It’s a golden autumn day with a hopeful blue sky on the 3rd October 1987, when my parents drive me to college for the first time. The car is a capsule containing my thrilling new life. I have a suitcase of my favorite clothes; a box of kitchenware containing two plates, two bowls, two saucepans, mugs and a teapot; and another box that holds everything I need for work. I have the biggest French and German dictionaries I’ve ever possessed, great slabs of condensed vocabulary as thick as hearthstones; new ruled A4 pads and new A4 ring binders to put them in; carefully chosen pens, fineliners in blue and black ink. And I have my exciting set texts. The reading lists for my courses were immense and full of names I’d never heard of, so I took a trip to Heffers in the summer and let its bookshelves guide me. I’ve bought the books on my lists that had multiple copies, assuming these are the likeliest to be taught, or maybe the most fun to read. The future is unimaginable but I imagine it anyway, picturing myself in a montage of learning in the manner endorsed by all the films. Here I am, chewing the end of my pen thoughtfully in lectures. Here I am, writing at a desk that’s illuminated by a cone of bright light. Here I am, curled in a chair, lost in a book.
The working week in Cambridge begins on a Thursday. Of course it does. Thursday mornings for me now mean French language classes at the Faculty. First up, French translation, and I like translation. There are about twelve people in the class and I sit down beside a rather beautiful girl from Homerton. The teacher up front is bearded and genial, cracking jokes about the way French mangles proper names (Beethoven, he points out, sounds like le Bate-ove). Then he hands out a sheaf of photocopied papers which I can see contain one solid block of text. My beautiful neighbor turns an Eek! face towards me, mouths ‘sooooo hard’, and gazes round the room with panicked eyes. I skim-read the French; it is extremely hard. The teacher nods at the poor sod sitting on the end of the front row of desks. ‘If you’d like to have a go at the first line,’ he says.
This, I will learn, is an ‘unseen’, a passage for translation that we will never have clapped eyes on before, for which we are given no vocabulary, no helpful hints, and no context. Nevertheless we will be expected to transform it by magic into elegant, literary English. I, too, start to gaze around the room with panicked eyes. I am counting heads, and then counting sentences, figuring out which one will land in my lap. The outcome is not good; I have one of the worst kinds of sentence in which all the individual words are simple and recognisable but together clearly mean something idiomatic, because the literal translation is nonsense. I shift uncomfortably in my chair. The other students seem to be acquitting themselves well. There’s a random quality to the sentence attribution which means some people do a little more and others a little less, but the awful sentence still heads straight for me, a shame-seeking missile. My beautiful neighbor is called upon and she makes light work of her task, offering an eloquent phrase that causes the teacher to look at her with pleased interest. My heart is hammering in my chest, and I can’t seem to focus properly, my mind blitzed by white noise.
‘So if you’d like to do the rest of the passage for homework,’ the teacher says. ‘Hand them in to my pigeon hole here at the Faculty.’ Students start shoving notebooks into their bags and winding scarves around their throats. I stare at the invisible line that separates my neighbour’s space from my own. It is as if a natural cataclysm has occurred and I stand on the crumbling edge of a precipice watching the floodtide recede, watching the tornado barrel away northeast.
There is an hour before the next class and I go to the library. Not to finish off the translation, which is what I ought to do, not least because I wasn’t paying attention to the correct translation of the first half. No, I sit there in a daze, nursing my survivor guilt, wondering what just happened. French translation was supposed to be my easy win. What on earth will French prose be like?
I have learned something this morning, at least. As we file into class, on the fine principle that if you can’t see them they can’t see you, I take a seat right at the back and keep my head firmly down. This time we are given a passage from Orwell’s Animal Farm to translate into French. The keen types in the front row get what’s coming to them, as our teacher is anxious to embody the stereotype of the brutal French woman who despises her ignorant charges. No! No! Obviously you require the future anterior here, third person plural, an irregular verb ending in -ir, you should know this! Preceding direct object rule! Pluperfect subjunctive! I realize now that I can’t remember the name of the teacher. I wasn’t so much hiding in that class as dissociating. But still some students come out of this grilling with their honor intact. It occurs to me that there are bilingual people in this class, students who have spent all their holidays in France, students who have had gap years abroad. How sensible that seems now, though what I would have done with myself in a foreign country for a year, I have no idea. I just studied hard enough to get through A level, and that, it transpires, was woefully inadequate for a Cambridge degree.
I leave class inclined to pat myself down. I feel as if something is missing, some part of myself hewn off by the experience, but all my limbs seem present and correct. Oh, I know what it is: my confidence. I walked into the Raised Faculty building this morning with it intact, and I leave with it in pieces. It occurs to me that in a few day’s time, I will have to do this all over again in German, the distinctly weaker of my two languages.
****
But what of literature? What of my beloved books, which were after all, the whole point of coming here? With an enthusiasm born out of complete ignorance, I chose the 18th century as my first French literary paper. The only novel I’ve ever heard of is Les Liaisons dangereuses but the first book I am assigned is nothing so racy: Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Rêveries du promeneur solitaire. I have a fortnight to read it and write an essay on it. Up until now I’ve studied four books over the space of two years, but I certainly believe I can read that fast. The first oddity, though, is that the first lectures are on a different book, Lettres Persanes by Montesquieu. Lectures, it turns out, rarely if ever correlate with the books assigned by supervisors. But bring on the books, I think, the more the merrier, right?
Lettres Persanes indulges a favorite trope of the 18th century – travellers in a foreign land, reporting back home with wide-eyed disingenuity about so-called primitive people who live better lives, in fact, than the French. The lecture hall feels thrillingly authentic, tiered rows of seating rising in the manner of an amphitheater. I have pictured myself drinking in great thoughts from an inspirational colossus, who strides across the dais gesticulating artistically. But in reality the lecturer sits at a desk, her head down, reading from a thick sheaf of pages at a speed my notetaking can’t maintain.
In the seraglio, the master plays an autocratic role while his many wives…..
As the spirit of rebellion takes hold….
Everything cascades in the final letters, when….
Say my notes, in a hasty scrawl of handwriting. I leave confused. It feels like this ought to be a fascinating book, but the lecturer and her dry, monotone delivery have left me with no desire to read it. With Rousseau I am faring no better. The daydreams of a solitary walker sound romantic, enticing, but all I find is an elderly, self-righteous man, wandering around the outskirts of Paris ruminating on his pet theories concerning education and politics, grizzling in the best académie française style about his persecution by critics. There may well be substance here for a mature mind, but I am still a callow girl who yearns for a story. In years to come, I will be able to assign this book to my least favorite category – texts written by blokes who were drunk or stoned or self-pityingly in exile, and who found what they said in this state to be acts of self-soothing genius. Harsh, I know, but given Rousseau died before finishing it, I can’t help but wonder whether he found it a bit of a trial too.
My supervisor for this paper is a gaunt man with a corona of fluffy white hair, so elderly that my youthful self can believe he read the books when they first came out. He has sumptuous rooms with black leather sofas, soft lighting and bulging bookcases. My supervision time is five o’clock and the nights are drawing in. As I sit on the sofa, not daring to move for fear of the farty sounds the leather makes, enveloped in the warmth of his superior gas fire, squinting at my notes in the golden glow of lamplight, it becomes increasingly hard to keep my eyes open. He talks and talks and talks. Voltaire’s Candide is a particularly fine example of…… my notes read. I shake myself, blink hard. The main philosophical message behind the witty tale of disaster suggests that optimism is…… At one unguessable, unforeseeable point in the hour, I catch a faint rising inflection in his otherwise colourless voice and understand that a question has been asked, and that its answer is not a simple yes or no.
French literature is a disappointment, but my module on German literature is pure trauma. The supervisor for this paper is a lecturer at my own college, let’s call him Dr. M. The first thing I learn about him comes from word of mouth student legend that he has ‘the perfect brain’. There’s a bronze sculpted bust of his head on one of his bookcases, which speaks to the atmosphere of awe and reverence that surrounds him. He is quite short, with a perfectly bald head and big black-rimmed glasses, and unlike my French supervisor, he doesn’t talk on and on. He asks lots of questions, but in a slightly languid, hopeless voice, as if anticipating the stupidity he will have to endure. To our meandering answers his usual response is, ‘I think you’ve missed the point.’ I don’t come out of these meetings with many notes, because this is memorable and doesn’t need writing down.
The first text we tackle is Danton’s Tod, a play about the French Revolution. I have chosen the 19th century this time and whilst the books will please me much more, I have come upon my nemesis right out of the blocks. Georg Buchner was a prodigy who, had it not been for his early death, might have reached the dizzy literary heights of Goethe and Schiller. A boy genius, in other words. I don’t much like Danton’s Tod the first time I read it, partly because I barely understand a word of it. German texts are even more impenetrable than French ones when you try to read them too fast, too late at night. Dr M holds up my homework as I sit down on his equally sumptuous but tapestry-upholstered sofa. ‘Is this what you call an essay?’ he asks. I am struck dumb: every question sounds like a trick question.
I feel so stupid around him that I do stupid things. I conclude my not-quite-an-essay on Buchner with the thought that maybe if he hadn’t died so young, he might have written better plays. Dr M’s contempt is usually so great that it weighs visibly on him, dragging him down the sofa, but this perks him up a bit. My essay is covered in red exclamation marks and triple underlinings. I am thoroughly chastised. And of course he is right; I know nothing and it is a silly value judgment. I want to protest that my ignorance is not a thoughtless lack of effort, not obtuse laziness. But I am too young and cowed to say anything and instead my intellectual curiosity starts to wither in the icy cold of disapproval and disdain.
***
I go home a lot that first term, where I think I might have left a vital horcrux of myself in my parents’ safekeeping. They are disappointed and not a little bewildered by what is happening, but they keep the faith. You’re good at languages, they tell me. You always took to them naturally. Come on now, we know you and this isn’t like you.
I don’t know how to explain to them that I feel betrayed. I am in love with learning and it has turned on me. LIke so many early affairs I have loved it for the way it makes me feel, for the stolen glimpses in its mirror of myself in graceful flight. Now I have lost the joy of competence, that great talisman against so many fears and uncertainties. Now I am incompetent, which means clumsy, hopeless, stupid, and I can’t bear it. Looking back on this moment thirty-seven years later, I see that I was protecting my status as an A grade student. But it seems extraordinary that this status should have been so inflexible, that I should know the work was far harder than anything I’d done previously and yet this altered in no way the demands I placed on my intellectual performance. But the performance has literally taken on a life of its own – it has taken over my own life, holding the truth and the reality of it hostage. I need that performance the way I need oxygen and water.
I spend the Christmas vacation trying and failing to catch up on work I’ve missed. Not only do I fail to understand what I need to do to complete it, it’s so far beyond my current abilities that I don’t even know how I’m supposed to learn. Classes don’t seem to be helping; probably because I expend most of my energy simply surviving them. And supervisions aren’t helping either. I am not exactly on terms of easy interaction with my supervisors; they are not people to whom I can take my concerns. They are people who bring out an icy defensiveness in me beneath which I bristle and squirm, people whom I withstand as a threat. Underlying all the teaching attitudes I encounter is this bedrock of mystery: whether it’s an essay or a translation, the message is that explanations are futile, you either get it or you don’t.
But there is one person I feel able to approach, and this is my Director of Studies. He is a gentle, kindly man in his fifties, preternaturally neat haired and besuited with the kind of belly that speaks of many a college feast. Compared to the average don, he is a comfortable and comforting person, like Winnie the Pooh grew up and got himself a PhD in French literature. I go to see him and tell him everything and he is kindness itself. I will know this man for many, many years, and will come to see that the failing student doesn’t exist whom he will not champion. He immediately finds a time for us to meet and gives me another prose to do so we can go over it together.
This is undeniably wonderful. And yet…. Every fortnight I am expected to hand in two literary essays and two language essays, four proses and four translations. My German prose teacher enters the class every week smiling at me eagerly and fumbling with the catch of his briefcase within which lurk remedial exercises. I don’t think there are enough exercises in the world to bring my German up to scratch and I can barely do what’s expected of me, let alone extra work on top. I somehow manage to squeeze another prose into my schedule and have the immense good fortune to receive my Director of Studies’ individual tuition on it. But it doesn’t help. There’s something about the retrospective approach to prose that isn’t working. Afterwards, when it’s spelled out to me, I can see all the silly mistakes I make, but it’s not preventing me from making them in the moment. I don’t understand the questions I need to be asking myself as I move through a prose, the choices I need to be making. And I’m desperate to find help that doesn’t come with extra homework.
And so the bright idea strikes me that I could approach one of the second year students at my college for help. I ask around a bit in the bar and lo and behold, a young man makes it known to me that he is happy to do some coaching. We’ll call him M. I go around to his rooms the following week, clutching my dreaded homework in my hand and we do it together, with him taking over the parts that defeat me. I watch, absorb the right technique and am profoundly, humbly grateful. Finally, this starts to make a difference. Maybe it’s being in another student room and not the combat zone of a class, maybe it’s because when M explains things to me, he’s talking at my level, not at some advanced state of grammatical perfection. Maybe, and here I shake my head at my teenage self – maybe it’s the sheer fact that I am no longer getting thirds on my homework that makes me relax enough to start learning again. It is too easy for me to forget that I’m not doing this work alone. I’ve become addicted to a good performance, mistaking it for something real, ashamed of the honest battle with the work when I am the person battling. But there is a truth here that teachers fail to see – the obstacle was never the wall that I hit, but the injury to my sense of self that came from hitting it.
There is no such thing as an easy win, In a few weeks’ time, M. starts to call on me more regularly and not so very long after that he declares himself by pressing into my unwilling hands a little scrap of paper on which the words ‘Je me suis épris de toi’ are written. Naturally, I can’t translate them. I hate to fail him by admitting as much, and so I endure a painfully confusing conversation until finally I get rid of him and rush to my dictionary. For once the dictionary comes good: épris, e (ptp de éprendre) adj (frm) (d’une femme) smitten (de, with), enamoured (de of) (littér). So in terms more suited to an eighteenth century man of letters, which is to say wholly appropriate to the archaic atmosphere of Cambridge, M is professing a burgeoning romantic interest in me. Oh, bugger! I think. I mean, he is a nice person, and obviously clever, but I don’t feel that way about him at all.
And my love life is demanding enough. I’d arrived in Cambridge with a boyfriend back home and no interest in a new relationship. But then I’ve become friends with a tall blonde engineering student who has impressed me in various unexpected ways. Like the time several of us were sitting and chatting in his rooms and a huge cockroach scuttled out from under his trunk into the middle of the floor. While the rest of us shrank in startled horror, he simply stood up and stamped on it. I think that shows unusual presence of mind, though later, when I visit his house, an old manor cottage that is regularly invaded by wild life, I understand better. But then I noticed, too, that he’d brought all of his records with him, and I mean all. Even Dire Straits and the Smurfs. I can’t help but be impressed by such unconditional self acceptance. I seem to spend all my time pruning the bits of my past and personality that ruin the overall effect. And then he is ruthless at the level of his need in a way I have never dared to be. One evening in the bar, he blurts out: ‘Everyone thinks we’re going out but I’m getting none of the perks!’ Whilst so much of my Cambridge life is a puzzle to me, this is at least mercifully clear. For those of you who have been around this blog for a while, you might recognize that distinct discursive style. Yes, dear readers, I did marry him, but that was a long time off in the future and a story for another day.
I’m aware that the obvious thing to do would be to stop meeting with M, but I need those homework sessions. I can’t possibly date him, but I don’t feel able to abandon the morphine of his help. And so I fall into one of those strange compromise formations, in which I continue to turn up with my French proses and we continue to work together and I try to say as little as possible that can be construed as definitive. Oddly enough this works out okay, as M. likes to have long conversations with me of such allusive complexity that I rarely knew what we’re talking about anyhow. I am beginning to wonder whether the accelerated learning of two foreign languages has somehow screwed up my capacity for comprehension per se. But I do my best to hold M. at arm’s length and endure all manner of little notes pushed underneath my door, some featuring an Egyptian style eye with a lone tear snaking away from it.
It’s not just in language work that I am finally experiencing some breakthroughs. In my German literature supervisions, we study Immensee by Theodore Storm. This text is already known to me, was in fact one of the books I studied at A level. In a few sentences, Dr M opens it up for me in a way that is more profound, more meaningful, than all the teaching I’d received on it before. This is the kind of revelation I have come here to find, this is the experience I crave above all others. There are no words for what I seek, but a feeling of immense expansion, like rounding a corner to find a panoramic view. And then we read Lenz, a brief novella by that nemesis of mine, Georg Buchner, and a tale so strange and wild and unlike anything else that I am in love with literature again. I forgive it for abandoning me. The fault was mine.
At the distance of thirty-seven years, I see things differently to my younger self. The fault was not really mine. What I understand now is that learning can only occur directly on top of the things we already know. It is an act of construction that requires us to move upwards brick by brick, to progress step by step. No step can be missed, and only one can be taken at a time. Yet Cambridge was expecting me to jump whole flights of stairs. I realize now that the exam papers for the end of the first year are at the same level as those given to Finalists. From the moment we arrived in those first year classes, we were given work of the standard we would only be expected to complete in four years’ time. This was true of literary essays too. Our supervisors discussed books that they knew intimately and had taught for years, expecting us to reach their level when we’d had insufficient time to read those texts even once. In some ways my slowness saved me. The first year taught me that I simply couldn’t get all the work done. I would learn subsequently to ditch books that didn’t speak to me, and focus my attention instead on those I loved. I didn’t learn, as so many around me did, just how to bullshit convincingly.
***
So, I am making progress, but not fast enough to save me from the end of year exams. Exams exert a powerful black magic over the mind of the young. They have the same kind of finality as death, and put students in the same state of abject vulnerability as a public whipping. This is because students have spent the previous academic year being forced to think slowly – to analyze carefully, to consider thoughtfully, not to miss details out, not to grab for the immediate answer that comes to mind. Whereas an exam is a test of thinking fast, of acting on instinct, of trusting to a kind of intellectual autopilot. The whole mindset is radically different and so of course no one feels prepared. No one is prepared.
When I come to revise I fall into a common trap for anxious female students. The only safe way to approach these exams – it seems obvious to me – is to know everything. The encyclopedic urge has me in its perfectionist grip. There is probably a sensible way to approach these exams but I’m not about to reach for it. What does it mean to be sensible? It means giving up on the romance of the grand gesture. It means eschewing a narrative of triumph over adversity, abandoning hope in revelation and epiphany. Not many 19 year olds in love with literature are going to be able to embrace being sensible, and certainly not those who have fallen for an epic narrative of learning. And I know nothing. Nothing about myself, nothing about the transactions and compromises that need to be made between our desires and the rebarbative world. I am all striving and desperation.
So the inevitable happens. I work myself into the ground and fall ill halfway through the exams. My kind Director of Studies drives me in the most dilapidated car I’ve ever seen to the doctors’ surgery, where I promptly pass out on the doctor and am declared unfit to sit Tripos. There are no retakes at Cambridge, and so when the results come out, I have the ignominy of receiving a ‘declared to have passed with honours’. I feel some relief, but it is a shameful feeling. It means I am a coward. I know I have run away into illness, escaped into it, by giving myself permission to overwork and stress.
I go home, and think, what just happened there?
The long summer vacation stretches out, a balm to my spirits. Finally I do what I do best. I haul the ancient sun lounger onto the patio and start to read through the texts for my second year. I have signed up for the critical theory paper, and have an introductory book by Terry Eagleton. For months now, I have been trying to find the entrance to a walled garden of exquisite beauty. I have been walking around and around the perimeter, searching for the place that will yield to my touch. The book at first seems unprepossessing. It makes me defensive again, with its strange theories and nonsensical perspectives. And then, I reach a chapter where everything changes. Relaxed in my own back garden, the defensiveness is unsustainable.
I allow my mind to open up. I lift my head and stare into the middle distance, gazing into a whole new world.
The first part of this memoir can be found here: The Unwild Child
Another part will follow in a few weeks.