Vol. 31 No. 3 · 12 February 2009
pages 8-9 | 3293 words
Delighted to See Himself
Stefan Collini
- BuyMaurice Bowra: A Life by Leslie Mitchell
Oxford, 385 pp, £25.00, February 2009, ISBN 978 0 19 929584 5
What is the best case that can be made for Maurice Bowra? In his day, and it was a long day, he was the most celebrated don in Oxford, and therefore in England. Born in 1898, he became a fellow of Wadham in 1922; he was elected its warden in 1938, holding that office, astonishingly, until 1970; he died a year later. He wrote or edited some thirty books, mostly semi-scholarly, semi-popular expositions of the imperishable qualities of the ancient Greeks, though also studies of, and translations from, modern European poetry. But, as his friend Isaiah Berlin later wrote, ‘those who knew him solely through his published works can have no inkling of his genius.’
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Letters
Vol. 31 No. 4 · 26 February 2009
From A.N. Wilson
When coming into college and seeing the flag at half-mast, Maurice Bowra said to the porter: ‘Don’t tell me. Let me guess.’ Surely a brilliant remark? Or looking up at the New Bodleian building opposite Wadham, adorned with strange squiggly motifs: ‘Lambs’-tails from Shakespeare?’ When thwarted in a committee by a don named Baker: ‘I’ve met my Bakerloo.’ When Warden Sumner’s coffin was carried into All Souls Chapel: ‘Sumner is icumen in.’ And when Sumner was succeeded by Warden Sparrow: ‘One Sparrow doesn’t make a Sumner.’ Or of Hugo Dyson: ‘The life and death of the party.’
Not only do the dozens of Bowra-isms still have the capacity to make me laugh. They somehow imply a whole attitude to life which Stefan Collini might find tiresome, but which seems admirable to others (LRB, 12 February). Bowra was of the generation that had been through the trenches. They did not wear their hearts on their sleeves. I met him perhaps six times in the last 18 months of his life when he was an old man. The obvious thing about him, which is actually a very unusual quality, was his fondness for the young. As he explained what was good about Yeats, Rilke or Tennyson, you went away yearning to know them by heart. He was generous with time and drink. Isn’t this what university teachers at their best are for? He promoted the interests of those he admired and his sympathies were broad. Some might not think it was a good thing to have given Terry Eagleton a fellowship, but the fact that Bowra did so – ‘Very good thing, very good thing, Pope John Marxist’ – suggests someone unlike Collini’s narrow ‘snob’.
A.N. Wilson
London NW1
Vol. 31 No. 5 · 12 March 2009
From John Jones
A.N. Wilson reminds us that Maurice Bowra could be kind to the young (Letters, 26 February). He once gave me his rationale, shouting, ‘Self-interest! Self-interest!’ against my attempt to thank him for a supremely good turn. ‘Self-interest, dear boy. The gates of heaven open wide for those who are kind to us when we are young.’
John Jones
Oxford
Vol. 31 No. 6 · 26 March 2009
From Andrew Wilton
A.N. Wilson mentions among various obiter dicta of Maurice Bowra his use of the phrase ‘I’ve met my Bakerloo’ in connection with an Oxford don named Baker (Letters, 26 February). The remark is better known as Edwin Lutyens’s rueful comment when he realised he had been upstaged by Herbert Baker’s government buildings on the Rajpath leading to his own Viceregal Lodge in New Delhi. It seems that Lutyens said it in 1922.
Andrew Wilton
London SW11
