Bloomsbury (2023) p/b 350pp £24.99 (ISBN 9781350295827)
Dover’s autobiographical Marginal Comment, rejected by Oxford and published by Duckworth in 1994, was largely greeted with horror. Presidents of Oxford colleges do not usually confess to a desire to kill their colleagues, as he had Trevor Aston, let alone talk about their sex lives. But D. was an ‘emotionally guarded’ man of brutal and rather embarrassing honesty who, as a historian, felt his only duty was to tell the truth as he saw and remembered it. What otherwise was the point of writing an account of his life?
But the air of cold objectivity that he bought to his task, without any concern whether it was to his credit or discredit (especially the Trevor Aston incident), left most of his reviewers struggling to make sense of the man, and for the most part they were not impressed. D. seemed to be expecting it: ‘Some of the data which I have selected as important determinants of my life will seem to the reader ridiculous, embarrassing, contemptible, or disgusting. Some readers may indeed decide that I am a lunatic. If so they may still find something of historical and sociological interest in the process by which a lunatic was so often invested (by election) with honours and responsibilities.’ One can understand why some readers thought that Dover was out to shock. The truth sometimes does.
It has been a great pleasure rereading his autobiography nearly 20 years on. Edited by Stephen Halliwell, a colleague of Dover’s at St Andrews, and Christopher Stray, an expert on the history of classical education and scholarship, it makes important and enlightening additions to the original text, which had already received a light editing in the reprint of 1995. Here D.’s text, as well as being further corrected in a number of places, now features e.g. copious footnotes, derived from D.’s and other people’s reflections on the autobiography, provides background knowledge which D. assumed others would have known, together with cross-references to significant details within the book. The new Introduction puts Dover’s autobiography in brief context (family background, other classical autobiographies, his narrative strategy ‘as a resolute empiricist’) before ranging widely over the responses that the book received.
One note is of special significance—a letter Dover received a few months after publication from his very old friend Donald Russell, which Russell later developed in his British Academy obituary co-authored with Halliwell (https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/1470/11_06-Kenneth_Dover…). In the letter, Russell admitted that he was saddened that the book ‘was not really “you” or worthy of you’ ... ‘the qualities your friends love in you’—his humane and sympathetic character—were simply not evident. Russell was spot-on. But D. the historian made it clear that his job was to report as accurately as possible on what he had said, done, written, thought and felt (he kept constant notes about his feelings ‘on matters that deeply affected’ him): it was up to others, not himself, to judge what they made of him.
On re-reading the autobiography, what struck this reviewer was D.’s extraordinary capacity for hard work, extreme conscientiousness in his dealings with pupils and colleagues (including Aston over some nine years), total dedication to teaching and administration (he found great pleasure in being faced with and trying to solve problems) and his very happy married life, as well as a capacity for sharp and amusing observations. During the Sir Anthony Blunt affair (should he, a Russian spy, be sacked from the British Academy?), D. as president was invited by some Fellows to ask him to resign. D. comments ‘it went against the grain for me to ask a man if he would be so good as to consider the comfort of his executioners’. On the architect James Stirling he observes ‘He was a designer of very large building-like objects which elicited admiring cries from those (including me) who did not have to work in them and cries of another kind from those who did’.
But, as with any autobiography, especially one as controversial, one will never know what D. left out, or the other side of his version of the story. One therefore looks keenly forward to reading Halliwell and Stray’s accompanying collection of essays Scholarship and Controversy: Centenary Essays on the Life and Work of Sir Kenneth Dover (Bloomsbury 2023)
Peter Jones
MARGINAL COMMENT: A Memoir Revisited
Bloomsbury (2023) p/b 350pp £24.99 (ISBN 9781350295827)
Dover’s autobiographical Marginal Comment, rejected by Oxford and published by Duckworth in 1994, was largely greeted with horror. Presidents of Oxford colleges do not usually confess to a desire to kill their colleagues, as he had Trevor Aston, let alone talk about their sex lives. But D. was an ‘emotionally guarded’ man of brutal and rather embarrassing honesty who, as a historian, felt his only duty was to tell the truth as he saw and remembered it. What otherwise was the point of writing an account of his life?
But the air of cold objectivity that he bought to his task, without any concern whether it was to his credit or discredit (especially the Trevor Aston incident), left most of his reviewers struggling to make sense of the man, and for the most part they were not impressed. D. seemed to be expecting it: ‘Some of the data which I have selected as important determinants of my life will seem to the reader ridiculous, embarrassing, contemptible, or disgusting. Some readers may indeed decide that I am a lunatic. If so they may still find something of historical and sociological interest in the process by which a lunatic was so often invested (by election) with honours and responsibilities.’ One can understand why some readers thought that Dover was out to shock. The truth sometimes does.
It has been a great pleasure rereading his autobiography nearly 20 years on. Edited by Stephen Halliwell, a colleague of Dover’s at St Andrews, and Christopher Stray, an expert on the history of classical education and scholarship, it makes important and enlightening additions to the original text, which had already received a light editing in the reprint of 1995. Here D.’s text, as well as being further corrected in a number of places, now features e.g. copious footnotes, derived from D.’s and other people’s reflections on the autobiography, provides background knowledge which D. assumed others would have known, together with cross-references to significant details within the book. The new Introduction puts Dover’s autobiography in brief context (family background, other classical autobiographies, his narrative strategy ‘as a resolute empiricist’) before ranging widely over the responses that the book received.
One note is of special significance—a letter Dover received a few months after publication from his very old friend Donald Russell, which Russell later developed in his British Academy obituary co-authored with Halliwell (https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/documents/1470/11_06-Kenneth_Dover…). In the letter, Russell admitted that he was saddened that the book ‘was not really “you” or worthy of you’ ... ‘the qualities your friends love in you’—his humane and sympathetic character—were simply not evident. Russell was spot-on. But D. the historian made it clear that his job was to report as accurately as possible on what he had said, done, written, thought and felt (he kept constant notes about his feelings ‘on matters that deeply affected’ him): it was up to others, not himself, to judge what they made of him.
On re-reading the autobiography, what struck this reviewer was D.’s extraordinary capacity for hard work, extreme conscientiousness in his dealings with pupils and colleagues (including Aston over some nine years), total dedication to teaching and administration (he found great pleasure in being faced with and trying to solve problems) and his very happy married life, as well as a capacity for sharp and amusing observations. During the Sir Anthony Blunt affair (should he, a Russian spy, be sacked from the British Academy?), D. as president was invited by some Fellows to ask him to resign. D. comments ‘it went against the grain for me to ask a man if he would be so good as to consider the comfort of his executioners’. On the architect James Stirling he observes ‘He was a designer of very large building-like objects which elicited admiring cries from those (including me) who did not have to work in them and cries of another kind from those who did’.
But, as with any autobiography, especially one as controversial, one will never know what D. left out, or the other side of his version of the story. One therefore looks keenly forward to reading Halliwell and Stray’s accompanying collection of essays Scholarship and Controversy: Centenary Essays on the Life and Work of Sir Kenneth Dover (Bloomsbury 2023)
Peter Jones