Malcolm McNaughtan Bowie (1943–2007)

The death of Malcolm Bowie at the tragically early age of sixty-three is a cruel blow to his family and friends, as well to the numerous colleagues and graduate students in French studies and other disciplines who found him a vital source of inspiration. Born at Aldeburgh in 1943, Malcolm attended Woodbridge School and then studied at the University of Edinburgh, going on to take a D.Phil. at Sussex in 1970. His first book, Henri Michaux: A Study of his Literary Works (1973), was based on his doctoral thesis. After two years teaching at the University of East Anglia (1967-69), he was appointed to a University Assistant Lectureship, then Lectureship, at Cambridge where he was a Fellow of Clare College. In 1976, at the age of thirty-three, he became Professor of French at Queen Mary College, London, remaining there until he was elected to the Marshal Foch Chair of French Literature at Oxford in 1992. After ten years at Oxford, where he was a Fellow of All Souls, he returned to Cambridge to be Master of Christ's College, spearheading the College's celebrations of its five-hundredth anniversary in 2005. He stood down from the Mastership two months before he died, on 28 January 2007, of multiple myeloma, an incurable form of cancer that had been diagnosed in the autumn of 2004. The uncomplaining fortitude and good humour with which Malcolm carried on his work following the diagnosis, especially during the months of remission after intensive treatments, were typical of him. Visitors to the Master's Lodge at this time were likely to be moved by the enduring delight Malcolm so evidently took in the powers of literature, thought and art, as well as by the joy he derived from his family life with his wife Alison Finch, and their children Sam and Jessica. Malcolm's partnership with Alison, whose scholarly interests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French literature matched his own, was at the centre of a life whose public dimension was extraordinarily many-sided and full of achievement.

Malcolm Bowie's second book, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (1978), confirmed his exceptional gifts as a reader of modern poetry, ever alert to the subtlety and complexity of verbal performance. The same qualities drew him to Proust, on whom he delivered his scintillating inaugural lecture 'Proust, Jealousy, Knowledge' at Queen Mary College in 1978, and to Lacan, on whom he first wrote at length in his contribution to John Sturrock's Structuralism and Since (1979). His 1987 book, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, treated the trio as 'portraitists of the mental life' and as theorists of desire. A further book, Lacan, in the Fontana Modern Masters series (1991), insisted on the importance of Lacan's reworking of Freud, despite the 'babble' of many would-be Lacanians, while in Psychoanalysis and the Future of Theory (1993) Freud himself tends to overshadow Lacan as the author explores the resonances of psychoanalysis in European culture. Malcolm's masterpiece, Proust Among the Stars, which was published to great acclaim in 1998 and won him the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2001, will endure for its wonderfully elegant and enriching formulations of the essentials of Proust's achievement, as well as for the originality of its insights. His contribution (on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) to A Short History of French Literature (2003), co-written with Sarah Kay and Terence Cave, demonstrated the breadth as well as the depth of his knowledge of French literature.

Malcolm was at one and the same time a committed and meticulous scholar, delighting in tracking down the wayward fact and anchoring his perceptions in textual and historical data, and a defender and exponent of Theory at its most adventurous (the support he offered the Modern Critical Theory Group and to the fledgling Paragraph in the early 1980s was immensely valuable). He was also an incomparable comparativist, as much at home with the languages of painting and music as with the achievements of all the major European literatures: his Presidency of the British Comparative Literature Association was a...