Making the Most of It Page 2

  All this was organized by the undergraduates themselves, not by the university. At student parties, too, I met surprisingly interesting people. In my first year I found myself in an engrossing conversation alone, outside the party, with Oscar Wilde’s son, Vyvyan Holland. He told me how, during the scandal that engulfed and destroyed his father, no one, literally no one, would explain to him and his brother what had happened, nor did anyone explain it for years to come. The two boys were surrounded on all sides by shock and horror, and their lives were shattered; they were made to go into purdah and change their surname; yet they could never find out what it was all about. He talked with moving objectivity, without self-pity, about the effect all this had on him while he was growing up. It was one of the most emotionally memorable conversations I have ever had. But again, it had nothing to do with the university; we were there because a friend of mine had invited us both to the same party.

  This, I began to see, was the point about being a student at Oxford. All around me the great big university, with its unconsidered and uncaring requirements, lumbered along like a juggernaut, prepared to crush you under its wheels if you ingested its values. Out of its thousands of students it was impossible to know more than a few; and among the hundreds of organized activities it was also not possible to engage in more than a handful. So I had to piece together my own Oxford. There were enough fellow-spirits, and enough congenial activities, to keep me happy. I woke up to the fact that my disappointment with Oxford had been caused by mistaken attitudes on my part. If I embraced it for what it was, instead of wanting it to be something else, I could enjoy it and get a lot out of it. There were all these congenial people of my own age, with all this self-created social life, all these clubs, societies and magazines, all these attractive women, in a setting of astounding beauty. What more could anyone ask? Precisely because an individual could participate in only a fraction of what was going on, each individual’s Oxford was bound to be different – an anthology selected by him from the mass of available possibilities, leaving most of them out.

  I made my own anthology. In so far as there was a pattern to it, it was something like this. I went to at least one party, or to the Randolph, most days. Over four years I went to every single weekly meeting of the English Club, and all but one of the weekly debates at the Oxford Union, and became President of both. I had a volume of poems published in London by the Fortune Press, wrote for several magazines in Oxford, and edited a college magazine. I became engulfed in what was, up to that time, the most passionate love affair of my life. I accepted the fact that there were huge regions of the university that I had nothing to do with. Sport was the biggest as far as other undergraduates’ interests were concerned: it contained many worlds within its one big world. Religion was another. There were innumerable clubs and societies whose meetings I never attended; and there were colleges I rarely entered, because I had no friends in them. The only aspect of this that I regret now is that I did not take more interest in undergraduate music and theatre. These – music and theatre – were my greatest loves of all, but I had become so conditioned by metropolitan standards of performance that I regarded student performances as not really worth going to. Unconsciously, I was the victim of a sort of London-snobbery. I took little interest in that side of undergraduate life, though actually it was rich. I realize now that the writing and public speaking that I did go in for were no nearer to professional standards than the acting and instrument-playing that my friends were going in for. But where I was an active practitioner it came naturally to get involved, whereas I was a passive consumer otherwise, and therefore unconcerned with anything except how good something was. When I did go to an OUDS (Oxford University Dramatic Society) production of Shakespeare’s Richard III, simply because the play itself meant so much to me, I was astonished at how good John Wood was in the title role – it remains, I think, the best piece of amateur acting I have seen. For the first time I got an inkling of what I might be missing. Since then I have heard about other performances that I wish I had seen. In particular, contemporaries whom I did not know at that time, because they were wholly immersed in those worlds, have since become friends, and I wish intensely that I had seen their earliest performances, some of which are still reliably reported to have been good. I could so easily have done so, but felt I couldn’t be bothered. That attitude now seems to me ignorant and snooty, and I am embarrassed by the thought that it may have seemed so to others at the time.

  Some of the limitations this might have inflicted on me were countered by a tendency for the people at or near the top of the various undergraduate worlds to be brought together by circumstances (chiefly parties) and get to know one another. There were seven thousand seven hundred undergraduates, and these were said to divide into the seven thousand and the seven hundred. The seven thousand were oriented to their colleges. They made their friendships in them, and carried out their other activities – dining and drinking, sport, acting, debating, writing for magazines, attending society meetings, and so on – in college organizations. The seven hundred had these relationships with the university as a whole: they represented it in sport (and sometimes went beyond – an undergraduate at my college, Alan Dick, was a gold medallist in the Olympic Games) and organized the university-wide clubs and societies, produced or starred in the OUDS productions, edited or wrote Isis and Cherwell magazines, were Presidents of the Union, and so on. Because they did things on a university-wide scale they were involved with other undergraduates without regard to their colleges, and their friendships reflected that. Then, through that most worthwhile of all undergraduate institutions, the drinks party (there were, fortunately for the rest of us, people who were interested in being successful hosts), they were continually meeting their opposite numbers in other fields. Socially these constituted the top layer of the undergraduate world, lords of the little universe that was undergraduate Oxford, the figures the gossip columnists in the student magazines (and sometimes the national press) wrote about. They were the young men who were expected to become stars in the outside world – and in a way it was surprising how many did. To pick examples from my own largest cabbage patch, the Union: when later, though still only in their thirties, Jeremy Thorpe became leader of the Liberal Party, William Rees-Mogg editor of The Times, Robin Day a household face on television, and Dick Taverne the youngest QC in the country, it was no more than the rest of us had assumed would happen. For such figures there was something heady and unrepeatable about that first fame in Oxford, the first fame of adult life; and its possessors knew that. Years later, Robert Robinson wrote in his memoirs: ‘Robin Day was President of the Union the term I was editor of the Isis – ‘We’ll never be as famous again’, he told me, and of course he was right – being well-known isn’t the same.’

  Also many years later, but this time to me, Robert Robinson said: ‘When we were at Oxford it never entered my head to think of academic study as the purpose of our being there. I thought of it as the collateral we had to put up.’ With the precision of language characteristic of him, this expresses what was also my attitude. What the majority of students at Oxford got most out of, and learnt most from, was not their relationship to the University but their relationship to one another, and to the world they created for themselves. None of the ablest ones I knew were focused primarily on academic work. Those who wanted to be writers were more concerned with writing for the student magazines, perhaps editing them, and also with learning from established writers at meetings of the English Club and the Poetry Society – and in discussing all these things with like-minded friends. Those who wanted to go into politics were focused on the Union, and perhaps the political clubs. Those who aspired to a life in the theatre were wrapped up in one student production after another, each of which they would spend most of a term rehearsing. The whole experience of being at Oxford, the totality of it, was a preparation for life in the world outside, and students who devoted themselves primarily to academic work seemed to me to be miss
ing the point of being there. I saw them as blinkered creatures who were preparing themselves for nothing more than a continuance of life in Oxford while missing out on most of its fun. As far as my own academic work was concerned I studied what fed my spirit, and tried to keep out of trouble. I did not apply myself to it in a sustained way until my fourth year, when I had already taken my first degree and had drunk undergraduate life to the full – and was at last taking a degree in something I was emotionally committed to: Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

  The prevailing attitude to academic work was different in those days from what it is today. Many undergraduates came up explicitly to have a good time – to take part in sports, go to parties, make friends, meet girls, and generally have fun for three or four years before having to buckle down to earning a living and bringing up a family. They were more than happy with a third class honours degree, which was known as ‘a gentleman’s degree’: for the rest of their lives they would have the cachet of being Oxford men, with honours degrees. In those days something like a third of the undergraduates got thirds. A standard saying among them about their results was: ‘If you get a first you’re a friend of the examiners. If you get a second, you’re a filthy swot. If you get a third you’re a proper chap. If you get a fourth you’re a friend of the examiners.’ Such people made an invaluable contribution to the character and life of the place, and plenty of my friends were in that category. They would have no chance of getting in nowadays: the university would not dream of accepting them. Yet they nourished a wonderful atmosphere that we all shared and fed on. Nearly all of us, including most of those who might be called intellectuals, saw our aims as being to have fun while preparing ourselves for life across a very broad front. Today, however, Oxford undergraduates are given no alternative but to work hard at their academic studies; and for most of them this is a loss. There has been a transformation in student life: the number of third class degrees in any year is negligible, because anyone who looks like getting one is not admitted in the first place.

  It might seem to the reader as if I myself came into the category of people who lived like that, and I nearly did – but not quite, because I did have strong and serious intellectual interests. When all is said and done I did do some academic work during my first three years; and it was to have a lifelong influence on me, though the effect was cumulative, and slow to establish itself. Lectures were not compulsory, and only a small proportion of undergraduates went to them; but individual tuition, which the whole system was based on, was compulsory, and consisted of having to read for, and write, weekly essays under the personal supervision of a tutor. I would spend an hour alone with my tutor once or twice a week; and these tutorials constituted above all else a training in analytic thinking. To almost any assertion I made he would come back with a response like one of the following: What exactly do you mean by that? Yes, but what do you mean by the key term there? What is your evidence for this? Aren’t the implications of what you’re saying now incompatible with those of what you said about so-and-so last week? How in that case do you explain such-and-such? Have you considered the following counter-example? Ought you not to draw a distinction between so-and-so and such-and-such?

  At every step I found myself being challenged and forced to defend my use of words, my use of evidence, my arguments, my logic, my conclusions, their implications, my omissions. In particular, the paramount need to base opinions on evidence, and not just on emotion, was dinned into me; and alongside that the need to be critical of the evidence itself. I was taught to take a responsible attitude to meaning, and to pay attention to even small distinctions of meaning, for they could turn out to have important consequences. I learnt that before committing myself to any argument I needed to ask myself what objections could be brought against it, and how I would answer those objections. I needed also to ask myself what side-implications it held, and whether I was willing to go along with all of them.

  The more intelligent you were, the more difficult these challenges were to meet, and the more good they did you. To develop a person’s mind there is nothing like it. Quite apart from anything to do with the subject of history, it was a marvellous training in analytic thinking as such, and was intellectually the most valuable thing I got out of being at Oxford. That, in fact, was the university education. That it changed me, and made a difference to my whole life, is without question. But this was a slow process. When I came up I was a teenager, and there was still something of the teenager about the way my mind worked. For instance, I was a passionate socialist, given to making sweeping and deeply felt assertions. I was also used to arguing with contemporaries who were as immature as I was. Except for one master at school I had never encountered anything like this dispassionate analysis of my views, and my schoolmaster had done it with nothing like the same relentless determination. At first I found it disorienting. It was contrary to my natural way of thinking. What seemed to me right and natural was to base your position on true, spontaneous feeling and then think up the best arguments you could to support it. To base your opinions on evidence seemed too detached, too cerebral, too cold and calculating, too unfeeling – all right, perhaps, for those who were not engaged, but not for those who were. I saw it as the attitude of a bystander. But I had already in me enough potential for rational thinking to feel I was being successfully got at by this formidable critique of my approach, and to feel a need to produce an effective answer to it – and to be embarrassed when I knew I had failed. Slowly, against powerful emotional resistance from inside myself, I began to learn to think. But I was to find that learning to think was not a neat process that ran its course and came to a natural conclusion. It was a never-ending process that has been going on, with some difficulty, ever since.

  The Oxford approach is not without its limitations. The most serious of these is that it stops short with analysis. We were not encouraged to have ideas of our own but to criticize other people’s. If anything, we were made to feel that if we stuck our necks out and said anything positive we would be shot down in flames and deserve to be. All generalizations were distrusted. Nothing could be said to be like anything else, because there were always differences. Theory itself was distrusted, because theory involved generalization. We were trained to be effective critics, but at the same time we were given inhibitions about being creative, imaginative, or original. When misused, as it so often is, this approach encouraged second-rate people to take a critical and superior attitude to everything without committing themselves to anything. Properly used, though, it constituted a wonderful training for someone who was going to think positively for himself, and be willing to commit himself, because it equipped him with invaluable means of self-criticism and self-correction, and gave him a permanent antidote to self-indulgence. But it was dangerously limiting for the others. It made them frightened to say anything positive of an intellectually serious kind. It was a first-class training for senior civil servants, for it made them brilliant at seeing the flaws in everything that was proposed while making them, partly for that reason, unwilling to propose much themselves. And of course this is not a coincidence, because much of the character of Oxford education was consciously developed during the last two hundred years as a way of training individuals to run the administration of the country.

  I ought not to leave this subject without saying something about the one respect in which I think the process may have done me harm. It did not, I think, materially diminish my independence of mind, or my underlying urge for synthesis, or my willingness to commit myself, and it did give me powers of analytic thinking and self-criticism that are indispensable accompaniments to these. As far as those things go, it was gain. But the aesthetic side of my nature did not pass through a corresponding development – and I am by nature a predominantly aesthetic person. I arrived at Oxford as someone whose greatest loves in life were for music, theatre and poetry: I was a greedy consumer of all three, and a writer of poetry that would later be published. My approach to life, incl
uding its intellectual dimension, was primarily one of feeling. However, there took place a huge development not of my involvement with any of those things but of my capacity for conceptual thinking, which is not central to the arts or to feeling, and can be at odds with them. This altered the balance of my personality. The imbalance remained, I think, for a number of years. I was never corrupted by intellectualization – that lethal curse of academe – in my approach to the arts, but I developed a hypertrophy of the analytic intellect without a counterbalancing development in emotional or aesthetic awareness. It took me quite a long time after I had left Oxford to rediscover and recover the equilibrium that had been natural to me before; and I may never quite have recovered it. As a result of going through Oxford I am on balance more ‘intellectual’ than I would have been otherwise. And I do not think this is an improvement.

  One unquestionably good thing about it, though, is the full realization that if you are going to think rationally and realistically, and to some purpose, you need facts and logic as well as feelings. Thought, and above all analytic thought, needs a subject-matter, something to think about. However, that subject is the vehicle for your education, not the education itself. I happened to be cutting my teeth on history, but I could have acquired a similar training through the study of another subject. As things were, in the study of history my adolescent attitudes were able very much to make themselves felt. Not only was I sceptical of authority of every kind, which is in itself a good thing: I automatically assumed the worst about governments and their motives, which is foolish, because divorced from reality. Here again my tutor would challenge me. ‘All right,’ he would say: ‘Suppose you yourself had been the King in those circumstances, what would you have done? What were the alternatives confronting you? You could have done x, or you could have done y, or you could have done z – or you could have done nothing, which is always an option, and sometimes the best one. There were serious drawbacks to each of these policies, and a cost to be paid for each; but can you think of any others? If not, think these through carefully, and tell me next week what you would have chosen to do, and why.’ And again, slowly, I learnt that to govern is to choose, and that all choices have drawbacks and costs; there is always opposition, always resistance, resources are always finite and therefore limited, and the range of options is also limited. Not even the most powerful dictator can do whatever he likes. I came to see political situations from the point of view of whoever has to take the decisions. This is not to say that I necessarily liked the people or approved their decisions, but I began to realize what it was like to be in their shoes, and this made me better at understanding them and what they did. In fact, the more I read about them the more evident it was that in essentials they were human beings like me. I think this fundamental insight had already been instilled in me by Shakespeare, but the study of history clothed that skeleton with a great many real-life examples of flesh and blood. When I arrived in Oxford I looked at government from the outside, always with a measure of hostility, but by the time I left it I looked at political problems in terms of what needed to be done about them, and therefore from the point of view of those who are, or others who want to be, in power. This was a part of growing up, of course, part of becoming mature, and might partially have happened at that stage of my life anyway, but it was also a part of my education.