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Besides having a wide reputation in England as a poet, scholar, and Oxford don, Peter Levi is also a translator of Russian and Greek writing. He has traveled extensively through Greece and Afghanistan. His travels through Greece, which began in 1963, led to an extended companionship with such writers as George Pavlopoulos, Katsimbalis, and George Seferis; with Seferis he was politically involved in Athens during the “reign of the Colonels” in the late 1960s. The trek through Afghanistan resulted in one of Mr. Levi’s few works of prose, The Light Garden of the Angel King, published in 1973. His most recent publication is a thriller, The Head in the Soup, about Greece under the Colonels.

This interview took place during one afternoon in the spring of 1976, just after Mr. Levi had left the Jesuit Order to get married. We were in his rooms at Pembroke College, where he tutored during the interim between religious and secular teaching positions at Oxford. Though it was a sunny day in spring, the chill of the English damp was everywhere, and no place more than the stone colleges of Oxford. We sat in overstuffed armchairs in front of a gas fire, cheered on by an occasional glass of scotch, which the host was kind enough to provide.

Levi is a tall, lumbering, handsome man, with a sometimes intimidating manner. But his eyes betray him—they are full of kindness, much given to laughter; they suggest a genuine love of life and the subject matter that it has been his life to pursue—the classics, literature in general, and most especially the reading and writing of poetry. His poetry reflects his classical background; it has a restrained, almost a distilled quality and is conscious of the whole range of classical as well as modern structures of rhythm and meter. Among his works are The Gravel PondsRuined AbbeysPancakes for the Queen of Babylon, and Death Is a Pulpit.


INTERVIEWER

Having recently left the priesthood, perhaps you’d care to talk about how religion and being a priest have affected your writing?

PETER LEVI

Well, I suppose that anything that affects one as a human being affects one’s writing. I do believe in Christianity.

INTERVIEWER

When did you become a clergyman?

LEVI

When I was seventeen. I was in religious training most of my life. I did a lot of things when I was a clergyman which most people don’t have the opportunity to do. For instance, to start with, I’m half-Jewish and also I’m a Roman Catholic. Therefore I’m very much on the edge of ordinary English society, of any kind and of any level of that society. But clergymen can move between classes and be accepted, always with a difference, by whatever class they are talking to. So I’ve had access to more parts of English society than most people do. Had I left the school I was at, and done the job I would have done, I suppose I should have been stuck in some kind of class model or other. I would have dressed in a certain way, spoken in a certain way, ate and drunk and had holidays and married in a certain way and had children of a certain kind. And that’s quite different from the life I have led. Then again in the Roman Catholic Church clergymen are bachelors—this may make them hellishly idle—and it does mean they spend an awful lot of time in pursuits which married people on the whole don’t have time for. Then again people in endless, almost perpetual training to become priests are encouraged to take seriously all weighty matters. They were so perhaps more in my day than they are now. But that’s because the training in my day was more meaningless, and more endless, than it is now. Now it’s all purposive. Frightful nonsense. In my day it was rather purposeless and went on and on and on. One had a lovely time.

INTERVIEWER

Wasn’t the Jesuit training rather rigorous—hair shirts and spiked bracelets?

LEVI

I haven’t ever worn a hair shirt, but I wouldn’t think it a particularly rigorous thing to have to do, would you? I’ve been far more uncomfortable, I think, than a hair shirt could make one. If anyone feels that their life is so easy that they need to go and inflict themselves with gratuitous fantasies, well . . .

INTERVIEWER

How do you feel about the sermon as a creative medium?

LEVI

Oh I think it’s very interesting. Donne’s sermons are wonderful. An opportunity not open to most human beings of having a captive audience. I think it is much unexploited and I think it has thrilling potentialities, but of course only if you happen to believe what you’re saying. And it so happens that I did. I mildly regret not being able to preach any more sermons.

INTERVIEWER

You’re a classics scholar. Has your poetry been influenced by your knowledge of Greek and Latin?

LEVI

Well, I suppose it must have been because I read a lot of Greek and Latin. I suppose one must be influenced by any profound admiration. My admiration of Homer is immense and yet, I can’t imagine that I’ve been influenced by him very much. Then I admire Aeschylus, I admire Aristophanes—but everyone does, I think. I don’t think there’s anything so odd about being a classical scholar. It’s just that most people aren’t classical scholars because they don’t know Greek and Latin, poor things. And if they did, they would just think like I do about it. Horace is, I suppose, of all writers, my most constant admiration. I admired Horace enormously when I was a schoolboy. I still do, and there’s been no intervening year in which I haven’t admired and read Horace.

INTERVIEWER

What is it specifically about Horace that you admire?

LEVI

Well, he’s autobiographic, in a very restrained way. His rhythmic mastery is almost unparalleled even in Latin—that dense and apparently casual language. There’s an awful lot of reality in his poems. More, as it were, of the grit and gravel of reality to the square foot than there is in most writers. I wish I could be like him. I even like his meters. I like him in quite simple ways. I like the noise he makes.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel that the knowledge of languages is important to a writer?

LEVI

I think it was Belloc who said that there are only two ways of becoming happy. Either you stay in the same place, or you go right around the world and come back to the same place in old age. Well, I think it’s like that with languages for writers. A man might be perfectly suited by knowing nothing but English—really knowing English. I don’t know what really knowing English is like. Who knows English? The person who knows the most words, the person who can do the Times crossword puzzle? No. You end up having to use words like “genuine” and “authentic.” No use, are they? On the other hand, if you’re not going to stick to one language, if you’re going to know a little bit about other cultures, it might be better to be John Clare or to live on a mountain or never to move out of one village. If you can’t do that, then knowledge may not be better than innocence of knowledge, but it’s certainly better than false opinion. So then, I think people ought to learn languages. As to how many, I should have thought that depended on leisure, talent, individuality . . .