A young man's scorn for the intelligentsia of Oxford
Robert Kee
GORBALS BOY AT OXFORD by Ralph Glasser
Chatto & Windus, £11.95, pp.., 84
The best thing about this book, which contains many good things, is that it sends the reader back to the author's Growing Up in the Gorbals, the wonderful first section of an autobiography of which both books are an integral part. The best thing is thus also the worst thing: if you start here there are enough opaque references to make you wonder whether you ought not to stop and read the other one first. Because opaqueness is itself part of the strange stuff of life and because Ralph Glasser is a writer of poetic quality, he almost manages to make an asset of this drawback. But it is a bit like hearing the second movement of a work of chamber music first. This health warning needs to be attached to an otherwise enriching experi- ence.
The son of a Lithuanian Jewish immig- rant craftsman, Ralph Glasser was brought up in Glasgow slums which had a magical aura of squalor and social injustice for well-heeled Oxford revolutionaries of the late 1930s, but which he had known only as reality. They were a reality from which, after years of hard and sometimes danger- ous work in a pressing factory, he decided, with some ambivalence of sentiment, to emerge in search of more, having been awarded a scholarship to Oxford.
In later years Philip Toynbee, then an Oxford card-carrying Communist who made the attempt with its seemingly fore- gone conclusion to recruit Glasser for the cause, would recount with the generous glee of an intelligent and sympathetic man grown wiser with years, the dismay in Party circles at Glasser's calm rejection of the idea that they had anything much to offer the working class. Along with the rats and the flowing excrement taken for granted in the Gorbals courtyards, Glasser had ac- quired everyday knowledge of the Com- munist party too. His best friend had joined the International Brigade to fight for the Spanish Republic, that apparently noble cause which seemed to offer such supreme and easy ideological fulfilment to so many of the young of that time. He had come back to tell Glasser of the Party's obsession not with Franco but with devi- ation in its ranks, and though he carried the scars from a Franco bullet in his shoulder his own last bullet had been used to kill a South Wales miner stealthily delegated to kill him. (This, incidentally, is an example of full explanatory material missing from this volume because it had already been made available in the first. Here, although the friend's disillusionment with the Party is made plain enough, the exact cause is something of an enigma. A similar sense of enigma about some of his family feelings is also clarified in the first volume.) It is, however, the confrontation be- tween the intelligent young man from the working class and the democratic left-wing intelligentsia of Oxford, who literally patronised his class' cause, that provides most of the refreshing insight into the social and political traits of the times in which the book abounds. Crossman, Lind- say, Cole, Beveridge, Gollancz and Laski, fossils now from the progressive intellec- tual past rather than the monuments it once seemed they might be, all come up as suitable cases for treatment and, with the possible exception of Crossman, receive attention that is as fair and free from caricature as memory of a young man's partial scorn can make them. A pass from Maurice Bowra and an attempt to recruit the Gorbals boy for MI6, as doomed to failure by reason of his intellectual integri- ty as was Philip Toynbee's very different one, are thrown in for good measure.
Orwell he saw as 'a middle-class voyeur'. And though Glasser reproves himself to- day for being 'so arrogantly dismissive' and with some reason, for Orwell was one of the least doctrinaire and theoretical of those who then thought about how they wanted society to change — his dismissive- ness then of much of the intellectual Left because of its divorce from the reality he knew connects meaningfully with our world today. For would 'socialism' today seem such an empty and archaic remedy had not the progressive intelligentsia of that time been so unrealistically confident of their certainties?
Gorbals Boy at Oxford is wrong in a few details of emphasis. Sympathy with the Nazis was very much the exception at Oxford in the late Thirties, though Glasser rather suggests the reverse; reports of anti-Jewish atrocities in Germany were not generally treated as Zionist fantasies; con- centration camps and their early horrors were certainly known about at the begin- ning of 1939; 'Oxford bags' were strictly only those with very wide trouser-legs, a phenomenon of the Twenties rather than the late Thirties, and were 'carbide lamps' still then in use on bicycles? Only one piece of social observation seems actually to have escaped him: the extent to which he enjoyed one privilege over very many `boss-class' public school undergraduates, namely that of previous confident hetero- sexual experience.
Glasser's two volumes will be a valuable social document for historians. But they are also something much more important than that. They are effective because they are above all, like all good autobiog- raphies, a celebration of, and lament for, life itself.
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