Bright Days -- Oxford or no

I was in Oxford for Freshers’ Week. Long shadows fell on the Front Quad of Trinity, my old college. Outside the rooms the college had given me young voices chattered febrilely. They were gathering for the Freshers’ Dinner, to be addressed by Michael Beloff, president of the college. My rooms looked out on to two quads enclosed by the chapel, the hall and various staircases. (How easily I slip into this self-congratulatory, clubby mode.)
From the basin by the bedroom window I could see Garden Quad and a bust of Cardinal Henry Newman, Trinity’s most famous cleric, who left Oxford and never returned after he was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest, and who found his time at Trinity a trial: “I really think, if anyone should ask me what qualifications were necessary for Trinity College, I should say there was only one, drink, drink, drink.” But like almost everyone who has ever been to Oxford, he kept strong feelings for the place. As Philip Larkin puts it in his “Poem About Oxford”, “The old place still holds us.”
The old place still holds me. Outside, the voices had an unfamiliar timbre and I realised what it was: girls’ voices. Oxford prefers to call them women but these were unmistakably girls, children, chattering brightly, chiming nervously. Only much later in the night did I hear something more familiar, the bull-calf bellow of a drunken public schoolboy.
Later that night I sat in the gallery of the hall looking down. The candles were lit, the college silver beamed triumphantly. Latin grace was said under the portrait of Sir Thomas Pope, the founder, before the college servants, formally dressed in dark trousers and waistcoats, moved in. Below the Adam urns, which decorated the gallery, I put my head in my hands and wept. The tears were brief and strangely pleasurable, like being moved in the cinema. What was it that moved me?
Michael Beloff told the freshers they had been chosen on merit, no matter what their background or schooling: “At Trinity we discriminate neither in favour of nor against anyone. We believe that you are very lucky to be here and that we are very lucky to have you.” And this is a feature of Oxford that outsiders, and even some living within its quadrangles and enclosed gardens, believe, that there is something too privileged about the life. Looking down on the freshers that evening it was hard to imagine any comparable group of students outside Oxbridge enjoying a dinner like this, candlelit, securely framed within the perfect hall.
And there was plenty of symbolism on view for those who knew where to look; the Jewish president of the college presiding over a Latin grace, spoken by the Anglican chaplain, the portraits of the great and the good suggesting, semaphoring, a kind of ease with history and tradition; a sense – not peculiarly Oxonian but always present there – that history, religion, art, science and ethics are the servants of a liberal society, not its master.
Beloff also told the freshers that the college expected high standards of application and behaviour: “It is not necessary to get drunk every night.” And I wondered if this wasn’t in some sense also Oxonian, as these children were unashamedly being served wine from the college’s stocks. Underneath Oxford are thousands of bottles of wine, laid down by committees of interested dons. But also underneath Oxford, stretching right under Broad Street, are millions of books, not merely books designed to aid the student in passing a degree, but Islamic and Hebraic collections, political papers, ephemera, a Shakespeare First Folio, Cranmer’s bible, Kafka’s manuscripts and much, much more, a richness almost beyond comprehension.
Oxford’s relative importance has declined but its hold on the imagination is still strong. The Evening Standard’s columnist Victor Lewis-Smith recently proclaimed one of his rules, that everyone who was at Oxford would announce that fact within 11 minutes of the start of any conversation. I’m afraid it is true of me. But it is also true that many people who didn’t get in to Oxford wish they had. I loved this from another journalist, Giles Coren: “You can always tell a person who went to a good second-rank university because within the first 10 minutes of meeting you, they will say, ‘You can always tell a person who went to Oxford or Cambridge because they will tell you about it within the first 10 minutes of meeting you.’ ”
For all its civilised aspect, Oxford is prone to rancour. Oxford anthologies of anecdotes are full of cruel snobbery, philistinism and vicious put-downs. A sort of witty cynicism has long been prized. But as the years go by some of the aphorisms can seem merely self-regarding. Although Bowra’s “Buggery was invented to pass the awkward hour between evensong and cocktails” is rather brilliant. And I also like “Awful shit, never met him”.
The literature of Oxford dons, from Lewis Carroll to Tolkien and CS Lewis, suggests that a certain infantilism is admired. (Iris Murdoch is another matter.) Waugh, perhaps Oxford’s greatest 20th-century writer, with his defiant third and his abhorrence of all literary pretension, is the perennial Oxford novelist, and John Betjeman with his pass degree, teddy bear and nostalgia, is Oxford’s most-read poet. Betjeman loathed his tutor, CS Lewis, and Lewis, as his diaries reveal, loathed Betjeman: “I wish I could get rid of the idle prig ... I was rung up on the telephone ... from Moreton in the Marsh, to say that he hasn’t been able to read as he was suspected for measles & forbidden to look at a book. Probably a lie, but what can one do?” Betjeman for the rest of his life blamed Lewis for his failure to get a degree, which needed a pass in divinity – “failed in Divvers” was his lament in one of his poems.
The tutorial system, the idea that as an undergraduate you can spend an hour or two a week with one of the finest minds in Oxford – maybe even in England – is seductive. So it came as a surprise to discover that the tutorial system is the product of the Victorian reforms of Oxford: I had assumed it was something time-honoured and venerable. So lazy, drink-sodden and self-serving had many fellows of colleges become by the mid-19th century – a majority didn’t even live in Oxford – that private tutors had to be found outside the colleges for the intellectually curious.
When the reforms were introduced in 1852 and 1854 these private tutors, who had set up shop all over Oxford, were brought into the colleges not out of the sudden realisation that one-to-one teaching was desirable but to bring the standards up. Oxford was deep in a trough: Matthew Arnold wrote “Beautiful city! So venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene.”
At Trinity I met a young English don, Simon Humphries, whom I asked to take me for a tutorial, setting me an essay and criticising it without fear or favour. I decided I would try, as far as possible, to rely on my own literary knowledge and what I had learned in 20 years of reading and reviewing, to write the essay. Simon was disconcertingly vague about what I was to do: he would be giving me some extracts to read; I was to make of them what I could ... What method, I asked tentatively, do you advocate in Oxford these days? Close reading, he said...
The extracts Simon had given me to consider were a piece from John Ruskin’s “Of Kings’ Treasuries” from Sesame and Lilies; “Stepping Westward” by William Wordsworth, “It Was a Hard Thing” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The Knight in the Wood” by Lord de Tabley, and “Old China”, an essay by Charles Lamb. As far as I could remember, I had never read any of these except for the Lamb ... I knew a little about Hopkins and Ruskin, but I had never read a word by Lord de Tabley, or ever heard of him.
Simon, I thought, was asking me to look behind the arras and see what the pieces were really about. When I came back to Oxford a week or two later, I had prepared a few pages. I review a fair number of books every year, the job being to give the occasional reader a summary of the book, some context, and then to advise him or her if I think the book is worth buying. But for the academic the job is different; to read and interpret, and to take account of research, social history and the shifting drifts of literary theory, in order to draw from the student some deep response to literature.
Simon had started life as a librarian and came to Oxford as a mature student, without any academic qualifications, and went on to take a first in English. I began to read my essay. I started with Ruskin’s, “Very ready we are to say of a book, ‘How good this is – that’s exactly what I think!’ But the right feeling is, ‘How strange that is! I never thought of that before, and yet I see it is true; or if I do not now, I hope I shall, someday.’ ... Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.”
I have been using a sentiment much like this as a definition of literature, as opposed to genre fiction, that literature produces the sense that we have intuited something similar but never heard it expressed in this way. Literature, in this fashion, increases the human understanding. I explained this, and moved on. But I saw immediately that I had passed too lightly over Ruskin’s prescription of how to attack an author’s work: I had ignored, for example, as Simon soon told me, Ruskin’s reference to a writer’s reluctance to give the meaning of his work too readily: Ruskin refers to writing in parables. Simon asked if I had wondered why he used the word “parables”? I had a feeling of drowning. Simon suggested it might be a reference to Mark IV, in which Jesus says he speaks in parables so that men may not understand. Already I was feeling apprehensive of what was to come.
I had ignored the most significant thing about the piece, which is that writers deliberately withhold meaning. In an interview with Craig Raine, David Lodge makes the same point, that novelists are reluctant to get right down to the bedrock of their ideas, for fear of revealing the poverty or banality of their sources. As I was reading [to Simon], it struck me that just the two pages of Ruskin could have produced a much more detailed and interesting essay than the wafer-thin criticism I was now offering on all five pieces ... I clung, however, to the idea that the limits I had set myself were the reason for my failure.
We moved on to “Stepping Westward”, by Wordsworth. I knew by now that my two paragraphs – longish – would be hopelessly inadequate. I was able to summon from memory Hopkins’s “inscape” – the imperative to discover the essential quality of things. While I was writing the essay I felt I had discovered the essential qualities of Simon’s brief, but now I was not so sure...
I did better with “Old China”, by Lamb. Simon said he would have to reconsider his view of the essay in light of my suggestion that Lamb draws the reader into a satirical trap which is sprung much later in the piece. I was pleased to be complimented, after decades of writing, with nine novels and hundreds of reviews and essays published, by young Simon. [But] I left Trinity shaken by his judgment that, if I were a first year, he would say “Must read more attentively”.
Benjamin Jowett, probably Oxford’s most famous head of a college, aimed to use the tutorial to “inoculate England with Balliol”. When a Professor Blackie of Glasgow University wrote to him, “I hope you in Oxford don’t think we hate you,” Jowett replied, “We don’t think of you at all.” Oxford was “the granary of intellectual and spiritual life”, wrote JA Smith. “Nothing,” he said, “will be of any use to you except this, you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot.” ... “I have a great prejudice,” Jowett said, “against all those who do not succeed in the world.” But for him material success was to be achieved in the imperial project, in the Law and the Commons, not in an investment bank or ... in some solicitors’ firm dealing with the City and its superfluity of money; there was something of the moral enquiry about Oxford tutorials, the better to discover idealism and patriotism.
I think one can see pretty clearly where Oxford finds itself now: the tutorial is prized more as cultural capital, part and parcel of the whole Oxford experience, than for its own sake, although I don’t think anybody could deny that a fondness for the essay, followed by the vigorous discussion, is visible at the top levels of the civil service, cabinet and in the adversarial nature of parliament and High Court: they are the children of the tutorial system and conditioned by the quad. Every report by some distinguished judge or retired civil servant reads like an extended essay, concerned with advertising a higher intellect, as much as with the matter in hand...
For an outsider like me [Cartwright is South African], with a sentimental view of Oxford, it seems that the power of the myth of Oxford and its consequent value are underestimated by those who live and work there. The place is so beautiful, the teaching – at its best – is so wonderful, the sense of collegiality – of belonging to something ancient and serious and open-minded – is so pervasive that I think the natives sometimes fail to see it as the world sees it, as something unique and irreplaceable. When I walked down Broad Street after my tutorial, I was again aware that under my feet were the great collections of the Bodleian. And, although I had taken something of a pasting from Simon, I thought of my tutorial and Hopkins’s lines:
“The sun on falling waters writes the textWhich yet is in the eye or in the thought.It was a hard thing to undo this knot.”