David Hockney, Sonny Rollins, James Burrows, Duane Michals, J.H. Prynne, Edward Lucie-Smith, Maureen Duffy, Carol Rumens, Desmond Morris, Andy Kershaw, Roy Hattersley, Clive Davis, Garfield Sobers, Kevin Keegan, Bill Oddie, Raoul Vaneigem, Phyllida Law, Jay Maisel, Dolly Parton, Yayoi Kusama... [1]
Recently, there has been something of a pile-up of significant "passings", as people seem to like to refer to death and dying these days. I suppose it's a handy way of fudging whether you think people have "passed" like a storm, or were "passing through" to a further stage of existence like some cosmic traveller. Or perhaps when people say the dead have "passed", they're thinking of life as some sort of exam? Which, of course, many religions do. None of the above have "failed", however, at least as far as I know. Although it's true that some religions do believe in resits.
Obviously, that particular roll call is mostly meaningful to those of us who are now entering our own latter decades. Brits in particular: who but us remembers Zoo Time or The Goodies? I'm sure there must be an equivalent list for, say, 70-plus Hungarians. As you would expect, the people now vanishing from the scene are the ones who gave the years between the 1950s and 80s their particular flavour, and who presided as senior figures over the succeeding decades. Most of their lives will already have become a well-rounded story: biographies will have been written, and obituaries would have been on file, waiting. You might even have been surprised to learn that some of them were still alive in 2026.
The life stories of important and influential people have an obvious intrinsic interest. But we all have a story, just as we all have "ancestors" going way back to wherever and whenever the story of humanity began. Like the lives of those countless nameless ancestors, however, the vast majority of our stories will go untold. Which is just as well: unless there really is some improbably vast divine data-centre tracking and recording an inventory of our every move, to be assessed on some future Day of Judgement, what on earth would be the point? But, as old age creeps up on you, and you look back over what turns out to have been your "life" – how did that happen? – something of the shape of your own story emerges, and it becomes clearer where the main inflection points were. Good choices, bad choices, happy and less happy accidents... All lives have a shape, some more bent and twisted than others, but all are nonetheless leading in one direction, like those aerial shots of wiggly animal tracks converging on a waterhole in the savannah.
As for my own emerging story – like most of us, I expect – I made some crucial choices in my younger years, some of which were essentially mistakes. By "mistake", I don't mean some error I stumbled into; I mean a decision taken in good faith that turned out rather differently to what I had intended. Perhaps "miscalculation" would be a better word. Unlike a straightforward mistake, an important miscalculation, just as much as a good decision, needs to have been given a suitable degree of forethought and preparation. In that cartoon scenario of a guy sawing off the branch he is sitting on, or the one in which he has painted himself into a corner, I can well imagine that he has given rather more thought to the right saw or paint for the job than to the nature and outcome of the job itself.
So, setting aside some genuine mistakes such as a couple of ill-advised and ill-fated late-teen "romantic" entanglements – I'm hardly the first to fall foul of those – my own first real miscalculation, the one that put the first interesting kink in my trail through life, was twofold.
My secondary-school teachers were in little doubt that I was a pretty good linguist, and that I should double down on that at university. To the extent that my little "prize", bought by my English teacher for having the top exam result in English that year, was a compact edition of one of Thomas Mann's short stories: in German (hint, hint...). But, out of an idiotic combination of contrarianism and a suspicion that to pursue languages at university would involve actual work and thus cramp my style, I settled on English as the next best thing to Advanced Hedonism Studies, which wasn't on offer in those days. So that was Miscalculation One, Part 1.
Part 2 was that, having achieved a full hand of top grades in my A-level exams, I allowed myself to be persuaded into applying to Oxford, and in particular to Balliol College, which to me then was just another one of those weird "Oxbridge" names, but, as it turned out, is actually one of Britain's elite springboards for notable political and academic careers. Who knew?
Now, I had already reluctantly conceded that choosing art school rather than university might be a silly idea, but I had an instinctive inverted-snob's aversion to Oxbridge, at least as portrayed in the popular imagination. Besides, I had already made my applications to a range of universities with a reputation for English, so I now had an assured place at Bristol University, and my escape from small-town life was guaranteed.
But... By 1972, I had begun to imagine that I might be a Special Case (I know... Alarm!), an impression that is all too easily gained in a small school in a small town where the only competition is essentially your own little circle of friends and antagonists. It didn't help that getting top grades in my exams had cost me comparatively little effort. As one of my geography teachers warned in his final report, "He has the ability to make much out of little, but I would reinforce the comments about detail and width of reading". In other words, "FFS do some actual work, you arrogant little prick, or you may come to regret it!" But, as it seemed to me then, I was good with languages, a decent writer and artist, and an insightful interpreter of great literature. I mean, come on, was this boy on track for an exceptional life, or what? So in the end I allowed myself to be talked into it. Oh, go on then...WTF... Why not give Oxford entrance a go, if the place is all it's cracked up to be?
I think we may have miscalculated here, old friend...
However, getting into Oxford is one thing, being there quite another. Nothing pricks the bubble of inflated self-esteem quite like encountering genuinely brilliant minds, truly dedicated scholars, and the ruthlessly ambitious or, worst of all, those intimidatingly exceptional types who combine at least two of these attributes, often seasoned with a certain arrogance. In a college like Balliol these alien beings are surprisingly thick on the ground, and you realise quite quickly that there is a difference not just of degree but of kind between a certain ease in the exam room backed up by a good line in improvisatory self-promotion – my own "superpowers" – and an A++ mind possessed by someone who, at age 18, is already planning ahead for a stellar career among the movers and shakers in their chosen field.
That rude awakening is the core university experience for most small-town undergraduates anywhere, of course. But it is rather ruder at certain Oxbridge colleges, and, in the 1960s and 70s at least, was a destabilising experience for many of those who found themselves immersed in it, not least those of us from families with no prior experience of university, never mind of Oxbridge with its baffling vocabulary and mad college traditions. [2]
Even so, was this a mistake or a miscalculation? After all, I did have a great time – in those days Hedonism Studies was an acknowledged if unofficial subsidiary, on a par with sport and theatre – and I made some lifelong friends, not least the woman I have shared my life with for fifty years. If I had not blown the second of my two "vivas" – just one is more typical – I would have landed a first-class degree. Not quite the customary "much out of little", but so very close... So wasn't that "mission accomplished"? Yes, of course it was; but, on the other hand, wouldn't much the same have happened at any other university? Perhaps a more congenial alma mater with less extreme Tiger Mom expectations and fewer Brainiac aliens to contend with?
They walk among us...
Beyond a certain salutary humbling, though, there was the Oxford Way. In those days – things have changed for the better since, I believe – the famous Oxbridge college-based tutorial system was a perfect disguise for some truly terrible teaching and "pastoral" neglect. You generally only hear about the good, life-changing aspects of this set-up. In my own college, for example, many who studied, say, PPE (no, not "personal protective equipment", but "philosophy, politics, and economics") admired their tutors, and some even made lifelong two-way connections with them. But in my experience, and in that of many others, that was very far from the case.
The Oxford Way was a "sink or swim" arrangement, ostensibly because we were assumed to be capable of working unsupervised: a case, I suppose, of "Better drowned than duffers, if not duffers won't drown" (Swallows and Amazons). But this chilly neglect of even quite vulnerable and disorientated undergraduates, some of whom did indeed sink, was mainly intended to free as much time as possible for the academic staff to get on with their "real" work, whatever that was: finding cures for deadly and debilitating diseases, say, or editing literary texts, or in some cases not doing terribly much at all.
A humanities undergraduate usually had two tutorial commitments in each week of three very short eight-week terms, in which they would read out an essay to their tutor, along with one or two others of their tutorial group. In the case of many – most? – the need to produce two essays a week with unlimited, unstructured, unsupervised time in between – inevitably taken up with the desire and pursuit of whatever actually turned you on, whether it was friends or music or rowing or theatre or journalism or any one of a hundred ways of evading actual study – was a contradictory combination of pressure and leisure that resulted in a permanent "essay crisis" mode. That is, apart from the library-bound scholarly types who, weirdly, happened to be turned on by their actual degree subject. But, unlike the bracing intellectual jousts of legend, in my experience these weekly all-night lash-ups were generally received with a few perfunctory comments from a tutor who might not even have taken the trouble to, ah, refresh their acquaintance with the particular author's works you had chosen to discuss. And there was definitely no sherry on offer. It was all a bit of a let-down after the exciting intellectual awakenings of the school sixth form.
Worst of all, for English students Anglo-Saxon was compulsory in the first year. Damn, actual work after all! But were any language lessons on offer? Maybe an interactive audio-visual course linked to a novice-friendly textbook of the sort we had become accustomed to at school? Not a chance! You simply had to buy or borrow a copy of Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer and grind and groan your way through it: a truly grim task to impose on anyone unfamiliar with the tables of declensions and conjugations of an inflected language (the requirement for competence in Latin as an entrance requirement had been dropped in 1960).
"Bird"
singular: se fugol, þone fugol, þæs fugles, þæm fugle
plural: þā fuglas, þā fuglas, þāra fugla, þæm fuglum...
So there was that. But there was also the tenor of the times, man. For a decade or two after the War, young working and lower-middle class students who were finally able to gain places at university had seen it as an exciting opportunity for social mobility. Regional accents and attitudes were dropped as soon as a stripy college scarf was wrapped around a fresher's neck. Most of our schoolteachers were of that pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed generation – well, the men, anyway – and did not feel like idiots being expected to own and wear an academic gown on formal school occasions. But by the 1970s a lot of us had actually taken on board the anti-establishment, anti-careerist rhetoric of the late-60s counterculture. We rejoiced in our regional accents. We bought no college-branded merch, wore no jackets and ties, grew our hair long and adopted the scruffy jeans-and-dressing-up-box fashions of students everywhere. Finding ourselves standing on a springboard for notable political and academic careers like Balliol, we decided to jump up and down on it instead, like delinquent teens at the swimming pool. Or at least some of us did. We were not a popular generation, and quickly forgotten as an aberration by the university.
Oxford Examination Schools Occupation 1973
(from "Fight For A CSU!" by Fiona Thompson)
Oxford Indian Institute Occupation 1974
In the end, though, whether some life-altering choice you have made is a mistake or a benign miscalculation comes down to the unpredictability of what Brian Eno has called "scenius":
So I have this idea of ‘scenius’. Genius is the brilliance of an individual. Scenius is the fertility of a whole scene of people. So much of art history doesn’t acknowledge that at all. You know, it’s like: Picasso, Kandinsky, Rembrandt, these great individuals. But look at the world that they were in. There were a lot of other great individuals around them, and there were other people who don’t even get called artists, who facilitated. Curators, dealers, critics, people who ran salons, girlfriends, mistresses, wives, children.
At Oxford and Cambridge, divided into many small, self-contained colleges, each with its own history, traditions, and ethos, I think it's probably much more difficult to find a "scene" in which you might thrive than in a more typical university, especially if you have landed in a college that is so uncongenial that you're forced to go looking elsewhere for friends and entertainment. In my time there wasn't even a central Students Union where the like-minded could congregate, the famous Oxford Union being a members-only debating society which most 70s students shunned on principle.
As fate would have it, though, a good many such peripatetic misfits gravitated to my own college, then headed by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill and famously liberal (apparently it was known as the Hotel Balliol in the stricter colleges, with their "gated" hours and severe disapproval of overnight "guests"). Consequently, I arrived to find there was already a lively scene happening, primarily political and aggressively left-wing. Although it wasn't exactly the sort of scene I had anticipated it was congenial, convenient, and exciting, so I was happy to play a walk-on role in the more histrionic aspects of student politics with its occupations and demonstrations, and as a provider of late-night entertainment and emergency accommodation for the more hedonistically-inclined comrades, square pegs, and oddballs. [3]
In the end, for me, Oxford-plus-English was a "miscalculation" that turned out pretty well, and not the radical mistake it could easily have been. I made little impression there beyond my immediate circle of new friends and antagonists – who does? – but, as Eno points out, the significant beneficiaries of "scenius" are dependent on the unacknowledged participants who do the unglamorous grunt work. Not everybody is prepared to creep around central Oxford in the dark, dodging the police while flyposting with a carrier bag full of wallpaper paste, or to spend the entire night laying-up and sometimes knocking out cover illustrations for the weekly left-wing 'zine, Oxford Strumpet. I was, and it was fun just to feel part of something new and happening, as we used to say.
So, if you, too, had a small part in some "scene" somewhere, some time, you are probably also anticipating with mixed feelings the appearance, some day, of a few familiar names in a roll call of recently-deceased members of the great, the good, and the notorious, like the one above. Alas, poor So-and-So! I knew him / her / them, Horatio! There won't be any point in looking for your own name in the index of any biographies, though: no scene is ever about the also-rans, helpmeets, and temporary expedient friends. But I'm pretty sure that we are the ones who got the most fun out of it.
When I have talked for an hour I feel lousy –Not so when I have danced for an hour:The dancers inherit the partyWhile the talkers wear themselves out andsit in corners alone, and glower.Ian Hamilton Finlay
Scene fragment reconvened, 2004
1. I started this post early in the summer, and the list just keeps getting longer. I suppose it was never going to get shorter, was it? "Hey, I'm back! Just kidding...". I must try to finish it before any of my real senior heroes join it...
2. I do not exaggerate. It would have helped to have had an introductory booklet, explaining the meaning of everyday jargon like "battels", "buttery", "collections", or "handshaking". Perhaps also a few initiatory pointers, such as "be aware that this college has been involved in low-level warfare with the college next door since the 17th century".
3. For a fuller account of all this, see my post The Long 1968.
No comments:
Post a Comment