The Oxford Tribe

33

THE OXFORD TRIBE

By Peter Rudiak-Gould

Copyright © 2015 Peter Rudiak-Gould

All rights reserved.

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For C, who pushed me there.

For H, who kept me there.

I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

-Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited

Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is…The greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Contents

Admissions

Michaelmas

Chapter 1: Full Tweed Jacket

Chapter 2: A Pole in Melanesia

Chapter 3: There Will Be Wine

Chapter 4: The Definition of Futility

Chapter 5: Fire and Ice

Hilary

Chapter 6: Among the Pos Mádinis

Chapter 7: The Remembrance of Things Posh

Trinity and Beyond

Chapter 8: The Merry Clerks of Oxenford

Chapter 9: Good Mark Hunting

Chapter 10: We Marry Those We Fight

Supplication

[sic]

Sources

Notes

About the Author

Admissions

In my mid twenties I left my native America and traveled to a faraway island. Britannia, as it was called, was a forbidding land of perpetual rain and cloud cover as constant as Mordor’s. I trekked into the very heart of this isle, to the point farthest from the sea. And it was there that I found a legendary city, a millennium in age, and the color of gold.

I had come to study a tribe so ancient that no one could say precisely when it originated: the Oxonians. I would not only observe their way of life but take part in it. I would live in their stone houses and meditate in their monasteries. I would learn their tongue, with its polysyllabic words and baroque syntax. I would sit among fellow pilgrims, listening to the sermons of learned elders. In order to more closely observe the Oxonians, I had in fact disguised myself as an apprentice to these elders, shamans of a local cult known as an’tra-páladji.

I was an undercover anthropologist, a culture-chaser disguised as a student of culture-chasing. A party crasher crashing a costume party costumed as a party crasher. But maybe even that was a disguise - because this was not just a scientific mission. I was in search of love in those days, confesses Charles Ryder, the young hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited when he comes up to Oxford. So was I. And where do you go when you hope to fall in love with a place, with a way of life? You can choose your own idiosyncratic answer to that question, your own unique vision of happiness. But most seekers, consciously or unconsciously, borrow one of the paradigms of paradise given to them by their culture. These are prefab, ready-to-wear myths, weighted with extra resonance due to their cultural currency and long history. For Charles Ryder, the prefab myth is the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie—the dignity of tradition, the orderliness of hierarchy, the pleasures of wood paneling and aged wine. He invests that vision in the stately home of Brideshead, the most beautiful house I’ve ever seen, doomed to be overrun by the barbarians of reform. It is an aristocratic Eden. In Polynesia, Herman Melville fell more or less accidentally into another popular image of paradise: the island outside of time, untainted by civilization, where the scenery just happens to be first-rate and the women just happen to be beautiful and willing. The Orientalist paradise has its share of chasers, too. The name Shangri-La comes from a Lost Generation novel in which a world-weary Brit, himself once a lecturer at Oxford, finds himself marooned in a secluded Himalayan valley of Eastern wisdom and tranquility.

Then there is another paradise-image. It is sought by fewer perhaps, but no less ardently. This is the philosopher’s paradise, academic utopia: quiet libraries, stimulating banter, big important ideas, small trivial ones for the love of thinking itself; plenty of time to read and write and seek a kind of fame that doesn’t require performing in front of a crowd; brick buildings and quads, where the season is always autumn and the weather is always just chilly enough for a ruffled blazer. There is a bit of that image in Brideshead, of course, and more than a bit in Shangri-La. The myths cross-reference each other. And indeed in Brideshead Revisited, paradise is invested not only in the fictitious Brideshead but also in the very real Oxford, though more for its aristocratic glow than its intellectual sparkle. Oxford, the English-speaking world’s oldest university, is a favorite place to pin that fantasy. Doubly so for Americans, to whom that university is a mythical place of intellect and cultural sophistication, filled with upper-class public school boys who are so clever and classy that they never have to do anything other than drink sherry and play the kind of sports where you do not get your gear dirty.

I had done my share of paradise seeking. I followed Melville’s primitivist path, landing on a far-flung tropical isle with nothing but natives, and found that little other than the pretty beaches resembled what I had imagined. Expecting to find my fantasy, which is to say expecting the place and the people to be an extension of my self, I had instead found an other. The idea of paradise appeared lost. But really it had only shape-shifted. The primitive utopia failed; let’s see if the intellectual one can deliver. In the primitivist fantasy, the more unknown the place, the better. Obscurity is key. In the intellectual fantasy, the more known the place, the better. Renown is key. So I chose the intellectual site perhaps best known in the world: Oxford, the city of dreaming spires. I found myself packing up to yet another island.

This is a memoir with a healthy dose of poetic license. The worst sins of fictionalization are confessed at the end of the book in a section called [sic] - the way that academics say I know this is wrong, but don’t blame me for it. I’ve compressed time, reordered events, reconstructed dialogue, anonymized details, and composited characters. But everything in this book really happened in one form or another, and all factual information is correct to the best of my knowledge. I use the past tense nearly everywhere, even when describing things as present and future-assured as an 800-year-old institution. This is intentional. I was at Oxford at a particular time. I was also at Oxford in a particular college, in a particular degree course, and in a particular brain (my own). My observations and experiences occurred in that context. The book is not about them as much as a particular encounter between myself and them.

This book would not have been possible without the following people, whose contributions are too personal for a last name to feel appropriate here: Claire, Cynthia, Harvey, David G, Bubbe, Matthew A, Gareth, Niko, Sebastian, Matthew W, Mariah, Emily W, Emily F, Bert, James, Hugo, Mom, Dad, Nat, Ben - and many other wonderful people I knew in Oxford, who are too numerous to name. Two full names I will give: The Lord John Krebs because half the reason for an acknowledgements section is to show off, and my agent Andy Ross, to give him some free advertising.

Michaelmas

At Oxford that first term in my tweed suit, playing rugby for the college team, eating crumpets afterwards and then drinking too much in the White Horse next door, I still, I think, retained a sense of irony, a sense that I was consciously taking part in a parody.

-Justin Cartwright, This Secret Garden

Chapter 1: Full Tweed Jacket

When the High Lama asked him whether Shangri-La was not unique in his experience, and if the Western world could offer anything in the least like it, he answered-with a smile: ‘Well, yes. To be quite frank, it reminds me very slightly of Oxford, where I used to lecture. The scenery there is not so good, but the subjects of study are often just as impractical, and though even the oldest of the dons is not quite so old, they appear to age in a somewhat similar way.’

-James Hilton, Lost Horizon

On October 1st, 2006, I found Jesus. Jesus College, that is. It turned out that all this time Jesus had been hiding down a street called The Turl in a small city in the English midlands. The scene was a little too perfect. It was suspiciously movie-settish. There was a narrow cobble-stoned lane, walled in with pale golden stone on either side, overhung with gargoyles and a chestnut tree, with a church-cum-library towering at the end. It was a movie set. Down the street a film crew was at work on an episode of Inspector Lewis, while crowd control held the tour groups at bay.

The entrance to Jesus College was nestled almost secretively on the western side of the street, easy to miss amid the delivery trucks and the whooshing bicycles. But once the threshold of the college was crossed, the street noise was instantly hushed, and the college opened wide - somehow larger on the inside than on the outside. The quad was in equal parts monastery, palace, and fortress. The stone walkways sagged from centuries of footsteps, but the feet themselves were young. Fresh-faced undergraduates carried boxes to and fro. The girls were in oversized sweaters and poofy straightened manes. The boys were in pin-striped shirts and the kind of carefully tousled hair that requires advanced European hairspray technology and a wind chamber.

On barbarian-defense duty was the porter: half butler, half bouncer, simultaneously a servant and an authority figure. A cop in tweed. He was ensconced behind glass in the porter’s lodge, a sort of military command center with television screens fed by security cameras around the college, seeing everything. He found my name on a list. I signed a form. I had accepted Jesus as my personal college.

He handed me an electronic fob and a skeleton key: door-access technologies from the future and the past, but none from the present. Go find your pigeonhole, he said, a bit abruptly. But he was not telling me off. He was suggesting I check my mailbox.

I found my pigeonhole in the lodge. There were five or six stray papers and then, crushing them all, overflowing the cubby, was an enormous tome entitled (simply, brutally) Examination Regulations. It was one thousand, one hundred and forty pages long.

A ginger-haired freshman noted my look of anxiety. Not to worry, he told me. If you are examined on your knowledge of those exam rules, just cheat and claim ignorance of the rules as your defense. He shuffled out of the lodge before I could finish parsing all of the logical layers of that statement.

I’m at Oxford.

* * *

In the sixth grade I had a friend named Gil. He once told me, "There’s this college called Oxford. But you have to get all A plusses in all of your classes ever if you want to go there. If you get even one A, you can’t go."

Even in P.E.? I asked.

Yes, he answered with a tone of awe.

And I remember thinking, Wow. Even in P.E.

I hadn’t gotten an A+ in P.E., but here I was. Perhaps it was because someone had cast a spell on my application.

I had been living in Boston, doing various and sundry temp jobs. In one gig, I was paid in an hour what my comb-overed lawyer-boss was paid in one minute and fifty-one seconds. In another, I helped rich people track down products like toilets in Turkey, tuxedos for infants, and dog-bone-shaped golden plaques embossed with the words Life is just better with my dog around. In yet another, I recorded donations to the Massachusetts Republican Party, a job where there was every reason to take as many billable hours as possible to complete the work since it would increase my cash flow and decrease theirs, both of which I considered laudable goals. And for ten months I lived the glamorous life of a corporate cubicle-dwelling Purchasing Assistant, which, despite the name, involved no choosing of anything to buy, no buying of things, and no using of anything bought.

The permanent temporary worker. I had hoped for more than this out of life. My boss at the cubicle farm knew I wanted out, so she put her full power behind my application to Oxford. Her full magical power. This Director of Worldwide Procurement and Travel moonlighted as a witch. She googled up some druidic runes and instructed me to trace them invisibly onto the application package with a finger dipped in rain water, outdoors at night under a full moon. A sort of letter of recommendation from the Universe. This was good practice for an anthropologist-in-training: encounter person with nutty belief; humor them; come away semi-converted.

I had applied to the University of Hawai’i as well, and they had responded in no time at all, in a huge package stuffed with all sorts of welcoming papers and helpful information—a parody of themselves. The acceptance letter was something like this:

"Aloha Peter!

That’s Hawaiian for hello and love! We’re so excited to tell you that you’re in! We’ve got some great activities planned, and just can’t wait to meet you!

Mahalo! And welcome to Hawai’i!

Brad & Cindy

Student Happiness Reps"

Oxford was equally a parody of itself. Nothing for several months, then a plain envelope enclosing a single sheet of paper - surely a rejection letter. Wouldn’t a letter of acceptance arrive with forms to be signed, an information package? Not at Oxford. The letter of acceptance went something like this:

"Dear Mr. Rudiak-Gould,

Your application for admission as a graduate student reading for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Social Anthropology has been accepted.

In due course you will receive a letter from a college informing you of the financial conditions of its offer and, if necessary, any additional conditions that the college may wish to set.

Please note that your student membership of the University will be on the basis explained in the Graduate Studies Prospectus, and will be subject to the Statutes and Regulations of the University as amended from time to time.

Regards,

Simon Hughes-Jones

Secretary of Graduate Studies

School of Anthropology"

Then the university observed radio silence. It was a full six months before I received their next missive. It informed me that I had been assigned to Jesus College. Colleges were related to the university as a whole in a way that few could fully explain and fewer could fully justify. There were 39 of them in all, not to be confused with the permanent private halls, though two of the halls were actually colleges and one of the colleges was actually a hall. It all made a lot of sense. Physically the colleges were real enough: little enclaves in the city, usually a linked collection of high-walled quads and gardens hidden away from the proletarian hordes on the streets. The grandest among them sported croquet lawns, cricket pitches, riverfront real estate, chapels as grand as any cathedral. Their expansive open spaces were worth a fortune in that overcrowded city, yet they remained ostentatiously undeveloped. They had their own bars, dining halls, libraries, apartments. Scholastically they were nebulous: they could choose their own undergraduates but not grant them degrees; they had professors but not the professors’ academic departments; they allowed students from other colleges to hang out there sort of as a right and sort of as a privilege, no one was really sure. They were the center of undergraduate teaching yet some of them had no undergraduates. One of them had almost no students at all. Financially they were enigmatic: public-ish but basically private, they were bound by London to charge no more than £3,000 in yearly tuition, yet possessed of their own enormous endowments with which they could do pretty much anything they pleased - usually a combination of need-based scholarships and desire-based wine cellars. The endowments ranged from under £10 million to well over £300 million, a legacy of centuries of bequests, royal donations, land sales, investment windfalls and blunders. Socially they were indispensable: they were where one lived and dined, and one of the many places where one drank.

I had listed St. John’s College as my first choice. St. John’s wasn’t quite at the level of Oscar Wilde’s Magdalen College, Albert Einstein’s Christ Church College, or J.R.R. Tolkien’s Merton College. But it was still a stretch for me: fantastically wealthy, 451 years old, alma mater to Tony Blair. Someone somewhere decided that I was not entirely fit to be affiliated with such a college. Instead I was placed at Jesus College in the University of Oxford of Queen Elizabeth’s Foundation, as its full name went. At four hundred thirty-odd years old, it counted only as middle-aged by Oxonian standards, but otherwise it wasn’t half bad. It had a prime minister on its alumni list, and it was where a certain T.E. Lawrence had shown early promise as Lawrence of Academia.

Each college had a ceremonial head variously called Master, Warden, President, Provost, or Dean according to the college. At Jesus the title was Principal, and the role was currently filled by John Krebs. A.k.a. the Baron Krebs of Wytham in the County of Oxfordshire. A.k.a. the Lord Krebs Kt, MA, DPhil, FRS, FMedSci, Hon DSc. He was a Lord, a Knight, a Baron, a Fellow, a Doctor, a Principal, and a Life Peer. He also had to his name an honorary doctorate or thirteen.[1]

Oxford broke its monastic silence one final time just a day before I was scheduled to cross the pond. Here, finally, was the overflowing envelope of information. I was to purchase a gown, of a sort not much changed since medieval times. Specifically, I had to acquire a graduate’s gown, taking pains not to embarrass myself by mistakenly acquiring a commoner’s gown, like some kind of undergraduate plebe, or a scholar’s gown, as if I were so exalted. I needed a mortarboard to go on my head, and a subfusc under my gown. Subfusc was helpfully defined as a suit of sober hue, shoes to match, and a white shirt and white bowtie. There were just two exceptions to the subfusc rule. If I was a man of God I could replace the subfusc with vestments, habit, dog collar, etc. And if I was a man of war I could go for broke with full military regalia. Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition. The package was stuffed with cream-colored envelopes from each of the several tailors that specialized in this gear: Ede & Ravenscroft, Castell & Son, Shepherd & Woodward. Ede & Ravenscroft’s brochure bragged that it was London’s oldest tailor. They seemed especially proud to announce that their gowns were made of stuff. This was apparently a good thing. The pamphlet for Walter’s of Oxford screamed WARNING: PLEASE READ. It instructed me that while some stores might offer caps and gowns in sizes small, medium, large, and extra large, they had always insisted on ten different sizes. In bold type, for emphasis, it read, "It is vitally important that your gown is the correct length, therefore ensuring you are correctly and accurately dressed in readiness for matriculation and the coming year’s events at Oxford University." Apparently the success of my entire academic career might turn on the length of my regalia.

A letter in the package invited me to join the Jesus College rowing crews. There were the Beer VIIIs. They were, by their own admission, crews devoted primarily to the pleasures of the bottle and strongly opposed to hard work. Then there were the more serious crews, who lived and breathed for no goal other than bumping the public-school bastards of Trinity College and earning Blades. The best of the crews might be chosen for the high Dark Blue honor of participating in the annual destruction of the Tabs. Trinity term, read the letter, "is a time of garden parties and May Balls, Pimm’s and punting and crew dates, and is also one of hardcore training and hench endurance in preparation for the mid-term event Summer VIIIs." Some of the jargon was defined handily in a Key:

Blades: The highest honour that can be awarded for intercollegiate rowing. A 10ft oar with names and weights painted on it is awarded to each member of the crew.

Dark Blue: The colour of Oxford.

Hench: A term used to describe Herculean individuals, feats or crews.

Tab: Your worst enemy.

Crew Date: Two crews from different colleges and (normally) of the opposite sex meet at Formal Hall for competitive pennying, and then wake up with sore heads and scattered memories.

Pennying was left undefined. I would not learn till later what relation this practice had to sore heads and scattered memories.

Looking at all of this, I thought: Oxford mixes stuffiness with silliness. It joins them so seamlessly that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins. It is so stuffy it is silly and it takes its silliness so seriously that the silly soon becomes the stuffy. Its humorlessness is matched only by its humor.

* * *

My digs were across a narrow street from Jesus College proper. I had been assigned a cavernous room where there was hardly any natural light even at noon, where the doors were supposed to remain closed at all times for fire safety, and where occupants were allowed to decorate anywhere but the walls—which sort of narrows down the decorating options. They were trying their best to encourage suicide. Looking out the window, though, my mood lifted. It was all warm yellow stone, ornate windows, crenellations. An enormous old wooden gate guarded the college’s side entrance.

My neighbors were British undergraduates with forenames like Alberic, Amadeus, Rowan, Posey, and Gruffudd and surnames like Owen, Labhraí, Roberts-Harry, and, my personal favorite, St. Leger-Honeybone. Some graduate students were mixed in, hailing from all over Europe and beyond. They sported names like Llorenc O’Prey, Artem Shyrkozhukhov, Ana Vlaisavljevic, and Mike Brown.

I met the scout. This was Oxford’s answer to the charwoman or chambermaid of old. Nowadays the scout was as often a man as a woman and more often a first-generation immigrant than a working class native. My scout was a Venezuelan man who had traded chartered accountancy under the regime of Hugo Chavez for 57-hour-per-week janitorial duty under the regime of The Lord Krebs. Every day he emptied my rubbish bin and once a week he meticulously cleaned my room. Accustomed to having the working poor who make my life easier comfortably out of sight in Bangladesh garment factories and California tomato fields, my guilt was palpable.

The little things: the hot water and the cold water came from two different taps, the former scalding, the latter arctic; the toilet handle had to be pumped up and down several times in order to flush. Those random things you find in foreign countries that are different from home for no particular reason—holdouts from standardization—may they never disappear.

The welcome dinner for new students was scheduled for half six that night. Academic gowns were required. It was time to score some regalia. Just down Turl Street from the college was Walter’s, The Man’s Shop. They were purveyors of all manner of suits, ties, pocket squares, cufflinks, academic gowns, mortarboards, and Spotty Hanks (on sale for £2.35 apiece). The shop was flanked by the Men’s Hairdressing Salon on one side and The Whisky Shop on the other - everything a young Oxford man needed, all in one convenient location. A squinting, gnomish fellow fitted me with my very own scholastic superhero cape.

Dinner time came. Throngs of students arrived in the required smart dress and gowns and found their assigned seats in the Jesus College dining hall. Hall, as it was nearly always called, was a lovely chamber. It was long, darkly wood-panelled at eye level, brightly painted up above, lined with centuries-old wooden tables and benches. The basic design of the Oxford dining hall was unchanged since eight hundred years ago. Newer touches including the bilingual, English-and-Welsh No Smoking signs. The walls were decked out with portraits of the college’s notables. There was Sir Hrothgar Habakkuk (he went by John). There were two different men with the unlikely name Eubule Thelwall. Thelwall the elder, that is Sir Thelwall, was suppering under this roof around the time when good advice might be Watch out for Barbary pirates and Marry into the Medicis. That is to say, a while ago. Edmund Meyricke, 1636-1713, looked Latino, and Norman Washington Manley, a Jamaican statesman, looked white. Former Principal Peter North—not to be confused with the porn star of the same name—looked either bored or defiant. Hugh Price was small and frightened. Lawrence of Arabia had a five o’clock shadow. And Queen Elizabeth (the college’s founder, given pride of place in an imposing portrait centered high on the far wall) was a pale white butterfly-body flanked by enormous butterfly-wings of finery. That painting was said to be worth £5 million.

I sat down. I contemplated the cutlery. I listened to the restaurant-like roar of mixed conversations. Then there was silence and everyone stood up smartly. The college muckedy-mucks were filing in. Principal, Dean, Senior Tutor, Wine Fellow, Home Bursar, Chaplain, and assorted underlings walked in single-file towards the far end of the hall. Here they had their own table. It was called high table because it stood on a platform physically raised a foot above the rest of the hall, where the plebes ate. They arranged themselves at that altar in order of cachet: the Principal stood in the middle facing outwards, with flanks of decreasingly awesome cronies to his left and right, until, wrapping around the other side of the table back towards the center, stood the untouchables, the Junior Dean and a Junior Research Fellow, stationed directly opposite the Principal yet socially miles away.

The Principal handled his gavel, which looked like an ornate rubber stamp, and brought it down smartly on a purpose-built block. The whacking sound was the cue for a Classics student to begin reciting the college grace at breakneck speed. It came out something like this:

Nosmiserihominesetegeniprocibisquosnobisadcorporissubsidiumbenigneeslargitustibideusomnipotenspatercaelestisgratiasreverenteragimussimulobsecrantesutiissobriemodesteatquegrateutamurinsuperpetimusutcibumangelorumverumpanemcaelestemverbumdeiaeternemdominumnostrumiesumchristumnobisimpertiarisutqueillomensnostrapascaturetpercarnemetsanguinemeiusfoveamuralamuretcorroboremur. Amen.

The undergraduates had a competition going as to who could recite the grace fastest at a formal dinner. The current record: 19.6 seconds.

Over four courses and three kinds of wine, delivered by uniformed serving staff, I got to know my seatmates. There was Mette. She was a Danish student of economics and a long-time expatriate in England. Whatever I said to her she would always say I just read an article about that, and she would mean it, too. She knew to within a meter how far away her girlfriend in Copenhagen was (1,000,821, if you care). She was not a frivolous woman. When I asked her what her interests were, she said, Climate change. Nuclear weapons. Poverty. Economic development. Human rights. Cognitive science. Philosophy of mind. Evolutionary psychology. ‘Pataphysics. Complexity. Emergent phenomena. Her current pleasure reading was Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century.

There was Anthony, a student of biology. He hailed from the Jersey shore (by which I mean a seaside house on the island of Jersey in the English Channel) but had grown up around the world, towed by his diplomat parents. His accent was sometimes mid-Atlantic, more often untraceable. Assassination figured prominently in his life. His father had survived an attempt on his life by five hired thugs in Assam, beating them off with his trusty gada, a kind of subcontinental metal club, before the police showed up. Now Anthony, on the mean streets of Oxford, carried one of his own. He opened his dinner jacket like