The Novels of Rex Warner: An Introduction

165 Pages·1989·15.744 MB·English

by  N. H. Reeve (auth.)

THE NOVELS OF REX WARNER
The Novels of Rex
Warner
An Introduction
N.H. Reeve
Lecturer in English
University College, Swansea
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-20476-2 ISBN 978-1-349-20474-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-20474-8
© N. H. Reeve 1989
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1989
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1989
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reeve, N.H., 1953-
The Novels of Rex Warner: An Introduction/ N.H. Reeve.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-312-03703-1
1. Warner, Rex, 1905--Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title
PR6045.A78Z88 1989
823'.912-dc20 89-37890
CIP
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Introduction 1
2 Allegory and The Wild Goose Chase 22
3 The Professor 48
4 The Aerodrome 75
5 The War and its Aftermath:
Why was I Killed? and Men of Stones 112
6 The Historical Novels 138
Afterword 153
Works by Rex Warner 157
Index 158
v
Acknowledgements
I should particularly like to thank the following for their varied and
always generous help: Frances Arnold, Michael Bott and the University
library at Reading, George Butterick and the Homer Babbidge library at
Storrs, Connecticut, Sam Dawson, Richard Johnstone, Marion Lomax,
Valerie Minogue, Jeremy Prynne, Arnold Rattenbury, Steven Tabach
nick, John Turner, Rhys Williams, and especially Richard Kerridge.
N.H. Reeve
1
Introduction
Rex Warner (1905-86), whose writings deserve to be rescued from
neglect, had a literary career in outline very similar to those of his
better-known contemporaries. His education begins at a minor
public school (StGeorge's, Harpenden) and is completed at Oxford
in the mid-1920s; he becomes friendly there with Auden, shares
many of his interests, and is subsequently regarded as a kind of
associate member of the 'Auden group'. He travels, teaches in
various schools (being sacked from one, The Oratory School at
Caversham, for political activity), and develops his rather unstable
left-wing enthusiasms, which begin to subside as the 1930s draw to
a close. His works are for a time keenly awaited and quite widely
read, 1 and their public profile helps in his eventual enlistment as a
more trustworthy Establishment figure; he moves from eager
Communist (who sold the manuscript of his first novel to raise
Party funds), to Director of the British Institute in Athens, within
the space of a few years. After the war he concentrates on a second
career as a teacher and translator of the classics, and while his
original writing continues to discuss political and moral issues, its
occasions become increasingly withdrawn from modem life, with
the consequent loss of most of the vitality and excursiveness of his
earlier work. Religious enquiry and faith meanwhile become
steadily more important to him. Such a story, with relatively minor
variations, could be told of a number of his fellows - Isherwood,
Day Lewis, even Auden himself.
Yet the writings Warner produced are quite distinctive and
personal. They may for convenience be called novels, but there is
little danger of mistaking them for anyone else's. While the images
and themes he works with reflect common preoccupations among
his peers-frontiers, leadership, human and technological values
he developed his own literary forms for them, committing himself
from the beginning not to the methods of orthodox realism but to
prose allegory. He was not, except in a few relatively unsuccessful
passages of his first book, The Wild Goose Chase, concerned to be at
all stylistically innovative; he rather sought almost to excess a
1
2 Introduction
clarity and plainness for his writing which would enable it to
address basic themes directly and without ornament. In this
respect his work aligns itself with the puritan allegorical tradition
reaching back to Bunyan, rather than with the principal develop
ments of literary modernism. His classical training led him addi
tionally to aim for a detached, orderly, Lucretian overview, even
while he implicitly questioned its tenability. All his writings
express a concern for proportion and symmetry, for the values of
the general over those of the exceptional, and for the kind of
rhetorical crystallisation of what might be aspired to, rather than
the exact recording of what was, whose use Thucydides first
encouraged. Warner tried to organise the clutter and urgency of
contemporary life into shapes whose form could be grasped and
followed with some security; he wanted to enlighten his readers
about abstract questions without removing them too far from the
local and immediate. Hence his novels approach the ideas that
interest him head-on, through strong set speeches about them,
and obliquely, through the invention of symbolic occasions for
meeting their unacknowledged presences in people's lives. His
main characters are not merely stock allegorical types, or mouth
pieces for the competing positions in the contemporary debate, but
individuals whose experiences, consistently presented in relation
to the influence on them of larger forces than themselves, could
stand without complete loss of particularity for those of the many.
At the same time the more powerful and interesting of the works
involve a straining against or calling to account of the smoothly
interlocking patterns on which they rely; there is a rebelliousness
in them, which rarely interrupts the authoritative evenness of the
writing, but which can work itself more insidiously into the
texture.
His literary output divides neatly in two. The main work is the
sequence, published between 1937 and 1949, of five political
allegories or novels-of-ideas, all subtitled in ways which draw
attention to their non-realistic elements: The Wild Goose Chase
(originally called 'an allegory', but in some editions 'a novel'), The
Professor ('a forecast'), The Aerodrome ('a love story'), Why Was I
Killed? ('a dramatic dialogue'), and Men of Stones ('a melodrama');
together with Poems and Contradictions of 1945, and a collection of
essays, The Cult of Power, a year later. The second, less successful
flowering, comprises four historical novels appearing between
1958 and 1967: The Young Caesar, Imperial Caesar, Pericles the
Introduction 3
Athenian and The Converts. This essay takes the form of a commen
tary on the novels in chronological order. Its aim is simply to
suggest something of what these works can yield to reading. It is
not primarily concerned to rival the numerous excellent general
studies of Warner's period which have secured his minor niche in
literary history-for example Samuel Hynes's The Auden Generation,
Richard Johnstone's The Will to Believe, or Katharine Hoskins's
Today the Struggle-to all of which the present essay is indebted. Its
particular enquiry is rather into the relationship between what
Warner set out to say, and the forms in which he chose to say it.
The main drift of the former has never been in much doubt, but
some of the consequences of its interaction with the latter can
provoke further interests than those Warner's name is usually
associated with. Since only two of the novels, The Professor and The
Aerodrome, are currently (1989) in print, a fair quantity of introduc
tory exposition is involved, but I hope this will help to draw
attention to the texts of works whose didactic intentions are
usually regarded as sufficiently obvious for the details of their
writing to be neglected. I believe that many of the questions raised
both by the successes and the limitations of Warner's works
continue to have considerable relevance, even in times ostensibly
ready to dismiss both works and questions (an Observer reviewer in
1987 even coined the adjective 'Rex Warnerish', apparently to
denote something recognisably puerile, turgid and pretentious);
the possibilities of non-realistic or parabolic prose fictions not
dissimilar to his own, as vehicles for diagnostic exploration of the
contemporary world, are perhaps more widely courted now than
in the 1950s and early 1960s when the reaction against the literary
preoccupations of the 1930s was at its strongest. There are occa
sions when the very simplicity of Warner's methods can help to
concentrate the attention upon some of the political, moral and
aesthetic issues perennially involved in such writing. In The
Professor (1938), for example, Warner does not just write a novel in
order to discuss some of the problems of liberalism. He seeks to
enact those problems in the structure of the fiction, and by so
doing produces something richer and less clear-cut than the
propaganda it initially looked like being; the implications of the
fiction can simultaneously support and conflict with the message it
is supposed to deliver. In The Aerodrome (1941), the sheer symmetry
and comprehensiveness of the allegorical linkages stand in ambi
guous relation with the welcome the novel affords to the uncertain
4 Introduction
and the unpredictable. Tensions of this kind are involved in each of
Warner's fictional projects, and in sequence the works present a
continuous reappraisal or modification of the positions their prede
cessors had reached. Proust wrote of Hugo that having begun by
giving his readers thought, he proceeded to give them what was
much more stimulating, food for thought; in Warner's case, an
abundant and readily-digested supply of the former has perhaps
obscured the presence of the latter, in works which have more than
merely antiquarian or journalistic attractions.
The openings of Warner's novels can take a swift and arresting
grip on their reader. Some involve an abrupt propulsion into a
world that calls instantly for new bearings, while we hear as it were
the clanging-shut of the gates behind us:
I continually wonder how I may account for my present state,
which, I suppose, it would be accurate to describe as one of
death.
(Why Was I Killed?)
The last week enjoyed, or rather experienced, by Professor
A. may be reconstructed with tolerable accuracy from two
sources ...
(The Professor)
Elsewhere there are breathless plunges - anxiously reined back by
qualifying asides or meticulous punctuation - into a kind of
vertigo:
It seems, though it was many years ago, only yesterday that we
citizens of a seaside town, standing in ranks along the esplanade,
watched, cheering at the same time with all the force of our
lungs, the outset of the three brothers who, with the inconsider
ate fine daring of youth, were prepared, each in his own way, to
go far on bicycles, distinguishing our town by an attempt which
even the brothers only dimly understood and which seemed to
most of us who stood spectators vociferously cheering impractic
able, to some even ridiculous.
(The Wild Goose Chase)
It would be difficult to overestimate the importance to me of the
events which had taken place previous to the hour (it was