A Squire of Skies

It’s difficult to sum up the career of Peter Chad Tigar Levi, FSA, FRSL, late Professor of Poetry at Oxford University (link). The son of a Shepardic Jew from Istanbul, Levi became a Jesuit priest, then left the priesthood to become variously an archaeologist, prison chaplain and, oh yes, professor of poetry. His CV is more than a foot long, including some 22 items under poetry alone, plus, inter alia, biographies oh Shakespeare and Virgil, translations from Greek, Hebrew, Russian and Serbo-Croat and four novels—he also a completed a novel begun by his wife’s deceased first husband.

Perhaps the most durable of his works is a memoir, The Flutes of Autumn,. He “has the knack,” I wrote a few years back, for conveying, through language, a tactile sense of place and a small-c catholic sensibility for forgotten peoples, living and dead.” Here Levi remembers his life as a theology student at Heythrop in North Oxfordshire:

I went often to Oxford or London, to museums and libraries, and explored the Cotswolds far more thoroughly than before. Religion for me was like a flock of birds moving across the winter fields and among the stony villages. Twenty years ago (sc. from 1983) a way of life survived in villages that must have vanished by now altogether. In the big snow of one of those winters a squire of skies was taken for an apparition from the other world. In the summer, the country boys used to walk ten miles to a dance and ten miles home after it. You could still travel along way across country and meet no one. You could swim naked in lonely rivers. You could bicycle safely at night from Chipping Norton to the Welsh coast.

Reflecting on his experience as a prison chaplain, Levi sums up the learning of a lifetime in a tone that harkens to Biblical wisdom literature:

Neither life nor death is safe, and almost everything that consoles us is false. It is the right and in a way the dignity of every human being to defy cure or comfort, though it is a sad dignity, and most people can be helped in one way or another. They can even be educated, even cured of a deep wound. But one should give only what people need or want, and in the way they need or want it. In the same way one must accept the blackest truth about human history, without pretending things were less bad. It is a bad fault and not an unusual one to ionsist on curing or reforming or comforting, and then to lose patience, to blame the wicked client, when this process, the illusion one had of one's efficacy, is rejected.

--Peter Levi, The Flutes of Autumn (1983)