John Basinger, an actor and college professor believed to be the only person to have memorized all 12 books of John Milton's epic poem “Paradise Lost” (a feat he turned into a one-man show that inspired research into how memory works) died May 29 in Brookings, S.D. He was 92 years old.
His death, in a hospice, was due to complications from pneumonia, said his wife, film historian Jeanine Basinger.
Throughout his life, Mr. Basinger (pronounced BAY singer) engaged in activities that some would have dismissed as fanciful. When he was young, he walked from New York to San Francisco. She moved to Kenya on a whim and learned to speak fluent Swahili after spending five years teaching at a rural children's school.
Perhaps most unlikely, he became a musician with the National Theater of the Deaf. His own hearing was not affected, but he was fluent in sign language and spent decades performing, writing and helping run the company. He also taught drama, speech, and sign language in Norwich, Connecticut, at Mohegan Community College (now part of Connecticut State Community College).
But none of Basinger's exploits received the kind of attention she received for memorizing “Paradise Lost.” The idea came to him in 1993, after he retired from teaching.
He began carrying a copy of the poem to the gym and developed a routine: He would memorize seven new lines on the exercise bike and, while lifting weights, review the last 14 lines he had studied, emerging with a sweaty mastery of 21 lines of verse.
The 17th-century poem, which deals with the biblical narrative of the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve and the promise of redemption through Christ, consists of 10,565 lines, or more than 60,000 words in 12 books.
“I knew I wanted to make something of size and substance, perhaps not unlike Milton himself,” Basinger said in a short documentary about her effort, “Thus Spoke John” (2008), directed by Andreas Burgess. “What was time for me? It was a gift.”
Mr. Basinger convinced his wife to listen to him practice; in return, he rubbed her feet while he did so. In the documentary, she recalled hearing him intone the lines “All night long, the fearless angel unchased / Across the sky in Champain” about 50 times.
“Paradise Lost” is terribly dense. The first sentence has six lines of prepositional phrases and subordinate clauses before a verb appears. But Basinger aimed to show that Milton's masterpiece was compelling and dramatic. In December 2001, after eight years and 10 months of practice, he gave a marathon three-day performance at a theater in Norwich.
“Knowledge forbidden?” Mr. Basinger asked as Satan, laughing in disbelief, during the show. “Can it be a sin to know?”
The documentary called it “the first and probably the last performance of its kind.”
But over the years, Basinger performed “Paradise Lost” from start to finish at least two more times. For a time, he also read excerpts every Sunday at a performing arts space in Middletown, Connecticut, where he lived.
Speaking to The Hartford Courant, he called his project a “12-step Alzheimer's program.” In 2010, an article in Memory magazine agreed. Wesleyan University psychologist and neuroscientist John Seamon and two co-authors, Paawan Punjabi and Emily Busch, argued that while Basinger had demonstrated “virtuosity in memory,” her story suggested that “exceptional memorizers” “are made, not born, and that cognitive expertise can be demonstrated even in late adulthood.”
The academic article inspired stories in New York magazine and The Guardian. Mr. Basinger told Connecticut Magazine: “I am proof that the average person can do a lot if they put their mind to it.”
John Basinger was born Peter Reese on May 10, 1934 in a Salvation Army hospital in Chicago. His mother, Marguerite Reese, was a single German immigrant who worked various jobs; He never knew his father's identity.
He grew up in foster care before being adopted at age 13 by a couple in Mountain Lake, Minnesota. His adoptive parents, Harvey Basinger, a doctor, and Marie (Enns) Basinger, renamed him John Peter Basinger.
John graduated in Biology and Mathematics from Bluffton College (now University) in Ohio in 1956. In the mid-1960s, after his time in Kenya, he received a master's degree in teaching from Wesleyan.
Around the same time, the university held the first public performance of the National Theater for the Deaf. Mr. Basinger had heard that the group was trying to figure out how to use moving sculptures to replace sound; found a way to turn them into instruments that produced music for the audience with auditory and visual effects for deaf theatergoers. He then joined the company and remained a core member for decades.
He also had a supporting role in the acclaimed 1986 film “Children of a Lesser God,” set in a school for the deaf, and starred in a one-man film adaptation of “King Lear” called “The King” in 2012.
Mr. Basinger married Jeanine Deyling in 1967. In addition to her, he is survived by his daughter, Savannah Jahrling, and a granddaughter. The Basingers left Connecticut and moved to South Dakota several years ago.
Although celebrated for his supposedly extraordinary memory, Basinger once forgot to show up for an interview with a journalist for a story about his memory.
“I don't have a photographic memory,” he told the news website CT Insider. While memorization strengthened his mind, he said, the predominant feeling was having “all this in my head.”
Each “Paradise Lost” book was like a “Gothic cathedral,” he said, that you could enter by closing your eyes.
“I'll tell you,” he added, “it's very useful at the dentist.”
