Sunday, August 07, 2011
Miss Mary Arnold
Ian Jackson sent me a photocopy of Elizabeth Jones, née Proksch, Memoir of Miss Mary Arnold (1906-1944), issued in 2002 "as part of the celebration of the centenary year of The Classical Association of Scotland." Miss Arnold was Miss Proksch's tutor. Excerpts follow.
p. 2:
Newer› ‹Older
p. 2:
One evening a week then I walked up through the Meadows, past the huge pile of the Royal Infirmary and the stately presence of George Heriot's school for boys to Miss Arnold's flat. The cold raw air would be heavy with smog which blurred the light from the lampposts making it mysterious, even sinister. I scrunched dry leaves underfoot and later slithered along wet snow chanting to myself the various conjugations and declensions as they presented themselves in my grammar book: "Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant," and exhilarated by these chants that took me back through the centuries, felt that I was in love with the universe.p. 4:
Lessons with her continued for three years: two years to achieve the Lower then the Higher Prelims and then one year of free tuition in Greek, for, she explained, "If there's anything I love more than Latin, it's Greek."p. 4:
She had a great sense of ritual. One memorable occasion was the evening on which I was to graduate from prose to poetry. At my place was a small blue volume: Book I of Virgil's Aeneid in the Macmillan Elementary Classics edited by T.E. Page. First she explained the hexameter, the six feet of dactyls and spondees, the caesura, and then launched into "Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris ... " She read well, her clear voice rising and falling expressively but quite unaffectedly, confidently riding that "ocean-roll of rhythm" and I felt a huge surge of exhilaration. Then she guided me through deciphering and translating. Poetry read in a foreign language, it is said, is often experienced more intensely than poetry in one's mother tongue, because it is doubly strange and mysterious.p. 11:
To some people her interests seemed decidedly antiquarian, and I remember one of my friends scoffing when, at Mary's suggestion, I proposed going in search of some Roman remains. But there was something infectious about her unaffected enthusiasm for history and books. She may have seemed a redoubtable schoolmarm stuck in the past and dismissive of the modern world but to me she opened portals.p. 17:
Then she in turn told me about her reading. "They bring books around on a trolley for us to choose from. Well, I can't be bothered with those modern novels, everyone leaping in and out of bed with everyone else. But, look what I've found here, an anthology of bird poems with woodcuts by Bewick. Aren't they fine?"Related posts:
