Phillip Herring

Madison - Phillip F. Herring passed away among family on September 28, 2021.  Herring was born in Fort Worth, TX on June 30, 1936, and raised in Austin, TX in the days before air conditioning.  He used to tell people that he learned his love of literature by sitting in front of a fan while reading his favorite books, such as the Hardy Boys and the Wizard of Oz.  He dreamt of living in cooler climes, like Oregon and Finland (where his older son, Paul, now lives) and studied languages such as Polish, Swedish, and French.  He was an Undergrad at the University of Texas, and had the opportunity to study at Georgetown University in Washington, DC for one semester.  It changed the course of his life.  Suddenly he had a bigger perspective on the world and could visualize being a diplomat, a United States Senator or a university professor.  After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Texas in 1958, Herring served as an officer in the United States Navy in West Germany, where his facility with languages served him, and our country, well as he listened in on the communications of the East German and Polish navies.  During his two years in West Germany, Herring became fluent in German and developed numerous friendships that would endure a lifetime.  After the Navy, Herring began his doctoral studies at the University of Texas.  During this time, he met Lydia Balbontin Braham on a blind date in Austin, courting her while driving a convertible Mercedes Benz that the Service had helped him bring back from West Germany.  They fell in love and were married in San Luis Potosi, Mexico in 1962.  Soon followed their children, Paul (b. 1963) and Alec (b. 1967).  Herring graduated from the University of Texas in 1966 with a PhD from the Department of English.  He received an appointment at the University of Virginia, and by 1970 was invited to join the faculty of the English Department of the University of Wisconsin - Madison with tenure.  Herring was a popular teacher of Modernist literature, but in addition had a long career as a scholarly writer and biographer, producing important works on James Joyce and Djuna Barnes.  He first made his name as a Joyce scholar with the groundbreaking Joyce’s Ulysses Notesheets in the British Museum (Charlottesville: The Univ. Press of Virginia, 1972).  This book and its follow-up volume from 1977 were praised by Myron Schwartzman as “a prodigious labor,” and they established Herring as a leading researcher in Joyce studies.  In 1987, Herring’s critical analysis, Joyce’s Uncertainty Principle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), appeared to admiring reviews.  Herring was also invited to be a keynote speaker (along with Umberto Eco) at the 11th International James Joyce Symposium in Venice, Italy in the summer of 1988.  Herring later shifted the focus of his writing and produced the 1995 biography Djuna: The Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Viking, 1995).  Margot Norris singled out Djuna as coming “close to an ideal modernist biography in its aim of rendering Barnes not as a single or fixed identity” and lauded the book for bringing Barnes to life “with her voice and the voices of those she loved and hated, and who loved and hated her.”  Herring’s final major work was his edition of Barnes’s poems, which he co-edited with Osías Stuttman.  Overall, Herring’s books became known for their intense attention to detail, his interest in examining ambiguous or contradictory evidence, and his ability to present this evidence in writing that Alistair Stead once described as “lively, often witty and gracefully-turned.”  After retiring from the University of Wisconsin – Madison in 1996, Herring worked at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas.  After retiring in full, he and Lydia spent time living in Madison, Austin, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.  Herring joins his wife Lydia, parents, Floyd and Velma, and sister Janice, in the afterlife.  He is survived by his sons, Paul and Alec, his daughters-in-law Michelle and Alisa, and grandchildren Kris, Sonia, Julian, and Karl.

A memorial service will be held at 1:00 pm on Friday, October 8, 2021 at the Cress Center, 6021 University Ave., Madison, WI  53705, followed by a gathering of family and friends from 1:30 pm until 3:00 pm. In lieu of flowers the family suggests memorial contributions in Phillip's name to the Alzheimer's Association at Alz.org.

Services will be live streamed at the following Link: CLICK HERE

“His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

― James Joyce, The Dead

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Cress Center

6021 University Ave. Madison

(608) 238-8406