by Bruce Feiler
Wit is not taken lightly in Cambridge: it is the lifeblood of the body theatric. Unlike NARGs, who treat conversation as imprecise word games, Yahs look upon even the simplest exchange as a chance to phrase a coinage. A typical Yah-like conversation goes something like this:
It begins with a question. “What is the difference between a nook and a cranny?”
Someone has an answer. “A nook is a niche, while a cranny is a crack.”
Someone has a crack response. “Then why does a nook need a separate niche?”
Someone has a definitive theory. “Because a niche was once a nest, while a nook was just a corner.”
Someone takes the theory and carries it to extremes. “You can’t very well eat breakfast in a breakfast niche.”
Someone returns with a coup de grâce. “And you can’t find your nook in life.”
All this took place in a gyp.
The longer I lived in Cambridge, the more I marveled at the cutting, almost divisive, role that language played in the lives of so many students. Much more than just words, language in Cambridge is about gamesmanship—scoring points off a verbal sparring partner. It’s about artifice—maintaining a facade of total control, where nothing requires too much energy or too much concern. It’s about inflection—delivering even the most casual remarks in a tone of voice that suggests utter humility while actually epitomizing complete condescension. And ultimately language is about class—using words to build a nest high up in a tree where birds of a feather flock together and where hedgehogs of a more mathematical bent are kept far away.
The gap in Cambridge between the literati and the numerati is hardly new. Soon after learning from Cyprian about the NARGs and the Yahs, I came upon a copy of a lecture by Cambridge physicist-novelist C. P. Snow on the chasm between scientists and humanists. “There seems to be no place where the cultures meet,” he said in the early 1960s. “In fact, the separation is much less bridgeable among the young than it was even thirty years ago.” Thirty years later this separation has not gone away, and the gap between Bernard’s birthday bash and Nigel’s bacchanal seemed to be wide enough for two novice crews to pass each other without even touching their blades. Fashion may contribute to this gap; snobbery may play a part; but ultimately what keeps these groups apart at Cambridge is that they speak different languages. Since the universal curriculum at Cambridge was abolished earlier this century, neither group has learned the necessary means to engage the other in meaningful conversation. Moreover, since the only way to be admitted to the specialized courses at Cambridge (and Oxford as well) is to pass specialized exams, students who wish to attend these schools study only their particular subjects, and a few related ones, during their years in secondary school. At exactly the same time they should be broadening their minds, young students in Britain are being told to narrow their course of study.
The result, at least in Cambridge, is a bipolar campus. As far as the humanists are concerned, science may be the meat and potatoes of industrial success, but what they learn in the humanities is the subtle spicing of wit—the true gravy of conversation. Wit, in this case, is much more than verbal pyrotechnics. It is an attitude, a life-style, an expression of confidence: “I’m young, I’m British, I’m at Cambridge, I am, by extension, on top of the world.” True wit, in the minds of these people, is not something one can learn by reading a Berlitz guide; it cannot be put on and taken off like a DJ and bow tie. In fact, wit is not something you have or have not; it is simply something you are or are not. The goal of the classic Cambridge education is, simply put, to become British wit. Those who aren’t just disappear underground, while those who are just float through their myriad conversations on a gossamer of literary illusions and rhetorical pageantry that lifts them farther and farther away from earth and into an artificial orbit.
After several hours the Thirkill Room seemed to be even lighter than it was when we arrived. Nigel had dimmed the chandelier and allowed the candles to frolic alone in their tender strobe. Ian had managed to transcend his doom and was becoming increasingly animated as he talked in the corner with Chantalle, his damsel in a dress. Even I had downed one-too-many cocktails and was feeling free of the pressures of international relations and interuniversity romance. Somewhere after my third Kahlúa-vodka-allspice-and-cream I found myself floating in front of the balcony in a lightly salted conversation with Hillary, who it turns out was not a “maid,” but, in Cambridge terms, a “matron.”
“So tell me about your ‘husband,’” I said. “I mean your boyfriend.”
“His name is Dean,” she said. “He’s a vet.”
“A bunny and hedgehog type of vet,” I asked, “or a cow and horse variety?”
“Definitely a horse vet. He’s very much of a horsey person, you see. He rides for the university.”
“You mean he rides for some team.”
“He rides for The Team,” she corrected me. “That’s with a capital THE. He’s a member of the Polo Club.”
I smiled at the successful exchange. She retrieved a cigarette case from her bag.
“If he’s a vet, he must be very busy?”
“Not really. I don’t see him much during the day, but he usually pops round about nine. You could say we have a nine-to-five relationship.”
“A working relationship.”
“At times.”
She rummaged in her bag until she found a silver lighter and handed it to me.
“You like talking about relationships, don’t you?” she said. “That’s very American of you.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I find it difficult to talk with English men about my personal life.”
“About your love life, you mean, or your sex life?”
“Oh, I will tell people about my sex life, but not my love life. I find it easy to tell someone that I went to bed with a man, but I won’t tell them why.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Sex is something you have—it’s physical. Love is something you are—it’s personal.”
A voice came from the other side of the room.
“Hillary, Hill, where are you? Help.”
Peter came pushing through the crowd and began pawing at Hillary’s shoulder. “Where’s Susanna?” he said. “Have you seen Susanna? I can’t find her. I have to find her.” He turned to look at me. His eyes were glazed, his hair askew, his pupils reverberated in their sockets as they tried to focus on me. “He’s not Dean…. Where’s Susanna? Who the hell is this bloke?”
“It’s Bruce,” said Hillary. “Susanna’s not here. She went to get a drink.”
“A drink? I don’t need a drink. I have to find her….” He turned around in a circle and staggered back into place. His four-button tweed suit clung to his sinking shoulders like a slumped-over bag of potatoes. “He sure does look familiar. Haven’t I met you before?”
He didn’t wait for an answer but turned toward the door and walked away.
“Take Peter, for example,” Hillary said. “I don’t trust him at all. He’s not personal, he’s merely physical.”
“He’s unbelievable,” I added. “He didn’t even remember that I rowed in his boat last term.”
“Apparently, he gets that way a lot,” Hillary said. “It’s how he reacts.”
“Reacts to what?” I said.
She looked at me for a moment as if trying to determine if I was making a joke, then placed the cigarette on the ridge of her lips and smiled. “Drugs.”
I jerked my thumb down on the igniter button, shooting the flame into my index finger and dropping the lighter in response.
“So…” I said, with a touch of forced grace after plucking the lighter from the rug and kindling it with two hands. “I guess that explains a lot.”
“Bruce,” she said, arching her eyebrows, “don’t be so naïve. Half the people in this room are on something.”
She blew a puff into my face.
“And how do you know that?” I said.
> “Everyone gets his stuff from the same place.”
“Which is where?”
“You don’t know?”
“I guess not.”
“The Buttery.”
I laughed.
“The Buttery?” I said. “I’ve eaten dinner there almost every night this term, and I can tell you with a certain degree of confidence that there are absolutely no spices of any kind in that place.”
“It’s not the food, dummy. It’s the servers.” She poked my crimson tie.
“The servers are selling drugs?”
“Well, I don’t know about all of them. But one in particular…” She took a step closer. “Everybody knows it, Bruce. You should just look around. I bet I can teach you a lot of things about this place that you don’t already know—”
“Peter, stop it!” The words careened off the ceiling paint and dropped into the room. “Just shut up!”
“I’m not going to shut up until you tell me where you went. What were you doing with that Indian bugger?”
Peter was standing in the door with his arms waving in the air; Susanna was slumping with her back sliding down the jamb.
“Peter,” she whispered through tightly clenched jaws, “everybody’s looking.”
“I don’t care,” he stammered. “I just—”
“Excuse me,” cried one of the many who had turned in the direction of the fight. “Could you two speak up a bit? We’re having a little trouble hearing you.”
A gentle laughter rolled around the room. The guests turned back to their drinks. Nigel went sliding around the perimeter to hush over the row. But the damage had already been done. The guests in the interim had glanced down at their watches, felt the prick of embarrassment, and begun collectively to disengage, decouple, and ultimately deflate. The great balloon that is a cocktail party slowly returned to earth with a giant exhale of hot air.
I said good night to Hillary, who flicked her cigarette into my drooling champagne glass and accepted my kiss on her hand.
I said goodnight to Ian, who was unsuccessfully attempting to seduce Chantalle by comparing himself to Helen of Troy.
I said good night to Nigel, who put his arm around my shoulders and proclaimed eternal brotherhood.
I descended the stairs, ascended the bridge, and returned at last to terra firma.
XV
PRAYING
Church and State
St. Mary’s tolls her longest chime and slumber softly
falls
On Granta’s quiet solitude, her cloisters and her
halls;
But trust me, little rest is theirs, who play in
glory’s game
And throw tomorrow their last throw for academic fame.
—Winthrop Praed
“Lines Written on the Eve of an Exam,” 1826
The road on exam day was covered with bags—bags on the sides of bicycles that test takers rode to receive the exam, bags under the eyes of the untested toilers who had read too late into the night, and bags on the backs of the testy tutees that were filled with books long past overdue. The books in the bags were dry and stuffy—dry as the sand in an empty desert, stuffy as a room shut up in a storm. The stuff in the books was freeze-dried in the minds of the three score and seven academic road warriors who gathered in the halls of the Cambridge Centre of International Studies and prepared to collect a qualifying exam that would take them fifty-six hours—almost as long as a cricket test match.
“Good morning, students. Please step up to the table and collect your examination papers. Make sure you enter your examination number at the top of each separate essay and do not write your name anywhere on the paper. Above all, please remember that essays must be written in English, no Americanizations allowed.”
Before receiving their honours degrees, undergraduates at Cambridge must pass a series of examinations that are known as a tripos, a term which originally described the three-legged stool on which all examinees were required to sit. Ph.D. students, by a different measure, are required to complete a dissertation of sufficient length and manifest originality. M.Phil. candidates, because of their respectless status between B.A.’s and Ph.D.’s, are required both to sit an exam and to write a dissertation. Unlike Ph.D.’s, who must write a free-standing tome of around eighty thousand words, our dissertations were required to be no more than twenty five thousand words; and unlike undergraduates, who must sit their exams in unventilated rooms within the perspirational sphere of smarmy neighbors and under the intoxicated glare of oft-plastered dons, we were allowed to pick up our questions at nine o’clock on Tuesday morning and return them along with four completed essays of ten pages each by five o’clock on Thursday afternoon.
At the first of the year that task seemed nothing short of insurmountable. After two terms I would be expected to write one essay in four of five categories—history, theory, strategy, economics, and law—four out of five of which I had no previous training in at all. At the end of first term, however, I began to view the assignment as much less of a burden—four essays, three days, an unlimited number of books, and all I had to do was write, something my friends kept telling me was the simplest profession in the world. But by the middle of second term I began to think that neither of these views was entirely accurate and that in fact the examination process was a giant test case in the psychological battlefield of international relations.
For starters there were the cryptic letters we received from the Centre. The exam was not an exam, they said, but “Compulsory Essay Question Papers.” We were not supposed to write one essay in four of the five categories, they said, but instead “answer any four questions, not more than one from any category.” Next there was the relentless jockeying among the pupils themselves. The British students, for their part, claimed never to study: “Who, moi? Exams. I can’t be bothered. These papers are merely necessary evils, like putting up with the weather.” The foreigners, for their part, claimed only to study: “Exams. Comme tragique! I never leave my rooms. Cambridge is the hardest university in the world.” Both of these lines struck me as equally absurd, but the self-professed disdain of the natives only seemed to heighten the self-induced delirium of the outlanders, especially those from the Developing World, many of whom mistook British arrogance for a thorough grasp of the material.
Finally, the strangest aspect of preparing for the exams proved to be the process of maneuvering through the academic mindfield of the U.L., the University Library. The library system at the University of Cambridge is the school’s most prominent memorial to the nineteenth century and, I suspect, was probably the inspiration for Oxford don Lewis Carroll’s mind-bending wonderland. To begin with, books in the library are primarily divided into categories not by subject but by size. That means that folio books on, say, the history of Japan are placed in one section—Fourth Floor, South Wing, Front—while quarto books on this same subject are located in a completely different section—Third Floor, Mezzanine, North Wing, Back—and octavos, duodecimos, and other odd sizes are kept on restricted shelves under lock and key and can only be obtained by receiving written permission from the head librarian. As if this arrangement were not enough of a disincentive, most students who use the library are forbidden to check out books. The authorities have tried to compensate for this inconvenience by allowing patrons to pluck any number of books they wish from the shelves, place these books on any table in the building, and with a simple signature reserve these books for their private use. The result of this policy is that during exam time there are often more books on the tables than on the shelves, and, as everyone except the librarians might have anticipated, the books in one subject, say international law, find themselves magically transported from their original location where other students might discover them and relocated to a totally unrelated area such as Arab nationalism or animal husbandry. Last and certainly least efficient of all, the number of hours that the library is open is only slightly greater than that of the average ban
k. Thus, if a student six weeks before an exam is clairvoyant enough to know the size of a book for which he is searching, and if that student is fortunate enough to find that book on the mostly uninhabited shelves, then that student will have the opportunity to peruse the pages of that hallowed tome to his mind’s content—but only until suppertime on weekdays, only until lunchtime on Saturdays, and not at all on Sundays, when he should be reading the Scripture in church (Ground Floor, South Apse, Front Pew, Kneel).
Day One began in earnest. The first question I answered was in Section E, International Law. We had ten options to choose from; I chose Number 8: “Discuss the legal rules governing the use of armed force in international relations.” The essay was fairly straightforward. “The use of armed force in international affairs can represent both the greatest failure and the greatest achievement of international law,” I began. Using the current war as a case study, I walked through the various restrictions against invading another country as well as the regulations governing the use of force in the U.N. charter. Whenever possible I tried to mix in as many legal terms as I could, such as jus ad bellum (the laws that govern going to war) and jus in bello (the laws that govern warfare), and drop in as many official figures, such as the number of the Security Council resolution authorizing the Korean War (S/1501; 25 June 1950). To end I reached for a resounding conclusion: “At its best, international law is capable of endorsing armed conflict as a means of promoting peace and security; at its everyday worst, however, the law remains an impotent reminder of the lack of justice in international affairs.” My style no doubt gave me away as a moralizing American, but at the height of that moment I actually believed what I wrote and, more important, at the end of the first day I started to believe that I might have learned something in the preceding months, despite having slept through most of my lectures.