Paper Boats

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28938, 4 July 1959, Page 3

Paper Boats

Paper Boats. By E. M. Butler. Collins. 192 pp. Lively reminiscences of her childhood and adolescence form the substance of the first two chapters of Professor Butler’s autobiography in which' the past seems to pulse with life again as she describes the various boarding schools in Germany and France which she attended from her eleventh year onwards. One imagines her to have been a highspirited girl, not easily amenable to boarding school, discipline, and capable, indeed, of defying it if the mood so possessed her. At the age of 20 she was sent to the Cheltenham Training College—an institution she came to detest heartily, so stifling and stultifying did she feel it to be. Cheltenham, she writes, gave her “an ineradicable distaste for English collegiate life.’’ But her collegiate days were then just beginning. From Cheltenham she went up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1808, and entered Newnham College where, in two years, she got through the medieval and modern languages tripos. Even at Newnham, surrounded by excellent tutors, she was possessed of an irrepressible desire to flout authority. Was it that by now she had more than her share of cloistered, institutional life—more than enough of scholastic regimentation? Explain it how one will, instead of giving her a keen appetite for research, Cambridge—she tells us —had quite the reverse effect upon her, making her “fully determined to have nothing whatever to do with it.” Renouncing her studies to go teaching, a short spell of this was enough to send her back to research work, if only to find release in something less exhausting.

And so. with the idea of working on a Ph.D. thesis in German, she went to the University of Bonn in 1913. The reception she met with from the professor under whom she was to study there rather dampened her scholastic ardour. For he gave her to understand that even though she had obtained first class honours at Cambridge, it would be necessary for her to “begin at the beginning” in the course of research she was now about to undertake. The advent of the first world war put another temporary stop to her studies and. in 1917, she went to serve as a V.A.D. on the Russian front at Odessa. In describing her journey thither, she tells of a gypsy she met in . Petrograd with whom she struck up a conversation. ‘‘To my astonishment” —writes Professor Butler of this ayps y_"she began to recite all the Christian names of my six brothers and sisters: Kathleen Theresa Blake, Maude Julienne. Rose Georgina, Theobald Blake, Fitzwalter, Francis James.” This anecdote will strain the credulity of most readers. Otherwise the war interlude to which it belongs is described in convincing and realistic fashion. After the Armistice the author endeavoured to obtain a post with the League of Nations at Geneva, but was rejected as a candidate on account of her Germanophobia. Her frank admission of this is In keeping with the deep-rooted repugnance to the Germans that manifests itself throughout her autobiography. And yet this repugnance has been offset in' her professional life by a profound absorption in German studies. Witness, for example, the biographies she has written of Prince Puckler-Muskau, Rainer Maria Rilke and Heinrich Heine.

In 1936 Miss Butler became Professor of German at the University of Manchester—a post which she occupied until 1944. when she was appointed to the chair of German at the University of Cambridge. There she remained till her retirement in 1949 Life as she knew it at these universities remains much in the background of her autobiography, the closing chapters of which are largely taken up with her vacation travels in India and Germany. Her strong interest in the occult is reflected in the long account she gives of her visit to “the magician of international ill-renown. Alestair Crowley ’’ She writes with the dowmright zest of a person who has lived intensely and derived a lot of enjoyment from life; and that, notwithstanding the fact she has sometimes felt at loggerheads with fortune and far from, reconciled to her professional lotj