Undergraduate Page
WRITERS IN THE MAKING
By PETER KING (Jesus College, Cambridge) I 6 T is midnight and you talk of bed: yet we have not decided
on the certain existence of a Deity." It is the nature of the undergraduate to talk in this way, with earnest yet unbalanced eagerness, and sincere but certain adolescence. Everyone knows the student to be a person of this kind—the kind who babbles so brilliantly in the Russian novels and makes such incongruous entries into the world of the detective story. But the undergraduate writer is not nowadays out to cut quite such a figure, and I want to indicate one or two reasons why he looks upon himself as more serious than his predecessors. Because I am myself an under- graduate at Cambridge my view of the writer will be to that extent parochial. But the state of affairs at Oxford and the other universities is not so very different. There, as here, the function of the university has, I believe, been transformed in recent years, and the writer reflects that transformation. There, too, university education still follows the traditional forms of the lecture and the specialised essay, which seem to me the basic influence on university writing.
First of all I think it is necessary to recognise the changing nature of the undergraduate and the extent to which his interest in the university has become utilitarian rather than dilettante. The older undergraduates returned from the forces stronger in numbers and less disillusioned in mind than their predecessors who returned in the early 'twenties. Their nervousness about their future took the form of seriousness rather than flippancy. The university became for them the preparation for an outside world that was technical, businesslike and utilitarian. Equally, the young undergraduate arriving from the schools is today the son of a father whose largesse Is lessened by the cost of living and restrained by income-tax. The older had no inclination towards witty extravagance, and the younger is padlocked to parental pocket-strings.
In this setting it is easy to see why an undergraduate newspaper which before the war was devoted largely to gossip columns and the Newmarket races should now be a more serious weekly, with leading articles on grants committees and scholarships for foreign travel. Extravagance was ordered out of court. And though it is true that it would be easy to over-emphasise the solemnity of today, yet the yellowing pages of the pre-war paper have the quaintness of those found under a carpet when compared with the finger- wagging seriousness of present undergraduate editorials. So in the businesslike atmosphere of a university which wants to be quite clear about its function and responsibilities, we find newspapers becoming perhaps the most common format for undergraduate writing. Oxford is remarkable for being the exception to the rule. The same bias towards practical writing shows itself in the great number of undergraduate playwrights, in the undergraduates of an Oxford college who made and produced their own film, and in the proposed Cambridge University Radio Station.
Although this concern with journalism and practicability is an indicative trend in university writing, it is not perhaps the most significant and energetic activity. The most prolific fount of undergraduate writing still rises from the " supervision " system, by which an undergraduate spends a week in writing a short thousand-odd word essay for his director of studies. It is this writing which has the most direct connection with the academic way of life, and I think that even what might be called "creative" writing (by which I mean writing produced independent of direct disciplinary demand) is influenced by the academic essay. An undergraduate reading for an arts degree will be expected to write on a critical maxim which he is asked to " expand " or " illuminate." The examinations for which he is studying will also require him to write in just this same way, to expand or defend.
The result is that the writer tends to make use of the short space allotted him, in either supporting or rejecting some standard critical remark. With little space in his few pages or his forty-minute examination answer to balance one view against another, his usual reaction is to jump. enthusiastically down on to one particular side of the critical fence. It is common to attribute the jumping of fences to an adolescent unbalance, but it is clear that the system of education does encourage and continue the habit. Furthermore, such intellectual athletics become the basis for a writer's discussion of any problem about which he writes. His usual mode is polemic. This " scholastic" approach to problems, the approach of the enthusiast or the debunker, is perhaps not in itself such an unwel- come approach. It has the virtue of clarity, and certainly awakens interest and controversy. But I think that it is clearly not the way of the world outside the universities, where judgement and " sympathy " are the usual virtues. A reader accustomed to these virtues will often be roused to anger by what appears to him to be the undergraduate's egotism and blindness.
The undergraduate is anxious to develop his theme in a style and structure culled from the reasonable oratory of books written by his intellectual betters. Often he will express his idtas in a frame- work of measured assurance and stylistic cunning which is charac- teristic of the academic book. Nothing is more exasperating to the reader used to a middle way in criticism than to find ideas with which he disagrees developed with such conviction. The common comment is, "Nonsense," followed by the aside, "But the fellow is very persuasive." It may be objected that writing outside the universities is also marked by partisan bias or political colour ; that enthusiasms are not confined to the undergraduate. This is indeed true, but I think the "scholastic" approach is in itself something different from a bias or a colour. It is a way of writing, a critical technique, which is almost a standard of its own, inde- pendent of partisan conviction. In fact the undergraduate develops his thesis rather for its own sake than from inherent conviction. His technique contrasts oddly with the sanity and urbanity of most national writers.
Whether or not this tendency has always been the " scholastic " way, I think it is exaggerated by the seriousness of the modern under- graduate. Not only is the writer today as interested as his prede- cessors in the new creeds of artistic and political rebels s he is convinced that the university has an especial role to fill in what he calls " the predicament of our time." This predicament of which he so constantly •speaks is, of course, connected with international affairs and the problem of war. But the critical writer considers himself bound to write of the "predicament" by using the full battery of academic guns. It is the only battery at which he has adequate practice, and he feels that it is an ideal weapon for the purpose.
The fact is that the conception of a " predicament " at all is an academic approach to the problems which face any age. It pre- supposes that a correct approach will resolve into a correct solution. Of course this defect does not go unreinarked. A recent editorial in a Cambridge undergraduate publication, the Supplement, carica- tured the predicament: " The University and the world are, so we are told, at the cross roads ; we do not know where the turnings are leading, but we must be sure to follow one of them, and to follow the right one ; the University is wallowing in 'crises,' and the present crisis, we are told, has revealed greater poverty of conception and sterility than any other period in modern university history. If we wish to rebuild the magnificent Christian past, we must work ; we are faced with choice. We must look to our consciences ; we must be humble ; we must realise our inadequacies and reform else we shall sin, and, still worse, be unsuccessful in our momentous future."
But the predicament has come to stay, both a product of and an exercise in, the academic approach. So it seems to me that the undergraduate writer has come to write critically of political prob- lems and of the problems of the artist in that opinionated way which the academic environment dictates. As I said earlier, he doesn't aim at cutting the figure which popular myth assigns to him, and I should exaggerate if I implied that the balanced and accepted undergraduate writer is nowhere to be found. But he is a rare bird, and my exaggerated point is in itself evidence of the commoner species.
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