Craig Allen Wilson

Craig Allen Wilson, gentle, witty, and graced with marriage to the love of his life for a lifetime, passed away on April 22nd, 2023, following just behind his wife, Erika, into the undiscovered country. Craig devoted much of himself to the study of language and literature; it is therefore especially fitting that we should robe his spirit here in happy words as he departs.

Craig was born to Homer and La Rue Wilson on January 23rd, 1946, in El Paso, Texas. The eldest of five siblings, he remembered the household of his youth as a uniquely harmonious one. His sister Suzanne he called “my oldest best friend”; his sister Deborah lovingly pushed his buttons; he was protective of his sister Cheryl; and he was a paternal benevolence in the life of his little brother, Scott, whom he taught to golf in the backyard with a minimum of chili-dipping. La Rue would amusedly recount the time when the preacher caught her and Craig, then a slender lad of slender years, out on the porch, she with a cigarette in her hand and he clasping a Budweiser in his, prescribed by his doctor as a digestive aid. The preacher huffily took his leave, but Craig’s appreciation of beer was there to stay. Throughout his boyhood and adolescence, Craig also began to nurture one of his more central passions: music. In his grandfather’s workshop, he fashioned two batons by hand—one he named Arturo Toscanini, the other Bruno Walter—and, poring over scores, waving Arturo or Bruno about, he would bring into concord the musicians of his fancy. In addition to shadow-conducting, Craig also played the clarinet in the Austin High School marching band and taught himself piano, the keys of which he struck with crisp, airy delicacy as an older man.

During the Vietnam War, Craig enlisted in the United States Army. He learned Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and thereafter deployed to West Germany, where he transcribed and translated intercepted Soviet communications. He did his duty punctiliously, although military bureaucracy ruffled the feathers of his mild anti-authoritarianism, and he would later joke that much of the intelligence that he and his colleagues gathered was not, in the final analysis, all that intelligent (for example, what Comrade So-and-so liked to eat for breakfast). Nonetheless, he enjoyed smoking his pipe and drinking Bier while off duty, touring the Bergisches Land in his caramel-colored VW along with his Army buddy Dan Dustin, and putting for birdie on German greens with his childhood friend and fellow soldier Bob Molder.

When, after being honorably discharged, Craig returned stateside, he availed himself of his G.I. Bill benefits by pursuing graduate studies in English literature, first at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), later at UT Austin. Poetry thrilled his imagination, as did the lecture-hall pyrotechnics of Professor Haldeen Braddy and the jovial parties held by Professor John Unterecker, even as he found literary scholarship somewhat muffling. Though he didn’t take the onerous busywork of spilling critical ink altogether seriously, he was a deeply serious reader. Indeed, it would appear that in his lifetime Craig read everything under the sun, this obituary excepted. He could recite the openings of Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake by heart, and, even in his final days, verses from Burns’s “To a Mouse” and Valéry’s “Le Cimetière marin” wove themselves into the texture of his conversation.

Much of Craig’s life, professional and recreational, centered on libraries. Though he began his career as an English instructor, serving community college students in El Paso, he eventually took a degree in library sciences and worked as a university librarian until his retirement, first at UT Austin, then at Oregon State University, and finally as the Assistant Director of Library Collections at the University of Delaware. His personal library, a labor of passionate research which traces deep connections among the best that has been thought and written, grew over the course of decades. It was at UTEP that Craig began to make the surreptitious copies of rare books that formed the embryo of this collection, and in later years he would pleasedly report on the acquisition of his “must haves.”

As meaningful as books were to Craig, it was a certain person whom he met through books who mattered most to him. One afternoon, in the course of pirating copies at UTEP, he courted the aid and abetment of an inter-library loan employee who would transform his life utterly, the woman who, as Tolstoy has it, “transported [him] into a magic world where he felt softened and moved to tenderness, as he could remember himself being on rare days in his early childhood.” That afternoon he met Erika. She thought that Craig was handsome at first, and he soon came to regard her as the most interesting person he had ever met. The two forged a bond that would endure for almost half a century. In Craig, Erika found a man of sensitive gentleness, agile conversation, and equanimity. In Erika, Craig found a woman of implacable affection, extraordinary intelligence commensurate with her extraordinary experience, and down-to-earth dignity. Their pet names for one another—he was Lemur, she was Turtle—were in decorative evidence throughout their home, where these animals made appearances in statuettes, framed prints, and animal crossing signs nailed up in the garage. To step into Lemur and Turtle’s habitat was to step back in time, into a world where Bach and Verdi and Schoenberg inspirit the air, where Victorian games hide in nooks and crannies, and where books load the walls like overhangs of ivy.

In marrying Erika, Craig also became a father to Erika’s children, John and Felicity, and later a grandfather to Felicity’s children, Alex and Lynn. As a father, Craig respected the independence of John and Felicity, granting them reasonable discretion in charting their own courses, and he never resorted to crossness. Felicity recalls that she snuck out of her parents’ house only once; Craig locked the door behind her, readmitted her when she came home, and quietly advised, “Go to bed.” This was Craig at the peak of his sternness, and it sufficed—Felicity was dissuaded from ever sneaking out again. When Felicity, Alex, and Lynn would visit Craig and Erika later in life, Craig baked from scratch gargantuan chocolate-chip cookies, of which he was known, now and then, to eat the lion’s share. Among company, he spoke softly even as his hands spoke loudly, fleet as wings, orchestrating the air into coherence. He would take his and Erika’s guests to museums across the East Coast, where he sometimes played docent for Alex and Lynn. He also had an especial fondness for Rehoboth Beach; there, stripped down to his trunks, he’d frisk in the surf like one restored to boyhood. After a trip to Rehoboth, Craig unfailingly took care to return home with slices of Grotto pizza for Erika.

Craig’s final years passed in an atmosphere of sweetness and light. At home he took pleasure in listening to music in Erika’s company, attended to her needs, read for the last time the great classics, and translated poems by artists ranging from Juana Inés de la Cruz to Goethe. He developed a close friendship with one of his golfing buddies, Charles Alexander, who memorably described him as a person whose “humanity is endearing.” When he found time for a daytrip, Craig liked to breakfast at Norma’s in New York and attend operas at the Met, where, during intermission, he would sometimes sneak swigs of scotch or rum from a companion’s flask behind the opera house. And, as he approached the end of his life, Craig met it characteristically: with graciousness of spirit, with wit betokening an intrepid mind, and with a love for Erika in his heart, which, if anything is eternal, deserves to be eternal.

In addition to his parents, Craig was preceded in death by his wife, Erika Wilson; his stepson, John Williams; and his sister Deborah Hyde. He is survived by his daughter, Felicity Condon of Caldwell, TX; his sisters Suzanne McGregor of Crestone, CO, and Cheryl Wilson of El Paso, TX; his brother, Scott Wilson, of Grand Junction, CO; his grandchildren, Alex Condon of Caldwell, TX, and Lynn Condon of Bryan, TX; his nieces, Genevieve McGregor of Manhattan, KS, and Hannah Wilson of Grand Junction, CO; and his nephews, Andrew McGregor of Cave Creek, AZ, and Joshua Wilson of San Francisco, CA.

Services will be private.