Memoir:A dual career as classicist and farmer helped David Grene avoid the 'mediocrity of good sense'.
David Grene lived two lives fully, as classics scholar and farmer. His command of Greek was by all accounts spectacular. At sight he could translate into perfect English any passage presented to him. After a year at the University of Chicago he bought a smallholding 30 miles west of the city and farmed it intensively. He was renowned for striding round the lecture theatre shedding flakes of manure from his boots. One of his obituarists reports that he was probably the only faculty member to have a resident litter of mice in his car.
In his memoir, written towards the end of his long life, this latter-day Hesiod explains his two vocations. It was boyhood summers spent on country cousins' farms in Co Tipperary that made him want to live and work on the land; and he fell in love with Greek at the age of 10. In a reserved way he celebrates some of the people who mattered to him: his father, a hard-working but underpaid accountant; his mother, "clever, optimistic . . . adventurous and complex"; hot-tempered Nicholas, of Grenepark Farm, who bought the first milking machine in Co Tipperary; and, the deepest familial influence, Aunt May, whose Protestantism was "bred of an intense conviction of a personal relation to her God". Grene, who cared for her deeply, seems to have recognised something of himself in "her isolation from the mediocrity of good sense". Aunt May started him horse-riding, and his contempt for "the mediocrity of good sense" extends to anti-hunt protesters. One chapter of the book is devoted to hunting.
At St Stephen's Green, his first school ("small and dubiously exclusive"), Grene was taught brilliantly by an old lag called Dicky Wood. After a few months devoted conscientiously to grammar, the 11-year-olds were by the second year reading the Alcestis of Euripides. "I remember Dicky dying magnificently as Alcestis, flopping very naturally on the dusty floor, declaiming her dying speech."
Our culture's debt to such idiosyncratic, visionary schoolteachers is incalculable. Indeed, this great scholar writes: "I know that I owe more to Dicky for my love and knowledge of Greek than to anyone who ever taught me afterward."
About this time he enjoyed another life-altering epiphany. He saw Sybil Thorndike in Saint Joan in 1924, then Charles Doran in Othello, and felt "excitement and even fear".
He won an entrance scholarship to Trinity, where, he says, the men who taught him honours classics "combined a well-deserved reputation for scholarship with a remoteness from ordinary life, and manifest loneliness, and very notably an inability to act or speak or dress like any normal members of their class and kind". There was JG Smyly, a leading papyrologist and a librarian of the college, whose own main interests were music and pornography. His successor found boxes and boxes of volumes on other subjects that had never been unpacked. One-eyed, with a sepulchral voice, his clothes always in rags, George Mooney asked the same questions every year in the viva voce exams. Sir Robert Tate (knighted for his services as an interpreter during the first World War and holder of the DSO) knew, it was claimed, 10 to 15 languages as well as Greek, Latin and Hebrew. He taught his students how to write Greek and Latin prose and verse (a torture I myself endured), converting, for instance, Milton's majestic cadences into crippled (in my case) hexameters and elegiacs.
In a wonderful passage that tells us much about Grene himself, he commends such teachers: "They come before you as a part of the mystery that lies in their complete mastery of those long-dead languages, and in their eerie power to jolt your imagination beyond almost anything that you can read of criticism in the more modern and apparently commonsensical fashion."
AFTER SABBATICALS IN Vienna, which he didn't care for, and at Harvard, which he found smug and stuffy, he arrived at the University of Chicago and decided to make his academic life there. Opinionated and outspoken, the young Irishman soon found himself at odds with the Aristotelian fundamentalists in the classics department. He was turned down for tenure.
Fortunately, this setback coincided with the establishment of a new department called the Committee on Social Thought, which quickly established itself as an unorthodox centre of brilliance. Teachers on the committee have included Saul Bellow and Hannah Arendt. Attracting talented misfits whose interests could not be easily pigeonholed, the committee provided Grene with an intellectual home for 64 years.
He owned, at one time or another, three small farms - in Illinois, Wicklow and Cavan. Half of every year was spent on the land. He did the work himself, sowing, ploughing with horses rather than a tractor (his favourite task), raising chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep and cattle. He trained horses for hunting and ploughing and working in carts, and rode on horseback to bring his cows home for milking. "What I want from animals is to share with them a world that is theirs, not mine." The man who in childhood had kept and studied white mice, guinea pigs, rabbits and hedgehogs, writes movingly about "the reaching out to another kind of creature, living on a continuum with ourselves physically and mentally, but significantly different in degrees".
A pioneer of university courses that today we call classical studies or classical civilisation, Grene co-edited with Richmond Lattimore the University of Chicago's The Complete Greek Tragedies and translated several of the dramas, including The Theban Plays of Sophocles, The Oresteia of Aeschylus, and Euripides's Hippolytus. He also translated The History of Herodotus and Hesiod's Works and Days. These books continue to sell worldwide and are among his enduring achievements.
"He was on a first-name basis with Sophocles and Aristophanes," said Saul Bellow, "that was how he made you feel." And in his universe of books and ideas he made room for creatures and plants. Of Farming and Classics is a minor classic by a major classicist.
Michael Longley is the fourth Ireland Professor of Poetry. His Collected Poems was published in 2006
Of Farming and Classics: A Memoir By David Grene University of Chicago Press, 169pp. $30