Sunday, February 23, 2003		Books

Resuscitating Rex Warner’s genius
Arun Gaur

Fiercer Than Tigers: the life & works of Rex Warner
by Stephen E. Tabachnick. Michigan State University Press. Pages 522.

WHEN for Rex Warner’s 60th birthday (March 9, 1965) Cecil-Day Lewis penned a poem, Rex could not resist making a half-wry, half-witty remark: "You showed an unusual sense of restraint in not bringing communism, fascism or lechery." Indeed one subtle, if not openly professed, aim of the present study is to help Rex in wriggling out of that Marxist-fascist syndrome. Tabachnick tries to show how Rex — the "religious Marxist" of the 1920s gradually outgrew his ideology-fixation after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939. In novel after novel the classical Thucydidean spirit went on taming the prorevolutionary urges. From the allegorical The wild Goose Chase Rex’s stance came to occupy space in The Professor somewhere between allegory and realism (due to daughter Anna’s paralytic attack of encephalitis), and then in The Aerodrome due to wife Frances’s extra-marital affair, Aldous Huxley’s pacifist position surfaced which became clearly pronounced in Why Was I Killed? finally doing away with all totalitarian systems.

Along with this exacting but meticulously executed salvaging mission of Tabachnick, we are furnished with a number of biographical allegiances that stimulated, sustained and indeed coloured the creative genius of Rex. Clearly, the Miltonic-Biblical tone of the very first line of chapter one — "In the beginning, there were the Warners and the Luces, and there was Amberley" tells us that we are going to witness the myth of the evolving genius of Rex Warner. Tabachnick traces various possible influences of family members and places on Rex: from father Frederic Ernest Warner, a passion for nature with its associated quaint moral sense and love for epic heroes; from uncle George Johns Stratton, a love of birds; from mother Kathleen’s repressed upbringing, a masked and coded allegory writing; from father-mother pairing an internal conflict between Hebraism and Hellenism; from uncle Arthur Aston Luce an interest in philosophy.

No easy theory that can connect the artist, his art, and the times can be formulated, yet Rex’s life and work which had the backdrop of almost the entire 19th century enjoyed an immensely effective interplay of mutual rivalries, envies, and camaraderie of four Oxford friends — Cecil-Day Lewis, W.S. Auden, Stephen Spender, and Rex Warner himself. All the four grew together through their pre-and post-Holocaust days into big names and consciously or unconsciously influenced each other. Rex’s classical interests were further nourished by Maurice Bowra, Gilbert Murray and Arnold Toynbee. All this eventually culminated into his fine translations from Greek ancient and modern literature. Commenting on Rex’s method of translating Seferis’ poetry which helped the Greek bard the Nobel Prize, Tabachnick finds that his method was close to Auden’s that made it imperative for an undertaker to justify any departure from the philologically literal exercise. In contrast to this theory Cecil-Day expected a kind of originality in a translated piece.

Though Tabachnick chooses to eschew the rigorous mode of psychoanalysis, he authoritatively examines the wide range of Rex’s works that include his historical novels, poetry, and essays. Rex’s passionate relations with women (Frances, Trevelyan, Liz, Barbara), his casual remarks about the death of a servant’s husband, his vengeful reviewing of Robert Graves’s work, his fear of a rival Greek translator (Kimon Friar), were perhaps some of his blemishes but he did adore the company of Kafka, Austen, Forster, and Milton and at his death-bed he could still charmingly correct the grammar of his physiotherapist. His American professorship at the University of Connecticut finally won him many committed scholars and pupils like Tabachnick who made Rex Warner’s ultimate country retreat at Wallingford a place of pilgrimage.