Mr. Jon Robert Pearce

The beloved teacher, formidable athlete, champion of Canadian literature, and devoted friend to many, Jon Pearce, age 78, died in his sleep on November 18, 2015, at his home in Toronto. Jon didn't understand how imposing he looked in his prime, with his large athlete's frame and ferocious eyebrows and a face that tended to settle into something short of a scowl. Seeing him for the first time you wouldn't know he had a heart as big as a house. He also had a prodigious memory and a way of speaking that was level, direct, and emphatic. Once when this writer was a young professor I invited Jon to my seminar on Joyce, during the course of which he intervened three times to correct factual errors I was making. When I told him afterwards how embarrassed I had been, he was stricken. It was, truly, the last thing he wanted to do. But Jon did know literature and had strong ideas about what was good and what wasn't. A well-crafted sentence brought him great delight, while a failure of grammar was cause for grave concern. He was always reading, right up to the end, and when he discovered a good new novel he would give copies to his friends, inscribed and carefully wrapped. Jon had an extraordinary power of focus. In his early years, it made him a champion single-scull rower who represented Canada in the Empire and Commonwealth games, and in his later years it made him one of Toronto's premier squash players. This laser-like gift also made him an excellent close reader, serving him well as an English major at McMaster, Johns Hopkins, UBC (BA), and the UT (MA). With Marked by the Wild: Literature Shaped by the Canadian Wilderness, co-edited with Bruce Littlejohn in 1973, Jon contributed to EcoLit a quarter century before it became an academic field. The book itself was keyed to Northrop Frye's observation that 'everything that is central in Canadian writing seems to be marked by the imminence of the natural world'. It was also part of Jon's mission to heighten awareness of the literary riches Canadians had right at home. Marked by the Wild was followed by Mirrors: Recent Canadian Verse (1975) and Twelve Voices: Interviews with Canadian Poets (1980), both demonstrating the range and on-going productivity of contemporary writing in Canada. They in turn complemented Jon's mission at Upper Canada College (1975-1996) to bring Canadian literature into the classroom so that Canadian students would learn early in life that they had their own Canadian cultural legacy. As Head of the UCC Prep School English Department, he created 'CanLit Weeks', a program that brought Canadian poets and novelists to the campus. If literature was Jon's first love, teaching was a close second. His commanding presence, leavened by his sense of fun and above all his deeply caring nature, made him at once the students' mentor and friend. In retirement, he kept up with many of them. And in his passing, he has bequeathed funding for the Quentin Compson Bursary at UT to support graduate students in English. In naming it after Faulkner's brilliant, yet doomed, Harvard student, it is very likely that he wanted to memorialize a student he loved but could never save. By his Friend, Porter Abbott