It wasn’t sensible to regret my change of subject. The results from my Part I exams had told their own story: a First for my German oral, an Upper Second for my spoken Spanish. A Lower Second overall. Reading Modern Languages had indeed been a lost cause, while reading English was merely a losing battle. Even my strengths (as I saw them) did me no good. An American lecturer came to lead a seminar on Thomas Mann, which I attended. The professor made a meal of the last sentence of Mann’s story Mario and the Magician, saying it was a wonderful ending and the key to the meaning of the whole. Fine, but make sure you’re using an accurate translation. The last sentence in German contains the clause ‘ich konnte und kann nicht umhin’, meaning ‘I can’t think otherwise’, or simply ‘I have to agree’. The translation on which the prof was placing so much weight said the opposite — ‘I don’t think so’, or something of the sort.
I put up my hand to explain that the translation was defective, and the prof just said again, ‘Such a wonderful ending.’
‘It can’t mean what you want it to mean. It’s not possible in the German.’
‘Uh-huh,’ was the best he could manage at short notice. Then he regrouped his forces and said, ‘Literature can accommodate any amount of ambiguity. That’s a great thing. We must agree to disagree. There’s no dishonour in that. And I thank you for your contribution.’
Deputising for the tide
We didn’t agree to disagree. We disagreed about our disagreement. Ambiguity is one thing, ignorance is another. He couldn’t admit to being wrong on the facts of language. He was reduced to pretending that his interpretation could overrule the text, and there was dishonour in that. When he said, ‘Thank you for your contribution,’ it was another twisting of language, this time of the English language (so he had fewer excuses). What he meant was closer to ‘Piss off, you little wretch, and next time you have a bright idea keep it to yourself.’
I was rather disillusioned about the way the academic world worked. I was naïve. Small boys don’t enjoy it when their sandcastles are swept away by the tide, particularly when an even smaller boy deputises for the tide, on his first day at the beach.
Not everything in the English department was so uninspiring. I attended some of Muriel Bradbrook’s lectures on Ibsen. She was the Mistress of Girton who had wanted to protect her charges, if not from sex then at least from its repetition, by locking the doors at ten o’clock. As a lecturer she insisted that we couldn’t understand the plays unless we understood the geography of Norway. She would rather we looked at pictures of fjords than volumes of criticism.
I found this exhilarating, until I started to think it was just another version of what I had heard in the Faculty of Modern (and Mediaeval) Languages. Nothing short of total immersion is any good.
One German word which had the power to reproach me was a fashionable one in English at the time, gestalt. All I had in the way of a life was a series of interlocking routines — bedder, Hall, lectures, yoghurt manufacture — with none of the feeling of an organic whole. My summer enlightenment had faded like a tan.
Perhaps I had as strong a claim as anyone to the word gestalt, since I at least knew its derivation from the Old High German stellen, meaning (to locate the core of a cluster of ideas) to shape. My life had no controlling shape.
Still, there were pockets in my week that gave me pleasure and some small sense of belonging. I had got into the habit, for instance, of drinking a half-pint of beer at the Cambridge Arms on a fairly regular basis. Perhaps as often as twice a week. It was my first experiment in having a ‘local’, a step on the way to the stranger state of actually being a local. The Cambridge Arms, on King Street, was pleasantly nondescript. The public bar at least didn’t attract much of a university crowd. King Street itself was modest, not exactly a back street but mainly used by university people as a short cut, or for sheer relief when the glory of the colleges became too much to bear.
Adjusting my bow tie
The public bar of the Cambridge Arms had the advantage, from my point of view, of an outstandingly friendly and coöperative Australian barman. He was called Kerry Bashford, and after a while we evolved a routine. I would park outside and sound the horn in my trademark pattern, the series of blasts which spelled out Om Mane Padme Om, and Kerry would come out and help me get into the wheelchair, after lifting it out of the boot of the car. He lifted the chair one-handed, swinging it in an effortless arc. He was quite unselfconscious about his strength and the grace it produced. I liked the fact that he didn’t suddenly freeze up with the realisation that he could do such a lot with his body that I couldn’t. Why is it supposed to please me when people hunch their shoulders to atone for being tall, or restrict their movements to apologise for being flexible? There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your body. I would if I could. I do when I can. It’s much easier to see that the body is an illusion if you’ve actually spent some time there.
Kerry always insisted on fitting the wheelchair with its footplates. I didn’t usually bother asking people to do this — say what you like about ankylosed joints, but at least they don’t need support. There was something motherly about Kerry’s attention to detail in this, as if he wanted me to be turned out at my best, the equivalent in wheelchair terms of adjusting my bow tie.
Kerry was a Jehovah’s Witness from Newcastle, New South Wales. My first tame Jehovah’s Witness, though he’d more or less grown out of that strange faith. He had fair skin and a big broad face, with a scrawny beard more or less holding the whole unstable gestalt together. He told me of a time when he’d gone to an open-air pop concert back home and been so sunburned he went a sort of purple. To finance his European adventure he had worked on a gang repairing railway track. His was the sort of skin that will never take a tan, wrapped round an antipodean boy slow to take the hint that peeling is not how epithelial cells say Thank you, we enjoyed that.
Kerry would always be reading Howards End out of sight behind the bar, but he wasn’t exactly spoiling for literary chat. If I asked whether he was enjoying the book, he’d just say, ‘Bloke can write,’ sometimes with neutral appreciation, sometimes dogmatically. Once he even struck the closed book lightly with his fist, but the verdict was always the same. Bloke can write. He wouldn’t be coaxed into detail. He’d said all he had to say.
Kerry was very good at anticipating my needs without making me feel like part of a social worker’s caseload. Even on my first visit he didn’t need to be told that I needed my half of Abbot in a glass with a stem or a handle. Not a straight glass which calls for a capacious fist.
On subsequent visits he came up with the game of giving me a free half of Abbot on the basis that I was required to declare it fit for drinking. I would take a slow suspicious sniff of the bouquet of esters, then a small sip, which I swilled around my mouth. I pushed my lips forward like someone trying to kiss himself on each cheek in turn. Then I would pass judgement, as if I was an itinerant palate retained by Greene King to check on the standard of their products, a roving taster. There are worse jobs.