Consciencious objector during WW2

English Scholar and poet, born Willenhall, Straffordshire, 7 August, 1912. Died 18 April, 2000. Lived and taught English at Magdalene Colledge, Cambridge.

SALE, Arthur. UNDER THE WAR & OTHER POEMS. 1975. Hutchinson.
Dw price clipped. Poet's first collection.. £4.00


Arthur Sale, who has died aged 87, would not have fared well in the streamlined world of modern higher education. He published virtually nothing during more than 50 years as an academic. He quietly abandoned lecturing, finding it not to his taste. He had little time for high-table niceties and no time at all for committees, college politics or faculty intrigue. He just taught.

He was a brilliant, enthralling, inspiring teacher. You would climb the rickety stairs to his room in the 15th-century eves of the first court at Magdalene College, Cambridge. A pot of coffee would be produced and some homemade biscuits. He would proudly show off the latest etchings by his son, Bevis, or some rare first edition of an obscure 19th-century novel he had chanced upon that morning. He would then settle down and listen patiently as you falteringly read him your weekly essay.

There was never a word of criticism. He would pick up on some theme you'd touched on - however leaden or clichéd - and talk enchantingly for the rest of the hour. There seemed no book, poem or play in the western canon that he hadn't read, and that he could not illuminate. He would mix a flow of completely personal literary perceptions with quietly subversive political asides and digressions on such passions as mid-war smallholdings or modern American TV.

The oddity was to find him at Magdalene College, which traditionally catered more for followers of the hunt and students of land economy than the critical theories of IA Richards or FR Leavis. He was as un-Magdalene a figure as you could hope to meet, which may explain why he retained the hybrid status of "fellow-commoner" to the end.

Arthur Sale was born in Willenhall, Staffordshire, the son of an engineer and lay preacher. He was educated at West Bridgford grammar school and Nottingham University. He first arrived in Cambridge in the 1930s, teaching correspondence courses at an institute run by London University - something he kept up during the war (he was a conscientious objector) despite the offer of a job by the university.

It was not until 1957 that the offer of a university post was repeated. By then, Sale had settled in the village of Girton, some three miles out of town. Despite a weak heart, he would walk to and from college every day - initially through fields, latterly down the traffic-choked Huntingdon Road.

His sole written contribution to literary criticism was the introduction to the poems of George Crabbe. Two volumes of his own poems emerged, 25 years apart. They were rejected by Fabers as "woefully obscure," a criticism which gave him unreasonable pleasure.

One of Sale's first pupils was Bamber Gascoigne, who later spoke of "his unsurpassable range of knowledge, his personal humility, his extreme critical severity." Nicholas Snowman, now running Glyndebourne, remembers how "he found out what you were interested in, and, whatever it was, he'd know all about it. In my case, it was Henry James and Edith Wharton, and he'd make me a present of editions I couldn't otherwise have got hold of."

Benedict Nightingale, the Times's theatre critic, was another student who owes a debt to those hours in Sale's attic: "You felt very much at ease with him. You knew he wasn't going to throw his intellectual weight around. He accepted one's amateurism, and his relative powerlessness in the college made him far easier to deal with."

John Simpson, of the BBC, who thought Sale "the best teacher of English in the University of Cambridge", was another student. Sale was pleased to follow the progress of his former pupils, though one sensed a certain disappointment in those - quite a numerous band - who ended up in journalism. Re-meeting Simpson recently, he observed: "You split an infinitive in Afghanistan." Simpson tried to explain that he was under heavy gunfire at the time. It cut no ice.

Favoured students were invited to the whitewashed 40s Girton bungalow at weekends, or to Sale's cottage at Southwold. His former pupils bonded into a sort of club. Membership was rewarded by long, immaculately written - in every sense - letters. Half a dozen of us made the pilgrimage back to Cambridge five years ago, and were briefly embraced back into his world: his friendship with Henry Moore, his passion for Richard Jeffries and the American novel, his dry observations on contemporary culture and politics.

His first wife, Nell - a fellow student at Nottingham and an ever-welcoming presence at Girton - died in 1989. Their other son was Jonathan Sale, the journalist. Later, he married Penny Moffett, to whom, until recently, he read each night from a novel, surrounded by his books and in the shadow of the willow tree which was a constant metaphor in his poetry.
-- Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian, Friday 21 April 2000