Mentor Par Excellence
In Henry James’s short story “The Scholar,” we see a young man who is described by those around him as a genius. I say “see” deliberately. The boy says almost nothing, and the reader is given no evidence of his brilliance, aside from the way that he is treated and spoken of by the other characters in the story. For years, I have been troubled by this story. Why didn’t James show us what a genius is like? Ever since reading “The Scholar,” I have been trying to find an intelligent fictional character, or failing that, trying to create one.
John Bayley, Mentor Par Excellence
A good place to start would be to write about John Bayley, my first advisor at Oxford. In the October 8, 1986, letter to my mother I wrote, “On Monday [of the first week of Michaelmas Term], I saw my advisor, Prof. John Bayley. He is an elderly gentleman who looks a little like the elderly Benjamin Franklin. He has wispy white hair.” A comparison to Ben Franklin is laudatory. Franklin is one of America’s great elderly mentors, and his list of thirteen virtues is still a model for living a decent life.
At that time, my only familiarity with John Bayley came from reading his elegant book reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, which I had used as models for my own writing. He was one of the great literary critics of the twentieth century. However, his mentorship went beyond the written word.
The English faculty had wisely chosen Prof. Bayley to be my advisor. In the 2001 film Iris, the young Iris Murdoch (played by Kate Winslet) asks John Bayley (played by Hugh Bonneville, known for his role as Lord Grantham of Downton Abbey) what he did for a living. He replies, “I mother French and American students.” That was exactly right.
John Bayley explained what I needed to do get my degree from Oxford, hinted at Oxford’s discretionary approach to the rules, and reassured me that everything would be fine. From him, I learned the attitude of ease (to act as if the things I did or wrote were created effortlessly) and the art of “not trying too hard.” The contrast between Bayley’s approach to mentoring and others at Oxford is clearly evident in this excerpt from Michaelmas 1987. After the first year of probation, I was waiting to hear if I had been accepted to the D.Phil. program:
“I got the form back from John Bayley about transferring status. He said, ‘It should be quite all right now if you have it signed by Keble. Do come and see me if you have any problems or would like to talk about the work.’ Then on the form under the remarks section, he wrote, ‘She’s done excellent work and her research capability is highly promising.’ So presumably there won’t be any problem with this transfer. I was nervous because Thursday, when I went to the literary theory lecture, I was sitting next to Michael [Winship] who started in the program when I did. He’s an American who got his undergraduate degree from Harvard. He made some remarks that concerned me. He said that he had already transferred from probationary to full status, and he had gotten the impression from his advisor McKenzie that it wasn’t just a routine, perfunctory matter but that they carefully scrutinized your statement, implying that it was a difficult hurdle to clear. Then he told me how his advisor had given him a hard time and he had spent hours and hours preparing his statement. That made me very nervous because I sat down at the typewriter and threw the thing together in an hour. I didn’t even write a rough draft because I assumed it was a routine matter, and since I passed the exams, I did not think it was a big deal.”
In the end, we were both accepted.
What I did not know at the time was that John Bayley was facing personal challenges in the late 1980s and early 1990s. His wife, the famous writer Iris Murdoch, was developing Alzheimer’s disease. The story of their life together is documented in Iris (with Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent playing the older versions of Iris and John).
Prescribed Lectures
Continuing with the letter to my mother, “he [John Bayley] said that I am to attend the following lectures:
(1) Prolegomena to Medieval Literary Studies
(2) Editions of Old English Texts
(3) How to Describe a Medieval Manuscript Book
(4) The Paleography of Manuscripts Produced in England 1100–1300
(5) Middle English Philology
(6) Medieval Textual Criticism: Theory and Practice
(7) Medieval Latin
(8) English Hands since 1500
(9) Bibliography and Textual Criticism
(10) The 1790s: Revolutions in Politics and Poetry
(11) The Modern Tradition
(12) Writing a Thesis
(13) History and Resources of the Bodleian Library
“It sounds like a great deal of work, but fortunately, the lectures (for the most part) only meet once a week. I looked at old copies of the exam and realize that it is of a technical nature and I do not anticipate any problems with the work itself.” In addition to these lectures, I also had to take Greek and Latin because I did not have a Classical education.
In order to be accepted into the doctoral program, I had to spend the first year at Oxford as a probationary M.Litt. candidate. At the end of the year, I had to pass examinations on the above-listed topics and submit a proposal for my dissertation. Unlike American universities, these were not courses with grades or assignments. You were expected to master the content and show proficiency when you wrote the essay answers at the year-end exam.
The required lectures were odd by comparison to what you would study when doing a PhD in the United States. In Paleography, I learned how to read historic handwriting from Carolingian miniscule to Secretary hand of the seventeenth century. In Bibliography and Textual Criticism, I learned how to describe various editions of books and how to create an authoritative text. The program was designed to train scholars to use the raw materials of manuscripts and pre-publication materials to create variorum editions (works that collate all known variants of a text) and definitive texts (such as the Norton Critical Editions). This highly specialized type of scholarly work forms the foundation for other scholars to use in weaving their theories and literary analysis. It was at one of these Medieval lectures that I met Fulbright scholar Roy Liuzza, who was at Exeter College. As I mentioned in last week's newsletter, the boundaries of belonging at Oxford were not clear. Roy attended many of the same lectures that I did, so we would have lunch together at the English Faculty cafeteria after lecture. Certainly, in my mind, he belonged to Oxford even though his PhD (several years later) was from Yale.
Socializing
A description of the first week of Michaelmas term would be incomplete without mentioning the social activities.
Richard Bevington got up to a bit of mischief. As I recounted to Kent Gulley, “one of Seth’s public school [U.S. private school] friends pretended that Richard [of Hatfield Polytechnic] was one of his old school mates to some Americans. Richard started acting in a bizarre fashion and gave them a strange impression of what British public-school life was like.” And I learned a new expression: taking the mickey out of someone.
One of the non-academic goals that I set for myself was to visit every college at Oxford, which meant that I needed to visit two colleges each week. I had already been to one college on Monday, St. Catherine’s, when I met with my advisor. St. Catherine’s (Catz) is a modernist, glass-concrete-brick type of college that appeared as “Lovelace College” in season 4 of the British series Endeavour about the young Inspector Morse.
At Keble College men outnumbered women by six to one, which played out on Friday night. I joined five guys from Keble and went to a party at New College Sports Ground (I thought this would give me a second college for the week). The sixth guy in the group was an Oxford biochemistry researcher named Malki, who was friends with one of the biochem majors at Keble. The party was at the Sports Club (or maybe pavilion is a better word to describe it), which was essentially a clubhouse for the New College athletes. Although, oddly enough, it had a well-stocked bar and beer on tap. I was excused from buying a round of beer, since there was no way that I would last six rounds. There were no toilets inside the building; they were out back. This makes sense. If you are playing on the field, you need access to a toilet, and the clubhouse would not always be open. When I went out to the dimly lit area by the toilet, a guy took hold of me. Fortunately, Malki had followed me out of the clubhouse and intervened. He offered to walk me back to Keble. On the walk back, I asked him about his research. He said that he worked with blood and was researching a new fatal disease called AIDs. I had never heard of it. As he explained what they knew about AIDs, I slowly realized that the Golden Age of Sex had come to an end. Sadly, for some people of my generation (including one of my cousins), news of the disease did not reach them before the disease did.