EPILOGUE

Of all the things to look at around Notre Dame I think I like the trees best. We've been losing some of my favorites lately. [1991] The big ailanthus, the 'tree that grows in Brooklyn," died. Ailanthuses are rank trees, growing wild all over Indiana, along the back roads and in the hedges. But ours, on the Main Quad just off the road that curves by the Student Center, was a nobler specimen, tall and slender. I was more surprised to see it flourish than to see it die; these softwood trees don't live long. Our grounds crew labored mightily to save its rare neighbor, a yellowwood across the road toward the east. But it, too, finally died. It was first identified by the elder Michaux, Andre. Francois, who followed in the footsteps of his famous father in botany, brought one to Paris. I saw its decendant once in the Jardin des Plantes there, plainly labeled. I wonder if it's still there.

Most of the big trees at Notre Dame are maples of one sort or another; there are many varieties. They are so glorious in the fall I can forgive their often bulging girth and crowding branches. They are the best of the American shade trees-perhaps the best all-round, too. But, except in the fall, they are less interesting to me than the black walnuts. I rather think there was a big virgin grove of these stretching from behind Lyons to the river. Many of them still remain, of later growth, on both sides of St. Mary's Lake, great tall majestic trees, the aristocrats of our woods. They have been sadly pillaged recently by midnight vandals who quickly saw away the long, branchless, valuable trunks. Better security has checked this lately, and one of my favorite sites for the house I can't build, the tongue of land just beyond the island in the southwest part of St. Mary's Lake, is still ringed with them. I seldom took at that island without thinking of how lovely its redbud trees look from the Grotto lawn in the spring. Our redbuds grow to no great height. They are like the Russian olive trees, with the alrnost-white undersides of their leaves dappling in the wind. They make a pleasant contrast to the huge walnuts and cottonwoods.

The walnuts live longer, I think, than do our oaks. Coming from middle Tennessee, where oaks have protean shapes and leaf patterns, I find these red and white oaks are not prominent on the landscape, handsome though they are. I like better the native sweet gums, even though they can grow scrawny, like the one in front of the east wing of the Main Building. When one grows just right, as on the west side of the Moreau chapel, it is, summer and fall, of elegant beauty. But the great sight of the Notre Dame fall are the dozen or so sour gums in front of the Post Office and Kellogg.

I am not a tree snob. I love the rank old rows of osage orange, now disappearing. I even enjoy the mulberries for their leaves of different shapes, along with the sassafras the only such trees on the campus. And I love the oddball katsura trees east of the Morrissey chapel and the twin hornbeams facing each other across the Library reflecting pool.

They help the planting which makes Hesburgh Library look better than it is. As many trees as possible were spared while it was building, and when the Radiation building went up quite a few large trees were transplanted. It's the planting which gives the Library quad its charm, The buildings are mostly uninteresting. The Library itself is so poorly designed that the stone- and-mural exterior fails by miles to make up for it. It's foolish to do a library tower. A library building should spread out, and go up only as far as necessary. Even so, the building has more character than its satellites, Radiation, Math, and the somewhat better Galvin. But look across from Galvin to the best of the recent buildings at Notre Dame, the Decio Faculty Office Building. It's all the Library isn't, superbly designed. The problem it presented its designer, the avoidance of prison cell monotony, is brilliantly solved in its staggered grouping. Faced with a similar problem, the designers of O'Shaughnessy simply confessed failure with its classroom cell blocks. Only the great hall and the art galleries are good. The Snite Museum, by contrast, is handsomely designed and neatly integrated with the O'Shaughnessy galleries by a charming sculpture courtyard.

Northward from the Library it's the same story. Although the Pasqueritia dorms are well designed, the exteriors look like prison additions. Siegfried and Knott are some better, well designed for female occupancy, but squat and a little gauche in appearance. The tower dorms are also well designed and, to my eye, handsome, but foolish in conception-why towers on an empty prairie?

I roam around these buildings sparingly. My work plops me among them, and I am deeply grateful for my library office and the other amenities. I do find the new landscaping interesting, though I don't much like the artificial rises or the 'flower beds and borders, here and elsewhere on the campus. I think flower beds out of place in the sweep of a campus. These small riots of color belong in smaller settings-little courtyards and gardens, like that enclosed by Brownson's wings or the charming one between Hurley and Hayes-Healey. But the broad sweep of campus vistas are better served by breaks of greenery. I groan at the flowers on our beautiful Main Quad. The larger planting here is so imaginative and effective that I never tire of strolling through it. As I descend from the Main Building I am almost at once surrounded by the Japanese magnolias and the spreading beeches. In the spring especially I feet almost suffocated by the rich growth and delicate color. But a few steps to my left opens a small vista framed by a tremendous maple on the north and the beautiful white birch to the south. Next to the birch is my favorite young tree on the campus, a European linden, the lime tree so beloved of English writers. It makes me recall sadly the big splendid one that died a few years ago, on the satellite small quad ringed by St. Edward's, Zahm, and Cavanaugh. On this small quad the flowers look good, but in the still smaller little area between Cavanaugh and Washington Hall, the bald cypresses have grown so big it seems almost crowded, like the mini-quad between Nieuwland and Crowley. I like to look from here down to the memorial fountain designed by John Burgee, whose rugged contours mirror the library's large forms and soften its impact. Yet I return to the fanciful Victorian architecture of the Main Quad with renewed pleasure at its contrast with the steel structure severities of the east side. I laugh with pleasure at Architect Willoughby Edbrooke's eyebrows over the windows of the Main Building and the masterful intricacies of the tower of Washington Hall. How well they go with Sorin's curving road, and his evocation of French formality in the design of the quad. I especially love the little eccentricities, the twisted pines, the dwarf beech and the camperdown elm. Oh, this is the place to stroll! Even the nineteenth century convent architecture of Walsh can't spoil the effect, and on the other side Crowley's modest classicism is a neat echo of LaFortune's simple elegance, so immensely enhanced by the recent tasteful reproduction on its east side.

But the only bold note of classicism in the campus architecture is the old Library, now the School of Architecture. This white stone structure, to me pleasingly at variance with the prevailing buff brick, was built to celebrate the diamond jubilee of Notre Dame. There is about this quasi-quad, defined by Corby and the back of the Bookstore, an air of the unfinished. The row of ash trees never grew well, but there ought to be some sort of green barrier to close off the basketball courts, a good spot for these, from the rather interesting planting to the north. Here are two rare cucumber magnolias and the best dogwood on the campus. I wish the architects would think up some effective stroke.

The new dorms planned for this area happily never were built. They came a little later complete with new thinking. Enter Francis Wynn Kervick, the head since 1913 of the Notre Dame Department of Architecture, who, more than anyone since Sorin, influenced Notre Dame architecture until the advent of the Ellerbes in the 1950s.

Kervick seemed a quiet mousey person, but under his reserved exterior he was thoroughly opinionated. He hated modern architecture and shrugged off the plans Frank Lloyd Wright drew up for Notre Dame's expansion in 1923. He adored the Gothic style. He was, of course, in the swim: Yale, Princeton, and West Point led the 1920s in an outpouring of collegiate Gothic building in the United States.

However, Kervick was no slavish copier. His Howard- Morrissey-Lyons group, easily the best of the Notre Dame dormitories, is playful Gothic, a loving adaption of largely English models. Gothic does well as a dormitory style. It also does well for refectories. Notre Dame's best building is its South Dining Hall, designed by the high priest of American Gothic, Ralph Adams Cram, a Kervick hero. Gothic for gymnasiums or laboratories is questionable, as witness the false fronts of the Rockne Building and Kervick's own Cushing Hall of Engineering.

Kervick's main contribution to Notre Dame was his master plan, which swung building away from Notre Dame avenue to a new east-west mall. Father John W. Cavanaugh had, in the last days of his presidency, commissioned this plan. Kervick submitted it to President Burns, who did no building. It was left for Father Walsh to implement it. The plan has suffered many a sea change, of course. Its main flaw in the long run is, it seems to me, that it is so long that it has too little definition at its west end (Rockne) or its east one (O'Shaughnessy). A bad loss to this one is that of Kervick's imposing entrance building. Notre Dame still suffers from having no main gate. The sorry mound at the northwest corner of Angela and Notre Dame is a child's burlesque of one.

I walk this mall steadily, along with the many students who are ducking into its classroom buildings and dorms, or playing on its long stretches of lawn. I love its feeling of college, of youth and laughter and generosity. It was originally planted with long rows of American elms along its sides, many now lost to the Dutch elm disease, though there remains, happily just west of the junction with the Main Quad, one that is, I often think, the finest big tree on the campus. I also often happily go beyond this mall, through the Lyons arch and around the lakes. I've been doing this since 1930. Basically, thank the Lord, it is mostly the same; the only big difference is that you encounter more people. Yet even among so many I still have a sense of rurality, of woodland and field and wet and wildness. Not much, it's true, but enough to give me a satisfying sense of continuity.

So far the new campus to the east, designed mostly by the Ellerbe Organization of St. Paul, has not proved an inviting place to stroll. The new recreation buildings repeat, sensibly and handsomely, the keynote first struck by the stadium, of straightforward functionalism. This sort of unpretentious structure often slips into genuine esthetic pleasure, as with our Eck tennis Center-although it may be the only sports spectator building in the world with no public restrooms. But on the east campus I never feel I am part of the college, the community of scholars and dreamers who set the tone. I feel I am among busy, single-minded people who come to exercise, to build muscle, to drill, to practice the piccolo, and to count the number of times they do what they do. No time or place for strolling, for dally- ing, for staring, strutting, drifting, all the things people like to do away from work and purpose. I keep thinking that, especially compared to my own college days, these are too much with us.

And yet I have little nostalgia for the old days, small piety for the lost days of youth. As Evelyn Waugh puts it in Brideshead Revisited, 'the zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of youth come and go with us through life. Again and again in riper years we experience, under a new stimulus, what we thought had been finally left behind, the authentic impulse to action, the renewal of power and its concentration on a new object; again and again a new truth is revealed to us in whose light all our previous knowledge must be rearranged. But languor-the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse-that belongs to youth and to youth alone."

I beg to differ. It belongs to college, not youth; and something of it stays with us old collegers, I have to think. I'd like to think I'll leave it as joyfully as I entered it, sixty years ago.