NASSCFL and SE17 Members Remember Perry Gethner, age 76,
Who Passed Away on Tuesday, November 14, 2023
Perry Jeffrey Gethner was a faithful friend of both NASSCFL (since 1980) and SE17 (since 1986), having served as the treasurer of NASSCFL since 1994 and on the Editorial Board of the Cahiers since 2008. It was rare that Perry missed a conference, and his constant and beloved presence in both societies will be greatly missed. Known for his quirkiness, for his abiding kindness to all, and for his propensity to break into song when delivering a paper, Perry’s musical talents will perhaps be best remembered by the resounding piano tribute he performed in honor of Francis Assaf’s retirement at the SE17 conference at Dartmouth College in 2016.
In addition to being a gracious and generous colleague, Perry was a world-renowned expert in 17th and 18th-century French theatre who was not afraid to take risks and who always followed his heart when pursuing a new project. Perry did not care whether a particular topic was trendy or popular. A champion of the marginalized and forgotten, Perry built his career around the cause of creating equal scholarly opportunity for the study of playwrights who had not been deemed worthy of inclusion in the official French literary canon by making their works available to contemporary readers in the form of critical editions and translations. Perry began his scholarly journey by focusing on marginalized male playwrights such as Rotrou, Du Ryer and Du Laurens. However, he truly hit his stride in the early 1980s when a chance encounter with Villedieu’s Le Favori would set Perry on a different path for the rest of his career. Without him, so many important female playwrights—including Graffigny, Desjardins, Barbier, La Roche-Guilhen, Du Boccage, Staal-Delaunay, Durand and Maintenon—might still remain in the shadows to this day.
Perry lived and breathed the performing arts; if he wasn’t studying a play or an opera, you could be sure that he was either attending or participating in a performance, himself. Perry looked forward to his annual trip to Santa Fe each August, during which he was able to see the Santa Fe Opera’s full season. In his free time, Perry regularly played and sang in concerts. As a lay Rabbi at Temple Emmanuel in Ponca City, OK, his beautiful singing voice and love of performance brought life to the words and liturgy of the Jewish faith.
Given Perry’s commitment to theatre, it may seem odd that in the early 2000s, he agreed to co-author an English translation of a novel—Henriette-Julie de Murat’s Voyage de campagne (1699)—and that he could be found working on an edition of a second novel by Murat nearly two decades later. In Perry’s honor, I would like to share the story of how these collaborations came to be, and of the unique and supportive friendship that grew out of them—a friendship and partnership that was cut short too soon.
A Tribute to Perry Gethner by Allison Stedman
I first met Perry in 2003 at the NASSCFL convention at Dartmouth College. Our common interest in seventeenth-century French women writers made it so that we had a lot to talk about, and in the years that followed, we corresponded occasionally, usually regarding materials that either he or I had presented at a conference. During this time, I was fairly entrenched in the study of novels published by late seventeenth-century French women writers that contained fairy tales, and of these I had found the countess de Murat’s 1699 novel, Voyage de campagne, to be by far the most entertaining and engaging. I dreamed of reviving interest in late seventeenth-century “hybrid novels” by publishing an English translation and a modern French edition of Murat’s work as an example, but as a new assistant professor with no training in translation, I was not sure where to begin. This is when Perry truly entered the picture. Over lunch in 2006 at the SE17 convention at the University of Iowa, Perry listened to the struggles I was having with respect to the prospectus, and said that if I wished, he would be more than happy to collaborate.
That conversation marked the beginning of a two decades-long collaboration that over time turned into a deep and abiding friendship. Despite our superficial differences (he’s male, I’m female; he’s Jewish, I’m Catholic; he’s a Boomer and I’m a Gen-Xer), Perry and I always managed to find common ground. Our daily and weekly emails regarding the projects we were working on increasingly included more and more details about what we were doing and how we were feeling. When my oldest daughter, Ana, was diagnosed with cerebral palsy in 2007, my regular emails with Perry reassured me that I would be okay, no matter what lay ahead. By the time the summer of 2013 came around and the French edition of the Voyage was in its final phase of proofs, Perry and I had become close enough that when he visited me and my family in Paris, my 2-year-old son handed “Uncle Perry” a children’s book and climbed up into his lap.
Over the next few years, Perry and I continued to keep in touch, but without a project to work on together, our emails became less frequent. I think that we both missed the way that our previous collaborations had enriched our lives, but no ideas for a follow-up project came to mind. That would change in the fall of 2016, when Perry excitedly wrote to me with an idea. He had just returned from the NASSCFL convention in Orlando, where he had presented a paper entitled “Murat, Durand and the Novel of Recreation.” “I received an interesting comment about my paper,” Perry told me. “A young colleague wondered why, after editing Voyage de campagne, we didn’t move on to editing Les Lutins du château de Kernosy. I agreed that the novel is worth working on and said that I would pass the idea along to you. If we do decide to work on it, we wouldn’t have to start anytime soon. Meanwhile, I look forward to seeing you at Dartmouth. Bises, Perry.”
Perry and I began the modern French transcription of the project in 2018 and started with the English translation in 2019, falling back into our familiar rhythm of dividing and conquering, with one person translating and the other one editing, sending a word document back and forth between Oklahoma and North Carolina, along with news of what we had been doing—or were planning to do—while the other one took a stab at the document. This collaboration proved to be a lifeline during the COVID-19 pandemic. I found solace in hearing about how Perry was coping, and the fact that we were continuing to make headway on the editions during this time period made life feel less lonely and unpredictable.
On August 28, 2023, Perry wrote to me with some surprising news. He had enjoyed his annual trip to Santa Fe, but had also been complaining of a blockage in his throat for several weeks, to which I had only thought to ask whether it was affecting his singing. “The blockage in my throat, which has been bothering me for some time, has turned out to be a tumor.” Perry wrote. “The doctors think it is cancer, though the biopsy results aren’t in yet, and they are planning additional tests to check on other areas that might be affected. In any case, they want me to start radiation as soon as possible, and I agree. The tumor needs to be shrunk. Still, I am in a funk at the moment, and I can expect September and October to be a washout. I am definitely cancelling my trip to France, planned for November.” Based on this timeline, we decided to postpone further work on the introduction to the French edition until January, when Perry expected to be in better shape. We agreed that I would take the first stab at the page proofs for the English translation, and Perry shared with me his excitement about his new research on non-dramatic divertissements. “It turns out that several others have been recorded. I just got a pair of them by Lalande, dating from 1683. It seems that Louis’s permanent move to Versailles the previous year sparked a renewed interest in this type of royal entertainment,” he said.
My last email from Perry was dated October 30, 2023, at 12:31 pm. “Dear Allison,” He wrote, “I now have a completed draft of my paper for the Lyon conference. It consists mainly of autobiography and of a list of interesting features I learned while studying the women playwrights.” He assured me that he had gone back to working on his various editions, and that he was feeling mercifully good most of the time. He told me that he had a second round of chemo scheduled for the following day and that they were to continue at two-week intervals for the next 5 months. “But I lucked out with the side effects of radiation,” Perry said, with his typically reassuring optimism, “so maybe I’ll luck out again. Meanwhile, I am glad that Ana got to have a good birthday. Can she really be turning 16? I must be getting old. Bises, Perry.” I made a note to check back with him in two weeks, if I didn’t hear from him before then. He passed on November 14th, before I had a chance.
Words cannot express how much Perry has meant to me as a mentor, a colleague, and friend. His steady presence in my life over the past 20 years has truly been a blessing, and I know that I am not the only one whose life was better for having Perry in it. His collegiality, generosity and friendship were without peer. He will be deeply missed by his friends, his colleagues, his students, and by anyone who was fortunate enough to have an “Uncle Perry.”