A tale of two towns

Christopher Booker

My Cambridge introduced by Ronald Hayman, My Oxford introduced by Ann Thwaite (Robson Books £4.75) 'They were good practical little meetings, as I remember, in which we tried to suppress our own vanities, and be of help to each other.' it sounds like the memoirs of a follower of John Bunyan, but is in fact Thom Gunn recalling the meetings of a group of 'Cambridge poets' in the early 'fifties. 'Jasper Ridley (we called him "Bubbles" . . .), discovering me there for the first time, leant down to ask, "What do you think of Tuesdays?" ' It sounds like an extract from Brickshead Revisited, but is in fact Nigel Nicolson recalling a 'brilliant constellation' of Oxford conversationalists of the late 'thirties.

Of all the many attempts made to identify the extraordinary difference between the ethos of university life at that bleak little city in the Fens, and that lived amid 'the last enchantments' of the world of Sebastian Flyte, by far the most durable and revealing is that which goes back three hundred years to the days when Cambridge was the hotbed of earnest, self-righteous Puritanism, and Oxford the haunt of dandyish, self-consciously glittering Cavaliers. It is a difference finely caught by these two remarkably dissimilar books, in which a dozen alumni of each place look back on their university days at different times between the 'twenties and the early 'seventies.

Of the Cambridge volume, the predominant 'tone' (as its presiding genius, Barren Leavis, might observe) is dour, sour and humourless, of 'success-oriented,' unimaginative Roundheads, deeply preoccupied with their own two-dimensional little lives. An essay of keynote bleakness describes how little John Vaizey arrived from St Mildreds Road, Lee, SE 12, with 'an iron will and high ability.' After three years' hard work (only relieved by the solemn pleasure of 'learning how to wine, dine and order in a restaurant') Vaizey goes out into the world 'dedicated to work, self-improvement, the cultivation of the intellect, goodness and truth.'

Donald Davie, another prize depressant (and like far too many of the contributors, a product of the Cambridge English school— what a pity none of them learned how to write English) again hits the nail on the head when he admits 'we Cantabridgian Jeremiahs have the gift of comedy only fitfully or not at all—we are all too often pompous and boring and self-pitying.' Thom Gunn tells us how he wrote 'a series of poems about dejected old men walking through dead leaves.' Raymond Williams takes us on a seemingly interminable odyssey round his succession of dank little lodging houses and meetings of the Cambridge University Socialist Club (yet with relentless bleak egotism tells us how 'years later one of my examiners told me that mine was one of two sets of papers she remembered after many years of examining'—presumably because they were so dull). Simon Gray recalls a Christmas Day spent eating sardines off bread. The three senior contributors, physicist Sir Nevill Mott, Lord Caradon and Muriel Brad' brook, simply put the reader through ordeal by platitude.

After all the diet of Camus, Sartre and grammar-school self-improvement, Etonian Piers Paul Read at least promises a flourish of Oxford 'pseudery,' with his description of the 'light, beautiful, civilised' drawing rooms of Kensington and Belgravia in which he spent nine months before going up, but even he is sucked down by the dank, fenny air into little more significant than 'breakfasts at the Whim' with 'the Ice Cream Set.'

It is left to the youngest contributor, Arianna Stassinopoulos, with a touching description of how she rose from a first, stumbling, Greek-vowelled speech at the Union (when the clerk said 'Thank God, at least we won't have to learn to spell that funny name') to become President, to introduce wit and a sense of wider horizons-with her cracks at Cambridge philosophers and economists (Joan Robinson in her Mao jacket) and a fine little pen-picture of George Steiner ('on his feet Steiner is at his best. All the rococo obscurities of his writings, the gall icisms, the "counter-factualities" and "hermeneutics" go, and there he stands, wearing the full Grand Old Lecturer panoply . .'). Her final list of acknowledgements ('to Mr E. M. Forster for my passions to Mr G. E. Moore for my intellectual frivolity . ..) rounds off the volume on a souffle note quite out of keeping with the solemn tedium of the remainder. In almost total contrast, the 'cavalier fantasy world of Oxford, with its poseurs reading The Waste Land through megaphones after lunching on plovers' eggs, may not be ultimately any more profound, but._ by golly, it is a relief. The two great props of the Oxford fantasy, here recreated with a wealth of often quite improbable anecdote by writers who are, on the whole, in a different league, are memories of nights of de

bauch and exotic eating places (like John

there.

Betjeman's George restaurant 'where

was a band consisting of three ladies' . and where punkahs swayed to and fro, dispelling the smoke of Egyptian and Balkan cigarettes') and larger-than-life eccentric dons..

In recent years so steady has been the driP

of the memoirs of 'twenties Oxford men from the presses that some of these, like `Sligger Urquhart, Humphrey Sumner and that old bore Bowra, have almost become fictional characters in their own right, Jo Grimond, after his first tutorial, was casually Offered by Sumner two volumes he might like to read: 'They appeared to be a detailed study of the Russian railway system as it had affected their dispositions on their Western frontier,' partly in French and with Russian footnotes. A friend of Nigel Nicolson's, after a stay in Bergen, sought to challenge Sumner's omniscience by leading the conversation round to the prospects for Trondheim and Lillehammer in the coming Norwegian football Season: 'he was conversant with er;'er), statistic, the name of every star player.' °b Boot hby was stopped by Namier short!), before his exams with the warning 'it is too late for reading and writing. . . there is now 2111Y one hope. Talking.' To whom?' asked noothby. 'To me' was the reply. While for Nina Bawden, the chief memory of early forties Oxford, 'restored by war to a strange and timeless silence,' was of the 'small, warm, dignified person' of Helen Darbyshire °I,, Somerville, saying, 'Come in dear child' (and also of young Margaret Roberts, later Thatcher, defending her decision to join the Conservative Club because 'the members are a bit dull and stodgy' and there was more chance of being noticed').

It must be admitted that some of the

essays are of an almost Cantabrigian dullnAess—John Mortimer's, for instance, or tIngus Wilson's (recalling how he became 'a member of an exclusive dining club, the MYrMidons, where we wore special violet evening coats and violet ties'). The worst (Oxford's answer to John Vaizey) is that of Antonia Fraser, who begins with the words see it all in terms of clothes,' and in a Parody of Vogue-prose works downward rorri there-1f caught alone. . . it was con y. entional to snatch up a book of poetry Ponne was rather smart).' Alan Coren produces one of those essays in homogenised facetiousness, based on no observation whatever, for which he has become so 1...sattious in Punch (he even refers to 'Lord tillatterley'). And when finally little Martin f‘This arrives, in his 'black velvet suit, my snakeskin boots 'and eagerly patterned Shirts,' to spend three years either working alhlrlally one in his bedsitter or in pursuit of girls (he gets one), we are almost back in the grottY, self-improving, sex-obsessed Wtr9rld of Cambridge. Perhaps the only real 1unit:ill of the 'educational revolution' of

ur time will be, by a process of reduction, to have made one place indistinguishable from the other.