Oxford
Author's St. Jo Connection
by David Stacey, Kim
Cole, and Dan Woody
Every summer, the Department of English at Missouri Western State College gives students from St. Joseph a three-week opportunity to live and study in Oxford, England. In a course called "Literary Oxford," they study writers who have lived or studied in o
ne of the world's greatest college towns. Many Oxford writers have come and gone, but there is one "living author" on the syllabus, Haydn Middleton.
MWSC's Summer Study in Oxford has been in existence for six years, Mr. Middleton visits each year, spending one long morning talking about literature in the Junior Common Room (a living room for undergraduates) at Manchester College. He brings along his
recent novels, like the
King's Evil
or
The Lie of the Land,
and discusses the life of letters in contemporary England. He also likes to spend a long evening talking about his own life and family at the local pub, the Turf or the King's Arms. He brings along his children, Alex, now eleven, and Sarah, now eight
years old, and waxes enthusiastic about soccer, pop music, American television and whatever else should come up.
Mr. Middleton studied modern history ("modern" to the year 1700, where
Oxford draws its line between then and now) at Oxford's New College ("new" in 1379, when it was founded by Bishop Waynefleet). Since graduating in 1976, he has undertaken a wide
variety of writing projects, making his living at various times in advertising, publishing, and teaching. Currently he lectures on British myth and legend for Oxford University's Department of External Studies, designs unique "time line" posters for the
British Foreign Service, and writes novels, stories and reviews.
In addition to several myth-based novels intended for an adult
readership, Mr. Middleton has written fiction and history for children.
His most popular works thus far are The King's Evil (now in paperback) and The People in the Picture, his first full length novel
(which may yet be made into a movie).
Mr. Middleton is intensely committed to the responsibilities of the writing life. As he explains it, a novelist should not shirk from exploring both the good and the bad, the light and the dark, the high and the low in contemporary life. Like many
another Oxford writer before him, his themes and topics can be serious and challenging,
mysterious and dark, perhaps even a bit forbidding.
The plots of his novels are structured around age-old Celtic myths. True to his scholarly background, he does his own research into British history and myth. And because he is true to the actuality of the myths he studies, his stories often feature the
mysterious; his characters know sexual obsession and fear of the dark; his endings can be strange and inconclusive or even violent. And here students of literature meet a commanding irony in the novel written by Haydn Middleton: his books are like this,
the author explains, because they deal "with the effects of children on our lives."
A novelist, according to Middleton, has a responsibility to make the world livable for the innocence of childhood, and this can only be done by exploring the whole of life. He creates fiction that addresses the question of evil by adding ancient British
myth to contemporary British domestic life, or, in his terms, he simply "re-writes the myths." Important figures from Celtic myths and legends appear as modern people shrouded in dangerous ambiguity. They may or may not be alive or dead, good or bad,
everyday human or actually divine. Middleton's endings are also ambiguous. Because they resist closure, they don't feel like endings. There is a reason for this, however; a Middleton novel mimics the story or dream time of myth, rather than the real or c
lock
time of life. It thereby allows the mythic nature of the story to come full circle, as the author intends. Readers move from unknown to known to unknown again. And the reader is abandoned, finally, not to satisfactory knowledge but to a state of
"wondrous bafflement."
Two years ago, Mr. Middleton moved backwards from modern British life to the
middle ages in his Mordred Cycle, a series of tales that explores various aspects of the Arthurian legend. In The King's Evil, The Queen's Captive. and The Knight's
Vengeance Mr. Middleton scrutinizes Arthur as a man who rules "not so
much as a king as a condition." For his next project he plans to move less further back in time, when he will chronicle the lives of the Brothers Grimm, the classical linguists who
collected folk tales and lore in 18th Century Germany and Austria.
Eventually he would like to rewrite the myth of Albion as "an alternative history of Britain." Middleton is fascinated by this history, the magic history, the history that "people wanted
to happen" rather than the history that actually occurred. "For me, Albion is like England ... the sort of mythic, timeless England where everything that you want to happen should happen."
Back to Haydn
Middleton