Academic Angst

Some books I set out to read, others I get involved with by accident. And since I so often enjoy those accidents, if I am heading off to a holiday cottage, for example, I may well fail to pack any books and decide to see what I find when I get there. Unless it’s an exceptionally streamlined matt black and chrome kind of rental, there’s always a shelf in the living-room or a beam in the corridor where at least a handful of battered paperbacks have been left either by the owner in a half-hearted attempt at thoughtfulness or by previous visitors.

It was on just such a holiday that I came to read Ivy Compton- Burnett’s Pastors and Masters and Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man in quick succession. And since one is the predecessor of the campus novel and the other a seminal example of the genre, inevitably I started comparing. Compton-Burnett I’d been meaning to read for a while. But Bradbury had already been written off somewhere in my head. I’d enjoyed his criticism. Probably because of vague memories of snatched glimpses of the TV version, I’d pigeonholed The History Man as shallow and chauvinistic. Certainly, arrogant men dominate both novels. But in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novel, the central male, Nicholas Herrick, is not actually an academic at all but owns a boys’ school in order to fulfil his desire to be perceived as an academic as he swans around his old university town. By contrast, Malcolm Bradbury’s book is absolutely entrenched in the lectures, lives and parties of the new campus university of Watermouth, where the central male character, Howard Kirk, is a radical sociology lecturer. There are of course many other differences, including the period. Pastors and Masters was published in 1925, and its atmosphere makes me feel that the characters are spooning marmalade on to their toast and crisping bacon by the fender around the end of the 1800s. The History Man was published exactly fifty years later and is set very clearly in the early 1970s, with trips in mini-vans to find good squats whose inhabitants will eat ‘real yoghourt’ and throw parties described as ‘social theatre’. In Pastors and Masters, as the title indicates, pastors play key parts, one as a parent of two of the pupils, the other as a friend of the Herricks. God is questioned, but it is still a pastor who must lead the school’s prize-giving. In The History Man, which is full of spliffs, Valium, marches, demos and wife-swapping, pastors would only be met with derision. But the themes of the two books are strikingly similar, and not what I’d expected. Given their titles, I’d assumed I’d be entering very male arenas, yet both books take a long, sharp-eyed look at the place of women in society. The main female character in Compton-Burnett’s novel is the protagonist’s sister, Emily, while in Bradbury’s novel she is the protagonist’s wife, Barbara. One occupies a time before women’s suffrage, the other after. Their situations should be very different. Barbara has the vote, and the Pill, so should be striking out to occupy her place in the world with certainty. Both live with intelligent, informed men. But both women are absolutely tied to those men and persistently undermined by them. Nicholas Herrick can hardly be bothered to read prayers in the morning for ten minutes to the pupils whose parents pay him so much money. He and Emily both know that she is the driving force behind the school that is their livelihood, answering the door and hosting dinners to pacify disgruntled parents. Yet theirs is a relationship in which he wields all the power. Unmarried at 50, Emily is stuck. Asked by her friend Theresa if her brother knows what a good sister he has, she replies dryly, ‘He knows what a good brother I have in him. How I should have had to go on the streets, or even be a governess without him.’ Barbara appears to have the luxury of an open marriage. She’s free to work, except she can’t because someone has to look after the children. She’s a tireless promoter of new causes – Women for Peace, The Children’s Crusade for Abortion, No More Sex for Repression – forcing all who drop by for tea to sign petitions. She conducts an affair with an actor in London in an attempt to grab some self-respect as her husband very publicly sleeps his way round their circle of friends and colleagues in Watermouth. For most of the novel she appears to be a marginal character for whom the author feels little, but then at the end the story suddenly turns and I found myself crying. Beneath the veneer, Barbara is suicidal. More predictably, perhaps, another main theme of both books is the importance of writing. But both question it. Indeed, they suggest that most writers are frauds, intellectually and actually. As far as Howard Kirk is concerned, his writing is simply something to show off when he and Barbara have just moved to Watermouth and their old friends Henry and Myra Beamish are driving them round in Henry’s little Renault to find a place to live, and he feels compromised. The two women are confiding. ‘From time to time, feeling the need to counter-balance the prejudiced narrative recorded in the back, [Howard] talked, victoriously, to Henry, in the sunlight, of his well-liked book, of the reviews, of the new commission and large advance the publisher had given him.’ When he discusses William Blake with a colleague it is in a bid to seduce her. She quotes Blake’s comment that ‘Opposition is true Friendship’, and a page and a half later Howard is using the same quotation to someone else as if it were his own discovery. In Pastors and Masters too the point of a book is to raise yourself in others’ esteem. William Masson and Dickie Bumpus are friends of the Herricks who do actually work at the university. ‘Well, William,’ says Bumpus during one irritable exchange back in Masson’s rooms in college, ‘I have protested that I have written a book. You must know that it is your part to seem to want to talk about it.’ They have been friends for thirty years, yet Bumpus has to accept that William will neither discuss it nor read it. Nicholas too is reluctant to read others’ books. But he talks incessantly  a about his disappointment that he has till now written merely critical works and that he has only managed to finish his first novel at the age of 70. ‘My first original piece of writing!’ he announces early on, unaware that the group he is telling includes the person whose work he has stolen. Compton- Burnett’s novel, which at first seems quite meandering, comes to feel like a thriller, as we try to work out at what point the manuscript fell into Nicholas Herrick’s hands and whether the real author will realize what’s happened. The reader finds out, but there is no Agatha Christie moment when the culprit is revealed, far from it. Compton-Burnett allows Nicholas to have his cake and eat it. By refraining at the last minute from actually reading the poached text out loud, he can remain elevated in his friends’ eyes for having written a novel and convince himself that he has acted nobly. For all their bluster, Howard Kirk and Nicholas Herrick are lonely. Pastors and Masters and The History Man both look at how the intensity of our desire for intimacy can bring a fear that real communication will be impossible. Their presentation of the ways in which we then push each other away feel painful and true, and they are rendered in precise, beautiful prose. Even as Compton-Burnett and Bradbury pronounce writers vainglorious and worthless, with their books they entertain enormously, and they enrich.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 27 © Josie Barnard 2010