Frank Laurence Lucas (28 December 1894 – 1 June 1967) was an English classical scholar, literary critic, poet, novelist, playwright, political polemicist, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and intelligence officer at Bletchley Park during World War II.
He is now best remembered for his scathing 1923 review of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land,Lucas, F. L., 'The Waste Land': New Statesman review, 3 November 1923; Vol. 22, No. 551, p.116,118. Scan of full review: . Extracts: shubow.com and for his book Style (1955; revised 1962), an acclaimed guide to recognising and writing good prose.Epstein, Joseph, 'Heavy Sentences', The New Criterion ; Walther, Matthew, 'The Art of Writing Well', New English Review His Tragedy in Relation to Aristotle's 'Poetics' (1927, substantially revised 1957) was for over fifty years a standard introduction.'Hogarth Press', University of Delaware Library Special Collections His most important contribution to scholarship was his four-volume old-spelling Complete Works of John Webster (1927), the first collected edition of the Jacobean dramatist since that of Hazlitt the Younger (1857), itself an inferior copy of Dyce (1830).Lucas, F. L., ed., The Complete Works of John Webster, London, 1927; vol.1, p.1 Eliot called Lucas "the perfect annotator",Eliot, T. S., 'John Marston' in Elizabethan Essays, London, 1934Lucas's views on the editing and annotation of literary texts, and his answer to the question 'What are the qualities of a perfect edition of an English Literature Classic?', are outlined in his article 'Publishing in Utopia' (New Statesman, 3 October 1925, p.697-8) and in the Preface to his Webster (1927). and subsequent Webster scholars have been indebted to him, notably the editors of the new Cambridge Webster (1995–2019).Gunby, David; Carnegie, David; Hammond, Antony; DelVecchio, Doreen; Jackson, MacDonald P.: editors of The Works of John Webster (3 vols, Cambridge, 1995–2007)
Lucas is also remembered for his anti-fascist campaign in the 1930s,'F. L. Lucas: Writer with Love of Liberty', The Times (London, 2 June 1967)Annan, Noel, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London, 1990)'F. L. Lucas is dead'; The New York Times, 26 June 1967 and for his wartime work at Bletchley Park, for which he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).The London Gazette, 9. Jan. 1946: thegazette.co.uk
Life
Early life and the War
F. L. ("Peter") Lucas grew up in Blackheath and was educated at Colfe's (1902–1909),Frank Laurence Lucas, Colfe's Archive, colfesarchive.daisy.websds.net where his father F. W. Lucas (1860–1931)Frank William Lucas, blackmanfamily.org , lewishamheritage Duncan, Leland L., A History of Colfe's Grammar School, Lewisham, with a Life of Its Founder (London, 1910); Duncan, Leland L., The History of Colfe's Grammar School, 1652–1952, ed. H. Beardwood (London, 1952) was headmaster, and from 1910 at Rugby, where he was tutored by the Sophocles scholar Robert Whitelaw (1843–1917) in his last year before retirement.Lucas, F. L., The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays (London, 1960), p.142 He won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1913 to read for the Classical Tripos, adding the Pitt ScholarshipThe Cambridge Review, 11 February 1914, p.283 and Porson PrizeThe Cambridge Review, 11 March 1914, p.372 in 1914. In January 1914 he was elected Apostle – the last Apostle elected before the WarSkidelsky, Robert, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–1937 (London 1992), p.6 – coming under the influence of G. E. Moore.Levy, Paul, G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (London and New York, 1979) Believing Cambridge threatened with the fate of Louvain,Lucas, F. L., The River Flows (London, 1926), p.170, 173 he volunteered, aged 19, in October 1914 and was commissioned in November,4 November 1914,The London Gazette, 6 Nov. 1914: thegazette.co.uk serving from 1915 as second lieutenant in the 7th Battalion The Royal West Kent Regiment in France. From August 1915 he was in the Somme trenches opposite Fricourt and Mametz; he was wounded by shrapnel in May 1916. "One simply gapes at the gigantic capriciousness of things," he wrote to John Maynard Keynes in October of that year, "waiting our own turn to disappear in the Cyclops' maw."Lucas, from a letter to Keynes, 20 October 1916, quoted in Lubenow, W. C., The Cambridge Apostles, 1820-1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life (Cambridge, 1999), p.195 He returned to the front as lieutenantLieutenant, 17 July 1916: Army List, November 1917, p.1356a in January 1917, went into battle near Grandcourt on 17 February in the Ancre Offensive, was mentioned in despatches on 22 February, and was gassed on 4 March. In all he spent seventeen months in war-hospitals, among them Dorchester House. By September 1917 he felt that the cause of honour and justice had been lost in the lust of VictoryLucas, F. L., 'September 1917' in Poems, 1935 (Cambridge, 1935) ("We were too ready to go on fighting without offering terms"Lucas, F. L., Journal Under the Terror, 1938 (London 1939), p. 257). Passed fit for garrison duty at Chatham (3rd Battalion Royal West Kent HQ), he sought the help of fellow-Apostle Keynes to return to France, and from August 1918 to the Armistice he was Staff lieutenant in the Intelligence Corps (Third Army HQ), examining German prisoners near Bapaume and Le Quesnoy. His life hung in the balance in November 1918 shortly after the Armistice, when his lung wounds reopened in the influenza pandemic.Lucas's war memoirs are contained in his Journal Under the Terror, 1938 (1939) [pp. 12–19, 38–39, 95–96, 235–236, 257–259], in The Greatest Problem (1960) [pp. 26–27, 143–151], and in the final chapters of The River Flows (1926). He returned to Cambridge in January 1919. Fell-walking in the Lake District "on Easter morning on Kidsty Pike, between Hawes Water and Hayes Water, a blinding spring sun on snowy ridge beyond ridge, from Fairfield to Blencathra, brought a moment of such ecstatic intoxication that, were I a mystic, I should have called it a mystical experience."Lucas, F. L., The Greatest Problem, and Other Essays (London, 1960), p. 257
Career Resuming his undergraduate studies, Lucas won a Chancellor's Medal for Classics and the Browne Medal (1920), and revived meetings of the Apostles, suspended since 1914, becoming Society Secretary and contributing nineteen papers.Deacon, Richard, The Cambridge Apostles (London, 1985) He was elected to a Fellowship at King's College in 1920 before he had completed his degree, Keynes paying for him to holiday in Greece with Sebastian Sprott on the eve of his Tripos.Lucas, F. L., The Greatest Problem (London, 1960), p.271 He took a starred firstAt that time a pass in the fifteen papers of Part I of the Classical Tripos was equivalent to a B.A. degree. Lucas proceeded to his M.A. in 1923. and began his career as a Classics lecturer in October 1920. In the spring of 1921 he spent three months in Greece as a student of the British School at Athens, locating the site of the Battle of Pharsalus in Thessaly (see Pharsalus below). Back in Cambridge he switched that yearLucas, F. L., autobiographical essay in World Authors, 1950–1970: A Companion Volume to Twentieth-Century Authors, ed. John Wakeman (New York, 1975), pp.882–884 to teaching for the English Tripos (instituted in 1919).Wilkinson, L. P., Kingsmen of a Century, 1873–1972 (Cambridge 1980), p.102 He was a member of the Cambridge University English Faculty (as it later became) from 1921 to 1939 and from 1945 to 1962, and a university Reader in English from 1947 to 1962. At the invitation of Desmond MacCarthy, literary editor of the New Statesman, Lucas reviewed poetry and criticism for that journal from 1922 to 1926, having begun his career as reviewer with the Athenaeum in 1920–21, its last year. Early reviews and essays were collected in his Authors Dead and Living (1926). Among them was a review of Housman's Last Poems (1922)Lucas, F. L., 'Few, but Roses', New Statesman, 20 October 1923, p.45–47; reprinted in The Dial, September 1924, Vol. LXXVII, No 3; in The Living Age, 319:419; and in A. E. Housman: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip Gardner (London, 1992) that, unusually, met with the approval of the poet himself.Lucas, F. L., 'Mithridates : The Poetry of A. E. Housman', Cambridge Review, 15 May 1936, p.385Lucas, F. L., The Greatest Problem, and other essays (London, 1960), p.191Burnett, A., ed., The Letters of A. E. Housman (Oxford, 2007), Vol.1, p.570 His move from Classics to English and his edition of Webster (1927) were inspired in large part by J. T. Sheppard's March 1920 Marlowe Society production of The White Devil, which made a powerful impression on him: "What could make the Cambridge production of The White Devil in 1920 seem, to at least two who saw it then without preconceptions, the most staggering performance they had ever known?" he asked in the New Statesman.New Statesman, 1 March 1924 (The production had been swift-moving, in the Elizabethan manner, with minimal scenery and with emphasis on "beautiful poetry beautifully spoken".Cambridge Review, 12 March 1920) "[Lucas] has been lucky in finding a writer [Webster] who takes his standpoint," T. E. Lawrence remarked, "and sums up life rather in his fashion."Lawrence, T. E., 1928 letter to E. M. Forster, in Wilson, Jeremy, & Wilson, Nicole, eds., T. E. Lawrence, Correspondence with E. M. Forster and F. L. Lucas (2010), p.133 Lucas' preference, however, lay with Comparative Literature, and after Webster he turned to his Studies French and English (1934; revised 1950) (he was Membre Correspondant Honoraire de L'Institut Littéraire et Artistique de FranceBiographical Notes, The English Association, Poems of To-day: Third Series (London 1938), p.xxvii.), and later to studies of Scandinavian literature.Lucas, F. L., 'Iceland: In theory' (essay on the Icelandic Sagas), Cornhill magazine, July 1935; reprinted as Chapter VI in the 1936 and 1937 editions of The Decline and Fall of the Romantic IdealLucas, F. L., The Drama of Ibsen and Strindberg (London, 1962)August Strindberg: Inferno; translation by Mary Sandbach, introduction by F. L. Lucas (London, 1962) He served as committee member for the Cambridge Greek Play (1921–33)Cambridge Greek Play: Oresteia ; Bacchae ; Oresteia and continued to write on Greek and Latin literature. As part-time Librarian at King's (1922–36) he accessioned the donated papers of Rupert Brooke. His students at King's included George Rylands, John Hayward, F. E. Halliday,Halliday, F. E., Indifferent Honest [autobiography] (London, 1960) H. C. A. "Tom" Gaunt, Alan Clutton-Brock, Julian Bell, Desmond Flower,Flower, Desmond, Fellows in Foolscap [memoirs] (London, 1991) Ken'ichi Yoshida,Lucas, F. L., Journal Under the Terror, 1938 (London, 1939), p.159 and Winton Dean. By Cambridge English students in general he was known as "F. L.".The Granta, 25 January 1939, p.195