The Pry Chronicles

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 Heraclitus, 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 arc frozen, but a university is not its bUildings, it is those th:l ( inhabit and use them.

I discovered brilliant people and dunces and everything in between. There were the lively and there were till' preternaturally dull. Every imaginable special interest was represented. You could spend your three years as a ll

undergraduate on sports fields and never know there were

any theatres. You could in~olve yourself in politics alld be wholly unaware of orchestras or choirs. You could hunt with beagle packs, sail, dance, play bridge, build ,I

computer or tend a garden. Just as you can at hundred ,~

of universities, of course. It is only that Cambridge h :1

the advantage of being both bigger and smaller thall 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 ( \1

audiences and participants in sport and drama, readersl,ip circulations for magazines and captive markets for all SOil

of enterprises and undertakings. I need not, of course, have worried that I would 111

College to Colleague 85

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 maller things. A point of view, a single way of thinking

that encompasses all elements of a subject, allows essays

more or less to write themselves. The way to pass exams s to cheat. I cheated all the way through my three years t Cambridge. Which is not to say that I looked at the

work of the student next to me, or that I brought

11 outside material from which to crib. I cheated by !lowing in advance exactly what I was going to write

t.fore the invigilator bid us turn over the question sheets nd started the clock. I had a theory of Shakespearean ragic and comic forms, for example, which I won't bore

u with and which is probably specious, or at least no lore truthful or persuasive an overall interpretation of bakespeare's forms than any other. Its virtue was that

answered any question and yet always appeared to be (·cific. I had found part of it in an essay by Anne Barton (:C Righter). She is a fine Shakespearean scholar, and I Ilcted and regurgitated some of her ideas for both Parts

IIC and Two of the tripos (Cambridge calls its degree amination the tripos, something to do with the three-~ged stool on which students used to sit when taking

rm). In both of the Shakespeare papers I got a First. In l lin Part Two it was the top First for the entire university. was essentially the same essay each time. It only takes a

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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. {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 sex.' 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 (Witwatersrand Review, Vol. 3, Sept. 75, edt Jablonski, Yale Books, 1968, that sort of thing). I am awar 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 0

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

College fo Colleague

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 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 people think their lack of knowledge of the Hundred Years War, or Socrates, or the colonization of Batavia has to do with

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

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lay not in the staff but in my self that I was ignorant. Theil one day, or over the course of time, I got greedy. Greed y to know things, greedy for understanding, greedy fOI information. I was always to some extent like that robot Number 5 in the movie Short Circuit who whizzes abollt shrieking, 'Input! Input!' Memorizing for me became lih eating Sugar Puffs, an endless stuffing of myself.

I do not say that this hunger for learning was morall y. intellectually or stylistically admirable. I think it was " little like ambition, a little like many of the later failings in my life we will come to: membership of so mall Y clubs, ownership of so many credit cards ... it was part of wanting to belong, of feeling the need constantly lo connect myself. Rather vulgar, rather pushy.

While the manner and motives of it may not haw been magnificent the end result was certainly useful. TiI <' urgent desire to pack the mind, my insatiable curiosit y and appetite for knowledge led to all kinds of advantages. Facile exam passing was one such. I had never found writtell tests under time pressure anything other than enjoyab l · and easy. That is because of my fundamental dishoneslY, I never tried to engage authentically or truthfully witll 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. Thcr are plenty who are more obviously show-offy than I alii , but that is what is so creepy about my particular brand 01 exhibitionism - I mask it in a cloak of affable modesty alld touching false diffidence. To be less hard on myself, I thi II ~ these displays of affability, modesty and diffidence 111 ,'

once have been false but have now become pretty mll l It real, in much the same way that the conscious maUl H'

College to Colleague

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 niversity life, which is what this chapter is supposed to £fer. The life of a student however, especially that of a ore than usually self-conscious student in an institution

ike Cambridge, does involve a great deal of questioning f the mind and intellectual faculties and the meaning nd purpose of scholarship, so I think it right to try and thom what my mind was about in those days. I went to three lectures in my entire three years. I can

nly remember two, but I am sure I went to another. The rst was an introductory talk on Langland's Piers Plowman

J. A. W. Bennett, who had been installed as C. S. wis's successor in the chair of Medieval and Renaissance terature in I963 and seemed old enough to have lived rough much of the period of which he had made himself

master. His lecture was a monumentally dull explanation f why the B-text of Piers Plowman (an achingly long work f Middle English allegorical alliterative verse) was more

be relied upon than the C-text, or possibly the other ay around. Professor Bennett begged leave to disagree ith W. W. Skeat on the issue of the A-text's rendering of . Harrowing of Hell, blah-di-blah-di-blah ... That was enough for me. I knew that five minutes in

faculty library would let me dig up a rare enough tide in the Sewanee Review or similar to furnish fodder r: an essay. Lectures broke into one's day and were arly a terrible waste of time. Necessary no doubt if you

ere reading Law or Medicine or some other vocational u\dect, but in the case of English the natural thing to do

The Pry Chronicles

was to talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books and go to plays.

Perhaps be in plays?