AND ANOTHER THING
A Lenten meditation on Oxford under the spell of Magdalen tower
PAUL JOHNSON
The first Saturday in Lent. February fill- dyke doing its worst: torrential down-pours punctuated by spells of spotty showers and a shaft or two of deceptive sunlight. Can even Oxford charm in such conditions? Yet it can — it does. I sat under a leaking exotic in the Botanical Gardens to draw the great tower of Magdalen.
As my pen traced the structure of this miracle of late Perpendicular, all the old magic came back instantly. There was the pride of my old college, exactly as I used to draw it nearly half a century ago, refur- bished and cleaned in the 1970s perhaps, but still confidently asserting the faith of mediaeval Oxford in Almighty God and scholarship. It was completed in the first decade of the 16th century, on the very eve of the Reformation, when the world of old Oxford fell apart. For it was Cambridge which opted for Protestantism and power — and it was Cambridge men who ran Eliz- abethan England: their Queen, as it were, was a Cambridge girl.
Never mind, Cambridge has nothing to match Magdalen tower. It was the one thing I loved above all when I came up at the age of 17, and truth to tell I hardly need to look at it to draw it: I know every rib and pinnacle by heart. But I sometimes feel guilty that, as a youth, I did not appreciate Oxford as it deserved. I can't remember ever setting foot in the Botanical Gardens, for instance, founded in 1621 as the first herbiary in England. A generation or two later it was superbly adorned in memory of the martyred king, Charles I, by Danby, a rapacious ruffian and the only politician ever to be impeached twice by the Com- mons, but a man of taste nonetheless. He loved Oxford. What makes its old stones so hypnotic is that they radiate back to you the affection of so many generations of clever and gifted men — often of dubious charac- ter like Wolsey and Harley and Laud, whose overwhelming passion for the uni- versity was the redeeming expiation of their lives.
As the rain had stopped, I dodged the traffic pouring over Magdalen Bridge to look round the college again. People com- plain that Oxford has been destroyed by cars and progress but I do not agree. The old core is largely intact, the finest con- glomeration of buildings in Europe, still riddled by little alleys like Magpie Lane and Catte Street and the Turl, still with lit- tle shops which seem eternal. I bought some ties at Hine's, at the bottom of the High, and could almost swear that the gen- tle old man who served me was the same who sold me my first college tie in 1946.
True, a generation or so ago the fellows of Magdalen built an abomination across the river called the Waynflete Building, where two of my sons served sentences. But the college has redeemed itself by a new quadrangle at Longwall, a masterwork of well-contrived traditional modernity. The deer-park is exactly as I knew it in the 1940s when, leaning companionably against the railing, Gilbert Ryle pointed out to me a dapper figure paying a visit to the New Buildings: 'That's Freddie Ayer. Might have been a great philosopher. Ruined by sex.' I passed through the Cloisters and by Kitchen Staircase, where poor Oscar Wilde once had a magnificent abode crowded with his exquisite bric-a-brac. In my day it was still an undergraduate set — if you could afford it. Now it is a 'Function Room'.
Addison's Walk, exactly a mile round the college water-meadows, is much the same. A proto-Pugin 'improver' wanted to goth- icise it in 1801, putting in a hermitage or two, but ancient-minded fellows resisted him and they have continued to fend off those who would turn this enchanting wilderness into a Heritage Trail. At Oxford, the heritage is all in the mind, where it belongs. Not that Addison himself was other-worldly or anti-urbane. He boasted in the Spectator in 1711, 'I have brought philosophy out of Closets and Libraries, Schools and Colleges, to dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-tables and in. Coffee-houses.' I was taken round his walk by C.S. Lewis, a kindly man always anxious to impart information, who told me what an astonishing difference it would have made to English literature if Wordsworth and Coleridge had been at Oxford instead of Cambridge. And I used to walk here on my way to attend tutorials with A.J.P. Tay- lor at a then isolated college house called Magdalen Ford, across the stream. In the garden was a caravan, where Taylor's naughty wife Margaret cavorted with the poet Dylan Thomas, who sponged there in repellent ingratitude. Taylor hated him, as well he might, though he did not show it at the time. In those days adultery, and the bitterness it engendered, were carefully shrouded — though I do recall having pointed out to me Dr Martin Ridley, deprived of his Balliol fellowship 'for being caught in flagrante delicto on college premises' — it was the last circumstance which damned him.
I looked in at the college chapel, which was empty save for an organ scholar prac- tising. There is a tale that Oliver Cromwell stole the college organ and used it for his private delight at Hampton Court, where he lorded it as Protector. But the college got it back and in due course it was played on by Sir John Stainer, choirmaster at the college in the 1870s, when he got the idea for my favourite Easter oratorio, 'The Cru- cifixion'. In the ante-chapel are tombs and plaques of dusty old fellows. Magdalen is famous for its long-lived presidents, such as Sir Herbert Warren, elected to the post in 1885, who survived in it till 1928, a reign of 43 years. When I was up, some of the dons still remembered him, vividly and not always with affection, 'though he got us the Prince of Wales, you know, in 1911. That was one in the eye for Balliol and the House!' An even longer tenure was Martin Routh's, president for 63 years until his death in 1854, who staggered Macaulay by referring to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 as 'the late Troubles'. But then, what is wrong with very old dons who remember better times? What Oxford is about is the reconsideration of the past through the prism of modern mores. Waiting in the piti- less February rain, I enjoyed hearing one woman jogger say to another, 'It's unbeliev- able! I wonder what Kant would have said about her!'
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