H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: I VERBALI DEL GRUPPO DI GIOCO DI H. P. GRICE: WINSPEARE

 G.: Winspeare, I must begin with an orthographical confession. Speranza is indecently pleased that you exist. W.: I should hope he is pleased for better reasons than that. G.: He is, but the first is alphabetic. In his whole gallery of Italian philosophers, you are the solitary W. W.: Then I am a botanical rarity in the lexicon. G.: Precisely. A philosophical wynn, or rather a VV with a legal education. W.: I have been called worse. G.: I have no doubt. But the point matters. W is not quite an English letter, not originally. It enters by way of need, awkwardness, and the inability of a stricter alphabet to represent a barbarous sound. W.: So I am already, in my initial, a case of exile. G.: Admirably put. And since your family itself knew exile of a sort, the letter becomes almost genealogical. W.: You refer to Yorkshire and Naples. G.: Exactly. It interests me enormously that a Yorkshire name should end by philosophising in Naples on Cicero and Antoninus. W.: The route is less capricious than it sounds. Religion does strange things to geography. G.: It does. The English Reformation produced more foreign philosophers than English histories like to remember. W.: Some moved by choice, others by necessity. G.: Usually the latter dressed up later as the former. W.: And your own family, I gather, moved too. G.: Yes, though not in the same direction. Most of the Grices of my line had come down into the West Midlands, to Edgbaston, from Yorkshire antecedents. W.: From the Ridings? G.: From that general weather, yes. The family memory, such as it is, runs back to a Richard d’Gris or de Gris, who settled land later known as Gryce Hall. W.: Still called that? G.: Still called that, to my amusement. A proper survival of consonants. W.: And inhabited, you say, by an eccentric lord. G.: Naturally. English country houses always end by producing either antiquaries or lunatics. Sometimes both in one body. W.: Then your family legend is already half Ciceronian: land, name, continuity, and a slight absurdity. G.: Exactly. Which is why I feel a certain sympathy when I see a Yorkshire name reappearing under Vesuvius. W.: In Portici, no less. G.: Yes. Not merely Naples in the large, but Portici in the local. A legal and civic mind growing in Campania under an English surname. W.: English only by ancestry, of course. My formation is wholly Neapolitan. G.: Quite. And that is part of the interest. One may carry a northern name and yet become more Roman than the Romans in one’s prose about Cicero. W.: I should prefer “Latin-minded” to “Roman,” but yes. G.: Fair enough. Now tell me: which Riding would your people have claimed, if one forces the matter? W.: Family tradition points north rather than east or west, though such traditions improve themselves with repetition. G.: As all respectable traditions do. The North Riding has the advantage of sounding philosophically severe. W.: The East would sound more mercantile. G.: And the West more damply pastoral. W.: Whereas Naples is all three and volcanic besides. G.: Excellent. That is one reason England exports Catholics so badly and Italy receives them so well. W.: That is a sentence no jurist should sign, but I understand it. G.: We are not signing anything. We are merely conversing, which is safer and usually truer. W.: Safer only if no one is taking notes. G.: Speranza is always taking notes. W.: Then one must at least be elegant. G.: That was my thought. Let us begin again with Yorkshire. Did your people leave under the old recusant pressures? W.: That is the accepted family account. A bad time, as the dry phrase has it. “Bad” in such genealogies usually means the state had become theological. G.: Splendid. When the state becomes theological, names begin travelling. W.: And once names travel, letters travel with them. G.: Precisely. Which brings us back to W. A foreign body in the Latin script, borne into Italy by confessional weather, and then naturalised in Campania. W.: You make my surname sound like a diplomatic mission. G.: Most surnames are. They negotiate between dead contingencies and living vanity. W.: Then “Winspeare” must negotiate between Yorkshire consonants and Neapolitan vowels. G.: Admirably. And rather better than some Englishmen manage their own tongue. W.: You say that as a classicist. G.: As a classicist and as one who has heard undergraduates pronounce Cicero as though he were a racehorse. W.: We have fewer excuses in Naples. Cicero is still half alive in the schools. G.: That is exactly what I envy. In England one reveres him from a distance; in Italy one still seems capable of using him. W.: He was for me less a monument than a civic instrument. G.: Yes. Your praise of him is not merely literary. You say he gave Latin citizenship to Greek discipline. W.: And more than that. He gave public language to philosophy in a way useful to private and civic life. G.: Which is why you speak of philosophia practica. W.: Exactly. The Greek schools may refine, but Cicero domesticates without vulgarising. G.: That is very well put. He is Greek enough to think and Roman enough to oblige thinking to enter public life. W.: Which is why Antoninus matters too. G.: Let us come to Antoninus. You praise him not as a mystic emperor but as an ethical exemplar under Roman discipline. W.: Because his prose, if not as elegant as Cicero’s, joins moral inwardness to civic self-command. G.: A very un-English combination, unless one counts certain bishops. W.: Or certain dons. G.: We do not count dons; we classify them and then leave them in the wrong drawer. W.: Then classify Cicero. G.: Gladly. Sapiente as the agora, eloquente as the Academy, erudite as the Lyceum, severe as the Stoa. W.: You have been reading. G.: With pleasure. Your formula is almost too handsome to paraphrase. It makes Cicero gather Greece by Roman use rather than by Roman conquest. W.: Which is the better empire. G.: Usually. Intellectual empires are at least less expensive in cavalry. W.: Not always cheaper in vanity. G.: True. But that applies to Oxford too. We annex the Greeks every week and pay them nothing. W.: Naples paid them in another coin. G.: Yes, by making them speak to law, institutions, and the civic life. That is what I find so unlike my own official setting. W.: Because you are a tutor and lecturer. G.: Precisely. A college tutor and university lecturer in a machine of small rooms, weekly papers, and public examinations. You are of the juridical and civic world, where philosophy is pressed by law and administration. W.: Yet both worlds need Cicero. G.: Very much. Oxford needs him for style and distinctions; Naples needs him for public reason and eloquent legality. W.: And Yorkshire? G.: Yorkshire needs him for weathering dignity. One can imagine Cicero surviving there only if wrapped in wool. W.: While in Naples he would require shade. G.: Exactly. The same text, different meteorology. W.: Do you think your own Yorkshire antecedents made you more sympathetic to such transplanted names? G.: I suspect so. A name that has travelled is already philosophically suggestive. It reminds one that identity is less local than parish historians suppose. W.: Yet one must not romanticise the migration. G.: Certainly not. Families moved because kings and confessions left them choices they could not much admire. W.: Henry VIII appears often in family mythology as a blunt instrument. G.: He was exactly that, and not only in mythology. W.: Then your joke about “your head off or move to Capri” is not wholly a joke. G.: No. Merely a compression. The Tudor state was not in the habit of offering Capri, but it offered enough pressure to make the Mediterranean look morally attractive. W.: Naples has long been an asylum for difficult continuities. G.: Very good. Keep that. W.: I shall if you promise not to claim it in a footnote. G.: No promise. Now tell me, do you feel English at all in the name? W.: Philologically, perhaps. Existentially, no. The name is an inherited shell; the mind was formed by Naples, law, and Cicero. G.: Excellent. That is exactly how these things ought to be. One should not let the surname think for the man. W.: Nor let the man forget that the surname has a history. G.: Very good. You see, this is why Speranza likes you. Not because you are the only W, though that delights him childishly, but because your very initial becomes a small history of displacement and naturalisation. W.: A lessicografia filosofica of the alphabet. G.: Exactly. The letter itself becomes a note on migration, script, and identity. W.: You are making too much of a consonant. G.: That is what classicists do when they are happy. W.: Then let us talk about Gryce Hall. Was it really inhabited by an eccentric lord? G.: Family rumour insists upon it, which is generally enough. English houses with old names must, by custom, produce at least one eccentric proprietor, preferably one who breeds theories or peacocks. W.: And in your case? G.: I believe he collected singularities of behaviour and perhaps rents. The exact balance is lost to family discretion. W.: Then your own line to Edgbaston was a descent from hall to suburb. G.: Exactly. A great English philosophical trajectory: from hall to Midlands respectability, then to Clifton, Oxford, and footnotes. W.: Whereas mine runs from Yorkshire recollection to Portici, Naples, legal office, and Cicero. G.: The better line, frankly. W.: More picturesque, at least. G.: And more Roman. Oxford can discuss Rome; Naples still seems capable of continuing it under altered forms. W.: You flatter Naples. G.: I flatter Cicero in Naples, which is safer. W.: Then let us ask the obvious. Why Cicero rather than, say, Ulpian or Seneca? G.: Because Cicero gives one both lexicon and civic theatre. Ulpian gives law more purely; Seneca gives inwardness more sharply; Cicero gives the whole conversational republic of public reason. W.: That is why he mattered to me. He made philosophy discursive without making it merely decorative. G.: Exactly. He attaches speculative reflection to practical destination. W.: And that is what many English readers miss. G.: Because the English tend to divide style from seriousness unless style is ugly enough to reassure them. W.: Naples has the opposite vice. G.: Quite. It sometimes trusts style too far. But with Cicero the two are properly joined. W.: Then perhaps Yorkshire and Naples meet there. G.: In austerity and eloquence under different skies, yes. W.: That is almost too handsome. G.: Then let us spoil it. Which Riding would Cicero have preferred? W.: None. He would have found them all under-lit. G.: Excellent. And Naples? W.: Too loud, but survivable. G.: Like most good philosophy. W.: And Oxford? G.: Too indoor for him. He liked forums better than quadrangles. W.: Yet you made him survive there. G.: Barely. He survives at Oxford only when someone remembers that a dialogue is not an essay cut into pieces. W.: Which is why Speranza makes him speak again. G.: Precisely. He refuses to embalm him, just as he refuses to embalm you. W.: That is generous. G.: It is more than generous. It is just. The danger with jurist-philosophers is that they become footnotes to institutions. The danger with exiled surnames is that they become curiosities. Speranza avoids both. W.: And gives me a letter too. G.: Yes. Your W is now canonical. W.: Canonical by alphabetical accident. G.: Most canons begin that way and are justified afterward. W.: Then tell me, in your own family, was Yorkshire still spoken of, or only remembered? G.: Remembered in fragments: names, places, a hall, a farm, a suggestion of older soil beneath Midlands gentility. Enough to make one feel that Edgbaston itself was only a later paragraph. W.: That is well put. G.: Thank you. And in yours? W.: Yorkshire survived as family weather: a place of origin abstracted into confession, endurance, and distance. Naples supplied the substance; Yorkshire the prologue. G.: Splendid. So both our families kept the north as an explanatory fiction. W.: Not wholly fiction. G.: No, never wholly. The best family narratives are half archive and half tonal adjustment. W.: Then perhaps philosophy begins there too. G.: Very likely. In inherited names, altered geographies, and a tendency to ask why one is here rather than somewhere colder. W.: Naples answers that last question by climate. G.: Oxford by scholarships. W.: Cicero by duty. G.: And Yorkshire by silence. W.: You are becoming lyrical again. G.: Only because your W has improved my mood. W.: Then let us end where we began. Am I to be remembered chiefly as the only W? G.: Certainly not. But it is an excellent way to begin the remembering. W.: And after the letter? G.: After the letter, Cicero. After Cicero, Antoninus. After Antoninus, Naples. After Naples, Yorkshire by way of conscience. After that, law, language, and the strange fact that a transplanted name may become more Italian than many native ones. W.: That is almost a verdict. G.: A conversational one only. W.: Then I accept it. G.: Good. Speranza will be delighted. W.: Because of Cicero? G.: Because of W. W.: Barbarous. G.: Entirely. And therefore worth keeping.