Opinion Under the Gothic arches

The most memorable scenes in the book are those of wanton excess — the annual dinner where the fellows and students feast on mounted swans,and the lurid set-piece where the college quadrangle is besieged by a thousand inflated condoms for reasons too complicated to explain. But what stays with the reader when the laughs have died down is the sheer pessimism of it all. Sharpe’s comedy has a “Lord,what fools these mortals be” tone crossed with a tragic strain,a sense of human beings as sinners through and through. In this,Sharpe reminds one not of the gentle and good-natured humour of a P.G. Wodehouse but the destructive and often cruel wit of Evelyn Waugh.

Waugh’s writing career began with its own set-piece of university misdemeanour,this time at Oxford. His Decline and Fall (1928) opens with a scene of college “dons” looking forward to all the port wine they can buy on the fines they’ll collect from students after the annual dinner of the famously rowdy “Bollinger Club”. The dons listen nervously to “the sound of the English county families baying for broken glass. Soon they would all be tumbling out into the quad,crimson and roaring in their bottle-green evening coats,for the real romp of the evening”. Waugh is talking about the club’s ritual humiliations of unsuspecting undergraduates.

There is here none of the old romance about Britain’s ancient universities. They too are places where sinners dwell. The British comic writer has long helped himself to the inherent comedy of the setting. The campus novels of David Lodge (Small World: An Academic Romance,1984,is the best known of the lot) too find their humour in the sight of supposedly unworldly scholars revealing themselves to be as earthily human as the rest of us.

Just as fertile a source of humour in the British campus novel is the constant struggle of the old universities to retain something of their eccentric traditions,real or invented,in the face of the relentless demand on them to “modernise”. This is,roughly,the plot of Porterhouse Blue,and a constant theme in Lodge’s novels: the comedy that ensues when an old institution is forced to change. Where Sharpe was different was in his ability to see that the change was just as much a source of tragedy. The British university in the 20th century,with its burgeoning bureaucracy and increasingly professional structures,no longer had room for the eccentrics who thought that the university might be the place to escape from the demands of middle-class morality. The hiring system today is designed to weed out the eccentrics with their elbow patches and unwritten monographs.

The campus comedy wouldn’t work if it required us to identify straightforwardly with the modern against the traditional,and that is why the Oxbridge setting of these novels is significant. Surrounded by their atmospheric Gothic structures,it is easier to feel a little bit of Sharpe’s antipathy for what he calls “the shoddy innovations of the present”: the concrete architecture,the empty pews in college chapels,and above all,the younger academics.

What a shame,one says,and in the next breath,thank goodness for that. After all,as the old cliché goes,the old dons were lazy,snooty and sexist. But their replacements have their own vices. The new sort of Oxbridge don,who no longer calls herself a don,is a thorough professional with the body of a gymnast and the wardrobe of a banker,expected to publish constantly and to do the rounds of international conferences. Lodge’s novels are irresistibly drawn to these farces of egotism and competitiveness.

We’d like to have it both ways — tradition and modernity,eccentricity and professionalism — but no one has yet found a way of realising this in practice. Perhaps it isn’t even possible in theory. It is the impossibility of having it all that gives the British campus tragicomedy its special flavour,its sense that universities,like everything else,are going to the dogs whatever we do. It’s enough to make one cry,but perhaps it’s better to laugh instead.

The writer is doing a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford

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