OXFORD INFELIX

BOOKS OF THE DAY

By GRAHAM GREENE

OXFORD has deserved it : that is our first thought on closing this sumptuous record of a crime. The lovely photographs of Mr. Moholy-Nagy lean, as it were, over the characters in Mr. Betjeman's pages with an effect of horrifying incongruity, lending the whole thing the kind of moral seise we are not accustomed to in Oxford guides. Buffy Bounce, the athletic Fellow of St. Ervares, goes breezily by under the elaborate Jacobean Tower of the Five Orders—an angel trumpets above the bald head and the lion and the unicorn pose imperishably in stone.

"Who doesn't know Buffy ' ? And who, who knows him, d3esn't love him ? Reginald Bounce is his proper name, though one forgets that 'Buffy' has a Christian name at all—somehow 'Buffy' suits so well that round, jovial, red-faced fellow whom you may see any time in the summer trotting down in shorts, his bald head gleaming above his white sweater, on his way to toggers or buggers playing leap-froggers with an undergraduate, his great boisterous laugh swinging like a gust of wind up into the elm trees of Christ Church Walk."

Certainly something, somewhere, somehow, has gone wrong : North Oxford may have been built for Buffy, but not the Camera, the Tower of the Winds, the Divinity School with the ancient studded doors leading in to Medicine, Jurisprudence, and Theology.

Mr. Betjeman opens his book with a few generai essays— on the three Oxfords (the old agricultural town, the University and the modern industrial city), on undergraduates, dons and college _servants ; and afterwards in close double-column he takes the reader for an alphabetical tour of the city and the university (Revival Gothic plays a large part, and—as we should expect—the shades of theological opinion in all the dim forgotten churches are neatly differentiated). Nobody can catch atmosphere better than Mr. Betjeman—whether he is describing the little shops poked away in St. Ebbe's with their "painted firescreens, writhing vases, cumbersome clocks such as might deck the parlour of some small farm among the elms ten or twenty miles away," the "purple mouldering quality of Oxford stone," or the literary society (" a lot of chuckling betWeen the pipe-sucks as to who has got the unexpurgated edition and who has not "). He can distinguish with the exactness of an anthropologist between the different college and inter-college sets—and a word of praise is due here to Mr. Osbert Lancaster's drawing of the Union members : the negro with his waisted, belted sports-jacket and little pointed shoes, and the Welshman, with tattered commoner's gown, bicycle dips, a breast-pocket full of fountain pens and pencils, unshaven chin, supporting a bicycle with odd ancient bars like a yak's horns. I think Mr. Betjeman has a rather undeserved contempt though for the "dim men " :

"They creep out of their rooms to the Hall and speak to nobody. Their rooms are a blank. The college furniture is theirs—the cumbrous sofa the carpet with holes in it, the table with its baize cover, the looking glass over the chimney-piece, a packet of ten Players and one of those enormous, boxes of Club' matches."

Regular attendants at lectures, Sunday walkers beyond Witney, keeping up vitality with cocoa, they do belong— if not to the best period of Oxford architecture, at any rate to the darkest, most mouldering mediaeval building. They represent the poor student and go back to the days before the sumptuous Jacobean pageantry or the Carolingian Royal Society acidities,—to the lean fare of which More wrote. Grant An Oxford University Chest. By John Betjeman. Photographs by L. Moholy-Nagy. (John Miles. 15i.) them at any rate that they do not smack—as the " fast " set do—of the new by-pass from Wolvercote to Headington. These

"arc more like stockbrokers than you would believe possible in an Oxford man. There is something a little squalid about them when compared with the rich and snobbish sets. Their affairs are a little coarse—any girl who can be got and a mock love affair after too much luncheon. Many of these poor fellows have spots on their faces and wear check caps."

From this picture of the living Oxford (ably reinforced by the photographs of a college bedroom, a bicycle in front of

Balliol, and a woman undergraduate all tooth and spectacle, bobbed hair and bonhomie—in Mr. Betjeman's wayward way this picture is not listed), we shall all of us miss something.

I miss the tutor who makes his own clothes, the whiskered female don, the decorative and vaguely dangerous woman, prominent with a borzoi in the Corn, who alters only in in- essentials from generation to generation, and the sinister middle- aged man, often a Roman Catholic with diplomatic connexions, who settles for a while in the High before he moves on—some say by proctor's order—to South America. And surely too there should have been photographs of the G.W.R. station, the canal bank and the 'Lamb and Flag '—one of the few inns of beauty left undamaged by the University or the town. Ah ! there we reach the rub.

The other day I came through Oxford by train from Glouces- tershire. As the sun went down behind the black meagre woods, one passed a landscape of ruin, mediaeval farms like abbeys in picturesque decay, the property of Oxford colleges : then the big industrious town, lights flickering within unmodel factories : dark gasometers and little leaden reservoirs beside the enormous waste of Midland lines ; villas petering out beyond a cemetery into starved fields. We were free again : the University city was behind. Nobody who has known Oxford well can avoid that feeling of rancour—for the spoilt image and the devastating irresponsibility.

It is an irresponsibility so enormous that at times it seems engaging, like an eccentricity, as when the head of a college recently broke up a lot of old eighteenth-century glass to stick upon the wall. But one is less inclined to laugh away the threats to Merton Street, Beaumont Street, Ship Street, or the monstrous new Bodleian which is rising in Broad Street with the apparent purpose of balancing Baker's, the big store at the other end, the plans of which had the blessing of the Oxford Preservation Society. Individual members of the Bodleian Committee disapprove—I doubt if a single one would defend the new building, and yet it goes up, for no one will accept responsibility. The Preservation Society

buys more and, more fields outside Oxford from which it is possible, on a clear day, to see the gasometers—certainly a preferable sight to the new University buildings—and passes plans for Rhodes House, Baker's, the Bodleian : the hollow

donnish voices mildly complain, hands are raised in little Pilate gestures with dainty North Oxford vowels : you cannot expect more from the characters so ably drawn by Mr. Betjeman —from Buffy and Mr. Snugg and Dr. Scurf, Bishop Proudie Professor of Comparative Numismatics. Oxford will soon be remade in their own image—muddled, ponderous, really rather unfunny—instead of in that of Laud and Wilkins and Wren. They have the money and the power and the tastelessness as for the rest of us, the vast scattered army of fortunate exiles, what Can tve do ? Nothing, I suppose, except sec to it that our sons shall go to Cambridge.