Mungo's Dream

by J. I. M. Stewart

  Mungo had a great notion of joining clubs and societies around the university, and paid out numerous subscriptions in this interest: he had been instructed that these affairs made a large part of Oxford life. There were societies for celebrating William Burroughs, for promoting modernism in the Church, for combating modernism in the Church, for watching birds, for climbing rocks, for listening to Verdi, for boring other people with your poetry, and for a generous variety of political purposes. Mungo had a go at most of them, became vehemently enthusiastic about some, and had a gloomy feeling that he would be disillusioned with the whole lot before the term was over. All this, too, amused Ian, whose idea of a club (he told Mungo mockingly) was some chaps dining together, preferably in very special dress-clothes designed by their great-grandfathers, and then breaking all the windows in Surrey before being carried off to bed. This infuriated Mungo chiefly because he knew he was being baited; he felt there was something in Ian which didn’t go with that kind of thing. Ian got infuriated only when Mungo declared that for him, Mungo, the college and the entire university of Oxford had been a wholly disillusioning experience. It was Ian’s savage denunciation of what he called the callow posturing in this that told Mungo Ian rather liked him.

  Mungo decided that the trouble was too much talk and too little action. One could only be relevant if one took up an activist position. And there seemed plenty of scope for this. Many of the graffiti which had so puzzled him on his first nocturnal wandering with Ian proved to have just such a slant. Some were urgent injunctions to smash things: not windows (which were what some of Ian’s friends had a kind of hereditary faith in the propriety of chucking bottles through) but regimes and ideologies and athletic occasions – many of which appeared inconveniently far away for the purpose. Others simply called for assembly in one place or another at such and such a day and hour for the purpose of holding a demo. For some time Mungo did several demos a week, but they were commonly harangued by the same people, and when there was any liveliness to them it was rather in the style of what, in old-fashioned novels of varsity life, was called a rag. This wasn’t really much good, because although Mungo found some of the proceedings funny it wasn’t in fact fun that he was looking for. He had a very vivid sense that homo sapiens was hard at work smashing the world to bits, and he believed that one’s best reply was to get busy on one’s own part of it. Things being as bad as they were in South-East Asia and Africa and Belfast, it seemed probable that they must be pretty bad in Oxford as well, and indeed there were some quite rational-seeming chaps convinced that the university was virtually a little police state on its own.

  By the middle of term this line of thinking (or feeling) took Mungo out of demos and into a sit-in. He didn’t know who had master-minded it, but the idea seemed superb. The university was to be brought to a dead stop by the simple means of paralysing its pay-roll. Occupy the office from which the cheques went out, and in no time at all the whole body of the dons would be queued up for some sort of dole from the Department of Social Security. It was a very well-organised sit-in, and with a strong cultural flavour to it. People held discussions and gave lectures, and some group or other came and did folk-songs the simple airs of which were taken up as a whistle by the policeman patiently wearing down the pavement outside. Only it went on and on. It went on for days, and Mungo – although he wouldn’t have confessed it to anyone – began to find it a bit of a bind. Moreover it looked as if it would result in his having to cut his tutorial at the end of the week. This bothered him because his tutor, although he didn’t seem particularly useful, was an amiable and conversible old gentleman to whom he didn’t want to be rude.

  Then it was discovered they had occupied the wrong office. This one didn’t send the dons their cheques; it administered university estates – and in so devious a manner that the total surcease of its operations would probably pass unremarked by anyone for several years. At this the majority of the sitters-in produced their Oxford University Pocket Diaries and discovered that they were almost missing an important demo in Wolverhampton. Two comfortably appointed motor-coaches came round, and they departed to this fresh activity amid hilarity and applause. The Thames Valley Constabulary also departed upon other occasions. And Mungo, who had never heard of Wolverhampton, returned to Howard 4, 4. When Ian got back from casually sampling some well-reputed lecturer he found his room-mate gloomily learning Anglo-Saxon verbs. Mungo learnt them quite fast, but to the accompaniment of a great deal of cursing of this fatuous aspect of the English School. Ian mocked his disaffection. English literature was something civilised people picked up as they went along, and as an academic subject it needed to have something senseless and arid packaged with it, so that the English dons – ‘ushers’, Ian called them – could hold up their heads among the others. About the fiasco of the sit-in, on the other hand, Ian was tolerant, even although his common line with people running that sort of thing was to advise their taking a single ticket to Haiti, Brazil, or any other locality in which there was something honestly to create about. But the fantasy of ushers on the dole tickled him.

  Oxford’s three terms – Michaelmas, Hilary, Trinity – astonish the hard-working outer world by each lasting eight weeks and no more. Subjectively, their temporal dimensions are conditioned by being poised – Michaelmas most of all – upon a turn of the year. To Mungo’s hyperborean sense his own arrival had been into lingering summer: almost full summer by day, with only the vapoured evenings to draw autumn on. At noon the main quadrangle showed like a formal chamber, remotely roofed in a blue upon which some baroque artist had here and there whimsically sketched a fleecy cloud. Warmth still radiated from the north front; by hugging it you could pleasantly toast yourself on two sides at once, and pluck figs or grapes or peaches from imaginary espaliers on the grey stone. In the centre of the quad the fountain splashed ceaselessly into its great basin of dark green water, but without disconcerting the lazy silver and gold of the cruising fish. Mungo understood that people occasionally got chucked in; the fish were large enough to take quite a nibble at you, he thought, as you scrambled out amid the unfeeling laughter of your enemies or – more probably – your best friends. But these would be nocturnal occasions. By day the place sometimes contrived to be deserted, Chirico-like, with only perhaps a very old don, permitted by some random academic charitableness to linger on beyond his time, creeping like a dusty tortoise from his unfrequented lodging to the patchy sociability of a common room.

  At first the afternoons too were almost for basking in. The Isis was restless with rowing; you could watch the sweaty spectacle as if it was a chunk of op art – the image flicking into reverse and the oars doing all the work, heaving the rowers to and fro like sacks of flour with red and furious faces on top. But the Cherwell was Kenneth Graham stuff: an inefficient fooling about in boats and punts – only by humans instead of animals – on a slow snagged stream upon which the leaves were slowly falling and drifting and turning like weightless guineas. The girls had rugs but the men had only shorts or jeans; it was possible today, might be possible tomorrow, and then would be folded away until an April as distant as the moon. The voices, the transistors would fade, the sun-flecked stream perhaps be frozen over by the unimaginable end of term. Caledonian Mungo – sandy-haired, freckled, long-limbed, on the raw-boned side – strode through these appearances with a ready grin for anybody prepared to notice him, at times not resisting an imbecile and exulting sense that he had arrived, that he owned it all, and at times very much wondering what he had landed himself with. It wasn’t the world he had taught his senses to be vigilant before or his mind to respond to. He wondered whether he could ever assimilate it to the serious vague purposes that had come to hover before him when, with books in his rucksack, he had played truant first in the compassable wildness of Cluny Hill and later through the dark ridings of Darnaway with a wary eye for the keepers as he walked.

  This was rather solemn. But solemnity faded at tea- time – either in a crowded J.C.R. or snugly
in Howard, making his own and Ian’s anchovy toast before the electric fire. The anchovy toast was something new, and so was the quality of the evening hours it introduced. This was in part simply an atmospheric phenomenon. Anywhere in the south of England, of course, dusk was a more rapid affair than in Moray, but it sometimes seemed to deepen in these quadrangles as rapidly as if it had walked through the lodge with a casual nod to the man in the bowler hat. The crepuscular hours from five to seven were supposed to be a period for work. You were even quite likely to have a tutorial at six, and there was a book of rules saying that music must not be indulged in during these hours. But this was little attended to. Music came from all over the place, and surprisingly little of it was mechanically produced. Through lighted and uncurtained windows one saw – as well as men brushing their hair, scrambling into shirts, gossiping with girls, or throwing parties which were like a crowded ballet much involved with glasses and bottles – pianists and fiddlers and flautists addressing themselves with wholesome confidence to pieces often largely beyond their technique. Mungo found this cultural manifestation more impressive than Ian appeared to do, perhaps as being something that didn’t much happen in Forres.

  At times the concert was muted, as if somebody had pressed down a soft pedal on the whole performance. The earlier dusk was increasingly bringing in with it mists and vapours. They were sometimes dun and pervasive like a fog, sometimes white and wraith-like and drifting – the ghosts of girls, Ian sombrely announced, haunting the scene of their betrayal at Commem. balls long ago. Mungo was ignorant of Commem. balls, but he had read Pope and took the reference. It touched a theme he hadn’t much been thinking about, although he did rather suppose that quite soon sex would be rearing its ugly head. Things would be going badly wrong if it didn’t. There were a lot of girls about the place, and although none ever came to Howard 4, 4 he suspected with a certain envy – or perhaps it was even jealousy – that Ian was ahead of him in examining the general problem they represented. What he was himself aware of was of having entered a masculine and traditionally segregated society which was now under threat: it was rather like Tennyson’s The Princess in reverse. If by girls one meant young women with approximately one’s own brains and habits and assumptions, then Oxford was a crackpot place in which they were in criminally short supply. But if this pushed up the energy and ingenuity put into luring them inside, it didn’t at all make them the less intruders in terms of the obstinate lingering ethos of the place.

  This was most apparent to Mungo in these evening hours – both before dinner and after it. There would be girls around until quite late – he hadn’t at all gathered what the regulations were – and correspondingly there would be men out and around Oxford until as near dawn as they pleased. But essentially in the evening, at the violet hour, the place closed in upon itself, as did a score of these grey stone honeycombs around Oxford. It became, to its own deeper sense, the kind of place a barracks must be, or a public school. Bred into Mungo, and undisturbed until this his nineteenth year, was another notion of the violet hour. As for the fisherman and the typist in The Waste Land, it should be the signal for going home.

  For some weeks the violet hour tended to give Mungo the blues.

  But one doesn’t sit back and think in such a fashion. The Oxford full term has its velocity as well as its brevity, and perhaps it was the consequent carpe diem feeling that, about half way through, set Ian and Mungo talking to each other a good deal. Dum loquimur, jugerit invida aetas, Mungo was actually able to quote to his friend – since his curious syllabus had turned out to embrace a little Latin as well as Anglo-Saxon poetry. Except on Mondays, when Ian wrote his weekly essay into the small hours, and Thursdays, when Mungo did the same, they talked pretty well every night. The great college bell banged out the hours across the quads; revellers returning from parties clattered up their staircases and went to bed; the two occupants of Howard 4, 4, each with his long limbs ingeniously curled up on his sofa, talked absorbedly on. If they paused, it was only to drink Ian’s whisky and munch Mungo’s biscuits. These respective adjuncts to debate represented a disparity in material resources that didn’t trouble them in the least. At the start they had taken to each other more or less at a glance; for weeks they had been friendly with an element of wary reserve; now they had, so to speak, frankly signed one another on. They exchanged intellectual persuasions and somewhat edited sexual histories; and (as Ian’s mother had predicted) pooled pretty well anything that came back from the wash. By day they stalked about the college together, and Ian taught Mungo to play squash. Mungo’s tutor, having encountered them strolling in the Meadow one day, gracefully informed them that they were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’th’sun, and that what they changed was innocence for innocence. Mungo looked this up, and was obliged to give it poor marks as a felicitous pleasantry. Leontes and Polixenes hadn’t exactly stayed chums.

  An important event took place: Mungo wrote his first Oxford short story. It came to him as he lay soaking – all but most of his legs and thighs – in a very hot bath. Around him, through open doors and across perfunctory partitions, naked youths, either mud-bespattered still or fresh-washed and glinting, were talking loudly and boisterously about a rugger match. Inspiration up-welling in such banal surroundings must be too authentic to be put by, and Mungo clattered on his typewriter, regardless of Ian’s slumbers, all through the night. He worked in a state of high excitement that didn’t in the least impair his conviction that here was something absolutely detached and controlled at last. What had been revealed to him in his bath was the innermost working of the psyche of the old gentleman like a tortoise, a don after the style of a past age. Like another such whom Mungo had read about somewhere in E. M. Forster, the old don went in tremendously for young men. In fact he made a full-time job of sentimental but entirely high-minded and Freudianly unaware relations with them. But now young men had ceased at all to dig that kind of thing, and as a result the old don was isolated and lonely. (You could divine this, if you were sufficiently sensitive, just by watching him as he crept from his unfrequented rambling set in an obscure corner of the college to some arid senior common room.) He was an aged innocent, and about how undergraduates behaved in Oxford today he just hadn’t a clue, so that when a group of them started being charming to him in the dear remembered fashion he was fatally slow in discovering that all they wanted was the convenient solitude of his rooms to smoke pot in when their owner wasn’t around. Finally, the police came along with a lot of dogs, and the dogs sniffed out a cache of pot behind a row of learned journals, and the unfortunate old gentleman was put in gaol.

  This sad little story, if not quite up to Henri Beyle dit Stendhal, after all, was at least finished before breakfast. Ian read it later in the morning, pronounced a favourable verdict with gratifying conviction, and added casually that the sentimentality was not exactly confined inside the old don’s head. Mungo received this qualification unresentfully, having a certain seriousness in these matters which enabled him to accept truths when presented to him. Anyway, he said, he would scrap the thing, since he wasn’t going to have future dons talking about his juvenilia. At this Ian grabbed the story, locked it up in a drawer of his own, and declared that he would get it published in Isis next term. Mungo, who had appeared in print in his school magazine and been thereby baptised in those dark waters of vanity which all authors know, protested rather feebly. And that was that.

  What Ian presently recurred to was less the story itself than the how and why of its coming into existence. He seemed almost alarmed.

  ‘But it’s perfectly natural,’ Mungo said. ‘Haven’t you ever written anything yourself?’ And he added unwarily, ‘Your mother says you have.’

  ‘That’s just bits of verse, which is entirely different.’ Ian had flushed swiftly. ‘But concocting stories about people is really extremely strange. Just look! You see this perfectly actual old man pottering across the quad – probably with the placid intention of taking a glass of madeir
a and a biscuit with a crony. And then you make a grab inside your head at something having nothing to do with him: rot you’ve read in some paper about drug addiction in the university. After that you take another look around at this chap and that – a bit of Pons, say, and a bit of me and half a dozen others – and turn us in a perfectly arbitrary way into treacherous young clots. And there’s your story! I repeat it’s frightfully good. But that just makes the process – putting two and two together, and bringing out the answer as a triumphant forty – all the odder.’

  ‘And more dangerous?’

  ‘Well, yes. It’s in Rasselas, don’t you remember?’ (Rasselas had quite clearly appeared as Ian’s favourite book – although it was not at all like Bevis.) ‘The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination. That’s what the chapter’s called. The astronomer gets fancying things. Pushing them round inside his own head, just like you – only it’s the sun and the moon, instead of senile dons and junkie undergraduates. Sends him off his rocker.’