I am currently in Italy, which is one reason why the reminiscences of undergraduate life in the seventies have been on hold. I’ll get back to that topic when I’m back in the UK, starting with a post on Ken Severs, about whom I wrote last year. I had a fascinating conversation with his son, and that provided more information, so watch this space, as they say, for memories of the 74-75 academic year.
In Italy, I try to read some Italian, or at least books with an Italian theme. Tobias Jones is currently my guide down the River Po. His previous book, Dark Heart of Italy, caused somewhat of a fuss here by shining a light on institutionalised corruption in the country. On a lighter note, his recent Engelsberg Ideas essay on dubbing in Italian versions of English-language films is enlightening and amusing. Engelsberg Ideas is worth a subscription, by the way: a very wide range of topics, intelligently covered, by experts.
So, I may post intermittently for a while on Italian topics, but will be back among the brutalist architecture of the Leeds campus before too long.
I became a lecturer in higher education quite late in life – I was 38, and had a career as a secondary school teacher behind me. At that point, in the early nineties, many universities were moving into what was called modularisation. The elements of degrees, often called courses hitherto, were being replaced by a system where each element, or module, of a degree programme would be worth a certain number of points. A degree would require 360 points, so 120 points per year in the English system. As a result, I became very familiar with the process of module and programme design, and over the next twenty years went through many validation procedures, where modules and the programmes they contributed to were approved. Every module had to have its assessment regime, showing how the proposed assessment would meet the learning objectives, how that would fit into the overall assessment pattern, and so on. Typically, in my experience, modules would have two or three items of assessment, usually assignments plus an exam, with each element weighted: maybe 40% for an assignment, 20% for a presentation, 40% exam. And those elements would be marked out of 100 according to a published scale of criteria, ensuring that every student knew exactly how marks were arrived at. So, looking back on how we were assessed fifty years ago, I find no real sense of an overarching system. We wrote essays during term time, and at the end of the year we took exams. As far as we knew, the essays, though compulsory, had no standing in the way we were assessed. Everything was based on the exam performance, though maybe our efforts in term-time essays were informally taken into account. I don’t know, because nobody told us. The assessment regime, and the methods by which degree classification might be awarded, were never explained to us.
We chose essay titles from a list given to us, and we had deadlines for handing them in to our tutor. These were handwritten, of course, and marked solely by our tutor – no second marking took place. What’s more, we discovered that each tutor marked according to their own system, so comparisons were difficult. My first year tutor, Alistair Stead, used Greek letters, with plus or minus symbols, sometimes with the symbols in brackets, and question marks to indicate a borderline case. So you might receive a mark of β + ? +, or α – (-). In the end, what mattered were the comments, which were always clear, fair, and pointed.
I can’t find our first year list of essay topics, but I do have the second and third year ones. Here’s the short essay list from 1974: 1500 words minimum.
These titles covered the texts studied in the poetry and novel courses of that year, and I’ll come back to those at a later date. The long essay (minimum 3000 words) titles were these:
For one of the short essay topics, I chose Herbert, whose poetry seemed to me to be less problematic than some of the other metaphysicals. This is the first page of my effort:
I’m impressed by the front of my nineteen-year-old self, declaring confidently just how Herbert derived the ideas for his poems. My tutor commented: “There are one or two words or expressions about which I am doubtful, with reference to Herbert’s poetry, or cannot read. Still, a most promising beginning.” As Pope put it, “damn with faint praise.”
Anyway, we worked hard to present our essays (we never referred to them as “assignments”) and dutifully took our exams at the end of the year. Passing the exams ensured progression. There was a retake option for those who had failed, but I didn’t know of anyone who did. One of my peers though, having read up on the exam regulations, decided that turning up to register his presence and just writing his name on the answer booklet before leaving would ensure that he got a second chance. Alas, the regulations demanded that an “effort” be made, and writing his name was deemed insufficient. He had to go, and the next time I saw him, he was collecting fares on the number 4 bus.
First, dear reader, apologies for the prolonged silence, which has happened because of Reasons. I will be getting back to reminiscences of early seventies university life before too long, but in the meantime, a brief update, and a rant.
I’ve posted a few more reviews on Shiny New Books, the most recent being of Charles Lambert’s excellent novel Birthright. This is very much up to the standard of his previous work, and will entertain and intrigue. In the midst of an election campaign, it was illuminating to read Andy Burnham and Steve Rotherham’s manifesto for change, particularly for the north of the country. And it was a pleasure to get my hands on Maestro Paul Phillips’s giant new edition of Anthony Burgess’s writing on music.
Speaking of music, it has long been a policy of mine not to go to concerts in arenas or stadiums. That’s meant missing out on some gigs I would have really liked to see, but bitter experience has taught me that I would inevitably be disappointed. And I have been to so many excellent small-venue gigs in recent years. As a venerable oldie, I absolutely require as a bare minimum a comfortable seat and decent sightlines. And neither are available for the average arena or stadium concert.
The last stadium gig I attended was well before the smartphone revolution and social media. Now, it appears, you can’t say you’ve been to a gig unless there’s some shaky iPhone footage taken from a standing position miles from the stage. I came across this example from Bruce Springsteen’s recent concert at Sunderland. The song is one of his best, The River. It’s a delicate, plaintive song about the loss of innocence and the possibility of redemption. But here, as soon as the crowd hear the familiar harmonica intro, they are gearing up for a singalong, bellowing tunelessly when they are not having a chat with their mates. I am really at a loss to understand why anyone would want this experience. You pay a lot of money to stand in the rain, looking mainly at the giant screen because you can barely see the stage. You don’t listen to the artist you’ve paid all that money to see. Instead, you roar the lyric out, drowning the artist’s rendition, while all the time of course, holding up your soggy phone to record the occasion, to possess footage that you will probably never look at again once you’ve uploaded it to YouTube. Not my idea of fun. If you want to sing your lungs out, go to a karaoke bar.
It’s March already, and I haven’t posted since the end of last year. In the meantime, I’ve published a couple of reviews on Shiny New Books which I’ll link to here. The first was Cynthia Zarin’s little book of, well, essays I suppose one might call them, on aspects of Italy and Italian life. These pieces are quite personal, and the reader feels invited into her (rather privileged, it seems) life. The second was yet another book on Proust, who seems to be an inexhaustible subject. This is another book with a more personal approach than might be expected. Michael Wood (not the English telly historian, but the Anglo-American literary critic) has produced a quirky take on Proust that had the effect of sending me back to the original work. So, job done.
Since we are now well into 2024, I am planning some posts on undergraduate life in my second year at Leeds, 1974. But before then, I will return to the subject of Ken Severs, poetry tutor, about whom I now know much more.
It’s almost 2024, so soon the neat symmetry of my 1973 reminiscences with the current year will be no more. Just time, then, to fit in some memories of the final strand of the first year English programme at Leeds fifty years ago. The A level result that landed me a place at Leeds was in English Literature, but the degree was designed to cover English very broadly defined, and the advanced study of English language was part of that. So, we had, I think, a weekly lecture and tutorial on various aspects of Language study. We learned about accent and dialect, about world Englishes, about Received Pronunciation, about how to transcribe speech using the International Phonetic Alphabet; in short, we were immersed in linguistic study, starting from a base of almost total ignorance. Years later, I was involved as a teacher in the development of A level English Language, but in 1973, few of us had any sort of grounding in this area. Thus, as was the case with Anglo-Saxon, a steep learning curve presented itself.
In 1973, there can have been few better places to embark on the study of English Language than Leeds, which had built up expertise in the subject over many years. The department had a centre for the study of dialect, which had hosted the massive Survey of English Dialects under the leadership of the pioneering Harold Orton. During my time at Leeds, Stanley Ellis, his successor, was in post, and was much admired by us as a communicator. I wrote about him when he died in 2009:
“Reading this obituary took me back thirty odd years to a lecture theatre in a brutalist concrete building in Leeds. The first year English students were being lectured about accent and dialect by the great Stanley Ellis. He asked one of our number, picked at random, to say a few words. He’d chosen Bob McNally, a lad whose accent to the rest of us was just “Geordie”. Stanley had other ideas. After listening for no more than a few seconds, he identified the precise area within Newcastle where Bob came from, and also suggested that he’d spent some time in his adolescence away from Geordie land, naming, I think, an area in Yorkshire. An astonished Bob confirmed this was the case. We applauded. Stanley Ellis was a delightful, down to earth man with a passion for the linguistic diversity of this country. Leeds had become a major centre for the study of accent and dialect, thanks to Harold Orton’s Survey of English Dialects, to which Ellis contributed. The arrival of this man, in a caravan, with an unwieldy primitive tape-recorder, must have been startling for the rural communities he visited- especially when he asked the questions. The researchers wanted to avoid planting words in the minds of the subjects, so, if they wanted to elicit the local word for a cowshed, say, they would ask something like “What do you call the building where you keep the animals that go moo?” One can imagine how this might have gone down with the tough farming types who were the typical respondents. Stanley’s party piece could be useful, as the obituary reports:
He came to national prominence when he declared that a tape released by the police in June 1979, purporting to be the voice of the Yorkshire Ripper – then suspected of the murder of 10 women – was by a hoaxer, someone who hailed from Castletown, a small village on the edge of Sunderland, Tyne and Wear – many miles from the scenes of crime. The police disregarded his warning, a decision that may have put their investigation on the wrong track for more than 18 months.
Ellis was proved to have been right in 2005, when the hoaxer was identified and shown to have lived all his life within walking distance of the area Ellis had pinpointed.
Another former student wrote to the Guardian, with a similar story to mine – Stanley must have delighted and entertained thousands of students with his ability, born, of course, of intense study.”
It’s a melancholy fact that, of the Language staff I recall from that first year at Leeds, most will now be dead. Another memorable lecturer was A.P. (Tony) Cowie, whose area of expertise was in Language usage. I don’t suppose many of us had encountered the study of language in this mode, using transcripts of ordinary conversations to observe linguistic patterns and choices in ordinary speech. We learned from him about concepts such as phatic communion, which occupies more space in our utterances than we probably imagine. He also helped us to appreciate the importance of context, to understand the difference between a friend greeting another with “Hello, you old bastard!” and the use of the same epithet as an insult. Some words are obviously pejorative, but some pejorative associations depend on context. I recall that he pronounced “pejorative” as “PEEjorative” with the accent on the first syllable. I’ve never heard it pronounced in that way since, but we were not going to argue with a distinguished lexicographer. How distinguished we did not know. I found this obituary, which records a life of wide-ranging activity and scholarly enquiry.
My Language tutor in the first year was Dr Loreto Todd, who is still with us, aged 81, which means she was 31 when I encountered her, just over a decade older than her students. She was a lively and engaging woman, with a Northern Irish accent, and she had already, comparatively early in her academic career, conducted ground-breaking research into one of her main areas of study, pidgins and creoles. It was presumably her interest that led to one of the assignments we had being on pidgins. My memory is a little hazy on this, but as I recall, the assignment for this part of the course was an extended analysis, of some piece of language. Suggestions were given – a TV talk show, a speech, a dialect poem, etc. One of the choices was to attempt an analysis of a piece of pidgin or creole language, and I opted for this. When we reported our choices to Dr Todd, she said how pleased she was I had chosen that topic. I replied, idiotically, “Why?” and she informed me that this was her main research interest. I hadn’t known, of course. It made me acquire her newly published book Pidgins and Creoles, to help with my assignment. It cost £1.25. I see the latest edition is £35.99.
With her encouragement, I descended into the stacks of the Brotherton Library (which probably deserves a post of its own) to find copies of a journal from Papua New Guinea which carried items written in the pidgin English used there. I discovered a short story about a boy coming from the highlands to the capital, Port Moresby. It was called “Mosbi nambawan peles” (Moresby, number one place) and I set about analysing it to discern the ways in which the pidgin adapted the structures and forms of Standard English.
Loreto Todd went on to have an extremely distinguished career, writing not just academic books, but retellings of folk tales, books about Celtic names, and many student guides in the York Notes series. This last endeavour is very much related to her tenure at Leeds, and I will return to it in a future post. This biography on the website of Irish publisher O’Brien Press, gives an overview of her extremely active career:
She never told us about Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane! What a fantastic career, which continues in her retirement.
These were the highlights of the Language strand of the degree in the first year. What happened next will be revealed in future posts.
I was very engaged by this novel, which uses well-known real historical figures, but then applies a “what if?” scenario to a crucial moment in their lives. James Joyce, when arriving in Trieste in 1904 in search of a job at the Berlitz language school, left Nora Barnacle, with whom he’d left Ireland, to wait for him at the railway station. What if she’d felt abandoned, and had gone on to forge a different life? Mary Morrissy imagines that life in this novel, which really demands that you know something of Joyce and his work to fully appreciate it. It’s a richly rewarding experience in any case. I reviewed it for Shiny New Books here.
Probably the biggest shock to the system back in 1973 was the requirement to study Anglo-Saxon. Most of us had encountered Chaucer, since the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales plus one of the tales was a common package set at A level. I’d read the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Knight’s Tale. So we had some idea of an English that was older than Shakespeare’s, but Anglo-Saxon was challenging. The Anglo-Saxon strand of the degree in the first year consisted of a lecture, in which we learned about the history as well as the literature, and a seminar where we would tackle the set texts, translating passages and learning the grammar. In the first term, the lecture concentrated on the history, and the seminar on grammar and vocabulary. In the second term, we explored the literature in more depth. Our texts were Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer and Anglo-Saxon Reader, together with three long poems: The Battle of Maldon, The Wanderer, and The Dream of the Rood. It was tough, but enjoyable, and certainly entailed some concentrated study to enable us to grapple with some very unfamiliar material.
My lecture notes for Anglo-Saxon are headed, to my shame, “Auntie Joyce.” This was Dr Joyce Hill, whose lectures were packed with information, and delivered with enthusiasm. We called her “Auntie”, affectionately, because she had a rather old-fashioned look. She was, we imagined, approaching fifty perhaps, a real bluestocking academic. So, imagine my reaction when I tried to trace what happened to her, and discovered that she is still going strong, delivering lectures on YouTube for the Leeds Civic Society, and writing a column for her church, St Aidan’s. Clearly, the lively, vigorous woman in the recent video footage is not that old, so our youthful estimates must have been very awry. Back in 1973, she must have been much younger than we assumed, probably no more than 30. Her career at Leeds was a notable one, and her profile as an emeritus professor shows the extent of her achievements.
Guided by Joyce Hill, and in my seminar by a PhD student whose name was, I think, Pam, we got to grips with this strange and exhilarating language. Unusually, we did get some handouts to illustrate the subject matter, but most of the time we were reliant on the ancient volumes of Henry Sweet, who was, allegedly, the model for Professor Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. His Primer and Reader had been much revised, but the basis of the books was still what Sweet had published at the end of the nineteenth century, when the study of “Old English” was really in its infancy. The handouts were typed, of course, probably by Audrey Stead, the English Department’s secretary. I wonder how she managed the special characters, like the eth and the thorn on a typewriter?
What did we learn? A lot of history, to begin with. We were encouraged to read Peter Hunter Blair’s Anglo – Saxon England, which was a solid introduction. I see my copy cost £1.60, which was expensive, especially as it was old stock, and the price had been overprinted: the original price was 18s or 90p, as it had been originally published in 1970.
Joyce Hill was particularly good on the Benedictine Revival, which I see now was a major research area for her. We covered the history very thoroughly, right up to the Battle of Hastings. Then we concentrated on the literature, and again, it was thorough, painstaking line-by-line reading. I find I still have many pages of vocabulary and translation from the texts we studied. Here are a couple of examples from The Battle of Maldon.
Reading these texts made me appreciate what academic study was all about. This was very different from school work. Grappling with the unfamiliar grammar and vocabulary, trying to understand that distant and strange world made you feel part of an academic community in a way that school never did. This was the pure pursuit of knowledge, esoteric knowledge at that, and it was very satisfying. The poetic techniques of the Anglo-Saxons, with the strong emphasis on rhythm derived from the oral tradition, were very different from the metrical exactitudes of much of the later poetry which we had learned for A level. The use of alliteration and the dramatic pause in the middle of each line gave it a chant-like quality, and confirmed the directness of its approach.
I loved the scholarly little editions we had. For Maldon and The Wanderer, we had Methuen’s Old English Library, very sturdy paperbacks, with excellent introductions. For the very mysterious Dream of the Rood, we had a Manchester University Press edition. Manchester, as I discovered much later, had an impressive Anglo-Saxon and Medieval English group of scholars. As had Leeds, of course. The department published a journal, Leeds Studies in English, which is still extant, and looking through issues from the seventies, it’s clear that the scholars of Anglo-Saxon and historical linguistics dominated.
We even had time in the brief post-Easter term to look at Icelandic sagas, which we examined in translation. Laxdæla Saga and Hrafnkel’s Saga were our texts, read in Penguin Classic editions. The lectures were given by an Icelandic expert rather than by Joyce Hill, and seemed rather tacked on to the programme. But again, vistas opened up: this was an introduction to a great national literature, closely connected to our own, of which I knew nothing.
Looking back fifty years on, I feel privileged to have been introduced to this remarkable body of work by someone so obviously engaged and deeply knowledgeable. Thank you, Auntie Joyce.
Emmeline, by Charlotte Smith (Walmer Classics, 978-0-6457519-0-1 paperback)
A novel with the title Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle, published in 1787, immediately suggests that the narrative will deal with a spirited and noble heroine, whose virtue will be threatened by a villainous admirer. The heroine will have a champion who will rescue her from the clutches of the villain, though not before she has endured death threats, encounters with brigands, and imprisonment in some fortress in the Apennines. There will be dungeons, secret tunnels, and mysterious apparitions. Along the way, the plucky protagonist will be thrilled by the power of nature, especially of the mountainous variety, and will probably compose poetry inspired by the terrain. The novels of Ann Radcliffe, wildly popular at the end of the eighteenth century, followed this pattern, perfectly reflecting the literary zeitgeist of early Romanticism, and the concomitant enthusiasm for picturesque landscape. Radcliffe was pre-eminent among a group of women novelists of the time whose works were gently satirised by Jane Austen in her first completed novel, Northanger Abbey. Turning to Emmeline, then, now republished as the second volume in the Walmer Classics series, we might expect a Radcliffian narrative, and to some extent that’s what we get, but there are important differences.
Charlotte Smith was Radcliffe’s precursor, and this novel, while anticipating some of the tropes of the female gothic, is not really of that genre. Our heroine, Emmeline, is the “natural” child of a nobleman and an unknown woman. Both parents are deceased, and Emmeline grows up an orphan at Mowbray castle in Wales, a crumbling ruin, where she is in the hands of the family servants who live there. Her adventures start when, on a rare visit from the family, she catches the eye of her rakish cousin Delamere. He is the nearest character to the classic gothic antagonist, but is not the Machiavellian schemer who frequently figures in Radcliffe and her peers. Rather, he is a driven, passionate, selfish young man, who fixates on Emmeline, and will pursue her at all costs. That pursuit is the mainspring of the plot, which follows Emmeline’s peregrinations, and her complex relations with the family, until the predictable outcome.
This narrative proceeds in a leisurely fashion – close to 800 pages are required to complete the story, and sometimes Smith is guilty of emphasising telling at the expense of showing, so that there are passages of wordy narrative where there is rather too much detail on, say, the logistics of changing horses on a post-chaise for a modern reader. But there is much to enjoy and admire here, not least the subtle analysis of society and the workings of eighteenth century patriarchy. Charlotte Smith had a troubled life. Following a disastrous marriage aged 15, she gave birth to twelve children, and was incarcerated in a debtors’ prison along with her feckless husband. Afterwards, they were frequently obliged to move in order to avoid his creditors. So, it is not surprising that a leitmotif of this, her first novel, is the impact on women of marriage to useless husbands. Mrs Stafford, Emmeline’s friend, is one such unfortunate, whose intelligence and good sense are just about sufficient to keep her family’s head above water. Smith has something of Jane Austen’s sharpness when describing Stafford and his ilk, and an eye for the comic detail. Here is Stafford, who loses money hand over fist by pursuing crackpot get-rich-quick schemes:
“Mr Stafford…was now gone for a few days into another county, to make himself acquainted with the process of manuring land with old wigs — a mode of agriculture on which Mr Headly had lately written a treatise so convincing, that Mr Stafford was determined to adopt it on his own farm as soon as a sufficient number of wigs could be procured for the purpose.”
Another minor character, the fop Elkerton, one of several suitors for Emmeline’s hand, flatters himself that she would be unable to resist him, and couches his appeal in terms which recall Jane Austen’s ironic universally acknowledged truth:
“Elkerton, in looking about for the happy woman who was worthy the exalted situation of being his wife, had yet seen none whom he thought so likely to succeed to that honour as Miss Mowbray; and if she was, on enquiry, found to be as she was represented (related to Lord Montreville) it would be so great an additional advantage that he determined in that case to lay himself and his pied horses, his house in Kent, his library, his fortune, all at her feet immediately. Nor did he once suffer himself to suspect that there was a woman on earth who could withstand such a torrent of good fortune.”
The society in which idiots like Stafford and Elkerton are afforded every opportunity, but where women are denied basic agency, is implicitly criticised at every turn. Certainly, women are the main sources of intelligence and rationality in the narrative. It is no surprise to learn that Charlotte Smith was an early advocate of women’s rights. Her own life, which had many striking parallels with that of Mrs Stafford, gave her ample reason to side with such contemporaries as Mary Wollstonecraft on this issue.
Smith is very illuminating on the business of class, and the rigidity with which a person’s perceived rank fixed their place in society. Emmeline is, of course, beautiful, sensitive and accomplished, but cannot be thought of by his family as a match for Delamere because of her origins. Various sub-plots also centre on the way in which societal norms impede the path to happiness of the characters, and how an upper-class background gives someone carte blanche to act in the most arrogant manner to those of lower social status. Even so, some social mobility is possible, for those devious enough. One of the most unpleasant characters in the novel is the social climber Crofts:
“To his superiors, the cringing parasite; to those whom he thought his inferiors, proud, supercilious and insulting; and his heart hardening as his prosperity encreased, he threw off, as much as he could, every connection that reminded him of the transactions of his early life, and affected to live only among the great, whose luxuries he could now reach, and whose manners he tried to imitate.”
Emmeline’s travels in escaping the clutches of Delamere take her first to the environs of London (Clapham is a pleasant village a few miles from the metropolis), the Isle of Wight, and eventually abroad, to France. A storm on the island presents a grandeur which “gratified her taste for the sublime” but it is when she crosses the Channel that the narrative most resembles the style that would soon become so popular, with the heroine immersed in dramatic landscapes. Even so, Smith never really fully buys into the idea of the romantic sublime. Her characters are more domesticated, and more likely to be overwhelmed by the prospect of an unpleasant meeting than by the mysterious power of nature. Fainting fits are frequent, usually resolved by the use of hartshorn and Hungary water. Nevertheless, there are some passages which could easily have been written by Radcliffe. Here is Emmeline on the road:
“As they were travelling between Marseilles and Toulon, they entered a road bounded on each side by mountainous rocks, which sometimes receding, left between them small but richly cultivated vallies; and in other parts so nearly met each other, as to leave little more room than sufficed for the carriage to pass; while the turnings of the road were so angular and abrupt, that it seemed every moment to be carrying them into the bosom of the rock. Thro’ this defile, as it was quite shady, they agreed to walk.”
Shortly after, following a description of the various species of trees that could be discerned from the road, our heroine allows herself to be overwhelmed by nature:
“Emmeline in silent admiration beheld this singular scene; and with the pleasure it gave her, a soft and melancholy sensation was mingled. She wanted to be alone in this delightful place, or with some one who could share, who could understand the satisfaction she felt.”
The idea of the sublime surfaces in one or two other places, for example in the poetry of Emmeline’s friend Adelina, but otherwise, there are few passages that treat of the romantic sensibility commonly exhibited by the gothic heroine. Emmeline is, despite her complete lack of schooling, refined, intelligent, and artistically talented but more inclined to concentrate on practical matters than flights of the imagination.
Emmeline’s journey from poor orphan to the inevitable happy and prosperous marriage with which all such narratives must finish, is a tortuous one, along which she encounters many obstacles, but none that are life-threatening, as in the novels of Mrs Radcliffe. Rather, she must forever react to the power exerted by malevolent men, and rely on help from other women (and one or two virtuous males) to navigate her passage.
Charlotte Smith went on to write nine further novels, and it is to be hoped that this edition, well-produced as we have come to expect from Walmer, Britain’s most northerly publisher, is not the only work of hers to see deserved republication. She is an important figure in the development of the novel, and merits more attention from both readers and critics.
Thanks to Mike Walmer for the review copy. Some more reviews of Walmer books can be found on the Shiny New Books site.
Back in 1973, the weekly poetry lecture focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth century. For many of us, this was familiar territory, since Helen Gardner’s The Metaphysical Poets was a common set text at A level. I had studied Donne, Marvell, Herbert and others for A level Eng Lit, and felt quite confident about studying them at degree level. I even had my school prize complete editions of Donne and Marvell to hand. In the lectures, my lack of deep understanding became apparent early on, as ideas drawn from philosophy and rhetoric forced me to rethink my comfortable interpretations.
Our lecturer was Kenneth Severs, a minor poet himself. He had been a senior figure at the local BBC station in Leeds, just down Woodhouse Lane from the university. In the post-war years, he had been a journalist and a PhD candidate at Leeds. We didn’t know that at the time, of course: he was a besuited man who swept into the lecture theatre at ten o’clock on, I think, Tuesday mornings, and launched into whatever that day’s topic was. One quirk, with which we soon became familiar, was that he would get noticeably twitchy around the 35-minute mark of his scheduled hour. And by the 40 or 45 minute mark, he was motoring towards his concluding remarks. The reason for cutting short his lecture was easily discerned. Just across the concrete wasteland of a courtyard in which the lecture theatre stood, was an exit from the campus to Springfield Mount, where the Faversham pub was situated. In those days, of course, the licensing laws meant that pubs opened from 11.00 a.m. to 2:30 or 3:00 p.m., before opening again for the evening trade. Ken Severs timed his peroration so that he could be first through the door as the clock struck eleven.
He still packed a lot in, and I remember often struggling to follow his arguments, not because they were poorly presented, but because they were grounded in the cultural and historical context, of which I was largely ignorant, having completed A level study very much on the basis of the “New Criticism” where attention to the text was everything. I think we’d been recommended at school to read a slim volume by EMW Tillyard called The Elizabethan World Picture, which I discovered about forty years later was seriously flawed.
It occurs to me that I should say something about lecture style. I am sure that the lecture theatres were state-of-the-art for 1973; after all, the building was only a few years old. But I don’t recall any lecturer, ever, in my entire degree programme, using any audio-visual aids. The lecturer stood at the front, spoke for an hour (or a bit less) and disappeared. Very occasionally, there might be a handout with some suggestions for further reading, but that was as far as it went. We attended, we listened, we made notes.
I don’t know if Ken Severs held tutorials. I just encountered him across a lecture theatre, and I think he left Leeds after my first year, or maybe he was still employed at the BBC and just covering for someone at Leeds. But he was a significant figure in Leeds life beyond the university. I came across a fascinating PhD thesis on the BBC in Yorkshire, 1945 -1990, by Christine Verguson. She mentions Severs a couple of times, and interviewed a BBC Leeds colleague, who remembered him thus: “Ken’s contacts were legion and Ken liked a drink, and in his office at the end of the day there would always be some amazing character who you would give an arm and a leg to be in the company of…Writers, actors, performers, academics, it was an intellectual hotspot.”
Poetry was important at Leeds: the Gregory poetry fellowship was awarded to some very significant poets over the years, and the journal Poetry and Audience, while ostensibly a student publication, featured the work of many well-known poets. I remember Severs commending the new student editor to us, and encouraging us to submit work. Some of us did; I didn’t. The Leeds poetry map shows the many and various ways that poetry was woven into the fabric of Leeds. Vernon Scannell, whose unusual career involved transitioning from army deserter to professional boxer to award-winning poet, is mentioned on the map. He had a connection to Ken Severs, which is recounted in James Andrew Taylor’s biography of Scannell. Severs befriended him in Leeds after the war, and enabled him to move in the local literary and artistic circles, introducing him to figures such as Bonamy Dobrée, then professor of English, his colleague the Shakespearian scholar G. Wilson Knight, and Jacob Kramer, the artist. By the time I was at Leeds, the art school had been renamed Jacob Kramer College. This sketch of Ken Severs by Kramer must date from that time.
Severs also inadvertently introduced Scannell to his future wife, Jo Higson, as recounted in Taylor’s book:
Ken Severs seems to have been a very talented man who never quite fulfilled his potential. I can’t find any references to him after the mid-seventies. If you know what happened to him, I’d be grateful for the information.
Recently, I was corresponding with a friend about doing some guest lectures, and I was asked about what topics I could cover. I said, jokingly, “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf.” I wasn’t claiming expertise over a thousand years of literature, merely a kind of Jack-of-all-trades competence. It stems initially, I think, from teaching A level English Literature forty and more years ago, where you just had to teach what was on the syllabus: Chaucer, Milton, Jane Austen, say, or Shakespeare, Dryden and Ted Hughes. Later, when I worked in higher education, teaching undergraduate and post-graduate Eng Lit, I specialised in modernist and contemporary literature, simply because I replaced someone with that specialism. But I also convened big survey courses, and introductory courses, so the breadth of literature I covered was maintained. Hence my jokey response to my friend’s request. But that phrase was actually borrowed from another source, an academic whom I encountered in that brutalist lecture theatre fifty years ago.
Thinking about my experience back then, it struck me that we didn’t really know who our lecturers were. The system at Leeds, as mentioned previously, was to have free-standing lecture series, with tutorials in which any of the material from any of the courses might be examined, at the whim of the tutor. So, unless your tutor was one of the lecturers on a course you followed, you wouldn’t encounter him/her. When I was putting together module handbooks as a lecturer, the first thing which would go in would be my details (email, office hours etc) so all the students knew who and where I was. Back then, we usually got a single sheet with the set texts, and a bare list of lectures, usually with no name attached. Which means that, looking back, I really struggled to identify who did what. So I consulted Dr Google, with some interesting results.
I still have some of my lecture notes from back then (I know…) and I found I’d written “MacDonald” on my first year Renaissance drama notes. This turns out to be an interesting character, Alasdair MacDonald, whose post-Leeds career was mainly in universities in the Netherlands, and who has a long list of publications, including one published quite recently. He even qualified for a Festschrift in his honour, “Airy Nothings”, published in 2013, the scope of which gives some indication of his broad interests.
The introduction to that volume gives a potted history of his career, and contains that Beowulf / Virginia Woolf quip as an expression of the varied nature of his academic experience.
At Leeds, the first year drama course focused on Elizabethan and Jacobean drama excluding Shakespeare. So we read Marlowe, Kyd, Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Tourneur. I remember using the Penguin English Library versions for some texts, because you got three or four plays for the price of one.
That led me to write about plays that weren’t on the syllabus, which may have got me some bonus points in the eyes of my tutor. How we were assessed is a theme for a future post.
Next time, I’ll look at our poetry course, given by another interesting figure.
