by Sue Corbett
Following his death in 1951, she spent years working to get his prodigious literary remains into print. Many of them were written in German and Anscombe translated some of them herself. English-speaking readers are particularly indebted to her for her thoughtful translation of the Philosophical Investigations, probably Wittgenstein’s best-known and most influential work. She always reflected with thanks on the fact that Wittgenstein had been one of her teachers. His readers should reflect with thanks that she was one of his students.
Anscombe travelled widely and lectured in many countries including the US, Canada, Poland, Finland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Spain and Australia. In 1941 she married Peter Geach, who also achieved considerable philosophical renown. They had seven children together, but she did not like to be called “Mrs Geach” and, in academic circles, she continued to be known as “Miss Anscombe”. It has been said that someone looking for Mrs Geach at the door of their Cambridge residence was told that there was no such person there. Whatever the truth of that story, there is no doubt that Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach were a devoted couple. And their intellectual interests were more than purely philosophical; they both shared a deep commitment to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.
Anscombe became a convert to the Church in 1940 and her Catholic loyalty is evident in much that she wrote. But she had problems making the leap into Catholicism. For instruction on Catholic doctrine she went to Father Richard Kehoe of Blackfriars, Oxford. She was worried about the teaching of the 16th-century Jesuit Luis de Molina, according to whom, in Anscombe’s words, “God knew what anybody would have done if, eg, he hadn’t died when he did”. She found that she could not believe this doctrine. As she subsequently wrote: “It appeared to me that there was not, quite generally, any such thing as what would have happened if what did happen had not happened, and that in particular there was no such thing, generally speaking, as what someone would have done if… and certainly there was no such thing as how someone would have spent his life if he had not died as a child.” Father Kehoe was amused by her reaction and rightly thought it compatible with Catholicism. So Anscombe made the leap.
Apart from her work as Wittgenstein’s literary executor, Anscombe will probably be best remembered among philosophers for her 1957 book Intention (widely regarded as a classic in its field); for her 1959 work An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (a magisterial exposition and discussion) and for the contents of her three-volume Collected Philosophical Papers (1981), much of which has had a considerable impact in academic circles.
Particularly worth mentioning is her paper Modern Moral Philosophy (1958), which played a significant role in the contemporary revival of interest in the Aristotelian notion of human virtues. In it Anscombe argued that “it is not profitable at present to do moral philosophy”, that “the concepts of obligation and duty — moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say — and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’, ought to be jettisoned… because they are survivals, or derivatives of survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives”. The words might seem to represent an attack on ethical thinking. Their effect was to make “virtue ethics”, as it is now often called, one of the central areas of current philosophical inquiry.
Anscombe also published a number of more popular texts which were straightforwardly written from the position of a firm doctrinal commitment. An example is her Catholic Truth Society pamphlet Contraception and Chastity (1975), in which she strongly condemns contraception and argues that we shall be committing ourselves to more than we might want to if we think of it as a viable moral option. As she put it later: “You might as well accept any sexual goings-on, if you accept contraceptive intercourse.”
Such a verdict is not common among philosophers, but Anscombe was a courageous woman who had no qualms about defying popular opinion when it came to a cause in which she believed. She was an outspoken Catholic, working among people who largely had little time for religion.
She was no pacifist, but in 1939 she publicly argued that it was morally wrong for Britain to go to war since the war was not just. In 1956 she strenuously opposed the conferment of an honorary degree by Oxford University on America’s former President Harry S. Truman because of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder,” as she later wrote when reflecting on the episode.
She gave a talk for the BBC (published in The Listener in 1957) in which she ingeniously and ironically argued that the moral philosophy then prevalent in Britain was a corrupting influence on the young. And she was unafraid to adopt unconventional positions even with respect to technical debates within philosophy. In a much discussed paper, The First Person, she argued that “I” is not a word that refers to anything. In a number of other papers she challenged a huge amount of what many philosophers think they know about causality and freedom of the will. In 1985 she presented an ingenious defence of St Anselm’s so-called “Ontological Argument” for God’s existence (commonly regarded as a philosophical dead duck).
She was a bold, inventive, and original thinker. She was also a loyal and helpful friend who, though an unusually busy person, took time to correspond with students. It is hard for any generation to know which of its members will be read and admired in years to come. But Anscombe’s work made an important and permanent contribution to philosophy.
Her writings demand patience and effort from their readers since they are often intricate and subtle. But they are always hugely stimulating. For Anscombe had what all great philosophers share: the ability to be struck by simple yet teasing questions, and the capacity to pursue them.
She is survived by her husband Peter and by their three sons and four daughters.
Elizabeth Anscombe, Professor of Philosophy, Cambridge University, 1970-86, was born on March 18, 1919. She died on January 5, 2001, aged 81
DAME NINETTE DE VALOIS
* * *
BENEVOLENT AUTOCRAT WHO GAVE UP HER CAREER AS A DANCER AND CHOREOGRAPHER TO CREATE A NATIONAL INSTITUTION AS FOUNDER-DIRECTOR OF THE ROYAL BALLET
MARCH 9, 2001
Ninette de Valois was the founder and chief architect of the Royal Ballet, which under her iron control grew quickly from its tiny origins in 1931 to become world-famous as one of the handful of really great international dance companies. Its move to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1946, was the beginning of that theatre’s career as the home of important national companies, and was accompanied by the formation of a second troupe which in turn has grown into the Birmingham Royal Ballet, England’s first large-scale regionally based dance company.
De Valois also created, as a necessary forerunner and now a vital adjunct of the companies, one of the world’s leading ballet schools, which has long attracted pupils from every continent.
She laid down the lines of development for this great organisation and herself ran it for more than three decades. Then, with uncommon generosity, she stood down from responsibility early enough for others to learn how to run it after her. With hindsight one might wish she had continued longer in office. She did remain as director of the Royal Ballet School until 1971 and thereafter maintained her links as a life governor.
Even in official retirement she remained intimately involved with the activities of the companies and the school as their most valued adviser, particularly interested in the development of young choreographers. In spite of increasing frailty as the years went by, she kept her wits about her. A benevolent autocrat, she was loved as well as respected, as was shown by the warm response to her 100th birthday in June 1998.
More than once de Valois reproved audiences who wanted to applaud her achievements by remarking that “It takes more than one person to make a ballet company”. Of course, a great deal of the success of the Royal Ballet depended on her ability to find and encourage able collaborators. Frederick Ashton as principal choreographer and Constant Lamb
ert as the company’s first music director were the most invaluable, but the work of hundreds of choreographers, dancers, musicians, designers, administrators and others was needed. Without the vision, determination and clear-headedness of Ninette de Valois, however, the work of all these would not have flowered in the way it did.
A few disgruntled dancers and others complained that their personal hopes had been sacrificed to her vision of the company’s long-term development. But de Valois sacrificed her own potential career as dancer and choreographer far more than anyone else’s. Happily, the outcome was an achievement more glorious than she could otherwise have hoped for.
She was never afraid to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity, such as the availability of Rudolf Nureyev to join the Royal Ballet in 1962, and she welcomed him in spite of the opposition of some long-standing colleagues who feared his different background and approach would prove incompatible. Time proved her right, not only through the incomparable partnership he formed with Margot Fonteyn (the greatest star attraction the company ever possessed) but also through his enrichment of the Royal Ballet’s classical repertoire and his dramatic effect on the ambitions and qualities of the male dancers. She maintained her admiration and affection for Nureyev to the end, and was much saddened by his early death, as also that of another of her discoveries and special protégés, Kenneth MacMillan.
Yet the tactic of seizing the lucky moment, exemplified by her taking up of Nureyev, and earlier of linking Leonide Massine with her company, was combined with ability to fit such benefits into a carefully planned long-term strategy. As early as 1937 her first book, Invitation to the Ballet, revealed immense, deep and detailed thought about the nature of ballet and of theatre, and what was needed to put her ambitions for her company into practice.
Born in the last years of the 19th century at Baltiboys, the family home in Co Wicklow, the second of four children, she was christened Edris, the family name being Stannus. Her father died in the First World War as Lieutenant-Colonel Stannus, DSO; it is possible to think that any inheritance of a military aptitude for discipline and for planning campaigns was as important to her career as the artistic side contributed by her mother, who both collected and made glassware (and also chose her daughter’s stage name on the basis of a distant family link with the French royal house).
Her first dancing lessons (after the family had moved when she was seven to Walmer, on the English coast, and then, when she was 11, to London) were in what she described later as “fancy dancing”, but as a child she was taken to see Genée, Pavlova and the Diaghilev Ballet, and from about 12 or 13 she began to study for a theatrical career.
At 14 she danced The Dying Swan in a touring pupil show called The Wonder Children organised by her then teacher. They appeared, she later said, “on every pier in England”. At 16 she was principal dancer in the Lyceum pantomime. Subsequent engagements included being principal dancer in the Covent Garden Opera session of 1919, appearing in musical comedies and revue, and taking her own small group of dancers on the touring circuit.
She was, according to contemporary accounts and photographs, a most accomplished dancer, at her best in roles calling for lively characterisation, and able to bring the house down by her speed and brilliance in classical solos. As important as her performances during this early period was the fact that she methodically developed her knowledge of dance by studying with the leading teachers in three different traditions: Espinosa for the French school, Cecchetti for the Italian and Legat for the Russian. Her analytical mind tried to draw the best from each of these for herself and her eventual pupils.
Her first connection with the Russian Ballet came in 1921 as a dancer in the Massine-Lopokova company. Two years later she was invited to join Diaghilev’s company without even an audition, apparently on the recommendation of another British dancer, Lydia Sokolova (Hilda Munnings), and of her teacher Cecchetti. During two years with Diaghilev, de Valois proved a useful soloist: valuable enough for Diaghilev to invite her more than once to return as guest to dance the hostess in Les Biches or a solo in Aurora’s Wedding. She said, however, that it was the experience of working as a member of the ensemble in many ballets which she enjoyed most and from which she gained invaluable knowledge. When she left, it was with the determination to try to start in England a tradition of ballet as firmly grounded as the Russian.
Others had the same idea, but de Valois’ methods were more shrewd and more tenaciously pursued than most. The first steps towards her aim must have seemed tiny ones. She still danced occasionally to support herself, and she opened a ballet school in South Kensington called, rather grandly, the Academy of Choreographic Art. With her pupils she presented occasional ballets (including one, Rout, to music by Arthur Bliss, which achieved quite a reputation). She also took every opportunity of working with the increasingly important repertory theatre movement, being convinced that the future of ballet lay in becoming a part of this. She arranged dances and ballets for the Festival Theatre, Cambridge; the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, where Yeats regarded her as the ideal exponent of his “plays for dancers”; and at the Old Vic.
It was the support of Lilian Baylis at the Vic which led eventually to the beginnings of a permanent company, although before being accepted there de Valois had also applied in vain to Barry Jackson’s Birmingham Rep. However, the meeting of Baylis with the smart, well-mannered, highly intelligent and extremely well-organised ballet teacher was an immediate success. Their collaboration started with little ballets given as curtain-raisers before the operas: Les Petits Riens, arranged by de Valois to Mozart’s music, was the first, given at Christmas 1928. Just over two years later, with the opening of Sadler’s Wells Theatre, de Valois closed her own school, moved with her pupils to the Wells, and officially formed the Vic-Wells Ballet, which gave its first full evening of ballet at the Old Vic on May 5, 1931.
The existence of other organisations also aiming to establish a British ballet helped rather than impeded the enterprise. Job, the young company’s most ambitious production, was the fruit of collaboration with the Camargo Society, and the rival companies of de Valois and Marie Rambert shared many dancers.
The presence of Alicia Markova as ballerina and the guest appearances of Anton Dolin, Stanislas Idzikovsky, Lydia Lopokova and others made it possible for de Valois to mount the 19th-century classic ballets (Coppélia, Giselle, Swan Lake) which she regarded as the cornerstones of the repertoire. At the same time she set out to develop new stars within the company, and by the time she produced The Sleeping Beauty in 1939 she was able to present Margot Fonteyn, Robert Helpmann and other home-bred dancers in the leading roles.
It was also during the 1930s that de Valois produced the most important of her own choreographies: La Création du Monde to Milhaud’s score and Job to Vaughan Williams’s music were major works, both in 1931. The Haunted Ballroom, to a romantic score by Geoffrey Toye, proved a highly popular melodrama in 1934, and The Rake’s Progress (music by Gavin Gordon) was even more successful as vivid dance theatre.
That, with Job and Checkmate, her 1937 collaboration with Arthur Bliss, are the works she is likely to be remembered by, although Robert Helpmann’s comic solo in The Prospect Before Us (1940) must remain unforgettable by those who saw it. Thereafter, however, she left the creation of new works mostly to others (Roberto Gerhard’s Don Quixote in 1950 was her last big work, taken on only when the intended choreographer withdrew), although she played a vital part in new productions of the classics.
The rapid development of the company (renamed Sadler’s Wells Ballet) during the war years, meeting a greatly increased demand for serious entertainment, is well known. So is the story of the post-war move to Covent Garden, the international tours and wide acclaim that followed, and the grant in 1956 of the royal charter. With this, de Valois’ work was in a sense complete. She had ensured that the company would live after her. What had begun as one woman’s effort had become a national institution.
She remained arti
stic director until 1963, after which she devoted herself primarily for almost another decade to directing the Royal Ballet School. She also maintained a close interest in the ballet school and company which she had founded in Turkey at the request of the Turkish Government, for which she continued to find suitable teachers and directors.
With a little more time in hand, de Valois wrote further books, not only about ballet but a book of poems which she published to raise funds for the Royal Ballet School. For the same good cause she also undertook a gruelling lecture tour of the United States. Her capacity for driving herself on must have been phenomenal; at first (until the war years) she had to be company manager and administrator as well as artistic director, choreographer and, at first, leading dancer. All this was in addition to being the wife of a general practitioner, Dr Arthur Connell, whom she married in 1935.
Little of de Valois’ individual contribution will survive her. Of the many ballets she created, few have been seen lately. Birmingham Royal Ballet mounted Job (after an absence of more than 20 years) in honour of her 95th birthday in June 1993, giving it not only in Birmingham and London but also in Coventry Cathedral for the 950th anniversary of the original foundation. To mark her centenary, the Birmingham company reconstructed The Prospect Before Us with unexpected success. But only Checkmate and The Rake’s Progress have maintained a continuing — if tenuous — place in the repertoire, exemplifying the drama, the robust humour and theatrical flair which were her main virtues as a choreographer.
The memory will remain, however, of a gracious, efficient and kindly person, devoted to the work she had set herself, and concerned deeply for the wellbeing of all professional dancers. Her work, for instance, to expand the scope of the Royal Ballet Benevolent Fund to relieve distress among professional dancers is too little known, but was a significant supplement to her main achievement. She also more than once spoke up forcefully on behalf of the small, struggling London City Ballet when its existence was threatened by lack of public funding.
