Our novel course in 1974-5 took us from the early seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. Six substantial texts were prescribed, and a good many others recommended. Here’s our reading list from that year.
I think I read most of the novels listed here. All of the key texts, of course, and quite a few of the additional ones. I avoided Don Quixote until a couple of years ago, and I managed only small portions of Gargantuaand Pantagruel and Arcadia. Otherwise, a clean sweep. Wayne C. Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction was an invaluable companion, as was Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. Both of those critical works, it seems to me, stand up very well now, well over sixty years after they were first published.
Our course consisted of weekly lectures, which might or might not be backed up in the general tutorial, according to the whim of the tutor. This system, whereby the lecture programmes were distinct from the weekly tutorial, certainly kept us on our toes. We might have attended a lecture on, say, Moll Flanders, but our tutor would announce that we were discussing Tom Jones next time, so we had better read that before our next meeting. Our lectures were delivered by Douglas Jefferson, who was at the time, effectively, the head of department, I think. Not that we were aware of his status then. I think I remember an office door bearing the name A. Norman Jeffares, who was, until 1974, the head of department, but whom I never encountered. Jeffares was a noted Yeats scholar, and a kind of literary entrepreneur. He was responsible for launching York Notes, the UK equivalent of Cliff’s Notes, whose early volumes were often written by Leeds scholars, including Loreto Todd, of whom I wrote previously. Jeffares died in 2005, and this obituary gives an illuminating account of his life. The obit was written by W.J. McCormack, about whom I will write in a future post. Its portrayal of the department at Leeds confirms my memory that the staff did not engage much with the literary theory that was fashionable at the time. I had an exchange with some Bluesky pals on this, and Plashing Vole defined the 1970s state of play perfectly:
Leeds definitely seemed to be the “Leavisite middle” and Leavis himself will feature in these reminiscences in due course.
But back to the novel, and D.W. Jefferson, who was universally liked. I think of him now as a rather portly man in late middle age, not unlike Ford Madox Ford in appearance, with a pleasant demeanour and an easy lecturing style. He was a Leeds stalwart, spending his entire career there, excepting war service. I was delighted to come across this Festschrift (perhaps better described as a memorial volume) containing some of his very wide-ranging work. (And I think one of the editors was a contemporary of mine at Leeds.) Jefferson’s easy grasp of the subject made the lectures a very pleasant experience, and was doubtless the main reason that I was enthusiastic to read so many of the texts he mentioned. I see from my notes that it was week 5 before we got down to cases and considered Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. This was to allow for a consideration of the language of the novel, realism and morality in the novel. Jefferson used a technique that I adopted myself as a lecturer, which was to give us contrasting snippets to provoke observations on style, language, syntax etc. I have one here:
So, even though our focus was on the novels of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, we were considering wider questions of form and expression in the novel as a genre. I think the earliest novel I had read before this course was Persuasion for A level. So Nashe, the picaresque and especially Sterne were revelatory, and I enjoyed immersing myself in the way the novel shaped itself in its formative years. I find that I wrote essays on Nashe, Fielding and Richardson from this course, and extensively on Sterne in another course which will be the subject of a future post. Here’s the first page of my essay on Nashe:
My tutor is already getting a bit exasperated by it, from the early red ink comments. The final, actually rather generous comment reads, in part: “This is a light-hearted and rather witty treatment; easy and pleasant to read, with a number of intelligent comments, but rather thin.” The comment, which goes on for a whole page of A4, highlights a number of failings, but doesn’t totally condemn my effort. Later essays were more serious in tone, and attracted less flak.
We felt extremely well-catered for by this course, from which I gained a lifelong affection for Sterne, who became the subject of my MA thesis, and for the early novel in general. When I did eventually read Don Quixote decades later, I recognised so much of what the early English novelists had learned from Cervantes.
Blimey, it’s the end of June, so that means that 50 years ago, I was already well into my stint as a general dogsbody at a furniture trade exhibition in a building which would later become the Air and Space Gallery of the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, and which has just now become a trendy food hall. I’d completed my second year at Leeds, and exercised my franchise for the third time, having voted in the two elections of 1974. This time, we were voting in the 1975 Referendum on membership of the EEC. We voted overwhelmingly to stay….
Anyway, to return to the business of the Leeds English degree of half a century ago. At the end of the first year, we took exams in various aspects of English, and in our subsids of course. Having passed them – we weren’t told what marks we’d got, nor did we receive any feedback – we were then set fair for part II of the degree, where we would be concentrating solely on English for two years. We had to choose which “scheme” we would follow. Four options were offered. Scheme A was largely based on the Anglo-Saxon element of the first year; scheme B was biased towards medieval studies; scheme C was a broad-based English Lit programme; and scheme D was the English Lang programme. There were some elements common to all schemes, but each had a definite character. In common with about two-thirds of my peers, I chose scheme C. There were about 100 students in my cohort, so I suppose roughly 60 or 65 were on scheme C with me. In this post and the ones that follow, I’ll explore what that entailed.
We had lectures which were designed to give us a foundation in the study of literature, and the courses were very much organised on a historical model, so that in this part I year, we were studying texts from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. The core courses were on Poetry and the Novel. For the Poetry course, we revisited quite a bit of the material we’d encountered with Ken Severs, but with many additions. Here’s the handout we were given at the first lecture. Note that we were required to read nine texts, plus additional reading, for just this one element of the programme.
Just one lecture on Milton, you’ll notice, because we had an entire course on Milton, about which I’ll write at a later date. Unusually, for the section of the course on Metaphysical poetry, we were given another handout, and that handout had our lecturer’s name appended to it, which means that I was able to trace his further career.
Dr Mulvey, I am pretty sure, is Christopher Mulvey, who had a distinguished career as an academic specialising in American literature. In recent years, he has been involved in something called The English Project based at Winchester, where he is still Emeritus Professor. He seems to have stayed just one year at Leeds, but we found his lectures engaging, rigorous and informative. Certainly, following up his lectures in tutorials, and writing essays informed by them, we felt that we were engaging at a higher level than previously. Most of us had encountered the Metaphysicals, if not at A level, then in the first year. But the eighteenth-century figures, except for Pope, were probably new to the majority of students. All the poets studied were men, of course. It was fifteen years later that Roger Lonsdale’s ground-breaking anthology opened up the vast range of historic poetry by women for serious study. The early seventies were, I think, the last years of this kind of traditional degree. Already, the canon was being challenged, and something called Literary Theory was beginning to insinuate itself into the syllabuses of the more radical campuses, years after it had been chic in France. But we remained traditional at Leeds, and that ensured we had a very sound grounding in the subject – or at least in the masculine side of it.
It’s the end of March already, which means that fifty years ago, I was approaching the end of the second term of my second year. I haven’t said much about that yet, but I will shortly. In the meantime, I wanted to say a little about Ken Severs, about whom I wrote previously here. Since then, I have learned more about him, largely due to a conversation with his son Adam, who very kindly sent me a copy of his father’s book, A Place of Being, which I believe was the only full-length poetry collection that Ken Severs published, and even then posthumously. But the acknowledgements make plain something that I don’t think many of us were aware of at the time: that many of these poems had appeared in prestigious journals such as The Listener, The Spectator, The New Statesman and elsewhere. Ken was, as I mentioned previously, a leading light of the lively Leeds poetry scene, and encouraged students to submit to the in-house university publication Poetry and Audience, in which the work of really well-established poets was juxtaposed with that of undergraduates.
Adam, who had a long career in broadcasting himself as a sound engineer, gave me some more detail about his father’s life. Ken suffered from a broken back aged thirteen, and this caused him suffering for the rest of his life. After teaching in Cairo and Jerusalem after the war, he became a major figure in the arts scene in Leeds, after his BBC appointment, as announced here in the Yorkshire Post in 1954:
I would love to know what the job of “censor” at Durham University involved! By 1968, he was set for an important BBC post in Birmingham, after the corporation reorganised its regional bases, and decided to develop the Pebble Mill site in Edgbaston. Ken elected to remain in Leeds, and was appointed to a senior lectureship in the English department. My memory of him was as I recounted in the previous post. He died of a heart attack in February 1975, in my second year. To my shame, I don’t remember knowing about it, or coming across any announcement then. There must have been something, but as he was not either a tutor or a lecturer on any of my courses, I must have missed it.
Reading the poems, I find the work of a very accomplished poet on every page. What strikes me is that there doesn’t seem to be a consistent voice or tone, and perhaps that’s inevitable in a book of collected poems. The subject matter ranges from landscapes of the north of England to the Apollo space ship, to the reliquaries of ancient churches. The treatment varies too: some brief, lyrical pieces drawn, one imagines from personal experience, and some ambitious longer works, some set out in dialogue form. I can discern the shade of other poets in some of these pieces. Louis MacNeice is one such, and the poem “A Deadly Affair” is dedicated in his memory. Geoffrey Hill, a colleague at Leeds, of whom more in a future post, may have influenced poems such as “Evidence before a Prince Bishop of Durham (c.1400)” with its dark first person account of a violent sexual assault. Add to this some poems reminiscent of W.H. Auden, and some of T.S. Eliot, and you may think that Severs was not terribly original. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, there are clearly influences, but in these wide-ranging pieces, there are some startlingly different poems, in which both public and personal topics are examined in a fresh and engaging way. For instance, drawing obviously on his long career in the BBC, his poem “Broadcasting” seems just as relevant now as it did fifty years ago:
Kenneth Severs was an important figure for me, albeit only briefly. His breadth of knowledge and reference, and his rigour, were admirable qualities in anyone seeking to engage young minds in some of the most difficult English poetry. His lectures on the metaphysicals were real eye-openers, and stood me in very good stead in my teaching career. I have been engrossed in his poems, which bear repeated readings, each time revealing more depth of feeling. I shall return to his work again in future, but until then, I raise a glass to his memory. RIP, sir.
To Pordenone, a lovely town in the north-east region of Friuli Venezia Giuliafor the 43rd edition of the Giornate del Cinema Muto, the annual festival of silent film. We had dipped a toe in the event two years ago, and enjoyed it so much that we decided to register for the whole week this time. As expected, it was a very enjoyable experience: fun, entertaining, educational in equal measure.
The schedule is punishing, with screenings starting each day at 9:00 a.m. or even earlier, and the final tranche of films beginning at 11:00 p.m., meaning that some days were concluding around half past one in the morning. You need to be selective about what to watch, otherwise you are likely to be overwhelmed. As in previous years, there were a number of themes running through the programme. This year, the major strands were films from Uzbekistan, the work of cinematographer Ben Carré, and films featuring Anna May Wong. Our film choices were guided by the excellent catalogue that all attendees are given: a massive, well-illustrated book really, that presents all the relevant information about every film, in Italian and English.
One of the joys of the festival is that each film, whether it’s a three-hour epic, or a two-minute fragment, is accompanied by live music, usually piano, but often augmented by other instruments too. And the musicians are world-class. Neil Brand, for instance, last seen by me in 2023 at an event in Manchester where he explored the world of piano players in early British silent cinema, using Burgess’s The Pianoplayers as a starting point. At Pordenone, the highlight was his score for Susi Saxophon, a light-hearted romp about a Viennese girl who comes to London to train as a Tiller Girl. Brand was joined by virtuoso percussionist Frank Bockius and, appropriately, saxophone by Francesco Bearzatti. The special event shows were accompanied by a full orchestra, while Uzbek musicians playing traditional instruments were on hand for their country’s films.
There’s also a programme of discussions and lectures, and a film fair, selling books and memorabilia. It all takes place in the well-appointed Teatro Verdi, right in the centre of the delightful town of Pordenone, whose burghers seem to have seized on a surefire way to attract people: put on a festival. Apart from the Cinema Muto, I noted festivals of blues, literature, food, and music on the comune’s calendar. This is a great experience for anyone interested in film and its history. I wish there were something on these lines in the UK.
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.
