The World in My Head: A Tribute to Writer Claude Stanush (B.A. '39)

by Cary Clack (B.A. ’85), Columnist, San Antonio Express-News

Of the books that Claude Stanush wrote, the one whose title best described him was a collection of his San Antonio Express-News columns titled, The World in My Head. Not only was there hardly anything in the world that didn’t capture his fertile imagination and capacious mind, there appeared to be little in the world, especially when it came to literature, theology, philosophy, history and ethics, that he didn’t know.

His elegant and prolific pen was a mirror to his mind to reflect to the world his knowledge, passions, fears, loves, whimsies and dreams through articles, essays, novels and short stories. Stanush, one of the greatest writers to come out of Texas, died in his sleep in his San Antonio home on March 26 at the age of 92. He was born in San Antonio on June 18, 1918, just 50 feet from where the Tower of the Americas now stands. After graduating from Central Catholic High School at the age of 15, he went to St. Mary’s University from which he graduated in 1939 summa cum laude with a degree in English.

After starting off at the San Antonio Light, Stanush made his way to New York and, through much persistence, landed a job as a staff writer for Life magazine. It was one of the premier magazines in the nation, and Stanush’s journalism career took off. He became one of Life’s stars and eventually became the magazine’s religion editor and wrote deep and searching pieces on religion and evil.

In New York his life was forever changed when he met Barbara Lee Evans who became his wife and who gifted him with three daughters who became the other great loves of his life.

Life magazine would have given Stanush just about anything to keep him, but in 1962, feeling the pull of home and wanting to do some other kinds of writing, Stanush moved his young family to San Antonio. For four years, while doing some freelance writing, he engaged in intensive reading and reflection, poring over the classics he already knew so well.

Among the work he would produce over the years was his superb 2007 collection of short stories titled, Sometimes It’s New York. Stanush was a brilliant writer with the ability to move easily from fiction to nonfiction. He was a superb storyteller whose work was deepened by his rich moral imagination and humanity.

As committed as he was to the ideal of a story well-told with integrity, he was even more committed to a life well-lived with integrity.

Grace defined not only his beautifully crafted sentences but also his beautifully lived life. He wrote so well, not simply because of his mastery of the technical parts of writing but because his was an expansive soul that felt and cared deeply about people, this world and their futures.

In a wonderful column on the short story, he wrote, “Writing stories is, of course, an art, requiring practice and development. But it is first of all a feeling, a sense of the story’s importance; and if one wants to tell a story well, effectively, one has to internalize language, to feel it as one feels anger or love or despair, to be so at home with it that one instinctively chooses the right word – or, if the right word does not exist as the writer feels it, to invent it. Some of our greatest short story writers – Poe, Chekhov, Tolstoy – never saw a creative writing class. Most were self-taught.”

This wonderful, generous and loving man was a marvelous example of what it meant to live the life of the mind as well as the life of the heart.

When he closed his eyes for good, on this earth, in late March, Stanush was still working on several projects. Till the end, he had the world in his head.

From the Editor

Candy Kuebker

I had the good fortune of meeting Claude Stanush in 1991 and, over the next 20 years, our friendship blossomed. We would catch up at various University events and occasionally meet at a favorite local restaurant for long, leisurely lunches during which I would hear about, and marvel at, his vast interests, passions and projects. He was a writer to his very core so, not surprisingly, we occasionally exchanged letters, something not done all that often anymore and especially not by people living in the same city.

One letter written by Stanush in 2008 (not to me but to several Marianists) was shared by Brother John Totten, S.M., one of its recipients. Always when Stanush and I met, he spoke appreciatively of the Marianists and what they had given him. His letter, in part, read:

I have had an incredible life, a witness to history, science, art, religion, war, crime and other important aspects of human life and behavior, experiences that I could never even have imagined when I was a young student at St. Mary’s back in the 1930s, nor could I ever have had them if I had not been prepared for them by the education, the values and the love I received from the priests and brothers at St. Mary’s.

The letter from him that I cherish the most is his last. He’d taken a fall several months before it arrived, and was just beginning to venture out after a lengthy rehabilitation. It came before Christmas and in it, a tentative date for our next lunch was made. We hadn’t met for that lunch when I heard of his death, his letter still at the top of a pile of papers on my desk to “get to soon.” He wrote:

I am just now beginning to write again…I am now 92 and there are at least three more books I want to write before I die. One, with [daughter] Michele’s help, is almost finished. It’s called ‘A Piece of Cheese,’ and it’s about a young artist trying to survive in New York in the turbulent 1960s when just about everybody was revolting against something, even artists revolting against art, or at least traditional art painted on an easel. The other two books are ‘Good and Evil,’ and ‘A Life in Time and Eternity.’ I’ll tell you more about them and why they’re so important for me when I see you.

Claude, I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to our conversation.