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Kingsley Amis once asked a fellow- Oxonian 'a terrible question': 'What has Oxford taught you that Cambridge couldn't?' The answer was, 'Not to be afraid of the obvious' — apt if not obvious, and persuasively justified by Mr Amis in these pages. He cites the Oxonian Lord David Cecil as a doughty champion of the obvious. 'He'll tell you that Swift writes with savage indignation or that Words- worth turned his back on the poetic diction of the 18th century, and you've got to get through these stages of thinking before you get anywhere else. Cambridge tries to avoid that sort of stuff.'
Mr Amis mentions the Oxford Book of Christian Verse. The old edition, edited by Lord David, had all the obvious ones in it, 'Rugby Chapel' and a lot of Christina Rossetti. A new edition by Donald Davie from Cambridge left the obvious out — 'he didn't even give us "In the Bleak Midwin- ter": I can almost hear Mr Amis's scornful snort as he launches another trenchant more-means-worse dictum: 'The reason why the "obvious" is obvious is because it's better.' Professor Davie, dismiss!
Strange to relate, Mr Amis seems to me on the page before in flagrant breach of his own ruling. 'Oxford', he claims, 'has pro- duced more poets' than Cambridge which, if true, is hardly obvious. Does he perhaps mean recently, in our day, in the persons of his own favourite poets, all Oxonians, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin, Robert Graves, Roy Fuller? I think not, since he's quite ready to `go back to Tennyson to find a Cambridge poet for you'. Well, you don't have to go back much further to find some very obvious Cambridge poets indeed — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Gray, Milton, Marvell for a start. But there, since Mr Amis knows infinitely more about poetry than I do, I can only suppose that, in the excitement of being interviewed by the pushy, energetic Mr Whitley, he mis- expressed himself or that, touchy as we Cantabs are, I have misconstrued him.
What was Mr Whitley up to? Not long down from Oxford himself, he thought it a good wheeze to interview all sorts of well-known Oxonians about their Oxford days and in fact about everything under the sun. No one accepted first time off. Philip Larkin found his letters 'tiresome', Mrs Thatcher refused politely by proxy. But he managed in the end to land such catches as, in order of seniority at Oxford, Sir Harold Acton, the Marquess of Bath, Lord Long- ford, Anthony Powell, Sir John Betjeman, Indira Gandhi, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis, Cardinal Hume, John Mortimer, Sir Robin Day, John Schlesinger, Sir Roger
Obvious and shocking
Conn Welch
THE GRADUATES by Edward Whitley Hamish Hamilton, £12.95 Bannister, Bob Hawke, Michael Hesel- tine , Dudley Moore, Peter Jay, Richard Ingrams, David Dimbleby, Auberon Waugh, Martin Amis, Michael Patin, Di- ana Quick, Charles Sturridge, Tina Brown and William Boyd.
I have a slight prejudice against 'gim- mick' books of this kind. So you can probably believe me when I say that this one does come off. Why? Well, most of the lions interrogated are fascinating in them- selves, though there is a certain deteriora- tion (not least in the language, which would astonish an RSM) towards the end, with more and more show-biz personalities who read English at Oxford (though most of them are properly ashamed of that). Such mayflies ripen and perish early. If some of them are who-he?s to me now in my senescent Stocktonian innocence, some, alas, may be who-he?s also to my grandchildren.
And then there are Mr Whitley's own qualities — a lively, unprejudiced mind, insatiable curiosity, cheek, an ability to laugh at his own gaffes and bloomers, a disrespectful enjoyment of words, display- ing itself in bold new coinages, outrageous similes and felicitous transcriptions of accents. 'Is Hizel out of that blaady shiwer yit?' roars the approaching Mr Hawke; then, 'mind if I smike?'. Hasn't the de- scription of Mr Hawke's word-seeking pauses, one of them long enough to boil a kettle, a touch even of Amis in it? 'I leant forward in astonishment. Mr Hawke seemed to have started an elaborate imper- sonation of a sleep-walking pilot at the controls of a run-away aeroplane. In slowest motion his hands fumbled for all sorts of switches inches from his face.' At last the word came. 'It was an exhausting performance. He crashed out behind a large puffball of smoke, apparently fast asleep. It was a hard act to follow.' Mr Whitley's questioning irritated Mr Heseltine, who doesn't come out well. A total immersion in politics is interesting or not according to the quality of the mind immersed, and Mr Heseltine's, like Mrs Gandhi's, is not of the right calibre. Car- dinal Hume brought his interview to an abrupt end, but not before he had display- ed a testy intolerance and seemingly wilful bewilderment which I found astonishing. What did he expect from Mr Whitley? WhY did he agree to see him at all? Mr Whitley's interrogation also has the power to elicit sense and wisdom not only from the sensible and wise but also from people like Diana Quick. She extrudes, true, obligatory modish claptrap about explicit sex, David Hare (not 'cliched box office', it seems; would 'cliched anti-box office' do better?) and Oxford being a 'wank'. But she recovers at intervals elo- quently to excoriate the Oxford English school Call received wisdom', though among the wisdom she received is not the correct use of 'hopefully'), actors talking about acting ('hopeless') and the National Theatre buildings ('designed by commit' tees . . . a nightmare . . . fucked up in every way'). Mr Schlesinger also talks shit (as he would call it) about shocking audiences out of their apathy, shaking them all up a bit, and about 'certain things', inevitably aber- rant or offensive, which 'need saying'. A mildly hysterical woman rang up during the interview. Mr Schlesinger listened at first in silence, then decided what needed saying: 'Now listen. There are three words you should use in a situation like this whiei,h I find very useful and use a lot . . • Ric' off, cunt'. The trouble about shocking and shaking is surely how to go on shocking and shaking repeatedly. After the first full homosexual kiss, for instance, of which Mr_ Schlesinger is so naively proud, what nextY Apathy digests what shocked it last time and resumes its complacent reign, tolerat- ing one more outrage or affront. As vvith, drug fixes, ever bigger shocks are require° till the capacity to be shocked is eventuallY anaesthetised or killed. Yet even Mr Schle- singer is sound on what he knows about --- how to film Russia, for instance, hi Dundee.
johDneeBpleytimemovainn tihs etnhenienaterv rdieeawthwit!Ifilluil.
then he fell silent. "I am not a scholar. • • not even in this hot weather do I want to go to Oxford to see it, or. . ." And again he fell through the middle of a sentence lik.e some huge beetle falling over onto its ,bacK and lying there tired of getting up. He recited Youth and Age on Beaulieu River 'carefully, like a blind man feeling some- one's face'.
Difficult to pick out gems from such a sackful. Sir Robin Day, as shrewd and forthright being questioned as questioning, very sharp about the 'drop-out' Ingrams: 'I don't think good professional journalism consists in telling lies about people who may not be able to afford to correct them.' John Mortimer: 'I don't think I've ever taken anything seriously.' Peter Jay: detest being on my own. I detest privacy. I detest silence'; he used to play records of the same Brandenburg concerto 24 times over to mark out his 12-hour working day. Martin Amis inheriting his father's distaste for Beowulf ('Ouch! Christ! Shit!') and firmly declaring that all good writers Should be able to do rational criticism, just as (abstract) painters should 'be able to draw a hand or face' — otherwise `a bit suspect'. Charles Sturridge on televised Dickens: 'where they go wrong is that they pull out the only thing which is interesting in Dickens — which is Dickens — and leave you with some vaguely melodramatic plot which has nothing in it of what you read Dickens for.' This is why Brideshead Revisited on television was 'saturated' with the voice of Ryder and thus indirectly of Waugh.
Tina Brown, I confess, did shock and shake me to an extent Mr Schlesinger might have envied. Of her husband, Harold Evans, once editor of the Times, Whitley remarks, 'He should have kicked Murdoch out.' A very good thing to have done', Miss Brown agrees, and it would have been perhaps possible if Charles Douglas-Home had been 'solid', not Mur- doch's 'tool': 'It was tragic. I mean — if Only Harry had fired Douglas-Home straight away. It was his big mistake . . . I can tell you I fired all the people of this staff [of Vanity Fair] as soon as I arrived. . You have to have a very loyal staff.' By these blood-freezing revelations we are reminded how near the Times was to being denied the best editor it has had, even for a tragically short time, within living memory. Richard Ingrams was disappointed in 1957 to find that Oxford was not full of !ccerilrics, aesthetes and wits, strange uumosexualists and men in flamboyant Clothes — just a lot of men in duffle coats. _ in Cambridge a decade or two earlier he d have found the lot. Outstanding was an epicene aristocrat, mincing, tittering and flapping, whose face was so richly but ihn.expertly made up as to suggest to the istoncally minded the flaking paintwork af Post-revolutionary St Petersburg. But he w. as only the screaming primus inter roar- as pares. Auberon Waugh emphasises the oddity of his Oxford friends, their refusal oty inability to be wholly serious, none of ,llem `the sort of hard-edged, pompous San. d ambitious) person you find at Cam- bridge.' Who, me? Us? Them? Is it just ruffled Cambridge plumage which suggests to me that in the Oddity Stakes and Homosexuals Handicap, as in the Boat Race and the Poets' Plate, fortune favours now the one place, now the other?
Mr Waugh tells `a typical Oxford story' of Lord Curzon as envoy in Paris. 'He was dolled up in his medals and robes and whatnots, waiting in the great hall of the embassy for a banquet to start. He thought that nobody was looking so he started doing a little dance in front of the fireplace, when in fact a child was watching him'. Can Mr Waugh really suppose that we hard-edged, pompous and ambitious per- sons never, thinking ourselves unobserved, do little dances? He further tells of an Oxford friend who raped or nearly raped a girl outside the Bodleian. His excuse to the proctors was that he mistook her for a telephone box. Does Mr Waugh think that no such errors of judgment could take place in the cool clear light of King's Parade? He cannot be wholly serious. But then, Oxford men never are.
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