In Memoriam: Neil Forsyth (1944‐2025)

Neil Forsyth, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, has died at the age of 81. He burst into the world of Milton specialists at Vallombrosa, where the Third International Symposium convened in June 1988. A few of those present knew the article on an aspect of “Homer in Milton” that he had published a few years earlier, and some may have known that he was shortly to publish a book on the Devil, but almost no-one was prepared to meet a scholar with devilish good looks and a devilish laugh whose demeanor as a bon viveur belied the learned and insightful scholar that lay beneath what Rachel Falconer has aptly described as his charm and charisma. Neil had studied Classics at his grammar school and English and Latin at King's College Cambridge, graduating in 1965. Like D. H. Lawrence, he felt that England was too stolid for his free spirit, so he left for America, and was never again to live in England. He wanted to be close to the civil rights movement, and so initially went to University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) for an MA in Comparative Literature (1967). He then hitchhiked to Berkeley to embark on a PhD, and was taught by Stanley Fish and Wayne Shumaker while relishing his immersion into the countercultural community. He began teaching in five departments (English, Humanities, Classics, Philosophy, and World Literature) at San Francisco State College, and when the students went on strike, Neil joined them. In the mass arrest that followed, he was honored to have been arrested but disappointed not to have been charged. Two years later, hundreds of universities, including Berkeley, were closed in the wake of the Kent State shootings, and Neil decided to pause his studies and work his way around the world. He signed on as a deckhand on a Danish freighter and disembarked in Japan, where he stayed for nine months; his jobs included modelling trousers. Angela Carter was then living in Japan; their meeting inaugurated a friendship that was to last until her death in 1992. Neil's brief memoir of their time together offers shrewd insights into the ways in which the experience of Japan influenced her writing. Neil returned to Berkeley and San Francisco State College and finished his PhD in 1976. The next year he was awarded a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Bryn Mawr, where he taught Greek and Latin. In 1980 Neil moved to Switzerland, initially to an Assistant Professorship at the University of Geneva and in 1985 to a Professorship at the University of Lausanne, where he was to remain for the next 25 years, turning his energy toward reimagining Modern English Literature at Lausanne. He was, his colleague Kirsten Stirling writes, “not afraid of ruffling feathers in his pursuit of excellence, never less than passionate in his commitment to shaping the direction and reputation of Modern English Literature and the department as a whole.” Generations of students who passed through the English Department at Lausanne remember his brilliant teaching of Milton and Shakespeare, and many first year students, initially intimidated by the imposing professor who lectured in the English Literature Survey, remember how he punctured his gruff persona when he would appear in the guise of Charles Dickens to read A Christmas Carol in the last class before Christmas—a staple of Neil's teaching year. In their tributes in the week following his death his colleagues, past and present, particularly recalled the department's Shakespeare trips to Stratford and London which Neil ran for many years with his colleague Roelof Overmeer. The Stratford trips showed Neil in all his best lights: the scholar and teacher leading student discussions; the playgoer totally immersed in the performances; and in the bar of the “Dirty Duck” after the plays, he was to be found arranging Q&A sessions with the RSC actors with his customary “charm and charisma.” Lausanne was the center of Neil's professional life, but the splashes that he created there rippled out to the rest of Switzerland and beyond. He was an active member of both SAUTE (the Swiss Association of University Teachers of English) and SAMEMES (the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies). He was a committed European, and so became involved at an early stage with ESSE, the European Society for the Study of English; he delighted in the acronym, which at once punned on “essay” and evoked the most famous line in English literature, Esse aut non esse. He worked hard for ESSE, editing The European English Messenger from 1994 to 1997. He also participated in its conferences, most memorably ESSE 3, which met in Glasgow in 1995. One of the plenary sessions was handed over to a distiller at Whyte & Mackay, who appeared on the stage in front of a huge audience, and stood behind a table on which was a row of whiskies. He explained that he needed a volunteer to taste the whiskies, and suggested that if a man called Neil Forsyth was in the audience, he should come up onto the stage. Neil was startled, but gamely mounted the stage, and instantly become half of a double act with the distiller, explaining that he had been practicing for the occasion for many years. Neil was asked to describe the taste of each sample, and his familiarity with whisky and facility with words enabled him to do so eloquently. After each tasting the distiller explained what Neil had been drinking, and Neil enthusiastically proceeded to the next. When he tasted the sixth and final whisky, his enthusiasm soared through the roof, and he declared it to be the finest whisky he had ever tasted. The distiller then explained that it was a 50-year-old whisky and cost just over £500 (roughly £1250 or $1600 today). Neil was declared to be a master connoisseur of whisky and staggered back to his seat to tumultuous applause. Neil's first monograph The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton UP, 1989) was a vast and learned account of the Devil from Gilgamesh through the Bible and finally to Augustine. Jeffrey Burton Russell, himself the author of a distinguished book on the Devil in antiquity, described Neil's book as “genuinely brilliant and original,” and George Steiner's TLS review particularly commended the chapters on Augustine, which “glow with intelligence and sympathy.” Neil's second book, The Satanic Epic (Princeton UP, 2003), brought the learning of The Old Enemy to bear on a study of Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost. Michael Lieb described it as “a true scholar's feast, a most impressive and compelling work.” Neil's colleague Martine Hennard Dutheil declared it to be “probably the most illuminating, thought-provoking and inspiring scholarly book I've ever read.” The Satanic Epic won the MSA's Holly Hanford Award in 2004. In 2008, Neil published his final monograph, John Milton: a Biography (Lion Hudson, Oxford), a biography chiefly remarkable for its eloquence, scholarly integrity, and psychological insights. He retired in 2010, but continued to write, and in 2019 served as the Chair of IMS12, the International Milton Symposium organized by Christophe Tournu in Strasbourg. On retirement there was a conference in his honor (I was privileged to attend) and the proceedings were published as a Festschrift entitled After Satan (Cambridge Scholars, 2010), a tribute to the ways in which Neil influenced the study of the Devil in English and other literatures. After leaving the University he continued to live in the village of Lavigny, a few miles from Lausanne along Lac Léman, opposite the French spa town of Évian; Neil was wryly amused that English speakers had the temerity to rename the lake “Lake Geneva.” Those who visited his capacious flat, with books piled high in every room, enjoyed the warmest of hospitality. He continued to be active for many years after his retirement. Our shared interests included the Bible as well as Milton, and his talk on “Milton's Corrupt Bible,” first read at the King James Bible conference in York in 2011, was of such high quality that it was later published in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England. In 2015 a costumed staged reading of Paradise Lost was mounted in the chapel of New College Oxford. I was unable to attend, but Antoinina Bevan Zlatar assures me that God was memorably read by Neil. Alone among the actors, Neil did not need a costume because he spoke invisibly from the organ loft, and the chapel thurifer sent up a cloud of incense whenever God spoke (see Milton Quarterly 49.3 [2015]: 208-14). Toward the end Neil's memory began to fail, and he was moved into a nursing home in a suburb of Geneva, close to his son James. Kirsten Stirling assures me that he was well cared for, and on some days could ask after people by name. Despite the memory loss, he could still recite passages from Paradise Lost, the poem closest to his heart. He was a kind and gentle man, and tried to look after those around him as if they were his lambs. Ite domum impasti, domino iam non vacat agni.