The teaching awards line the corner office in Greenlaw Hall like wallpaper, but it is the unusual picture above the desk that rivets the eye.
It shows a bemused Dean Smith shaking hands with General William Richardson Davie, portrayed by Christopher Armitage, to whom the picture belongs. It was taken 21 years ago, when the two men took center stage – Armitage on horseback – for Carolina’s bicentennial celebration in October 1993.
“That was the day,” Armitage deadpans, “I met God.”
The first experience Armitage shared with North Carolina was in October 1954, courtesy of Hurricane Hazel that careened north from the Tar Heel state and reached Canada before veering east.
Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, it hit the Canadian passenger ship “The Empress of France,” with both Armitage and his fiancée Pauline Brooks on board. The experience, Armitage said, demonstrated the truth of Samuel Johnson’s observation that being on a ship “is like being in jail, with the chance of being drowned.”
“It was about the only time in my life that I thought it would be good to die,” Armitage said, recalling being tossed up and down endlessly by the enormous waves.
During his last year at Oxford University, a friend had set him up with a cousin visiting from Canada. That cousin was Pauline. “Very soon after that blind date I decided I was going to emigrate to Canada to marry her,” he said.
After surviving the wild ride across the Atlantic, they were married and settled near Pauline’s hometown in northern Ontario. Armitage took a job in Toronto selling encyclopedias door to door, but he quit after two days – without a single sale.
Then, three years as a technical writer for the Royal Canadian Air Force helped him decide life as an academic might be for him, after all.
He taught three years at the University of Western Ontario, and three more at the University of Guelph before Pauline planted a bug in his ear about getting his Ph.D.
He resisted at first. “What exactly is a Ph.D.?” he asked. “At Oxford, I sat at the feet of C.S. Lewis and he didn’t have one. I sat at the feet of J.R.R. Tolkien. He didn’t have one.”
Yes, his wife insisted, but you have three young boys to support and, for an academic in America, a Ph.D. is the union card.
As with most things, Armitage said, he knew she was right. So in spring 1964 he and his family ended up at Duke where he would complete his doctorate in three years.
He came to Carolina’s English department in fall 1967 at age 36 and has received many accolades for teaching 17th- and 20th-century English and Canadian literature. Armitage became the first UNC Professor of Distinguished Teaching in 1995, and other awards he has received include the Nicholas Salgo Outstanding Teaching Award and two Bowman and Gordon Gray chairs for undergraduate teaching. In 2009, he received the UNC Board of Governors Award for career excellence in teaching.
At 83, he shows no sign of slowing down.
‘Fortune’s tennis ball’
Last fall – 25 years after the publication of his annotated bibliography of Sir Walter Raleigh – Armitage wrote “Literary and Visual Ralegh: Essays on the Writings and the Visual Images of Sir Walter Ralegh.” (Don’t worry about the spelling, Armitage said. The biographer Willard Wallace lists 73 spellings of the explorer’s name in European languages.)
The essays, Armitage said, reveal Raleigh to be just as Sir Robert Naunton once described him: “Fortune’s tennis ball” with ups and downs that would take him from naval battles in Spain, to the glittering court of Queen Elizabeth, to Roanoke Island off the North Carolina shore where what became known as “The Lost Colony” would be launched.
In 1603, King James I threw Raleigh in prison in the Tower of London on trumped-up charges of treason, where Raleigh proceeded to write “The History of the World” as a guide for Prince Henry, who was next in line to the throne. Raleigh wrote the book in hopes that Henry, once king, would set him free.
Those hopes were dashed when Henry fell ill and died at 18.
James I let him out of prison to lead an expedition to South America where Raleigh insisted he could find El Dorado, the city of gold. Up river, the expedition found instead a fortress filled with Spanish soldiers lying in wait to ambush them. Upon his return to England, Raleigh was summarily thrown back in prison and beheaded in 1618.
Building on a legacy
Armitage said he has come to believe, as Raleigh did, that all of life is a diversion, cast less by the winds of fortune than chance.
Pauline died many years ago at the age of 47, and Armitage lost his second wife nearly a decade ago.
Sadness will find you on its own, Armitage said, and that is why it is important to seek what delights you – and to stick with it, even in the worst of times.
Since 1975, he has taken pleasure in returning to England every summer to conduct a six-week study program on “Shakespeare in Performance” for students and alumni. After three weeks in London, the program takes students to Oxford, and Armitage takes a trip back in time, to Saint Edmund Hall, where he entered his first year at Oxford in 1950 as he was about to turn 19.
Saint Edmund Hall, as Armitage proudly boasts, is the last surviving medieval hall at Oxford and the oldest academic society for the education of undergraduates.
Going back, he said, gives him “a sense of the extraordinary feeling I had about what it meant to be in a place of great scholarship and considerable beauty.” There is also a deep satisfaction watching students experience the place for the first time.
In 2011, he established the Christopher Mead Armitage and Pauline Brooks Armitage Scholarship for Visiting Students, which provides a term at the college for a deserving Carolina undergraduate. This past summer, Armitage learned that Oxford plans to raise money so scholarship recipients can attend a full academic year.
Several weeks ago, Armitage returned from Oxford to prepare for what will be his 48th year teaching at Carolina.
“I keep doing it because I love doing it,” he said. “I enjoy the students. Like all human activities, there is an element of self-interest in it in that it keeps me charged and prevents me from turning into a hermit, which I have a strong tendency to do.
“The students are always telling me I am intimidating. I walk into class and I tell them (he lowers his voice into a growl) how it is. From day one, I tell them, ‘I take my job seriously, but not solemnly.’ I want to indicate that I run a tight ship, but that we can enjoy it.
“Literature is a pleasure. That’s the essence for me.”
