Nick Sharp: A Human Singularity

by Charles McGuigan 05.2024

Nicholas Andrew Sharp passed away last month, leaving behind fourteen children, twenty-five grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and Linda, his loving wife of fifty-five years. He also left behind the rest of us, who either knew him personally, or knew of his existence through acts of humanity that echoed from him through those he touched. 

Nick Sharp was friend and mentor, and more like a close relative than many of my closest relatives. I have never met a human being quite like him. Don’t suspect I ever will. The mold he was cast from was shattered the moment he was born.

Nick struck a handsome, devil-may-care pose with a stylish mustache partially concealing a hint of a grin, not mocking or judgmental, but one suggesting, that though uncomfortable at times in the world, he nonetheless loved everything about it, including, and perhaps because of, all its glaring inconsistencies that might cause paralysis in an ordinary man. It was the smile of Voltaire, punctuated at its left corner with a cigarette or a pipe stem. He always wore an Irish flat cap (think “Peaky Binders”), and for many years donned tweed or corduroy jackets. But at certain point, Nick traded in his professorial sport coats and khakis, and replaced them with garments, from neck to ankle, that were jet black. From the rear he could have been Johnny Cash.  

Nick shunned public recognition or celebrity of any kind. I approached him on several occasions, asking if he would allow me to write a profile about him. Each time, he declined.

I have no idea how many people Nick influenced and helped and encouraged and taught over the years—thousands, I’m guessing: His reach was broad and unbiased.

I first met Nick when I was 23 years old and on the eight-year undergraduate plan at VCU, while working the dream job of waiter at Matt’s British Pub on Shockoe Slip. At the time I was dating a woman who had taken a class from Nick. She introduced us, and almost from the moment we met, Nick encouraged me as writer when few others—outside of girlfriends—ever did. 

Even though I never took a class with Nick (they were always filled by the time I got around to registering) he taught me more about life and literature and the art of writing than anyone else I’ve ever known.

For the better part of twenty years, I spent hundreds of hours in Nick’s office on the fourth floor of the Hibbs Building on Shafer Court. It was a windowless room, and the lighting subdued. A desk and chair faced two small armchairs that sandwiched an end table from which sprouted a small lamp with a low wattage light bulb. Behind those chairs there was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase that Nick himself had built, and it was packed with books.  

This room was always thick with smoke, and in the center of Nick’s desk there was a massive green glass ashtray brimming with charred pipe tobacco filings, spent wooden matches, amber-stained pipe cleaners, and cigarette butts curved like comas or quotation marks.

I never made appointments, and if Nick was busy, I’d simply come back another time. When I did gain access though, we would talk for an hour or two, about almost anything.

Nick introduced me to Hegel and Heidegger, Walker Percy and Jim Harrison. He recommended scores of books over the years, every one of which I read. At a point I began making my own recommendations to Nick, from Rick Bass to Amy Hempel, and he would read their books and then we would discuss them.

We often talked about the craft of writing, and even parsed literary wonders like “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, and others that were easier to dissect like Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Space.” 

Along with fiction and philosophy, we also discussed books about religion, history and science, and just about any other subject under the sun. His interest in Christianity tended toward the mystics—Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and, of course, Thomas Merton. Buddhism fascinated him, and Nick swore by the writings of Suzuki. When the craze of the Civil War hit, with the release of Ken Burn’s documentary masterpiece, Nick recommended a book by a man named Michael Shaara. Called “Killer Angels,” it became my favorite book about the turning point in that war—the Battle of Gettysburg. 

Nick loved words and the English language, and was generous with his time and his knowledge, and his advice, which was always sound. He did not trade in empty flattery, yet his criticisms were never harsh or dismissive. They were thoughtful, and always correct.

As we entered the new millennia, every few months I would deliver a new short story to Nick’s office, and within a week or two he would critique what I had written. And I would listen intently to what he had to say, and scribbled notes on a hard copy of the story I had written. He taught me more about writing short fiction than anyone else. 

While I was working on a particularly difficult short story, which would take me more than two years to complete, we spent many of our sessions talking about the nature of love. Here’s what he told me during one of those session: “McGuigan, you want to know what love is. What it really is. It’s wiping s**t from your baby’s ass and not complaining.” He paused for two seconds, and then said: “Particularly when that baby’s thirty-nine years old.”

Nick and Linda had more than their fare share of babies. Five of them were biological, the other nine adopted.  Once, I asked Nick why he and Linda adopted so many kids. He just smiled. “What else should we be doing?” he wanted to know.

Everyone knew the Sharp house at the corner of Belmont and Grove. It was the most active home in the entire Museum District, and sat on raised ground directly across the street from St. Benedict’s School. And on its porch, over on far left hand side, Nick could be found on many afternoons seated with a book on a table, or with a notepad, and pen in hand. I spent as many hours there as I did in Nick’s VCU office. 

On certain Sunday afternoons, my two children and I would often wander over to the Sharp house after a late lunch in Carytown, or a visit to the Virginia Museum. At such times we would frequently enter the Sharp home and congregate in the living room, often with the two latest additions to the household—Rebecca and Ann—stretched out in their respective wheelchairs, sitting beside us. These twins were long and lean, and loved to have their hair stroked, and there was always an abundance of flattened palms available. 

For several years after NORTH of the JAMES began publishing (first as NORTHSIDE magazine) Nick wrote a monthly column called Home Improvements. He would explain how to build things, whether they were bookcases or wheelchair ramps, but these columns were actually carefully constructed essays that would include Nick’s own perceptions about life as it TRULY is, minus any of the sugary decorations that only obfuscate reality.

Nick was a Midwesterner by birth. I remember him telling me about the first time he saw the ocean.   “I’d seen the Great Lakes before,” he said. “But the first time I stood on a beach looking out on the Atlantic, I had what you’d call a panic attack. I couldn’t breathe. My mind raced. I could not get over the immensity of it all.”

Nick graduated from the Shawnee Mission North High School in Johnson County, Kansas, then earned his bachelor’s in English from the University of Kansas. Directly after that he earned a master’s and a doctorate, both in English, from The Ohio State University. For almost fifty years, Nick worked as both an English professor and administrator at VCU. Among other things, he helped create the bachelor of general studies and the master of interdisciplinary studies program at VCU, and he wrote and edited scores of university publications. And he knew Shakespeare inside out, could quote every play and sonnet that the Bard ever wrote. He loved Shakespeare, and, what’s more, he respected him as both a writer and a man.

Though I was never able to take one of his Shakespeare classes, my daughter Catherine did. Nick was Catherine’s godfather, and would later act as her sponsor when she received the sacrament of Confirmation.

On April 27 a funeral service for Nick was held at Saint Benedict Catholic Church. It was a high Mass with plenty of incense and bell-ringing and genuflecting. Nick’s cremated remains were housed in a walnut box that looked for all the world like an antique pipe tobacco humidor. 

Following the funeral Mass for Christian Burial, a reception was held in the cafeteria of St. Benedict’s School. There were hundreds of people gathered there—college professors and colleagues and friends, and an enormous family, spanning the generations. I ran into one of Nick’s sons, whom I had not seen in years. His name’s Nate and he’s significantly taller than Nick was, but his face is the spitting image of his Dad’s. He told me his mom had taken Nick’s remains with her when she went out shopping; it would sit in the passenger seat next to her.

We were waiting in line to the buffet tables laden with an incredible assortment of mouth-watering food prepared by Croaker’s Spot. As we stood there, we chatted some, and then Nick’s son told me this: “My dad knew a lot of people, but he always spoke of you as a good friend.”

I held back tears, and smiled the smile I had learned to make many years ago from my dear friend Nick Sharp.