‘Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars’, by Daisy Dunn
A pleasant book which will divert and educate lovers either of Oxford, classical scholarship, or the interwar period.
As a boy I grew up in a very small world, comprised mostly of my little corner of Yorkshire. One result of this was that when I first went to Oxford at nineteen or twenty to visit a schoolfriend who had been studying there, I felt, as I walked its wide, elegant streets and took in its serene and beautiful architecture, as though I’d entered some impossibly beautiful fairyland. I can recall remarking to my two friends there at the time that, if I’d only known how lovely it was, I’d actually have put in some effort at school in order to get a place at Oxford!
It remains my favourite English city. It was with pleasure then that I took up this book on Oxford between the wars. Despite the title, it has little to say on Evelyn Waugh or his novel Brideshead Revisited. Rather the book revolves around three classical scholars famous in the period: Gilbert Murray, E. R. Dodds, and M. C. Bowra.
Murray, the elder, is perhaps best known today for being the subject of T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘Euripides and Professor Murray’, in which Eliot attacks the professor’s enormously successful translations of Euripides as essentially passé – staid, Victorian, and pre-Raphaelite in their aims. For better or worse, Murray’s translations are now mostly unread, having given way to generations of Eliot-inflected approaches.
Murray was however something of a star in his day. He was for many years Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford – an office established by Henry VIII in 1541 – was chairman and later joint president of the League of Nations Union, gave regular BBC broadcasts (some of which survive), and stood five times (though unsuccessfully) for Parliament.
Like Murray, the names ‘Dodds’ and ‘Bowra’ are unmissable for anyone who had – even fleetingly, as I did – to study the Greeks and Romans and their literature during their university days, even today. Dodds’ masterpiece, The Greeks and the Irrational, is still important reading for students, even if its conclusions by now seem somewhat out of date. Bowra, on the other hand, was more of a speaker than a writer, but remains a familiar name. It is a great advantage of Dunn’s little threefold biography that it adds some flesh and blood to these august and mysterious names. One puts the book down with a strong sense of their diverse characters and deep – at times deeply flawed – humanity.
Dodds, for instance, is introduced as ‘a very courteous rebel’. He was an Irishman in support of the Easter Rising – for which he was ‘sent down’ from Oxford; or rather, ‘strongly advised not to stay up’. (Part of the book’s joy is its use of such uniquely Oxonian language.) At school Dodds was also expelled for ‘gross, studied, and sustained insolence against the headmaster’. The pugnacious Irishman irritated figureheads throughout his life. He has the curious honour of appearing in Hitler’s ‘Black Book’ – his register of individuals to be arrested upon Germany’s invasion of Britain. ‘Eric Robertson Dodds,’ it reads, ‘Professor, propagandist against Franco and involved in the International Front Against Germany; presumed whereabouts: Oxford’.
Bowra was a rather different figure. He was a legend of Oxford social life, hosting dinners at which he served exceptional food for the time and place and offering conversation which made even dull guests sparkle. Kenneth Clark, of Civilisation fame, called Bowra the most important influence on his life – as well as on his speaking style in the famous television programme. Sadly, much of Bowra’s vivaciousness fails to come across in his rather formal writing – a privation noted at the time in his obituaries. But vocally he shone. He had a famous arsenal of phrases. Perhaps my favourite is his habit of referring to pleasant social exchanges as giving someone ‘the warm shoulder’ as opposed to the cold. He sometimes described himself to others as having enjoyed ‘a long and interesting silence’ with foreigners whose language he didn’t know.
Like Dodds, Bowra has a (negative, and therefore positive) connection to Nazism. He loved the culture of Weimar Berlin, visiting often throughout the 1930s. For curiosity, he attended one of Hitler’s speeches; but the lifelong student of the classics – and therefore of rhetoric – found the Führer disappointing:
‘The faulty syntax, the involved, clumsy, often unfinished sentences, the dreary recapitulation of German grievances and Nazi doctrine, the deafening, disturbing impact of that terrible voice . . . were not what one expected from a great orator.’
Gilbert Murray, of the older generation (he lived 1866–1957), was yet again a contrasting character. He was a great Liberal – teetotal, vegetarian, always thinking of civilisation, improvement, and progress. He may sound dry and perhaps even irritating, but he often buried himself in high-minded work during a long and sad life in which he lost most of his five children to a variety of tragic and early deaths.
Though this triumvirate is the book’s focus, the story is thick with other good characters. Nearly every major Anglophone writer of the period shows up at some point or other. So do Einstein and Marie Curie; their brief appearances here free them from the clichéd portraits we often see drawn of them. Oswald Mosley gives a speech in Oxford which devolves into a riot. Many of the best appearances, however, are put in by people who are no longer particularly well-known figures but who were larger than life in their time.
Reverend Spooner, for instance, has given us and the English language the ‘Spoonerism’ thanks to his minor speech impediment. In a charming touch, the book is dedicated to his great-great-great-Granddaughter Beatrice, six and three-quarters at the time of publication. I also enjoyed learning more about Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose portrait by Augustus John – one of her many extra-marital lovers – though as terrifying and unflattering as can be, delighted her. She hung it with pride over the mantelpiece of her London home. She once remarked, on being caught with a lover, Henry Lamb, that she ‘was just giving Henry an aspirin’.
The third chapter has perhaps the best momentum and the best self-contained story in the book. Though Gilbert Murray may sound dry from the summary above, the narrative of his courtship corrects this impression. We go back in time to the 1880s. Murray meets his future Mother-in-Law, Rosalind Howard, another passionate Liberal, who is impressed with Murray’s teetotalism. The two will never succeed, for better or worse, in their dream of abolition for Britain; but they will, after enormous effort, succeed in their other ambition of marrying Murray to Howard’s daughter, Maria Henrietta.
Maria Henrietta rebuffs Murray countless times; apparently he is always still ‘too selfish’. He is desperately enchanted by her beauty – and likely not without warrant, judging by a quick portrait of her in her youth by her Father, George Howard, a minor artist and MP. The ordeal left Murray on two occasions genuinely suicidal. (Ah, to be young!) One senses Rosalind’s encouragement and cultivation of the match – often expressed through frequent and voluminous letter-writing – as essential to the eventual good marriage.
There are many more interesting yarns and diverting witticisms in the book, but that is enough for this review. Thoroughly recommended to those with interests in its several areas of focus.
C. R. Eager
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