When Graham Greene was an undergraduate at Balliol, in the early 1920s, he was an unhappy and unruly student, not well regarded by his tutors, and he would have to get drunk in order to face his termly interview with the Master. By the time I met him he had become an honorary fellow of the college, having achieved international fame as a novelist. In 1979, Oxford University made him an honorary Doctor of Letters at Encaenia, and the college feasted him beforehand. As Master, I had the pleasure of entertaining him at the very table at which he had once had to be propped up to face handshaking. Where Oxford led, the nation followed, and in 1982 Greene was awarded the Order of Merit.
At the luncheon the day before Encaenia, Greene made a remark which had a lasting effect on my life. Greene and myself, and another guest, the Oxford publisher Dan Davin, were all, to varying degrees, lapsed Catholics. The conversation turned to the following question. Since, to the unbeliever, faith is only a delusion, why do those who have given up their faith feel a sense of loss? Greene quoted the words:
Of all the creatures under heaven’s wide cope
We are most hopeless who had once most hope,
We are most wretched that had most believed.
I did not recognize the quotation and was told it came from Easter Day by Arthur Hugh Clough. At that time, I knew of Clough only the two poems that everyone knows – The Latest Decalogue and Say not the Struggle naught Availeth – but Oxford University Press had just published the canonical edition of Clough’s poems, and a day or two later Davin sent me a copy as a present. The volume soon became one of my favourites, and I spent many hours reading Clough’s poems. I particularly liked his two novels in verse, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich about a Scottish reading party, and Amours de Voyage about the ineffective lovemaking of an Oxford don in the Rome of Mazzini’s 1848 Republic.
For years to come, reading and writing about Clough became one of my main intellectual interests. In 1998 I wrote a book, God and Two Poets, in which I compared Clough’s religious poetry with that of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Two years later I published an edited version of Clough’s Oxford diaries, which had turned up serendipitously in Balliol library while I was researching for the earlier book. When the new Dictionary of National Biography appeared, I was invited to contribute the relevant article, and in 2005 I published a full-length biography of Clough. Finally, I produced an edition of Clough’s lesser known poems, Mari Magno and Dipsychus. Every time I return to work on Clough I am grateful to Grahame Greene for introducing me to him.
A few years later I asked Greene to make a benefaction to Balliol. He declined, but suggested that the college should hold an auction at Christie’s of items donated by old members. He promised to set the ball rolling by giving some of his own manuscripts. Sadly, they proved disappointing – typescripts of four-page introductions to reprints of his works, and the like. Now, years after his death, the college has come into possession of a full collection of Greene memorabilia, which is one of the treasures of its archives.
It was Elizabeth Anscombe, I believe, who introduced me to Iris Murdoch. The two of them, along with Mary Midgley and Philippa Foot, constituted a formidable group of female philosophers in Oxford in the late forties and early fifties. While Elizabeth was teaching ancient philosophy at Somerville, Iris was teaching modern philosophy at St Anne’s. The two women did not, however, chime together philosophically. Iris once wrote in her diary: ‘The ruthless authenticity of Elizabeth makes me feel more and more ashamed of the vague and self-indulgent way in which I have been philosophising.’ Elizabeth, when she spoke to me about Iris, would adopt a tone of half-amused contempt. Relations between the two had been strained for reasons other than philosophical. Iris had been thrown out of her lodgings because of the terrible mess that Elizabeth had made there during Iris’ absence. Elizabeth had been doing cooking experiments with the logician Georg Kreisel, in the course of which a chiffon scarf of Iris’ had been ruined by being used to filter fish soup.
By the time I got to know Iris she had ceased to be a teacher of philosophy and had devoted herself full time to writing. I had read her early novels – Under the Net, The Flight from the Enchanter, The Sandcastle and The Bell – with great admiration. Iris retained an interest in philosophy, writing a book on Sartre in 1953. From time to time, she and I would discuss philosophy together. We shared a dislike for the neo-Kantian morality taught at that time by Richard Hare, and were both to some extent outside the mainstream of Oxford philosophy – she with her initial fascination with existentialism, and I with my scholastic background. I tried to persuade her that we should conduct a seminar together, but she refused to be drawn back into academic philosophy. Instead, she continued to publish philosophical books such as The Sovereignty of Good, and Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. For an Aristotelian like myself her works were far too Platonic.
My wife and I had an opportunity to sample the hospitality of Iris and her husband John Bayley. The challenges of their food have been well described by other writers, but I have a more vivid memory of our hosts’ attitude to wine. ‘Never acquire a taste for fine wine’, Iris warned us solemnly. But along with a contempt for quality, Iris and John had a great appreciation for quantity: bottle after bottle of cheap Beaujolais would be opened. The couple had no objection to the blending of wines, even accepting the mingling of white and red to form a murky rosé.
I found it dangerous to discuss with Iris any of my activities with the British-Irish Association. She came from an Irish Protestant background and had a hatred of popery, which gave her a kinship with the Ulster Unionists. This can be sensed in the background of her novel The Red and the Green. As the years went by, and she published novel after novel – notably The Sea, the Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978 – I lost my initial enthusiasm for her fiction, and indeed I found several of her later novels unreadable.
My last memory of Iris was of the occasion when we invited her to Rhodes House to be a dinner guest and give an after-dinner talk to the Rhodes Scholars. She was extraordinarily kind to them, taking seriously every question, whether sensible or idiotic, and encouraging would-be novelists among the Scholars, even offering to read their drafts. She had an ability, second only to that of Bill Clinton, to concentrate totally on whoever she was talking to, never looking over anyone’s shoulder to see who else was around.
On the basis of my personal knowledge of her, I always regarded Iris as one of the most kind-hearted people I knew. I was saddened when, after her death, her biographers and her letters revealed another side. During her life she must have caused a great deal of pain to each of her lovers as she dumped one for another in a seemingly interminable series.
Graham Greene made his name in the literary world with a series of novels with Catholic themes: Brighton Rock, with its teenage gangster, The Power and the Glory, with its whisky priest, and The End of the Affair, which inserts a miraculous element into a love story. David Lodge, in his autobiography, records that when he was a teenage Catholic with aspirations to be a writer, it was encouraging and inspiring that the two most famous English literary novelists living in the forties and fifties were both Catholics writing of Catholic themes. In the minds of many young Catholic readers, Graham Greene was paired with Evelyn Waugh.
I do not know David Lodge at all well: we meet from time to time at parties and at seminars. But I include him among these memoirs because his novels have captured in accurate detail the background to the various stages of my life. I never had to do national service, so his 1962 novel Ginger, You’re Barmy passed me by. But The British Museum is Falling Down (1965) dealt with an issue which constantly cropped up in my dealings with parishioners while I was a curate in the early sixties. This was the ‘rhythm method’ of contraception, which was the form recommended by the Catholic Church. Many people felt that since the intention in each case was to avoid conceiving a baby, it was hypocritical to make a moral distinction between the use of the safe period (permitted) and the use of condoms (forbidden). I recall Peter Geach defending the Catholic position by pointing out that there was a difference between fixing the date of a college meeting on a day when an obnoxious fellow was likely to be absent, and shutting the door in his face on a day when he turned up. David Lodge, who had himself suffered from the unreliability of the rhythm method, turned it in the novel into black comedy. In its first chapter, the hero’s wife is shown lying in bed with so many thermometers sticking out of her that she resembles a hedgehog on heat.
How Far Can You Go? (1980) takes as its title a question I was frequently asked when I was an assistant chaplain at Oxford. Premarital intercourse was impossible for an observant Catholic pair – but short of copulation, they would ask, what other forms of endearment were allowed? The devout young would inquire about the permissible limits of ‘heavy petting’, as it was then called. From my own experience of annual meetings of university Cath. Socs, I could call up acquaintances to replicate each of the characters in Lodge’s book. One character was a striking match for a friend of mine who was a devout daily Mass-goer. He always mapped out the day’s liturgy with seven multicoloured ribbons in his missal. Like the character in the novel, my friend eventually came out of the closet as a homosexual.
When I moved into an academic career, Lodge was always there waiting with a novel to describe my new environment. In Changing Places, the hero, Philip Sparrow, travels from the University of Rummidge to Euphoric State University in California, while his American opposite number Morris Zapp crosses the Atlantic in the opposite direction. I read and reread this book as I took visiting professorships in Chicago, Seattle, Stanford, Michigan, Minnesota and Cornell. Sadly, I never spent more than a few days at Berkeley, the archetype of Euphoric State, but I have met more than one Professor Zapp in the course of my travels. To this day, the best passages in the novel, when I read them for the fourth or fifth time, make me laugh aloud.
As I have grown old I have come to enjoy reading Lodge’s novels more than those of his heroes Greene and Waugh. I prefer his ironic realism also to the metaphysical flights of the later Murdoch. His novels continue to offer vignettes of new features of my life. When we moved into Rhodes House, my wife and I were surprised to discover that we had in our garden a family of foxes. Here is Lodge’s hero, Vic, in Nice Work:
One morning not long ago he saw a fox walking past his window. Vic tapped on the pane. The fox stopped and turned his head to look at Vic for a moment, as if to say Yes? and then proceeded calmly on his way, his brush swaying in the air behind him. It is Vic’s impression that English wildlife is getting streetwise, moving from the country into the city where life is easier – where there are no traps, pesticides, hunters and sportsmen, but plenty of well-stocked garbage bins.
Finally, Deaf Sentence was published just in time to greet my own loss of hearing. Like the hero of that novel, I have found that my hearing aid can be surprisingly creative. One morning recently I came downstairs and said to my wife, ‘Did you hear that an Oxford historian has been found guilty of murder?’ We spent a fascinating breakfast speculating which of our colleagues was the murderer, and who had been his victim. We could not, however, find a totally convincing answer, and eventually Nancy asked me, ‘Is it possible that what you heard was “Oscar Pistorius convicted of murder”?’
I have not read the 2004 Author, Author, a fiction based on the life of Henry James, which was embarrassingly pipped to the post by another book on the same topic by Colm Tóibín. But I look forward to David’s next novel, which will no doubt describe exactly what it is like to be on one’s last legs.