be known as The Humanities Research
Center, Clarence Cline, a personal friend of Dr. Ransom (who had
come up through the Department of English), supported the new Center
enthusiastically, foreseeing with its founder that it held immense
promise for the future of scholarship at the university. Over the
years, the Clines contributed to the purchase of the Gutenberg
Bible and furnished the Center’s Cline Room. Upon the death
of Mrs. Cline in 1992, Clarence established the Henriette F. and
Clarence L. Cline Memorial Endowment Fund. And after his own death
in 1998, his funds established at the Center the C. L. Cline and
Henriette F. Cline Senior Curatorship in British Literature.
In 1975 Cline retired as Ashbel H. Smith
Professor of English Emeritus after thirty-seven years of full-time
service. But that was hardly the end of his relationship with the
university. He had long been a member of a number of university
organizations, and he kept up his memberships. He was especially
active in the Executive Committee of the Chancellor’s Council
of the University of Texas System, of which he had been a founding
member, and he took pride in participating in its meetings and
deliberations. As his health deteriorated in the last years before
his death, naturally he slowed down and withdrew more into his
home life. But he still remained the modest, witty, educated, generous – and
admittedly sometimes grumpy – man that his colleagues and
friends had long known. In summary, as Chancellor Harry Ransom
said in 1975, Clarence Cline should be thought of in the context
of his whole career, "a rare example of complete citizenship
in a university."
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner, President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
John R. Durbin, Secretary
The General Faculty
This
memorial resolution was prepared by a special committee
consisting of Professors Emeritus Edwin Bowden (chair) and Gerald
Langford, and Professor James Garrison.
The Publications of C. L. Cline
Books
Byron, Shelley and Their Pisan Circle,
(London: John Murray, 1952). xi + 263 pp. Also: (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1952). Reprinted: (New York: Russell and Russell,
1969).
The Rinehart Book of Short Stories (edited),
(New York: Rinehart, 1952). 307 pp.
The Rinehart Book of Short Stories, Alternate
Edition (edited), (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964).
vi + 307 pp.
The Letters of George Meredith (edited),
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 3 vols., xlii + 1786 pp.
George Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (edited),
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). xviii + 432 pp.
Contributions to Books
Powell Stewart and Michael Bradshaw, Jr., in
collaboration with James H. Parke, Mody C. Boatright, Clarence
L. Cline, Bryant B. Carstarphen, Goodly Company: A Guide to
Parallel Reading, (New York: American Book, 1934). xxxv + 300
pp.
"George Meredith," in Victorian
Fiction: A Guide to Research, ed. Lionel Stevenson, (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1964), 324-348.
[Speech in honor of Mody Boatright], in Mody
Boatright, Secretary and Editor 1943-1964 (Austin: Texas
Folklore Society, 1965), 7-10.
"Qualifications of the Medical Practitioners
of Middlemarch," in Nineteenth Century Literary
Perspectives: Essays in Honor of Lionel Stevenson. ed. Clyde
deL. Ryals, (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1974), 271-281.
Articles
Forty-two articles, including fourteen on the
D’Israelis and seven on George Meredith.
Translations
"The Lady with the Little Dog," by
Anton Chekhov, Texas Quarterly, 7 (Spring, 1964), 173-185.
Reviews
Seventeen reviews of a variety of books.
For a complete list of publications, see Sources
for Reinterpretation: Essays in Honor of C. L. Cline, (The
University of Texas at Austin, 1975), 95-101.
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