This is a reissue of the biography originally published in 1988 and often reprinted. It includes a new ‘Afterword’ but at only five pages this addition, with no changes to the body of the work, is not enough to justify calling it a new edition. (Incidentally it is £18 cheaper than the original hardback edition!)
Described by Henry Chadwick as ‘a very splendid book’, Ker's biography has a secure place in the Newman bibliography. The first biography to give equal attention to his dramatic personal life story as well as to his achievements as a thinker and a writer, it was reviewed here soon after its original publication (New Blackfriars 71 (1990) 205–06). The book's focus on Newman himself, on his thoughts and sayings gathered from notebooks, published works and the then recently completed edition of his letters, was identified by the New Blackfriars reviewer (Paul Parvis) as both its strength and its weakness. It is a strength because the student of Newman has in one volume a summa, as it were, of Newman's thoughts about the intellectual and cultural debates in which he was personally and publicly so involved, as well as of his responses to the events of his life from day to day. Ker is wonderfully successful in his aim of allowing the reader to hear, as far as possible, the actual sound of Newman's voice (p, ix). Newman himself, in fact, had as good as demanded this kind of biography: ‘it has ever been a hobby of mine … that a man's life lies in his letters’. What makes it a weakness (again in the eyes of the original New Blackfriars reviewer) is that it does not tell us much about the reactions to Newman of his contemporaries, tells us little beyond their names of the other characters in Newman's life, and contains no serious consideration of the secondary bibliography on Newman's life and thought (substantial in 1988, vast by now).
The ‘Afterword’ begins with some comments about the progress of Newman's cause: the completion of the diocesan investigation, the miracle in Boston that supports his beatification, and the opening of his grave to find no trace of his body. The latter development attracted a lot of media attention: Ker notes a news report of the time which observed that Newman's coffin was covered with ‘mould of a softer texture’ than the clay in which it was buried, indicating that something was added to speed up the process of decomposition and the return of the body to dust, something done ‘in studious and affectionate fulfilment of a desire of Doctor Newman's’.
The bulk of the ‘Afterword’ is devoted to the other issue that continues to encourage speculation, the question of Newman's sexuality. It is only a post-Freudian hermeneutic of suspicion that feels obliged to see a sign of homosexual feelings on Newman's part in his desire to be buried in the same grave as Ambrose St John. The impoverishment of the range of possible friendships between human beings implied in this suspicion is lamentable and Ker rightly argues against it. In fact Newman's desire is complex, originating in his indebtedness to Ambrose St John whose death may have been hastened by the work Newman had asked him to do, in his preference for a simple grave among his colleagues rather than a grand tomb and, most striking of all, in the fact that buried on either side of St John were Joseph Gordon and Edward Caswall. These three were the men Newman described as ‘the life and centre of the Oratory’, faithful friends and supporters during the years of his conversion and his difficulties within the Catholic Church. To be buried among them, literally, seems like a very fitting way to acknowledge what they had been through together.
There is evidence in Newman's diaries of adolescent struggles with a strong heterosexual attraction. In 1840 he wrote a beautiful reflection on ‘the sympathy of a woman's interest’, something that is not, and cannot be, his, ‘yet not the less do I feel the need of it’. The issue is already considered in the body of Ker's biography, as Paul Parvis pointed out, with its concern to speak up the ‘masculine’ side of Newman's character against accusations that his over-sensitivity and effeminacy might also be taken as signs of homosexuality. It might just as easily be argued now (where Freud is as likely to be dismissed as anyone else for what he has to say about homosexuality) that all this indicates that Newman was simply a man in touch with his ‘feminine’. He was, after all, a poet.
John Henry Newman is one of the most intriguing personalities of the nineteenth century and the concern with his sexuality can distract from even more fascinating tensions in him that Ker's book illustrates at length: his daring openness to foreign things while being deeply fearful of them, his longing to be in the future in order to remember his travels rather than simply enjoying them as they happen, the power in his religious convictions that can seem fanatical but from whose implications he did not shrink, his struggle to chart a faithful course between Ultramontanism and liberalism. Newman's thought and Newman cannot be separated: they can only be known and appreciated together. It is the lasting achievement of this biography to have shown this once and for all.
