LONDON -- The sentence could have been written by Edgar Allan Poe or Feodor Dostoevski, the way it summons the unspeakable in a coldly confessional tone: "But it was clear to me by now that Trevor and the college must somehow be separated. My problem was one which I feel compelled to define with brutal candor: how to kill him without getting into trouble."
The words are not fiction. They are from a newly published autobiography of Sir Kenneth Dover, one of the world's most renowned classicists. And they describe a series of events that preceded the suicide of a troublesome colleague at Oxford nine years ago.
How much responsibility -- if any -- Sir Kenneth bears for the death of Trevor Aston, a brilliant but erratic historian, is a matter of public debate now that Sir Kenneth's autobiography, "Marginal Comment," has hit the bookstores. Excerpts were carried in yesterday's British newspapers.
The chapter dealing with Mr. Aston's suicide from pills and alcohol in October 1985 at the age of 60 stands as a modern morality tale. Some see it as the story of Sir Kenneth, who was the president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, defending his ancient and beloved institution by dealing firmly with a don who had become unmanageable due to alcoholism and seeming mental illness.
Others see it as a case in which the president -- fed up with all the problems and aware of the don's despondency and a recent suicide attempt -- pushed him to the brink by writing a letter expressing the college's disapproval of Mr. Aston's conduct at a time when his marriage was collapsing and he was particularly vulnerable.
Even those closely involved in the problems Mr. Aston was causing admit to being shocked by the icy detachment of the language and, apparently, the feelings of Sir Kenneth, a scholar whose works on ancient Greece are read by students throughout the world. Now 74 and retired, he lives in Fife, Scotland.
"The intellectual normally values reason above all," said James Howard-Johnston, a lecturer in Byzantine studies at Corpus Christi. "Dover demonstrates that reason divorced from emotion becomes cold, clinical, and ahuman."
The author admits to being aware of Mr. Aston's long and troubled psychiatric history. He admits to fantasizing about Mr. Aston's death, consulting a lawyer to see if he would be legally at risk if he ignored a suicide call, and not going to investigate Mr. Aston's room at the college after a colleague expressed concern the night Mr. Aston died.
"The next day I got up from a long, sound sleep and looked out of the window across the fellows' garden," Sir Kenneth wrote. "I cannot say for sure that the sun was shining, but I certainly felt it was. I said to myself, slowly, 'Day One of Year One of the Post-Astonian Era.' " Mr. Aston, a fellow of the college who began teaching there in 1952, showed promise for a distinguished career. He was college librarian, university archivist, editor of the official history of Oxford University, and editor of a journal, Past and Present.
"He was a central figure in the life of the college throughout the '70s and '80s," said Mr. Howard-Johnston. To Sir Kenneth, who was president of Corpus Christi for 10 years beginning in 1976 -- and to others there -- Mr. Aston was an embarrassment. There were squabbles over his housing, threats of lawsuits, disrupted meetings and drunken scenes at "high table," the nightly dining ritual at Oxford colleges.
"I'm 100 percent behind Kenneth," said Brian Harrison, a history fellow and tutor at the college. "It's astonishing he bore it all those years. Even knowing that Mr. Aston was a manic-depressive, you can't hold up the operations of a college with 300 people in it. For Dover to say he wanted Trevor dead -- well, it's like Henry II with Becket. You say, 'Goodness, will no one rid me of this man?' and the knights went off and did it."
In a telephone interview, Sir Kenneth contended that it was a notice of impending divorce proceedings from his second wife that drove Mr. Aston to suicide, not anything Sir Kenneth had done.
"It wasn't I who resolved it," he insisted. "What I said in the book was that I contemplated the possibility of causing his death by an act of omission. But that wasn't in fact how things turned out."