Sad

For a decade or so bridging the 1980s and 90s, until we had children and I went part-time, I was a member of the Executive Committee of the local branch of the academic trade union, then known as the AUT, at Southampton University. Those were difficult years for the trade union movement, and also for higher education: at times it felt as if we were at war with the zeitgeist, and as a result there was a high level of commitment and camaraderie among the activist members of our union. It was the same everywhere: when I attended national-level meetings as a representative of the so-called "academic-related staff" (librarians, administrators, and so on) the sense of embattlement was very real. Both government and the top management of many universities were clearly out to change things radically, but as we thought – rightly – in a bad way and for the worst possible reasons. So I was taken aback to discover recently that one of my old comrades from those days, a particularly effective President and Secretary, is now Sir Ian, ex-Vice Chancellor of Aberdeen University, and the National Statistician, no less.

There's no law against a poacher turning gamekeeper, of course, but the desire and pursuit of eminence is a curious hobby, and quite alien to most of us. Certainly, I was brought up in a family where the simple morality of working-class Baptism could be boiled down to: be nice; don't show off; be suspicious of hierarchies and self-proclaimed authorities; trust that everything and everyone has a purpose, but that it's not up to you to decide what that is. When it came to worldly aspirations, to become a teacher was about as far as anyone could see. At school I was quickly recognised as one of the brighter kids, but my teachers were good people of limited horizons, whose expectations and moral foundations were much the same as those at home. Nobody ever whispered in my ear, "One day, my lad, you could be Sir Michael, Lord Stevenage, ruler of the world!" Which was probably a very good thing. I have never wanted to be the boss of anything, or felt that my abilities, such as they are, entitled or obliged me to make any such claim.

Desire and pursuit are not necessarily linked, and it suits the purposes of those who would rule us to separate the two. It's widely acknowledged that one of the main motivating engines of our society is the constant stimulation of a free-floating desire, which is only ever temporarily satiated by material consumption. As a result, there are an awful lot of people who feel they want something quite badly, but have little or no idea what it might be. The idea of fame has substituted itself as a sort of consumer-lite version of genuine achievement. It seems many children, asked what they want to do with their lives, answer, "I want to be famous!", as if fame were a job description. Which, to an extent, I suppose, it has become.

In old age, this inchoate desire seems to transmute into a nagging sense that one might have done more with one's life. Which is almost always true. I expect even David Attenborough sometimes regrets the years he wasted making those TV programmes, when he could have finished his postgraduate degree at LSE and gone on to do some serious academic work. I'm no more immune to this than anyone else, so there I was the other day, reading an article in the TLS which considered the steep decline and fall of most boxing careers [1], when a quote from Matthew Arnold, of all people, delivered a stinging left jab. It was this:

It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits – and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself.

Now, I'm happy to put my hand up to a certain measure of under-achievement – I'm a lazy man, with a tendency to daydream, and an instinctive aversion to self-promotion – but this has never struck me as sad. It's who I am: I was never going to be anybody else. No, Arnold is transparently talking about himself: he is the poet laureate of anyone who had natural abilities that somehow failed to thrive, particularly if starved by deliberate neglect. Auden's sonnet on Arnold asserts, memorably: "He thrust his gift in prison till it died". He did give poetry a good go when young, and published what would in time prove to be some of the most enduring literature of the 19th century. However, his efforts came in for some snarky contemporary criticism and so, given that he doubted his own true capacities in that regard anyway, he gave it all up for a proper job. A trajectory that will be familiar to many, and which, again, does not strike me as remotely "sad". The world has a far greater need for school inspectors (Arnold's choice of career) than for poets.

Matthew Arnold and I have history, I should point out. He – or rather his poetry – featured heavily in my school sixth form English studies. I was introduced to his glum Victorian worldview at that sensitive age when your view of what poetry is all about – and indeed what life is all about – is being formed by the diet put in front of you. Seventeen-year-olds should only be exposed to the sophisticated but dubious pleasures of despair and self-repression, Arnold-style, with a certain caution, I think. Arnold's poetry, like that of so many Victorian poets, exudes existential sadness like a contagion. A too-early acquaintance with the pleasing melancholy of middle-aged regret can warp our expectations of life's outcomes, by pre-preparing us for disappointment and failure [2]. A not entirely unrealistic forecast, of course, but why get the Bad News so early in life? Arnold is best-known for a single poem, the anthology standard "Dover Beach", a sonorous groan of despair at the decline of the age of religious faith. It is without doubt a very good poem but, once you have discovered that in all probability it re-enacts a solemn but histrionic monologue delivered to his wife in a Dover hotel room on their honeymoon, it becomes irrevocably hilarious. As well as conflicted and sad, two rather more characteristic Arnoldian emotions.

Our criteria for success and failure are set very early on in life, I think. I've written before how a friend and I had been unprepared by our family backgrounds or education to grasp the nature of the opportunity that had been put in our path by being admitted to an Oxford college (also Arnold's college, as it happens) that has long acted as the launch-pad for eminent lives. For us, a solid public-service career in education or the Civil Service with a final-salary, index-linked pension scheme was the ultimate goal, Plan A, not a fallback position: it would represent a major step up in our family stories. Yes, we might have entertained fantasies about alternative lives as writers or musicians or artists, but failure – an almost certain outcome, in retrospect – would have been catastrophic, and to have taken that risk would have been the sort of folly only the exceptionally brave (or irredeemably strange) can contemplate: working-class families have no safety nets to cushion the fall of their crash-and-burn casualties. So success was measured by securing that job and doing it as well as possible, sustained over the course of thirty-plus years, with a bit of writing, music, and art on the side. A very ordinary and possibly underpowered set of ambitions, perhaps, but the bar seemed high enough, and it was gratifying to have cleared it comfortably and in fine style.

True, I came nowhere near being the person I fantasised I might become in my teenage moonage daydream years. But who does? I'd bet even Tony Blair still poses in front of the mirror with his Fender. Which must be a sad spectacle, indeed, in the more contemporary sense of the word. But what if those other, bolder, riskier choices had paid off? What if, instead of crashing and burning as a writer or artist, I had soared, reached escape velocity, and left the ordinary life of a "civilian" far behind? Well, I imagine that – in the very unlikely event that those bolder, riskier choices had paid off – it would have felt pretty good. I imagine that it would have seemed like the just reward for being a truly special person, a golden exception to the general rule; justified, even, in a quasi-religious sense. Dangerous stuff. But I also wonder if, looking back, it would have felt good enough to compensate for the trail of wreckage and hurt that seems to accompany the self-centredness of prominent creative lives? I'm also pretty sure that even to wonder about that is to understand why one was never in the running in the first place.

More mundanely, there was always the route of the dedicated careerist, of course, seeking serial promotions into the most elevated senior ranks of the professions, where the honours come up with the rations, as my dad would have said. But, just as Groucho Marx didn't want to join any club that would have him as a member, I had no desire to lead any organisation that would have had me as its boss. Besides, I never once dreamed about living that sort of sober-sided, grey-suited lifestyle, learning to conduct a committee like a string ensemble, or how to compose the definitive position paper. Again, what sort of person does? "Sad" doesn't begin to cover it.

Of course, I did have the unfair advantage that no-one had ever whispered in my ear, "One day, my lad, you could be Sir Michael, Lord Stevenage, ruler of the world!" But is that really how extreme ambition arises in otherwise normal-seeming folk? I wouldn't know, obviously. Do some schools run special extreme-level careers-advice sessions? Or perhaps it's genetically pre-programmed into alpha types? Do some more modest people get talked into it by their exceedingly ambitious partners, à la Macbeth? Or maybe they get blackmailed by shadowy "black ops" agents, seeking to corrupt the workings of the state from within? Who knows? Perhaps, if we ever meet again, I should ask my old AUT comrade when and how it all started to go so horribly wrong for him, after such a promising start in the awkward squad. After all, nobody ends up as a university vice-chancellor or taking a knee in front of Her Madge by accident, do they? It seems a fair enough question to ask, on a par with, "So why on earth did you decide to get your face tattooed?" But I expect he wouldn't even remember who I am by now, after chairing so many committee meetings and drafting so many position papers, and might even have me escorted from the building by security. Now that would be sad.

1. TLS July 10 2020: "In the hurt business: The rise and fall of ‘The Fighting Jew’", By Declan Ryan.

2. Whether the close reading of gloomy poetry at an impressionable age might actually induce self-doubt and inner conflict or merely exacerbates pre-existing tendencies it's impossible to say, but I suppose, in this ultra-cautious age, someone somewhere might feel inclined to run a proper randomised, double-blind case-study to determine the truth of the matter: "Can Victorian poetry destroy a child's life-chances?". Meanwhile, a precautionary ban on the teaching of Tennyson is surely the only wise course of action.