In 1986, V S Pritchett described Rex Warner (1905-1986) in his obituary as ‘the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas produced’.
Born in Birmingham to a father in the clergy, Warner studied at Wadham College, Oxford, forming friendships with poets W H Auden (1907-1973)[1], Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972), and Stephen Spender (1909-1995)[2] and publishing in Oxford Poetry.[3]
A regular contributor to The Left Review, Warner’s first work, ‘Holiday’, was published in the New Statesman in 1930, and his first collection of poems was published in 1937. Novels include: The Wild Goose Chase (1937)[4], and The Professor (1938)[5], and The Aerodrome (1941).
While his first two popular-front novels explicitly encouraged the layman to rise up against oppressive governments, and particularly the Nazis and Fascism, through allegory, The Aerodrome, considered by many his best novel, indicates a movement away from this kind of simplistic political allegorising. This mirrors his relationship with Soviet communism. The 1930s communist was disillusioned after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between the Nazis and Soviets. As much is evident in The Aerodrome (1941), where we see a hero who suffers as he sees those in whom he placed his trust crumble and is forced to choose between his home village and the flat, sanitised life of the airman.
Warner then began to write historical fiction about Ancient Greece and Rome, including Young Caesar (1958), Imperial Caesar (1960), and Pericles the Athenian (1963). In the first two of these novels, he took Julius Caesar as his subject. Caesar justifies his genocide in Gaul, politically-motivated murder, suppression of dissidence and civil war. The novels paint an uncomfortable picture of Caesar, drawing parallels with Stalin, Hitler and other tyrants enabled by authoritarianism. Warner therefore directly uses ancient material to argue against the tyranny that he sees in the modern world. Pericles the Athenian tells the story of the formation of democracy under Pericles in Athens, fictionally narrated by his close friend, Anaxagoras – once advocating for fairness and democratic process in modern politics through an ancient historical lens.
Warner spent time in Greece as the Director of the British Institute in Athens between 1945 and 1947. While there, he translated various Greek and Latin texts, including Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which still sells healthily today, and Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars.[6] He also engaged with Modern Greek culture and politics, forming a bond with the famous Greek poet George Seferis (1900-1971), whose poems he translated in 1960. While he was living in Greece, the Civil War was in its early stages, between the Greek Communists and the right wing, and this encouraged his writing Men of Stones: A Melodrama (1949).[7]
An academic career followed, with Warner appointed Tallman Professor of Classics at Bowdoin College in 1961, and serving as a professor at the University of Connecticut between 1962 and 1973. Throughout his time in America, he was involved in politics. He was interviewed for Authors Take Sides on Vietnam (1967) in favour of US withdrawal.[8] In 1973, he retired, moving back to England, and died in 1986.
This profile was written by Anna Coopey
[1] For W H Auden, see Mendelson (2017): Early Auden, Later Auden: A Critical Biography (Princeton University Press).
[2] For Stephen Spender, see Sutherland (2004): Stephen Spender: The Authorised Biography (Viking).
[3] Many famous poets have published in this magazine.
[4] A fantasy novel detailing a dystopia in which the oppressive government is overthrown by a revolution.
For more in general on Warner’s novels, see Reeve (1989): The Novels of Rex Warner: An Introduction (Palgrave MacMillan) and Tabachnick (2002): Fiercer Than Tigers: The Life and Works of Rex Warner (Michigan State University Press).
[5] This text details the story of a left-wing academic who is arrested, imprisoned, and murdered after compromising with a repressive government. This was published around the time of the Nazi Anschluss, and might refer to the compromise of Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt Schuschnigg with Hitler.
[6] A full list of his translations goes as follows: Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound (1947); Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (1954); Xenophon’s A History of My Time and The Persian Expedition; Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (The Fall of the Roman Republic) and Moral Essays; Euripides’ Medea (1944); Euripides’ Helen (1958); Euripides’ Hippolytus (1958); Julius Caesar’s Gallic & Civil Wars (1960); The Confessions of St Augustine (1963).
[7] A novel set in a prison in Modern Greece, in which some leftists perform Shakespeare’s King Lear.
[8] Woolf & Bagguley (1967): Authors Take Sides on Vietnam (Peter Owen).
