Park Honan: he was adept at sifting through sources to build a picture of the subject

Park Honan, the American-born scholar who has died aged 86, wrote scrupulously researched and often revelatory biographies of major writers across a range of periods; his subjects included Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Matthew Arnold.

He was a “man of letters” of a sort that is increasingly rare: he read widely, avoided “lit crit” jargon and addressed his books as much to the general reader as to the specialist. Honan passionately believed that a writer’s life, family, friends and social background could all shed light on the work. The squabbles over literary theory in British universities held no appeal for him, but he was far from being a stick-in-the-mud. He was a hugely adventurous scholar, whose works included, in 1987, an anthology of Beat poets (themselves highly experimental young men). He was devoted to teaching but had little interest in administration.

Moving to Britain in the late 1960s, Honan built a reputation as one of the leading scholars of Victorian literature . Then, as a professor at Leeds University, he reinvented himself as a Tudor historian, producing acclaimed biographies of Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.

He was a master at ferreting out detail from careful sifting of primary sources. He took between seven and 10 years to complete each biography, often writing all night while holding down academic jobs. Honan’s life of Matthew Arnold , published in 1981, established him as a serious literary biographer; it identified Mary Claude as the real woman with whom Arnold had been in love in Switzerland, the subject of his “Marguerite” poems.

Jane Austen: Her Life, which drew on previously unseen sources, came out in 1987; Kathryn Hughes in The Daily Telegraph wrote that it set “a daunting high-water mark”. Christopher Marlowe, Poet and Spy (2005), revealed for the first time that the gay playwright, unable to support himself through his writing, had become horribly tangled in obligations to his spymasters, which probably led to his murder aged 29.

Hobart Park Honan was born on September 17 1928, in Utica, New York, followed, 20 months later, by his brother William, later culture editor at the New York Times. Their parents were a thoracic surgeon, also called William, who died of a heart attack in 1935, and Annette Neudecker, a Southern belle who had been a school friend of Wallis Simpson. After her husband’s death, Annette rented a small house in Bronxville so that the boys could go to the excellent High School there. In 1946 Park left for Deep Springs, a tiny liberal arts college on a cattle ranch in the California desert, run by its 26 students plus a few teachers.

Park was fascinated by reptiles. “I adored rattlesnakes,” he recalled years later. “They sweetly and fairly warn you if you’re within 50ft of them – though when a horse drew to a quick stop once, I almost fell on a big rattler.”

He took on various jobs at the ranch, including that of garage mechanic, labour commissioner and slaughterer (the students had to slaughter their own meat). “My boots used to be awash in four inches of blood in the slaughterhouse. That helped to make me a pacifist.” After a day repairing the engines of Model A Fords in the garage, Park would read the works of Shakespeare, in the Variorum edition edited by the American scholar Horace Furness. This convinced him to read English instead of Law at the University of Chicago, where he went in 1948.

After graduating, he worked briefly at the Friendship Press in New York. One evening, Park’s brother introduced him to a French girl in a beret. It was Jeannette Colin – “a disturbing girl”, as Park put it. Their marriage in Manhattan in 1952 was a simple ceremony. “We stood for about half an hour in a queue of pregnant Puerto Rican ladies . Our music lasted 30 seconds. Someone lifted a needle from a scratched record, so that Here Comes the Bride stopped in mid-phrase; a clerk mumbled; we said: ‘I do’; and all was over in two minutes.”

_{Park Honan in the 1950s}

Just as the Korean war was ending, Honan was drafted into the US army and, briefly, jailed as a conscientious objector. He spent a few hours in a cell with a forger, a Jehovah’s Witness and a man who had stabbed a postman. A judge agreed that he could serve as a stretcher bearer if needed and he was posted to France. Since under the GI Bill he qualified for a grant to complete his studies wherever he wanted, he decided to do his PhD on Browning at University College London (it was published as Browning’s Characters in 1961).

Returning to America he took teaching jobs, first at Connecticut College then at Brown University, Rhode Island. But when his friend the novelist David Lodge told him about a post as Lecturer at Birmingham University in the UK, Park jumped at the chance. He moved his family to Birmingham in 1968, staying there until 1983, when he was appointed Professor of English and American Literature at Leeds University.

It was at Birmingham that he produced his landmark study of Matthew Arnold and, before that, The Book, the Ring, and the Poet: A Biography of Robert Browning (1974). During the Leeds years, he completed perhaps his most ambitious work, Shakespeare: A Life (1988), which Stanley Wells, the leading British scholar of Shakespeare, considered the best biography in existence.

In his biographical technique, Honan was concerned to build a sense of immediacy or what he termed “presence”. He had a lifelong interest in drama and his work demonstrates a dramatist’s skill at bringing personalities to life. The scene in Christopher Marlowe in which the rakish young playwright is stabbed to death in a Deptford rooming-house is presented in vivid colours.

Among his other publications was Authors’ Lives: On Literary Biography and the Arts of Language (1990). He was one of the founders of the literary journal Novel. At the time of his death, he was half-way through a biography of T S Eliot.

Juliet Gardiner, Honan’s editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, described him as “persistent in his biographies and persistent in his friendships”. Park Honan and his wife had many friends and often entertained at their home in Leeds. Jeannette died in 2009. He is survived by their son and two daughters.

Park Honan, born September 17 1928, died September 27 2014

The idea of a hit squad dispatched into so-called “failing schools” (Report, 13 October) should sound an alarm on a few counts. It signals the continuation of the use of force that engenders fear in urban schools, labelled not as challenging schools or, more pertinently, disadvantaged schools in local areas that usually rank high on the Index of Multiple Deprivation. It wages a propaganda war against teaching staff and multi-agency workers who are working extremely hard to try to combat exceptional social and educational inequalities in school communities that have suffered much from austerity policies. The charge of failure, code-named “inadequate” by Ofsted, is a political ploy to mask the effects in teachers’ classrooms of poverty and deprivation, which should be seen as mitigating circumstances when it comes to exam results, national benchmarks and floor targets.

This is a dangerous social experiment with these disadvantaged schools, overseen by the prime minister and led by authoritarian politicians like Michael Gove and now Nicky Morgan, who is seemingly content to carry on with a deliberate misrepresentation of the social realities of these frontline workers and subject them to intense policy pressures and sanctions, including job losses. More worrying, in the absence of adequate research-informed system support to meet pupils’ academic and social learning needs, is the power allocated to these politicians to shut down these schools, which are then cut adrift from the local authority and reopened as academies with corporate sponsors intent on profit-making and wealth creation. This then paves the way for global edu-businesses to come in and take over the nation’s state school system, which in turn raises serious questions about knowledge control and the control of teachers’ work, not to forget the fate of pupils from poor and deprived family and social backgrounds. The fallout from these vernacular forms of global neoliberal policies will echo down the 21st century, and as history has shown, there are dangerous precedents.
Professor Lori Beckett
The Winifred Mercier professor of teacher education, Leeds Beckett University

• I write as a retired headteacher who had thought that nothing that was proposed by this government could any longer surprise me. However, your front-page news about Cameron’s National Teaching Service has left me astounded by its complete lack of understanding of the ways in which children learn or should be encouraged to learn. In particular, the idea that the new service will introduce “standard punishments for bad behaviour”. No longer any need to treat children as individuals, then? Where are these “behaviour experts” to be recruited from, and if they are so special, why are they not already teaching?

When I was training to be a teacher, and while reading education for a degree, my studies included the writings of Rousseau, Piaget, Pavlov and such more recent icons as Denis Lawton. In other words, a knowledge of child development was considered to be an essential requirement for a teacher. No longer, it would seem.

Lastly, the “regional commissioners” will bring in new policies on “classroom discipline, uniform standards and homework”. I have no problem with the first of these, except that I have always believed that if a teacher can capture the imagination of children in class, behaviour will not be a problem. Perhaps my previous eight years as a policeman helped somewhat. Again, I have never been a fan of school uniform or homework; the best education relies, as ever, on the quality of teaching in the classroom. I have no doubt that I will be considered an idealist by many of your readers.

The type of school envisaged by Cameron is taking us ever backwards to a grey, standard Dotheboys Hall.
Harry Galbraith
Peel, Isle of Man

• As a teacher who retired after 38 years in the classroom, I have been giving some thought to Tristram Hunt’s idea of a “teaching oath” (Martin Rowson’s cartoon, 13 October; Stuart Heritage, G2, 14 October). May I suggest the following:

I swear always to do my best to raise the standard of education for all my pupils so they can achieve their fullest potential. In doing this I shall:
a) Campaign to bring the 3.5 million children out of poverty so that they may be able to focus on learning rather than worrying about their next meal or where they are going to live.
b) Refuse to implement any government policy which has not been rigorously piloted and found to raise educational achievement by independent researchers.
c) Not spend hours going to meetings or training sessions that do nothing to improve my performance as a teacher so that I may stand a chance of being awake, alert and teaching at my most inspirational throughout the day.
d) Care about the wellbeing of all in the school community so that together we can work for the benefit of all, but particularly the children.
e) Allow myself time to think about and develop my subject knowledge and reflect on my practice as a teacher so that I may continue to improve my skills.
f) Not live in fear of Ofsted nor performance-related pay, for they are sticks and carrots I do not need to be a good teacher, for I am happiest when I know my pupils are happy and learning.

I would like to think Mr Hunt would agree with me, but somehow I doubt it!
Richard Stainer
Bradfield St George, Suffolk

• I am old enough to have taught in primary and secondary modern schools in the West Riding in the 1950s. Children often came to school undernourished, and explanations of school absence such as “He’s got no shoes this week” were not uncommon. At least in those days we had an Educational Welfare Service, and shoes and clothing could be provided. I thought all that was long gone. Now I read Louise Tickle’s article (Food, clothes, transport, beds, ovens: the aid schools are giving UK pupils, 14 October). And yet we have the scandalous waste of money that is the free school programme, some of whose bizarre results are mentioned in the same edition (Speed read, 14 October). Do we still have an independent inspectorate? What do they look at?
John Thorley
Milnthorpe, Cumbria

• It is interesting to read about another “teaching guru”, Doug Lemov, tempting aspiring teachers to learn from his experiences (American who wrote the latest classroom bible, 13 October). On the same page is a half-page advertisement for people to train as maths teachers, with a “£25k tax-free” incentive.

Lemov appears to offer little to help stop the 40% of teachers who are currently leaving the profession in their first five years of teaching (costing taxpayers to train more to replace them). He does acknowledge that “teachers soldier on in anonymity, we never honour them”.

Why do so many teachers enter the profession, often with high aspirations of making a real difference, only to burn out within five years? Have public perceptions of what makes a good teacher been unrealistically painted by politicians, Ofsted, and the media?

Parents are told good teachers mark books regularly (weekly), teach inspirational lessons, set homework, analyse pupil data to inform teaching and keep their knowledge up to date. A secondary school history teacher might thus expect to spend over 20 hours marking books and giving feedback, 10 hours preparing lessons (including use of data), on top of a 40-hour week in school. This does not include meetings or parent consultations. A conservative estimate of doing a good job means spending 70 hours per week.

It’s a wonder it takes young teachers five years to realise there is more to life than appeasing Ofsted.
Jenny Page (retired maths teacher)
Newton Poppleford, Devon

I watched the entire House of Commons debate on a motion to recognise a Palestinian state on Monday night, then read your report the next morning. It was as if your reporters were describing a different occasion. In just over 100 lines, you gave 38 lines to the admittedly significant change of heart by Conservative Richard Ottaway; five lines to the anti-recognition sentiments of Conservative Sir Malcolm Rifkind; 17 lines to the largely incoherent speech of an Israel supporter, Conservative MP James Clappison; and 21 to the rather measured words in support of the motion by Jack Straw. What was missing was any reference to the 40 or so passionate speeches by MPs of all parties condemning the decades of injustice, suffering and deaths imposed on the Palestinians by Israel, and calling for the British government to pressure Israel directly rather than make ineffectual statements of mild criticism from time to time. Although your paper presumably went to press before the vote, it was clear from the beginning of the debate that the House was overwhelmingly supportive of statehood for Palestine, and yet you hardly mentioned the arguments in favour, even those made by the proposer Grahame Morris, quoting one short phrase from his speech. As it was, the vote was an overwhelming 274 in favour of the motion and only 12 against, but no one would have guessed that outcome from your coverage of the debate.
Karl Sabbagh
Author, Palestine: A Personal History

• Will the House be equitable and propose a motion that those who support the concept of the Palestinian state recognise the existence and right to exist of the state of Israel?

No other UN member state has to continually argue its right to exist. So will the House demand the unequivocal recognition without further debate of Israel by other UN member states (specifically Arab states)? And will it condemn the terrorist organisation Hamas and promise that only when such organisations are removed from the Palestinian political landscape can Britain recognise the legitimacy of a Palestinian state?
Stephen Spencer Ryde
London

• Having lent credibility to the Palestinian terrorists, British MPs should now be ready to do the same for the Tamils in Sri Lanka, Sikhs in India, Kashmiris in Kashmir, Kurds in northern Iraq, Baluchis and Sindhis in Pakistan and so on.
Randhir Singh Bains
Gants Hill, Essex

Tory MP Richard Ottaway nobly changes his opinion about Israel and admits that the Holocaust had had a “deep impact” on him after the second world war . He doesn’t mention the impact on Palestinian Arabs when Jews changed from victims to aggressors in 1948 and arrived with the armed terrorist group Irgun at their head to eject 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and into exile, where they or their descendants continue to fruitlessly wave their title deeds. It is precisely this kind of one-eyed amnesia from the west that continues to enrage even moderate Arab opinion and is a contributory factor to Middle East terrorism.
David Redshaw
Gravesend

• Patrick Wintour mentions a “carefully constructed Labour foreign policy towards Israel”. If he knows what this policy is perhaps he could enlighten your readers!
Doug Simpson
Todmorden, West Yorkshire

This week the Mipim property fair is in London (Opinion, 14 October). A breeding ground for property developers, investment bankers, landlords and sellout politicians, Mipim represents the celebration of a housing system that puts concerns of profit over people’s right to a decent home. At a time when the UK housing crisis is causing homelessness, driving people out of social housing – such as the E15 mums – and forcing up rents for everyone, London mayor Boris Johnson will be giving Mipim’s opening keynote speech. We feel that no mayor of London should be attending this event and instead support the counter conference and mobilisation that has been organised to defend cities for people rather than profit. It is time to move away from treating houses purely as financial assets to be shuffled around for maximum gain and instead ensure that we provide affordable homes that meet people’s needs.
Jasmine Stone E15 Mums
Natalie Bennett Green party leader
Grahame MorrisMP Labour, Easington
John McDonnell MP Labour, Hayes & Harlington
Jeremy Corbyn MP Labour, Islington North
Cllr Rabina Khan Cabinet member for housing, London borough of Tower Hamlets
David Graeber London School of Economics
Darren Johnson Green party London Assembly member
Dave Wetzel Labour Land Campaign
Rev Paul Nicolson Taxpayers Against Poverty
Alistair Murray Housing Justice
Doug Thorpe Left Unity
Anna Minton Author, Ground Control
Rueben Taylor Radical Housing Network
Eileen Short Defend Council Housing
Pete Kavanagh Unite London and Eastern Region, regional secretary
Paul Kershaw Unite housing workers chair
Heather Kennedy Digs – Hackney Renters
Rachel Haines Southbank Centre Unite branch
Gerry Morrissey Bectu general secretary
Bella Hardwick Save Earls Court Supporters Club
Zaher Aarif Haringey Housing Action Group
Joseph Blake Squash Campaign
Liz Wyatt Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth
Christine Haigh Lambeth Renters
Liliana Dmitrovic People’s Republic of Southwark
Nic Lane Brent Housing Action
Alex Finnie Our West Hendon

• The picture painted by Aditya Chakrabortty is not one which people working to regenerate Britain’s cities and towns would recognise. For 25 years – and this week in the UK for the first time – Mipim has brought together public- and private-sector experts and contributed to the urban renaissance across the UK. The revival of towns and cities ranging from London boroughs to Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool and Leeds is admired around the world, and Mipim is proud to have played a part. Far from lacking in transparency, Mipim welcomes open discussion on all topics, from affordable housing to urban development, from green building to the well-being of all city dwellers. No other forum is so effective as a meeting place for cities and towns, and the listed property companies and pension funds who, by working in partnership, set standards around the world. Perhaps that’s why visitors from Asia and the Americas’ biggest cities travel to Mipim – to learn best practice which they can then use at home. We look forward to Aditya Chakrabortty accepting an invitation to attend Mipim UK this week to see what really goes on.
Peter Rhodes
Reed Midem UK

• Zoe Williams , 13 October) takes up the important point of rich foreigners buying up swaths of property, particularly in London. We spend far too much time worrying about less well-off hard working people form foreign lands coming into our country, rather than rich ones buying property and not properly contributing to the economy. Non-EU people or companies should pay an annual land tax on any freehold or long leasehold property that they acquire. Property is in short supply in Britain and there is not enough for the world to buy here. The tax would be easy to administer, not require a valuation by the hard-pressed district valuer’s office and yield a contribution from people who can easily afford to contribute to the services of this country. Those from abroad who do not want to pay can free up property for us British people.
Neil Spurrier
Twickenham, Middlesex

Sir, As a non-executive director in a primary care trust a few years ago, it became abundantly clear that our 2 per cent budget deficit was nothing compared to the waste that an NHS reform would bring with it. We were just getting to grips with our task and making plans for our predominantly rural patch when structural reform was announced and we were discarded. Waste in the NHS does not stem from within; it stems from the here-today gone-tomorrow nature of the senior government role ascribed to the NHS: one of the biggest employers in the world flits from one personal aggrandisement project to another. The best change ever for the NHS at any one time would be to leave it as it is. Allow proper management to flourish, rather than change management.
Jonathan Duckworth
Nailsworth, Glos

Sir, The NHS is in yet another funding crisis, aggravated by uninformed political interference — and inevitable, too, as experience has shown that medical inflation is about three times that of general inflation. It is not realistic to continue with a comprehensive and free NHS that will bankrupt the country. The choice is between rationing the service or charging the patient, or a combination of these.
Julian Neely
Horsham, W Sussex

Sir, NHS reform is necessary. My disappointment is not with the government but with health service professionals whose response to proposals for change seems restricted to criticism of anything that threatens their vested interests.
John Nairn
Brookmans Park, Herts

Sir, Should we be puzzled to read that David Cameron and George Osborne failed to realise the extent of Andrew Lansley’s plans for reorganising the NHS (“NHS reforms our worst mistake, Tories admit”, Oct 13), when these plans were so huge that they were described by the chief executive of NHS England as “visible from space”? Both prime minister and chancellor need to distance themselves from the damage done to the NHS as the election nears. However, if this means claiming that they did not understand Mr Lansley’s plans, or did not spot what he was doing, they have to accept that they are not fit to govern.
Dr Jan Savage
London E1

Sir, At the moment when one is most likely to need the NHS, retirees such as myself become exempt from National Insurance contributions, part of which is a premium towards a health insurance policy. We need a fair system whereby older people support each other by helping to fund this wonderful service.
Neil Kobish
Barnet, Herts

Sir, Last Friday my wife was admitted to a hospital that is run under a PFI contract. I am an expert on PFI and it was clear that many aspects of facilities management were not being delivered to the standard I would have expected. Whoever is at fault for this — the contractors, administrators or both — the taxpayer is paying for a service they are not receiving.
Tony Clarke
Great Dunmow, Essex

Sir, Targets, intrusive inexpert management and the European working time directive have all contributed to a deterioration in seamless patient care and the training of junior hospital doctors.
Stuart L Stanton
Emeritus Professor of Gynaecology, University of London

Sir, How depressing to read the various versions of “I told you so” from members of the NHS workforce (letters, Oct 14). That such comments were also laced with complaints about pay and sniping at private provision is even more sad. Since elements of the workforce have opposed pretty well all changes to “their” NHS, there will probably be more such letters in future. To blame politicians is a lame excuse. To blame a shortage of money is just laziness. They need to be more creative and adaptive over ideas for change.
Peter Cobb
Tring, Herts

Sir, I was a non-executive director of the former Buckinghamshire Hospital Trust for eight years. Despite all our best efforts and training, I believe that neither myself nor other nonexecutive directors made any impact on decision-making. What we did do was absorb the time and energy of professionals who would have been better off running the hospitals. There are a lot of good things about the NHS and the dedication of staff is one of them. My suggestion is that to save money and move the organisation forwards, a new look at the governance structure is necessary.
Jane Bramwell
Rottingdean, E Sussex

Sir, It is worrying to read of the inconsistencies in care in hospitals (“The good, the bad and the ugly”, Oct 14). In the latest national cancer patient experience survey, 10 per cent of breast cancer patients reported that their doctors talked to them as if they were not there, and 12 per cent stated that their doctor did not deliver their diagnosis sensitively. For those living with secondary breast cancer, which cannot be cured, we know that inconsistencies in care are particularly distressing. We want the best breast cancer care and for secondary breast cancer to be a priority.
Diana Jupp
Director of Services and Campaigns, Breast Cancer Care

Sir, Of all the acknowledged truths about the NHS, that we are short of nurses must stand at the forefront. Training young people to nurse has to be good for society; not just filling nursing posts as at present, but knowing how to look after old and young in the community. It is an investment that will benefit us all.
Dr Alastair Lack
Coombe Bissett, Wilts

Sir, Why should we celebrate the fact that the “NHS is treating more patients than ever before”? (“Protecting the NHS”, leading article, Oct 13). Shouldn’t we wish for fewer patients?
Nicholas Norwell
Newbury, Berks

Sir, Mention of Balfron Tower (letter, Oct 14) reminds me of the importance of these high-rise homes to people in the Fifties. My sister was doing her teacher-training in an East End school and one little girl gave her “news” to the class a day after being moved from substandard accommodation. She said: “We have a lavatory — in a bathroom — which is just for us; me and my mum and dad. And I go to bed in a room which is mine, just for me, and I looked out of the window and all I could see was fairyland.”
Patricia White
Oxford

Sir, The votes here and in Sweden to recognise a Palestinian state are terrifying (“Labour backs call to recognise Palestine”, Oct 14). The Hamas charter is expressly a programme for the destruction of Israel and Jews. Hamas is not a political party seeking a two-state solution and it never has been.
Robert Willer
London EC1

Sir, It seems that a marginal majority of UK MPs (most did not turn up to the vote) support the Palestinian propaganda narrative. How little these MPs understand the Israeli mind. Far from influencing the Israeli government, this will make the Israelis listen less to the British.
Harold Miller
London NW7

Sir, The claim that Palestinian Arabs were the original inhabitants of what is now Israel is not, as Melanie Phillips writes, “historically illiterate” (“Recognising Palestine won’t promote peace”, Oct 13). Thanks to the work of the Israeli historian Benny Morris we can be clear how many of these inhabitants left their land following the 1948 war.
James Davis
London SW15