Christendom and Anti-Hellenism: Walter Shewring's Sallies

Abstract

Christendom and Anti-Hellenism:Walter Shewring's Sallies David Ricks (bio) Walter Shewring (1906–1990) is a classic case of "the translator's invisibility." His prose translation of the Odyssey (1980) has been widely used and intermittently praised, but few readers can have given a thought to this translator, or even to his idiosyncratic discussion of Homeric translation modestly placed at the back of the book.1 Yet the back story to this late-life enterprise in Englishing Homer (Ronald Knox's downright verb still possesses utility) is not without interest, for Shewring's stance when it came to the place of the classics was avowedly off-center, indeed counter-cultural. And at a time when tenured classical scholars assail their own field for its failings, to the point even of denying its legitimacy, a glance back at some earlier debates (relating to, among other things, the rival claims of Greek and Latin; the place of modern languages and especially of Italian; and the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns) may be of interest. At the same time, Shewring's presence has always been a somewhat occluded one: everyone knows the Perpetua font created by Eric Gill, few that it was created for Shewring's 1929 edition of the Passion of SS. Perpetua and Felicity. Attention, then, to Shewring's skirmishes—and to his silences—may, then, have some value. Shewring was and was not part of the classical establishment. A son of the manse and of the provinces, he (like the present writer) attended Bristol Grammar School, where he won the poetry prize three times and dared to correspond with Housman. In 1924 he proceeded Scholar of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he won two University prizes; nor was it dishonor to be honorably mentioned for a further prize won by a Mr. Syme of Magdalen. I think it likely, from the fact that Shewring co-authored the article on prose rhythm in the 1949 Oxford Classical Dictionary with J.D. Denniston, that he had gone [End Page 71] to the latter for composition; and a pair of articles on Greek prose rhythm published in Classical Quarterly in 1930–1 are still cited by Dover in the current OCD. (A further one appeared in the Journal of Theological Studies.) A volume of Greek and Latin versions appeared in 1938. So far, so conventional. But in the meantime life-changing events occurred. At the avant-garde bookshop in Bristol owned by Douglas Cleverdon (later an influential producer for the BBC's Third Programme and a colleague of D.S. Carne-Ross) Shewring was swept off his feet by Eric Gill, whose lifelong disciple he became. He was also taken up by the influential theorist of homosexuality, André Raffalovich, and his companion, the strikingly original Nineties poet John—by now Canon John—Gray; and in 1926 he made his submission to Rome. Around that time, he was rebuffed in his courtship of a young woman who (it would seem) appears in the Latin dedication to his Odyssey more than half a century later and who is mentioned in a late poem.2 (Shewring's first poems had appeared as early as 1927 and then—with illustrations by David Jones—in 1930.) "On the rebound" scarcely describes the journey north to Ampleforth Abbey, where (with a break as a conscientious objector working the land during the Second World War) Shewring lived out his days as a schoolmaster. The entirety of a report on one boy—"Ignorant, indolent, insolent"—lives in legend. But from his marginal position Shewring exercised a Joycean exile and cunning. Contributions, if they did not exactly flow from his pen, were shot from it periodically, on more subjects than most people could hope to have an opinion on, or than I can mention here. I shall concentrate on certain positions—I would call them positions rather than simply postures—which Shewring took in a slim and elegant volume of essays called Topics (1940) and, concurrently, in an unfinished book, the ruins of which exist in a handful of copies deposited in British libraries.3 Both volumes are well worth reading, and re-reading: here I can...