I remember one mocking Shelley for writing that Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton had changed people’s minds more than kings, conquerors and lawgivers, therefore poets were mankind’s unacknowledged legislators. Shelley (said this professor gleefully) was an atheist, Socialist, pacifist and vegetarian, and none of his writings had persuaded anyone to become these; like other great writers Shelley had found the raw materials of art in the world around him, and what he made of them were fine poems without social consequences. I wish I had stood up and announced that Hitler, Stalin and every successful tyrant understood literature better than Auden and my professor because dictators banned and burned imaginative writing, shot or jailed poets, drove them to suicide like Mayakovsky, into exile like Brecht.37 Instead I timidly pointed out that Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had social consequences — it had been banned in Germany and France because young men, disappointed in love, had copied Werther by shooting themselves.
“Thank you for reminding me,” he said, chuckling, “Yes, emotional foreigners are unhealthily influenced by literature, but sane people are not. Good conversation, said Dean Swift, is life’s only sure source of happiness. I agree. We who have no interest in football find our happiest topics in books and art which are, after all, civilization’s finest blossoms.”
This thought-annihilating smugness did not silence me at first. I submitted an essay on Hamlet saying the plot was clumsily cobbled together in the hasty way Ben Jonson (a more careful playwright) deplored in Shakespeare. Hamlet is sent to England after stabbing Polonius but brought back just in time for Ophelia’s funeral by inexplicable pirates, pirates who capture his ship, let it sail on but return him to Denmark since the plot needs him there. Hamlet keeps postponing his revenge to the end of the last scene because Shakespeare, like all first class writers except Kipling, found the revenge motive too infantile to interest him, having sickened himself of it in his first and worst play Titus Andronicus. Of course all the Hamlet speeches are so entertaining that critics and audiences enjoy the play without question, accepting what happens as they accept the accidents of ordinary life. My tutor called me to his office and said, “Are you a Levisite?”
I told him I did not know what Levisites were.
“But you have read D.H. Lawrence’s opinion of Hamlet.”
“No!” I told him.
“Then where did this drivel come from?” he asked, waving the essay in my face. I said he had asked for an essay on Hamlet and I had written what I thought. He said, “You are here to learn — not think. Are you receiving a grant?”
Like most students in those days I was receiving a grant since the 1944 Butler Acts that paid the fees of working class students would never have been passed by parliament if the middle classes had not also benefited. The bastard said, “I do not see why my taxes should be used to support a student who does not understand the purpose of a university.”
I found this professor and others had written introductions to most of the plays and poems they examined us upon, so afterwards I pleased them by repeating their opinions without regard to the original texts. Luckily my main subjects were Latin and Greek where commentary was less important than accurate translation. I did so well in them that the Snell Foundation nearly sent me to Balliol, Oxford, where my life would have become very different. But I helped a fellow student write a very funny, damaging review of Professor Fordyce’s outstandingly bad edition of Catullus.38 The review was printed anonymously in G.U.M. but Fordyce was astute enough to work out who the authors were, and had enough power in the Senate to make sure we had no chance of a high academic post in Oxford or Scotland.
One Saturday morning I visited Renfield Street, a short street of shops in central Glasgow. It joins Sauchiehall Street, Bath Street and Argyll Street to the main bridge over the Clyde, so is always throng with pedestrians and vehicles. It is now almost incredible that second-hand books were once sold from flat-topped wheelbarrows at the corners of blocks on the western side. The spate of private cars must have swept these away in the 1960s, but in my second University year I found on one a tattered Penguin paperback of 19th century verse called Hood to Hardy. Opening it at random I found it had work by poets my teachers had never mentioned, and as I read the street noises seemed to withdraw, leaving me in a silence with these words:39
This Beauty, this Divinity, this Thought,
This hallowed bower and harvest of delight
Whose roots ethereal seemed to clutch the stars,
Whose amaranths perfumed eternity,
Is fixed in earthly soil enriched with bones
Of used-up workers; fattened with the blood
Of prostitutes, the prime manure; and dressed
With brains of madmen and the broken hearts
Of children. Understand it, you at least
Who toil all day and writhe and groan all night
With roots of luxury, a cancer struck
In every muscle; out of you it is
Cathedrals rise and Heaven blossoms fair;
You are the hidden putrefying source
Of beauty and delight, of leisured hours,
Of passionate loves and high imaginings;
You are the dung that keeps the roses sweet
I did not know what amaranths were or why they perfumed eternity, but that verse shook my intelligence awake by contradicting everything I had been taught about history and poetry at school and university — all I had been officially taught about life and would be taught for years to come. Since that day I have kept finding evidence that this grim view of what we call civilization is strictly true.
I still have and love that tattered copy of the Penguin Hood to Hardy. I bought it for ninepence. The jacket indicated that the price when new had been 2/6, meaning half-a-crown, meaning 30 pence when there were 12 pence in a shilling and 240 in a pound. How queer that old money now seems! Among notes at the end of the book I read that the author had been: John Davidson [1857–1909]. Born at Barrhead, Renfrewshire, son of a Dissenting Minister, Schoolmaster in Scotland until 1889 when he settled in London and published various plays and volumes of verse. He died in circumstances that suggested suicide. Barrhead is a small factory town in the Renfrew Hills six or seven miles south of Glasgow. It made lavatory pans, and I think could be reached by tram, before the trams were scrapped in 1963.
Davidson’s verses had been written at the start of the 20th Century before two world wars, huge massacres of civilian populations, and continual government-funded escalation of wars and weaponry. I discovered him when these catastrophes had left most British people feeling safe and prosperous, but what I read for myself and have since read confirms Davidson’s tragic view of civilization. It has taken a long while for me to reach the point of asserting it here. Despite great writers working to open folks’ eyes to that truth from the days of Homer and Euripides, the teachers who expounded their work did so with eyes firmly shut. The eye-opening effort is endless. In every age it must be tackled anew, but obviously it could not be tackled within the walls of a university.