The January/February edition of the American Book Review includes a nice piece on Wayne C. Booth's recent The Essential Wayne Booth—a collection of the late rhetorician and literary scholar's best work, edited by Walter Jost. James Phelan writes for the Review:

The seventeen essays, which Jost chose in consultation with Booth, effectively display the range of topics the critic addressed over his long career… [constituting] an excellent one volume introduction to Booth's thought.

And though delivering a comprehensive picture of the author's multifaceted career, as Phelan notes, the essays collected here are unified by Booth's perennial interest in "the multilayered relationship between author and audience" and his profound faith in the written word to bridge the divide between the two. Phelan's review concludes:

Booth's influence on so many spheres of inquiry is convincing evidence of the power of his rhetorical faith and his skill in communicating it. The Essential Wayne Booth is an important book because it puts that power and that skill on display on almost every page.

A capstone to Booth's long career, The Essential Wayne Booth is indeed an essential work by one of the most influential literary critics of our time.

Archived in Literature | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 03:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As electronic books, on-demand printing, and other innovations proliferate, the role of the publisher in the world of books is deeply uncertain. What value do publishers add to an author's work? In a world where authors are increasingly able to reach readers directly, is a publisher even necessary? Though these questions may seem new, Richard B. Sher demonstrates in The Enlightenment and the Book that they are as old as books themselves. Focusing on the explosion of intellectual activity in eighteenth-century Scotland that saw David Hume, Adam Smith, James Boswell, and others transform almost every field of learning, Sher demonstrates that key thinkers of the Enlightenment saw the book industry as crucial both for the dissemination of their ideas and for their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher shows how publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking not only to make profits, but in order to advance human knowledge as well. The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce—one that still exists in publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be a must read for anyone interested in the history of the book or Enlightenment thought.

Read the press release. Read an excerpt.

Archived in History | Literature | Press Releases
Posted by TXM at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Virginia Postrel has taken a detour from her Atlantic Monthly column, "Commerce & Culture," to write an interesting review for yesterday's New York Times Book Review of Kieran Healy's recent work, Last Best Gifts: Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs.

Healy's book is a sociological exploration of organ donation and the ethos of altruism that surrounds it—an ethos that the ever increasing demand for blood and organs threatens to extinguish. In recent years the increasing need for transplantation has supported the notion that donors might be supplemented or replaced by paid suppliers. However, Postrel writes, "even in the face of a critical shortage of organs, many leaders in the transplant field oppose any financial incentives for organ donors, including tax credits or payments toward funeral expenses." Last Best Gifts offers a fresh perspective on this ethical dilemma, examining the social organization of blood and organ donation in Europe and the United States to propose a balanced and nuanced solution that does justice to both sides of the argument. Postrel's review explains:

As an economic sociologist, Healy adds important dimensions to the intensifying debate over organ procurement. He reminds both advocates and opponents of markets that commercial transactions are embedded in social structures and as likely as any other exchanges to have social meaning. To succeed, incentives must show sensitivity to those meanings. A direct payment to a funeral home, for example, could honor a donor family's decision without making them seem to profit from their loved one's death. Or healthy adults could make binding contracts to be organ donors if they die in the right circumstances, with life insurance paid for by transplant centers, the government or a private foundation going to their heirs.

Essential reading for sociologists, donors, and medical professionals, Last Best Gifts explores the future of medical practice in the modern market.

Archived in Politics and Current Events | Reviews | Sociology
Posted by TXM at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

David Grene (1913–2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought and coedited The Complete Greek Tragedies. Six months of every year, though, he worked his farm in Ireland. This is an excerpt about how his interest in theatre developed, from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir.

Until the age of eleven, my only experience of the theater was at the yearly Christmas pantomime, to which our whole family always went. These are not pantomimes in the strict sense of dumb show, but a traditional form of comic entertainment put on at Christmastime. The greatest of them in my time was the one done year after year at the Gaiety under the leadership of Jimmy O'Dea and Maureen Potter. These were a wonderful pair of genuinely amusing comedians, and they ran the show to suit themselves. But prior to them, it was not like that. Most of the theaters in Dublin (the Gaiety, Royal, Queen's, and Olympia) put on a separate pantomime every year. Each pantomime was sketchily based on a folk story—Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, Dick Whittington, or others—and there was an intermittent effort to include a few scenes from the original story, especially the finale. All the rest of the show was given up to variety turns such as jugglers, clowns, and animal acts. One curious feature that even then stood out for me was that the hero and heroine were, conventionally, always represented by women. Thus, the principal boy was invariably a girl. I suppose this was for fear that simple sexual relations would creep across the footlights and disturb or corrupt the young. Also in a pantomime such as Cinderella, the two ugly sisters were both played by men. The men's voices, and even on rare occasions somewhat risqué jokes, enclosed an area of a cruder humorous mood suitable to its masculine representation and unthinkable for the delicacy of the women.

Every pantomime was dominated by its particular song, and depending on how catchy it was or how funny, we would hear everyone from businessmen and women to delivery boys whistling and singing it for months. I remember one of them which went like this:

How can a guinea pig wag his tail
If he hasn't got a tail to wag?
All the other animals, you will find,
Have got a little tail to wag behind.
If they'd only put a tail on the guinea pig
And finish up a decent job,
Then the price of a guinea pig would go right up
From a guinea up to thirty bob.

I am afraid that much of the funniness of this depends on knowing that a guinea is twenty-one shillings; as a coin of the realm, it had vanished even when I was a boy. But it was the unit in which you purchased various high-grade goods, such as fancy suits. I am glad to notice that it survives in similar snobbish settings. Christie's in London continued with it until the pound went metric, and you still buy racehorses in guineas in Newmarket. A shilling—twenty to the pound—was vulgarly a bob. I still know the tune of that song.

But in 1924, I had a quite different and first-time theatrical experience. Sybil Thorndike came to Dublin to play in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. I do not know whether this preceded her London performance or was shortly afterward. In those days, Dublin was often used for a tryout by big London companies. I had had a lot of training in this particular play, because our English master in my first school had made us learn by heart many of St. Joan’s speeches. He was himself a very strong lover of Shaw. However, nothing prepared me for the shock of this great performance. I had so far seen no plays proper at all (only pantomimes) and, in the cinema, the single picture The Hunchback of Notre Dame with Lon Chaney. I do not know how much reliable knowledge I can still retain of a performance more than sixty years ago. All the probabilities are against it. But I do know accurately some of the excitement and even fear I felt, and I dare to hope, faintly, that I remember accurately some of the voice and gestures which triggered those emotions. Very shortly thereafter, I was taken to see Othello, as rendered by Charles Doran. He was an actor who toured Ireland every year with his Shakespearean company. A few years after, the company was much strengthened by the addition of Anew McMaster, a brilliant player whom I saw ten years later in the same role. But even in Doran’s performance as the Moor, I vividly remember my intense reaction to his "Put out the light, and then put out the light" speech. I still cannot see this play without terror, and I am quite certain that the terror has elements of the feeling of that performance all those years ago.

It was a very exciting time to see Dublin theater, the twenties and thirties. The Abbey was again convulsed by nationalist agitation when Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and Stars met with a reception in 1926 as hot as that which had attended the first performance of J. M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in 1907. During that performance of the Plough, the crowd tried to pour onto the stage and burn the curtain because the national flag, the Tricolor, was brought inside a pub by three Irish volunteers in the 1916 rising, and there was a prostitute in the bar who tried to pick up some of the guests and eventually made it with the glorious Fluther Good. I was at another performance of the Plough in 1932, and there were still interruptions from the audience. The Abbey audience was until quite lately most volatile, and its prejudices, national, puritan, or otherwise, were very often to the fore and caused both actors and directors speculative misgivings about forthcoming productions. Humor is very consistently attributed to the Irish as a people, and perhaps on the whole justly, but they certainly have shown blind spots in this regard. Would anyone really have expected that a pub would be regarded as a sordid background for the national flag? Or that the mere presence of a prostitute in that pub contaminated the enthusiasm of the volunteers? Yet that was exactly what the nationalist and the pious interrupters claimed afterward when they published their grounds for the attack.

The Abbey company was very tightly knit; such repertory companies nowadays are very rare indeed. The play changed sometimes every week, almost certainly every fortnight. To see the same actors playing widely different roles so often makes one understand the versatility of which the profession is capable. Through this, it is possible to see the extraordinary blend of artificiality and realism that underlies most theatrical creations of the Western world. To me, this early experience of the Abbey has been beyond price. I have seen quite a few productions in London over the years, many of them of Shakespeare and many excellent. And in the year I spent in Vienna, I saw some great work done by Basserman and the Thimigs, but I never again have had the opportunity of seeing great repertory covering such a number of different kinds of plays over eight years. There was also something magnetic for me about the old Abbey, besides the acting. From the time I was sixteen till I left Dublin semipermanently in 1938, I used to haunt their first nights. Always, as the bell for the rising of the curtain rang, there would be a murmur among the audience, "There is Mr. Yeats," and the poet would come down the few steps to his place in the front row, head a little bent, slightly groping myopically for his seat. I loved the early Yeats plays and poems, and as much of the middle poems as were then written and I understood. The best, in my opinion, were still to come. But he was already, I was sure, as great as the greatest lyric poets in English, and there he was alive and palpable before me. I also have seen, at a respectful distance, Lady Gregory and Sean O’Casey. My reading world, till then shared with so very few people, was coming alive and totally realizable. In my first year in college before I had rooms there, I would walk from home to Trinity and I always went down Stephen’s Green in the hope of seeing Yeats, walking along muttering from his house toward the Green itself. I was often rewarded by the sight of him.

Another freakish bit of luck—in 1929 I believe it was—a special Sunday evening performance was given at the Abbey by an English company. It was Ibsen’s Ghosts, and the lead was played by Mrs. Patrick Campbell. I do not know how old she was then, but very near her end. She occasionally went up in her lines, and I saw her from what we called the Gods, which was the gallery of the old theater (burnt down in 1951), but it was for me an amazing thrill to see Mrs. Campbell, Shaw’s greatest actress. Again, I believe that I remember some of her characteristic playing. Certainly, something from that performance hovers in my mind in all the versions of the play I have seen since.

There was something else peculiar to the atmosphere of the old Abbey. The girls at the box office, the men who moved the props, the electricians, the carpenters were blended, it seemed to me, in one working family. I have never seen any other theater quite like that. These people were all heart and soul in the venture themselves and knew all the rest of the company as friends and intimates. The other great Dublin theater then was new—the Gate, housed in a section of the beautiful eighteenth-century Rotunda. They did continental and modern plays, rather explicitly contrasting with the Abbey, which mostly dealt in Irish plays, ancient and modern, and occasionally, when they had briefly an English director if some of the regular company were in America, Shakespeare. Between these two repertory companies—for the Gate was also repertory—and their very large number of plays English and foreign from the last three centuries, I do not think I could have had a better chance for developing an appreciation of drama.

Excerpted from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir by David Grene. We have two other excerpts from the book: "Learning Greek and Latin in Dublin Schools" and "Honors Classics at Trinity College."

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Classics
Posted by TXM at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On Tuesday, Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, posted an interesting comment on his blog about Joshua Weiner's recent book of poems, From the Book of Giants. He notes that Weiner's book includes a cleverly updated version of Martial's epigram 10.47—a poem composed of a list of the things necessary for "the good life."

As Stothard points out, it is a list that has been drawn from and imitated profusely throughout the centuries, translated into new languages and fitted into new meters, but whose underlying significance has retained a particular continuity that reappears almost two thousand years later in Weiner's post-modern verse—indeed it is a telling comment on our society that even a work of poetry as informed by modernity as this one still warrants acknowledgment in terms of its classical predecessors. Find out more about the book and read an excerpted poem on its UCP webpage.

Also, note that Weiner will be doing readings in the next few months, especially in April. See our author events page for particulars.

Archived in Commentary | Poetry
Posted by TXM at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

John Hyman's newest work, The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and Reality in the Theory of Art, addresses one of the perennial issues in art theory—the fascinatingly complex nature of pictorial representation. Here, Hyman makes a radical departure from recent trends in the philosophy of art to formulate what a review in the January 25 London Review of Books has called a "devastating critique of subjectivism"—all the while using "a complex array of texts and arguments from the full historical sweep of Western cultural reflection on the nature of pictorial art" to build his own "carefully nuanced" objectivist stance.

But though the work of reformulating hundreds of years of theoretical writings in the arts might sound complicated, the London Review continues, "the rigorous clarity and elegant concision of Hyman's writing—literary virtues to which the best analytical philosophy has always aspired—carry his reader through even the most difficult sections. No one will come away from this book without having learned a great deal about one of the most familiar mysteries of human culture."

And indeed, readers will find this an engaging critique of contemporary art theory a fascinating challenge to some of our most fundamental assumptions about the nature of pictorial representation.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Philosophy | Reviews
Posted by TXM at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Grene (1913–2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought and coedited The Complete Greek Tragedies. Six months of every year, though, he worked his farm in Ireland. This is an excerpt about his early education from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir.

The school my parents chose for me was St. Stephen’s Green and was essentially one of these small private Protestant schools. It was not a boarding school, but otherwise the atmosphere was very like that described by George Orwell in Such, Such Were the Joys. The fees in the bigger private schools like High School or St. Andrew’s (where I went toward the end of my schooldays) were certainly rather less than in a place like St. Stephen’s Green, and both varieties cost far more than what my parents should have sensibly entertained as possible for them. I believe that the smaller schools were associated with a more explicit version of gentlemanliness. In the larger private schools quite a few of the pupils came from what was very nearly working class. Anyway, my parents decided that the small and exclusive Stephen’s Green was absolutely best for me, and by scraping and saving they sent me to it.

So during my schooldays—from about eight to seventeen (kindergarten occupied the years from six to eight)—I attended two Dublin private schools. I was in Stephen’s Green for about seven years and St. Andrew’s for two—the years directly before entrance to Trinity College. I certainly learned a great deal of languages in St. Andrew’s and was well taught. But I still do not think that much which formed my mind or my intellectual interests would have happened but for one master in the first school, Dicky Wood. I can still see him, old (though not quite so old as I am now) with a red, round face and one slightly crossed eye, wearing very respectable grey suits. He had been retired from a provincial school, bigger than ours, some years before, and when he came to Dublin had been taken on as a cheap staff member at Stephen’s Green. He was so excessively tenderhearted and so irresolute that he found it very hard to keep order in his class. When the boys made a row, or were talking and inattentive, he was quick to put the offenders’ names in the Detention Book, but almost always succumbed to their pleas before the end of his hour and rubbed the names out again. But give him a small number of impressionable boys, and he was a different being—and his passion was for Greek literature.

I remember he started us out on a book of elementary Greek readings which featured passages in genuine ancient Greek authors, a little modified and reduced in difficulty. I should not even say "started," for he began conscientiously with the grammar, and we declined the declensions and recited the conjugations in a sort of chant. But this lasted something less than two months, and we were then confronted with the book of readings. The grammar was still drilled into us coordinately with the readings to make sure that we did not forget it. This was an entirely different way of instruction from what I had had in Latin, where the teachers kept us writing "sentences" in Latin, examined strictly for grammar and nothing else, for nearly two years before reading anything in the original language. I have no doubt about the superiority of the Dicky Wood system over my Latin learning. I suppose I am about as competent in the one language as the other now, but from those beginning years my instinctive response to the drift of the Greek periods and their meaning was much better than my rather wooden translation of the Latin. Dicky also started us reading the New Testament in Greek. We all knew lots of the English New Testament (Authorized Version) by heart, and we were absurdly proud of our ability to read the opening verses of St. John’s Gospel in Greek, with a not quite mistaken belief that we understood it miraculously clearly, and as we had never known it before.

In the second year Dicky had us read the Alcestis of Euripides. (There were five of us in Greek; the others in our regular class, the Fourth, had chosen one of the two alternatives to Greek: German or drawing.) We were all made to take parts and read the lines dramatically, first in Greek and then in English; Dicky himself insisted on playing Alcestis. Our classroom for Greek was an unoccupied room in the huge old eighteenth-century house on St. Stephen’s Green (now demolished), unswept and usually unheated. I remember Dicky dying magnificently as Alcestis, flopping very naturally on the dusty floor, declaiming her dying speech. He knew Browning exceedingly well, and Browning’s version of Alcestis nearly by heart. It was Browning he usually recited when he came to give us the English version. We, of course, stumbled through with whatever simple translation we could manage. The bracketing of the strangely attractive and secret Greek with the excitement of the comprehensible and elegant Browning transported us—and we also in an elementary way were penetrated by what we were doing in our clumsy efforts to render the Greek.

At this point Dicky also used to teach us English literature. He discussed all of his favorite books with his pupils, and especially with me when I would walk part of the way home with him along Leeson Street. He had vivid and often unusual preferences in fiction. For instance, he was a great devotee of Walter Scott, and surprisingly both he and I chose The Antiquary before the others. After that I listed The Heart of Midlothian, and he Old Mortality. He was always deep in nineteenth-century novels; I hardly ever heard him speak of Fielding or Smollett or Sterne—I suppose because in those twisted Puritanical days they would have been looked upon as undesirably coarse for the young. He knew and loved Dickens and Thackeray, and especially Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, and was strong on the connections of Charlotte’s parson father with his stories of Ireland and, in particular, between those stories and Emily’s Wuthering Heights. He passionately loved nineteenth-century poetry, especially Browning and Tennyson, but he stopped short of modernity in Yeats. One must remember that in the mid-1920s Yeats had not yet written what seem to me his greatest poems. I also remember once being brought up short by Dicky over a disagreement with me. I was about eleven years old and given to pretending to understand what I did not. In 1924 I saw Saint Joan and afterward Othello. I ventured to say how both had moved me and how extraordinary the experience of Othello had been. Dicky said, rather hesitantly, "Don’t you think it is a somewhat sordid story?"

I find it surprising, looking back, that even with Dicky’s interest and influence as strong as it was in both classical and modern literature, I stuck resolutely to Greek rather than English as my area of concentration; for within a couple of years, from thirteen to fifteen, those of us who expected to go on to university were already setting ourselves up to specialize in those subjects that suited us best. (This very early specialization has been, and still is, one of the major differences between the English and the American systems of education.) After all, English was my native language; Greek and Latin I knew only imperfectly. Even the fragments of the two languages I had mastered were hard won and doubtfully grasped. The appreciation of literature in its elementary form, the passionate response to story or rhythm, with half-understood glimpses of "meaning" conveyed in them, were only partially present in my head in two foreign languages that were no longer evolving or in use and, therefore, in some sense dead. Yet I think my choice, if one could call such a slight inclination a choice, was not wrong. There is something in the process of learning Greek and Latin which baffles an immediate comprehension, which slows the response but does not finally diminish the eventual depth of reception; often this becomes associated with some vaguely deeper taste for literature, especially poetry, and leaves the curious being so disposed a classicist rather than a scholar in English or, indeed, in the other more accessible modern languages. I know that I owe more to Dicky for my love and knowledge of Greek and Latin than to anyone who ever taught me afterward. Which would mean, if true—and I believe it is true—that the experience of a boy of ten to fifteen of a schoolteacher settled things for me in a way which could not be disturbed by far more qualified teachers later.

This was perhaps due somewhat to the nature of teacher and pupil. I was by nature very given to admire and follow someone idiosyncratic in authority, possessed by intense, observable enthusiasm, but also vulnerable. Dicky, in turn, was hardly capable of sensibly discriminating between the enthusiasm of a child for a subject he himself cared for so deeply, and the intelligent appreciation of someone much older. Many years later I heard that Dicky had been retired, a little prematurely, from his former schoolmastership because of a suspicion of pederasty. I certainly know that he never gave any overt, much less harassing, sign of it in relation to me or his other pupils at St. Stephen’s Green school. I think it is possible that he felt, and awakened in his students, a depth of emotional attachment which may have originated in the side of his character that had caused him trouble in the past.

Excerpted from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir by David Grene. See another excerpt: "Honors Classics at Trinity College"

Archived in Author Essays, Interviews, and Excerpts | Biography | Classics
Posted by TXM at 03:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert Bruegmann will be making a guest appearance this morning on California public radio's Forum with Michael Krasny. If you're in Northern California you can catch Bruegmann discussing "California sprawl and its historical, economic and aesthetic roots and consequences" with other guests Ann Wolfe and Gabriel Metcalf on KQED 88.5 San Francisco today at 10:00. If you're not, listen online; the program airs at 12:00pm central time. An audio archive of the program should be available on KQED's website soon.

Bruegmann is the author of the book Sprawl: A Compact History. In his incisive history of the expanded city, Bruegmann overturns every assumption we have about suburban sprawl. Taking a long view of urban development, he demonstrates that sprawl is neither recent nor particularly American but as old as cities themselves, just as characteristic of ancient Rome and eighteenth-century Paris as it is of Atlanta or Los Angeles. Nor is sprawl the disaster claimed by many contemporary observers. Although sprawl, like any settlement pattern, has undoubtedly produced problems that must be addressed, it has also provided millions of people with the kinds of mobility, privacy, and choice that were once the exclusive prerogatives of the rich and powerful.

The first major book to strip urban sprawl of its pejorative connotations, Sprawl offers readers a completely new vision of the city and its growth.

Archived in Art and Architecture | Books for the News | History
Posted by TXM at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Grene (1913–2002) taught classics for many years at the University of Chicago. He was a founding member of the Committee on Social Thought and coedited The Complete Greek Tragedies. Six months of every year, though, he worked his farm in Ireland. This is an excerpt about his university education from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir.

The men who taught Honors Classics in Trinity College had enough of the unusual and exotic to furnish a mysterious element to our education. They were nearly all of the recognizable British eccentric type, something grown much rarer since. There were five or six of them lecturing, or teaching if one preferred that title, and at least three of them—the seniors of the group—combined a well-deserved reputation for scholarship, backed up by a fair amount of scholarly publication, with a remoteness from ordinary life, and manifest loneliness, and very notably an inability to act or speak or dress like any normal members of their class and kind.

There was J. G. Smyly, one of the leading papyrologists of his day. Literary and other texts in Greek were preserved on papyrus for many hundreds of years before people came to use the expensive calfskin and other materials. But papyrus was not very lasting, and most of what has come down to us in papyrus is fragmentary. Indeed, many of the papyrus fragments are not literary at all. An unkind classicist vexed at the intrusion of the archaeologists once angrily discounted the value of learning from the contents of "thousands of washerwomen's bills in Egypt." Smyly and the two Oxford scholars B. P. Grenfell and A. S. hunt had edited a huge body of this material, called the Tebtunis papyri. At the time I came to college Smyly was temporarily doing a job that he found slightly uncomfortable. The professor who was responsible for Indo-European Comparative Philology had died, and the exam paper in the subject, which was always a part of Scholarship in classics—a very difficult and extensive exam in the middle of the Honors classical course—had to be set by someone, and lectures given as a preliminary. Smyly was taken out of retirement for the purpose because of the enormous knowledge of rare Greek words which he had picked up from his readings in the papyri. These words tended to be useful for explaining the various shifts in sound and form in the evolution of the comparative philology process. Smyly certainly knew something about the theoretical side of comparative philology—mostly Antoine Meillet's seminal text of the midtwenties, Introduction à l’étude comparative des langues indo-européennes—but he made quite fascinating the use of the rare words to illustrate Meillet. He made me feel a passionate, almost romantic, interest in comparative linguistics because of his own odd approach.

In the early 1930s Smyly looked like a photograph of a gentleman of the 1880s: stiff round collar, full morning dress, and an immense head of white hair framing a face which suggested an old eagle. He was reputed to be a prince—or whatever the proper honorific title—in the order of the Masons; his presence was certainly steeped in aristocratic dignity. I remember the shock that ran through the class when he cited, as an example, the Greek word epibda from Pindar, which there means the consequences of overindulgence in drinking. Smyly translated it for us as "You might say, ladies and gentlemen, the headache of the morning after." Somehow, everything was out of kilter—the pompous address (we were all about eighteen), the formality of the words and the dress, and the appeal to us in a colloquial reference which was supposed, quite wrongly, to put us at our ease with him. He was also a librarian of the College, and a somewhat remiss librarian. His own main interests were music and pornography, and books connected with these subjects were carefully attended to. I was told by his successor that he found boxes and boxes of volumes treating other subjects that had never been unpacked. He used to play the violin within hearing distance of those of us who used the reading room of the Old Library, and to us he seemed to play extremely well.

There was George Mooney, who had just changed from being University Professor of Latin to the Regius Professor of Greek. Being Mooney, his main contributions during his Latin professorship were two uniquely valuable editions of Apollonius and of the Alexandra of Lycophron, two late Greek poets; and he celebrated his elevation to the chair of Greek (the senior of the two professorships) by editing Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars, an especially important Latin text. As a human being everything marked him as inaccessible. Extremely reserved and shy, his physical features were unusually off-putting. He had only one eye—the other had been lost in his early days out hunting—and the missing eye was unabashedly just what it was, without a shade or anything else. He had a husky, sepulchral voice which he used very little. His clothes were always in rags. He was a very severe examiner on texts, being notorious for setting as "unseens" (that is, sections which were not on the prescribed parts of the author studied) passages which were themselves extremely hard even with commentaries and lexicon. In such an exam paper the difficulty was obvious and his markings niggardly. But all that was clear and straightforward; however, he also administered vivas (orals) in particular texts prescribed. On Scholarship he had two vivas, one on the Iliad and the Odyssey and the other on Thucydides, book 7. He apparently assessed us by some private standard of his own which had little to do with the questions he asked and we answered. He examined in Scholarship every year for a number of years, and for some extraordinary reason always asked the same questions on his viva. These questions were always quite particular, and as Scholarship was a very difficult exam it was often taken by the same candidate two or three times before getting it—or giving up taking it. Consequently many students knew exactly the questions he was going to ask them. But seemingly Mooney quickly decided either that you had read the books thoroughly when you answered or you had merely been told what his questions were. If the latter, he gave you three or four marks out of ten automatically. I remember sitting alongside him at a desk as he glanced at me with his good eye and said, "Lad, do you know the description of Olympus in the Odyssey?" I did know that this was one of Mooney's pet questions and had learned it by heart. Then there was an uncomfortable silence which he broke by asking, "Do you know what word Homer uses for a worm?" (He made the keyword a double syllable—wor-um.") This one I had not heard about, but fortunately remembered that indeed there were two: one, the worms that might have but hadn't eaten Odysseus's bow; the other, the "gleaming worms" that had been kept from eating Hector's body by the gods' intervention. Mooney made a very slight movement, and I knew that something had happened. He then asked me a number of detailed questions on readings, etc., and then quite unexpectedly made me talk about what I thought was the role of Laertes in the Odyssey, a discussion in which he joined with evident pleasure. "That will do, lad," he said, and it was over. He gave me eight marks out of a possible ten. I lost the other two, I think, for knowing the description of Olympus by heart, palpably by having been told of it beforehand.

I have not forgotten a most unexpected bit of kindness from Mooney. I was taking the exam for the Vice Chancellor's Medals. For that, in the year I took it, the text was the entire body of Terence's plays, all six of them, with three papers of passages for translation into English, a mass of exegetical questions, and finally a verse composition in the style and meter of Terence based on a given scene of Shakespeare. Mine was one of the Nurse's exhortations to Juliet. It was great fun doing this, no matter how absurd it is now made to look by more serious scholars.

The exam was always held in the Examination Hall, in those days without central heating or electricity. The month was November. I had six hours of writing the first day and six the second. I wore my overcoat with my gown on top and thin gloves on my hands. On the second morning of the exam Mooney entered with his printed exam paper in his hand—the College Press always printed the exams then, Greek characters and all, with your examiner's name at the top. The exam was sealed in an envelope which the said examiner broke open before your eyes. Mooney took one look at me and growled out, "Can you think of any reason why you should take this exam in this ghastly place?" I couldn't, so he beckoned me to follow him and put me in his rooms with a blazing fire and a cup of tea. It may not seem like much now, but then it was very different. He so rarely spoke to any of us at all and did not seem to notice much. The unexpected kindness was quite overwhelming, all the more so because the other two examiners, who always gave the impression of noticing students more, had passed by several times on the previous day in that chilly hall without passing any comment.

Then there was Sir Robert Tate, knighted for his services as an interpreter to the forces during World War I. He also had a Distinguished Service Order, so I assume he had done some fighting, too. He apparently knew ten to fifteen languages as well as his Greek, Latin and Hebrew. I have been told by his well-wishers, as well as their opposites, that he spoke all the modern languages with perfect correctness and an impeccable Anglo-Irish accent. He used to teach us how to write Greek and Latin prose and verse. He would, for instance, on Tuesday give us a passage of any author from Milton to Wordsworth, and on the following Tuesday take up our versions of them, done into whatever meter you deemed appropriate—hexameters for Milton, Ovidian or Tibullan elegiacs for Wordsworth. No one was compelled to send in versions. I secretly believe that the very harsh criticism to which we were subjected by Sir Robert was partly designed to diminish the number of copies given him to read. On the Thursday following he would enter the classroom, sit down with his face ostentatiously away from us and toward the window and lawn in the Square. He would then catalogue our infelicities or downright blunders without attributing any of them by name to the unhappy listening faces which would begin to redden. He would then comment with something like this: "I say nothing about the poetry of this; it is too much to expect that you have enough feeling for English poetry to have any notion of how to render it in Latin or Greek—but at least you ought to know the simple rules of Latin and Greek meter." I remember how I once glowed with delight when he read my version through, saying nothing at first. He then remarked, "I don't say this is good—but it's not at all bad; but I don't like the last couplet. It has the wrong ring to it for Ovid." About three weeks later I was at a college dance and there was Sir Robert—who was a deservedly well-known dancer. During an intermission he walked over to me and quoted two lines from Ovid and said, "You see what I mean, my dear fellow; that's why your lines seemed wrong."

These three were, as I have said, a breed that has grown very scarce. Some time ago I had a conversation with a professor of the College whom I had known since childhood days. He said that it had taken him a long time to realize that these eccentrics had been made so by suffering and frustration, and that was good for nobody. I don't know; but I do know that each of these men made very notable written contributions to the exegetical and stylistic values of classical literature. What is more, there is something special in being taught classics by men whom you cannot possibly imagine as being really like yourself when they were young. They come before you as a part of the mystery that lies in their complete mastery of those long-dead languages, and in their eerie power to jolt your imagination beyond almost anything that you can read of criticism in the more modern and apparently commonsensical fashion. It is true of course that they were dealing with works that inflame the imagination, so that it is hard to think it possible that you would not be engaged, with Homer and Herodotus, with Thucydides and the tragedies, with Lucretius, Vergil, and Tacitus. But it is better, I believe, if those who teach you do so from the heart of their own perhaps twisted personality, rather than with the standardized presentation of new historical evidence or current theories of psychology or anthropology. At any rate, there was some sort of inner harmony between the isolation and complexity of their personalities and their nearly magical way of understanding the texts and rendering them alive again in living linguistic detail.

Excerpted from Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir by David Grene.