reading, and the subtlety of your ear for the rhythms of the 1780s, say, or the 1920s. You came to grief, though, if you picked up on some autobiographical clue that identified the author; that, too, was thought to be ‘journalistic’. So when a religious sonnet in the language of the 1660s made reference to its author’s loss of sight or an ode in 1820 high Romantic contained a bout of coughing, I made out that my oddly precise dating of the text relied on analysing the vocabulary alone. I came top of the college in this paper in the first-year exams, but it was really just a parlour game that I happened to be good at. It didn’t seem like scholarship , which ought to have been harder.
I told Stellings this and he started calling me ‘Groucho’. I liked this better than the nickname I had had at school.
Something else looked briefly promising. This was called ‘Theory’ and it was just coming in. The point about Theory was that it didn’t matter if you read Jane Eyre or a fridge installation manual: what you were doing was studying how you studied them, and the important thing now was not the (anyway unquantifiable) ‘value’ of the original work but the effectiveness of the theory. Vanity Fair or Biggles was the guinea pig; the vaccine being tested was the -ism. Some of the theories came from the study of linguistics, which was partly based on neuroscience, and for a moment the poor English dons, so fed up with being looked down on by their scientific colleagues, could boast that they too had a ‘real’ subject with truths that could be tested in a lab.
The linguistics side of it hasn’t been fruitful yet because the people writing about the basis of language don’t seem to be able to write.
Other theories are coming in, but they’re based on Marxism or psychoanalysis and other doctrines which haven’t cut the mustard in their own world and now look as though they’re just trying their luck on defenceless Eng Lit – like soldiers cashiered from the regiment turning up as teachers at a struggling private school.
So for Gerald Stanley and the rest it looks like it’s back to Jane Eyre .
You can see why, personally, I prefer to take my neuroscience straight, with options in genetics and pathology.
More to the point, however, than my academic work is this: an unexpected but very good thing has happened.
Two
I’d better explain. It’s October, the beginning of my final year. I left off this story all of a sudden because I had to do some work for exams. They didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, but that doesn’t matter.
This does matter, though.
In the summer vacation, I worked in my father’s old paper mill for four weeks to make money. The work was boring (I pushed a rubber-wheeled wagon round the factory floor), but it wasn’t hard. At some time the union had agreed that in return for deferring a pay rise, the workforce would have a ten-minute break each hour – excluding lunch and tea and the official tea breaks of fifteen minutes and the five-minute two-hourly toilet breaks. You could roll all the minutes up, if you liked, and leave an hour early. As a casual, I wasn’t officially in the union, but I followed their rules and got paid in cash in a crinkly grey envelope on Friday afternoon.
Jennifer was going to Ireland to make a film with some people from Trinity. The director was called Stewart Forres and there were maybe thirty or so people, cast and crew and a few hangers-on, girlfriends, boyfriends, going to a large old country house near Tipperary.
There wasn’t room for everyone in the main house, so some people put up tents in the grounds and some took rooms in the local village. I found one above the butcher’s shop. The proprietor was called Michael Clohessy and we joked about having the same Christian name. His wife called me ‘little Michael’ and cooked breakfast of black pudding and bacon and sausage and soda bread. The rent was five pounds a week, and after Mrs
I told Stellings this and he started calling me ‘Groucho’. I liked this better than the nickname I had had at school.
Something else looked briefly promising. This was called ‘Theory’ and it was just coming in. The point about Theory was that it didn’t matter if you read Jane Eyre or a fridge installation manual: what you were doing was studying how you studied them, and the important thing now was not the (anyway unquantifiable) ‘value’ of the original work but the effectiveness of the theory. Vanity Fair or Biggles was the guinea pig; the vaccine being tested was the -ism. Some of the theories came from the study of linguistics, which was partly based on neuroscience, and for a moment the poor English dons, so fed up with being looked down on by their scientific colleagues, could boast that they too had a ‘real’ subject with truths that could be tested in a lab.
The linguistics side of it hasn’t been fruitful yet because the people writing about the basis of language don’t seem to be able to write.
Other theories are coming in, but they’re based on Marxism or psychoanalysis and other doctrines which haven’t cut the mustard in their own world and now look as though they’re just trying their luck on defenceless Eng Lit – like soldiers cashiered from the regiment turning up as teachers at a struggling private school.
So for Gerald Stanley and the rest it looks like it’s back to Jane Eyre .
You can see why, personally, I prefer to take my neuroscience straight, with options in genetics and pathology.
More to the point, however, than my academic work is this: an unexpected but very good thing has happened.
Two
I’d better explain. It’s October, the beginning of my final year. I left off this story all of a sudden because I had to do some work for exams. They didn’t go as well as I’d hoped, but that doesn’t matter.
This does matter, though.
In the summer vacation, I worked in my father’s old paper mill for four weeks to make money. The work was boring (I pushed a rubber-wheeled wagon round the factory floor), but it wasn’t hard. At some time the union had agreed that in return for deferring a pay rise, the workforce would have a ten-minute break each hour – excluding lunch and tea and the official tea breaks of fifteen minutes and the five-minute two-hourly toilet breaks. You could roll all the minutes up, if you liked, and leave an hour early. As a casual, I wasn’t officially in the union, but I followed their rules and got paid in cash in a crinkly grey envelope on Friday afternoon.
Jennifer was going to Ireland to make a film with some people from Trinity. The director was called Stewart Forres and there were maybe thirty or so people, cast and crew and a few hangers-on, girlfriends, boyfriends, going to a large old country house near Tipperary.
There wasn’t room for everyone in the main house, so some people put up tents in the grounds and some took rooms in the local village. I found one above the butcher’s shop. The proprietor was called Michael Clohessy and we joked about having the same Christian name. His wife called me ‘little Michael’ and cooked breakfast of black pudding and bacon and sausage and soda bread. The rent was five pounds a week, and after Mrs