Richard T. Neuse

February 24, 1931/June 14, 2016

In November of 1947, at the age of sixteen, Richard Neuse first saw the Americas when the ship carrying him, his mother and his three younger sisters sailed into the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia. He later recalled the sight as having been so bleak that he wished more than anything to return to England, despite the prospect of an imminent reunion with his father, who had gone ahead of the family to teach German at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York.

Richard was born on February 24, 1931 in Schlochau, Germany (now Człuchów, Poland), a town that had been annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia with the First Partition of Poland in 1772 and which would be subject to the vicissitudes of geopolitics well into the twentieth century. His parents, Heinrich Kurt and Rose (neé Vickery) Neuse, met when Rose went to Germany as part of the Quaker relief effort following the First World War, during which Kurt had served in the German army. In 1929 they married in Berlin and then moved to Schlochau, where Kurt had secured a teaching position. By 1932 Kurt had to flee Schlochau after having been beaten up and repeatedly threatened by local Nazis. In 1934 the young Neuse family ended up in the Netherlands, just outside Ommen, where German, Dutch and English Quakers had established a school for the primary purpose of educating and sheltering “children of politically persecuted or exiled parents,” a cohort that included a number of Jewish children threatened by the rise of Nazism in Germany.[1]

The International School Eerde, of which Kurt would eventually become director, was housed on a seven-acre estate that included a castle (complete with moat), and nearly 150 children were taught there at its peak when the Second World War began. This was perhaps the most formative period of Richard’s life, both for the idyllic academic community the school provided and its traumatic conclusion. With the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, Kurt was replaced as director of Eerde and had to go into hiding lest he be apprehended as a deserter. The school continued until April 1943, when German forces occupied the estate. At that time, fourteen Jewish students and teachers who had been unable to escape the country before occupation were separated out and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz, an incident that haunted Richard for the rest of his life and informed deeply his ethics and politics. The plight of displaced persons and people struggling under occupation was always foremost in his mind.

Following liberation by Canadian troops in 1945, Kurt, as a German, was expelled from Holland and could not secure a work permit in England, where Rose’s family lived in West Sussex. So he went on to the United States while the rest of the family settled temporarily in Storrington. During this time Richard studied at Leighton Park School in Reading. When he arrived at St. Lawrence University, from which he received his BA in 1950, Richard had a strong background in classics and European philosophy, and was fluent in several languages (he thoroughly enjoyed a good argument in German, Dutch or French, and could hold his own in Spanish and Italian). He then went on to graduate study of literature at Yale, where he wrote a dissertation on The Faerie Queene under the direction of John Pope. Toward completion of his degree, Richard took his first academic position at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, teaching German and English Literature. However, wanting perhaps to break away from the family business of German (Kurt’s younger brother Werner had been teaching in the US since 1927 and was a longtime Professor of German at Middlebury College), Richard took up a position in the English Department at the University of Rhode Island in 1956 after one year at RPI. He was a respected colleague and admired teacher URI until his retirement in 2003.

Richard was erudite and a natural comparatist. There seemed to be no corner of the literary or philosophical worlds, from antiquity to the present, that he didn’t know well—and about which he hadn’t formed some firm opinion. However, this is not to suggest any degree of intellectual rigidity on his part. He came from a rigorous, traditional academic background but possessed a fiercely creative, critical imagination and enjoyed few things more than having one of his students prove him wrong or, better yet, proving himself wrong. His students came to realize quickly that they couldn’t read the same poem twice in his classes, and it was a regular occurrence for him to walk into a seminar room, beaming with delight before demonstrating a completely new approach to a text. Indeed, Harry Berger recalls that Richard “was doing something like New Historicism way before other people were doing it, and that in a field dominated by traditional (pre-New Critical) scholarship; he was doing close reading before his contemporaries knew what that phrase meant. He had great and deep interpretive instincts.” Not only did he shuttle freely among writers of the Renaissance, but reading the scholarship Richard produced throughout his career one gets accustomed to fielding pointed references to more modern writers as well; Joyce, Brecht, Rilke, Gogol, Carlyle, and Wordsworth, to offer a sample.[2] Some of his earliest scholarship to receive notice was on Chaucer.[3]

Richard is most likely remembered by Spenserians for a series of articles he wrote during the 1960s and ’70s, most of which appeared in ELH. Spenserian epithalamia, intertextuality, poetic identity and the pastoral were recurrent concerns in these essays. Two, in particular, are enduring benchmarks of Spenser criticism: one on Book VI as the conclusion to The Faerie Queene and the other concerning the rota Virgilii in Spenser and Milton.[4] Bill Oram, fresh out of graduate school at the time, remembers how these essays “seemed to me then—and still do now—a brilliant combination of deep knowledge, especially classical knowledge, and original, imaginative alertness to language and form. His work on the Epithalamion as a kind of ritual magic and Book VI as an attack on courtesy as it exists in the actual world have been so assimilated by Spenserian scholarship that it’s hard to remember just how new they seemed at the time.”

In addition to these early essays, he wrote on Kidd, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton, and later contributed three items to The Spenser Encyclopedia—“Gardens of Adonis,” “Masque of Cupid,” and “Pastorella”—of which he was personally fond, according to his close friend Jim Rhodes, a former student and emeritus medievalist at Central Connecticut State University.[5] In Rhodes’s assessment, despite the range of literature Richard explored, “Spenser always remained dear to him, and more personal than Chaucer or Dante.” He recalls as well that Richard took particular delight in the meetings of the Porlock Society at Kalamazoo.

That Spenser would be so personally dear says rather a lot, since Richard produced a groundbreaking intertextual study of allegory in Dante and Chaucer in 1991. Chaucer’s Dante: Allegory and Epic Theater in the Canterbury Tales took full advantage of the critical approaches available as a result of the theory boom in order to present a provocative reassessment of the two fourteenth-century poets.[6] At the time this was an innovative approach for medieval scholarship, especially where Dante was concerned, and stood with a select group of new works, according to one reviewer, that were putting “language and desire to the service of rereading, rewriting, and reshaping the Middle Ages.”[7] Chaucer’s engagement with other Trecento writers, Boccaccio not the least, proved a rich vein for his work in subsequent years, but he would regularly loop back through Faerieland to recharge his critical spirit.

His research during his last few years of good health saw him returning to Eerde, with a specific focus on the tragedy of its little community of refugees, and beginning an expansive project on Milton and Spinoza. Tellingly, he also developed a fascination with J.M. Coetzee’s novel, The Childhood of Jesus.[8] Imagine where those three topics overlap, and one might glimpse something of the arc of an intellectual life.

While at Yale, Richard met and married a fellow graduate student, Marjorie (Maggie) Coté, who was studying French literature. Quickly at home in the academic village of Kingston, RI they raised three children: Thomas, Valerie, and Milena (Mia). Maggie then earned a second graduate degree and enjoyed a long career as a psychologist for the State of Rhode Island. Richard couldn’t resist extending jokes about the literary pastoral to life in bucolic Kingston (originally named Little Rest), but he loved the area deeply for its woodlands, wetlands and ocean. He and Maggie were enthusiastic travelers, frequenting northern Europe, the Mediterranean, and Asia, but found something of a second home in Nerja, Spain. His son Tom remembers Richard’s “passion for literature and life in general… . Rich often engaged people about their views on politics, the arts and the course of humanity. He disliked generalities and devoured the details of an argument.” That “engagement” could be quite forthright, even assertive at times, but Richard never lacked a genuine compassion and an earnest desire to know what someone else believed. Thinking back on his father’s character, Tom writes, “Rich met all the challenges of his life, perhaps the greatest of which was caring for my mom … when she started her battle with dementia. I’ll always remember an evening when Mom was overcome by sadness and frustration with her inability to express herself. He came to her at the far end of the room and said to her just the right words to console her.” Maggie died in 2008, and Valerie in 2014. These losses were devastating, yet even in his own eventual decline Richard sustained his love for family and friends, unfailingly rejuvenated by a poem—best if remembered in German—a good chat, and a glass of wine. Tom thrives in Baltimore, Maryland, as does Mia in Portland, Oregon.

Mark Sherman
Rhode Island School of Design

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