John COOPER

He was born Yianni Xiros, in a cabin on Mount Pentelicus outside Athens during the German occupation of Greece, of the unhappy marriage between Hariclea and Haralambos Xiros. His mother, grandmother and his mother's tubercular younger sister had fled Athens in part to escape the summer heat, in part to safeguard the child from a father who did not want him. Eighteen days before he was born, his mother's sister had died in the same bed. His first blanket was a Nazi flag abandoned by the weary, retreating Germans, trudging homeward along the dusty roads in September 1944. For the child who would become Dr. John Xiros Cooper, literary scholar and an Associate Dean of Arts at the University of British Columbia, life was a bundle of contradictions from the first breath. His father was a Nazi collaborator, his uncle a hero of the resistance who escaped an Italian prisoner-of-war camp to help lead downed British and American pilots to safety in the Vatican. Until the age of four, John was Greek. Then, his mother fled her abusive husband and took shelter with his uncle, the war hero, Teddy Meletiou, who was building a successful business in Palazzolo, Italy. There, John became Giovanni Xiros, an Italian urchin kicking a battered leather soccer ball on the streets until his mother met a soft-spoken former British naval officer, Norman Cooper, and they decided to marry. In 1952, Norman took John by train through Italy and France to his new home in England. Along the way, Norman began teaching John to speak English, and in England, Yianni/Giovanni became John. In July of 1954, weeks short of his 10th birthday, John crossed the Atlantic to Quebec, where his stepfather had found work managing the Montreal Athletic Association on Peel St. The little family settled in St. Lambert, across the St. Lawrence from Montreal. John soon became a passionate baseball fan. A neighbour was general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers fabled farm team, the Montreal Royals, and he passed John free tickets. Soon, he was taking multiple buses alone to legendary DeLorimier Stadium in the city (where Jackie Robinson played before he broke the colour barrier in the Major Leagues). John would sit in the bleachers kibitzing with the elderly Jewish men who sat smoking their cigars and tutoring him on the finer points of the game. It would become a lifelong pattern - quietly absorbing knowledge from those who knew. When his father moved the family to an apartment on Sherbrooke St. in Westmount, John became an outstanding student and athlete at Westmount High School, then a bruising football fullback at McGill and Queens, a student of physics at McGill and English Literature at Sir George Williams University. Along the way, there were many detours. In 1966, he took a break from university because he and a friend were going to make a spy movie set in Morocco and Siberia, even though they had no camera, no script, no experience making movies and no financial backing. The friend left for Tangier a month ahead of John; they never did locate one another but it all made for a marvellous story, except perhaps for the part where the friend was arrested while trying to smuggle hashish into Spain. Between 1969 and 1971, John had three separate stints at Globe Communications in Montreal - a dodgy tabloid operation where only a few of the stories were actually based in fact. It was there he met lifelong friend, novelist and columnist, Jack Todd. After winning a Woodrow Wilson Scholarship at Sir George, John began graduate work at UBC in 1971. He met Cheryl Kuntz and they married in 1974. After one semester, John decided he would prefer working in newspapers, so he left UBC and moved to Courtenay on Vancouver Island, where he began writing for the Comox District Free Press, known as the Green Sheet. There, he won a journalism award for a series of columns examining politics and business dynamics in Comox. He enjoyed the job but missed the depth and breadth of academic writing, so decided to complete a MA in English - with the intention of returning to newspapers afterward. However, when John was awarded a MA in 1977, his professor and mentor, Keith Aldritt, persuaded him to begin a PhD program in modern British literature. John was awarded a SSHRC grant to fund the rest of his studies and earned a PhD in 1980. There followed a nine-year stint as a lecturer at Mount Royal College in Calgary and ultimately, an appointment as Professor of Modern British and American Poetry at UBC, where he would eventually become an Associate Dean of Arts. John's various passions led to vast learning, but learning as such was never the point. What John sought was understanding. Once when he began talking with a motorcyclist in a blues bar, it ended with the two of them outside going over the fine points of a Harley-Davidson, the biker and the eminent Eliot scholar, deep in conversation about carburetors. Because John ranged so widely, he could make connections that others never suspected. As a professor, he could not only walk into a university classroom and discuss the works of writers in his area - W. B. Yeats, Sylvia Plath, and Louise Glück - he could also lecture on Fra Angelico and Early Renaissance Art, jazz and bebop in the 1950s, Wagner's Ring Cycle, or the photographs of Lee Miller. Yet John was equally insightful describing the dazzling footwork of Thierry Henry on his beloved Arsenal team or dissecting the San Francisco 49ers' offensive strategy in the Super Bowl. When the Cambridge University Press sought a renowned Eliot scholar to write The Cambridge Introduction to T.S. Eliot, John was chosen. He also published T.S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets and T.S. Eliot and the Politics of Voice, and he edited and contributed an essay to T.S. Eliot's Orchestra: Critical Essays on Poetry and Music. His mind, however, ranged far from T.S. Eliot, and the best of his books, Modernism and the Culture of Modern Society, shifted from Marx to Marinetti with ease. A late collection, The Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education and other essays, was published in 2020. He would speak to audiences in lecture halls in Seoul or Shanghai, or accept an invitation to spend a fortnight teaching at the University of Salamanca or at the T. S. Eliot International Summer School at the University of London. He could also simply escort a friend through the Duoma di Siena, offering commentary on every aspect of the architecture and sculpture on view. In 1994, he married Kelly McKillop. They would raise two children, David and Alexandra, and remain together until his death in Port Moody in 2024. In 2013, he retired from UBC to enjoy other passions – travel, jazz and opera, theatre, and time with family and friends. After his "retirement," his restless mind produced three Panos Akritas mysteries, set in Athens where he was born, and so thoroughly researched that they read as though he had never left. In a sense, he never did. When an Italian broadcasting company sought to adapt his first book for European TV, John, happy to undertake the challenge, was involved in writing the screenplay in Rome. Then, during filming in Athens, he watched his characters lift off the page near a neighbourhood where he spent his first four years. At the end of his life, he was still working on an autobiographical novel called Oleander and beginning a novel called Titus the Greek. To the end, through a lengthy, losing battle with cancer, he was a man with Old World manners and a New World cast of mind, a citizen of the world but especially of Greece, Italy, England and Canada, a superb listener, witty raconteur, devoted husband and father, magnificent friend and, in a phrase often spoken in jest, that rarity in today's world: a true gentleman and scholar.