David Grene's life: hedgehogs and Greek tragedy

David Grene
OF FARMING & CLASSICS
A memoir
169pp. University of Chicago Press. $30; distributed in the UK by Wiley. £19.
978 0 226 30801 2

"I have lived through a tremendous change in the evolution of classical studies in western culture”, muses David Grene as he recalls his undergraduate studies, devoted to the linguistic minutiae of ancient texts, at Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1930s. His experience of Irish, British, Austrian and American Classics across the whole period from the 1920s until 2002 makes this slim, deftly written, posthumously published volume an illuminating read for every classical scholar engaged with the current quest for the subject’s roots, and the excavation of the way that it has evolved over the past century and a half. But Grene’s memoir is made really memorable by his “other”, bucolic voice; for his account of twentieth-century Classics runs in tandem with his memories of his other profession, as a dairy farmer in Illinois and subsequently in Wicklow and Cavan in Ireland.

Most classical scholars spend much of their time incongruously reading about activities that they are unlikely ever to develop expertise in, or even witness: rowing triremes, casting metal weapons, and handling distaffs. But Grene actually performed the same tasks as one of his heroes, the narrator of Hesiod’s Works and Days. Persephone-like, for half of each year, Grene was a scholar of ancient Greek literature and thought, with something of a cult following, at the University of Chicago. But what he was really proud of was what he did with the other six months. He knew more about farming than any other twentieth-century classicist, with the possible exception of Victor Davis Hanson, who farms grapes and olives. The pervasive Aesopic tone in Of Farming and Classics is set in the opening two pages, with Grene’s description of the hedgehog he had captured as a child: “Like all hedgehogs I have ever known he managed to escape fairly soon”. The point here is not that the spiny mammal got away, but that Grene had, during the course of his life, been personally acquainted with a significant number of hedgehogs.

One of his several personae seems to have been modelled on W. B. Yeats. During his theatre-mad Dublin youth, Grene acquired his love of dramatic literature while witnessing not only famous, politically charged revivals of Sean O’Casey’s plays, but premieres of all Yeats’s mature dramas. Grene, who was brought up in the city, spends pages idealizing an Irish peasantry whose way of life was virtually a thing of the past even in Yeats’s later decades. But a more dominant voice still is that of an Irish Dr Doolittle, for Grene’s memoir contains rhapsodic accounts of his emotional intimacy with animals, including the lion cubs an indulgent keeper at the Phoenix Park Zoo allowed him to play with in infancy. Grene discusses, at length and without irony, whether animals have souls. He delivers Luddite polemics against agribusinesses, electric fencing, tractors that made working horses on farms obsolete, and the shameful practice of buying new heifers to introduce into herds instead of raising one’s own. He provides instructions on how to estimate the weight of a bullock. There are impassioned speeches about animals’ developed psyches: pigs, we learn, are highly intelligent and “bent on discovering things”, while one beloved mare possessed refined skills as a teacher. These passages are adorned with photographs of Grene in intense spiritual communion with cows, ducks and horses. Clearly a passionate man, whose youthful affairs with actresses are enthusiastically described, he avoids all discussion of his two wives, long-term partner (Stephanie Nelson, a Hesiod scholar) and several children. This creates the impression – perhaps mistakenly – that he liked animals more than people.

Grene had a high profile in farming circles in County Cavan, but in academe he is most familiar as one of the partnership known, to almost everyone who has studied Classics or Drama from the sixth form upwards, as “Grene and Lattimore”. “Grene and Lattimore” is synonymous with The Complete Greek Tragedies as edited by Grene and the much more famous Richmond Lattimore, poet and translator of Homer. These two editors themselves translated some of the thirty-one extant plays by the Greek tragedians. Grene did rather less than Lattimore: he was originally responsible for just four tragedies; in two of these – Prometheus Bound and Hippolytus – his choice may have been determined by the prominence of animals (a cow and horses respectively). But Grene and Lattimore’s great skill was in commissioning other scholars with a real ear for poetic English to help them complete the collection, including William Arrowsmith and Seth Bernadete. As a result, the translations were far superior to other mass-market versions, especially the mediocre Penguins by Philip Watling and E. F. Vellacott then available.

The Chicago series drew attention to ancient drama, made it accessible to a wider readership, and remains a significant cultural presence both on and off the curriculum. The series has sold nearly four million copies – an astonishing performance for any Greek or Roman classic author, in the same league as E. V. Rieu’s bestselling Penguin translation of the Odyssey. The series is now legendary in publishing history, and promoted as such by the University of Chicago Press, whose webpages imply that it was of equivalent importance to, for example, Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom.

Yet anyone looking for discussion of how Grene and Lattimore collaborated, or Grene’s theory of translation, or how he reacted to the theoretical shifts in Classics in the last three decades of the twentieth century, will look in vain in this maverick memoir. He announces early that he has no interest in methodology, and thinks all theoretical self-consciousness and analysis poor substitutes for unmediated emotional engagements with the “eerie power” of works that “inflame the imagination”. He has almost nothing to say about his own (not prolific) Greek scholarship. But he was clearly devoid of intellectual or personal vanity, and he is much less interested in his own output than in describing the curriculum wars that were waged at Chicago in the immediate post-war period.

Grene first arrived at Chicago in 1937. This was after brief academic spells in Vienna (where he experienced one of the last seminars held in Latin by Ludwig Radermacher, as well as the rise of Nazism). He then taught briefly in Harvard, where he predictably did not fit in, and which he thought “stuffy, unauthentically American, and quite dull”. He was much more impressed by an episode in Hollywood, where he was befriended by Harpo Marx. But at Chicago, Grene’s unconventional appearance, intensity and uncompromising attitudes meant that he was viewed with, as he puts it, “extreme suspicion as a dangerous import” by the Classics department. In 1945, he was humiliatingly dismissed from it, and from the Undergraduate Teaching College as a whole, on the ground (he says) that he had insisted that works of literature were susceptible to diverse interpretations. It would be fun to know exactly what dire departmental stasis this short narrative conceals.

His career was rescued by the progressive president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had earlier left a note in his file stating, “This man is not to be fired without consulting me”. Hutchins, the arch-apostle of the innovative “Great Books of the World” liberal-arts curriculum at Chicago, shrewdly saw where Grene’s talents as inspirational communicator and humanist lay, and invited him to join the newly formed graduate programme entitled the Committee on Social Thought. Grene, fortuitously landing in the right place at the right time, then became central to “the confused but intensely alive academic seasons” between 1946 and 1952, when the now legendary Committee began to function as an independent entity; he worked alongside such intellectual titans as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow and Mircea Eliade.

The Committee certainly saved Grene’s academic bacon. And it was in this environment that his significance emerged as harbinger, symptom and symbol of the dramatic changes in the teaching of Classics that were to take place internationally in the second half of the twentieth century. This he achieved by making central to the curriculum of any aspiring Chicago graduate student in Humanities the reading, in up-to-date English translations, of great ancient Greek and Roman authors: Thucydides, Plato and the Roman historians, in addition to drama and poetry. This was in the 1940s and 50s, long before the value of engagement with ancient minds in translation had become clear on most Western campuses. Indeed, what Grene contributed to was a whole neo-humanist curriculum geared to the different school training of the post-war period. His one substantial scholarly study emerged from that period, Man in His Pride, a rather mystical book about the thought of Thucydides and Plato, which baffled many: Victor Ehrenberg’s review in Classical Philology (1952) remarked on Grene’s “coining of half-poetical and unusual phrases, frequently vague and sometimes even unintelligible”. Yet with hindsight the poetical and unusual Grene also prefigured the recent trends in Classics of both interdisciplinarity and reception, through his involvement with contemporary theatre and his study of Shakespearean poetry, The Actor in History (1988).

Grene’s passionate advocacy of communicating the intellectual and emotional clout of ancient authors to as wide a constituency at Chicago as possible now seems forward-looking. But this paradoxical man had an intensely conservative side. Part of him seems to have become stuck in the seventeenth century, when his (then Roman Catholic and staunchly Royalist) family, in whose history he was extremely interested, first arrived in Ireland from England. He is proud that his forefathers fought at the Battle of the Boyne for James II, and traces his rebellious, intense personality back to these ancestors, fighting on the wrong side of history. In his vivid response to classical authors and education he does indeed seem strangely Early Modern; he bypassed the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century professionalization of Classics altogether, just as his preferred farming methods remained virtually untouched by mechanization. He was both a nonconformist happy to flout academic convention and a Romantic idealizer of the long-gone past. Indeed, at times the memoir suggests a consciousness verging on the bipolar.

At the end of it, one is entitled to ask whether farming and Classics really can illuminate one another. It has to be said that too much of the book consists of almost entirely separate chapters on one profession or the other (especially the final, extended defence of hunting on horseback – not only of foxes, but of stags). Yet when Grene does reflect on cross-pollination between his two “selves”, the results can be arresting. Belonging to two social worlds gives him an unusually keen eye for the precise nuances of social class and the ways in which they are defined and displayed. Looking at the effects of the British Empire on both farming and Classics produces a sophisticated reading of some aspects of both professions. An enthusiast for traditional farming methods and certainly no Marxist, Grene yet remains permanently aware, in an entirely practical sense, of the economic and material foundations of all human activities, with a shrewd eye to the ideological effects that the sources of a university’s funding can have on the curricula it offers and the teachers that it hires. He sees parallels between the mental attitudes and skills required of a satisfactory and personally satisfied small farmer and a university teacher: “some degree of intellectual discrimination and willingness to disregard the attraction of being like most other people”. He draws a few inspiring connections: for example, his charming account of how the myth of the centaur emerged from the magical synergy between a sensitive horse and a skilled rider. When talking of his own ecstasy in ploughing an Irish furrow with a team of horses, he alludes to passages in Hesiod and Aeschylus before drawing attention to what he perceives as the contentment of the ploughman in Breughel’s famous painting of the fall of Icarus.

That masterpiece might have made an excellent jacket illustration for Grene’s own book. Just as Bruegel’s ploughman dominates his painting, marginalizing the myth, so farming seems to have been, ultimately, more important to Grene than Classics. The hair-raising account of the experiences of Jewish immigrant farmers, facing the extreme anti-Semitism of German and Lithuanian communities in Illinois, makes the spats in the executive circles of the University of Chicago look like childish squabbles in a primary-school playground. David Grene certainly dilates more eloquently on the relationship between Annie and Patsy, his two ploughing mares, than on the praise Hannah Arendt once bestowed on his teaching. No wonder his students adored him.

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Edith Hall is Professor of Classical Theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her most recent book is The Theatrical Cast of Athens: Interactions between Ancient Greek drama and society, published last year.