Remembering Ken Newton

Abstract

Way back, with the onset of early male-pattern baldness but before the arrival of middle-age spread, I applied to Dundee University to do a PhD on George Eliot, and happily received a reply from the director of postgraduate studies that my proposed thesis (on Eliot and German Romanticism) would be supervised by Dr. Ken Newton. I’d read George Eliot: Romantic Humanist so was looking forward to working with him. For the next year, while I was resident in Dundee, we would discuss George Eliot, Yeats, Joyce, George Eliot, Goethe’s Faust, Romantic atheism, Victorian science and pseudoscience, George Eliot, nineteenth-century exegesis, and George Eliot. Hardly a surprising revelation in the pages of George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies, and Lewes got a sizable look-in as well, but it was always good to listen to Ken’s take on things. He was able to pinpoint matters in an idiosyncratic way—Philip Wakem, for instance, became an unsuccessful contestant on the ITV program, Blind Date (Maggie Tulliver’s attitude being, “I like him, but I don’t fancy him”)—while clearly “very deep with German writers” as Twentieth-Century Literary Theory: A Reader showed.After about a year-and-a-half toiling through Eliot and Romanticism, I admitted to Ken that I was more interested in exploring an idea associated with Daniel Deronda—that of the golem—and most of my recent research had been in that area, and I thought there would be more benefit in pursuing it further. He was enthusiastic: he pointed me to his own article, “Daniel Deronda and Circumcision.” As if I didn’t already know! What I really appreciated about Ken was the way he encouraged this—gave me the freedom to explore ideas and trains of thought, even if that meant wandering down the occasional pathless path. We went on to collaborate on George Eliot, Judaism and the Novels, a back-and-forth—in the days before e-mail was in common use—that was both rigorous and fun. I looked forward to the bang of a large envelope through the letter box because it meant being able to scribble notes on one of Ken’s sections, or incorporating his scribbled notes into one of mine. Ken generously took on the legwork of approaching publishers, and wasn’t above the mundanity of doing the index.I have some things to remember Ken—several books by and from him. And a particular memory: during my PhD viva, with the discussion ranging this way and that, the internal examiner became embroiled in an exchange with my external examiner—a bloke by the name of Baker whom Ken had suggested as external due to his expertise on George Eliot and Judaism (I often wonder what happened to him)—over myth criticism in the nineteenth century. The exchange went on for some time. I had little to do but sit back and listen, and looked over at Ken, who was sitting relaxed and insouciant, as if to ask, “What am I supposed to do?” He shot back a grin of extreme merriment to let me know, “Not a clue! Just go with it.”Cheers, too, to Ken for the introduction to Professor William Baker; and to Bill for dedicating an issue of the journal to K. M. Newton, a cool dude on the silvery Tay.I first met Ken in 1995 at a conference on “George Eliot and Europe” at the University of Warwick, which I helped to organize. Speakers had been arranged by invitation and Ken was not among them, but when people started registering to attend, I recognized him as the author of the 1991 Longman’s Critical Reader and was pleased to know he was coming. During a tour of George Eliot Country that was part of the program, he quietly let me know that, if there were a space, he had brought a paper with him that he would be happy to deliver. This was characteristically helpful and unassuming of him, and I still regret that I did not find a way of inserting him into our very full program. He did not appear to bear a grudge and clearly enjoyed getting to know other international George Eliot scholars who were attending. It was a pleasure to talk to him at that conference and at the others that followed in the next quarter of a century, particularly those one-day London conferences at Senate House organized by Barbara Hardy in her final years. Ken was always prepared to make the long journey from Dundee and play a major part in the proceedings, and I also recall many a stimulating discussion with him in the informal fringes of those conferences. As one of the editors of the George Eliot Review, I was grateful for his cheerful readiness to undertake book reviews and offer articles for publication, and he always delivered on time. We were able to publish his final article last year, which was his planned introduction to the panel discussion he was to lead at the Leicester Bicentenary Conference in July 2019 before he was laid low by a stroke a few weeks before it began. The title of this piece, “Cervantes, George Eliot, and Milan Kundera’s The Art of the Novel,” is a good illustration of his wide-ranging approach to the novelist and the kind of erudition he would bring to bear on her work as he argued for her continuing relevance to contemporary culture. George Eliot has lost a forceful and eloquent champion, and the world of George Eliot studies an intellectually adventurous and stimulating colleague. He will be widely missed.Ken was a much-valued colleague at the University of Dundee, where I held my first full-time academic position, and I immediately warmed to our common connections as University of Glasgow graduates and devotees of George Eliot. I have many fond memories of Ken from my time at Dundee, and in particular our frequent chats in his office, where he would always greet me with his distinctive wry smile and good conversation, which blended his passions for literature and theory with amusing pragmatic professional tips (like “salami slicing” my mountain of marking, to do a little at a time and make it manageable). I still picture him at his large desk, covered in several towering piles of miscellaneous books, and prominently featuring a wood carving of the word “Professor” done (as I recall) by his son. He was always a kind, benevolent, and pragmatic senior colleague, which was especially valuable in a challenging departmental culture for junior academics. As a leading scholar of literary theory and George Eliot, Ken was scrupulous and perceptive, especially driven to make complex abstract ideas accessible. But, above all, his work demonstrates Eliot’s continuing and pressing relevance, which seems to me to be the main driving force behind his career, and which is powerfully evident right up to his later works: Modernizing George Eliot: The Writer as Artist, Intellectual, Proto-Modernist, Cultural Critic (2016) and George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century: Literature, Philosophy, Politics (2018).Ken was a uniquely dependable presence in the Department of English at the University of Dundee. He was an old-school professor, which is to say that he believed in coming into work rather than adopting the absentee delegate-to- facilitate approach of trendier line managers. When seen outside his office, Ken was usually carrying a library book inside a scrupulously reused plastic bag. He walked and spoke softly, but he kept a very keen eye on departmental life and his interventions in department meetings—prefaced by a characteristically extended “aye,” and punctuated by very measured pauses—were wry, skeptical, and not infrequently scathing dismissals of any pointless innovation, ill-considered reform, or ill-conceived precedent. Ken’s belief in critical pluralism meant that he was happy to look at Eliot’s writing through almost any eyes. Readers of the George Eliot–George Henry Lewes Studies might appreciate extracts from Ken’s side of an e-mail dialogue, which ran over several years around George Eliot, Byron, and Ken’s unexpectedly vituperative view of In Our Time (a live BBC Radio 4 discussion program on the history of ideas in science and culture, hosted by Melvyn Bragg).2012: I woke up this morning to find you famously on Melvyn’s show! … It must be unnerving with him constantly butting in, generally to little effect. Pity you didn’t get much of an opportunity to say more on Childe Harold [Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812) by Lord Byron]. Though I always listen to the programme, it’s frustrating that experts are assembled and are usually asked to provide only basic information like biographical facts or plot summary. However, it’s always more fun to listen to when someone one knows is on it. Hope all’s well with you. Ken2012: You’re right that the Byronic as represented in Spanish Gypsy is too narrow and negative but I don’t think it represents her final position on him. I think she’s critiquing only an aspect of the Byronic that influenced nihilistic thinking, Schopenhauer etc. She and Byron are pretty close intellectually and modern in sensibility despite temperamental differences. Her enthusiasm for Heine shows an indirect link with Byron since what she admires is his humour, wit and “love of freedom.” She would surely have been aware of the Hebrew Melodies [Byron’s collection of lyrics from Jewish culture, published in 1815]—which I haven’t read—but aren’t they supportive of Jewish nationhood, and Byron is pretty pervasive in Deronda, Gwendolen inspired by his grand-niece, Deronda himself embodying a kind of Byronic alienation which is compared explicitly to Byron’s sensitivity about his deformed foot—one might even see a connection between Deronda going off to nation build in Palestine and Byron’s Greek venture—while Hans Meyrick shows the mocking, ironic and sceptical side of Byron and the princess the rebellious and egotistic side. Too much is made of her comment that he’s “the most vulgar minded genius” in literature as its context seems to be the scandal of his affair with his sister coming to light and she accuses him of the “desecration of family ties.” That was in 1869 but he still returns in Deronda in various forms. Maybe I should have spelled some of that out more in the book.2013: I’m attaching this article that’s recently appeared [K. M. Newton, Textual Practice (2013): “The Otherness of George Eliot,” Textual Practice, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2013.840115] because it attempts to give a more balanced picture of the relation between Byron and GE than comes across in my discussion of him in the essay on The Spanish Gypsy. You don’t need to plough through the whole thing, the relevant material is on pp. 18–19. If you can think of anything else I should have said you can let me know.2013: Glad you liked the essay. What I’ve been doing in my recent writing on GE is to focus a lot more on close reading and I was pleased that that seemed to come across. There are so many bad readers of her out there and it’s fun to try to expose that. It’s mainly due to her being read with procrustean preconceptions. I expect you also encounter that with Byron! … Like you I used to print things out rather than read the screen but since I got a laptop, I’ve become corrupted though still resisting the Kindle of course.2018: You came into my mind today after listening to In Our Time on Middlemarch. Bragg is totally useless when faced with a literary topic, asking crass, ignorant, and simple-minded questions and tends to reduce the participants to his asinine level. At the end of the programme he had made me doubt whether it was worth reading as he made it sound like one of the most boring novels ever written. Hope you missed it. His literature programmes should come with a health warning. But hope everything is good with you. KenOne of the things I remember with great affection was that Ken still taught from his student copy of Middlemarch. It was a densely annotated, disintegrating paperback, which he used to hold up for tutorial groups to laugh at. He explained that when he was a student, he used to put a vertical line in the margin against any passage that seemed particularly significant; as he grew older, he realized that the vertical lines were slowly joining up to form continuous lines along the margin of every page. This showed, he used to joke, that every paragraph of Middlemarch was significant, and it was an inexhaustible novel to teach. His love of Eliot and his scholarship will live on. His dry humor and his kindness as a teacher and a colleague will be much missed.I knew Ken Newton for half a century or more, although for most of that time only occasionally, conversationally and, usually, conferentially.At Edinburgh in the sixties, he a postgraduate and I an “assistant lecturer” (academic frogspawn) he had, for me and others alongside me, a lasting effect. Ken was, quite simply, ahead of his time.Tremors of theory to come had been forecast by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in The Nature of Narrative (1966). Ken was already into Jakobson and Lacan. His research topic was George Eliot. But not the Eliot of W. J. Harvey or Barbara Hardy (excellent critics though they were). He saw her as a vessel richly laden with ideas.Insofar as the English department on the seventh and eighth floor of the David Hume Tower (since nominally decontaminated as 48A George Square) had a collective idea structure, it was unstrenuous Leavisism. Literature was life-affirming.Ken at this stage of his career was the fragment of grit, not the eventual pearl, in intellectual company. I recall a reading party (they still existed) in Angus, in 1968: évenéments everywhere. There was a seminar on an Elizabethan sonnet by Ken Newton in his dominie-like (even then) quiet Scottish speech outlined at length what, looking back a decade later (after having attended Frank Kermode’s seminars at UCL) I could see as a structuralist reading of the poem.In classic T. C. Kuhn mode, the departmental old guard, young me among them, ridiculed his preposterous exposition. We were alarmed. Time proved Ken a thinker of the future. Us vieux jeu.He was a pioneer. The books, articles, and interviews that followed continued the furrow he had begun at Edinburgh University, as a late child of its enlightenment. I personally was always able to read theory, take it on board, but not speak or write it. I have the same problem with French.But Ken I found always—more Jonathan Culler than Foucault—accessible. When he took over as chair at Dundee’s English Department, he must privately have felt a sense of vindication. But he was not by nature demonstrative—more Brecht’s drip of water that wears away the rock of prejudice than dynamite. He once told me (on one of his stayovers in my London home) that he liked to write at night, with earphones so as not to disturb the family, listening to heavy metal rock. He had a scholarly interest in punk, I recall. I gather from obituaries that his taste latterly moved toward rap. I feel for his eardrums.Ken was responsible for the one book I have written that I can count as a best seller: Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (1996). At one of our conference meetings he told me a conundrum he had been wrestling with: How could Daniel Deronda not know he was Jewish if, as the novel suggested, he had undergone a bris? Ken’s wife Catriona (Cate) was a librarian and had done what would now (not then) be known as an internet search for him. He’d discovered that circumcision was much more common among upper-class Victorians than popularly believed.I used the question as a chapter and starting point in my book of Victorian literary puzzles, with due acknowledgment. Ken responded with a lead, think-piece, article in Essays in Criticism commending my close reading ability but lamenting my woeful lack of higher critical thought. Like everything about him, it was done with courtesy.His last book, George Eliot for the Twenty-First Century, completed the circle begun with his first, George Eliot: Romantic Humanist. In between those two volumes he did more than most to advance the intellectual refinement of his profession. It was lucky to have him. I was lucky to know him.