The Amateur

by Wendy Lesser

  To the general sources of depression that afflicted us all, I added a special one of my own: the cold. I had gone east to college in part to become adapted to all sorts of weather. As a teenager I scorned the California softness, the paradise weather, those countless days of sun marked off by a relatively brief season of rain. I longed to be in a real climate, where I could undergo the sort of weather I had read about in books. But what I discovered at Harvard was that I could not tolerate the bone-chilling cold of a Massachusetts winter. It made me want to curl up and hibernate, and to a certain extent that’s what I was doing.

  One day, on one of my rare visits to Widener Library, I was standing on line waiting to check out a book when I happened to glance down at the library card of the man standing next to me. I had already noticed its owner: he was an elderly man with a prominent nose and sharp, hooded eyes, and he made me think of an eagle. Idly, I read the name printed on his card. Then, without pausing to consider, I turned to him and said, “Lewis Mumford! You’re Lewis Mumford! I’ve admired your work for years—The City in History is one of my favorite books!” He seemed pleased, and invited me back to Leverett House (where he was a visiting something-or-other) to have tea and meet his wife, Sophie.

  This, I suppose, was a turning point, because Lewis Mumford told me about Patrick Geddes, the Scottish city planner about whom I ended up writing my undergraduate thesis. And in order to write the thesis I spent a summer in Edinburgh doing research. (Some generous grantmaking body at Harvard paid for the trip, but I’m afraid I no longer remember the philanthropy’s name.) And while I was in Britain I went to visit a former professor of mine, a man who had spent one semester teaching Victorian literature at Harvard but was now back at his usual post at Bristol.

  “What are you going to do with yourself after you graduate?” said Christopher Ricks. We were on a lengthy walk through the streets of Bristol; Christopher walked very fast (he still does, a quarter-century later) and I was struggling to keep up.

  “Oh, I guess I’ll just go to law school,” I panted.

  “Are you particularly interested in the law?”

  “No, not at all. But it seems the easiest thing to do next.”

  “Have you ever thought of going to graduate school in English?”

  “I’ve thought of it,” I said, “but every time I’m in a roomful of academics, I can’t picture myself turning out like that.”

  “Can you picture yourself turning out like a roomful of lawyers?” he countered. He had me stumped, as my silence admitted.

  Then he tried another approach. “Sometimes, if we have talents we choose not to explore—out of fear, or social distaste, or for some other reason—it’s like leaving a room in a house closed off for years. It gets stuffy in there. Sometimes you need to open the door.” (Most likely these are not his exact words; all I remember is the metaphor itself, which struck me vividly.) “And if you don’t like the idea of graduate school in America, you could always try Oxford or Cambridge. They accept Americans for special degrees, and it might give you a chance to see whether you want to go on in English literature, without the same career pressure you’d find in a Harvard or Yale Ph.D. program.”

  A month later, I filed my application to Cambridge University. And a year after that, in the fall of 1973, I found myself at King’s College, Cambridge.

  AN AMERICAN IN ENGLAND

  rom the time it was founded in 1441 to the Michaelmas term of the year before I arrived, some five hundred years later, King’s College was open only to male students. Women had been admitted to Cambridge starting in 1869, but they were confined to the three women’s colleges and only shared university-wide lecture courses with the men. As at Harvard, all the real action—including much of the teaching—took place at the residential-college level, so it was very lucky for me that in 1972 King’s and two other centrally located Cambridge colleges decided to break the Oxbridge tradition by admitting women.

  I was aware of my luck, but I tended to think of it along broader lines than those of gender. I had escaped everything—the shallow newness of California, the cold insularity of Harvard, the ugly situation in American politics (which at that historical moment combined Richard Nixon and the Vietnam War), my family, my friends, the question of what to do with my life—and had leapt into an entirely new dimension. England was, for me, a dream: a place where bus conductors read Wilfred Owen’s poetry while they were on their breaks (I knew this because I had peeked at the book cover while waiting for the bus to bring me from the train station to King’s); where a humanely socialist political party was a mass organization rather than a wild-eyed fringe group; where courtesy in public behavior was the rule rather than the exception; and where astonishingly beautiful buildings and grounds were inhabited by the likes of me. Harvard had been a place of privilege, but it was nonetheless run as a large bureaucracy, with official channels and impersonal procedures and unavoidable delays, whereas Cambridge was run like a private club. Once my check from America was late in coming; I simply went to see the Bursar of King’s College (a large, kindly South African Jew) and he lent me fifty pounds to tide me over. Another time I went to him to urge the College’s involvement in building low-cost housing for town residents, and he wrote out a thousand-pound check on the spot. That’s how things were done in the Cambridge of that time, and the sense of ease both thrilled and moved me.

  Even now, the assertion of one’s collegiate privileges is a remarkably easy, gentlemanly affair. Recently, when I was in Cambridge for a conference at Downing College, I walked over to King’s College to take a look at my old haunts. I was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and the gowned don standing at the college gate looked as if he were about to tell me that the grounds were closed to tourists for the day. “I was, or am, a—” I began, and before I had even reached the phrase “member of King’s College,” he was waving me through the gate. Tickled at my success, I decided to test how far my realm extended. Queen’s College, the lovely old Tudor-brick complex next door to King’s, was charging a pound per head to tour the buildings. “I’m a member of King’s,” I announced, and was instantly admitted free. The scam could be worked infinitely.

  Most of the Englishmen I know now (they tend to be men rather than women) have a passion for things American. Our movies, our literature, our political movements, our cities, our pop music, our television shows: they are all considered vastly better and more exciting than the tiny, tidy, overly cautious British version of same. But when I first lived there in the early Seventies, this was all reversed. America was a rather despicable place to be from. Our greatest shame was the Vietnam War, but there were other national outrages: the relatively recent assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.; the racial and economic inequities that had led to the Watts riots; the incredible shenanigans exhibited in the Watergate hearings; and the federally approved firebombing of the Symbionese Liberation Army headquarters (that era’s equivalent of the Waco disaster), which took place live on American television while I was at Cambridge and shocked my English friends to the core. England may have been a deeply class-ridden society—it was, and still is, a deeply class-ridden society—but even its political conservatives, when I lived there, espoused views that would have been considered left-wing by American standards. Universally subsidized medical care, free higher education, guaranteed unemployment payments for life, nationally owned railways and utilities were all deemed normal and natural. Public space was considered more important than private space, so that parks, art museums, and the London Underground were beautifully kept up, whereas most middle-class people survived without central heating, modern kitchen appliances, or fully effective plumbing. At the time this seemed to me an admirable way to live.

  Academically, too, Cambridge fit my requirements perfectly. The standard course of education there consisted of a series of “supervisions”—weekly one-on-one meetings between a student and a college faculty member—supplemented, as desired, by l
ectures given at the university’s departmental buildings. In some fields, such as chemistry or applied mathematics, you skipped lectures at your peril, but in English they were entirely optional: all the work for the final exams—the “Tripos”— was done in supervisions. This suited me fine. I occasionally tried attending some lectures, but in each case I gave up well before the end of term. Meanwhile I was scouring the university for the best supervisors, ranging beyond King’s to the precincts of Gonville and Caius, Clare, and the other colleges. As the result of this entrepreneurship (no one but an American, it was implied, would actually seek out a supervisor), I received an incomparable literary education during those years.

  For “practical criticism”—the Cambridge-identified close-reading method invented by I. A. Richards and fruitfully elaborated by William Empson—I studied with the kindly Joan Bennett, an expert in the metaphysical poets, as well as with the eccentrically brilliant Jeremy Prynne, a poet so avant-garde that his work was generally acknowledged to be unreadable. (Prynne’s college rooms were lined with rare books of a kind I had never seen before, such as a folio-sized vellum-bound edition of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary; only at Cambridge, I decided, could the literary avant-garde be so luxuriously traditional.) For “moralists”—a philosophy-based course that ran from Aristotle to Freud—I engaged in weekly arguments with John Casey, a politically conservative don who dressed in flowing velvet robes, refused to tutor women students (he made an exception in my case, possibly as a favor to Christopher Ricks), and treated my pipsqueak ideas with the utmost intellectual respect. And for “tragedy”—a required Tripos exam that took in dramatists from Aeschylus to Beckett—I had Wilbur Saunders, a forceful, forthright Australian whose lectures in Shakespeare and Jane Austen I had admiringly (if briefly) attended. After my first few weeks of studying with Saunders, he gently told me that I wrote too much like a Harvard student, relying on unwieldy, impersonally deployed Latinate phrases that didn’t really mean anything. I was cut to the quick, and I went back to my room in Peas Hill Hostel to sulk. Then I began to work on my weekly essay in the manner he had suggested to me. I used short, simple sentences that expressed exactly what I felt and no more: “I don’t always think Socrates is fair. I don’t like the way he treats Antigone …” etc. From there, over the course of the year, I built up my paragraphs from scratch. To the extent that I have one, I owe my critical-prose style in large part to Will Saunders, and I am grateful to him, wherever he may be.

  This intellectual development had its parallel in my emotional development: that is, in both instances I had to lose myself in order to find another, more workable version of myself. I know of no American who attended Cambridge in those years who did not have some kind of breakdown, and I was no exception. In my case, and I imagine in the case of many others, the dreamlike ease of the place was partly responsible. (It was aided, no doubt, by the quiet boredom, the dank weather, and the depressingly pervasive, unruffled respectability.) Because I had escaped reality, I was free to crack up. England, or at least Cambridge, seemed to hold a kind of safety net beneath me that had not been there in America; no permanent harm could possibly come to me in this idyllic setting, this fictional place. And so I let go.

  During my first year I had fallen in love with a fellow King’s student, a working-class, London-born, Grantham-bred chemistry graduate named Shaun. We met at King’s, but we got to know each other mainly through our involvement in Labour Party politics. (Not only did I join the British Labour Party during my first term at Cambridge—I was also an elected student representative to the party’s local governing body. People seemed remarkably unconcerned about the presence of an “outside agitator,” and in all the months of canvassing I did before the 1974 General Elections, no one ever questioned me about my American accent; perhaps they just thought I came from a part of Britain they hadn’t yet visited.)

  Shaun and I began as friends but soon fell into a love affair. The consequences were so dire that I have never again made the same mistake. My relationship with Shaun was clearly meant to be a friendship (it still is a friendship, twenty-five years later—we were able to patch things up once the dust had cleared), but I, or he, or both of us had insisted on turning it into something else. We had about twelve months of a horrible relationship and then we broke up, after which we continued to have an even more horrible relationship, of a hardly less connected type, until I finally left England. Each of us felt captivated, victimized, and ultimately destroyed by the other, but because I was a woman, and American, I was more vocal and expressive about my distress. Shaun just became silent and angry.

  I had had unhappy love affairs at Harvard (it was impossible to get through college in those days without them, and probably the same is true now), but nothing in my past could compare with the sense of annihilation I felt during my battle with Shaun. I remember thinking: When I am alone in a room, it is as if there is no one here. I had allowed him to become identified in my mind with the England I loved, and I had then imagined myself to be a new person inhabiting that wonderful country. When the love affair ended, the country turned darkly unfriendly and its new inhabitant disintegrated, leaving me homeless and—I was going to say solitary, but that implies the presence of one, whereas I felt nonexistent. I deduced from my reading that this was not an uncommon experience, but the reading didn’t help me feel any better, since I identified with all the most depressing people: Miriam in Sons and Lovers, Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. Just as, when you are having an illicit affair, all great literature seems to be about adultery, so it seemed to me then that all the best novels were about broken hearts.

  In the midst of this disaster, around Christmas of my second year, my mother arrived in London for a visit. My sister was already in England at the time, on a year’s break from college, but since she too was coping with an unhappy love affair, her presence had been of minimal comfort—and in any case I was in Cambridge and she was at least two hours away, in Hampstead. The three of us gathered at my sister’s bedsitter. I had not foreseen how I would feel at this familial encounter. (My sister, who by now has several degrees in matters relating to mental health, always points out to me that I never foresee how I will feel in such situations, with the consequence that I am always unpleasantly surprised. She herself finds it best to be prepared for the worst at all times, and as a result of her pessimism she is able to be comparatively sanguine in the face of disaster when, as expected, it arrives.) What I felt, as it turned out, was tremendous anger at my mother for divorcing my father. I believed, with an insistent logic and a complete lack of humane reasonableness, that this single act of hers sixteen years earlier had led directly, step by inevitable step, to my current unhappiness with Shaun. My first response to this feeling was to remain stonily, excessively silent. (Possibly, it now occurs to me, I was unconsciously imitating Shaun’s behavior toward me.) My mother perceived that I was in trouble and she clearly wanted to do something, but I think she was afraid of me as well as for me. Finally, however, she asked me what was wrong, at which point I launched into a diatribe, reduced her to tears, and stormed back to Cambridge on the first available train.

  That was the low point. Shortly thereafter I began seeing a psychologist—an extremely intelligent and ultimately helpful woman, the wife of a Cambridge anthropology professor. I also developed little routines to get me through the day. I made lists of people who depressed me and people who cheered me up (Shaun was on neither, since it still gave me a charge to see him even though it also made me unhappy), and I tried to associate only with the latter. Eventually I even had another love affair or two—small, harmless episodes that didn’t touch me deeply.

  I also decided to go back to America. I had been told I could get a place doing research at Cambridge, and a part of me very much wanted to stay in England forever. But a saner and, luckily, stronger part knew I had to get out of there. The English people of my acquaintance all considered California the only place in America worth living in, and I had
been getting the same message from the books I was reading by Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood. So being in England, oddly enough, made it possible for me to think about going back to California in a way that being at Harvard never had.

  I applied to Berkeley’s Ph.D. program in English. I wasn’t sure what I would do when I got there—whether I would finish the degree or not, whether I would ever want to teach, how I would go about supporting myself for all those years of graduate school—but it seemed as good a way as any to get out of the mess I was in at the moment. As always happens in such cases, the very act of trying to get out of the mess, the exertion of will on my own behalf, went a long way toward making me feel better. And this, in turn, enabled me to begin looking out-ward at the world again, instead of just inward at my own unhappiness.

  CONSULTANTS

  or the first few months of our consulting careers, my business partner and I couldn’t get over the feeling that no one would ever hire us. And why should they? Katharine and I were both graduate students in English at UC Berkeley, and, strictly speaking, we knew nothing about the areas in which we were seeking employment. All we had to recommend us were our Ivy League and Oxbridge degrees, which were prominently cited on our business brochure. In fact, our brochure consisted almost entirely of our educational résumés, since at that point we had nothing else to advertise. Our implicit motto was: If you can write, you can think; and if you can think, you can do public policy consulting. There may have been a flaw somewhere in this logical train. Or the problem may just have been our clothes. (We hadn’t discovered Dress for Success.) At any rate, no one hired us at the beginning.