Small Latin and Less Greek

While watching one of the many recent television programmes about the Bard of Avon, I was amused to hear a historian mention how the BBC had celebrated the “tercentenary” of Shakespeare’s birth.  The BBC is a venerable institution, but would have to be a lot older than it is to have been able to do that, since the tercentenary occurred in 1864.  What she was talking about was the “quatercentenary”, which I remember quite well myself, purely because I found the word rather troubling; surely, I thought, it should have another “r” in it?  I was only eight years old then, and had not learned any Latin.

The historian’s inability to cope with long words that are virtually never used nowadays reflected her youth.  She presumably did not study Latin at school, or she would certainly have been able to make an educated guess at the meaning of “tercentenary”, even if she had never come across the word before.  Shakespeare himself would, of course, have learned Latin at grammar school, and we even know the name of his teacher – Thomas Jenkins, a Welshman. 

It seems, though, that Shakespeare was not much of a Latin scholar.  He certainly used Thomas North’s 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives as the basis of his play Julius Caesar.   Latin was not essential for reading most of the works from which he drew the plots of his plays.  His friend Ben Jonson wrote that he had “small Latin and less Greek”, and in Julius Caesar we find the first-ever published use of the phrase “it was Greek to me”. Had he been a more accomplished classical scholar, Shakespeare might have been drawn into using classical dramatic conventions in the manner of a Racine or Corneille long before he finally observed the unities of time and place in one of his last plays, The Tempest.  

Shakespeare belongs firmly in the world of the Elizabethan actor, an itinerant worker with no practical skills to his name. His companions were men like Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert, John Heminges and Will Kempe. They came from lower and middle-class backgrounds and would have been moderately well-educated but had not been to university.  They were usually well-travelled. If they were in the service of the monarch or another important person, they might also be well-paid.  Some of the playwrights of the age were better educated: Christopher Marlowe was a Cambridge graduate (though it did not mean quite the same as it does now) and Ben Jonson himself, though from humble beginnings, won a scholarship to the prestigious Westminster School. 

Shakespeare’s lack of Latin, as evinced by his preference for alternative sources for the plays he wrote, indicates that he did not belong to the nobility, but I will avoid getting into the Shakespeare authorship “question” (if there really is a question).  Latin continued to be the language of choice for serious writers for centuries to come, Isaac Newton famously using it for his scientific treatises.  Others who wrote mainly in Latin included the philosophers René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes. Even poetry and drama continued to be written in Latin, partly with the intention of it reaching an international audience.

By the early twentieth century, most public schoolboys and even grammar school boys had a good grounding in the Classics and it influenced their writing.  We've discussed this before, so we need not go into the details here. What is interesting about Siegfried Sassoon is that he, like Shakespeare, wrote his most effective poetry when he found the level of the average person, like the soldiers he found under his command in the First World War.  You could almost say that he "dumbed down" his writing to suit them.  In the sixteenth century, that would be considered no bad thing.  Medieval writers had a duty to appeal to the lowest common denominator because this enabled them to spread their work amongst the largest possible number of people, in the days before printing found its way to Britain and when illiteracy was still commonplace.  It did not do Shakespeare's work any harm. His "universality" is the thing we most admire about him, and I think that is also true of Sassoon.

Grief Observed

I’m imagining a big variety show going on in Heaven.  The compere is Terry Wogan, and Pierre Boulez conducts the orchestra in an overture of his own composition. The first half consists of a Victoria Wood special, with Ronnie Corbett, Alan Rickman, Frank Finlay, Gareth Thomas and Sheila Sim all taking cameo roles in “Acorn Antiques”, with a script co-written by Arnold Wesker.  Following the interval, during which Howard Marks serves drinks and nibbles (with assistance from Johann Cruyff), Paul Daniels does a set, giving way to Percy Sledge and Merle Haggard, who each do a couple of numbers arranged by Sir George Martin.  Joint top of the bill are Bowie and Prince with their band featuring Keith Emerson on keyboards and Black on backing vocals. The whole show is produced by Robert Stigwood.

People do die.  The swathe of “celebrity” deaths in the first four months of 2016 has attracted comment, but it’s not that unprecedented. It's just that the news gets out more quickly these days, and nothing much goes unreported. Looking back to 1963, two giants of the literary world, CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley, both died on the day President John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas; consequently their deaths went almost unnoticed by the world’s media.  Likewise, the death earlier this year of novelist Anita Brookner had passed me by; I have read half a dozen of her books. 

Brookner, an art historian by discipline, did not begin her career in writing fiction until she was in her fifties. Her parents were Polish Jews, real name Bruckner which (ironically) they changed during the First World War because of anti-German feeling.  Many of her books deal with people in her own situation – people from Jewish backgrounds, often caring for elderly relatives.  I am sorry that there won't be any more.

I read an interesting article about how celebrity deaths affect the lives of their fans.  In many cases, they feel as if they have lost a family member. This is perhaps more understandable in the case of actors and musicians, now that the mass media has brought them closer to us and enabled “ordinary” people to become familiar with the appearances, voices, mannerisms and even the personal lives of those they admire.  With writers, I think, it is the recognition of a “voice” that chimes with the reader’s own feelings, as the voices of Siegfried Sassoon, Thomas Hardy and other writers do with mine.  If the writer is very skilful, he or she can take on another voice, putting him- or herself into the place of a person who is really nothing like them.  People are often disappointed when they meet their idols face to face and they realise that the actor is not the same as the fictional character they portray on screen (or in print).

Sometimes, or so I gather, a celebrity death can become confused in a person’s mind with a personal loss.  For example, one woman who had recently lost her grandfather without displaying any great outward emotion, found herself devastated by the death of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman in 2014. Other people often find such reactions inexplicable and even laugh at those who experience them.  Columnist and rock drummer Tim Thornton sensibly asks: “What damage does it do to anyone else if someone is waxing lyrical in a slightly embarrassing manner?” The repression of emotion is often associated with being British, and an opposite tendency is one of the things we look down on “foreigners” for.   There is a widespread suspicion that giving vent to such feelings is a sign of immaturity and/or lack of self-discipline.

Wartime is when the “stiff upper lip” shows itself most clearly.  During the Blitz, ordinary Londoners got on with their lives, with a minimum of grumbling.  Many must have felt they could not afford to show strong emotion, as they needed all their energy to care for their families, and sometimes simply to survive.  Repression of emotion is not always good, however, as Sassoon learned from Rivers.

Although mass hysteria may not be desirable, it does sometimes result from a genuine wave of public feeling. I cannot imagine any admirer of Victoria Wood becoming involved in the kind of scenes that took place at the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 (can it really be more than a quarter of a century ago?) but perhaps the occasion fulfilled a need for his followers to vent their feelings. Violence is not normally the British way, though.

The media, who are so often responsible for stirring up trouble where there was none, have long been a problem for those attempting to grieve privately.  At Thomas Hardy's star-studded funeral in Westminster Abbey - far from the quiet family occasion Hardy wanted for himself - Sassoon was too distressed to sit in the front-row seat reserved for him, and never forgave Humbert Wolfe for the way he used the occasion to publicise himself and almost immediately turned on Hardy by publishing criticisms of his poetry.  At T E Lawrence's funeral a few years later, Sassoon physically assaulted a would-be photographer at the graveside. "Let me have my feelings to myself," he wrote in his diary, unwilling to share his grief even with his wife.

The Snowball Effect

While strolling along Lamb's Conduit Street in Bloomsbury on Saturday last, looking for a likely place to enjoy a leisurely coffee before The Lamb opened its doors at 12 noon, it crossed my mind that I might bump into Cynthia Greenwood.  This has happened on several previous occasions, as Cynthia and I seem to have a mysterious empathy when a desire for liquid refreshment strikes us.

Standing on the corner (not, as far as I know, watching all the girls go by), was that doyen of the War Poets Association, David Worthington, who informed me that he was awaiting the arrival of two friends, who were late for their appointment.  It was just then that one of these much-maligned friends greeted David from the doorway of the cafe (they had been awaiting him within while he enjoyed some spring sunshine at an outside table). True to form, who should be sitting at the next table but Cynthia?

Before long, another member had been waylaid on his way to The Lamb, and the snowball effect was beginning to be noticeable. It struck me that this is an effect well illustrated by the growth in SSF membership (and no doubt the growth of many other literary societies). A member once commented to me that "once you start coming to these things, you can't stop." Addictive, this literature business.

It certainly seems to be the case with The Lamb.  For those of you who wonder why we are still holding meetings in the upstairs room of a pub with limited space (and I'm asked as regularly as clockwork), the answer is that affordable venues in London are not easy to come by. This is not our annual conference, and it is priced accordingly. It was conceived as a cheap and cheerful members-only event, and demand sometimes exceeds supply, but we usually manage to squeeze everyone in somehow.  Moreover, we nearly always have attendees who have never been to a WOA or SSF meeting before, which is remarkable.

So, if you are thinking "maybe next year", what can you expect to find on your arrival?  I cannot deny that there will be quite a few people milling around trying to find seats.  If you are having lunch, I cannot guarantee when your meal will come out of the kitchen (relative to everyone else's) but I can guarantee that it will be worth waiting for when it does.  I can also promise that there will be a lot of noise - it generally takes twenty seconds or so before the whole room becomes aware that the Chair is trying to speak.  You can, however, be sure that what comes out of her mouth will be sensible.

You can look forward to hearing good speakers, and the variety of subject matter is notable.  Men and women from various backgrounds, both academic and "ordinary", have addressed the group in recent years, on topics ranging from the influence of the classics on poets of the First World War to the nefarious activities of Siegfried Sassoon's lover Stephen Tennant.  This year, Dr Paul Norgate and sculptor Anthony Padgett kept us entertained and interested for a couple of hours, and we rounded off the meeting with a few drinks in the downstairs bar.

At this point, you may be expecting me to tell you about the talks we heard at The Lamb on 2nd April.  However, if you are a member of either the WOA or SSF, you will be able to read all about these in the next edition of Siegfried's Journal.  If, on the other hand, you are not yet a member... You know, you really should join us.

Easter Rising

I happened to be in Ireland last week, and, as every schoolchild probably knows by now, 2016 is the centenary of the Easter Rising.  The taxi driver with whom I discussed it was of the opinion that "people need to be careful when they stir up nationalist feeling".  His concern was that the hundredth anniversary of the event might have a similar long-term effect to the fiftieth anniversary in 1966, when Irish Republicans famously blew up Nelson's Pillar, a relic of colonial rule that stood in the middle of O'Connell Street, just across from the General Post Office which had been the rebels' HQ during the Easter Rising.

What many people do not realise is that repeated attempts had been made by the Irish government to remove the Pillar; they were thwarted by the terms of a trust that had existed since it was first erected in 1808.  Legal attempts to obtain permission to demolish it had failed.  To be fair, a few Irish people actually liked it; James Joyce and W B Yeats who wanted it to be preserved.  In general, though, it was an anachronism whose destruction was not greatly regretted.

Prior to the explosion, during the 1950s, the Irish government gave brief consideration to replacing the statue of Nelson with one of Patrick Pearse, the poet and schoolteacher who read out the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the steps of the GPO on the first day of the Easter Rising. The most articulate of the rebels, he gave them a voice, and this led inevitably to his execution in May 1916.  In death, he became the most famous and most missed of the leaders of the rising, his name being given to buildings, streets, parks, sports clubs and stations, while his face appeared on coins and stamps after Ireland's independence was finally achieved.  

Pearse's body was buried at Arbour Hill Military Cemetery in Dublin, after being transported from Kilmainham Gaol where he was shot by a firing squad, along with his younger brother Willie and other republican leaders.  The British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, had been warned not to return the rebels' remains to their families for fear of their graves becoming martyrs' shrines.  Pearse's mother and sister went on to become members of the Irish Parliament, whilst he and his companions acquired martyr status without too much difficulty.

One of those shot in company with Pearse was Thomas MacDonagh, a poet and playwright from Tipperary who taught with him at St Enda's School, where efforts were being made to keep the Irish language  alive. Despite the association, MacDonagh was a late recruit to the elite group of educated men who masterminded the  Easter Rising.  Tragically, his widow would die in a drowning accident a year after his execution; their legacy was their son, Donagh MacDonagh, brought up by an aunt to become both an accomplished writer and, at 29, the youngest person ever appointed to the Irish judiciary.

While the Easter Rising was taking place, thousands of Irishmen, of various religious and political persuasions, were fighting with the British forces against Germany.  Three days after the rising in Dublin, German gas attacks at Hulluch began, resulting in over 400 deaths among the 16th (Irish) Division.  Meanwhile, the poet Francis Ledwidge, a nationalist from County Meath, was on leave after being injured on active service in Serbia.  The news of the rising and its aftermath were devastating; he overstayed his leave and was later charged with being drunk in uniform; Ledwidge began once again to question his position, having already searched his conscience carefully before making the decision to enlist.

Some of Patrick Pearse's poetry in support of the Irish republican cause could so easily have been written about the First World War.  After the Easter Rising, however, with Pearse no longer around, Ledwidge was one of those who briefly filled his place, producing a "Lament for the Poets".  A close friend of MacDonagh, Ledwidge also produced a "Lament for Thomas MacDonagh", which takes on a less militant and more personal note. A year later, Ledwidge himself would be dead, the victim of a random shell explosion as he stood in a ditch, near Ypres, with a mug of tea in his hand. He died on the same day as the Welsh-language poet Ellis Evans (better known by his bardic name of "Hedd Wyn"), who was fatally wounded in action and is buried just a hundred yards away from Ledwidge. Members of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship visited both of their graves during our visit to Ypres in October 2010 and paid tribute to these much-lamented Celtic war poets.

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Trees of Remembrance

I will confess that the idea of a "National Memorial Arboretum" seems rather a bizarre one.  Certainly there is a trend, and not really a new one, for people to plant trees in memory of loved ones. Siegfried Sassoon's mother, Theresa, notably planted one on the village green at Matfield to commemorate the end of the First World War, although the one that is to be found on the spot now is not the one she planted; that blew down in the great "hurricane" of 1987.  Nevertheless, the idea of a 150-acre site full of trees and other types of memorial is not one that would ever have occurred to me.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I visited the Arboretum last week, but I was pleasantly surprised. Admittedly the new visitor centre is mostly still under wraps, as is the main armed forces memorial, erected in 2007 and dedicated by Dr Rowan Williams, in his capacity as Archbishop of Canterbury.   It takes the form of a stone circle and carries the names of servicemen and women who have died in the years since World War II, many thousands of them, like a smaller version of the Thiepval memorial, or the Menin Gate of which Siegfried was so critical.  The main difference is that almost all of those named have known graves.  Their family has a private memorial; the nation has a public one.

Dr Williams is known as a man of peace, but clearly does not shrink from open admiration of the armed forces. "All the service and skill that keeps us secure may be invisible a lot of the time," he said at the opening ceremony, "but if we are not to be dishonest, shallow and unreal, we need to make the invisible visible once in a while."  There was a time - at the height of "The Troubles" in Northern Ireland, perhaps - when such recognition was hard to come by in the UK.  The Falklands conflict resulted in a certain thawing of public relations, but the army remained something you really didn't want your son to join.

What finally changed the atmosphere in Britain, I believe, was the peacekeeping activities of UN troops in countries like Cambodia, Mozambique, Bosnia, Rwanda and El Salvador. In 1988 the UN peacekeeping forces received the Nobel Peace Prize, an accolade that seems well-deserved even if their subsequent efforts were not always successful.  Meanwhile, the global situation suggested that the assault on Iraq in the First Gulf War was justified by the undisciplined conduct of the country's leader, and a decade later, the events of 9/11 left every country in the West looking over its shoulder.

What was more, acting with allies in the cause of world peace was starting to seem more like something you would want your son, or even your daughter, to be involved in.  It wasn't about being "Top Nation" any more (to quote Sellar and Yeatman); it was about showing how civilised you were by comparison with other countries.  If that sounds as though I'm being critical of the soldiers who went to Afghanistan, I'm not, but, like Siegfried, I'm not so sure about the politicians.

Memorial to the Land Girls and Lumber Jills

If it's peace we prize, and peace is the reason we now respect members of the armed forces, surely we should be giving some consideration to others who give their lives to help others: the fire service, the police, the lifeboat crews?  Many of these are volunteers and are not even paid for their service.  And it is here that you will find them, those who "also served".  It's a curious mixture really, and I suppose that its very randomness is, and will continue to be, an attraction, which is why there were plenty of visitors around on a cold Monday in March, and that number will undoubtedly grow.  A lot of them will be older people who actually remember a world war, but there will be the school parties and the older students and people like ourselves, who simply look on, if not with outright admiration, then at least with respect.

The artistry and workmanship that has gone into these memorials is also something to be appreciated. They come in all shapes and sizes, from traditional monuments relocated from closed-down public buildings to modern, brightly-coloured structures.  I would not be myself if I didn't comment on the fact that a couple of the carefully engraved stones and plaques suffered from the extraneou's apostroph'e syndrome - what a pity, when so much money has been spent on them, that no one took the trouble to check that the commemorative message was written correctly - spoiling the ship for a ha'porth of tar, so to speak - but I daresay the majority of visitors have not even noticed.

All in all, a recommendation for a visit.  Allow yourself plenty of time to walk around, or, if your mobility is limited, take the tour by "road train" with a running commentary from a British Legion volunteer.  I think it is worth it.

A Game of Statues

There was a bit of a fuss recently about a statue.  Not the first such fuss, of course.  Most of us can recall incidents of a similar nature.  Usually the controversy is about one of two things: either people don't like the statue itself, or they don't like the subject of the statue.

The row I have just heard about is over a statue of Cecil Rhodes.  I think most people in Britain today - and of course in South Africa - are of the opinion that he really wasn't a very nice man.  He may have left a fortune that now enables overseas scholars to come and study at Oxford University (former US president Bill Clinton being possibly the best-known beneficiary), but that doesn't make up for his treatment of the native people in South Africa and what is now Zimbabwe, whom he drove from their lands to further his own business interests.  In human terms, his belief in his own racial superiority was on a par with Hitler's.

We all recognise that Rhodes was a product of his time.  The question is, does his generous bequest to educational funding make up for his unpleasant politics?  Initially, Rhodes Scholarships were reserved for white males; only in the last decade of the twentieth century did they become truly inclusive.  The first protests by students against commemoration of Cecil Rhodes took place when the "Rhodes Must Fall" movement was created in 2014 to seek the removal of a statue erected at the University of Cape Town in 1934.  The movement spread to Oxford where, late last year, the Oriel College authorities were urged to remove a bronze statue of Rhodes from the façade of the Rhodes Building which fronts onto the High Street. They have declined to do so (perhaps hoping that rebellious undergraduates might do the job for them?)

In a public statement, Oriel College said that they would ensure that "acknowledgement of the historical fact of Rhodes's bequest to the College does not suggest celebration of his unacceptable views and actions".  That is as far as they are prepared to go and, for the most part, commentators seem to consider their decision to be the right one.  The great Michael Wood, whose BBC History column is always worth reading, suggests that a statue of an African leader might be put alongside that of Rhodes, to balance things out.

I'm not sure about it.  I was an undergraduate at Oxford for three years and have visited the city many times since.  I must have walked past Rhodes' statue hundreds of times without ever noticing it was there.  So what would be so terrible about removing it?  As yet, I haven't succeeding in finding out the identity of the sculptor, but it doesn't appear to be a great work of art.

Hamo Sassoon's statue of Rhodes in Kimberley

I would feel differently, though, if it turned out that the sculptor was, for example, Sir Hamo Thornycroft, Siegfried Sassoon's uncle, or one of Siegfried's grandparents.  On checking my facts, I discovered that Hamo did indeed create a statue of Cecil Rhodes - an equestrian statue at Kimberley in South Africa, unveiled in 1907.  An early study is held by the Tate Gallery.  Would I want this statue taken down?  No, not really.  (Luckily, the "Rhodes Must Fall" campaigners don't yet seem to have their eye on it.) Would I object if all such statues of Rhodes were removed from their pedestals and placed in museums where their context could be more clearly shown?  No, I wouldn't.  But I wonder, which museum would want them?

Johnny Conchie

When I was perhaps about twelve, I tried to describe to my grandmother a man I kept seeing in her street, who always smiled and said hello to me.  "Oh, that's Johnny Conchie," she eventually said, and laughed.  She told me that it wasn't his real name, but his nickname, because he had been a conscientious objector during the war.  I was old enough to understand that she meant the First World War, but I had never heard of a conscientious objector before.  It was explained to me that he had refused to fight during the war, "because he thought it was wrong".

So, in the mid-1960s, a man in his seventies was known by a nickname he had picked up about fifty years earlier.  My grandparents knew him well and appeared to think nothing of this.  They clearly felt no resentment against him for it.  

Perhaps they were not a typical family.  My grandfather just missed the Western Front, after sitting for several hours on a train in Pembrokeshire only to be returned to his training barracks because the Armistice was about to be signed. His four brothers were too young to be called up; his father was too old.  My grandmother's older brothers were the right age, but chose the navy and survived. So perhaps, unlike some, they had nothing to resent Johnny Conchie for.

The motives for Johnny Conchie's action, or inaction if you prefer, were never known to me.  Being from an industrial town in South Wales, he could well have been a socialist, or very religious, or both.  My family even seemed unsure what the punishment for his rebellion against authority had been; there was a vague idea that he had been to prison.

Contrary to the classification many give him, Siegfried Sassoon was not a conscientious objector, or at least not in the usual sense. He went willingly to war in 1914 and willingly back to war in 1917. Between those times, he did indeed suffer a crisis of conscience, but it was not caused by a religious experience, nor - I think - by a specific experience of any kind; it was more a reflection of the mental anguish brought about by the sight of so much human suffering and the deaths of so many of his friends and comrades.  Who could have blamed him if he had lost touch with reality as a result of such an environment?

Yet Siegfried, though suffering from hallucinations and having difficulty with civilian life, had not lost touch with his sense of what mattered.  It was being away from the war, in the comfort of convalescent accommodation, that enabled him to look more dispassionately at his situation and realise that, in order to be true to his dead comrades, he had to be true to himself.  I have always argued, and will continue to argue, that he acted of his own accord, that he was not bamboozled by the cleverness of Bertrand Russell or anyone else into doing their political dirty work for them. Seeing that Sassoon was desperate to do something constructive to help other soldiers, they showed him some possibilities that he might not have come up with by himself.  Although, after a few months in "Dottyville", he may have felt as though it had all been a waste of time, he never blamed others for encouraging him to make his protest.

It is true that Sassoon, had he merely been deemed a traitor rather than being branded as mentally ill, might have come before a court-martial and been shot if convicted, but that was never a likely outcome for one who had already served with distinction at the Western Front. In the First World War, the real conscientious objectors suffered punishments that were mostly less severe than those that could be imposed by a court-martial - which may be considered ironic.  If their consciences allowed them, they might be able to take up a non-combatant role, such as stretcher-bearer or transport duties. Some of the hard-liners, like the "Richmond Sixteen", had their death sentences commuted to penal servitude and did not complete their sentences until after the war.  Altogether, about eighty conscientious objectors died in the course of their imprisonment, in some cases because of their harsh treatment.

Deserters, on the other hand, or any serviceman convicted of cowardice, could be executed.  It was important, the authorities felt, to make an example of them, but the death sentence was carried out in only 10% of cases - around 300 men in all during the First World War.  That is another story, for another time.