For the Defense: The Life of Hugh Winder Nibley

Boyd Petersen, Hugh Nibley's biographer, is also his son-in-law. And he's my friend. This past August, I e-mailed Boyd, asking for some help on an assignment I was preparing for my freshman writing class at BYU. I wanted to send my students on a sort of footnote scavenger hunt in the Harold B. Lee Library. Their job would be to take a few well-annotated pages from any book and check the actual sources to see how the book's author had used or abused those sources. Could he recommend any books or articles? Boyd wrote back, "I have a couple of suggestions. One, [Hugh's] talk 'Leaders to Managers: The Fatal Shift' has a couple of misrepresented quotes in it from Brigham Young." Boyd has always spoken his mind, but his suggestion surprised me. I'd heard that Nibley sometimes got it wrong, but I never expected to hear it from his son-in-law. Nevertheless, I checked the quotes against the Journal of Discourses, the original source, and sure enough, Boyd was right: His father-in-law got it wrong -- at least that time.

Hugh Nibley: A Consecrated Life, on the other hand, got it right. No hagiography, Nibley's authorized biography is a balanced and thoroughly engrossing tale of Mormonism's gadfly scholar by someone willing to rummage though the closets without losing sight of the spectacular view. Take those Brigham Young quotes, for example. Petersen's book explains how errors like that could creep in. According to Gordon Thomasson, Nibley's graduate research assistant, they were once in the "cage" of the Church Historian's office studying the original volumes of Brigham Young's manuscript, filling out a 3x5 note card anytime they found something interesting. To avoid the possibility that A. William Lund, senior assistant church historian, might confiscate any of their notes, Nibley asked Thomasson to take "accurate but indecipherable word for word notes." Thomasson, in turn, suggested that they use the "Spanish equivalents for English words but writing them using the Greek alphabet." As Petersen explains, that was fine with Hugh because he had "always done his own notes in Gregg shorthand, with assorted Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, or Egyptian notes thrown in." Once again, Petersen balances the account: Lund was only doing his job. Quoting Thomasson, "No one else was going to embarrass the Church by exploiting the Historian's office as Fawn Brodie had done, if Lund had anything to do with it . . . Neither of us enjoyed the subterfuge. That was simply a reality of working there."

If you're a Nibliophile like I am, you've been waiting for this book ever since you read his short autobiographical essay, "An Intellectual Autobiography," published in 1978. Who is this man behind all these essays and books -- half text, half footnotes? What's the real story behind the briefcase he acquired during World War II? Did he really ask Phyllis to marry him the first time he met her? And most importantly, is the private man any different from the public one? The answers to the last two questions are no and no. You'll have to read the book to answer the first two.

Organized in alternating chronological and topical chapters, Petersen's book covers Nibley's life and contributions, starting in 1810 in Scotland with Hugh's great-grand parents, James and Jean Nibley and ending with Nibley finally turning over chapters of his last baby, One Eternal Round, to his editor. (Until recently, this 92-year-old scholar and defender of his faith put in three to four hours in his office each week day.) The book's topical chapters cover Nibley's roles as social critic, naturalist, and educator. They tell of his faith and his defense of The Book of Mormon and Pearl of Great Price. They reveal a man as opposed to war and as he is in love with the Temple.

Petersen drew extensively on interviews, private correspondence, journals, and other never-before published materials, in addition to Nibley's large corpus of published writings, to tell the story of this extraordinary man. We read from a letter from Klaus Baer to the Tanners that Nibley's "articles in [the Improvement Era on the Book of Abraham] hit very close to home if you know something about the field." We learn from a letter from Spencer W. Kimball to his wife, Camille, that "we are fortunate to have such men of his scholarly attainments and sweet faith in our University." But best of all, we discover from his correspondence with his son Alex that this very public defender of his faith also bore frequent testimony of its truthfulness in private. For example, quoting Brigham Young, he writes Alex, "'Tell the Saints to get the Spirit of the Lord,' and 'Don't be in a hurry.' On the few occasions when I have been willing to take that advice seriously I have flourished like the green bay tree -- the rest of the time has been a struggle, and no need for it." This man is not the conflicted scholar some have maintained, a man playing mind games with the faithful even as he fought battles in his own mind over his own faith. This man believed what he wrote and wrote what he believed.

Well written and thoroughly researched, Petersen's biography is a must have for anyone struggling to reconcile faith and reason. For Nibliophiles, it should stand at the top of their wish list. (By the way, the book's forward written by Nibley's daughter and Boyd's wife, Zina Nibley Petersen, is alone worth the price of the book. Among the many vignettes of Nibley family life she relates is the one where she remembers -- in high school -- calling herself a "daughter of a false god," in reference to her father's fawning groupies. "I think this is funny," she continues. "I think if I told it to the groupies sitting at Daddy's knees they would not get it.") I think I got it.