Tony Woodman
It is a fairly long journey from the manuscripts of Aristophanes to the literary criticism of major Latin poets, but that was the route taken by David West: as soon as he realised his true vocation, the postgraduate research on which he had embarked was abandoned and he devoted the rest of his professional life to the interpretation of Lucretius, Horace and Virgil. His first job was in Sheffield but he soon returned to his native Scotland and became a member of the formidable assembly of classicists in Edinburgh, where such scholars as Kerr Borthwick, Anthony Snodgrass, Michael Stokes, Peter Walsh and Kenneth Wellesley would later be joined by Francis Cairns and James Wright.
When in 1969 the Chair of Latin in Newcastle fell vacant on the retirement of G. B. A. Fletcher, who had been in post since 1937, David was appointed to succeed him. It was perhaps a surprising appointment, since, apart from an early article on Catullan metrics (1957), he had started publishing seriously only in 1964–65 and his one book at the time was his slim volume on Horace (1967); but Harri Hudson-Williams, as the incoming Head of Department, recognised in David a humanity kindred to his own and knew that the future would require a broader view of scholarship than in the past. The appointment was a stroke of genius. David, simply by being the person he was, transformed the Department of Classics into the vibrant, confident and convivial community of scholars that became familiar to generations of undergraduates and fellow classicists.
When David arrived in the North East, he installed his family (he and Pamela had five children) in a large and elegant house on a hillside on the outskirts of Hexham, and moved his library into his office on the second floor of the Percy Building, at the head of the Quadrangle in the University. Shortly after his arrival his acclaimed second book, on the imagery and poetry of Lucretius, was published (1969), to the mild consternation of the two Greek philosophers who were our colleagues and who had thought that Lucretius belonged to them; this was also the year that he published the first of his classic articles, on multiple-correspondence similes in the Aeneid, to be joined in the following year by its sequel, on Virgil’s multiple-correspondence similes and their antecedents. Almost his first act on joining the Department was the purchase of equipment for making and drinking coffee and the establishment of a room in which the coffee could be made and drunk, anticipating correctly that it would soon become a focal point of departmental life. (Fletcher had the departmental secretary make coffee for colleagues at 11.15 on Wednesday mornings at the weekly departmental meeting; but, when he retired, his coffee service departed with him.) David’s second act was the unusually prompt delivery of an Inaugural Lecture, entitled, with particular aptness, ‘Individual Voices’, since his was always a distinctive voice in Latin scholarship. ‘To attend a lecture of his’, one scholar has remarked, ‘was often to feel that one was understanding the text properly for the first time.’ His third act was to start reorganising and modernising the Classics syllabus, moving the emphasis away from set books and textual criticism to the study of authors as representative of genres. Horace’s Odes somehow failed to fit into this new system and as a result were abandoned altogether. David, having already written his book on Horace, cheerfully dismissed this omission as a minor inconvenience; but he later relented, and the Odes were brought back as a final-year special subject.
It soon became clear that David was a brilliant and charismatic teacher, perhaps at his best in a tutorial or seminar format, and always as concerned for the needs of the less able student as for those of the high-flyer. He was also much in demand for lectures in schools and other outside bodies, invitations which he always accepted because of his determination to introduce to as wide an audience as possible the world of Latin poetry and the ways in which it could be read. It is easy now to forget that landmark titles such as Kenneth Quinn’s The Catullan revolution had been published only in 1959, J. P. Sullivan’s twin volumes of Critical essays on Roman literature only in 1962–63. The literary criticism of Latin literature was in its early days, a circumstance which in Newcastle had two significant consequences. The first was David’s idea of a northern Latin seminar, which he established at Newcastle under the name Seminar Boreas. It was remarkably successful at attracting a large membership (on one memorable occasion David’s office was so full of seminarists that the only way he could get from one end of it to the other was by walking across the top of the table), and, although most of its meetings were in Newcastle, there was at least one in Edinburgh too. The plan was that eventually the seminar would become peripatetic between the various northern universities, but the plan foundered as soon as it left Newcastle and was deprived of David’s inspiring presence. Eventually, when Francis Cairns moved to Liverpool as Professor of Latin, he effectively re-started the seminar as the Liverpool Latin Seminar and published many of its papers in its Proceedings; after a transitional period in Leeds, it thrives to this day as the Langford Latin Seminar in Tallahassee, having happily preserved its acronym through three decades and across two continents.
When David first arrived in Newcastle, I had been in post for only a year and was thus fresh from my recent association with fellow postgraduates in Cambridge such as John Bramble and Oliver Lyne. I too was seized by a proselytising spirit, and I suggested to David that he and I should edit a volume to demonstrate the practical criticism of Latin poetry. Hence was born Quality and pleasure in Latin poetry (1974), illustrating explications de texte by sympathetic scholars of an older generation (E. J. Kenney, Guy Lee and Gordon Williams) along with those of a younger (Bramble, Lyne and Francis Cairns). This second Newcastle development has also had long-lasting consequences. David and I edited two further such volumes ourselves (Creative imitation and Latin literature in 1979 and Poetry and politics in the age of Augustus in 1984), while for the fourth, his Festschrift (Author and audience in Latin literature, 1992), David’s place as co-editor was taken by Jonathan Powell, his successor to the Chair of Latin at Newcastle. The series, loyally supported by Cambridge University Press, continued with further volumes on Horace (2002) and Catullus (2012).
It is ironical that the enthusiasm for new ways of reading Latin literature in the 1970s coincided with the swift and almost complete elimination of Latin from British schools. To mitigate the effects of this crisis David came up with the idea of ‘Latin Alive’, a week-long residential course in Newcastle each Easter and aimed at pupils whose schools still had Latin on the curriculum and who, by being exposed to intensive teaching, might pass on their enthusiasm and thus help to preserve the subject. Peter Walsh was always invited down to participate in the teaching, thereby ensuring that there were enough adults to join in the grand football match which traditionally brought each ‘Latin Alive’ to a close. David was a great lover of and believer in sport, and, having played hockey at Cambridge as a student, it was football and tennis which he enjoyed in the days when I knew him. He was intensely competitive and relished a physical challenge of any type, as his opponents knew only too well.
Since David never became Head of the Department of Classics, it is not clear how his colleagues in the Faculty of Arts knew that he had the required administrative talents to be elected as Dean; perhaps it was simply his gift for getting on with people and his obvious and forthright good sense. However, his Deanship amply demonstrated his flair for administration, and it seemed no time at all before he was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor (1976–80). His workload, never light, became even heavier, and there were many nights when he was unable to return home to Hexham and was obliged to sleep in the Department on a camp-bed in his office, much to the amusement of Phyllis, the departmental cleaner. His administrative tasks nevertheless did not keep him from scholarship: his translation of the Aeneid came out in 1990, ending a decade loosely framed by two of my favourite articles (‘Pauca meo Gallo’, LCM 8 (1983) 92–3, and ‘Cur me querelis’, AJP 112 (1991) 45–52), each of them characteristically radical.
After his retirement from the Chair of Latin at Newcastle in 1992, his services to Latin were recognised by his being elected President of the Classical Association for 1995. It is the convention that the President delivers a Presidential Address at the Annual General Meeting of the Association, and David chose as his subject Horace, on which he was then working; his translation of the Odes and Epodes would appear two years later, exactly thirty years after his first book on Horace. It was the title of his Address, however, which once again caught the eye: ‘Cast out theory’. Throughout his Newcastle career David was an outspoken opponent of poor or pretentious scholarship. When, at a Triennial Meeting of the Hellenic and Roman Societies, a young firebrand delivered a paper whose scatological title was calculated to provoke and insult attending scholars in equal measure, David’s robust response brought spontaneous applause from the audience. He had no time for ‘the personal voice in classical scholarship’; and, although he wrote on George Herbert and published almost five hundred pages of commentary on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, he had no time for ‘reception theory’. He fought against approaches which bring ‘nothing except obscurity and banality, pretentious writing and penitential reading. Their findings are numbingly obvious platitudes obscured by jargon to look dauntingly profound. My advice to the young’, he said in his Address, ‘would be to cast out theory, and get down to real work on the texts.’
This is what he himself was doing in the years of his retirement, producing a set of three volumes on Books 1–3 of Horace’s Odes, comprising translations and running commentary (1995–2002). One of his ambitions had been to write a commentary on the Aeneid to accompany his own translation. He never got round to it; instead he devoted much of the next decade to annotating and commenting on the Scots translation of the Aeneid which was produced in the early sixteenth century by Gavin Douglas, Dean of St Giles in Edinburgh. But, before David could finish his work, he died of a stroke on 13 May 2013, almost exactly five hundred years after Douglas had completed his translation.