Rex Warner

Rex Warner (9 March 1905 – 24 June 1986) was an English classicist, writer and translator. He is now probably best remembered for The Aerodrome (1941).[1][2] Warner was described by V. S. Pritchett as "the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas produced".[3]

Biographical sketch

He was born Reginald Ernest Warner in Birmingham, England and brought up mainly in Gloucestershire, where his father was a clergyman.[4] He was educated at St. George's School in Harpenden, and at Wadham College, Oxford, where he associated with W. H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Stephen Spender,[5] and published in Oxford Poetry. He obtained a 1st in Classical Moderations in 1925 and later graduated with a 3rd in English in 1928,[6] he spent time teaching, some of it in Egypt.

Warner's debut story, "Holiday", appeared in the New Statesman in 1930.[5] His first collection, Poems, appeared in 1937. Warner's poem, "Arms in Spain", a satire on German and Italian support for the Spanish Nationalists, has often been reprinted.[7] He was a contributor to Left Review. Warner was a great admirer of Franz Kafka, and his fiction was "profoundly influenced" by Kafka's work.[4] Warner's first three novels all reflect his anti-fascist beliefs; The Wild Goose Chase is in part a dystopian fantasy of a tyrannical government which is overthrown in a heroic revolution.[8][9] His second novel, The Professor, published around the time of the Nazi Anschluss, is the story of a liberal academic whose compromises with a repressive government lead eventually to his arrest, imprisonment and execution "while attempting to escape"; contemporary reviewers saw parallels with the Austrian leaders Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg.[2][8] Although Warner was initially sympathetic to the Soviet Union, "the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact left him disillusioned with Communism".[5] The Aerodrome was an allegorical novel whose young hero is faced with the disintegration of his certainties about his loved ones and with a choice between the earthy, animalistic life of his home village and the pure, efficient, emotionally detached life of an airman.[2] The Times described The Aerodrome as Warner's "most perfectly accomplished novel".[4] Why Was I Killed? (1943) was an afterlife fantasy with an anti-war theme.[5] Warner then abandoned contemporary allegory in favour of historical novels about Ancient Greece and Rome, including Imperial Caesar for which he was awarded the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. Imperial Caesar was praised by John Davenport as "delightfully perceptive and funny" and by Storm Jameson as "brilliant, intelligent, continuously interesting. It has everything".[10] The Converts, a novel about Saint Augustine, reflected Warner's own increasing devotion to Christianity.[4]

Warner served in the Home Guard during World War Two.[4] From 1945 to 1947 he was in Athens as Director of the British Institute. At that time he was involved in numerous translations of classical Greek and Latin authors. Warner's translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War sold over a million copies.[5] He also translated George Seferis, later a Nobel laureate (Poems of George Seferis, 1960). Warner's time in Greece coincided with the early stages of the Greek Civil War which ended with the Greek Communists defeated and suppressed. This formed the background to his book "Men of Stones; A melodrama" (1949), depicting imprisoned leftists presenting "King Lear" in their prison camp.

Interviewed for the book Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, Warner argued that the US Army should withdraw from Indochina.[11]

Later he was Tallman Professor of Classics at Bowdoin College (1961) and then professor at the University of Connecticut from 1962 for eleven years. He died in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

Personal life

Warner was married three times. His first marriage was to Frances Chamier Grove, in 1929.[4] The marriage ended in divorce after almost two decades, and in 1949 Warner married Barbara, Lady Rothschild, formerly the wife of Baron Victor Rothschild.[4] After his second divorce, Rex Warner, in 1966, remarried his first spouse.[3]

Works

Novels

Poetry

Non-fiction

Translations from Ancient Greek

Translations from the Latin

Translations from Modern Greek

As editor

Film and TV adaptations

In 1983 the BBC screened an adaptation of The Aerodrome. It was written by Robin Chapman and directed by Giles Foster. The cast included Peter Firth as Roy, the protagonist; Richard Briers as the Rector; and Jill Bennett as Eustasia.

References

  1. ↑ Trash Fiction: Review of The Aerodrome
  2. 1 2 3 Chris Hopkins, English Fiction in the 1930s: Language, Genre, History Continuum International Publishing Group, 2007 ISBN 0826489389 (pp. 138–57).
  3. 1 2 "Rex Warner, 81, Dies; Author and Translator". The New York Times, 17 July 1986
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Rex Warner(Obituary)". The Times. 27 June 1986.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Michael Moorcock, "Introduction" to The Aerodrome, Vintage Classics, 2007. ISBN 9780099511564 (p. ix–xx)
  6. ↑ Oxford University Calendar 1932. Oxford University Press, 1932.(pp. 270, 310).
  7. ↑ Katharine Bail Hoskins, Today the Struggle: Literature and Politics in England during the Spanish Civil War. University of Texas Press, 1969 (p.230)
  8. 1 2 Janet Montefiore. Men and Women writers of the 1930s : The Dangerous Flood of History. Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0415068924 (pp. 16, 170, 201).
  9. ↑ John Clute, "Warner, Rex", in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by Clute and Peter Nicholls. London, Orbit,1994. ISBN 1-85723-124-4 (p.1299-1300).
  10. ↑ Advertisement for Imperial Caesar, Encounter magazine, November 1960, p. 81.
  11. ↑ Cecil Woolf and John Bagguley (editors),Authors Take Sides on Vietnam, Peter Owen, 1967,(p.47).

Further reading

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