Kingsley Amis on Tolkien as teacher
I have not done so well in my reading of Brideshead Revisited. Monday night, instead of reading Waugh before bed, I read a chapter in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Last night and this morning on the train, I resumed reading a biography of the poet Philip Larkin, which I left off reading a month ago.
I found the following interesting passage in the biography:
[Larkin's] course of studies was a far cry from the one which exists at Oxford today—it was strongly biased towards philology, and ended with the writers of the 1820′s. The only bright spots in his week, he told [his parents], were ‘Edmund Blunden [on the Lake Poets] and Lord David Cecil [on the Romantics]: for the rest I’m trying to comprehend just why the quarto Othello is different from the folio Othello and how and where and who’s responsible for it.’ Other lectures got similarly short shrift, among them J. R. R. Tolkien on Anglo-Saxon poetry, Neville Coghill on Chaucer and Shakespeare, C. S. Lewis on Medieval and Renaissance literature, and Charles Williams on Milton. According to Kingsley Amis, whom Larkin did not meet until early the following spring, Larkin took Iles’s advice and simply cut most of the ‘group stuff’ he should have attended. ‘He didn’t go to lectures much,’ Amis says. ‘Not even Lewis, who was marvellous. Not Tolkien, either, but then he was an appalling lecturer. He spoke unclearly and slurred the important words, and then he’d write them on the blackboard but keep standing between them and us, then wipe them off before he turned round.’from Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life by Andrew Motion. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux,1993.
Quite a lineup of teachers there! Coghill, Tolkien, Lewis, Williams, not to mention Edmund Blunden. With instructors like that, it’s rather easy to see how an institution such as Oxford produces the great writers of the age.
One wonders if the same is true of America. If one were to make a catalog of the great writers of this day—whomever they might be, I haven’t a clue—and the Universities they attended, would one find that they went to elite schools? Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Notre Dame, Stanford, Chicago, Columbia…
I know that in the nineteen-eighties, Bennington College in Vermont produced a “school” of writers including Brett Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt. Bennington is elite and expensive, however. I looked into it when I was looking for a school, and it was far out of my league. I was an admirer of Ellis at that time. American Psycho seemed to me something new and original. It was also a scandalous book in an age in which literary scandals were few and far between. So of course I read it avidly.
I know nothing about England that is not an illusion created by reading British literature, so I can’t even say if there are any other schools in England besides Oxford and Cambridge. They may even be different colleges in the same school, for all I know. I suppose there are less elite colleges in Britain, but has anyone ever heard of a great writer coming from Liverpool Polytechnical Institute (I’m just making up a name there).
Similarly, do American public colleges and state institutions produce greats? Or just Stephen Kings? Not that I am putting down Stephen King. I’ve read everything he has ever written, and I happen to think he is more important a writer than he is given credit for being. Also, he makes a lot of money, so he must be doing something right. However, now that I think about it, some of the best American writers never even went to college, Hemingway for example. But others like H.’s buddy Fitzgerald went to Princeton.
Larkin didn’t know how good he had it at Oxford. I love to read descriptions, fictional or otherwise, of school life in England. I could probably be happy at a school that taught no writers of a more recent vintage than 1820.
I enjoyed reading your observations. I have always felt myself an Anglophile and have wished that I could have been educated in England. I have always enjoyed English history and literature! Thanks for the read!
Certainly lots of great American writers went to not so prestigious schools–especially if you include, say, graduates of the U of Iowa Writer’s program, which is an extremely prestigious program that’s put out lots of great writers, but it’s at a big state U, not Harvard. Then you’ve got, e.g., Raymond Carver–probably the great short story writer of the second half of the 20th c–who attended Chico State College in Paradise, CA, where his teacher was another somewhat important author John Gardner. The other guy I might nominate as the great short story writer Tim O’Brien, though, went to Harvard (after returning home from Vietnam).
I don’t know where Richard Russo, who won a Pulitzer recently and has writen a number of fine novels, went to college, but for a long time he taught at a small college in Maine. Then you’ve got Toni Morrison, who is a prof at Princeton.
Graham Swift is one of the more important youngish British writers these days (he was extremely important a decade ago or so, at least, not sure if he has quite the same stature now), and according to this bio page he was educated at “Dulwich College, Queens’ College, Cambridge, and York University.”
I’ll have to look up Swift. Thanks for the recommendation. I often feel painfully ignorant of the contemporary literary scene, and sometimes I tend to overly privilege ‘canonical’ writers. I hope I did not sound snobbish in my speculation about which colleges the best writers attended. I do sometimes wonder, however, the extent to which economics influences which writers are read and admired and which ones are grouped in a sort of ‘lower’ literary class. I would tie education to economics as well, since sometimes it can seem as if the most expensive, elite colleges produce today’s leaders in every field while state college educated people are more the cogs and wheels of the machine rather than the engineer or ‘driver.’
I really like Swift, and I bet you would enjoy Waterland. It’s about history and story-telling, connection to place, family history. The narrator is a high school history teacher who is having his own family crisis and one of his students, who is extremely bright, asks him some version of the question: what’s the point of history given that we’re all probably going to be wiped out by nuclear bombs. The narrator starts weaving together stories of the French Revolution, which he’s supposed to be teaching them, his own life story, and the family history that led to that moment–from his great-grandfather who was an important brewer, on down. There’re some really beatiful passages about history as a means of answering the question why. I would love to teach it one of these days.
No, I don’t think you sounded particularly snobbish with that post. But particularly in the American writing scene, I don’t think there is a particular connection between the creative writers who do well and how elite their colleges are. There may be a bit more of a connection in Britain, though even there the connections are proably fairly tenuous. I’m not exactly versed in contemporary British lit, though, so I couldn’t say with certainty.