Charles Newman, RIP
A reader recently let me know that Charles Newman — novelist, critic, and founding editor of TriQuarterly magazine — passed away on March 13 at age 67. Newman has been somewhat forgotten in recent years. Just last October, in fact, I noted this exchange in Robert Birnbaum’s interview with Stuart Dybek:
RB: I know TriQuarterly from the Charles Newman and Elliott Anderson days.
SD: I go that far back. Sure. And now Susan Hahn.
RB: Where are they now?
SD: I don’t know. Elliott Anderson ended up in Hawaii, which is not a bad place to end up in, but I’m not sure where Newman is.
As it happens, Newman was teaching, as he had for many years, in the writing program at Washington University in St. Louis. Last spring, the program’s newsletter featured a conversation with Newman in which he discussed growing up outside Chicago; his 10 years at Northwestern; his experiences at the magazine; his tenure as head of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and subsequent experiments in agronomy; and the novel trilogy he left unfinished at the time of his death.
Newman published four books of fiction: New Axis (1966), The Promisekeeper: A Tephramancy (1971), three short novels in the volume There Must Be More Than Death (1976), and White Jazz (1984). His best-known book, however, was The Post-Modern Aura (1985), which divided contemporary novelists into “formalists” and “realists” and lamented the failure of literary fiction to compete in the contemporary cultural marketplace. You can get a sense of Newman’s style (and sense of humor) in this review he wrote for the New York Times in 1988.
His chief distinction was his role in the creation of TriQuarterly. One memorable issue that he edited (together with Alfred Appel) was a festschrift for Vladimir Nabokov on the occasion of Nabokov’s 70th birthday in 1970. Among the contributors were Robert Alter, George Steiner, Simon Karlinksy, the Proffers, Stanley Elkin, Anthony Burgess, John Updike, Alfred Kazin, John Barth, and many others, including Newman himself. (Newman recounts carrying a rolled-up copy of Pale Fire in his pocket through Army basic training.) You might enjoy Nabokov’s written response to this issue, which includes some kind words for Newman’s contribution. (Other contributors, like Steiner, weren’t quite as lucky.)
TriQuarterly had been knocking around Northwestern for years as a student and faculty publication before Newman took the helm. But in Newman’s time it became one of the truly great literary journals of the 20th Century. I just thought it made sense to mark his passing.
Addition 3/24: A New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox appeared on March 22. She describes how Newman’s novels were received: “Critical response was divided, often within a single review. Perhaps this was the point: he succeeded in atomizing even the individual critic, who fractured and flew apart with the effort of interpretation.”
Addition 4/10: Another good obit at LA Times.
March 22nd, 2006 04:25
Thanks for that. I can attest that Newman also wrote very thoughtful and kind rejection notices.
March 23rd, 2006 01:39
I knew Charles through Tri Quarterly’s AD Larry Levy. Chas. enjoyed a good drink and had an aversion to indoor plumbing, thus he would, on any given evening, combine these to the disadvantage of close-by shrubbery.
Thanks for noting his passing
March 23rd, 2006 20:15
Charlie was an icon, one of the strangest and smartest American prose writers since WWII, possibly the last of his kind: formed in suburbia, fed on the Continent, honed by a hatred of this country’s endless pretense (and its cheerful anti-intellectualism). I want him back, his work and voice back. I want his presence made room for. I really, really miss the guy. He was completely himself and completely honorable to the end.
March 25th, 2006 08:41
[...] Charles Newman has died, and Sam Jones is on the case. [...]
March 26th, 2006 00:35
[...] The issue was edited by the novelist and critic Charles Newman, who passed away on March 13. Golden Rule Jones has written an excellent tribute to Newman (from whence the Nabokov notes link was purloined). As Sam notes, in Newman’s own contribution to the Nabokov issue of Triquarterly he wrote of having carried a copy of Pale Fire “pure and scrolled in my Fatigues’ long pocket like a Bowie knife” through Army basic training in Texas. [...]
May 30th, 2006 18:34
Michael Anania called me in Santa Monica at around 11:00 p.m., 1:00 a.m. CST on the 14th or the 15th of March. Charlie died, I said. Michael and I are friends but not of the sort to call past midnight
Birnbaum’s right. Charlie was rough on the shrubbery, but no half so rough as he was on himself. He is missed.
December 20th, 2011 18:41
See also: http://www.bu.edu/agni/essays/print/2011/74-boyers.html