Rex Warner
Encyclopedia
Rex Warner was an English
classicist
, writer
and translator
. He is now probably best remembered for The Aerodrome (1941), 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.
, England and brought up mainly in Gloucestershire
, where his father was a clergyman. He was educated at St. George’s School in Harpenden
, and at Wadham College, Oxford
, where he associated with W. H. Auden
and Cecil Day Lewis, and published in Oxford Poetry. After graduating in 1928, he spent time teaching, some of it in Egypt
.
His first collection, Poems, appeared in 1937. He was a contributor to Left Review, and his first novel, The Wild Goose Chase, is in part a dystopia
n fantasy of a tyrannical government which is overthrown in a heroic revolution. 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 Austria
n leaders Engelbert Dollfuss
and Kurt Schuschnigg
. After Why Was I Killed? (1943), Warner 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.
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 authors. He also translated George Seferis (Poems of George Seferis, 1960).
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.
and directed by Giles Foster
. The cast included Peter Firth
as Roy, the protagonist; Richard Briers
as the Rector; and Jill Bennett as Eustasia.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
classicist
Classics
Classics is the branch of the Humanities comprising the languages, literature, philosophy, history, art, archaeology and other culture of the ancient Mediterranean world ; especially Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome during Classical Antiquity Classics (sometimes encompassing Classical Studies or...
, writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
and translator
Translation
Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. Whereas interpreting undoubtedly antedates writing, translation began only after the appearance of written literature; there exist partial translations of the Sumerian Epic of...
. He is now probably best remembered for The Aerodrome (1941), an allegorical
Allegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
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.
Overview
He was born Reginald Ernest Warner in BirminghamBirmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
, England and brought up mainly in Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire
Gloucestershire is a county in South West England. The county comprises part of the Cotswold Hills, part of the flat fertile valley of the River Severn, and the entire Forest of Dean....
, where his father was a clergyman. He was educated at St. George’s School in Harpenden
Harpenden
Harpenden is a town in Hertfordshire, England.The town's total population is just under 30,000.-Geography and administration:There are two civil parishes: Harpenden and Harpenden Rural....
, and at Wadham College, Oxford
Wadham College, Oxford
Wadham College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, located at the southern end of Parks Road in central Oxford. It was founded by Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham, wealthy Somerset landowners, during the reign of King James I...
, where he associated with W. H. Auden
W. H. Auden
Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...
and Cecil Day Lewis, and published in Oxford Poetry. After graduating in 1928, he spent time teaching, some of it in Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
.
His first collection, Poems, appeared in 1937. He was a contributor to Left Review, and his first novel, The Wild Goose Chase, is in part a dystopia
Dystopia
A dystopia is the idea of a society in a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian, as characterized in books like Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four...
n fantasy of a tyrannical government which is overthrown in a heroic revolution. His second novel, The Professor, published around the time of the Nazi
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
Anschluss
Anschluss
The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....
, is the story of a liberal
Liberalism
Liberalism is the belief in the importance of liberty and equal rights. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but generally, liberals support ideas such as constitutionalism, liberal democracy, free and fair elections, human rights,...
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 Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
n leaders Engelbert Dollfuss
Engelbert Dollfuss
Engelbert Dollfuss was an Austrian Christian Social and Patriotic Front statesman. Serving previously as Minister for Forest and Agriculture, he ascended to Federal Chancellor in 1932 in the midst of a crisis for the conservative government...
and Kurt Schuschnigg
Kurt Schuschnigg
Kurt Alois Josef Johann Schuschnigg was Chancellor of the First Austrian Republic, following the assassination of his predecessor, Dr. Engelbert Dollfuss, in July 1934, until Germany’s invasion of Austria, , in March 1938...
. After Why Was I Killed? (1943), Warner abandoned contemporary allegory in favour of historical novels
Historical fiction
Historical fiction tells a story that is set in the past. That setting is usually real and drawn from history, and often contains actual historical persons, but the principal characters tend to be fictional...
about Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
and Rome
Ancient Rome
Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....
, including Imperial Caesar for which he was awarded the 1960 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Founded in 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are among the oldest and most prestigious book prizes awarded for literature written in the English language and are Britain's oldest literary awards...
for fiction.
From 1945 to 1947 he was in Athens
Athens
Athens , is the capital and largest city of Greece. Athens dominates the Attica region and is one of the world's oldest cities, as its recorded history spans around 3,400 years. Classical Athens was a powerful city-state...
as Director of the British Institute. At that time he was involved in numerous translations of classical Greek authors. He also translated George Seferis (Poems of George Seferis, 1960).
Later he was Tallman Professor of Classics at Bowdoin College
Bowdoin College
Bowdoin College , founded in 1794, is an elite private liberal arts college located in the coastal Maine town of Brunswick, Maine. As of 2011, U.S. News and World Report ranks Bowdoin 6th among liberal arts colleges in the United States. At times, it was ranked as high as 4th in the country. It is...
(1961) and then professor at the University of Connecticut
University of Connecticut
The admission rate to the University of Connecticut is about 50% and has been steadily decreasing, with about 28,000 prospective students applying for admission to the freshman class in recent years. Approximately 40,000 prospective students tour the main campus in Storrs annually...
from 1962 for eleven years. He died in Wallingford, Oxfordshire.
Novels
- The Wild Goose Chase (1937)
- The Professor (1938)
- The Aerodrome (1941)
- Why Was I Killed? (1943)
- Escapade (1953)
- Young Caesar (1958)
- Imperial Caesar (1960)
- Pericles the Athenian (1963)
- The Converts (1967)
Nonfiction
- Men and Gods (1950)
- Greeks and Trojans (1951)
- Views of Attica (1951)
- Eternal Greece (1953) with Martin Hürlimann
- The Greek Philosophers (1958)
- Athens at War (1970) "retelling" of Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War
From Greek
- ThucydidesThucydidesThucydides was a Greek historian and author from Alimos. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the 5th century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC...
, History of the Peloponnesian WarHistory of the Peloponnesian WarThe History of the Peloponnesian War is an account of the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece, fought between the Peloponnesian League and the Delian League . It was written by Thucydides, an Athenian general who served in the war. It is widely considered a classic and regarded as one of the...
(1954) - XenophonXenophonXenophon , son of Gryllus, of the deme Erchia of Athens, also known as Xenophon of Athens, was a Greek historian, soldier, mercenary, philosopher and a contemporary and admirer of Socrates...
, A History of My Time and The Persian ExpeditionAnabasis (Xenophon)Anabasis is the most famous work, in seven books, of the Greek professional soldier and writer Xenophon. The journey it narrates is his best known accomplishment and "one of the great adventures in human history," as Will Durant expressed the common assessment.- The account :Xenophon accompanied... - PlutarchPlutarchPlutarch then named, on his becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus , c. 46 – 120 AD, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia...
, Parallel LivesParallel LivesPlutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, commonly called Parallel Lives or Plutarch's Lives, is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings, written in the late 1st century...
(as The Fall of the Roman Republic) and Moral EssaysMoraliaThe Moralia of the 1st-century Greek scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea is an eclectic collection of 78 essays and transcribed speeches. They give an insight into Roman and Greek life, but often are also fascinating timeless observations in their own right... - EuripidesEuripidesEuripides was one of the three great tragedians of classical Athens, the other two being Aeschylus and Sophocles. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him but according to the Suda it was ninety-two at most...
, MedeaMedea (play)Medea is an ancient Greek tragedy written by Euripides, based upon the myth of Jason and Medea and first produced in 431 BC. The plot centers on the barbarian protagonist as she finds her position in the Greek world threatened, and the revenge she takes against her husband Jason who has betrayed...
(1944)
From Latin
- War Commentaries of Caesar (1960) Gallic & Civil Wars
- The Confessions of St. AugustineAugustine of HippoAugustine of Hippo , also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin, St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius . He was a Latin-speaking philosopher and theologian who lived in the Roman Africa Province...
(1963)
Film and TV adaptations
In 1983 the BBC screened an adaptation of The Aerodrome. It was written by Robin ChapmanRobin Chapman
-Biography:Chapman began his career as an actor at Cambridge before holding a spear at Stratford-Upon-Avon, working in repertory and then joining Joan Littlewood’s revolutionary Theatre Workshop where he turned to writing. Among his stage plays are High Street China, Guests and One of Us...
and directed by Giles Foster
Giles Foster
Giles Foster has been a British television director since 1975. He specialises in television dramas. He has also directed in Australia and more recently in Germany. He wrote some television dramas in the 1970s....
. The cast included Peter Firth
Peter Firth
Peter Firth is an English actor. He is best known for his role as Sir Harry Pearce in the BBC show Spooks, of which he is the only actor to have starred in every episode of the show's 10 series lifespan...
as Roy, the protagonist; Richard Briers
Richard Briers
Richard David Briers, CBE is an English actor whose career has encompassed theatre, television, film and radio.He first came to prominence as George Starling in Marriage Lines in the 1960s, but it was in the following decade when he played Tom Good in the BBC sitcom The Good Life that he became a...
as the Rector; and Jill Bennett as Eustasia.