In Partial Disgrace

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In Partial Disgrace, indeed, though the emphasis should be on that intermediary word — that unstable, pieceworkish, Latinate by one definition and French by another, partial. This is an introduction to a book that is itself an introduction. Charles Hamilton Newman — among the best, and best-neglected, of American authors — had intended to write a cycle of three volumes, each volume containing three books, for a total of nine. But when he died, in 2006 at the age of sixty-eight, all that had been completed was an overture — or just the blueprints for a theater, the scaffold for a proscenium.

Arcadia

Charles Newman was born in 1938 in St. Louis, Missouri, city of the Mississippi, of Harold Brodkey, William S. Burroughs, T. S. Eliot — three eminences who’d left. Newman never had that privilege. His father made the decision for him, moving the family — which stretched back two centuries in St. Louis, to when the town was just “a little village of French and Spanish inhabitants”—to a suburban housing tract north of Chicago, adjacent to a horseradish bottling plant. The prairie, the imagination, lay just beyond. A talented athlete, Newman led North Shore Country Day School to championships in football, basketball, baseball. Yale followed, where he won a prize for the most outstanding senior thesis in American history. He befriended Leslie Epstein, novelist, and Porter Goss, future director of the CIA under Bush II (more on “intelligence” later). Study at Balliol College, Oxford, led to a stint as assistant to Congressman Sidney R. Yates (D, Ninth District, Chicago), which lasted until Newman was drafted into the Air Force Reserve, which he served as paramedic. Korea was avoided.

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