Richard Wollheim, who died in November 2003, was Grote Professor in the University of London, before moving to the States, where he taught at Columbia and at Berkeley. His last book was On the Emotions (1999).
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Vol. 16 No. 12 · 23 June 1994
pages 3-6 | 5640 words
Fifty Years On
Richard Wollheim
One snowy night in the early months of 1945, we were dining in the basement of a bombed-out house in one of those neat workers’ suburbs of which the Dutch were proud. ‘We’ were the ten or so officers on the Head-quarters of 214 Infantry Brigade. For protection against the fierce cold, we had an anthracite stove, which smoked, and large tumblers of Dutch gin. We had been out of the line for an unprecedented ten days, and the Brigadier was in a more relaxed mood than we had seen since the last days of training in Kent the previous summer. He said that we must promise him something. We had been through a lot together. ‘My word,’ he said, and he chuckled. When the war was over, we might start to think of these as great days of our lives. ‘I want you never to forget that war is the filthiest, the most disgusting, thing man has invented.’
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 13 · 7 July 1994
From James MacGibbon
Richard Wollheim’s account of his war experiences (LRB, 23 June) is moving and masterly. His initial pacifism, his subsequent cool courage and the closing comment on whether ‘the haphazard killing’ was worthwhile without an eventual ‘change of heart’ says all that needs to be said about the futility of war. There is much else in the article about how war dulls human reaction to brutality. The account of the hooligan prank played on him in the officers’ mess (faking, with the MO’s connivance, his wetting of his trousers) is a small but significant bit of evidence of how war brutality can be personified.
James MacGibbon
Manningtree, Essex
From Mark Prosser
Proustians everywhere will be bucked to learn from Richard Wollheim’s account of his war that he got a job at HQ because he was one. Far better literary chat than flying gliders, I’d say. Did the unusually literate Brigadier ever call on him to talk about Proust, though? I wish Wollheim had said.
Mark Prosser
Winchester, Hants
