by D. J. Taylor
And bustling round the globe as cultural gaucho
Your chums bag TV shows and bursaries
In a land where Wood Lane meets the Groucho
You pastiche Amis (K) with effervescence
In a style a few yards short of obsolescence.
It’s not all bad – oh no, there’s personal stuff in here
Things about love, truths uttered from beneath the moral hat
The only absentee is Germaine Greer
Amid a throng of Ozzie takes on where it’s at
’81, your rhyming round-up says, was quite a year
Two decades on, the SDP seem smallest of small beer.
‘Last night the sea dreamed it was Greta Scacchi’
I’ll admit I giggled hugely over that
Styled like an elephant with howdah by Versace
A versifying fizz that’s fallen sadly flat.
My own credentials won’t match up to you – alas
I never wrote for Ian Hamilton’s Review.
Oh well. I have to go now Clive, my pen runs idle
Unlike your own uncurbed extravaganzas
Unchained by any editorial bridle
And dancing on from stanza unto endless stanza
As for your talent – well I’ll gladly tender that
There are three Clives – James I, James II and Old Pretender.
HOW BOILETH YE POT
ANDREW MOTION
A new ‘civic liturgy’ on the theme of St George
Hark how this patented late-Romanticism of mine, with its dying falls – ah, that torrent of melting silver,
the rain on the forest floor, the clouds carved in the shape of the bear’s
dread paw – and its undemanding half-rhymes, so zealously persists. Yet for a man in my position – the Laureateship
gone, the Guardian not what it was – such prestige commissions
are hard to resist. But that reminds me. The poem. What should it
say? Who is this fellow, a pilgrim, that symbol of spirit and nation,
who swerves off alone from the far-flung field of folk? Whence came their
desperate alliteration? What better way to greet the Shakespeare Institute’s
kind suggestion than a host of unanswerable questions? But that reminds me again. Well no, it doesn’t remind
me at all – this is a poetic device – yet what, I ask of you,
is this country summoned to be and to become?
And what is he called, this
elemental wanderer, who forsakes the forest for the city, where
the runcible spoons of state have beaten his eggs into new
omelettes? One thing you will notice about these poems of
mine, for better or worse, is that as they continue they stop being what most people would regard as poetry and turn
into prose, neatly chopped up into lines of irregular blank
verse. And here is our pilgrim, on the world’s latest threshold,
bright axe newly-minted. The greatest mystery facing us now
is how to keep faith – that, and how on earth this kind of thing
still gets printed. Let me say it again. How to keep going? How to press on?
Here in the field where sinuous rills unwind, tenebrous yet time-bright,
and clouds that are forged in the shape of something or other announce
another most heartening return to the limelight.
IN THE BLOOD
ANDREW MOTION
Bliss was it in that bright dawn to be alive,
Mummy’s step on the parched lawn (O my hot youth!)
The lanes of genteel Oxfordshire, bat-haunted night
gaunt in the hedgerows, misery handed down, along
With words one couldn’t say (like ‘toilet’ ‘serviette’ and ‘Strewth’)
Oh how the perilous trail ran on, a trifle sadly
To the terrifying public school at Radley.
An English education – alas, it made me what I am –
feet shuffling on gymnasium floor, coleoptera, Spam.
And thence to glorious Oxford – my park, my pleasaunce,
and that scree of words come tumbling raptly o’er the
vertiginous cliffs (I say, this is rather good, isn’t it? A. M.)
to mark the end of adolescence, knowing that I would
Hull-wards hearken, to blithely drench myself in scent
Of Larkin. How long ago it seems, how long? The bard
Of Humber one and twenty years a gone! Much else besides.
Footloose and fancy free – the poet’s sempiternal ruse,
I have at least been faithful to my muse.
She of the royal birthday, she of the foreign war,
She of the state occasion and the Whitehall door!
The needle hovers high upon the reminiscent graph
My agent’s sold an extract to the Daily Telegraph.
MOY SAND AND GRAVEL
PAUL MULDOON
Being a distinguished contemporary Irish poet – like Seamus and
Tom and them other fellers –
carries its own responsibilities. Bringing in the cultural allusions
(Tom likes Verlaine, I’m more of a Valery guy) while remembering in the end
that your verse man, like the one who recited to Brian Boru,
is only a story teller. It
doesn’t have to scan, of course, but you
can arrange it over the page to look
as if it
does. And meanwhile the funny place-names need a mention,
so I’m putting in Auchnacloy, Cullaville and Derrymacash, some of
them
in italics, in the hope that
they’ll grab your attention. Did I forget anything? Oh
yes Dev and O’Hanlon and all that ould Gaelic stuff. That fifties childhood, of course,
with the packet of fags on the car seat and the clothes built to
last. Anything else would be
forswearing our past. Me, Seamus, Tom and the others. As poetry
goes – and boy does it go – we’re just calling your bluff.
THE WASTE OF SPACELAND
CRAIG RAINE
So here’s a book about Tom
Who, in a very real sense, we all hail from
Yes, me and old Seamus, Muldoon and the others.
The whole sodding modern poetic galère
That gets its advances from the chaps at Queen Square
That chittering band of post-modern blood brothers.
But Tom now, what an influence
On yours truly – not unduly, some might say, the old boy’s
Criterion not quite the machete I wield
In Areté. Prufrock at half-cock?
Less of that, buster.
He didn’t trust her, his first wife, that is,
When she went tonto.
If their love was ethereal, then he lived his material.
And got out pronto.
In the room the students come and go
Talking of their tutor’s libido.
I was a Martian once. I wrote a postcard home
From a lifetime’s wandering on the Oxford loam
Glittering prizes – I’ll take all they’re giving
Teaching students? Well, it’s a living.
But back to Tom, who wrote of wastelands, knew Virginia and Leonard,
And criticised the critic, and was a mite too
Pacific if you ask me, never went off
In a huff. As for me, show me the bastards who dump on my
Stuff and I’ll soon have a go. Especially the sods at
Front Row. Anyway, you might think
Tom here was a dry old stick. Actually, no.
Take it from me he was a real goer, married a chick forty years
His junior, danced like a dervish so they say, couldn’t have
Been spoonier. Never mind the worries about the fully
; Lived life. You should just see Tom go with his spanking new
Wife.
(Not a point, alas, that I much care to labour
– the lady’s a shareholder at Faber & Faber.)
I could have been a coiled serpent under a log
But settled for Art and a soft college job.
THE OXFORD MANNER
FLOURISHING: LETTERS 1928–1946
ISAIAH BERLIN: Edited by Henry Hardy
All Souls, Oxford, 1 July 1936
TO THE HON VENETIA STARBORGLING1
Dear Boffles,
I feel acute guilt & displeasure at having left the postage stamp that I borrowed from you some months ago, while staying at your very nice house in Hampshire,2 unreturned, the thought of having prevailed upon your essential goodness, fine nature, elegance of judgment &c being sufficient to plunge me into a gloom unrelieved by various events of whose relative magnitude I leave you to judge.
1. There is a civil war in Spain. This is really very serious.
2. Sammy’s3 non-elevation to the professorship of Greek. How this came, or did not come, about, is a source of cataclysmic misery, for we had done everything in our power, written to Frisk and Whiskers4 about it &c. And Sammy – so mad & gay & snobbish & sweet & so disappointed. Hearing of his arch-rival Professor Vole’s victory in the election – a learned, scholarly, unsuitable man – I at once rushed off to dine with him, & I think really consoled him by my insistence that it is the striking, original figures who survive in Oxford legend irrespective of whether they do any work or not.
3. Bobby’s5 failure in Greats. This, I must admit, perplexed me gravely. He had done a fine Latin translation and a noble Greek unseen. While his inability to attend Schools for the final three papers undoubtedly counted against him, one would have thought his qualities of gentlemanliness and sympathetic understanding, not to mention his father’s very agreeable residence in Perthshire, where I stayed last summer, would have redeemed him to some extent in the examiner’s eyes . . . [continues].
1 The Hon Venetia Starborgling (1913–84) daughter of Lord Dull, Minister for Agriculture, February to March 1925.
2 Lucre Grange, near Fordingbridge. On his stay here in 1935, Berlin recorded that he tipped the butler 10/6d.
3 Samuel Ainsworth de Montmorency Drudge (1898–1970), Fellow of Wadham College, author of Some Little Travels in the Levant (1932).
4 To my eternal regret and shame I have been unable to decipher the real identities behind these amusing soubriquets.
5 The Hon Robert Twistleton-Byng (1914–99), son of Lord Mulcaster, sportsman, socialite and alcoholic.
MAURICE BOWRA: A LIFE
LESLIE MITCHELL
. . . It was in the spring of 1939, with storm clouds gathering across Europe, that Maurice became involved in perhaps the most legendary episode of his disputatious Oxford career: the unusually vexed question of who should succeed Professor Horace Yaughn to the Chair of Sanskrit. The leading candidate, hotly supported by Bowra’s old bête noire, Dame Enid Starborgling of Somerville, of whose hairstyle he is once supposed to have remarked ‘All the colours of the Rimbaud’, was Dr Hiram Oaks. ‘But I don’t at all pine for Oaks to be at the ’elm,’ Bowra is reliably reported to have complained. A second aspirant, the celebrated American scholar Silas Bole of the University of New Dworkin, was also found wanting. ‘On the whole, not Bole,’ Bowra pronounced. Lady Primula Tanqueray is thought to have fainted with delight when this bon mot was conveyed to her at the breakfast table at Poshleigh Grange, Salop, where Bowra enjoyed so many stimulating weekends.
Amidst the cares of office and the internecine politicking that gave pre-war Oxford its distinctive savour, Bowra managed to find time for a relaxing holiday with his friends Reggie Simper, the brilliant young fellow of All Souls, and the Hon. Gavin Twisk. Writing from Berlin to his friend the Countess of Axminster, in one of the witty communications for which he is so renowned, he disclosed that ‘it is all highly agreeable, and the Germans are all most accommodating – particularly the boys one meets in the Unter den Linden. Reggie has caught a picturesque disease and Gavin has been very naughty. Meanwhile I have been thinking hard about the heritage of symbolism. Professor D’Ulle’s death, is of course, a great blow.’ The irony of that last sentence would not have been lost on his correspondent . . .
. . . The first fruit of these lucubrations was Bowra’s influential study Attic Wanderings. Its opening paragraph may be taken as the summation of everything he believed in, his insistence on truth, individual responsibility and the humanist pursuit of all that is best and good in life. ‘The poet,’ he wrote, ‘is really rather a special chap, not at all like those ghastly bank-clerks and the politicians who go about stopping us having a good time. It is our duty to furnish the conditions in which the productions of his muse may best be realised – elegantly panelled rooms, lots of friends to gossip with and plenty of servants. But, of course, nobody really cares about art these days.’
The failure of Attic Wanderings and its successor, the autobiographical Ramblings, to win a permanent place in the literature of our time was one of Bowra’s most grievous disappointments. And yet it is Maurice’s influence on so many succeeding generations that remains his most lasting memorial. As Gervase Drudge, later a senior official in the Ministry of Pensions, recalled: ‘Most dons just wanted you to do tedious things like get on with your work and be a credit to the college. But Maurice was different. He wanted to have you to dinner, so he could make up smutty limericks and tell you how he hated the Professor of Greek. He encouraged us all to despise convention and achieve our full potential as human beings, and I have always been grateful to him.’ Lady Stultitia Blodwyn, whose amitie amoreuse with Maurice must surely count as one of his most bitter-sweet relationships, agreed: ‘Maurice was simply frightfully amusing. It was as if we were all at the Court of Louis XIV, and not just at Oxford listening to some egotistical old don droning on . . .’ [continues for hundreds of pages].
MY DEAR HUGH: LETTERS FROM RICHARD COBB TO HUGH TREVOR-ROPER AND OTHERS
TIM HEALD
Cobb’s election to a fellowship at Balliol, Oxford, was testimony to his growing reputation as a scholar of revolutionary France. But to this genuine egalitarian the college’s increasingly left-wing bent was a source of growing disquiet . . .
To Trevor-Roper, 30 May 1974
Dreadful news from Belial – would you believe, they have just appointed Dr Weevil as tutor for admissions? No more Etonian peers of the realm and witty boys from Winchester, alas. Dear me, how I shall miss them. We used to be distinctly aristocratic here, before ‘progress’ laid its dead hand on our shoulder. One of my first pupils was Lord Mordecai Drone – undoubtedly the stupidest man I have ever met (he thought that Runnymede was an alcoholic drink) but so charming you know, and with an absolutely unrivalled taste in port. Then there was Viscount Ditchwater, whose father subscribed so handsomely to the library fund to secure his admission and can truthfully be said to have made the Vomit Club a shining example of patrician excess. Why, it is said that after one of their dinners, at which I was not myself unwelcome, every one of the college staircases had to be sluiced down. It is really tragic that such a fine old tradition of noblesse oblige should perish . . . [continues].
. . . Meanwhile, even worse news about the election for the D’Ulle Professorship. As you know, we had hoped for Silas Todhunter, a splendid drinking man from Oriel who wrote that wonderful piece in the Anti-Democrat about how prudent the Chileans were to get rid of Allende – why this caused such a fuss I can’t imagine – but no, the electors for some inexplicable reason have settled for Dr Keith Drudge, one of those scholarly, hard-working men interested in Tudor hegemony, or some such rubbish. If only people would realise that a professor of history’s real job is to cut a figure and write amusing articles in the Spectator about things that have nothing to do with his subject, then the value of education would be more appreciated by the ingrate young.
A welcome div
ersion from the challenges of university life came in 1984, when he was appointed to chair the judging panel for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
To Trevor-Roper, 24 October 1984
Well, it is all over and by dint of some ingenious manoeuvring I think I may be said to have done a little negative good by keeping anything with genuine literary merit – Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Lisa de Someone or Other – off the shortlist. What a blessed relief it was to be able to give the prize to Eloise Twinch’s Loosestrife. Incidentally, whatever the press may have reported, I was not drunk at the ceremony – merely a couple of bottles of the Latour ’45 you and Xandra so kindly gave me at Easter – and the remark that I had never read a modern novel in my life nor wanted to was meant as a joke . . . [continues for hundreds of pages].
CAST OF CHARACTERS
The Hon. Jolyon Urquhart-Smythe Undergraduate at Christ Church Oxford, where he was Custodian of the Foot Beagles, and early pupil of Cobb’s. Known for his lilac-coloured waistcoats. Drank himself to death in 1965.
Gervase Ffolkes-Crenshaw Admissions tutor at Merton College for over sixty years and famous for his dismissal of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, in a celebrated review for the Fogey magazine, as ‘the worst gardening manual ever written’. Once admitted the entire Eton rowing VIII to read Agricultural and Forest Sciences . . . [continues].
HUGH TREVOR-ROPER: THE BIOGRAPHY
ADAM SISMAN
. . . 1966 began auspiciously for Trevor-Roper, with an invitation to spend the New Year with his great friend Henrietta, Lady Fawning, at Poshleigh Grange in Northumberland. Here he was delighted to encounter his old acquaintance Sir John Bigotte, in whose genealogical interests – both men claiming descent from the seventeenth century Recusant scourge, Bishop D’Ulle – he took a lively interest, and to observe the survival of such charming local customs as the Twelfth Night peasant hunt. Further pleasure was assured by the publication of his latest book of essays, Learned Trifles, which was cordially reviewed by several old friends in the Sunday newspapers. A momentary source of irritation surfaced in the unexpected arrival of Professor Silas Drone at dinner, but happily, by feigning deafness and taking his plate to the orangery (where he was later found playing bezique with one of the footmen) Trevor-Roper managed to avoid speaking to his distinguished academic colleague for the entire evening.