NORMAN T. GATES

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NORMAN GATES Obituary

GATES
NORMAN T., Ph.D., April 17, 2010, age 95, of Haddonfield, husband of the late Gertrude l. (nee Morre). Loving father of Marilyn G. Hart (Robert T.) of Canton CT, Norman E. (Emma) of Valley Springs CA and Patricia A. Winder of San Francisco CA. Also survived by 5 grandchildren, 4 great grand-children and his dear friend and companion, Peggy Will. There will be a time set aside on Saturday, June 12th, for family and friends to celebrate his life. Arrangements by
KAIN-MURPHY FUNERAL SERVICES of Haddonfield, NJ.

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Published by Philadelphia Inquirer/Philadelphia Daily News on Apr. 20, 2010.

Memories and Condolences
for NORMAN GATES

9 Entries

Ludmilla Volodarskaya

April 16, 2011

I'll never forget this generous and attentive man!
L.Volodarskaya

Marcy Tanter

April 15, 2011

Norman was such a dear man. He is sorely missed.

Terry Dearden

October 6, 2010

I had the honor and joy to be assigned to Dr. Gates English class my first semester at Rider (College) in 1974. After that, I made sure to take his classes for every semester until graduation including all Intermim break classes. His passion for literature was infectious. I found his website a few years back and he happily returned my email with a brief overview of his current endeavors. I am very sorry to have just heard of his passing through the Rider Alumni newsletter. He was an inspiration.

April 30, 2010

Sincere sympathy to all the family. I was happy and proud to have known Norman. Norman was my father's first cousin. I knew his father "BD" very well. You are all in my prayers!
Peggy Gates

Michel Pharand

April 24, 2010

Although I had the privilege of meeting Norman only once (in July 1992 at the Aldington conference in Montpellier, France), we kept in touch every few months and his letters and emails were invariably heartwarming and courteous. When he learned I did not own a copy of his book, “The Poetry of Richard Aldington,” he immediately sent me one, and I cherish his inscription of 7 November 1995: “… ‘who gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche’ even, as now, in far off Japan.” He was a true gentleman-scholar whose passion for life continues to inspire me. They don’t make men like you anymore, Norman.

Caroline Zilboorg

April 22, 2010

Of course I knew about Norman before I knew Norman.

In 1987, I had the privilege of participating in an NEH Summer Seminar on Modernist Poetry under the direction of Professor A. Walton Litz. In order to become a member of this select group, I had submitted an application that included a project I wanted to work on and which I had chosen in part because I knew so little about it: H.D. and her relation to Modernism. I read rather madly both in preparing my proposal and between the time of my acceptance in May and my arrival with my husband and four young children (the oldest was then seven) in Princeton in June, one question became increasing pressing: who really was Richard Aldington and why did those writing on H.D. seem to have such mixed feeling about him?

While working at the Firestone Library that summer, I came across Brigit Patmore’s memoir My Friends When Young. There Aldington features large-- and the handsome photographs of him both young and mature-- well, I did begin to wonder: what had H.D. seen in him that her feminist champions seemed, at least to me, to be missing? What part had he played in Modernism and in her life?

So then I changed my angle on things and began to focus on Aldington-- and the first thing I looked at after Aldington’s ¬Collected Poems was The Poetry of Richard Aldington: A Critical Evaluation and an Anthology of Uncollected Poems (Norman’s doctoral dissertation, published in 1974) and Norman’s A Checklist of the Letters of Richard Aldington (1977). Both are works of primary scholarship, the bedrock of any historical study and vital to any critical or theoretical work that might come later. They were, for me, goldmines-- and they led me that summer to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, to the Widener Library at Harvard, and to Norman himself, who luckily for me lived not far from Princeton in southern New Jersey.

After reading Norman’s books, I immediately wrote him care of Ryder College, where he was then an emeritus professor, and received an answer amazingly quickly. I had so much I wanted to ask him! Walt Litz was another prince in my life that summer and an advocate of the important networking that has nourished my scholarship. All seminar participants had privileges at the Princeton University Faculty Club and we were supposed to use those privileges to invite people we wanted to meet to lunch. Norman was the person I most wanted to meet that summer, so I invited him and he graciously accepted, driving up from Haddonfield on a dazzlingly sunny day in July and bringing with him a copy of a full run of The New Canterbury Literary Society Newsletter-- a treasure trove!

I cannot recall what we ate that day, but it was a very long lunch and we were certainly the last people to leave the faculty dining room. We continued our discussion on a campus bench under the shade of enormously tall trees: Norman spoke of his relationship with Catha Aldington; with ‘the other Norman’ (Yale University professor Norman Holmes Pearson, champion of H.D.’s work); with Alister Kershaw, Aldington’s friend and literary executor; and with David Wilkinson, then living in the house in Padworth where Aldington had lived with Arabella Yorke in the 1920s. He agreed with Walt that I should take a few days off and go both to Yale (where Aldington’s letters to H.D. from the Western Front had just become available to readers) and to Harvard (to consult the papers of Amy Lowell and John Cournos)-- no easy feat for me to contemplate while juggling the demands of both family and seminar-- but with his encouragement I went and the rest of my career at least is history.

Norman and I began that summer a correspondence which continued until shortly before his death, the reams of letters being replaced by emails over the decades. I saw him in France in 1992 at the Aldington conference in Montpellier, and twice I visited him at home, once before his wife Gertrude died and once afterwards when he was on his own. On both occasions he was the most gracious host and we talked and talked and talked.

Over the years Norman was invariably encouraging of my writing and welcoming of my thoughts, even when I wondered about both. I have beside me on my desk this morning in Brittany copies of his books. The Poetry of Richard Aldington and the Checklist are inscribed identically with characteristic generosity: ‘3 February 1988-- For Caroline, who carries on our work-- Norman’. What a responsibility, what a gift!

David Wilkinson

April 22, 2010

Norman and his wife Gertrude knocked on the front door of my cottage in Berkshire, UK, in July 1978. Norman was on a quest for the writer Richard Aldington who lived there in the Twenties. My life changed at that moment. Norman became my university, my mentor and my closest soul mate. For thirty-eight years he has kept Aldington scholarship alive. I took my son to close the circle at his home in Haddonfield on Norman's 94th birthday in 2008. I am blessed to have known him and his family.

Gemma Bristow

April 21, 2010

Dear Professor Gates, thank you for your books, for the NCLSN and for being such a gracious correspondent. It feels like we enjoyed you for such a long and productive time, although of course it had to end one day.

Claudia Phifer Buderman

April 20, 2010

Dr. Gates taught me to love poetry at Rider College in 1972. He radiated compassion and wisdom, and his example reinforced those qualities in my own life. I was lucky to run into him and his wife years later at the Theater, and I felt like I was meeting a world leader or a famous actor or maybe, just a great man. I will carry him in my heart forever, right there next to all my beloved dogs-which believe me, is a place of honor.

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