In Auden's Shadow: Rex Warner

Rex Warner (1905-1986)

The first person I thought of when I came up with this overall topic of writers languishing (or flourishing - who knows?) under Auden's shadow, was Rex Warner.

When I was a teenager I bought a second-hand copy of Warner's novel The Aerodrome (1941), and was suprised to observe that it came from a 'uniform edition' of his works.

Rex Warner: The Aerodrome: A Love Story (1941)

Some of the comments on the blurb were intriguing, too. He was, it seems (according to V. S. Pritchett), 'the only outstanding novelist of ideas whom the decade of ideas has produced' and the comments about his other books made it clear that they, too, had been considered of major significance at the time.

The Aerodrome (Uniform Edition): blurb (1946)

The only Rex Warner I knew about was a translator and occasional commentator on Greek texts and culture. I had a copy of his version of Caesar's commentaries - conveniently, if unconventionally, transposed from the third person into the first. I also had his Penguin Classics translation of Thucydides.

Caesar: War Commentaries, trans. Rex Warner (1960)

Who, then, was this earlier Rex Warner, this eloquent critic of fascism, this author of a series of odd, symbolic texts which seemed to have run in parallel with much of the early work of Auden and his friends - The Wild Goose Chase (1937) with Auden & Isherwood's bizarre charade-play The Dog Beneath the Skin:

Rex Warner: The Wild Goose Chase (1937)

W. H. Auden & Christopher Isherwood: The Dog Beneath the Skin, or Where is Francis? (1935)

The Professor (1938) with Spender's play Trial of a Judge:

Rex Warner: The Professor (1938)

Stephen Spender: Trial of a Judge: A Tragic Statement in Five Acts (1938)

Why Was I Killed? (1943) with MacNeice's Group Theatre extravaganza Out of the Picture?

Rex Warner: Why Was I Killed?: A Dramatic Dialogue (1943)

Louis MacNeice: Out of the Picture (1937)

Rex Warner began, as novelists so often do, as a poet rather than a prose-writer. Remember those lines from C. Day Lewis's The Magnetic Mountain (1933) I quoted above, in the first of these posts?

Then I'll hit the trail for that promising land;
May catch up with Wystan and Rex my friend ...

Rex Warner: Poems (1937)

It wasn't till four years afterwards that he finally broke into print with his own verse. Here are a couple of samples:

Rex Warner: 'Sonnet'. Poems (1937), p.11.

Sonnet


How sweet only to delight lambs and laugh by streams,
innocent in love wakening to the early thrush,
to be wed by mountains, and feel the stars friendly,
to be a farmer's boy, to be far from battle.

But me my blood binds to remember men
more than the birds, not to be delicate with squirrels,
or gloat among the poppies in a mass of corn,
or follow in a maze endless unwinding of water.

Nor will my mind permit me to linger in the love,
the motherkindness of country among ascending trees,
knowing that love must be liberated by bleeding,
fearing for my fellows, for the murder of man.

How should I live then but as a kind of fungus,
or else as one in strict training for desperate war?

Note the prevalence of alliteration - a device brought back into popularity by Auden's predilection for Anglo-Saxon verse: "Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle. / Upon what man it fall. ..."

Note, too, the clipped, slightly awkward diction: another sign of the deep influence of his younger contemporary on his writing. The poem might as well have been titled 'Audenesque'. Sonnets composed in simple, prosaic language, too, were another favourite device of Auden's.

Having said that, the poem is not without interest in the severe psychological traumas it tries to explore. Who, in 1937, did not feel themselves 'in strict training for desperate war'?

Rex Warner: 'Light and Air'. Poems (1937), p. 19.

Light and Air


Our private vision is death, and the seers are yellow
who saw something remarkable in the dark,
who left the gas turned on, but never lit it,
and innocently withdrew before the explosion,
only too glad to forgive everyone.

Broken fragments are left, pieces of pottery,
fragments of a branch or frond for the microscope,
groups seen for an instant in indistinct light,
sometimes a curious smell outside the window.

We sometimes raise our heads from the window sill.
We sometimes venture to the ruinous door;
in the creaking house we demand light and air;

for what we need most is an atmosphere
fit to be breathed, and light by which to see.

The Auden influence is strong on this one, too. But here one might almost see Warner's preoccupation with the 'curious smell outside the window' as prophetic of Auden's later lines, in 'September 1, 1939':

The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night

The Wild Goose Chase: blurb

That same year, 1937, saw the publication of Warner's first novel, a rather bizarre allegorical mishmash called The Wild Goose Chase.

Clearly, judging by the blurb above, his publishers had high hopes of the book, and while it hasn't really stood the test of time as much as some of his later work, the same could easily be said of similarly mad creations of the thirties mindset as Auden's The Orators (1932) - or, for that matter, C. S. Lewis's allegorical novel The Pilgrim's Regress (1933):

C. S. Lewis: The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933)

Here's the verse dedication Warner wrote for the book:

The Wild Goose Chase: Dedication

Wild Goose, I made you a symbol of our Saviour,
With your fierce indifference to bye-laws and quiet flying,
your unearthly song, your neck like thunder and lightning,
and your mysterious barbaric love.

O missionaries and motor-cyclists!
Let us at daybreak honour the flying host,
the yelping hounds of air who, with blood for essence,
thrust like live shells through the speedways of heaven
above low coasts, over bed of rotting weed.

By light-houses, through showers of ice, listen
suddenly for onrush of wings, or from the storm
the bell-like note of an outriding voice.

This makes clear the basically Christian perspective he was working from at the time, as well as his continuing devotion to Auden's stylistic tropes: that mention of 'motor-cyclists', for instance, surely recalls Auden's 1930 poem 'Consider This'?

Consider this and in our time
As the hawk sees it or the helmeted airman

There's more there than just Auden, though. For the first time, I think, we catch a distinct echo of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

It's important to remember, in this connection, that - while we (rightly) consider Hopkins as a nineteenth-century poet, his collected verse was only published by his friend Robert Bridges in 1918, after the First World War.

Robert Bridges, ed.: Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rev. Charles Williams (1930)

Bridges, Robert, ed. Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 1918. Second Edition With an Appendix of Additional Notes, and a Critical Introduction by Charles Williams. 1930. The Oxford Bookshelf. 1937. London: Oxford University Press, 1941.

Charles Williams' second, enlarged edition appeared in 1930, just in time to exert a decisive influence on all of the thirties poets - especially Rex Warner's close friend, Cecil Day Lewis:

Rex Warner: The Converts: blurb

All of which brings us, by a a commodius vicus of recirculation back to The Aerodrome, his third and still most celebrated novel. Like Auden's The Orators, which it resembles in many ways, it's an allegorical / satirical account of Fascism - what a distinctly English brand of it might look like, and the aspects of English life which already tend in that direction:

W. H. Auden: The Orators: An English Study (1932)

Anthony Burgess, in the blurb I've reproduced above, describes it as 'the best, perhaps the only, English Kafka novel.' In his own introduction to a later reprint, he goes further and claims that: 'its value as literature becomes increasingly apparent at each rereading:

Rex Warner: The Aerodrome: A Love Story (1941)

Maybe you had to be there. For me, it reads more like various other 'symbolic' works of the late thirties and early forties - Ernst Jünger's Auf den Marmorklippen [On the Marble Cliffs], for instance:

Ernst Jünger: On the Marble Cliffs (1939)

Or, for that matter, Alfred Kubin's pre-First World War account of a weird journey to the depths of the unconscious mind, Die andere Seite [The Other Side]:

Alfred Kubin: The Other Side (19008)

I don't myself see much of Kafka there. Rex Warner's inspiration seems far more matter-of-fact than that to me, though perhaps the posthumour Amerika comes as close as anything.

Rex Warner: Julius Caesar: The Young Caesar & Imperial Caesar. 1958 & 1960 (1967)

For me, I'm afraid, the really readable and durable part of Warner's oeuvre comes in his later historical novels about such figures as St. Augustine, Julius Caesar and Pericles the Athenian. Each of these seems lively and interesting to me in a very original way - far beyond any conventional 'novelisation' of their respective careers.

Rex Warner: Pericles the Athenian (1963)

I'd go so far as to say, in fact, that his only real rival in this field is the great Mary Renault, re-inventor of Ancient Greece for the love generation.

Mary Renault: The Last of the Wine (1956)

It's true that Renault's own homosexuality adds a passionate polemic dimension to these alleged 'recreations' of Ancient Greek mores - and incidentally guarantees the continuing value of her work - but Rex Warner runs her a close second in his vivid sense of what it might have been to be alive then.

Nor is his own work bereft of passion. Take, for example, this piece from his 1945 collection Poems and Contradictions:

Whether love leaping to love as loose as fishes,
sand-sensitive, hot and delicate as a moth,
or whether with crushing load and slavering mouth
on impassive flesh, and hate trembling the lashes,
or whether as customary, and without fuss
that seed slid in the membrane and found a home
in the throbbing darkness of the impulsive womb,
that seed lodged firm and mastered all the mass;
and knew no love but to take toll of blood,
dreaming the dream of creepers or of fish,
limpet or saurian, the start of man,
fastened and fettered by a string to food,
by love or lust or duty framed in flesh,
growing in bulk, and groping into pain.

One thing seems certain. While his novels and stories may never be the first thing to leap to mind when you think of the thirties writers - or, for that matter, when you think of post-war classicists - anyone willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and actually pick up one of his excellent books will not find it disappointing.

Here is one case where a revival is, I firmly believe, long overdue. I haven't read the biography yet, by his student Stephen Tabachnick, but it seems to have been quite well reviewed.

Julius Caesar: blurb

•


The Professor (Penguin edition): blurb (1945)

Rex Warner
(1905-1986)

[titles I own are marked in bold]:

Poetry:


1. Poems. London: Boriswood Limited, 1937.
2. Poems and Contradictions (1945)
3. New Poems 1954 (with Laurie Lee and Christopher Hassall) (1954)




Rex Warner: The Converts: A Novel of Early Christianity (1967)


Fiction:


4. The Wild Goose Chase: A Novel. London: Boriswood Limited, 1937.
5. The Professor: A Novel. 1938. Penguin Books 482. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1945.
6. The Aerodrome. 1941. Uniform Edition. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head Ltd., 1946.
7. Why Was I Killed? A Dramatic Dialogue. London: John Lane / The Bodley Head Ltd., 1943.
8. Men of Stones: A Melodrama (1949)
9. Escapade (1953)
10. Julius Caesar: A One-Volume Edition of the Two Novels The Young Caesar and Imperial Caesar. 1958 & 1960. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1967.
11. Pericles the Athenian. London: Collins Clear-Type Press, 1963.
12. The Converts: A Novel of Early Christianity. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1967.




George Sefers: On the Greek Style, introduction by Rex Warner (1967)


Translations:


13. Xenophon. The Persian Expedition. 1949. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952.
14. Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. 1954. Ed. M. I. Finley. 1972. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.
15. Plutarch. Fall of the Roman Republic. 1958. Ed. Robin Seager. 1972. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
16. Caesar. War Commentaries. Mentor Books. New York: New American Library, 1960.
17. Seferis, George. On the Greek Style: Selected Essays in Poetry and Hellenism. Trans. with Th. D. Frangopoulos. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1966.
18. Xenophon. A History of My Times (Hellenica). 1966. Ed. George Cawkwell. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
19. Plutarch. Moral Essays. Ed. P. A. Russell. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.




Rex Warner: The Stories of the Greeks (1967)


Miscellaneous:


20. Men and Gods. 1950. Penguin Books 885. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1952.
21. Greeks and Trojans. 1951. Penguin Books 942. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953.
22. Cavafy, C. P. Poems. Trans. John Mavrogordato. Introduction by Rex Warner. 1951. London: Chatto & Windus, 1974.
23. The Stories of the Greeks: Men and Gods / Greeks and Trojans / The Vengeance of the Gods. 1951, 1953, 1955. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1967.
24. The Greek Philosophers. 1958. A Mentor Book. New York: New American Library, 1963.




Stephen Ely Tabachnick: Fiercer Than Tigers: The Life and Work of Rex Warner (2002)


Secondary:


25. Stephen Ely Tabachnick: Fiercer Than Tigers: The Life and Work of Rex Warner. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002.

Rex Warner: Men and Gods / Greeks and Trojans (1950-51)

11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month

P.J. Hammond: Sapphire and Steel: The Railway Station (1979)

Perhaps all wars require a mythic dimension to put alongside their otherwise irredeemable horror and brutality. The abduction of Helen by Paris adds a romantic sheen to what may actually have been a protracted struggle between the Achaean and Hittite Great Kings over trade access to Asia Minor.

In Homer's version of the Trojan War, of course, the irony of the whole thing lies in the fact that Helen is back as reigning Queen of Sparta by the beginning of the Odyssey, and is clearly inclined to see the whole thing as a youthful bagatelle. There's a slight edge to it all still, though.

In her version, she was the only one to recognise Odysseus when he entered the besieged city disguised as a beggar, and aided him in his mission, having (by then) repented her past indiscretions:

... since my heart was already longing for home, and I sighed at the blindness Aphrodite had dealt me, drawing me there from my own dear country, abandoning daughter and bridal chamber, and a husband lacking neither in wisdom nor looks.

Her husband Menelaus's account is, to say the least, a little different. He sees her as, if not an active collaborator with the Trojans, at any rate somewhat ambivalent in her support of the Greeks:

You circled our hollow hiding-place, striking the surface, calling out the names of the Danaan captains, in the very voices of each of the Argives’ wives. Diomedes, Tydeus’ son, and I, and Odysseus were there among them, hearing you call, and Diomedes and I were ready to answer within, and leap out, but Odysseus restrained us, despite our eagerness. [Odyssey 4, 220-89]

The Allied soldiers who fought at Gallipoli, just across the straits from Hissarlik, the probable site of ancient Troy, were by no means unaware of these parallels. Their classically trained young officers were, indeed, preoccupied by the subject - possibly to the exclusion of other, more vital, concerns.

Jean Giraudoux: La Guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu
[The Trojan War will not take place] (1935)

Take, for instance, Patrick Shaw-Stewart's famous poem "Achilles in the Trench":

I saw a man this morning
Who did not wish to die;
I ask, and cannot answer,
if otherwise wish I.

Fair broke the day this morning
Upon the Dardanelles:
The breeze blew soft, the morn's cheeks
Were cold as cold sea-shells.

But other shells are waiting
Across the Aegean Sea;
Shrapnel and high explosives,
Shells and hells for me.

Oh Hell of ships and cities,
Hell of men like me,
Fatal second Helen,
Why must I follow thee?

Achilles came to Troyland
And I to Chersonese;
He turned from wrath to battle,
And I from three days' peace.

Was it so hard, Achilles,
So very hard to die?
Thou knowest, and I know not;
So much the happier am I.

I will go back this morning
From Imbros o'er the sea.
Stand in the trench, Achilles,
Flame-capped, and shout for me.

The poem is valorised not only by those remarkable last two lines, but also by its author's own death, on active service, in 1917. I suppose what it's always recalled to me, though, rather than all of Achilles' dazzling deeds in the Iliad, are the last words we hear in his own voice, when he encounters Odysseus on his own journey to the Underworld:

Odysseus, don’t try to reconcile me to my dying. I’d rather serve as another man’s labourer, as a poor peasant without land, and be alive on Earth, than be lord of all the lifeless dead. [Odyssey 11, 465-540]

Kurz & Allison: First Battle of Bull Run (1861)

The American Civil War famously began in Wilmer McLean's front yard and finished in his back parlour.

McLean, a wholesale grocer, was so appalled by the experience of having his farm fought over in the first major engagement between the Union and Confederate armies, that he relocated his family in 1863. Unfortunately, the place he chose, an obscure little hamlet called Appomattox Courthouse, turned out to be the location of Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant in 1865.

Wilmer McLean's two houses (1861 & 1865)

That's what I mean by a mythic dimension. There's no real meaning in this strange coincidence, but it seems to betoken some kind of cosmic symmetry in things: a design behind all the relentless bloodshed human beings seem determined to mete out upon one another.

Wilfred Owen: Selected Poems (2018)

Another, of course, is the awful fatality of Wilfred Owen's life and death. He died, on the 4th of November 1918 - almost exactly one hundred years ago - in an assault on the Sambre–Oise Canal. However, as the Folio Society are at pains to remind us in the advertisement for their sumptuous new illustrated edition of his selected poems:

... his parents received the telegram announcing his death on 11 November itself, just as the church bells rang out in Shrewsbury to mark the end of the Great War.

There lies the apparent design. The poet who wrote in the draft preface to his as yet unpublished poems:

This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak
of them. Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor anything about glory, honour,
dominion or power,
Except War.
Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry.
The subject of it is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.

could somehow not be permitted to survive the war. Like Abraham Lincoln, or Achilles himself, he had to fall victim to it in order to achieve his full status as a sacrificial victim.

"He died that we may live." That's the kind of unctuous platitude that tends to come out on these occasions. And yet, it's hard to avoid a sense of strangeness about the whole thing, about the idea that the author of "Anthem for Doomed Youth" could not himself be allowed to outlive the war that turned him into perhaps the greatest of all war poet since Homer.

Mary Renault: The King Must Die (1958)

Mary Renault perhaps puts it best, in her novel The King Must Die (about the myth of Theseus), where she tries to explain the Ancient Greek concept of moira as:

The finished shape of our fate, the line drawn round it. It is the task the gods allot us, and the share of glory they allow; the limits we must not pass; and our appointed end. Moira is all these things.

"The king must go willingly, or he is no king." Whether it is Abraham Lincoln going to Ford's Theatre to show himself to the public one last time, Wilfred Owen refusing to accept non-active service away from the Front Line, or Achilles weeping with Priam over the body of Hector, there is something superhuman about all these noble, almost transcendent gestures.

The armistice itself is replete with legends: many of them clustering around the strange symmetry of "the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month."

Sapphire and Steel (1979)

In the cult British TV Sci-fi classic Sapphire and Steel, for instance (pictured at the head of this post), the storyline called "The Railway Station" concerns an out-of-the-way deserted railway platform haunted by a First World War soldier.

The precise nature of his grievance, and the reason he's been able to gather so many other disgruntled souls around him, hinges on the armistice: specifically, on the equation he keeps on drawing on the windows of the building:

11 / 11 / 11 / 11 = 18

It turns out that he was killed eleven minutes into that eleventh hour, and was thus an altogether unnecessary sacrifice to the gods of war.

Thomas Keneally: Gossip from the Forest (1975)

An even more complex set of ironies is explored in Thomas Keneally's 1975 novel Gossip from the Forest (subsequently made into a powerful, atmospheric film), about the German deputation sent to negotiate the surrender, and the subsequent murder by a right-wing fanatic of their leader, politician Matthias Erzberger, whilst walking in the Black forest a few years later.

From the Forest of Compiègne to the Black Forest, in fact.

Lady Ottoline Morrell: Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves (1920)

I don't mind admitting, though, that my favourite of all of the poetic moments associated with the armistice is the one recorded in Siegfried Sassoon's great poem "Everyone Sang":

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Sassoon survived. He went on to write many (mostly disappointing) further volumes of poems, but also a wonderful series of war memoirs and autobiographies. He got married, had a son, lived a long life. So let's not get too beguiled by the beautiful symmetries and high-mindedness of these seductive legends:

It is well, as Robert E. Lee said, that war is so terrible. We should grow too fond of it.

Robert E. Lee & Traveller (1865)

Or, as the somewhat more mordant A. E. Housman said in his "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries":

These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling,
And took their wages, and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

Metamorphoses XV (1632): Hippolytus

Perhaps y' haue heard of one Hippolytus;
By Step-dames fraud, and fathers credulous
Beliefe bequeath'd to death. Admire you may
That I am he, if credit, what I say.
Whom Phoedra formerly solicited,
But vainely, to defile my fathers bed.
Fearing detection, or in that refus'd;
She turnes the crime, and me of her's accus'd.
My father, banishing the innocent,
Along with me his winged curses sent.
Toward Pitthean Troezen (1) me my charriot bore:
And driuing now by the Corinthian shore,
The smooth seas swell; a monstrous billow rose,
Which, rouling like a mountaine, greater growes;
Then, bellowing, at the top asunder rends:
When from the breach, brest high, a Bull ascends;
Who at his dreadfull mouth and nosthrills spouts
Part of the sea. Feare all my followers routs:
But my afflicted mind was all this while
Vnterrifi'd; intending my exile.
When the hot horses start, erect their eares:
With horror rapt, and chaced by their feares,
O'r ragged rocks the totterd charriot drew:
In vaine I striue their fury to subdew,
The bits all frotht with fome: with all my strength
Pull the stretcht raiynes, I lying at full length,
Nor had their heady fright my strength o'r-gon;
Had not the feruent wheele, which roules vpon
The bearing Axel-tree, rusht on a stump:
Which brake, and fell asunder with that iump.
Throwne from my charriot, in the raignes fast-bound,
My guts drag'd out aliue, my sinewes wound
About the stump, my limbs in peeces hal'd;
Some stuck behind, some at the charriot traild;
My bones then breaking crackt, not any whole,
While I exhal'd my faint and weary soule.
No part of all my parts you could haue found
That might be knowne: for all was but one wound.
Now say, selfe-tortred Nymph, (2) or can, or dare
You your calamities with ours compare?
I also saw those realmes, to Day vnknowne:
And bath'd my wounds in smoking Phlegeton. (3)
Had not Apollos Son (4) imploid the aid
Of his great Art; I with the dead had staid.
But when by potent hearbs, and Paeons skill, (5)
I was restor'd, against sterne Plutos will:
Least I, if seene, might enuie haue procur'd:
Me, friendly Cynthia (6) with a cloud immur'd:
And that, though seene, I might be hurt by none;
She added age, and left my face vnknowne.
Whether in Delos, doubting, or in Creet;
Reiecting Creet and Delos as vnmeet,
Shee plac't me here. Nor would I should retaine
The memory of One by horses slaine:
But said; hence forward Virbius (7) be thy name
That wer't Hippolytus; though thou the same.
One of the Lesser Gods, here, in this Groue,
I Cynthia serue; preserued by her loue.

(1) A city of Peloponesus, where Pittheus the Grandfather of Theseus by his mother Aethra once raigned.
(2) Aegeria.
(3) A burning river in Hell.
(4) Aesculapius.
(5) Physick; of Paeon an excellent Physitian.
(6) Diana, of Cynthus a mountaine in Delos.
(7) Twice a man.

George Sandys, Ovid's Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz'd, and Represented in Figures. Oxford: John Lichfield, 1632.

Sandys' Marginal Note:

Virbius once Hypolitus, now a God of those groues, goes about to comfort Aegeria; and extenuate her sorrow with the relation of his former calamityes; torne in peices by his horses through his stepmothers fraud and fathers imprecations. The Curses of Parents fall heauy on their Children, allthough vndeserued, as this of credulous Theseus. Rash beleife is the author of much mischiefe, and vnsuspended rage of too late repentance. The chast youth suffers for anothers vnchastety. But virtue, though afflicted for a time, can neuer be finally suppressed: Eminent in the example of Bellerophon; but especially of Ioseph and his miraculous aduancement. Miserably disioynted Hypolitus is set together and restored to life by Aesculapius, Diana, his patronesse (changing his youth into age, and his former ominous name into Virbius, which signifies twice a man, the better to conceale him,) conueyed him hether and made him one of the Inferior Deities. But what saith Lactantius? Diana when she had allmost lost her louer, much bruised and torne by his vnruly horses, called Aesculapius, an excellent Phisitian (and therefore feigned to restore life vnto the Dead) to his timely helpe, whom she as soone as he was recouered, conueyed to those sequestred aboads. What showed this diligence in his concealed cure? these priuate retreates? his long conversation with a woman, and that in a place vnfrequented? the change of his name? and lastly her detestation of horses? but the guilt of her incontinency, and of such a loue as agreed not with a virgin. This Virbius, who boasted to haue beene Hipolytus was according to some authors a cunning Imposter, suborned by the Preists of Diana Aricina, to draw a greater concourse to that Groue, that their gaine might increase by more frequent deuotion. Nor haue others in latter ages serued their turnes with lesse incredible forgeries.

I've already discussed in my comments on the story of Aegeus and Medea in Metamorphoses Book VII how much an early reading of Mary Renault's The King Must Die affected me:

Horses go blindly to the sacrifice; but the gods give knowledge to men. When the King was dedicated, he knew his moira. In three years, or seven, or nine, or whatever the custom was, his term would end and the god would call him. And he went consenting, or he was no king ... When they came to choose among the Royal Kin, this was his sign; that he chose short life with glory, and to walk with the god, rather than live long unknown like the stall-fed oxen. (Renault, 24)

And what was Moira? "The finished shape of our fate, the line drawn around it. It is the task the gods allot us, and the share of glory they allow; the limits we must not pass; and our appointed end. Moira is all these." (23)

I looked eagerly for its sequel, The Bull from the Sea (1962), but when I finally read it, I found it disappointing. Renault seemed to have trouble with the figure of Hippolytos. He became a pious prig in her version. Nor did she seem particularly sympathetic towards Theseus's Cretan bride Phaedra. The impulsive child, sister to Ariadne, we meet in the first book has become a "little Cretan lady, just like the portrait I had been sent." The real loves of Theseus' life are the Amazon woman Hippolyta, mother of his son, and his buccaneering friend Pirithoos.

The main problem with the book, I guess, si the need to run through all the salient events of Theseus' life: the meeting with Oedipus at Colonus, the attempted abduction of Helen, and (of course) the death-curse put on his son.

Parents, as Sandys reminds us, should be more trusting of their offspring. Is that the whole meaning of the story, though. It's in the mould of other stories where ageing heroes destroy their own sons. Sohrab and Rustum, from Firdausi's Shah-Nameh, the epic of the Kings; Cuchulain, the Hound of Ulster, and his son Connla; Zeus and his father Saturn ...

It's another denial, I suppose, of the cyclical nature of the things. Sons should grow to full strength to succeed their fathers, but it's not in the nature of the masculine ego to retire into the shadows gracefully - there's always that midlife temptation to reinvent oneself totally, try to recover one's own youth (perhaps with a new young partner) rather than moving on to the latter maturing stages of life.

And, as so often in Ovid, this attempt to arrest time leads to disaster. What Theseus sees as an attempt by his son to usurp him prematurely by raping the queen, is in fact his own inability to understand his son's more reflective nature.

Of course Phaedra, in this reading, comes out as the villain, but again it's not difficult to see how she might prefer Hippolytus, much closer to her in age, to the grizzled ferocious husband who killed her father Minos and abandoned her sister Ariadne despite all the help she'd given him.