I have no idea what kind of figure I cut. Well, no that's not true. I am afraid I have all too clear an idea of what kind of a figure I cut. My typical mode of dress was a Harris tweed jacket with leather buttons, Viyella shirt and knitted tie, V-neck lambswool sweater, corduroy trousers of lovat green and brown half-brogue shoes polished to a high gloss. With my trademark flop of hair and a pipe clamped between my teeth I looked like what I of course had been all the previous year, an assistant master from a small rural prep school, perhaps with something of the air of a Second World War back-room boffin. Whatever impression I gave it certainly wasn't that of a hip young rocker in the age of The Clash and The Damned.
Chess, Classics, Classical Composers, Curiosity and Cheating
It turned out that Queens' did indeed have two deans, a Dean of Chapel, and a Dean in charge of discipline. At each of the first-week decanal sherry parties I found myself falling into conversation with a first-year called Kim Harris. He was handsome in a way that reminded me of a young Richard Burton and radiated a powerful mixture of severity, secrecy, relish and surprise that I could not but find intriguing. Like me he was separated from other freshers by appearing on the one hand more mature and adult while on the other exhibiting an unembarrassedly high doctrine of what Cambridge ought to be. He was educated, I soon discovered, at Bolton School, an independent day school that a generation or two earlier had thrown Ian McKellen at Cambridge and a grateful world. Kim had come to Queens' to read Classics. He dressed rather like me but in Church's full brogues and V-necks of the purest and priciest cashmere. He was even capable of wearing a bowtie without looking absurd, which is a very great human skill indeed. We became instant friends in the way that only the young can. We did not consider going to any party or event except in each other's company.
'Are you gay?' I asked him quite early on.
'Let's just say that I know what I like,' was his prim and opaque reply.
Kim Harris. Not unlike a young blond Richard Burton.
Aside from his proficiency at Latin and Greek Kim had another skill and at a level of brilliance that seemed to me to be quite superhuman. He was a chess Master. At Bolton he had played with, and to some extent mentored, Nigel Short, who was already becoming well known as the greatest prodigy England had ever produced. At the age of ten Short had beaten the great Viktor Korchnoi and now at fourteen was on the verge of becoming the youngest International Master in history. Kim was 'just' a Master, but that meant he was skilful enough to play blindfold, a trick I never tired of urging him to perform. Without any sight of the board he would demolish all comers.
When I first saw him do this it reminded me to raise a point with him.
'Kim,' I said, 'when we very first met at one of those sherry parties I remember we looked at a chessboard in the Dean's rooms, and I asked you if you played chess.'
'So you did.'
'And do you remember what you replied?'
Kim raised his eyebrows. 'I don't think so.'
'You said, "Let's just say, I know the moves." '
'Well, I do.'
'You know a bit more than the moves,' I said.
'Your point being?'
'My point being, if that's how you answer someone who asks you if you play chess, how am I to interpret it when you answer the question, "Are you gay?" with the words "Let's just say, I know what I like"?'
Kim's family was well off, and they lavished upon their only son every imaginable luxury, including a magnificent Bang and Olufsen stereo system on which Kim played Wagner. And sang to Wagner. And conducted Wagner. And lived Wagner.
I had fallen for Wagner's music myself when young but I had never penetrated the mysteries of the full works. Aside from anything else I had never been able to afford the huge box sets. As well as Lohengrins and Meistersingers and a Parsifal or two Kim had two complete Ring cycles on record: Karl Bohm's live Bayreuth recording and the great Decca studio production of the Solti Ring, one of the masterpieces of the gramophone age. I know how bored and restless people become at talk of Wagner so I won't dwell on him at length. Let it just be said that Kim completed my Wagnerian education, and for that alone I would be grateful to him for ever.
He and I and a friend of his from Bolton called Peter Speak, who was reading Philosophy, would sit around discovering late nineteenth-century masterpieces over which to go into ecstasies. Strauss, Schoenberg, Brahms, Mahler and Bruckner were our gods and Kim's B&O our temple.
Given that Britain was boiling with anarchic post-punk creativity, the political excitements of multiple strikes and the election of Margaret Thatcher to the leadership of the Conservative Party, that there was rubbish piling up on the streets, corpses going unburied and inflation rocketing skywards, given all that, a knot of tweedy Cambridge late adolescents gasping at the wonder of Strauss's Metamorphosis and Schoenberg's Transfigured Night seems ... seems what? Perfectly legitimate. Entirely in accordance with what education is supposed to be. Education is the sum of what students teach each other in between lectures and seminars. You sit in each other's rooms and drink coffee - I suppose it would be vodka and Red Bull now - you share enthusiasms, you talk a lot of wank about politics, religion, art and the cosmos and then you go to bed, alone or together according to taste. I mean, how else do you learn anything, how else do you take your mind for a walk? Nonetheless, I'm slightly shocked at how earnest and dull a picture I present in my tweed jacket and corduroys, puffing at a pipe and listening to all that German Late Romantic noise. Is that where it all went wrong? Or is that where it all went right?
There is that in student life which reinforces the connection between the words 'university' and 'universal'. All divisions of life are there, and all the circles and sodalities, coteries and cliques that you will find in the wider human cosmos can be found in the swirling flux of young people who shape and define a university for the three or four years of their tenancy.
Whenever I return to Cambridge I wander the familiar streets as a stranger. I know and love the architecture intimately, but while the chapels and colleges, courts, bridges and towers are what they have always been, Cambridge is entirely different each time. You cannot step into the same river twice, observed Heraclitus, for fresh water is always flowing over you. You cannot step into the same Cambridge twice, or the same Bristol, or Warwick, or Leeds or any such place, for fresh generations are for ever repopulating and redefining them. The buildings are frozen, but a university is not its buildings, it is those that inhabit and use them.
I discovered brilliant people and dunces and everything in between. There were the lively and there were the preternaturally dull. Every imaginable special interest was represented. You could spend your three years as an undergraduate on sports fields and never know there were any theatres. You could involve yourself in politics and be wholly unaware of orchestras or choirs. You could hunt with beagle packs, sail, dance, play bridge, build a computer or tend a garden. Just as you can at hundreds of universities, of course. It is only that Cambridge has the advantage of being both bigger and smaller than most. Smaller because you are in a college of perhaps 300; bigger because the whole university numbers over 20,000, which confers some sort of an advantage when it comes to audiences and participants in sport and drama, readership circulations for magazines and captive markets for all sorts of enterprises and undertakings.
I need not, of course, have worried that I would be quizzed and found wanting on the subject of Russian poets or the principles of particle physics; the fear proved groundless that I would find myself in such rarefied heights of academic brilliance that I would be unable to breathe.
To do well at exams (in the field of literature and the arts at least) it is better to be a hedgehog than a fox, if I can borrow Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction. In other words, it is better to know one big thing than lots of smaller things. A point of view, a single way of thinking that encompasses all elements of a subject, allows essays more or less to write themselves. The way to pass exams is to ch
eat. I cheated all the way through my three years at Cambridge. Which is not to say that I looked at the work of the student next to me, or that I brought in outside material from which to crib. I cheated by knowing in advance exactly what I was going to write before the invigilator bid us turn over the question sheets and started the clock. I had a theory of Shakespearean tragic and comic forms, for example, which I won't bore you with and which is probably specious, or at least no more truthful or persuasive an overall interpretation of Shakespeare's forms than any other. Its virtue was that it answered any question and yet always appeared to be specific. I had found part of it in an essay by Anne Barton (nee Righter). She is a fine Shakespearean scholar, and I filleted and regurgitated some of her ideas for both Parts One and Two of the tripos (Cambridge calls its degree examination the tripos, something to do with the three-legged stool on which students used to sit when taking them). In both of the Shakespeare papers I got a First. In fact in Part Two it was the top First for the entire university. It was essentially the same essay each time. It only takes a paragraph at the top to twist the question such that your essay answers it. Let's say, in simple terms, that my essay proposes that Shakespeare's comedies, even the 'Festive' ones, play with being tragedies while his tragedies play with being comedies. The point is that you can trot this essay out no matter what the question. 'Shakespeare's real voice is in his comedies': Discuss. 'King Lear is Shakespeare's only likeable tragic hero': Discuss. 'Shakespeare outgrew his comedies.' 'Shakespeare put his talent into his comedies and his genius into his tragedies.' 'Tragedies are adolescent, comedies are adult.' 'Shakespeare cares about gender, but not about sex.' Discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss. I did, of course, no such vulgar thing as discuss. All my ducks were in a row when I walked into the examination hall and I had to do no more than point their beaks at the question.
Of course, having a good memory helped ... I had enough quotations in my head, both from the works and from Shakespearean critics and scholars, to be able to pepper my essay with acute references. So creepily good was that memory that I was always able to include Act, Scene and Line numbers for every play quotation or to place in brackets the source and date of any critical reference I cited (Witwatersrand Review, Vol. 3, Sept. 75, ed. Jablonski, Yale Books, 1968, that sort of thing). I am aware that to be given a good memory at birth is worth more than almost any other accomplishment but I believe too that it is as rare for one person to be born with a physically better memory as it is for them to be born with better fingers or better legs. There are young men and women up and down the land who happily (or unhappily) tell anyone who will listen that they don't have an academic turn of mind, or that they aren't lucky enough to have been blessed with a good memory, and yet can recite hundreds of pop lyrics and reel off any amount of information about footballers, cars and celebrities. Why? Because they are interested in those things. They are curious. If you are hungry for food you are prepared to hunt high and low for it. If you are hungry for information it is the same. Information is all around us, now more than ever before in human history. You barely have to stir or incommode yourself to find things out. The only reason people do not know much is because they do not care to know. They are incurious. Incuriosity is the oddest and most foolish failing there is.
Picture the world as being a city whose pavements are covered a foot deep in gold coins. You have to wade through them to make progress. Their clinking and rattling fills the air. Imagine that you met a beggar in such a city.
'Please, give me something. I am penniless.'
'But look around you,' you would shout. 'There is gold enough to last you your whole life. All you have to do is to bend down and pick it up!'
When people complain that they don't know any literature because it was badly taught at school, or that they missed out on history because on the timetable it was either that or biology, or some such ludicrous excuse, it is hard not to react in the same way.
'But it's all around you!' I want to scream. 'All you have to do it bend down and pick it up!' What on earth people think their lack of knowledge of the Hundred Years War, or Socrates, or the colonization of Batavia has to do with school I have no idea. As one who was expelled from any number of educational establishments and never did any work at any of them, I know perfectly well that the fault lay not in the staff but in my self that I was ignorant. Then one day, or over the course of time, I got greedy. Greedy to know things, greedy for understanding, greedy for information. I was always to some extent like that robot Number 5 in the movie Short Circuit who whizzes about shrieking, 'Input! Input!' Memorizing for me became like eating Sugar Puffs, an endless stuffing of myself.
I do not say that this hunger for learning was morally, intellectually or stylistically admirable. I think it was a little like ambition, a little like many of the later failings in my life we will come to: membership of so many clubs, ownership of so many credit cards ... it was part of wanting to belong, of feeling the need constantly to connect myself. Rather vulgar, rather pushy.
While the manner and motives of it may not have been magnificent the end result was certainly useful. The urgent desire to pack the mind, my insatiable curiosity and appetite for knowledge led to all kinds of advantages. Facile exam passing was one such. I had never found written tests under time pressure anything other than enjoyable and easy. That is because of my fundamental dishonesty. I never tried to engage authentically or truthfully with an intellectual issue or to answer a question. I only tried to show off and in the course of my life I have met few people who are my equal at that undignified art. There are plenty who are more obviously show-offy than I am, but that is what is so creepy about my particular brand of exhibitionism - I mask it in a cloak of affable modesty and touching false diffidence. To be less hard on myself, I think these displays of affability, modesty and diffidence may once have been false but have now become pretty much real, in much the same way that the conscious manner we decide to sign our names in our teens will slowly stop being affected and become our real signature. The mask if worn long enough will be the face.
All of which seems a long way from a memoir of university life, which is what this chapter is supposed to offer. The life of a student however, especially that of a more than usually self-conscious student in an institution like Cambridge, does involve a great deal of questioning of the mind and intellectual faculties and the meaning and purpose of scholarship, so I think it right to try and fathom what my mind was about in those days.
I went to three lectures in my entire three years. I can remember only two, but I am sure I went to another. The first was an introductory talk on Langland's Piers Plowman by J. A. W. Bennett, who had been installed as C. S. Lewis's successor in the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in 1963 and seemed old enough to have lived through much of the period of which he had made himself a master. His lecture was a monumentally dull explanation of why the B-text of Piers Plowman (an achingly long work of Middle English allegorical alliterative verse) was more to be relied upon than the C-text, or possibly the other way around. Professor Bennett begged leave to disagree with W. W. Skeat on the issue of the A-text's rendering of the Harrowing of Hell, blah-di-blah-di-blah ...
That was enough for me. I knew that five minutes in the faculty library would let me dig up a rare enough article in the Sewanee Review or similar to furnish fodder for an essay. Lectures broke into one's day and were clearly a terrible waste of time. Necessary no doubt if you were reading Law or Medicine or some other vocational subject, but in the case of English the natural thing to do was to talk a lot, listen to music, drink coffee and wine, read books and go to plays.
Perhaps be in plays?
I regularly get letters from aspiring actors or their parents asking for advice. If I get lots, you can imagine how many Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, Simon Russell Beale, David Tennant and other legitimate actors must get. The phrase 'crowded profession' is used more for the acting business than for any other I ever heard of a
nd for good reason.
As in so many fields in life there are people out there longing to be given a secret, a way-in, a technique. I can understand it absolutely. Almost as common as the phrase 'crowded profession'; are phrases that express the idea of 'just need a break' and 'not what you know, but who you know'. I am excluding, for the time being, the whole issue of fame and concentrating exclusively on those who actually care about acting in and of itself: I expect we will come to those who obsess about the ancillary 'benefits' of red-carpet recognition and celebrity magazine coverage later.
The letter-writers want to know the best way to achieve a foothold in the acting profession. All that is required, they know, is a chance, one opportunity to shine: their talent, industry and commitment will do the rest. They know, the world knows, how much luck has to do with it. They may have heard about some young striver who wrote a letter to an established actor and got a role as a walk-on in a film, or an audition, or a place at a drama school as a result.