Josiah Carberry Day

I first encountered Josiah S. Carberry, Professor of Psychoceramics at Brown University, in Joel Feinberg’s Harmless Wrongdoing, the fourth volume of his epic tetralogy, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law. Its acknowledgements end with this tidbit:

Finally, I must mention Professor Josiah Carberry, word of whose death has just reached me. De mortuis nil nisi bonum. On his behalf it must be said, in all fairness, that his actions were rarely as bad as his intentions.

Intrigued, I looked back at the front matter of earlier installments. In Volume 3, Harm to Self:

On this particular volume I received no help from Josiah S. Carberry. For that too I am grateful.

Nothing in Volume 2; then, from the Preface to Volume 1, Harm to Others:

Philosophical helpers have been too abundant to acknowledge individually in this limited space. I hope I have remembered them all in the notes. In any event, they know who they are, and I want them all to know that I am immensely grateful for their help. My former colleague Josiah S. Carberry will claim to be among their numbers. He may even go so far as to sue me for plagiarism. Let him sue; he won't have a chance.

I’m unreasonably fond of barbed acknowledgements. There was a Preface I dimly recall—let me know if you can identify it—that began by thanking those who had helped in the writing of the book, before a line break and a paragraph that opened, “On a less pleasant note…” There’s also the classic switcheroo:

I’d like to thank my family for their love and support as I was writing this book. Sadly, I can’t: they complained the whole time.

But the sustained dys-acknowlement of Carberry in Feinberg’s book is something else entirely. Who was Josiah Carberry?

Josiah Stinkney Carberry was born on a bulletin board in 1929, in a notice that read:

On Thursday evening at 8:15 in Sayles Hall J. S. Carberry will give a lecture on Archaic Greek Architectural Revetments in Connection with Ionian Philology. For tickets and further information apply to Prof. John Spaeth.

The announcement was greeted with suspicion—a rival professor inserted the word “not” between “will” and “give”—but Spaeth had more to add:

When he was asked for information, John Spaeth obligingly mentioned Carberry’s ungrammatical wife Laura, his poetical daughter Patricia, his puffin-hunting daughter Lois, and his accident-prone assistant Truman Grayson, who was always being bitten by things that begin with A. With a little bit of help, the Carberries grew and prospered, and sent telegrams, letters, and postcards, and annoyed the local press by inserting notices about themselves until they were banned by the Providence Journal.

Carberry’s specialty, psychoceramics, is the study of cracked pots, but he was something of a polymath: his work on diverse topics has been cited many times in print, ranging from classics and pop culture to plasma physics and (silly) string theory.

Notwithstanding his propensity to irritate, Carberry is rightly remembered:

On Friday, May 13, 1955, an anonymous gift of $101.01 was received by the University from Professor Carberry to establish the Josiah S. Carberry Fund in memory of his “future late wife.” A condition of the gift was that, henceforth, every Friday the 13, and during leap year on February 29, would be designated “Carberry Day,” and on that day friends of the University would deposit their loose change in brown jugs to augment the fund, which is used to purchase “such books as Professor Carberry might or might not approve of.”

It is unclear from his faculty page whether Carberry is alive or dead, though Feinberg implies a terminal date of 1988. Both had second thoughts. My interest in Carberry was revived, not long ago, by the close of the acknowledgements in Feinberg’s 1992 collection, Freedom and Fulfillment:

For a variety of reasons it has become my custom to mention my former colleague, the late Josiah S. Carberry (1874-1988), in the acknowledgements for my books. As I reported at the time, Carberry died shortly before the publication of my Harmless Wrongdoing a few years ago. There would be no point in mentioning this matter again were it not for the fact that I have recently received a letter from Carberry in which he argues with his usual fanatic stubbornness that he is not dead! His argument, in my opinion, is weak and contrary to all the known evidence. It combines a misapplication of the Cartesian cogito with the kind of self-deception that characterized Carberry's long life. Some people simply cannot bear to accept the truth about themselves.

If it’s hard to acknowledge that one will one day not exist, how much harder to admit that one never did.