UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Ex-Editorial
By PETERUNWIN. (Christ Church, Oxford) THIS week-end I am face to face with the fact that I am a has-been. To edit Oxford Tory for a term brings two months of notoriety in a clique within a clique. It is by general consent the worst magazine in Oxford, and, though the editor conventionally disagrees with such a verdict, he is lucky if he can establish his disinterestedness. This term I tried to argue that Oxford Guardian had filched Tory's ultimate place in Oxford political journalism, but I faced polite suspen- sion of belief: it is not that the editor of Tory is a liar, but merely that he is prone to an occupational disease.
An editor of Tory, then, has little honour even in his own university. There are the ardent Conservatives who introduce one at parties as the editor of that magazine, but they are parties one ought to have the sense to avoid. There are, too, those non-politicals who have never heard of it, and they are perhaps the better company; they are certainly easier to talk to than the Socialists who rate Tory on a par with the Federa- tion of British Industries. But, on the whole, Oxford does not care about Tory; when it does, its hostility is blatant and, admittedly, justified. It is a magazine which brings its editor notoriety and little else, and to be ejected after two issues makes one even less desirable than one's predecessor who kept it for four.
Ejected is the wrong word, and in using it I am not doing myself justice. The truth is that I resigned, that I went before they threw me out. But resignation is too dull for Oxford, and the violence of my going is to most of my acquaintances the only interesting feature in the fact that I went at all. There are friends who agree that the liberty of the Press must be defended against censorship, that the "old guard" must be resisted, that I chose a path of honour which led into the wilderness. But ejection is better news-value; and as an ejected editor I stand.
As an ex-editor one has the time to enjoy whatever publicity comes one's way. I no longer spend hours in the labour of bringing forth -a typical Tory headline, monosyllabic, glaring, meaningless. I am beginning to forget the misery of forging correspondence to fill the letter-page. I can look at Gill letter- ing with pleasure, without the analysis of: "How many point?" I have time to read the books Tory begged for review, and which alone among the archives I refuse to pass to my succes- sor. Someone else is chasing the Union report; someone else will in time receive the cryptic printer's notes which for the last month have come to me; someone else can compose polite replies to the rare and ineffectual literary offering. But some- one else has succeeded to the dubious title that was mine, and the shaft of jealousy goes deep.
The squabble in which Oxford Tory had a part achieved a quarter-column in the Manchester Guardian, was ended by mutual agreement and has gone to the limbo of unreality where undergraduates go if they die before they take schools. It was not a squabble which would bear resurrection here. But it had a raucous week's existence before they smothered it in a flow of platitudes to keep the Press quiet. It was the sort of story Tory would have enjoyed if only we could have covered it. We had thought of the headlines, and the articles themselves could have been turned out to fit them. We had thought of the blurb for the front cover, and we had contemplated rising cir- culation. It might have been as good a Tory as its reputation allows Tory to be; it might have made a story which someone would have read; but they smothered it, with the squabble, in a flow of platitudes to keep the Press quiet. In a moment of surprise and pride I understood that Tory was numbered among the Press, that authority was treating Tory as an in- fluence, as a magazine responsible for its actions. I was proud of Tory, and then I fell from it before the committee turned, as they would have done, to drive me out. Now Tory reverts to respectability and a gossip column, and an editor who pleases the committee, and I am a has-been whose fame, even whose notoriety, is dimming, whose memory will be cold on Monday.
To edit Tory was fun while it lasted, and realism tells me that it could not have lasted long. I was struck, like a famous judge, "by the many-sidedness of truth "; what seemed the truth to me the committee thought nearly libellous. I might argue that they wanted to prevent my printing the truth, but they believed I was printing insults; and, as there were so many of them, the chances are that they were right and I was wrong, that my side of many-sided truth was the wrong one. In any case they won, and now they have an editor who can unite truth and respectability as I failed to do.
It is invidious to remain a mere ex-editor for long. At the end of this term Tory will constitutionally have another, more recent ex-editor, to steal my thunder and criticise his succes- sor. The problem is to find something fresh to do. It is as well, when beginning the new, to have the springboard of what one has done, and in the recent squabble the life went out of the Tory springboard. To be an ejected editor is to be compared only with martyrdom, and the best part of my martyrdom is waning. Having died for my interpretation of the truth. I have to fill the gap before physical death. There is no debate in the Union on the liberty of the Press; philo- sophical examination of Truth is beyond me, Tory is no train- ing-ground for /sis, and I lack an actor's figure. Absorption in one's work is th stock solution for those who are crossed in love and journalism, but Tory's allusive editorials have spoilt me for Modern History and, as my tutor tells me, the raw material of history is missing in a mind that finds facts elusive and dates impossible.
Business and the Foreign Office are traditionally the escape of the unsuccessful, but they call severally for the ability to add, to talk French or. in the absence of these first -two quali- fications, for a second-class degree. Tory accounts I never understood, though I once achieved a mental surplus of 5s. 9d. Foreign languages Tory avoids like the devil, for it aims at a readership like the Daily Mail's. A degree remains in pros- pect, it is true, but after Tory's distractions dare one hope for more than a third ? Prospects are poor and—as Tory never admitted—unemployment figures are going up. Ex-editors, it seems, are unemployables; my one asset is that my advertise- ment in the agony column of The Times will at least be gram- matical. If I had edited Tory all this term, even grammar would have been beyond me.
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