Authorial disclaimer: like the other posts, this is all about me. I think it’s quite well written, but it is all about me. Read on at your own risk.
About the university the pages let you down
It helps you find your way around in any English town
About the university the pages are in French
It helps you find your way around in any English town
– Scritti Politti, “Messthetics”
I was 18. I was applying to Cambridge to read English (at Raymond Williams’s college – which would mean a lot to me later – although I didn’t know it at the time). Our school offered a ‘seventh term’: in the autumn of the year after we’d finished sixth form, a couple of us met an English teacher once a week for extra tuition. At the end of the term we sat ‘S’ Level English and applied to our chosen colleges, then sat the college’s entrance exam. I remember reading Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes, one after the other, and finding them all quite wonderful (Samson especially); I think I read some Shakespeare too. The entrance exam, as I remember it, consisted of two questions on Romanticism, two on Shakespeare and a separate language paper (I took Latin). The college didn’t know – and didn’t greatly care – precisely what we’d been studying, so the exam papers gave us a fairly free rein when it came to actual topics. I answered one of the Romanticism questions on Wuthering Heights, which I’d just read, and the other on the poems of Edward Lear, several of which I knew by heart (Orwell’s article on nonsense poetry was an influence here). As for the Shakespeare questions, my main resource there was Wyndham Lewis’s The Lion and the Fox, which I’d found in the local library and – again – had only just read (I finished it on the morning of the exam). I got in; in fact I did quite well: I was awarded an Exhibition, which effectively meant they thought I was in the 2.i bracket. This, I thought, was it: Operation Life Of The Mind (Future Tense) was go. This was (would be) my world, and I was about to come into it.
It didn’t really work out. One way to follow the previous paragraph would be to say that entrance exam fireworks were one thing, but I couldn’t hack it when it came to following an actual programme of study. But that’s not quite how it was; apart from anything else I don’t think I was faking it in the entrance exam, or putting on a show with nothing behind it. I mean, The Lion and the Fox is obscure for good reasons – it’s crazy, basically; but it is interestingly crazy. My arguments about Emily Brontë and Edward Lear weren’t glib either – well, they were glib (come on, I was eighteen years old), but they weren’t just glib. If I’d carried on like that I would have been fine; I would have enjoyed myself a lot more and probably done better work. In point of fact, some of the best times I had at university were spent in very much that kind of concentrated pursuit of serendipity. On the morning of my American Literature Finals paper, I remember, I read an article about Henry James by T.S. Eliot and one about Emerson by Henry James; then I thought “that’ll do,” put my notes away and went for a walk. (I quoted both those articles in one answer, and got a First on the paper.)
My problem was the opposite: it was that I didn’t feel that I could work like that all the time. Or rather, I did feel that I couldn’t work like that all the time (shouldn’t? mustn’t?). I spent very little time, over those three years, doing the fun and challenging stuff, gathering ideas together and bouncing them off one another (“Conrad – late nineteenth, early twentieth… what did Lawrence say about Conrad? what did Conrad think of Freud?”); I spent far too much time peering earnestly into my reactions to the text (“What was Conrad doing when he wrote this page? Why does it have that precise effect on me?”). Although playing with ideas came naturally, I somehow thought that fishing for authentic personal insights was what I ought to be doing. My Director of Studies would have been mortified if he’d known I thought like this – he regarded the whole “authentic personal response” approach as pointless narcissism, and made sure we knew it. (Mind you, he was witheringly sceptical of a whole range of concepts – including “concrete description”, “naturalism” and on one memorable occasion “reality” – so perhaps it’s not surprising that his impact on us was a bit hit-and-miss.)
Why did I think like this? It’s not as if the idea-juggling approach was being discouraged – other people in my year-group did it with some success. If asked, I think I would have said that working that way was a bit flashy and inauthentic, and I wanted to lay a good solid foundation of authentic personal insightiness first. Which is where, looking back, I get suspicious: if time is limited, committing yourself to tackle task A first can be a way to avoid facing task B at all. I think, in other words, that my dogged engagement with the Hopkinsian inscape of the text was a refuge. I was in retreat, but (weirdly) in retreat from doing something I found both challenging and enjoyable. The culprit, I think, was a genuinely deep-seated conviction that it wasn’t for me, or that I wasn’t good enough for it: I wasn’t there (yet). And this wasn’t just puritanical self-denial: I felt genuinely timorous and inadequate. (Yeah, I know – 18-Year-Old Feels ‘Inadequate’ Shock.) Cambridge hadn’t enfolded me like a leather armchair; I still felt incomplete or excessive, still felt as if I was waiting to be called into independent adulthood. To go out there and just pretend to be one of the grown-ups would have been absurdly presumptuous – and, somehow, a disservice to myself, to the emotional damage I’d carried this far.
In the mean time, and while I waited for Cambridge to show some sign of choosing me, I could at least hail my thoughts into the text and listen to the echoes. It’s striking in retrospect that confidence returned, and my idea-juggling streak woke up again, when it came to Finals: I could do it when I was being asked to excel on my own, and in particular when I felt I was qualifying for a transition into the future. But the world where I would be happily playing with ideas alongside other people was always the world I wanted to get into, never a world I felt I could possibly already be actually in. Once, when I was a contributor to the student newspaper, I bumped into one of the editors in the street; we chatted, and she teased me slightly about the piece I’d just submitted. I went straight home and never wrote for the paper again. It wasn’t the thought that she actually had a problem with the piece that disturbed me, but the thought that she seemed to like me. Not right. Not me. Not there yet. (I did have a girlfriend, on the other hand, so I suppose you could say it was just a massive over-reaction.)
And so it was that I spent most of my time at Cambridge in self-imposed confinement in the unique (but unredeemed and inadequate) me-ness of me, which I contemplated both as a source of personal insights and as a constant reminder of how much worse I was doing than everyone else. What a waste.
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