Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

He grinned. Kenneth chuckled. Bernard clapped his hands in delight. I excused myself and went to fetch a drink.

  When I first came to Cambridge, I expected to find a student body that was a unified class. It would be a charming, chatty group, I thought, with members sharing a common background, an uncommon accent, and, naturally, a communal uniform. What I found was quite the opposite. Inside the otherwise exclusive world that comprises a Cambridge class lives a seething, unspoken set of standards that confines a Cambridge student to an “arm” within the student body, and a “class” within the class.

  I first learned about this tacit social ladder from Cyprian. We were sitting down to a plate of chips and beans early in Lent Term when he outlined the system for me. (In the British culinary patois, fries are chips, chips are crisps, and beans, even baked, are just called beans.) The two most prominent undergraduate classes at Cambridge, Cyprian explained, are the NARGs and the Yahs.

  “It’s like a civil war,” he said. “The two sides battle each other for control of the college. They eat in different parts of Hall, drink in different parts of the pub, and generally scorn the company of the other side.”

  A Yah, so-named because he speaks with a patrician yah instead of the more plebeian yes, is the Cambridge man of myth. He, and now she, is often dressed in corduroy slacks, linen shirts, and 110 percent silk cravats. He owns two colors, or colours, of all-cotton, all-weather Barbour jackets and has three pairs of all-leather, all-weather brogue shoes, preferably the kind with the doily design on top like the ones my grandfather used to wear everywhere, from the bank to the beach.

  “I don’t own a pair of white shoes,” Cyprian said. “I don’t even own white socks.”

  “What do you do when you play football?” I asked.

  “I always wear black.”

  Class, however, is thicker than feet; it’s also a question of soul. According to Cambridge standards, a Yah is someone who probably comes from the South of the country, probably went to a boarding school (or to a state-run school that is over five hundred years old), and probably studies the humanities. History is good; English is better; classics, last refuge of scholars, is best. Over the years, Yahs have been called everything from Hooray Henries to Sloane Rangers, from swells to snobs. Today, with declining social standards, they go mostly unregistered and must secretly aspire to a whispered entry in the unofficial Yah Who’s Who.

  NARGs, on the other hand, have no Who’s Who; they don’t even have a what’s what. “The Yahs always end up with ‘She loves me,’” Cyprian said, “while the NARGs get stuck with ‘She loves me not.’” The term NARG itself is an acronym for Not a Real Gentleman, but in the Cambridge lexicon it can be used as a noun, as in “There’s a NARG in my soup,” an adjective, as in “That shirt is very NARGy,” and even an adverb, as in “She dances NARGily to Barry Manilow.” A NARG wears denim jeans instead of corduroy trousers, flannel shirts instead of linen blouses, and thin black leather ties instead of silk cravats. He, and even she, owns a navy blue anorak parka that hangs NARGily from the shoulders, and two pairs of NARGy plimsoll tennis shoes—one grey, one black—that constitute the single condition of membership in the unofficial NARG Club Mod.

  “You can always tell a NARG by his glasses,” Cyprian said, pointing at someone across the Hall. “See how they have those wire rims. Always the latest alloys.”

  Like the Yahs, the NARGs are known for their accent and their interests as much as for their clothes. NARGs tend to come from the North of the country, speak with a clipped tongue instead of a mellifluous mutter, and study science. NatSci (natural science) is common; CompSci (computer science) is worse; and engineering is downright vulgar, because one runs the risk of getting dirt beneath one’s fingernails. Since Cambridge students study only one subject for all three years, these labels take on even more permanence than they otherwise might. As a result, a Cambridge class is classified by a separation of words and numbers: I write therefore I Yah; I count therefore I NARG.

  Bernard’s birthday party was a classic example of an underground NARG fest. There was not a brogue in the place, not an ascot or waistcoat anywhere in the joint. After white and black, blue denim was the color of choice. On one side of the room a group of students huddled around the music system, which had now been repaired and was screeching with the latest sounds of American bubblegum pop. One person would select the tape. The next person would take the tape to the kitchen with her Walkman and find the correct song. Another person would place the correctly cued tape into the right deck. And a final person would select the right deck at the appropriate time. Occasionally, we would get a spurt of Gloria Estefan in the middle of George Michael, but on the whole the organization was impressive.

  On the other side of the room, meanwhile, the two dozen or so guests were gathered around a foldout table littered with warm bottles of beer, store-bought biscuits, and garlic-and-onion potato crisps. When I arrived at the table, a bag of these crisps was just making its way around, preceded only by the breath of its bearer. I declined the bag and took a plastic cup to the kitchen to wash out the breath of the previous user before filling it with some warm ginger beer. Barely refreshed, I made my way across the room and sat down on a stack of three Sunday school chairs in front of an underground window that looked out on three feet of dirt.

  Around the room several people had moved from the food corner to the dance corner (NARGs tend to take corners with them wherever they go). I noticed two people, both less than five feet, who were busily embracing in the corner beside the stereo. They weren’t wiggling or writhing or particularly advancing; they just stood face-to-face, enjoined at the lips, with their arms interlinked like jigsawed pieces. I was looking at them, puzzled, when Bernard sat down on a stack of chairs to my right.

  “Did you pay those people to stand in the corner and make out?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “it was their idea.”

  “But they don’t come up for air.”

  “It’s their first time.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yeah, man. Isn’t it awesome? Earlier I asked that guy if it was better to have the lights high and the music low, or the lights low and the music high. He said we should keep the lights low so people have a chance to get off. I guess he was planning ahead.”

  “Getting off” is the British euphemism for what Americans variously call getting on, getting down, or getting at it. In a world where language rules, it seems somehow emblematic of a larger cultural divide that Brits are forever rushing to “get off” while Americans are ever clamoring to “get on.” But the true British handicap is much larger than words. It took me a while to catch on, but I eventually realized that the real reason the British are so skittish about sex is that they don’t know how to play baseball. As a result, British adolescents (not to mention college prudes) don’t have terms to mark their sexual progress, such as first base, second base, third base, and—the ultimate teenage fantasy—a homerun in the backseat. In contrast, the English national sport—cricket—is notoriously slow. Games take five days instead of three hours, and still they often don’t produce winners. Also, cricket lovers don’t make pitches, they bowl; and they don’t hit towering home runs, they hit gliders that roll merrily along the grass and occasionally across a tidy white line.

  As Bernard and I admired the lovers’ stamina, if not their drive, a guest sat down next to us on the stacked orange chairs, and Bernard perked up, ready to try out his intro bit again.

  “This is Bruce,” he said to his friend, who was dressed like most of the others in tight-fitting jeans and a black T-shirt. “He was the one I was telling you about.” Turning to me, he continued. “This is Daren. We traveled together in the South of France.”

  “Did you play any games?” I asked, thinking of our earlier encounters.

  “Yes,” Bernard answered. “Go.”

  If Bernard were just a puppy, he would have stopped at Monopoly. But as a full-grown savant, he also played chess, bridge, Othe
llo, mah-jongg, and go—an ancient Japanese game involving black and white stones on a simple grid board. Bernard, moreover, took his games seriously. He was the treasurer of the Cambridge University Go Society and the vice president of the Bridge Club.

  “That reminds me,” Bernard said to Daren. “The Chess Club didn’t come tonight, did it? I guess that means I wasn’t elected president.”

  “You ran for president of the Chess Club,” I said, “and you were opposed?”

  “By three people,” he said. “We have about forty members, and I had to make a speech. It was very competitive. But I left to come to my party so I didn’t get a chance to vote.”

  “Bernard, Bernard!” A NatSci genus female scampered over to our group and squatted on the floor at Bernard’s feet. “No one will dance with me. Won’t you come?” She was wearing black jeans, a baggy denim shirt, and purple high-top sneakers. She pulled Bernard to the middle of the floor, squeezed her legs together, and shook her head like a pom-pom. Bernard, meanwhile, leapt around the floor, waved his arms like a cheerleader, and jumped up to touch the ceiling.

  I turned back to Daren, who now had sweat running down his neck from a previous round of dancing and who was shaking the front of his shirt, letting fresh air in and stale air out.

  “What are you reading?” I asked.

  “Maths,” he said.

  “For what degree?”

  “Ph.D.”

  “What year?”

  “Second.”

  I was beginning to feel a bit like a tax assessor trudging through a list of questions.

  “What college are you in?”

  “Trinity.”

  “I hear that’s famous for maths.”

  “I live in the rooms where Newton lived.”

  “I guess that means yes, huh?”

  Trinity is the oldest and crustiest of Cambridge colleges and the scones and cream of the Cambridge myth. The home of Bacon, Darwin, Russell, and Wittgenstein, Trinity has long been the locus philosophicus of the university and is still the home of the newest generation of mathematical prodigies. Newton’s apple fell inside Trinity, and for many it remains the, well, pi in the sky. But genius, as I was ascertaining, does not necessarily make for good conversation. Scientists at Cambridge, because of their exclusive training, rarely have the skills to conduct a simple exchange. Daren, like Kenneth and Sean before him, reminded me of many of the undergraduates I knew in Clare who were for one reason or another incapable of conversation. I felt like grabbing his shoulders and shouting: “We are having a conversation! The technique is very simple. I ask you a question. You answer. You ask me a question.” I knew Japanese junior high school students who were more conversant after two months of studying English than students at Cambridge who had spoken the language all their lives. NARGs, I reluctantly concluded, don’t have conversations; they grow them—in petri dishes.

  Finally, starved for discourse, I asked a question that had been bothering me for some time. “Can you tell me why maths are called maths in Britain but just math in America?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s because you leave off the s.”

  He stood up to leave.

  “Hey,” he said, “do you want to have a push-up contest? I bet I can do more.”

  “No, thank you,” I said. “I think I’ll dance.”

  As I moved to the center of the room, Daren flung himself to the floor and began counting push-ups. This gauntlet proved to be too much for Bernard, who soon joined his friend on the floor and challenged him to a race. Within seconds the entire party had gathered in a clump to cheer for one of the boys on the ground, as if they were cocks in an alley.

  “Push it, Daren!” someone shouted. “God save the Queen!”

  “Power Ten, Bernard,” called another. “Born in the USA!”

  Daren was the first to reach twenty-five (perhaps the Red Coats should have worn black), at which point he flipped onto his back and began spinning around in a Cambridge slam dance that seemed to embody Newton’s fourth law of physics: any student when filled with alcohol will act like a juvenile delinquent until an external force acts to suspend him.

  As I stood by myself, with Daren and Bernard on the floor and the vestal virgins still in the corner in their hammerlock embrace, I thought for a moment that we combined to make a strange syzygy. The guests at this party seemed to be part of an elaborate underground world, a subterranean galaxy complete with its own constellations of spinning dancers, dancing lovers, and loving puppies. Many of these people had probably not been above ground for days, maybe weeks. Some of them had beards that had never been shaved, as well as red and black plaid shirts they first put on when they went to school at age thirteen and had not since taken off. They lived underground, worked in labs without windows, and most, I suspected, had come to this basement room for Bernard’s birthday party without even thinking about walking on the grass. There were probably secret tunnels connecting all of these labs in different colleges that required passwords, or maybe pass numbers, to enter. These were men made by machine, nourished by code, and inspired by the glow of the terminal screen that offered them access to a heaven higher than earth.

  I, on the other hand, rarely dipped into this realm. I could recite Newton’s laws, write a letter on computer, and do simple long division, but I met none of the conditions of numerical supremacy. When I played chess, I never managed to think more than three moves in advance. When I saw Daren spinning on the floor, I did not think in vectors and curves but in simple sentences. When I got dressed in the morning, it never occurred to me to wear white jeans.

  I began to wonder why I felt so out of place in this environment. It wasn’t a matter of nationality, for Bernard fit in perfectly well. It wasn’t a matter of chronological age, since many of these students were older than I. It was, as Cyprian warned me, more a matter of class. Not the class that comes from money, not the working class or leisure class or any other class that comes from an individual’s relationship to the means of production. It was the class that comes from the classroom. This was a group of people who lived, worked, studied, ate, drank, danced, dressed, courted, kept and—eventually—lost their virginity with one other. No one forced them to do it; they were all self-selected; and most of all they were free to leave at any time. But they didn’t. They were part of each other, and I was not. It was I who had to leave.

  “Goodnight, Bernard,” I called after gathering my coat, emptying my glass, and catching a last glimpse of the lovers, still answering the question “Who’s on first?” “Happy Birthday,” I said.

  “Oh, Bruce,” he said, looking up with hurt puppy eyes from the arms of his genus female. “You’re leaving?”

  “Sorry,” I said, mustering an excuse. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  “Hey, thanks for coming anyway. Let’s do dinner this week.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll get in touch.” Most people in this situation would promise to drop off a note or leave word in my pigeonhole, but Bernard, true to form, had another idea: “I’ll E-mail you,” he said.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “I never use the system.”

  “You never use the system!?” he cried. “No wonder you haven’t been responding to my messages. How am I supposed to contact you?”

  “You can give me a call at the Porters’ Lodge,” I said.

  “Will they take a message?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Just ask for Terry. He’d love to speak Californian with you.”

  “Cool, man. I’ll do it. That Terry’s a hip dude.”

  XIII

  RAGGING

  Incline and Fall

  No wonder that Oxford and Cambridge—profound,

  In learning and science so greatly abound;

  When all carry thither a little each day,

  And hardly a soul carries any away.

  —Anonymous,

  “Epigram,” 1801

  “Students today are no longer ro
mantic. They are afraid of heights.”

  Christine Martin sat forward in her chair and pushed her spectacles down the ridge of her nose to show Rachel and me her well-read eyes and the depths they had seen in forty years of selling used books at No. 6 Turl Street.

  “But this place is full of social climbers,” I said. “They’re crawling their way higher and higher every day.”

  “Love is different from class,” she said. “If you’re going to reach the highest peak, you must accept the risk of a fall.”

  “Even for those at the top?” Rachel asked.

  “Even those at Oxford, my dear. You people have the most to lose.”

  Oxford in winter, like Oxford anytime, is a city of considerable elevation. With few tufts of green on the lawns and the trees and few spots of color in the gardens and the parks, the grey walls that line the town’s haggard streets give the city a stark dignity like a gathering of aging gravestones tucked behind an old stone church. If Cambridge is famous for its river and roads, and the bridges that splice the two, Oxford is famous for its buildings and towers, and the spires that rise above them all. To be sure, Oxford has its rivers, the Isis and the Cherwell; it also has its roads, both Broad and High; but the town is known around the world for the simple shapes that crown its halls: the blue cupola with the black weather vane on top of the Sheldonian Theatre; the elongated tower like a wizard’s cap atop the Church of St. Mary the Virgin; and the bulbous dome attached like a lens to the top of Radcliffe Camera. It’s also known for its students, who come to Oxford when they are young to learn the lessons that defy age.

  I, for my part, came to Oxford in mid-February and soon felt the pressures of time. Rachel had been hoping for several months to introduce me to Oxford. On my first night we went to a dinner party with her friends from the English faculty, where the topic of conversation was the rise of ambition among undergraduates. The second night we visited her faculty adviser, a young don who was editing the journals of Virginia Woolf and trying to encourage Rachel to abandon her dreams of becoming a lawyer and write a D.Phil. dissertation. (Cambridge, like most places, gives Ph.D.’s; Oxford, like no place, gives D.Phil.’s. instead.) On the morning of the third day, as we woke up to rain, Rachel again broke down in tears.