Going Up (9 page)

Sullivan and I scanned the list of lecturers and composed a menu that began at nine in the morning with Mr Lee on Latin verse, followed by F. E. Adcock, a lisping epigrammatist, for ancient history. John Patrick had escaped from a Merseyside back-to-back and from Roman Catholicism. He had no nostalgia for working-class life, none of Baron Moss’s revolutionary solidarity, small appetite for the candle-lighting angst of Graham Greene (who was, John told me, known in France as ‘Grim Grin’). He had three years in which to sharpen his excellence and arm himself for the steep climb to the academic high ground. I was more dismayed than stimulated by his single-mindedness. Who but a perfectionist would choose to read
Advanced Greek Prose Composition?
I preferred
The Magic Mountain
and
Manhattan Transfer
.

Early in our first year, Sullivan set himself to practise a skill that I have never acquired. He wrote to famous people in a way that at once quizzed and flattered them. By doing so, he insinuated himself into their train. I am told that, early in his career, a famous modern historian spent the first two hours of his day writing sincere letters of praise to persons who might later
be useful to him. Proust and Henry James were no less effusive; the latter’s letter of sympathy over the death of a friend’s pooch is a masterpiece of careful, only slightly camp, condolence. Sullivan’s first mark was Ezra Pound, whose
Homage to Sextus Propertius
had piqued his purposeful interest.

Robert Graves was already known to have mocked Pound’s errors, not least in translating ‘
minas
’ – in Latin the accusative plural of a noun meaning ‘threats’ – as ‘mines’, of the Welsh variety. Graves was a self-consciously vatic poet, of a kind viewed with suspicion in the Cambridge English faculty, a brave soldier in the Great War, a classical scholar and the bestselling author of
I, Claudius
and
Claudius the God
, which were based on Suetonius’s lascivious gossip, not least about the emperor’s delectable, nymphomaniac wife, Messalina, who enjoyed a night job as a common prostitute. Although Suetonius had had privileged access to imperial records, he was regarded by classicists as uncanonical on account of his journalistic vulgarity, none of it improbable when read in a modern light.

Graves was also a copious translator with too keen a philological conscience for him to indulge in Poundian glosses. As an ex-frontline soldier, he may not have been as indifferent as Eliot and company to Pound’s siding with our recent enemies. His younger brother, Charles, was a popular journalist and
bon vivant
. My father had been in officers’ training camp with him, on Wimbledon Common, at the end of the Great War, and was a contemporary of Robert’s at St John’s College, Oxford. Robert was an Old Carthusian, whose
Goodbye to All That
was the measure of his small enthusiasm for the school. William Makepeace Thackeray had already called our old school ‘Slaughterhouse’. There are few grateful literary Old Carthusians. Simon Raven wrote sentimentally only about his days playing cricket on Green, with Peter May and Jim Prior. He regretted his expulsion most keenly because it had robbed him of one more season as a flannelled fool.

With regard to accuracy in translation, Sullivan might have been expected to side with Graves, but he found something exemplary in
Pound’s innovative
arrivisme
. I never imagined that Pound would reply to an unknown correspondent, but John had phrased his letter with specific interrogative applause. Edward Shils, an eminent sociologist, isolated what he called ‘Vitamin P’, a prescription guaranteed to have an uplifting effect on recipients. The ‘P’ stood for praise. No one was known to be allergic to it. A few weeks later, John was pleased to show me the two green, typewritten pages on which Pound responded thoroughly, and almost gratefully, to his queries.

The ribbon on Pound’s typewriter was of a pale, unusual, pinky-brown hue. I regarded Ole Ez’s green signature with a mixture of nausea and envy (of its recipient). By procuring the Bollingen Prize for him in 1949, T. S. Eliot and his friends had purged Pound of the iniquity surrounding his virulent wartime broadcasts in favour of Fascism. Was there a tinge of ‘there but for the grace of God’ in the great Tom’s endorsement of the prize committee’s decision? It implied that it was uncomely to disqualify someone who had done nothing worse than incite the physical elimination of all Jews. The reputation of Karl Shapiro, a good poet and a combat veteran, never recovered from his pronounced dissent from the majority of the Bollingen Prize committee’s decision to drape Ole Ez with redeeming laurels.

Mr Eliot benefited, in post-war literary circles, from the modernisation of the fourth-century BC Athenian law against
mnesikakein
(recalling attention to previous misdeeds). It continues to be said that he was not an ‘anti-Semite’, as if this were a condition similar to being diabetic, rather than a fashionable vanity to be paraded in pre-war company and abandoned, overtly at least, when no longer marketable. Between 1945 and 1960, the murder of six million Jews had no specific name and was rarely mentioned. Pound did later apologise, grudgingly, for his embrace of what he chose to call the ‘suburban prejudice’, but only on the grounds that anti-Semitism had deformed his overgrown
magnum opus
. He showed no genuine shame at having aligned himself with mass murderers. His post-war poem ‘Pull
down thy vanity’ sounded like some kind of recantation; but it was addressed to those who dared to criticise genius.

Sullivan had landed a difficult fish with the easy bait of inquisitive admiration. Equipped with the insurgent nerve and sourced intelligence that would mark his professorial career, John was pleased to be both rigorous and heterodox. Having learned some German while he was in the Intelligence Corps, perhaps in the knowledge that it would be needed to read the footnotes in scholarly texts and to garnish his own,
Weltschmerz
and
Stimmung
figured in his apprentice, quasi-parodic scholarship. The
zeitgeist
was, of course, omnipresent in post-war Cambridge. It spoke, very often, in the moderated tones of a cosmic sergeant-major: ‘Get some service in, son’; ‘You’ve got two chances: a dog’s chance and fuck all chance’; ‘When I say move, I want you to move like shit off a shovel, MOVE!’

In the hope of being in the swim, at whatever shallow end, I went to Bowes & Bowes and bought Pound’s
Seventy Cantos
. I wrote F. M. Raphael on the fly-leaf; stranger to myself. If I had somewhat hoped to find Pound’s work despicable, it held me in its serpentine coils like Laocoön. ‘Fish-scale roofs’ was a masterly phrase; but I did wonder why the arcane adjective ‘swart’ had to feature twice in the first Canto. Pound’s Chinese character Kung had the same name as a Brighton and Hove hotelier’s son, first name Freddie, who was in my house at Charterhouse. In a time of rationing, he received enviable, unshared food parcels. He was attractive and ‘spo-ey’ (sportive) enough to be immune to accusations of meanness.

Howland distributed printed forms with the names of canonical authors at the top of large white spaces. We were expected to fill the blanks with the specific works that we had read. Did he assume that we would have the wit to find our way in the libraries and explore their catalogued riches? I hardly knew where to start. I read a great deal, but without system. There seemed to be little difference between the Latin and Greek compositions I was set to do, while preparing for Part One in the Classical Tripos, and
those I had done at Charterhouse. I found myself in a glorified school distinguished by less discipline and, though I had yet to see any, a few girls. Where were the scintillating souls in whose company I dreamed of shining?

My neighbours at the top of E staircase in Third Court were also freshmen. Like Sullivan, Tony Becher had done his National Service before coming up. He had been at Cheltenham College and was then a second lieutenant in the army. His father was a colonel in the Indian Army. I was rather too pleased to discover that, although he too had a scholarship, it was only ‘minor’ and in mathematics. David Wilson was a large, jolly, provincial person with no scholarly distinction. Tony and I were not unkind to him, but he seemed not quite to be of our public school
genre
. He neither drank alcohol nor played poker. He had come up to read Archaeology, hence his proximity to Glyn Daniel, whose rooms were two floors below ours.

In quite short order, David Wilson abandoned his teetotal regime and became a first-class archaeologist. Like George Engel, he chose an academically untenanted topic in which to specialise: in his case, the Vikings. He ended his career as the director of the British Museum, in which role he defended the retention of the Elgin Marbles. He responded to hectoring Hellenists, Melina Mercouri the most voluble, with the unflinching good humour that he had displayed as my neighbour. His achievements were capped with a knighthood and an honorary fellowship of St John’s.

As college steward, Glyn Daniel was in charge of the wine cellar. His oenological prescience had procured a fine store of the great vintage of 1945. We gulped youthful Château Lynch-Bages at three and six a bottle with ignorant enthusiasm. When I went up, Glyn was a remote, if never ineffectual, don with whom I shared an address. Two years later, he was nationally famous as the question-master of the TV panel game
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,
in which distinguished archaeologists competed in identifying artefacts and fragments recovered from recondite ditches. Sir Mortimer Wheeler was the most charismatic. The first telly don to grace academia with erotic cachet,
he had a cavalier moustache, an unearthly instinct for where to dig victoriously and a predator’s eye for the ladies. Glyn Daniel was warily indulgent of his pulling presence.

David Wilson declined an invitation to broach my half-bottle of whisky. I opened it for George Plimpton, when he came to call. I had no soda water and there was no ice. He soon dispelled my notion that he was a lonely transatlantic stranger. Already a Harvard graduate, he let me know that he had been a member of the Hasty Pudding and Porcellian clubs, not that I had any notion of how distinguished these affiliations made him. Having made it clear that he did not lack elevated connections in King’s, he sipped my spare tooth-glass dry and walked out of my door and my life.

A few years after I saw him for that second and last time, Plimpton founded the
Paris Review
, a straight-faced derivative of the
Harvard Lampoon
, in which he had had an editorial hand. The epitome of the daring young man willing to swing on any publicised trapeze, he made an ostentatious career of playing sports with those much better than himself. Merely getting into the ring with Archie Moore was an act of gallant folly. As a gentleman sportsman who ate his helpings of humble pie with a silver spoon, Plimpton tricked foolhardiness into an expression of arrogance. While taking every opportunity to acquire Corinthian kudos, he could never be accused of social climbing; there were no higher rungs for him to reach. The
Paris Review
was funded by his well-heeled friends. Its rare fame was secured by the fact that it never sold many copies. To be selected for interview might glorify the writer who was put to the question; it certainly elevated the selector, Mr Plimpton himself, into being the literary taste-master of his time. Social climbing downwards, he proved how refined his intellectual palate was by patronising the
gratin
.

Johnians were divided into Hearties and Arties, never into oiks and toffs: few ever wore the flat caps that distinguished members of the Pitt Club, a pillared outpost, so its members liked to suppose, of White’s or Brooks’.
Hearties predominated in St John’s on account of the Lady Margaret Boat Club, which supplied six of the members of the victorious Cambridge crew of my first year. LMBC launched thirteen crews in the bumping races, twice as many as any other college club, including First and Third Trinity. What became of Second Trinity remains a mystery.

As promptly public-spirited as Cimon the Athenian aristocrat, who dismounted from his high horse in order to pull an oar alongside
tous pollous
in a trireme, the scholarly Sullivan and Becher signed on like commoners and went down to the river to do their ‘tubbing’. Trainees had to sit in a concrete stall locked to the river bank and pull an oar without getting anywhere. My only sporting show of collegiate spirit was to volunteer to play hockey. When I was selected for the second XI’s away match against my father’s old college, we were driven to Oxford in the usual high charabanc. We sat with our hosts all afternoon while rain blackened the waterlogged pitch. We had dark-blue tea and were then driven back to Cambridge. After I declared myself no longer available for selection, there was no loud call for me to withdraw my resignation. I do not remember talking to anyone in our team apart from someone called Ian Telfer and a tall second-year man by the name of Mike Littleboy, for whom the very attractive Joan Rowlands (later Bakewell) had an early passion.

My pigeon-hole in the Junior Combination Room was stiff with invitations to join all sorts of societies, political, recreational, dramatic, athletic, religious and ethnic (I had never before seen the word ‘Majlis’). Contending versions of Christianity – SCM and CICCU – promised to redeem me, but I did not feel the vocation; nor had I any wish to seek out other Jews in Cambridge. I did play bridge several times in a school that included Peter R., a Trinity PhD student who claimed my company as if I had no right to withhold it. He had dark curly hair and a blanched complexion and a habit, in serious conversation, of thrusting his right hand deep inside the front of his trousers, where it would remain for a few seconds before he extracted it
and took his perfumed fingers to his nose. His shamelessness was appalling and liberating: here was a Jew who didn’t give a damn what people thought. I never sought his company, but seldom refused it.

One fine Saturday afternoon, after we had failed to find anyone else who wanted to play bridge, he suggested that we take a punt on the Cam. Once launched, Peter steered with clumsy purpose towards where a punt with two young women in it was moored.