- Rex Warner
Rex Warner (
March 9 1905 -June 24 1986 ) was an English classicist,writer and translator. He is now probably best remembered for "The Aerodrome" (1941), an allegoricalnovel whose young hero is faced with the disintegration of his certainties about his loved ones and with a choice between the earthy, animalistic life of his home village and the pure, efficient, emotionally detached life of an airman.Overview
He was born Reginald Ernest Warner in
Birmingham , England and brought up mainly inGloucestershire , where his father was a clergyman. He was educated at St. George’s School inHarpenden , and atWadham College, Oxford , where he associated withW. H. Auden andCecil Day Lewis , and published in "Oxford Poetry". After graduating in 1928, he spent time teaching, some of it inEgypt . His first collection, "Poems", appeared in 1937. He was a contributor to "Left Review", and his first novel, "The Wild Goose Chase", is in part a dystopian fantasy of a tyrannical government which is overthrown in a heroic revolution. His second novel, "The Professor", published around the time of the NaziAnschluss , is the story of a liberal academic whose compromises with a repressive government lead eventually to his arrest, imprisonment and execution "while attempting to escape"; contemporary reviewers saw parallels with the Austrian leadersEngelbert Dollfuss andKurt Schuschnigg . After "Why Was I Killed?" (1943), Warner abandoned contemporary allegory in favour of historical novels aboutAncient Greece and Rome, including "Imperial Caesar" for which he was awarded the 1960James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.From 1945 to 1947 he was in
Athens as Director of the British Institute. At that time he was involved in numerous translations of classical Greek authors. He also translatedGeorge Seferis ("Poems of George Seferis",1960).Later he was Tallman Professor of Classics at
Bowdoin College (1961) and then professor at theUniversity of Connecticut from 1962 for eleven years. He died inWallingford ,Oxfordshire .Works
*"The Wild Goose Chase. A Novel" (1937)
*"Poems" (1937)
*"The Professor" (1938) novel
*"The Aerodrome" (1941) novel
*"Why Was I Killed?" (1943) novel
*"Poems and Contradictions" (1945)
*"Men and Gods" (1950)
*"Greeks and Trojans" (1951)
*"Views of Attica" (1951)
*"Escapade" (1953) comic novel
*"Eternal Greece" (1953) with Martin Hürlimann
*"Young Caesar" (1958) historical novel
*"The Greek Philosophers" (1958)
*"Imperial Caesar" (1960) historical novel
*"Pericles the Athenian" (1963) historical novel
*"The Converts" (1967) historical novelTranslations
From Greek
*
Thucydides , "History of the Peloponnesian War " (1954)
*Xenophon , "A History of My Time" and "The Persian Expedition"
*Plutarch , "Parallel Lives " (as "The Fall of the Roman Republic") and "Moral Essays"
*Euripides , "Medea" (1944)From Latin
*"War Commentaries of Caesar" (1960) Gallic, Spanish and Civil Wars
*"The Confessions of St. Augustine" (1963)Film and TV adaptations
In 1983 the BBC screened an adaptation of "The Aerodrome". It was written by
Robin Chapman and directed byGiles Foster . The cast includedPeter Firth as Roy, the protagonist;Richard Briers as the Rector; andJill Bennett as Eustasia.[http://imdb.com/title/tt0085140 Entry on "The Aerodrome" at the Internet Movie Database]
References
*"Politics in the Novels of Rex Warner" (1974) James Flynn
*"The Novels of Rex Warner: An Introduction" (1989) N. H. Reeve
*"Fiercer Than Tigers: The Life and Works of Rex Warner" (2002) Stephen E. Tabachnick
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