Park Honan, who has died aged 86, will be known to posterity chiefly as the American author (co-author in one case) of five outstanding biographies of classic English writers; but to his friends he will also remain one of the most memorable individuals they ever encountered. Even his first name was unforgettable. Park is a common name in Korea, and readers who knew him only from his books often assumed that he was part Korean. In fact it was the surname of his father’s best friend, which he preferred to his other given names, Leonard Hobart.
Park was born in Utica, New York. His father, William, a surgeon who commanded a military field hospital in the first world war, was much older than his mother, Annette (nee Neudecker), and died when Park was seven. Saving his mother tuition fees, Park won a scholarship to Deep Springs, an unconventional college in the Californian desert which prepared a select group of students for life with a combination of academic courses and hard manual work. From there he won another scholarship to Chicago University, which he left with a master’s, and ambitions to be a writer.
In New York, he met Jeannette Colin, a vivacious French Fulbright scholar, and they married in 1952. But he was soon in danger of being sent to prison when the Draft Board rejected his claim to be a conscientious objector, while Jeannette was in France with their young baby and likely to be refused re-entry into the US. It all ended happily, however, when Park accepted the draft in return for non-combatant status and was conveniently posted to south-western France.
He used the grant to which he was entitled after his military service to obtain a PhD at University College London, where as a younger postgraduate student I first met him. I was captivated by his life story, the exotic distinctiveness of his manners and speech, his prolific invention of nicknames for everyone he knew, and his gift for hyperbole in expressing likes and dislikes. The easy-going style of supervision at UCL suited him better than regimented American graduate programmes, and he found time to write prose fiction and perform in his own plays, as well as a completing a thesis on the poetry of Robert Browning.
Back in the US, Park taught for some years at Connecticut College and later Brown University, Rhode Island, but in 1968, he returned with his family to live permanently in Britain, as lecturer, senior lecturer and eventually reader in the English department at Birmingham University, and from 1984 as professor of English and American literature at the University of Leeds.
Park’s first book was a revised version of his thesis, published by Yale in 1961 as Browning’s Characters, a close analytical study of the dramatic monologues, focused on details as minute as punctuation, and for a time he applied a similar critical method to prose fiction. But when his friend William Irving, a distinguished Browning scholar, died leaving an unfinished biography of the poet and a wish that Park should complete it, he accepted the task and brought it to the UK with him. It was published as The Ring, the Book and the Poet in 1974, and it marked a radical change of direction in his work. His frustrated desire to be a published novelist found an outlet in biographical narrative, and helped him to achieve something he called “historical presentness” – the effect, for the reader, of accompanying the biographical subject as she or he moves through time and space.
Surprisingly his was the first comprehensive biography of Arnold to be written, but his next subject, Jane Austen, was a greater challenge, since there were already many biographies in existence. But Park discovered a previously unsuspected cache of Austen family papers, and in Jane Austen: Her Life (1987) explored parts of the novelist’s life that other biographies had neglected: for instance, what she would have learned from her ambitious and adventurous brothers at a time of momentous historical events. This fresh look at “dear Jane” delighted many readers.
But even Park’s admirers doubted the wisdom of his next choice of subject – Shakespeare, first because the Elizabethan period demands quite different research skills from those appropriate to the 19th century, and second because it was generally agreed that there was nothing new to be discovered or said about Shakespeare’s sparsely documented life. Again he triumphed over the doubters by widening the focus of his study to take in all kinds of data about the social, historical, familial and topographical context of the playwright’s life, from which a more rounded portrait than the received one could be inferred. Shakespeare: A Life (1998) was highly praised by well-qualified reviewers and nominated by some as their Book of the Year. The same method was successfully applied in Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy (2005).
Park’s last project, one he had long nourished, was a life of TS Eliot, which had become more feasible with the publication of two volumes of the poet’s letters and the promise of more to come. But with poignant symmetry his distinguished career as biographer, which began with the completion of another scholar’s unfinished book, ended sadly with the interruption of his own work-in-progress by mortal illness.
Jeannette died in 2009. Park is survived by his daughters, Corinna and Natasha, and a son, Matthew.