George Stade, Scholar-Novelist Partial to the Popular, Dies at 85

George Stade, a highbrow literary scholar who studied lowbrow fiction and who wrote the provocative 1979 satirical crime novel “Confessions of a Lady-Killer,” died on Feb. 26 in Silver Spring, Md. He was 85.

His daughter Nancy K. Stade said the cause was pneumonia.

Dr. Stade (pronounced stayed) wrote four novels and scores of journal articles and essays and was a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University for 36 years. He retired in 2000.

He specialized in 20th-century American and British literature. While his favorite authors included many of those in the traditional pantheon — Faulkner, Joyce, Beckett — he also revered writers who occupied what many in academia considered the lower literary rungs, among them Stephen King, Bram Stoker and Dashiell Hammett. He especially liked tales of horror, which he called “spookeroos.”

His “unapologetic enjoyment of lowbrow literature,” his daughter said, helped bring students flocking to his course “Studies in Modern Literature: Popular Fiction.”

In a 1982 interview with The Columbia Daily Spectator, the campus newspaper, Dr. Stade said he had devised the course to address the question “Why do we read?” He believed there was “something pure” about the storytelling impulse, he said, which was reflected in westerns, mysteries, romances and other popular genres.

These stories, stylistically simple and formulaic in plot, say a lot about the myths that a culture values and lives by, he contended. They allow readers to live vicariously through the villains and then safely change sides when the villains are defeated, as they always are. People read them, he said, because they want to, not because they have to.

Teaching during a period of upheaval on college campuses starting in the mid-1960s, Dr. Stade personified the rebellious spirit of the day. He wore jeans to his lectures and occasionally smoked cigarettes in class while imparting to his students his love of subversive literature.

While teaching at Columbia Dr. Strade was caught up in an extended battle over diversifying the department’s faculty and curriculum; problems began festering in the 1960s and exploded in 2001 when the department was essentially put in academic receivership, with other universities making decisions for it.

Long dominated by white men, Columbia’s English department was among the slowest in the country to welcome women, ethnic minorities and gays and to teach their perspectives. This led to years of internal strife, with Dr. Stade part of an old guard that resisted change.

His stance made it easy for some feminist critics to link him to the protagonist of his first novel, a dark, sex-crime satire called “Confessions of a Lady-Killer” (1979).

Its anti-feminist theme is evident from the beginning, when the protagonist declares he is either a hero or a villain, “depending on whether you are a feminist or a human being.”

The protagonist is, literally, a lady-killer. When his wife runs off with a woman, he ends up massacring feminists in New York City.

Needless to say, many women were disturbed by it. As Jane Caputi, the feminist author, wrote in a 1993 essay, “American Psychos: The Serial Killer in Contemporary Fiction,” Dr. Stade was normalizing violence against women and made it seem mainstream. She called “Confessions” a “profoundly misogynist novel” and classified it as serial-killer fiction.

Reviews were mixed. The Washington Post said the writing brought to mind Nabokov, while Kirkus Review called it “interminably sophomoric.” Most praised the novel for its humor and the urgency of its writing, but many also felt that Dr. Stade had lost control of the narrative and veered into melodrama.

“What begins in farce ends in cruelty,” John Leonard of The New York Times wrote in his review. Dr. Stade, he said, “would seem to be a moralist who gave up and walked away from his own book because it was turning out to be worse than he thought, brilliant but unmanageable, psychopathological. I walk away from his book impressed but queasy.”

Dr. Stade was born George Gustave Comins on Nov. 25, 1933, in Manhattan to George Comins, a Greek immigrant who came to the United States in 1913 and worked as a mechanic, and Eva (Aaronsen) Comins, a Swedish immigrant who arrived in 1922. The father abandoned the family when George was a baby.

With jobs so hard to find during the Depression, his mother and her close friend, Kurt Stade, who had come to New York from Germany in 1924, moved with George to Sweden, where Eva had a large extended family.

In 1939, on the eve of World War II, the three moved back to New York. George’s mother and Kurt Stade opened a beauty salon on West 96th Street in Manhattan and married in 1941. George’s surname was legally changed to Stade in 1945; his daughter said it was not clear if he had officially been adopted.

George spent most of the rest of his life on the Upper West Side. As a teenager, he worked in construction, formed a street gang and attended the now defunct Haaren High School. He went to the City College of New York for a year, but his mother, worried that he was hanging out with the wrong crowd, urged him to transfer to St. Lawrence University in upstate New York. He graduated in 1955 with a degree in English.

While at St. Lawrence, he met Dorothy Fletcher, whom he married in 1956 and with whom he had four children. She died in 2013. Shortly thereafter, he moved to Silver Spring to be near his daughters, Nancy and Kirsten Stade. In addition to them, he is survived by two sons, Bjorn and Eric, and three grandchildren.

Dr. Stade received his master’s degree in English in 1958 and his doctorate in English in 1965, both from Columbia. He taught there for the rest of his academic career.

The Society of Columbia Graduates awarded him the Great Teacher Award in 1996, citing his work writing book reviews for The Times and editing the Columbia Essays on Modern Writers. He also contributed to Partisan Review, The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Nation and The New Republic.

In addition, he was the consulting editorial director of Barnes & Noble Classics and editor in chief of Scribner’s British Writers and European Writers series.

In one of his last lectures, he returned to a favorite genre, horror fiction, and noted its ability to stimulate readers to imagine what is forbidden in real life. The most rewarding writers, he said, are those who understand “that where there are taboos, there is an itch to violate them.”

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