Queer Places:
Mount Hope Cemetery
San Diego, San Diego County, California, USA
Karl
Alexander Keller (May 29, 1933 - September 8, 1985) was for 20 years a professor in San Diego State’s English Department and author of a critically acclaimed study of the poet
Emily Dickinson — The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty.
One of Keller’s fellow professors said, “He was seriously into S&M, so that
would be one reason that he liked Emily Dickinson, because there’s an S&M
quality to Dickinson. I would see Karl once in a while at parties. He could be
very kind. He could also be verbally cruel when he got drunk. Karl gave a paper at a conference in Amherst for the Emily Dickinson Association. In the middle of delivering his paper, he said, ‘What I would really like to do is go up to her bedroom and put on her white dress and walk down the stairs, wearing that dress.’ Everyone in his audience was totally shocked. Karl has always been and remains to this day something of a legend in the Emily Dickinson world.”
Karl Alexander Keller was born into a Mormon family in Manti, Utah, in
1932. He was the third child of Calvin Thomas Keller and Lily Francis Barton.
It was a five-child family — two girls, three boys. Manti, the county seat of
Sanpete County, sits at an elevation of 5500 feet in central Utah. Settled in
1849 by Scandinavian and German/Swiss immigrants and incorporated in 1851,
Manti is the site of one of the state’s oldest Mormon temples.
When the Keller children were young, Manti had a population of some 2000
(the population now is about 3000). “It was really quite an artistic town,”
Hellen Keller Higbee, Karl's older sister, said. “We had great teachers. We
also had very capable musicians that retreated to Utah in the summertime. One
was a teacher in a boy’s private school in New York, and he taught piano
students and did a masterful job at that. Then there was another gentleman
that taught school in Santa Barbara and came back with his family and gave
vocal lessons to a whole bunch of people. So we had a lot of good basics as
far as the arts go. “Manti’s economy,” Higbee said, “was primarily based on
farming and livestock — sheep and cattle. And our father was obviously in that
line of work. But we didn’t grow up on a farm. In Utah it’s different from
most places; the people were encouraged to live in organized communities and
then go out to your farms. That’s what our family did. We had wonderful
parents. They were very loving and caring, and they loved each other very
much. I think that’s a great gift for children.” Karl and their mother, Higbee
said, “identified very closely. Karl was quite sickly. He had measles, and my
mother was afraid he was going to die. She had me sit beside his bed to be
sure he kept breathing while she did housework and cooking. Karl got out of
doing the heavy farmwork that the other boys were required to do. He was very
frail physically but made up for it with mental capabilities. He was quite an
independent young man. I think he read more than I realized, and he was always
writing plays. Being the oldest, you know, as I was, you’re always caught up
in your own life, and I can’t remember exactly. “Karl was an achiever. He went
to the University of Utah and was editor of the school yearbook in his junior
year and editor of the school paper in his senior year. He was a counselor to
a bishop while he was a university student. He was also involved in the
musical aspect of services. He sang beautifully. He had a marvelous voice. “He
went on a Mormon mission to Germany. He was in many places, but among them was
Dresden. He was probably 19 when he went, so that would have been early in the
1950s. There was a gentleman from Dresden that liked Karl so well. He went and
bought a complete dinner set for Karl with Karl’s initials. His wife has the
remainder of that.”
Karl Keller majored in English at the University of Utah. Professor William
Mulder taught Keller there. Professor Mulder remembered young Keller fondly.
“Karl seemed always so energetic, so bright. He was an excellent writer. An A
student. He had great talent and intelligence. Whatever he touched he did with
flair. “He was born into the Mormon Church, like so many of us. He was
immersed, as are the rest of us born into that faith, in the Mormon faith.”
Professor Mulder is one of the dedicatees of Keller’s book about Edward
Taylor, The Example of Edward Taylor. “Taylor,” the professor noted, “was an
interesting figure. Karl contributed to a growing appreciation of that
colonial poet, discovered somewhat by accident by Thomas H. Johnson, who was
the chief editor, of course, of Emily Dickinson.”
Karl Keller married Ruth Anderson in 1956, after his return from his
mission in Germany. He earned a doctorate in early American literature at the
University of Minnesota in 1964. His dissertation was titled “The Metaphysical
Strain in Nineteenth-Century American Poetry.” His first teaching job was at
the State University of New York in Cortland. In Cortland he served his Mormon
stake as a bishop (a bishop, Professor Mulder explained, “is not the eminence
that a Catholic bishop is. He’s more like the pastor of a congregation”). Utah
native Gary Shirts for many years has been a San Diego resident. Shirts met
Karl Keller when they were undergraduates at the University of Utah. “Karl was
a good friend. We both went on missions. He went to Germany and I went to
Hawaii. When I returned, we both married and he became my bishop. This was in
Salt Lake City. When my wife and I decided to marry — her name is Cozette and
they called her Cozy — Karl announced our engagement from the pulpit. There
was another guy by the name of Gary Sheets in our ward. Karl said, when he
made the announcement of our upcoming marriage, ‘I’m glad Cozy is marrying
Gary Shirts instead of Gary Sheets because she wouldn’t want to have her name
be ‘Cozy Sheets.’ ”
Karl Keller accepted a teaching job at San Diego State in 1965. For the
next two decades, he would teach, variously, freshman composition and
literature introduction classes to underclassmen. To upperclassmen, he would
offer Colonial American Literature, 19th-Century American Literature, and
seminars in Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. At least once, he directed a
seminar on E. M. Cioran, the Romanian philosopher. The family settled in. One
son was named after Puritan minister Cotton Mather, another after Henry James.
They bought a house in La Mesa. They were busy in their local branch of the
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, with Karl, as he had all his
life, employing his musical talents in the service of his church. At State,
Professor Keller taught, wrote, attended faculty meetings, and published. He
was popular with students and sought out by fellow faculty members. In 1973,
he received a Fulbright grant and taught at the University of Nice in France
and at the University of Clermont-Ferrand, near Lyon, France. Larry McCaffery
has been a member of San Diego State’s English Department since 1976.
Professor McCaffery said, “Karl discovered that he was gay, or admitted it,
when he was in France, in Nice, in 1973.” Professor McCaffery’s wife, Sinda
Gregory, also a professor in State’s English Department, said: “San Diego
State had an exchange program with the University of Clermont-Ferrand. Karl
was there for the year. One day he was at the beach, and he started swimming
out and he was going to commit suicide. One of the lifeguards came and got him
and brought him back. Somebody had said, ‘There’s someone in danger.’ It was
Karl, of course. “When he came back to California, he said that was when he
decided that he was going to act on what he felt. I don’t know if he then had
experiences there in Nice or if it was just a matter of coming back to the
States. I don’t know when the actual physical stuff started happening, but I
do know that that was an event that made him decide that he had lived one way
long enough and that he couldn’t live that way again. So that when he began
life again, he told his wife and at that point began having boyfriends.”
Once Karl Keller announced his homosexuality, he began to dress in
leathers. Even in the hottest weather, he might be seen in a black leather
jacket that was adorned with glittering chains. He also spent many nights in
Los Angeles, dressed in his black leathers and scoring drugs and picking up
men. He began to offer classes in gay literature.
In 1975 the University of Massachusetts Press published The Example of
Edward Taylor. In the acknowledgments, Keller wrote, “To my wife Ruth for kind
encouragement and indulgence. And to all the kids.” In 1979, the Johns Hopkins
University Press published Keller’s The Only Kangaroo Among the Beauty: Emily
Dickinson and America. The title comes from a letter Dickinson wrote to
Atlantic editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson in 1862. “I am Myself,” Dickinson
noted, “the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.” Keller dedicated The Only
Kangaroo Among the Beauty to Kingsley Widmer. Widmer is the one who told
Keller in the early 1980s to check if he had AIDS, after he told him about
some illness he had. ‘Karl, you’d better get checked out to see if you have
AIDS.’ I had read an article on AIDS. So, I’m the one who set off the sequence
by which he found out he had AIDS. “A lot of people, in those early years
—1983, 1984 — shunned people with AIDS. There was still the fear that it was
contagious. Karl came to me and said that he wanted to make a trip east, that
there was an American Studies convention in Pennsylvania, and did I want to
go. I said, ‘I don’t have the money, Karl.’ And he said, ‘I already asked, and
I know the chairman, and you just give a paper on something in American
literature, and you can get travel funds.’ “So I did. We flew to Washington,
rented a car, drove up to Penn State. We spent two or three days there, and we
both took a paper. His paper was on Whitman. Then we went back to Washington,
and Karl wasn’t feeling too well. So I changed the airplane reservations. We
stayed a couple days in a hotel, outside Washington. Then when he was feeling
better we went to the Hirshhorn. I’m a compulsive museumgoer. We also went to
the east wing of the National Gallery. We spent several days in this way, and
we were going to spend several more, since the trip, as it were, was paid for.
But then he got ill again. So I said, ‘Karl, we’d better go back.’ And we flew
back. He lost weight and was terribly thin, emaciated, practically. Another
was that he had Kaposi lesions on his skin, his flesh. Also, he had periods of
complete exhaustion, total chronic fatigue, which during this time occurred
intermittently. This was early spring of 1985, I think. When we came back, and
I felt rather guilty about this, he wasn’t able to go back to teaching. He
called me up and said, ‘Take over my American lit class.’ So I did. He went to
the hospital. I went and got him a couple of times from the hospital, when he
was feeling better, and took him out for lunch and then took him back to the
hospital."
When Keller died in September 1985, the Union obituary was headlined:
“Renowned literary scholar and activist Karl Keller, 52, dies.”
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