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.
I recently had a chat for the International Anthony Burgess Foundations’s podcast series “99 Novels”. Each episode discusses a book that Burgess included in his survey of mid-twentieth century fiction, published as Ninety Nine Novels in 1984. In this episode, the Foundation’s Dr Graham Foster and I discuss Robert Nye’s rumbustious novel Falstaff. We also explore some related and not-so-related works, finishing with my recommendation for a 100th book : Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square. It was great fun to explore Nye’s novel at length, and an honour to be part of this excellent podcast series.
When I started my degree, we weren’t bombarded with information in the way that freshers are now. Our only source of information was the noticeboard in the English department, which in those days was situated in one of the brutalist concrete buildings that had been built when the university expanded in the sixties. We were on the floor above Biosciences, and the department was really just a corridor of offices, at the end of which was a small departmental library. We constructed our timetables from the noticeboard. Most of it was lectures, which were given in another brutalist concrete building, imaginatively named the Lecture Theatre Block. A few years later, it became the Roger Stevens Building, after a former Vice-Chancellor. The V-C in my day was Edward Boyle, Lord Boyle of Handsworth. We occasionally saw him on the bus travelling down Woodhouse Lane on his way to work.
The system at Leeds for the English degree was that everyone followed the same curriculum for the first year, and then chose a pathway for years two and three. So, the hundred or so of us who started the degree had a varied programme that aimed, I suppose, at giving us a broad base for our further studies. Some of it we were familiar with from Eng Lit A level, while much of it was new to us. The different strands of the degree would be called modules now, and each would have its own rationale and assessment regime. Back then, we had lectures for what you might label mainstream English Literature – poetry and drama of the sixteenth and seventeenth century – backed up by a weekly tutorial in a group of three or four. The tutorials took place in a lecturer’s office, and the tutor had complete control over the weekly topic. So the tutorials did not necessarily reflect the content of the lectures, and that kept us on our toes. You needed to be prepared: there was no hiding place when the class consisted of you and two or three others.
The other elements of the programme were organised slightly differently. Anglo-Saxon history and literature was a lecture series, followed by a seminar, which, in my case, was convened by a young post-grad student, one of the few in the department in the days before mass PhD programmes. In addition, we had a language lecture, looking at accent, dialect and historical linguistics. So, while we (or at least I) had a relatively comfortable and familiar immersion in metaphysical poetry and Jacobean drama, there was a very steep learning curve when it came to grappling with The Battle of Maldon in the original, or the transcription of Received Pronunciation in the international phonetic alphabet.
Add to this activity the subsids, both of which were a one-hour lecture plus a one-hour seminar per week, and we were busy. We spent our money on the set texts at Austick’s bookshop across the road from the Parkinson building, and began to get used to the routine. The Lecture Theatre block became a second home, and I loved it. It had paternoster lifts, basically a series of open boxes going up and down the building, which you had to jump in as they passed. There was a café on the ground floor where we often met before and after lectures. Coffee (execrable, instant Nescafé in a styrofoam cup) was 5p, and we drank it and ate Kit-Kats while sitting around what seemed to be a water feature, but was in fact the cooling system for the building.
I made friends quite easily, of necessity really. We all did. Most of my peers were, like me, the product of the grammar school system. Technically, I had attended a comprehensive school, as Manchester had reformed its system the year after I passed the Eleven Plus. My boys’ grammar school became a high school, amalgamating with a secondary modern school on the other side of the playing fields. In truth, though, little changed, and the two schools were in effect still separate entities. At Leeds, there were a few public school types, who all seemed to have been herded into a hall of residence in an old building on campus, but most of us were first generation university students, enjoying an opportunity that would have been beyond our parents’ wildest dreams. It’s worth remembering that university education was still quite a rare experience. In 1973, only about 10% of eighteen year-olds went onto higher education, so we were, in effect, a kind of elite. Before the expansion of universities in the sixties, the percentage was about half of that, so even though many more of us were studying for degrees, it was still an experience denied to the vast majority of people. Remember, back then, you could leave school at 15, and many left effectively at 14, attending FE college to learn a trade on day release in their final year.
So, we felt privileged, and also excited to be embarking on what was almost guaranteed to be a life-changing experience. Next time, I’ll begin to explore the detail of the degree.
It was fifty years ago today… Well, fifty years last week anyway. I was 18 and about to become an undergraduate at Leeds University. I was reminded of the half-century (!) by a friend I met that week, and I thought I’d commemorate the event by writing about life as a student back then.
First, how did I get there? Sheer luck, I think. I’d managed a mediocre set of A level results, but had an A grade in English Literature. That must have convinced someone at Leeds to offer me a late place. I barely had time to think about it before I landed in a large, all-male hall of residence on the Otley Road, and began my adventure.
I remember talking to some of my own students about the differences between their experience and mine. The most obvious ones, which they highlighted bitterly, were that there were no tuition fees, and that we received grants. Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Tuition fees were required, actually, but we didn’t know about them, because they were paid by our local education authority. As for grants, they were means-tested based on your parents’ income, so only students from the most impoverished families received a full grant. Mine paid, at least in my first year, for my accommodation at Bodington Hall, with a very small amount left over. Otherwise, I depended on my parents to send me money for books, clothes and everything else. In another contrast to modern-day students, I never considered finding a part-time job in term time to support myself, and I knew of only one student who did: he was estranged from his parents, but nevertheless only received a means-tested grant, so he pulled pints in a pub a few nights a week. The rest of us just thought of ourselves as full-time students, because we were. In those days, it was even forbidden in some universities for students to take employment in term time: certainly at Oxbridge, and also at some of the more traditional universities.
As a result, most of us were not able to pursue the hedonistic lifestyle of student mythology. Fifty years of inflation have made the figures almost meaningless, but for the record my disposable income consisted of the twenty pounds a month my parents sent me. I paid their cheque into the bank at the start of the month, and then visited the bank each Monday, wrote a cheque to cash for £5, and that was what I had to spend that week. So, the occasional night out was largely nursing a pint for a long time in the pub, or going to a cheap gig in the university union.
The first week of orientation was mainly spent queuing for grants, library cards, and all the other bits and pieces required by the bureaucracy of the institution. We were split into groups of about ten, and given a third year guide who showed us around. Ours, a pleasant chemistry student, was very well-informed about the history of the university. I remember she said there were 10,000 students, which all of us thought was a huge number. Today, it’s approaching 40,000.
Preparing for the degree had been, necessarily, a rushed process. We were sent a rough outline of the degree, a booklist, and that was it. We went to the departmental notice board to find our names, and which classes we had to attend, and we also had to choose what were known as “subsids”: subsidiary subjects, which were studied alongside your degree subject. You could choose pretty much anything that was on offer, provided it fitted in with your timetable. I chose Roman Civilisation and Sociology, for reasons I forget.
So, having informed myself of what was expected, I prepared to enter the world of higher learning that October week half a century ago. I will continue in the next post with some memories of what an Eng Lit degree was like in 1973.
Blimey, it’s 2023! Last time I looked, it was 2017! I remember as a boy trying to work out how old I would be when the millennium came to its close. It seemed impossibly far distant, and my age in the year 2000 impossibly old. And yet, here we are. I’m currently revamping this site, and will be posting more in the coming weeks and months, and, I hope, years. First up, I’ll draw your attention to the Anthony Burgess special issue of the excellent Hungarian journal The Anachronist. I have a piece in it on Burgess’s love-hate relationship with Manchester. It’s available to download here.
Brexit is at the centre, both literally and metaphorically, of Jonathan Coe’s latest novel. The title hints at the territory it covers: geographical, since much of the action takes place in the English midlands; social, since many, but by no means all, of the characters are comfortably-off middle class; and psychological, since the sympathetic characters at least show some sense of being balanced and reasonable.
Coe goes back to the cast of characters first introduced in The Rotters’ Club, especially Benjamin Trotter, now living as a semi-recluse in a converted mill in Shropshire, and still working on the roman fleuve that he hopes to publish some day. We see him first after the funeral of his mother, listening to Shirley Collins’s evocative rendition of the old folk song “Adieu to old England.” Sophie, his niece, now an art historian, has a major presence in this novel, as does his friend Doug, now a hard-bitten member of the political commentariat.
The novel is structured around significant recent events in British life, beginning with the 2010 election, and taking in the 2011 riots, the London Olympics of 2012, the 2015 election, the killing of Jo Cox in the 2016 referendum campaign, and the rise of Trump and populism. There’s a specificity about it, not just in terms of the history, with particular dates and events in mind, but geographically, with the topography of the midlands frequently featuring. This is the England of garden centres and golf courses, but also of abandoned factories and foodbanks, homogenised high streets and hypermarkets.
The calamity of the referendum result lies at the novel’s heart, its implications rippling out to affect the lives of all the characters, usually for the worse, but sometimes, surprisingly, for the better. The novel, more so than the previous two in the series, seeks to anatomise England (not Britain) and finds a melancholy spiritual waste land at its core.
This is not to say that the narrative does not have its lighter moments. Coe shows once again what a master he is of the comic set piece scene, especially in the spats between two minor characters who are children’s entertainers. He is especially acerbic when presenting the vacuous doublespeak of Nigel, a spin-doctor working for David Cameron. He is also capable of managing a large ensemble of characters, skilfully intertwining their stories, and producing a kind of contemporary Canterbury Tales, in which each participant – Benjamin’s bitter widowed father, Sophie’s blokey husband, his mother’s eastern European cleaner, Doug’s liberal Tory MP girlfriend amongst others – contributes to the overall portrait of a country in terminal decline, at war with itself.
This is truly a “condition of England” novel, which, despite the lightness of its touch, plumbs profound and disturbing depths. It should be required reading for every MP, and everyone who cares for this country.
Piers Paul Read is something of an oddity in contemporary English fiction, in that he is probably best known for his non-fiction work, most notably Alive, the 1975 account of the aftermath of the Andes plane crash. His other non-fiction has varied between other chronicles of disaster, such as Ablaze, about the Chernobyl nuclear reactor failure, and studies of historical events, such as the Dreyfus affair. He has also written a biography of Alec Guinness, a history of the Knights Templar, screenplays, essays and criticism, as well as seventeen novels. One thread that runs strongly through the different aspects of his work is a robust traditional Catholicism, derived, one imagines, from his Benedictine schooling at Ampleforth. At 76, he is one of the grand old men of English letters, like Tom Stoppard, who was once a flatmate.
A Patriot in Berlin, first published in 1995, and now reissued as an e-book by Open Road Media, is a spy novel that begins as a thriller, and ends as a meditation on patriotism and loyalty. The scene is the newly unified city, shortly after the events of 1989. A pair of disreputable Russian smugglers are found brutally murdered, and the German police can make no progress. In Moscow, a former KGB agent, Orlov, has vanished, and the Russian secret service sees a connection between the Berlin murder and their man’s disappearance. A shabby functionary, Nikolai Gerasimov, is dispatched to liaise with the police, and to track down their agent. In another narrative thread, a young American art history professor, Francesca McDermott, arrives to see friends in Berlin from her student days, and is soon invited to curate a massive exhibition of Soviet art by Stefan Diederich, now Berlin’s minister of culture. These elements are artfully drawn together by Read into a fast-moving plot that switches cinematically between the streets of Berlin to those of Moscow, with some excursions to a former Soviet base in East Germany.
Read is excellent at evoking the atmosphere of post-Wende Berlin. In particular, he renders the contrast between the capitalist west and the rapidly-changing, but still down-at-heel east with a keen eye for the telling detail. Similarly, his descriptions of quotidian life in the somewhat chaotic Moscow of Boris Yeltsin and his cronies ring true. It was a time when national, and therefore personal identities were under threat, and the novel goes well beyond the normal confines of the spy genre to examine the nature of patriotism and duty. The characters are much more rounded and fully-realised than the usual stereotypes of genre fiction, and their complex motivations are a key aspect of the way the plot develops. Having said that, the usual elements of espionage fiction are here: murder, deceit, sexual tension, a race against time, a satisfying dénouement and an unexpected final twist. The Europe portrayed in this novel from two decades ago has not, in the era of Putin, changed as much as one might imagine. Read’s subtle and thoughtful story stands up well. This is a good example of a literary novel that uses the tropes of genre fiction with delicacy and intelligence.
As my dear reader will know, Anthony Burgess is a constant presence in my life, so it was a pleasure to provide a little guide to some of my favourites among his works for the latest Shiny New Books. As ever, Shiny has lots to offer the discerning reader. The photo is of me spouting nonsense (surely ‘delivering a magisterial exegesis’? Ed.) at the recent Burgess 100 conference in Manchester.
Shiny New Books is now updated more frequently, as the website posts reviews in smaller batches. My latest reviews are of Melissa Harrison’s charming Rain, and Thomas Dilworth’s monumental biography of the poet and artist David Jones. Harriet’s review of the new Helen Dunmore novel, Birdcage Walk has moved it high on my TBR list. Lots more to whet the appetite at Shiny!
Piers Paul Read is something of an oddity in contemporary English fiction, in that he is probably best known for his non-fiction work, most notably Alive, the 1975 account of the aftermath of the Andes plane crash. His other non-fiction has varied between other chronicles of disaster, such as Ablaze, about the Chernobyl nuclear reactor failure, and studies of historical events, such as the Dreyfus affair. He has also written a biography of Alec Guinness, a history of the Knights Templar, screenplays, essays and criticism, as well as seventeen novels. One thread that runs strongly through the different aspects of his work is a robust traditional Catholicism, derived, one imagines, from his Benedictine schooling at Ampleforth. At 76, he is one of the grand old men of English letters, like Tom Stoppard, who was once a flatmate.
As my dear reader will know, Anthony Burgess is a constant presence in my life, so it was a pleasure to provide 