IN MEMORIAM

Albert David Hutter

Associate Professor of English

Los Angeles

1941—2004

A vivacious raconteur, an ingenious practical joker, award-winning teacher and scholar, engaging colleague and devoted friend and father, Albert Hutter successfully pursued a career in two disciplines, literary criticism—principally of the Victorian period—and psychoanalysis. This second career he followed both as a practicing, licensed analyst and as a psychoanalytic critic of literature and the graphic arts. As if these areas were insufficient challenge, he wrote and published a detective novel and some short fictions as well as working on various television scripts, composed music, and followed his interest in the history of the English police force into scholarly and pedagogic work on detective fictions, with a stint as instructor (on counter-terrorism) at the Interpol Police College, Bramshill, Hampshire, and another as a member of Management Reserve Company 207 for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Typical of the way Hutter integrated scholarly inquiry and practical deed, he wrote a brief piece on the “History of the Management Reserve Unit.”

 

Albert Hutter loved above all to unravel mysteries, to learn how something – a mind, a plot, a film, a mechanism, a technique – worked. His last published piece of criticism is a long study of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White in which Hutter argued that enough clues were available to suggest that the novel’s villain, far from dead (as all other readers had believed), played one last trick to escape the morgue and justice. Similarly, his interest in the history of the police was also an interest in policing – whether it be the FBI’s profiling techniques or some new test of gunpowder residue or the age of ink marks on paper. Recently, his research had turned to another problem combining his literary and psychoanalytic abilities–the mysteries of writer’s block; part of the research for this project involved case histories because a number of his patients were themselves writers.

 

During his undergraduate years at Antioch College (B.A., 1964), Albert Hutter spent a year in Besançon, France, perfecting his accent and oenological skills. Europe continued to beckon, and he took the M.A. at Cambridge (1966) where he was a Woodrow Wilson fellow and studied with Graham Storey. He returned to the United States, completed his Ph.D. at Berkeley (1970) under the direction of the country’s then-leading psychoanalytic critic, Frederick Crews, and joined the Department of English in Los Angeles. Here, he embarked on a second Ph.D. (granted in 1978) at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, where he held a Research Clinical Fellowship for training in psychoanalysis for non-medical scholars and later won the Franz Alexander Prize. The range of his interests appears from his multifarious memberships: Southern California Psychoanalytic Society, American Psychoanalytic Society, Mystery Writers of America, Screen Writers’ Guild.

 

For Albert Hutter, good teaching and an interest in psychoanalysis seem to have had an affinity; he quickly became an admired teacher, particularly of undergraduates, and won the H. L. Eby Award, the special Distinguished Teaching Award for undergraduate teachers, in 1983. He also contributed to the teaching program at the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute, offering courses on object-relations theory and the writing of case histories, as well as leading the clinical case seminar. In the Department of English, his classes ranged from the Detective Novel, where students were thrilled to meet and be addressed by some of the authors–Michael Connelly and Thomas Perry, for instance–whose novels they studied, to the undergraduate courses in Shakespeare, where no one escaped Albert Hutter’s devotion to poetic scansion, and then onward to many courses in the Victorian novel, seminars on Dickens, on the psychological novel and much else. Aside from his quirky interest in scansion, Albert Hutter was for many years an earnest and conscientious–but also demanding–teacher of young critics. He regularly received unsolicited complimentary letters from former students, sometimes many years after graduation, and his colleagues with offices near his can attest to his lengthy hours of consultation and exhortation.

 

Albert Hutter died on Thanksgiving 2004 and no other date could have been less or more appropriate. His beloved and accomplished daughter, Katy, his many friends in the academy and outside it, his students old and new all give thanks for what he so generously and variously gave them. We wish we could have said thank you much longer.

 

 

A. R. Braunmuller