A Literary Discovery

"Never go back" is very wise counsel, especially where school and university reunions are concerned. So, when I was recently invited to a college reunion for the years 1972-76, a black-tie gathering known as a "gaudy" [1] in Oxford-speak, I was quite surprised to discover that several of my friends from that time were actually intending to go, and urged me to accept the invitation, too.

I have to say nothing – NOTHING – could have persuaded me to take part in such an occasion, even accompanied by the very best of good friends and with the promise of an excellent meal and plentiful drink. I have vivid memories from my student days of stumbling over formally-dressed and sometimes elderly men lying face-down in the quad, or having a particularly intense prayer experience on the big white telephone, and I found that whole sybaritic aspect of the Oxbridge experience mystifying, alien, and repellent. So I suggested to my chums that, yes, it would be great to meet up, but couldn't we instead (a) picket the event, so as to honour the true spirit of our time there, and then (b) all go to a restaurant for a nice meal with no dress code and thus avoid the utter pricks who would otherwise be turning up?

Sadly, they were unpersuadable. So I amused myself by imagining that I might turn up anyway to picket the event, standing alone on the hallowed spot by the steps up into the college dining hall where copies of Socialist Worker and Oxford Strumpet [2] were hawked in ancient times. But what sort of printed item might I press into the hands of the dinner-jacketed celebrants? The obvious thing would have been a fire-breathing tract calculated to shame my contemporaries into remembering who they once were, and to cast off the trappings of establishment convention. Repent, ye apostates and black-tied backsliders! But, fortunately, a sense of perspective intervened: nearly all of my old friends are far more politically-engaged these days than me. What right did I have to get on a high horse over the choices they make, however puzzling I might find them? But the only other thing that came to mind was a parody of the poem "Adlestrop" by Edward Thomas that had been buzzing around in my head for a while; not so much a hellfire sermon, then, as a mild-mannered, rather oblique apologia. Well, the choices I have made in my own life can be just as puzzling to me, after all, and have become more, not less so with age. Although I still won't wear a bloody suit or tie, much less formal dinner-wear, as a lifelong follower of the doctrine of principled scruffiness.

Obviously, I didn't actually go and picket – I'm not that much of an attention-seeking idiot – but I did finish the parody, and added some footnotes in the style of those scholarly editions where the annotations exceed the text in length, which I then distributed among my gaudy-bound "private friends" like Shakespeare with his "sugared sonnets", with the sole intention to amuse, rather than accuse. After all, I can't afford to lose any friends at this stage of my life.

But, now that its primary purpose has been fulfilled, and for what it's worth, you too can read it below. It goes without saying, of course, that "Adlestrop" is a poem of the first order, and provides the solid scaffolding without which my effort crumbles into abject dust. Apologies, ET; I meant well.

1. Apparently pronounced to rhyme with "bawdy", despite being derived from the Latin "gaude" (rejoice), and which I had always presumed therefore to rhyme with "Audi". By analogy, one of my witty friends has suggested that Lloyd Price's song might therefore be written "Laude Ms. Claude".

2. A leftist political 'zine for which I produced some controversial cover images and cartoons, not least for issue no. 69. Sorry about that.

Matriculation in subfusc, Michaelmas '73

(Huh? Call for a translator!)

A Literary Discovery

 Yes. I remember Balliol --
The name, because one afternoon
quite late our headmaster brought it up
Quite casually. It was late June.

The days passed. Most friends left for uni.
A very few endured the same:
an extra term. But what did I know
of Balliol? Only the name


Plus Arnold, Swinburne, and Clough,
Huxley, Hopkins, and Graham Greene
had all been there: with any luck
I'd find a literary scene.

And in that term I had a dream
That may have lasted half a century,
Stranger and stranger, a boy asleep
in Stevenage Public Library.

Notes:

These verses are clearly a parody of the much-admired poem "Adlestrop" by Edward Thomas. The text of the original poem is reproduced below for purposes of comparison, and for the benefit of the unliterary. The author has been identified as Michael Chisholm (Balliol 1973), partly from internal references in the poem, but mainly from a signed but unprintable (and actionable) satire-cum-rant on the other side of the paper concerning various Balliol contemporaries, including a prominent QC, several academics, a sententious journalist, and a self-styled "philosopher".

line 1: Balliol is one of the oldest colleges of Oxford University. In its own estimation, an elite institution, a training ground and launch pad for the eminent. In the view of others, an asylum for bright but delusional nerds, wonks, and wastrels.

line 5: "Most friends" is questionable. It is known that a good many of the author's home-town friends were actually school-leavers, stoners, and slackers, for whom higher education of any kind was a laughably remote and unwished-for prospect. Also, absolutely nobody referred to "uni" in 1972.

line 7: The universities of Oxford and Cambridge ("Oxbridge") require candidates to sit an entrance examination in November. State schools generally wait until A-level results are received and sufficiently good (three or more at "A" grade, usually) before allowing pupils to prepare for and sit Oxbridge entrance. This means an extra term at school, followed by a two-term "gap year", in which employment is usually sought (Chisholm worked as art assistant and remedial English teacher at the local Catholic boys' secondary school). Thus state-school undergraduates are customarily a year older and considerably more worldly-wise than their public-school contemporaries.

lines 9-10: These are the names of some well-known but really rather minor authors who were Balliol alumni. The college is not famously literary. Thus:

lines 11-12: The sentiment is probably ironic. Balliol in those days (1966-1976) was a hotbed of student activism, and populated by scholarly leftists whose idea of literature was a multi-volume biography of Trotsky or some impenetrable and jargon-filled philosophical tract. Volumes of Deutscher's Prophet series (emphatically not sci-fi novels) or Feyerabend's Against Method were often seen carried under one arm, in the way others might carry the latest Pink Floyd album.
Note on this note: Curiously, in German Feierabend literally means something like "celebration night" and thus might be thought similar to the Oxford term "gaudy", as applied to a festive reunion of a cohort of students, but in fact merely denotes the end of the ordinary working day (Ich hatte um halb sechs Feierabend = "I got off work at 5:30"). Which is weird, rather like calling your lunch-break "carnival time".  
Further note on this note: It is a remarkable fact that Pink Floyd's album The Dark Side of the Moon was first released in March 1973, despite seeming, in retrospect, to have been orchestrating eyelid movies since, like, forever. What? We just thought it was worth pointing out. Write your own damned notes.

lines 13ff: The author seems to be suggesting that he may have fallen asleep in his local public library, and that the 50 subsequent years have merely been a very strange dream, from which he may yet awake. See perhaps Bottom's speech in MND IV, i  ("I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was") or even the Grateful Dead song "Box of Rain" ("For this is all a dream we dreamed / One afternoon long ago"). It is known that the author was inexplicably prone to identify with Bottom the Weaver. It is also recorded that although he often and loudly declared his dislike for the Grateful Dead he was extremely moved by the song in question when it was played in Balliol chapel at the memorial of a friend and Balliol contemporary in 2010.

line 16: Stevenage is a New Town, 30 miles N of London, built in the 1950s to accommodate blitzed and slum-cleared Londoners and other humble folk aspiring to indoor plumbing, a garden, jobs in light industry, and good schools. In the end, though, that too must be said to have been just another dream, one that lasted until the Thatcher Years and council housing was sold off cheaply in the 1980s. Like Caliban, when we waked from that sweet dream, we cried to dream again.

 

Adlestrop, by Edward Thomas (1917)

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Second lieutenant Edward Thomas was killed at Arras, 9th April 1917 (Easter Monday), by a bullet though the chest. He was 39. His poem "Adlestrop" was published in The New Statesman under the pseudonym Edward Eastaway, also in April, just weeks after his death. His first collection under his own name, Poems, was published later that same year. Along with Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Charles Sorley, and so many others who had barely started on a literary career, he is one of the great "what ifs" of English poetry. For a poignant, if parochial insight into the scale of that great, unnecessary tragedy and its harvest of truncated lives, a browse through this Balliol College War Memorial Book is salutary.