E. Lucas Myers

1930 - 2019

E. Lucas "Luke" Myers

1930-2019

E. Lucas "Luke" Myers died peacefully with his wife by his side at his home in El Sobrante, California, on December 18, 2019. He was 89.

Myers was born on June 5, 1930, in Sewanee, Tennessee, to George Boggan Myers of Mississippi, and Margaret Jefferys Hobart Myers of New York City. His father had been the Dean of the Cathedral in Havana. His mother was a suffragette, civil rights activist and sponsor of the English-Speaking Union, an international educational charity.

The couple moved to Sewanee in 1922, where George Myers became a professor in the School of Theology at the University of the South. They built a residence, Bairnwick ("the abode of the children"), in 1925, and Margaret established a school there. Lucas was educated at Bairnwick School, where they sometimes performed plays written by his Hobart grandmother. Bairnwick is now the University's Women's Center and the site of the annual Sewanee Writers' Conference.

Myers attended boarding school at Groton, graduated from the University of the South, and spent time in the Merchant Marines. While in the Merchant Marines, he wrote a letter to his mother asking her to register him at Cambridge University in England. He put the letter in a bottle and threw it overboard. Somehow it reached his mother and he went to Cambridge.

At Cambridge, Myers became friends with poets and scholars Ted Hughes, Daniel Huws, Helga Huws, Daniel Weissbort, David Ross, David Wevill, Harold Bloom, Bert Wyatt-Brown and others. Myers, and Hughes, who was to marry the poet Sylvia Plath and later become the Poet Laureate of England, lived together for a time in a chicken coop at the rectory of St. Botolph's church. In February 1956 they published a historically significant one-issue journal, St. Botolph's Review, with some of the group's first poems.

After receiving his MA degree in anthropology from Cambridge, Myers lived in Paris, where he wrote plays, including "Body," which was performed in Paris. He also lived in Rome and Cyprus.

In 1968, he moved back to the United States, worked for the United Nations and continued to write and publish in magazines such as The Nation, Kenyon Review, and others. He had two daughters from his first marriage. In 1975, he married an old friend he had met in Paris, Agnes Vadas, a Hungarian who was a Holocaust survivor. They moved to San Francisco in 1981 where she joined the San Francisco Orchestra and he worked for the Department of Navy. They divorced in 1992 but remained friends till her death in 2007.

In San Francisco, Myers became active in sponsoring Tibetans who had emigrated to the United States, and traveled to India for research on a book about Buddhist nuns. His interpreter there was Dawa, a Tibetan who had grown up in a refugee boarding school; they were married on April 8, 1997. After living in Sewanee for a number of years, they returned to California.

In Sewanee, Myers wrote a booklet titled "George and Margaret Myers of Bairnwick," gathered oral histories for the Sewanee Trust for Historic Preservation, and published a memoir of his friendship with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. He also wrote a novel. Myers loved the beauty and inspiration of the woods of the Cumberland Plateau and its coves, and he loved singing, especially "Stewball was a Racehorse," and "Goodnight, Irene." On New Year's Eve he recited Tennyson's "Ring Out, Wild Bells," as was the tradition at Bairnwick.

Myers was preceded in death by his parents; brothers George Clifton Myers, Henry Lee Hobart Myers, and Hobart Jefferys Myers; sisters Lady Rosamond Hobart Myers Thornton and Elizabeth Jefferys Myers Winton; half-brother Alexander Henderson Myers and half-sister Alice Alexander Myers Beall; niece Alice Muchmore and nephew Olin Beall.

He is survived by his widow Dawa Myers; daughters Rosamond Myers and Meredyth Friend; four grandchildren; nieces Alex Hoole, Verna Medeiros, Margaret Parker, Ann Marie Romero, Betsy Kelly; nephews Andrew Thornton, Michael Thornton, George Myers, Jefferys Winton, and William Winton and their families; his sister-in-law Carole Myers and brother-in-law Calhoun Winton; and many friends, including John Bratton, David Clough, Richard Tillinghast, and Jamyang Norbu.

His Buddhist family and friends conducted traditional rituals in his honor. A larger Buddhist ceremony and memorial with the public will be held at Gyuto Monastery in Richmond, California on February 4, 2020, and a service will take place in Sewanee this summer, when his ashes will be interred in the Myers family plot at the University of the South.