Have I betrayed a way of looking at the world? Have I turned my back on freedom, perversity and outsiderism? Have I bourgeoisified and sold out? Most would think the question preposterous, but I do not. While the nicotine habit might rightly be characterized as dirty, dangerous, anti-social, ontologically pointless and physically deleterious and while those in its thrall might be regarded as reckless, foolish, self-indulgent, weak and perverse, I still find myself drawn to smokers and irritated by those who nag and bully them.
I was at a dinner party many years ago, sitting along from Tom Stoppard, who in those days smoked not just between courses, but between mouthfuls. An American woman opposite watched in disbelief.
"And you so intelligent!"
"Excuse me?" said Tom.
"Knowing that those things are going to kill you," she said, "still you do it."
"How differently I might behave," Tom said, "if immortality were an option."
Substances seem insignificant compared to the big things in life: Work, Faith, Knowledge, Hope, Fear and Love. But the appet.i.tes that drive us and our susceptibility, resistance, acceptance and denial of substances define and reveal us at least as much as abstract expressions of belief or bald recitations of action and achievement.
Maybe it"s just me. Maybe other people have greater control over their appet.i.tes and less interest in them. I seem to have been driven by greedy need and needy greed all my life.
College to Colleague
Cambridge The Winter of Discontent, they called it. Strikes by lorry drivers, car workers, nurses, ambulance drivers, railwaymen, refuse collectors and gravediggers. I don"t suppose I had ever been happier.
After all the storm-tossed derangement of my teenage years love, shame, theft, scandal, expulsion, attempted suicide, fraud, arrest, imprisonment and sentencing I finally seemed to have found something close to equilibrium and fulfilment. Seemed Seemed. Smoking a pipe as a placid and confident figure of authority in a small prep school was one thing. Now here I was at a huge university starting all over again as a new boy, a fresher, a n.o.body.
It is natural for people to despise the very idea of Oxford and Cambridge. Elitist, sn.o.bbish, hidebound, self-satisfied, arrogant and remote, the Ancient Universities, as they conceitedly style themselves, seem to embody the irrelevant, archaic, moribund and shameful past that Britain appears to be trying so hard to shed. And Oxbridge doesn"t fool anybody with all that flannel about "meritocracy" and "excellence". Are we supposed to be impressed by the silly names they give themselves? Fellows and stewards and deans and dons and proctors and praelectors. And as for the students, or undergraduates undergraduates, I beg their pompous pardons ...
Many people, but especially I think the young, see pretension and performance all around them. They will read att.i.tudinizing and posturing in every gesture. If they were to walk down Trinity Street in Cambridge during term time they would encounter youthful men and women that it would be very easy to characterize as self-conscious poseurs or play-acting p.r.i.c.ks. Oh, they think they"re so so intellectual; oh, they think they"re intellectual; oh, they think they"re so so Brideshead Revisited Brideshead Revisited; oh, they think they"re so so la creme de la creme. Look at the way they bicycle along the cobbles with their arms folded, too cool to touch the handlebars. See how they walk along with their head in a book. See how they wrap their scarves around their necks with a flick. As if we"re supposed to be impressed. Listen to their drawly public-school voices. Or, worse, listen to their fake la creme de la creme. Look at the way they bicycle along the cobbles with their arms folded, too cool to touch the handlebars. See how they walk along with their head in a book. See how they wrap their scarves around their necks with a flick. As if we"re supposed to be impressed. Listen to their drawly public-school voices. Or, worse, listen to their fake street street accents. Who do they think they are, who do they b.l.o.o.d.y think they b.l.o.o.d.y are? Mow the f.u.c.kers down. accents. Who do they think they are, who do they b.l.o.o.d.y think they b.l.o.o.d.y are? Mow the f.u.c.kers down.
Well. Quite. But imagine for a moment that these w.a.n.ky a.r.s.ehole poseurs are actually no more than young men and women with real lives and real feelings just like anybody else, just like me and just like you. Imagine that they are quite as scared and unsure and hopeful and daft as you and me. Imagine that instant contempt and dislike really says more about the onlooker than about them. Then imagine something further. Imagine that just about every single student newly arrived at such a place as Cambridge went through exactly those same feelings of dislike, distrust and fear when looking at the easy and a.s.sured second- and third-years milling around them with all their relaxed confidence and their superior air of a.s.surance and belonging. Imagine that they too had compensated for such feelings of nervous inadequacy by choosing to "see through" everyone else, by choosing to believe that those around them were pitiful poseurs. And imagine finally that without their noticing it they somehow became absorbed and naturalized into the place to such an extent that now, to an outsider, they are the ones who look like arrogant t.o.s.s.e.rs. Inside, you can take my word for it, they are still shrinking and shrivelling like salted snails. I know, because I was one, just as you would have been too.
It is true that I was a scholar. It is true that I was older than my first-year contemporaries. True also that I had more experience of the "real world" (whatever that might be supposed to be) than most. True as well that, unlike a surprising number of those arriving at university, I was very used to being away from home, having been sent to my first boarding school at the age of seven. True too that I had an apparently a.s.sured manner and a deep, resonant voice that made me sound as if I belonged to the place quite as much as the wooden panels, shaved lawns and bowler-hatted porters. I concede all that, but it is very important that you understand nonetheless how very scared I was inside. I lived, you see, in quivering dread of being at any moment found out found out. No, it wasn"t my status as a convicted criminal on probation that I wanted kept secret, nor my past history as thief, liar, forger and gaolbird. As far as I was concerned those home truths were perfectly fit for broadcast, as was my s.e.xuality, my ethnicity or any other thing of that nature. No, the terror that gripped me during those first few weeks at Cambridge was all about my intellectual right to be there. My dread was that someone would approach and ask me, in front of a crowd of sneering onlookers, my opinion of Lermontov or Superstring Theory or the Categorical Imperatives of Kant. I would prevaricate and palter in my usual plausible way, but, this being Cambridge, such stratagems would cut no ice with my remorseless and (in my imagination) gleefully malicious interrogator, who would stare at me with gimlet eyes and say in a harsh voice that crackled with mocking laughter: "Excuse me, but do you even know who Lermontov is is?" Or Rilke or Hayek or Saussure or some other name my ignorance of which would reveal the awful shallowness of my so-called education.
At any moment it would come to light that my scholarship had been wrongly awarded, that there had been a muddle with examination papers and some poor genius called Simon Frey or Steven Pry had been cheated of their proper place. A relentless public inquisition would follow in which I would be exposed as a dull-witted fake who had no business at a serious university. I could even picture the ceremony in which I was formally ejected from the college gates, slinking away to the sound of jeers and whistles. An inst.i.tution like Cambridge was for other people, insiders, club members, the chosen for them them.
You may think I am exaggerating, and perhaps I am. But by no more than 5 per cent. All those thoughts truly did spin around in my head, and I really did fear that I had no right to be a Cambridge undergraduate, and that this truth would soon become obvious, along with academic and intellectual deficiencies that would reveal me to be entirely unworthy of matriculation.
Part of the reason I felt all this is because I think I had a much higher doctrine of Cambridge than most undergraduates. I believed in it completely. I worshipped it. I had chosen it above Oxford or any other university because ... because of ... oh dear, there is no way of explaining this without sounding appallingly precious.
My favourite twentieth-century author in those days was E. M. Forster. I hero-worshipped him and G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles and their a.s.sociated Bloomsbury satellites Goldsworthy Lowes d.i.c.kinson and Lytton Strachey as well as the more ill.u.s.trious planets in that system, Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I admired especially the cult of personal relations that Forster espoused. His view that friendship, warmth and honesty between people mattered more than any cause or any system of belief was for me a practical as well as a romantic ideal.
"I hate the idea of causes," he wrote, "and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." That claim, from an essay called "What I Believe" and published in his collection Two Cheers for Democracy Two Cheers for Democracy, was taken by some to be all but treasonable. Given his connections to the group later known as the Cambridge Spies, it may be easy to see why such a credo still causes unease. He knew that, of course, for he went on to write: Such a choice may scandalise the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Ca.s.sius in the lowest circle of h.e.l.l because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome.
I know how insufferably awful I must appear when I tell you that I wanted to go to Cambridge because of the Bloomsbury Group and a parcel of poofy old bien-pensant bien-pensant writers and traitors, but there we are. It wasn"t because of Peter Cook and John Cleese and the tradition of comedy, much as I admired that, nor was it because of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin and the tradition of science, much as I admired that too. Cambridge"s beauty as a university town had some influence, I suppose. I saw it before I ever saw Oxford, and it pierced my heart in a way that first love always does. But it really was, pretentious as it may sound, the intellectual and the ethical tradition that appealed to my puritanical and self-righteous soul. I had emerged from a monstrous youth, you must remember, and I suppose I felt I needed the holy fires of Cambridge to cleanse me. writers and traitors, but there we are. It wasn"t because of Peter Cook and John Cleese and the tradition of comedy, much as I admired that, nor was it because of Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin and the tradition of science, much as I admired that too. Cambridge"s beauty as a university town had some influence, I suppose. I saw it before I ever saw Oxford, and it pierced my heart in a way that first love always does. But it really was, pretentious as it may sound, the intellectual and the ethical tradition that appealed to my puritanical and self-righteous soul. I had emerged from a monstrous youth, you must remember, and I suppose I felt I needed the holy fires of Cambridge to cleanse me.
"Cambridge produces martyrs and Oxford burns them." I honestly cannot remember if that phrase is my own or whether I borrowed it from somebody else: I seem to be credited with it on the web, which proves nothing, of course. Anyway, it is true that Martyrs" Memorial in Oxford commemorates the burning of the three Cambridge divines Hugh Latimer, Nicholas Ridley and Thomas Cranmer in the city of Oxford. There has always been a sense that Oxford is a worldly, political and establishment inst.i.tution, strong in humanities and history, and that Cambridge is more idealistic, iconoclastic and dissident, strong in mathematics and science. Certainly Oxford has provided Britain with twenty-six prime ministers where Cambridge has managed only fifteen. It is indicative too that Oxford was the Royalist headquarters during the English Civil War while Cambridge was a Parliamentarian stronghold; indeed Oliver Cromwell was a Cambridge alumnus and local to the area. Roundhead Cambridge, Cavalier Oxford. This pattern is repeated in theology the tractarian Oxford movement is high church to the point of being Romish, whereas Wescott House and Ridley Hall in Cambridge are low to the point of being evangelical.
This same doctrinal distinction is even to be seen in comedy, mad as that may sound. Robert Hewison (an Oxonian) in his excellent book Monty Python: The Case Against Monty Python: The Case Against shows how the great Pythons were divided along Oxford and Cambridge lines. Those long lean Cantabrigians (Virginia Woolf had noted fifty years earlier how Cambridge breeds them taller than Oxford) Cleese, Chapman and Idle were all icy logic, sarcasm, cruelty and verbal play while the Oxonians Jones and Palin were warmer, sillier and more surreal. "Let"s have a dozen Pantomime Princess Margarets running over a hill!" Jones might suggest, to which Cleese would coldly riposte, "Why?" shows how the great Pythons were divided along Oxford and Cambridge lines. Those long lean Cantabrigians (Virginia Woolf had noted fifty years earlier how Cambridge breeds them taller than Oxford) Cleese, Chapman and Idle were all icy logic, sarcasm, cruelty and verbal play while the Oxonians Jones and Palin were warmer, sillier and more surreal. "Let"s have a dozen Pantomime Princess Margarets running over a hill!" Jones might suggest, to which Cleese would coldly riposte, "Why?"
The creative tension between those two in particular, according to Hewison, formed the heart and soul of what Python was. You might see the same thing in the differences between Cambridge"s Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller and Oxford"s Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett. It is more than possible that you find the cuddly Dudley and the even cuddlier Alan Bennett and Michael Palin much more likeable than their tall, aloof and rather forbidding Cambridge counterparts. And perhaps this extends down to the later incarnations Oxford"s Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis are shorter and surely sweeter than the lofty and fractious Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.
Cableknit Pullover, Part 1.
The backlit ears of Hugh Laurie, gentleman.
Cableknit Pullover, Part 2.
There is tremendous romance in the cavalier tradition and absolutely none in the puritan. Oscar Wilde was an Oxford man, and a great part of me is deeply drawn to the Oxford of the aesthetic movement, Arnold"s "Scholar-Gipsy" and the Dreaming Spires. But the pull of Cambridge was always stronger; Forster"s world marked me for her own at some point in my teenage years and thenceforward it was Cambridge or nowhere.
All of which goes some way towards explaining, perhaps, why I was so nervous about being found out. It was obvious to me that Cambridge, the Mecca of the Mind, would be filled with the most intellectually accomplished people in the world. Students of organic chemistry would be familiar with Horace and Heidegger, and cla.s.sicists would know the laws of thermodynamics and the poetry of Empson. I was unworthy.
I would have had to be epically delusional or truly, medically paranoiac not to recognize such insecurities for what they were: a mixture of too idealistic a sense of what Cambridge was, allied to lashings of the worst kind of late adolescent solipsistic angst. I had never fitted in at school and, now that I was come to a place almost expressly designed to suit me, suppose I turned out to be unable to fit in there too? What did that say about me? It was too frightening to contemplate.
But the first two weeks at a university are designed, which is to say they have evolved, to enforce the realization amongst freshers that everybody is in the same punt and that everything will be fine. Besides which, after a few days I had met enough people and overheard enough conversations to realize that Cambridge was far from fifth-century Athens or fifteenth-century Florence.
University life begins with the Freshers" Fair and all kinds of "squashes" recruitment parties thrown by student clubs and societies. What with the comparatively healthy bank balance of a student in the first week of their academic year on the one hand and that keen desire to be accepted and loved that flows from all the insecurities I have described on the other, it is likely that a fresher will join any number of extracurricular groups in their first week, from the established the Footlights Club, Varsity Varsity magazine and the Cambridge Union, to the weird the Friends of the Illuminati, the Society of Tobacco Worshippers and the Beaglers Against Racism. All very silly and studenty and adorable. magazine and the Cambridge Union, to the weird the Friends of the Illuminati, the Society of Tobacco Worshippers and the Beaglers Against Racism. All very silly and studenty and adorable.
College and Cla.s.s I suppose I am going to have to stop off here and explain in the briefest and simplest of terms, if I can, the nature of collegiate life at Cambridge. Only Oxford has a comparable system, and there is no reason why anyone should understand how it works without having lived inside it. And, of course, no reason why anyone should care. Unless you are curious, in which case I love you, for curiosity about the world and all its corners is a beautiful thing, even if those corners are as uncool as the cloisters of Oxbridge.
There are twenty-five Cambridge colleges (well thirty-one in all, but two of those are for postgraduates and the other four only accept mature students), each of which is a self-governing inst.i.tution with its own history, income, property and statutes. Trinity College is the largest, with 700 undergraduate students. It is also the wealthiest of all Oxbridge colleges, worth hundreds of millions and owning land everywhere. Others are poorer: in the fifteenth century Queens" was a big supporter of King Richard III, whose boar"s head device still flies from college banners, and it consequently suffered from confiscations and other financial penalties following that unfortunate monarch"s defeat on Bosworth Field.
Each college has a hall for dining, a chapel, a library, senior and junior combination rooms (common rooms at Oxford) and a porter"s lodge. They are mostly medieval in fabric and they are all medieval in structure and governance. They are entered by towered gateways and laid out in lawned and cobbled courts (at Oxford these are called quads). You would not design an educational establishment from scratch along these peculiar lines, and indeed no one ever has. Yet for over 800 years the two collegiate universities have run continuously without a break and there has been no cause to change the fundamental principles that organize them, except through the slowest and most immeasurably gradual evolution. Whether Oxford and Cambridge can survive the envy, resentment, dislike and distrust of future generations we can only guess. It is perfectly possible that someone will attach to them the hideous word "inappropriate" or the hideous phrase "not fit for purpose" and they will be turned into museums, heritage centres or hotels. No one can stop them from being historic, however, and without vandalism they cannot prevent them from being physically beautiful either. Those two qualities alone will ensure that, come what may, young people will want to go to them in sufficient numbers to risk their being considered elitist.
An Oxbridge student is given a place, not by the university, but by his or her college and it is there that they will live and take their instruction in the form of tutorials which at Cambridge are called supervisions. The average number of undergraduate students at a college is about 300. When I arrived at Queens" in October 1978, there were five others reading English in my intake. Or was it six? I know one changed to theology, and two others dropped out altogether. No matter. The university, as distinct from the colleges, runs the faculties (History, Philosophy, Law, Cla.s.sics, Medicine and so on) with their tenured readers, lecturers and professors. In my time Queens" had three English Literature Fellows (or "dons") who were also attached to the university"s English faculty, although it is perfectly possible to be a Fellow within a college, taking supervisions and teaching undergraduates and yet be without a faculty post. Oh lord, this is so complicated and dull ... I can almost hear your eyes glazing over.
Look at it this way. You live and eat in your college and attend supervisions arranged by the dons in your college for which your write essays, but you go to lectures and are ultimately examined by the university faculties which are outside the college. There is no campus, but there are faculty buildings, lecture theatres, exams schools and so on. Would it help if I said colleges are like Hogwarts houses, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw and so on? I have a horrible feeling it might ...
The Queens" College of St Margaret and St Bernard is one of the oldest in the university. It is also one of the prettiest, with a divine half-timbered cloister court, a charming medieval Hall, all done over by Thomas Bodley and Burne-Jones at the height of the late pre-Raphaelite period, and a famous wooden structure known as the Mathematical Bridge that spans the River Cam and connects the old part of the college with the new. When I arrived in 1978 Queens" was still an all-male inst.i.tution. Girton, the first women"s college, started taking men the following year, while the more advanced King"s and Clare had been mixed for six years, but Queens" was carrying on in much the way it had for more than half a millennium. Incidentally, the apostrophe after the "s" is there on account of it being founded by two queens, Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville. In Le Keux"s of St Margaret and St Bernard is one of the oldest in the university. It is also one of the prettiest, with a divine half-timbered cloister court, a charming medieval Hall, all done over by Thomas Bodley and Burne-Jones at the height of the late pre-Raphaelite period, and a famous wooden structure known as the Mathematical Bridge that spans the River Cam and connects the old part of the college with the new. When I arrived in 1978 Queens" was still an all-male inst.i.tution. Girton, the first women"s college, started taking men the following year, while the more advanced King"s and Clare had been mixed for six years, but Queens" was carrying on in much the way it had for more than half a millennium. Incidentally, the apostrophe after the "s" is there on account of it being founded by two queens, Margaret of Anjou and Elizabeth Woodville. In Le Keux"s Memorials of Cambridge Memorials of Cambridge, which I am sure you have read, but I will remind you anyway, the author, writing in about 1840, spells the name of the college as Queen"s College, and appends a footnote: A custom has arisen latterly of writing the name Queens" College, as being the foundation of two queens. This appears to us an unnecessary refinement. We have the authority of Erasmus against it, who always calls his college "Collegium Reginae".
"Reginae" is of course Latin for "of the Queen", in the singular. G.o.d, I sound like a guide book. Not surprising, as I"m quoting from the college website. Anyway, there you are.
As the only English scholar in my year I had been allocated a rather fabulous set of rooms overlooking the President"s Gardens. That"s another idiosyncratic Oxbridge nonsense the t.i.tles given to heads of houses. Some are Masters or Mistresses, others are Wardens, Provosts, Princ.i.p.als or Rectors and a few, as is the case with Queens", are styled President.
On the day I arrived I stood at the bottom of my staircase and for ten minutes I played with the exquisitely exciting proof that, for the time being at least, I truly was a Cambridge undergraduate. You see, each staircase has at its entrance a wooden board on which are hand-painted the names of the occupants residing within. Next to each name is a sliding block of wood that obscures or reveals the words IN and OUT, so that when a student (or Fellow, for the dons have rooms in college too) pa.s.ses the board on their way to or from their rooms they can signal their presence or absence to an anxious and expectant world. I was happily flicking my block of wood back and forth and would still have been doing so to this very day if the sound of approaching footsteps hadn"t sent me scuttling up to my rooms.
I had arrived that afternoon with a collection of carefully chosen books, a typewriter, a gramophone, a pile of records, some posters and a bust of Shakespeare, all of which were soon disposed about the rooms in as pleasing and artfully artless an arrangement as I could contrive. Undergraduate sets are composed of a bedroom, a main room and a gyp-room, or kitchen. Gyp was the unfortunate nickname for a college servant: the more appealing Oxonian appellation is "scout", but I"m not going to get side-tracked with Oxbridge minutiae again, I promise. I know how much it upsets you.
I had determined that I would go out later for coffee, milk and other staples. For the moment I was content to sit alone but for two dozen or so invitations carefully laid out on my desk. In the days before email and mobile phones, communication was managed by notes left in a student"s pigeonhole in the porter"s lodge. If someone wanted to contact you it was much easier for them to leave a message there than to have the f.a.g of climbing all the way to your rooms and slipping it under your door. I had already gone down to the porter"s lodge three times in the last hour to see if any more invitations had come in. The pigeonholes were arranged and colour-coded according to undergraduate year. Thus a club or society could undertake a ma.s.s leafleting of first-years, a kind of targeted spamming. Hence the quant.i.ty of paper spread out on my desk. The invitations to squashes being held by sporting, political or religious societies I had instantly thrown away, but I had grouped together invitations from dramatic and literary clubs, magazines and journals. What about the Cambridge University Gay Society? I was undecided about this. I liked the idea of pinning my pink colours to the mincey mast but was wary of being involved in anything campaigning or strident. In those days I was a most conservative or at least actively inactive sort of figure politically. In the jargon of the day, my consciousness was unawakened.
Invitations to sherry parties held by the college"s Senior Tutor, by the Dean of Chapel and by an entirely different person also claiming the t.i.tle of Dean were not to be refused, I was told. Also essential was a gathering in the rooms of A. C. Spearing, the college"s senior English Fellow, who was to be, it seemed, my Director of Studies. The most impressive and formal invitation, all pasteboard, gold embossing and armorial bearings, was the one summoning me to the Queens" College Matriculation Dinner, a formal event in which the entire intake of first-years would be officially received and enrolled as members of the college.
And so I embarked on this round of parties and introductory gatherings. In A. C. Spearing"s rooms I met my fellow English Literature freshers. We stuck together in the first week, accompanied each other to a.s.sorted squashes and introductory lectures, swapped second-hand gossip and sized each other up academically, intellectually, socially and in one or two cases I suppose, s.e.xually. We were very typical of our generation. We knew T. S. Eliot backwards but could barely quote a line of Spenser or Dryden between us. With the exception of one of our number we would have looked like, to an outside observer, as prize a parcel of punchably pompous and b.u.t.toned-up a.r.s.eholes as ever was a.s.sembled in one place. The exception was a bondage-trousered, leather-jacketed, henna-haired youth called Dave Huggins. He looked like the kind of punk rocker you would cross the King"s Road in Chelsea to avoid. Despite being far and away the friendliest and most approachable of our group he scared the h.e.l.l out of me and I think out of everybody else too. Something in my booming voice and apparently confident manner seemed to appeal to him, however, or amuse him at least, and he dubbed me the King.
For all his forbidding street aspect, Dave had been to school at Radley, one of the smarter public schools: in fact almost all of us in the English Literature intake had been privately educated. Unsure of ourselves and nervous of being found academically wanting as we may have been, I cannot imagine how alarmingly and alienatingly at home we must have seemed to those arriving from state schools, to that cadre of young men and women who had never before stayed away from home and never before met public-school product en ma.s.se. Some months later a student who had been educated at a comprehensive in south-east London told me that for weeks he had been unable to understand what "say gid" meant. He kept hearing it everywhere: "Say gid! That"s jarst say gid!" Eventually he realized that it was how the upper middle-cla.s.s p.r.o.nounce "So good, that"s just so good." He observed how strange it was for him to be in the minority. Some 3 per cent of the population received private education in those days and here he was one of the great 97 per cent, but somehow feeling like a chimney sweep who has gatecrashed a Hunt Ball. No matter how much Cambridge might have presented itself as a purely academic inst.i.tution whose only criterion for entry was academic, the dominant accent to be heard was public school. It took a very special kind of self-belief and strength of character not to feel angry or out of place in such an environment.
I have no idea what kind of figure I cut. Well, no that"s not true. I am afraid I have all too clear an idea of what kind of a figure I cut. My typical mode of dress was a Harris tweed jacket with leather b.u.t.tons, Viyella shirt and knitted tie, V-neck lambswool sweater, corduroy trousers of lovat green and brown half-brogue shoes polished to a high gloss. With my trademark flop of hair and a pipe clamped between my teeth I looked like what I of course had been all the previous year, an a.s.sistant master from a small rural prep school, perhaps with something of the air of a Second World War back-room boffin. Whatever impression I gave it certainly wasn"t that of a hip young rocker in the age of The Clash and The d.a.m.ned.
Chess, Cla.s.sics, Cla.s.sical Composers, Curiosity and Cheating It turned out that Queens" did indeed have two deans, a Dean of Chapel, and a Dean in charge of discipline. At each of the first-week deca.n.a.l sherry parties I found myself falling into conversation with a first-year called Kim Harris. He was handsome in a way that reminded me of a young Richard Burton and radiated a powerful mixture of severity, secrecy, relish and surprise that I could not but find intriguing. Like me he was separated from other freshers by appearing on the one hand more mature and adult while on the other exhibiting an unembarra.s.sedly high doctrine of what Cambridge ought to be. He was educated, I soon discovered, at Bolton School, an independent day school that a generation or two earlier had thrown Ian McKellen at Cambridge and a grateful world. Kim had come to Queens" to read Cla.s.sics. He dressed rather like me but in Church"s full brogues and V-necks of the purest and priciest cashmere. He was even capable of wearing a bowtie without looking absurd, which is a very great human skill indeed. We became instant friends in the way that only the young can. We did not consider going to any party or event except in each other"s company.
"Are you gay?" I asked him quite early on.
"Let"s just say that I know what I like," was his prim and opaque reply.
Kim Harris. Not unlike a young blond Richard Burton.
Aside from his proficiency at Latin and Greek Kim had another skill and at a level of brilliance that seemed to me to be quite superhuman. He was a chess Master. At Bolton he had played with, and to some extent mentored, Nigel Short, who was already becoming well known as the greatest prodigy England had ever produced. At the age of ten Short had beaten the great Viktor Korchnoi and now at fourteen was on the verge of becoming the youngest International Master in history. Kim was "just" a Master, but that meant he was skilful enough to play blindfold, a trick I never tired of urging him to perform. Without any sight of the board he would demolish all comers.
When I first saw him do this it reminded me to raise a point with him.
"Kim," I said, "when we very first met at one of those sherry parties I remember we looked at a chessboard in the Dean"s rooms, and I asked you if you played chess."
"So you did."
"And do you remember what you replied?"
Kim raised his eyebrows. "I don"t think so."
"You said, "Let"s just say, I know the moves." "
"Well, I do."
"You know a bit more than the moves," I said.
"Your point being?"
"My point being, if that"s how you answer someone who asks you if you play chess, how am I to interpret it when you answer the question, "Are you gay?" with the words "Let"s just say, I know what I like"?"
Kim"s family was well off, and they lavished upon their only son every imaginable luxury, including a magnificent Bang and Olufsen stereo system on which Kim played Wagner. And sang to Wagner. And conducted Wagner. And lived Wagner.
I had fallen for Wagner"s music myself when young but I had never penetrated the mysteries of the full works. Aside from anything else I had never been able to afford the huge box sets. As well as Lohengrin Lohengrins and Meistersinger Meistersingers and a Parsifal Parsifal or two Kim had two complete Ring cycles on record: Karl Bohm"s live Bayreuth recording and the great Decca studio production of the Solti Ring, one of the masterpieces of the gramophone age. I know how bored and restless people become at talk of Wagner so I won"t dwell on him at length. Let it just be said that Kim completed my Wagnerian education, and for that alone I would be grateful to him for ever. or two Kim had two complete Ring cycles on record: Karl Bohm"s live Bayreuth recording and the great Decca studio production of the Solti Ring, one of the masterpieces of the gramophone age. I know how bored and restless people become at talk of Wagner so I won"t dwell on him at length. Let it just be said that Kim completed my Wagnerian education, and for that alone I would be grateful to him for ever.
He and I and a friend of his from Bolton called Peter Speak, who was reading Philosophy, would sit around discovering late nineteenth-century masterpieces over which to go into ecstasies. Strauss, Schoenberg, Brahms, Mahler and Bruckner were our G.o.ds and Kim"s B&O our temple.
Given that Britain was boiling with anarchic post-punk creativity, the political excitements of multiple strikes and the election of Margaret Thatcher to the leadership of the Conservative Party, that there was rubbish piling up on the streets, corpses going unburied and inflation rocketing skywards, given all that, a knot of tweedy Cambridge late adolescents gasping at the wonder of Strauss"s Metamorphosis Metamorphosis and Schoenberg"s and Schoenberg"s Transfigured Night Transfigured Night seems ... seems what? Perfectly legitimate. Entirely in accordance with what education is supposed to be. Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. You sit in each other"s rooms and drink coffee I suppose it would be vodka and Red Bull now you share enthusiasms, you talk a lot of w.a.n.k about politics, religion, art and the cosmos and then you go to bed, alone or together according to taste. I mean, how else do you learn anything, how else do you take your mind for a walk? Nonetheless, I"m slightly shocked at how earnest and dull a picture I present in my tweed jacket and corduroys, puffing at a pipe and listening to all that German Late Romantic noise. Is that where it all went wrong? Or is that where it all went right? seems ... seems what? Perfectly legitimate. Entirely in accordance with what education is supposed to be. Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. You sit in each other"s rooms and drink coffee I suppose it would be vodka and Red Bull now you share enthusiasms, you talk a lot of w.a.n.k about politics, religion, art and the cosmos and then you go to bed, alone or together according to taste. I mean, how else do you learn anything, how else do you take your mind for a walk? Nonetheless, I"m slightly shocked at how earnest and dull a picture I present in my tweed jacket and corduroys, puffing at a pipe and listening to all that German Late Romantic noise. Is that where it all went wrong? Or is that where it all went right?
There is that in student life which reinforces the connection between the words "university" and "universal". All divisions of life are there, and all the circles and sodalities, coteries and cliques that you will find in the wider human cosmos can be found in the swirling flux of young people who shape and define a university for the three or four years of their tenancy.
Whenever I return to Cambridge I wander the familiar streets as a stranger. I know and love the architecture intimately, but while the chapels and colleges, courts, bridges and towers are what they have always been, Cambridge is entirely different each time. You cannot step into the same river twice, observed Herac.l.i.tus, for fresh water is always flowing over you. You cannot step into the same Cambridge twice, or the same Bristol, or Warwick, or Leeds or any such place, for fresh generations are for ever repopulating and redefining them. The buildings are frozen, but a university is not its buildings, it is those that inhabit and use them.
I discovered brilliant people and dunces and everything in between. There were the lively and there were the preternaturally dull. Every imaginable special interest was represented. You could spend your three years as an undergraduate on sports fields and never know there were any theatres. You could involve yourself in politics and be wholly unaware of orchestras or choirs. You could hunt with beagle packs, sail, dance, play bridge, build a computer or tend a garden. Just as you can at hundreds of universities, of course. It is only that Cambridge has the advantage of being both bigger and smaller than most. Smaller because you are in a college of perhaps 300; bigger because the whole university numbers over 20,000, which confers some sort of an advantage when it comes to audiences and partic.i.p.ants in sport and drama, readership circulations for magazines and captive markets for all sorts of enterprises and undertakings.
I need not, of course, have worried that I would be quizzed and found wanting on the subject of Russian poets or the principles of particle physics; the fear proved groundless that I would find myself in such rarefied heights of academic brilliance that I would be unable to breathe.
To do well at exams (in the field of literature and the arts at least) it is better to be a hedgehog than a fox, if I can borrow Isaiah Berlin"s famous distinction. In other words, it is better to know one big thing than lots of smaller things. A point of view, a single way of thinking that encompa.s.ses all elements of a subject, allows essays more or less to write themselves. The way to pa.s.s exams is to cheat. I cheated all the way through my three years at Cambridge. Which is not to say that I looked at the work of the student next to me, or that I brought in outside material from which to crib. I cheated by knowing in advance exactly what I was going to write before the invigilator bid us turn over the question sheets and started the clock. I had a theory of Shakespearean tragic and comic forms, for example, which I won"t bore you with and which is probably specious, or at least no more truthful or persuasive an overall interpretation of Shakespeare"s forms than any other. Its virtue was that it answered any question and yet always appeared to be specific. I had found part of it in an essay by Anne Barton (nee Righter). She is a fine Shakespearean scholar, and I filleted and regurgitated some of her ideas for both Parts One and Two of the tripos (Cambridge calls its degree examination the tripos, something to do with the three-legged stool on which students used to sit when taking them). In both of the Shakespeare papers I got a First. In fact in Part Two it was the top First for the entire university. It was essentially the same essay each time. It only takes a paragraph at the top to twist the question such that your essay answers it. Let"s say, in simple terms, that my essay proposes that Shakespeare"s comedies, even the "Festive" ones, play with being tragedies while his tragedies play with being comedies. The point is that you can trot this essay out no matter what the question. "Shakespeare"s real voice is in his comedies": Discuss "Shakespeare"s real voice is in his comedies": Discuss. "King Lear is Shakespeare"s only likeable tragic hero": Discuss. "Shakespeare outgrew his comedies." "Shakespeare put his talent into his comedies and his genius into his tragedies." "Tragedies are adolescent, comedies are adult." "Shakespeare cares about gender, but not about s.e.x." "King Lear is Shakespeare"s only likeable tragic hero": Discuss. "Shakespeare outgrew his comedies." "Shakespeare put his talent into his comedies and his genius into his tragedies." "Tragedies are adolescent, comedies are adult." "Shakespeare cares about gender, but not about s.e.x." Discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss. I did, of course, no such vulgar thing as discuss. All my ducks were in a row when I walked into the examination hall and I had to do no more than point their beaks at the question. Discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss. I did, of course, no such vulgar thing as discuss. All my ducks were in a row when I walked into the examination hall and I had to do no more than point their beaks at the question.
Of course, having a good memory helped ... I had enough quotations in my head, both from the works and from Shakespearean critics and scholars, to be able to pepper my essay with acute references. So creepily good was that memory that I was always able to include Act, Scene and Line numbers for every play quotation or to place in brackets the source and date of any critical reference I cited (Wit.w.a.tersrand Review, Vol. 3, Sept. 75, ed. Jablonski, Yale Books, 1968, that sort of thing). I am aware that to be given a good memory at birth is worth more than almost any other accomplishment but I believe too that it is as rare for one person to be born with a physically better memory as it is for them to be born with better fingers or better legs. There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don"t have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren"t lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers, cars and celebrities. Why? Because they are interested interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is. in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.
Picture the world as being a city whose pavements are covered a foot deep in gold coins. You have to wade through them to make progress. Their clinking and rattling fills the air. Imagine that you met a beggar in such a city.
"Please, give me something. I am penniless."
"But look around you," you would shout. "There is gold enough to last you your whole life. All you have to do is to bend down and pick it up!"
When people complain that they don"t know any literature because it was badly taught at school, or that they missed out on history because on the timetable it was either that or biology, or some such ludicrous excuse, it is hard not to react in the same way.
"But it"s all around you!" I want to scream. "All you have to do it bend down and pick it up!" What on earth earth people think their lack of knowledge of the Hundred Years War, or Socrates, or the colonization of Batavia has to do with people think their lack of knowledge of the Hundred Years War, or Socrates, or the colonization of Batavia has to do with school school I have no idea. As one who was expelled from any number of educational establishments and never did any work at any of them, I know perfectly well that the fault lay not in the staff but in my self that I was ignorant. Then one day, or over the course of time, I got greedy. Greedy to know things, greedy for understanding, greedy for information. I was always to some extent like that robot Number 5 in the movie I have no idea. As one who was expelled from any number of educational establishments and never did any work at any of them, I know perfectly well that the fault lay not in the staff but in my self that I was ignorant. Then one day, or over the course of time, I got greedy. Greedy to know things, greedy for understanding, greedy for information. I was always to some extent like that robot Number 5 in the movie Short Circuit Short Circuit who whizzes about shrieking, "Input! Input!" Memorizing for me became like eating Sugar Puffs, an endless stuffing of myself. who whizzes about shrieking, "Input! Input!" Memorizing for me became like eating Sugar Puffs, an endless stuffing of myself.
I do not say that this hunger for learning was morally, intellectually or stylistically admirable. I think it was a little like ambition, a little like many of the later failings in my life we will come to: membership of so many clubs, ownership of so many credit cards ... it was part of wanting to belong, of feeling the need constantly to connect myself. Rather vulgar, rather pushy.
While the manner and motives of it may not have been magnificent the end result was certainly useful. The urgent desire to pack the mind, my insatiable curiosity and appet.i.te for knowledge led to all kinds of advantages. Facile exam pa.s.sing was one such. I had never found written tests under time pressure anything other than enjoyable and easy. That is because of my fundamental dishonesty. I never tried to engage authentically or truthfully with an intellectual issue or to answer a question. I only tried to show off and in the course of my life I have met few people who are my equal at that undignified art. There are plenty who are more obviously show-offy than I am, but that is what is so creepy about my particular brand of exhibitionism I mask it in a cloak of affable modesty and touching false diffidence. To be less hard on myself, I think these displays of affability, modesty and diffidence may once have been false but have now become pretty much real, in much the same way that the conscious manner we decide to sign our names in our teens will slowly stop being affected and become our real signature. The mask if worn long enough will be the face.
All of which seems a long way from a memoir of university life, which is what this chapter is supposed to offer. The life of a student however, especially that of a more than usually self-conscious student in an inst.i.tution like Cambridge, does involve a great deal of questioning of the mind and intellectual faculties and the meaning and purpose of scholarship, so I think it right to try and fathom what my mind was about in those days.
I went to three lectures in my entire three years. I can remember only two, but I am sure I went to another. The first was an introductory talk on Langland"s Piers Plowman Piers Plowman by J. A. W. Bennett, who had been installed as C. S. Lewis"s successor in the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in 1963 and seemed old enough to have lived through much of the period of which he had made himself a master. His lecture was a monumentally dull explanation of why the B-text of by J. A. W. Bennett, who had been installed as C. S. Lewis"s successor in the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in 1963 and seemed old enough to have lived through much of the period of which he had made himself a master. His lecture was a monumentally dull explanation of why the B-text of Piers Plowman Piers Plowman (an achingly long work of Middle English allegorical alliterative verse) was more to be relied upon than the C-text, or possibly the other way around. Professor Bennett begged leave to disagree with W. W. Skeat on the issue of the A-text"s rendering of the Harrowing of h.e.l.l, blah-di-blah-di-blah ... (an achingly long work of Middle English allegorical alliterative verse) was more to be relied upon than the C-text, or possibly the other way around. Professor Bennett begged leave to disagree with W. W. Skeat on the issue of the A-text"s rendering of the Harrowing of h.e.l.l, blah-di-blah-di-blah ...
That was enough for me. I knew that five minutes in the faculty library would let me dig up a rare enough article in the Sewanee Review Sewanee Review or similar to furnish fodder for an essay. Lectures broke into one"s day and were clearly a terrible waste of time. Necessary no doubt if you were reading Law or Medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English the natural thing to do was to talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books and go to plays. or similar to furnish fodder for an essay. Lectures broke into one"s day and were clearly a terrible waste of time. Necessary no doubt if you were reading Law or Medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English the natural thing to do was to talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books and go to plays.
Perhaps be be in plays? in plays?
I regularly get letters from aspiring actors or their parents asking for advice. If I I get lots, you can imagine how many Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Simon Russell Beale, David Tennant and other get lots, you can imagine how many Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Simon Russell Beale, David Tennant and other legitimate legitimate actors must get. The phrase "crowded profession" is used more for the acting business than for any other I ever heard of and for good reason. actors must get. The phrase "crowded profession" is used more for the acting business than for any other I ever heard of and for good reason.
As in so many fields in life there are people out there longing to be given a secret, a way-in, a technique. I can understand it absolutely. Almost as common as the phrase "crowded profession"; are phrases that express the idea of "just need a break" and "not what you know, but who you know". I am excluding, for the time being, the whole issue of fame and concentrating exclusively on those who actually care about acting in and of itself: I expect we will come to those who obsess about the ancillary "benefits" of red-carpet recognition and celebrity magazine coverage later.
The letter-writers want to know the best way to achieve a foothold in the acting profession. All that is required, they know, is a chance chance, one opportunity to shine: their talent, industry and commitment will do the rest. They know, the world knows, how much luck luck has to do with it. They may have heard about some young striver who wrote a letter to an established actor and got a role as a walk-on in a film, or an audition, or a place at a drama school as a result. has to do with it. They may have heard about some young striver who wrote a letter to an established actor and got a role as a walk-on in a film, or an audition, or a place at a drama school as a result.
What a creep or ungrateful beast you would have to be not to be moved by the cries of those on the outside who clamour for admission. If you have been lucky enough to advance in the profession surely the least you can do is offer a hand, or a word of helpful advice to those who would emulate you? Absolutely right, but one must be honest too. I can only advise from experience. If someone asks me to how to do something, I cannot answer in the abstract, I can only answer according to my own history. I have absolutely no idea how to become an actor, I can only tell you how I became one. Or at least, how I became a sort of actor who is also a sort of writer who is also a sort of comedian who is also a sort of broadcaster who is also a sort of all sorts of all sorts sort. Sort of. That is the best I can do. I cannot p.r.o.nounce on whether it is better to go to drama school or not to go, I cannot advise on whether to do rep or street theatre before attempting film or television. I cannot tell you whether it is deleterious or beneficial to the career to take on extra work or accept a part in a soap opera. I simply do not know the answer to these questions because they have never arisen in my life. It would be reckless and irresponsible of me to push someone towards or away from courses of action or inaction of which I know nothing.
So here is how I became an actor.
At prep school the school play was always a musical, so the best casting I could ever hope for would be in the non-singing roles: Mrs Higgins in My Fair Lady My Fair Lady was an especial triumph ("Would grace any drawing-room" being my first published critical notice). At Uppingham I wrote and performed with my friend Richard Fawcett in comedy sketches for House Suppers, as Christmas entertainments were called there. I also made a mark as a witch in was an especial triumph ("Would grace any drawing-room" being my first published critical notice). At Uppingham I wrote and performed with my friend Richard Fawcett in comedy sketches for House Suppers, as Christmas entertainments were called there. I also made a mark as a witch in Macbeth. Macbeth. I say "made a mark" because the director in a burst of creative licence which he must have regretted ever afterwards thought we should devise our own characters, costumes and props. I went to the butcher"s in Uppingham and procured a bucket of pigs" guts to pull out of the cauldron for the "Eye of toad and ear of newt" scene. My dear, the I say "made a mark" because the director in a burst of creative licence which he must have regretted ever afterwards thought we should devise our own characters, costumes and props. I went to the butcher"s in Uppingham and procured a bucket of pigs" guts to pull out of the cauldron for the "Eye of toad and ear of newt" scene. My dear, the smell smell ... ...
The next time I appeared on stage was at the Norfolk College of Arts and Technology in King"s Lynn. NORCAT"s lecturer in charge of drama was called Bob Pols, and he cast me first as Creon, in a double bill of Sophocles" Oedipus Rex Oedipus Rex and and Antigone Antigone, and then as Lysander in A Midsummer Night"s Dream A Midsummer Night"s Dream. I was camp and wore a cricket pullover, as Lysander, that is, not as Creon. My only other dramatic experience took place in a local church performance of Charles Williams"s Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury, a verse play by the "other" member of the Inklings (i.e. the one who wasn"t J. R. R. Tolkien or C. S. Lewis). That was the sum total of my dramatic experience, nativity plays aside, when I arrived at Cambridge. Yet I had it in my head that I was a natural actor, that I knew how to speak lines, that I would have a presence presence on stage, a weight, a heft, an ability to draw focus when required. I think this was because I was always confident about my voice and my ability to speak verse and to inflect and balance speech properly, without the misplaced emphases and false stresses that I could hear so clearly in the voices of prefects and other amateurs when they read lessons in chapel or recited verse or dramatic lines on stage. The few prizes I had won at school were for poetry reading or recitation of one kind or another. In the same way as one might wince at a discord I would wince at incompetent intonation and wish that I could get up and correct them. Such a point of view now strikes me as arrogance and insolent presumption, but I suppose a conviction that one can do better is a necessary part of the self-belief that is itself a necessary part of pursuing a calling. Heroes matter too. Everyone I"ve ever met whom I have admired has grown up with their own pantheon of heroes. I listened to, watched and admired Robert Donat, Laurence Olivier (of course), Orson Welles, Maggie Smith, James Stewart, Bette Davis, Alistair Sim, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Paul Scofield, Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando (natch), James Mason, Anton Walbrook, Patrick Stewart, Michael Bryant, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and John Wood. There were many others, but those I especially remember. I had not seen a great deal of theatre, but John Wood and Patrick Stewart at the Royal Shakespeare Company had made an enormous impression. I did impersonations of Stewart"s En.o.barbus and Ca.s.sius in the coach on the way back to school. The others in my list are fairly obvious choices for someone of my background and generation I suppose. on stage, a weight, a heft, an ability to draw focus when required. I think this was because I was always confident about my voice and my ability to speak verse and to inflect and balance speech properly, without the misplaced emphases and false stresses that I could hear so clearly in the voices of prefects and other amateurs when they read lessons in chapel or recited verse or dramatic lines on stage. The few prizes I had won at school were for poetry reading or recitation of one kind or another. In the same way as one might wince at a discord I would wince at incompetent intonation and wish that I could get up and correct them. Such a point of view now strikes me as arrogance and insolent presumption, but I suppose a conviction that one can do better is a necessary part of the self-belief that is itself a necessary part of pursuing a calling. Heroes matter too. Everyone I"ve ever met whom I have admired has grown up with their own pantheon of heroes. I listened to, watched and admired Robert Donat, Laurence Olivier (of course), Orson Welles, Maggie Smith, James Stewart, Bette Davis, Alistair Sim, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, Paul Scofield, Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando (natch), James Mason, Anton Walbrook, Patrick Stewart, Michael Bryant, Derek Jacobi, Ian McKellen and John Wood. There were many others, but those I especially remember. I had not seen a great deal of theatre, but John Wood and Patrick Stewart at the Royal Shakespeare Company had made an enormous impression. I did impersonations of Stewart"s En.o.barbus and Ca.s.sius in the coach on the way back to school. The others in my list are fairly obvious choices for someone of my background and generation I suppose.
When I was about twelve my parents took me to the Theatre Royal in Norwich with the promise of Sir Laurence Olivier. The play was Somerset Maugham"s Home and Beauty Home and Beauty, at least I think it was: memory can conflate different productions and evenings, maybe it was something else. When I settled in my seat and opened the programme I saw that the production was directed directed by Laurence Olivier. My heart sank. I had so hoped that I would see the theatrical legend in person. by Laurence Olivier. My heart sank. I had so hoped that I would see the theatrical legend in person.
When the play was over my mother asked how I had liked it.