Remembering the Old Professor: Kenneth Joshua Fielding (2006)

WHEN WORD came from Edinburgh that my honored mentor and beloved friend was soon to pass from this earth, I found empathy with Walt Whitman who waited dutifully each day at the docks of New York to learn if Carlyle had passed. I now fully understood Whitman's trauma. A sense of helplessness pervades. wait is excruciating; the news inevitably tragic. Thoughts of time past flicker through pent-up memory - the good times and, yes, the sad times. corporeal life of Kenneth Joshua Fielding, scholar celebrated, has ended. His death is a matter of record; his star now among the heavens. If we pause for just a moment, if we listen ever so silently, we can still hear the plaintive cry of Whitman when the news finally arrived, The Great Man is Dead! Old Professor, as I affectionately called him, struggled to the end. He seemed to have heeded in those closing days my oft-repeated injunction of the poet that he was not to go gentle into that goodnight. Eheu! I now feel guilty for urging this of him. One ought to be allowed to die in peace, free of moral imperative. Ah, me!For those of us who knew the Old Professor intimately, and for those of you who knew K J. Fielding professionally, we must surely agree: he was a scholar of extraordinary talent and dedication. Without his dogged determination to pursue primary texts, without those endlessly stellar footnotes, without those rhapsodic introductions, his enduring and last devotion, Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, would have very quickly been relegated to the ash-heap of convention. Without that same dogged determination, the Carlyle Newsletter would not have seen the light of day, and, thus, the Carlyle Studies Annual in its various iterations would be like a grain of sand lost in wind. Without that continued dogged determination, Carlyle scholarship as we know it would be lost in the fog-bound backalleys of theoretical conundrum. Without . . . the list is endless and hardly needs further specification. To aver that the Old Professor changed the course of how we perceive matters Victorian seems but a lame-laden litotes. His imprint can be found throughout Victorian letters; his legacy confirmed in the numerous books and hundreds of papers and lectures that now represent the lasting archive of his life. He was, as the University of Edinburgh proudly recognized, the Saintsbury Professor of English Literature.Yet to me, driving my sense of obligation here, there was another Old Professor, one not known to the Victorian legions who saw him as a tweed-suited, slightly dyspeptic Dickensian ectype, sitting atop the Devil's Den, David Hume Tower, looking out over God's Grandeur, Arthur's Seat. To be sure, he was an imposing tall, gaunt figure, who seldom tolerated nonsense, who deplored cant, and who on legendary occasion would erupt into Vesuvian flame. This was the KJF most people knew, and many feared. But there was another side to his character, a softness, a quietness, even a discernible humility. He especially liked to sit quietly, eyes dancing with pride, as one of his myriad students, now professors in their own right, launched forth, imperfectly but passionately, on this or that. On occasion, he would interrupt his self-imposed silence to correct an indiscretion or to embellish a pivotal point. As he grew older he seemed to relish even more those periods of silence, sitting sageful over a cup of tea and a scone, leaving it to others to pontificate on the mundane while he dreamed the dream.What I remember most about the Old Professor, at least in the later years, was his polished wit, both in its Renaissance and Modern senses. He was wise, almost to a fault; he was clever, almost without peer. He knew everything worth knowing about Charles Dickens, his first love, and Thomas Carlyle, his second. I once urged him, partly in tease and partly in earnest, to take his knowledge to a British game program called Brain Busters, or some such sappy title, where he would be asked the most minute of minutae on a subject of his choice. …