Cambridge revisited

National Review, Oct 18, 1985 by D. Keith Mano

IN 1963 I arrived at Waterloo Station, lugging an umbrella and seven suitcases, one entirely filled with American toilet paper. I was the Kellett Fellow from Columbia to Clare College, Cambridge. Just track-side I asked an attractive young woman where public telephones might be found. She made some amvibalent sign. When later I stepped from the booth her Cockney boyfriend was there. "If you keeps talkin' to girls whot is engayged, yer gonta come unstuck," he said. And hit me, palm-flat, on the sternum. It wasn't what you'd call an auspicious start.

And it got worse. Later the same first day, I became lost in Kensington. No one had told me that London ceases existence at around 12:32 A.M. Hitler wasn't night-bombing the English, he was just trying to wake them up. After some time I came across a lone bobby. "Hi, there," I said. "Do you know the way to Cromwell Road?"

"Yes," he said, "I do." And walked off.

By then, as you might imagine, I felt like I was first item on the food chain--super-vulnerable. So, next afternoon, when I saw two women writing postcards in St. James's Park, I thought, "Aha, could be American."

"Hi, there," I said, "I'm from New York and--" and they both, God, screamed. They ran. A bobby began to rush around the lake, yelling. "You, 'ey you!" I ran. Got on some sort of bus, got down one block later, fell off the elevator footwear mother had bought me, sprained my right ankle, and spent that initial Cambridge week in bed with a fuchsia instep.

They had given me advice at Columbia: buy the grottiest second-hand college gown you can find. I did. Mine had one sleeve, smelt of burnt Wellingtons, and somebody, I believe, had eaten a fried egg on it. Before dinner in clare Great Hall I took out the traveling iron Mother had given me, folded my college blanker eight times, and set out to press this sordid bat wing. Better pour black ink over the eggy part. Yes, and then I sensed burning. My iron had gone through eight layers of blanket--leaving a trapezoidal paper-doll cutout. Well, next day the gyp lady marvelous custom: she did your washing up and shined shoes) said, "Ow, sir, I gotta report this blanket." Ten minutes later the head porter came up and said, "Sir, in this college we do not smoke in bed." What did he think I had, some sort of giant trapezoidal cigar?

But no one, not even the master, would dare contradict the head porter. These were often men who had flown cover at Dunkirk or fought across North Africa. Mine, out of kindness, taught me where to climb is safely (and illegally) over Clare Memorial Gate. College gates shut at midnight, and inept American people could get hung up on a revolving spike. Actually, custom dictated that you climb into each college court (there were about 19 that counted) before graduation--including King's over the damn Gothic mini-cathedal. (It was also customary to throw our cox off Clare Bridge after a boat race. I remember searchlights as police dragged the Cam for his corpse.) Once, when Sir Eric Ashby went past, my porter shook his head, "Poor man."

"Why?" I Ask.

"His roses aren't very good, sir. Not at all."

Cambridge was-and still is--the most beautiful university in all of academic creation. Bosch-painted flowers (each an allergen to me) sprang up even on christmas Day. Who could concentrate? I was doing graduate research on something--how Dr. Johnson's scrofula influenced his metrical style, I think. And taking informal instruction from F. R. Leavis. Leavis by then was a baroque, half-mad figure. Downing College had lent him cloakroom space to lecture at random in--he wore a bathrobe, one carpet slipper, and many toast crumbs. Leavis would read Johnson or Addison or Swift aloud with interpretation--and you'd notice, after a while, that he had stopped turning the page. It was from pure memory. A world figure, yet all he cared for was his precarious (he made trouble) standing at Cambridge. "C. S. Lewis is dead," he announced to us one morning. "They said in the Times that we will miss him. We will no. We will not."

I realized now that Cambridge had almost no effect on me. (Unlike the terrific influence it exerted over other Kelletts--Norman Podhoretz for one.) Until this moment I have never written about my time there. Not once. True, Cambridge killed my passion for scholarly criticism (but Lionel Trilling had begun that process). True, I wed a Girton girl--but something similar might have come to pass in new York. I began my first novel on the Cam banks--but I would've begun it beside another river, and it was about Manhattan not England. I don't quite understand why such a severe cultural adjustment made so little lasting impression. It seems strange. After that first horrid week, I got on well. More than sport or intellect, drama was prime in Cambridge. I could act: for my age I had wide theater experience. I was much courted: a small celebrity, in fact. But when my tutor suggested I learn Italian for the second-year final exam, I got uncomfortable. "Oh," he said, "you don't learn it. You just memorize passages from Dante and Petrarch that've appeared on previous exams."