The myth that failed
Peter Ackroyd
Oxford Six or seven people were marching down the High Street; they were carrying banners, but most of them had been furled and the rest were tucked under someone's arm — shrouded in dark blue anorak. This was a new kind of demonstration; perhaps the slogans were so familiar that they no longer needed display, or perhaps the banners carried no slogans at all. A Banner's Right To Choose. This little group was in turn followed by a dispirited band of young men who were, unsuccessfully, trying to inflate red and orange balloons. It was a dull day, and no paid much attention. 'It's rather a cliché, isn't it,' one undergraduate asked me, 'writing about Oxford?' It was a real question and not a statement, as though he genuinely wanted to know the answer — as though the description of Oxford were something of a puzzle to him. Yes, it is a cliché, very much like writing about class or the working mother, but, then, what is one more among so many? 'Lovely, 'an old lady said to me on the train from London, just as we passed the cemet ery which is the traveller's introduction to Oxford, 'City of dreaming spires. Lovely.' I opened the ,iniversity newspaper, Chrwel to discover a 'Dean's Night of Shame'. Lovely. 'One member of the "Train-spotters" admitted to Cherwell that the identity of the group was really the "Squires", a renowned secret drinking society .. . The Squires' member also revealed the true nature of the "liquid" that drenched the dons . as urine. "It was a bucket of piss,", he said, "although the Dean thinks it's beer". 'The details of this incident are not important, and in any case I have forgotten them; only the code-words matter. Expressions like 'hacking', 'fresher', 'gaudy' litter such magazines — like the muttered incantations of a foreign prayer, the original significance of which has been forgotten I was dining with two eminent professors. 'Tell me,' one said to the other, 'What has been happening here recently?' There was a deep, reflective silence; there was an awful state of expectancy; the silence was prolonged. And then the other professor star ted describing A.E. Housman's sexual habits. We went on to discuss a dream about papyri.
There is an air of insubstantiality about it all. This is odd, since the physical fact of the place is clearly the most important: the bridges, the libraries, the gardens and the quads are, as it were, the doughnut round the hole. But the old no longer seems old; it seems fake, or as flimsy as a sepia print. There is a curious tinniness about the 16th century colleges and the 13th century walls — if you tapped them, they would ring. Walking through the streets of Oxford is like taking part in some artificial and overblown pageant. Hugh Trevor-Rbper is preaching somewhere on the 'Sin of Pride'; one of the pubs has covered its walls with old school ties in some kind of fetishistic frenzy; and, on the boundary between the university and an Oxford housing estate, there is a traffic-sign which reads 'Changed Priorities Ahead'.
The university has no palpable identity; ancient streets lead to a view of Safeways or W,H. Smith; colleges nestle against a shopping precinct; there is a betting shop next to a monument. As an experiment, I asked townspeople to direct me to one of the colleges —none of them seemed to know the way. They would gesture vaguely toward one of the ancient piles, and suggest that I ask 'inside'. Even when I talked about Oxford to students and Fellows, the conversation quickly slid onto other matters. There is really nothin g to say.
Oxford is insubstantial because it lives off myths, it is a clatter of broken images. It exists in lines of nostalgic verse, in portentous odes, in memoirs and slim first novels. It has been suggested that King Alfred played some part in its foundation, and the figure of Merlin hovers uncertainly in the margins of its history. In one of the Oxford galleries, there is even now an exhibition devoted to the 'Art of the Invisible'.
The university is a reality only in the imaginations of its members, in their collec tive aspirations. Like stone gods supplied with eager human sacrifices, the colleges receive a fresh 'intake' of young people each year in order to recover from their phantasmal summer existence. During the vacation these colleges are as remote and silent as Stonehenge; in autumn they quicken. The students climb their staircases and enter their rooms, and a subtle metamorphosis takes place. They become identified with the university as a mythical structure rather than a reality. They ingest this myth far more readily than they are able to understand, and gradually they acquire the characteristics of whatever Oxford stereotype is closest to hand: the Northern scientist, the disgruntled activist, the florid careerist, the intellectual in duffle-coat and glasses.
Other things, however, have changed. Something quite extraordinary, in fact, has happened to the students: they have lost their youth. Three years ago, quite suddenly, one lecturer told me, female undergraduates started wearing tweed caps and expensive dresses, like Sloane Rangers on holiday. There was talk of doffing 'green wellies', apparently an egregious sign of privilege. At lectures the women now wear make-up and the men have neatly combed their hair. It is impossible not to be struck by the respectability of the entire student population: clean shirts, neat little sweaters (sweaters everywhere), subdued ties (ties everywhere, too). I was reminded of those mediaeval family portraits in which the children are depicted as miniature adults — tiny, but perfectly formed.
I had been to watch Nixon performing at the Oxford Union some months before, and he was treated with the kind of reverence which would be inconceivable in any other institution. Politics of any sort hardly enters the conversation here; career handbooks are now the obligatory reading matter, and most of the students 1 talked to were interested only what they were going to do 'afterwards'. When I was a student we all tended to be, shall we say, exuberant, dismissive of the outside world and its claims. In the last five or six years, all that exuberance has vanished; worldliness and apathy have taken its place. Sex is everywhere — who's interested? Politicians are boring — who needs them? I have noticed the same phenomenon in America.,A wholeinew race of educated, and slightly mediocre, young are coming forward to put us all in our place. It is now smart to be boring. The Sixties and early Seventies marked the brief emergence of social extravagance and intellectual display —but those of us who lived through that period are now as out of date as astronauts or remaindered copies of Marshall McLuhan. People explain this transition in ecorkomic or sociological terms, but I prefer to see it as a simple act of historical vengeance. These new students, appearing in the gloom of the late Seventies like the ghosts of others' mis-spent youth, are coming into their own. They will inherit the earth.
But the porters still brood behind their glass partitions, and the bicycles still rust outside the college gates. To spend three or four days in a university town is to remember the boredom of its days and the melancholy of its nights, that lugubrious sensation of being in the same place with the same people doing approximately the same thing. The undergraduates here are in a state of suspended animation, like the frozen sleep of space travellers. They will wake up after three years, rub their eyes, and wonder where they have been, what sights have passed them by. In the meantime, the artefacts of student life are here to minister to their sleep: the battered kettles, the Sunblest sliced bread, the gas fires, the stained coffee cups, the awful lampshades, the notes pinned to each others' doors, the powdered milk, the scarves, the metalringed files, the cold evenings of autumn and the shouting across the quad. Last Sunday afternoon, as usual, the university settled down into a kind of empty torpor. It is only then that one recognises how restless and out of place most undergraduates are. They have come here because they have been told to do so; they are caught in some myth of their future, rather like a small creature transfixed by the headlights of an onrushing car. At dusk, elle sees them creeping back to Staircase A or Staircase M after dinner in Hall — the scientists with their pale faces, the public schoolboys with their jackets and loud voices, the 'overseas' students who never quite seem to fit in, the vast mass of unrecognisable others in their navy-blue great-coats, all of theme going back to their rooms: in a place vvher they think they ought to be, but which they do notlove.
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