by Stephen Fry
Aptly enough, today sees what a Wodehousean magistrate was pleased to call the annual aquatic competition between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, in short the Boat Race, and I feel it appropriate to outline my reasons for failing to apply for what the Daily Telegraph called ‘this most prestigious academic position’ and the Express ‘the role of supremo at Britain’s top snob posh university’.
I am, as those of you who have ever listened carefully to my little wireless essays before now will know, a most tolerant and sweet-natured person. Gentle, slow to anger, constant, docile and biddable. I am also, as those who have listened between the lines should be able to testify, a Cambridge man. I have no chauvinistic or overzealous attachment to Cambridge. Anyone who has lived and worked within a large institution, whether it be the BBC, the army, a school or large hospital, will know that cream and scum alike rise to the top; that blundering, hopeless, blinkered, purblind and ignorant incompetence inform the actions and governance of such places at all times. That bitchery, cattery and rivalry frustrate co-operation, good fellowship and trust. What, then, can explain my towering, blind, irrational hatred of Oxford and all things Oxonian? Let me instantly qualify this: I number amongst my best and firmest friends alumni and members of Oxford University. Some of the most upright and splendid people I know are qualified to put M.A. (Oxon) after their names. Yet this burning, implacable detestation. Wherefore. Am I simply mad?
Well, let us attempt to examine the differences between our two oldest universities. ‘Cambridge produces martyrs,’ was a popular phrase, ‘Oxford burns them.’ This in reference to Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley, Protestants burnt in Oxford under Mary Tudor. Cromwell was a Cambridge man, Oxford a Royalist stronghold in the Civil War. Almost every significant prime minister in our history has been at Oxford, up to and including Mrs Thatcher. Trinity College, Cambridge alone can claim more Nobel Prizes than France, Germany and Italy put together. Rutherford, Isaac Newton, Hewish, Crick and Watson, an awesome scientific heritage to match Oxford’s political. Keynes was Cambridge, Oscar Wilde Oxford. Warm, surreal Terry Jones Oxford; logical, ruthless, sarcastic John Cleese, Cambridge. Cuddly Dudley Moore Oxford, spiky Peter Cook Cambridge. Nedwin Sherrin Oxford, Jonathan Miller Cambridge. Is a pattern beginning to emerge for you? There is a streak of moralism, stern logic, rigour and discipline in Cambridge. Perhaps the weather, the cold Ural winds howling across the fens broken only by those icy stone fingers pointing up at the East Anglian skies. There is a softness about Oxford, a hedonism, something to do with the green Thames, the gentle valleys that break west into the roll of the Cotswolds. Oxonians are small and dark and slow drawling, from Wales and the south and west, Cambridge sires a race of tall, gabbling, lanky lighter-haired men and women. Stand Douglas Adams or Bertrand Russell next to A.J. Ayer or John Betjeman and you will see the difference at once. Many of you will be saying, ‘but I like the sound of Oxford, green, pleasant, mellow, fun-loving. Cambridge seems to be peopled by monks and mathematicians. We would rather the decadence of Wilde to the rigour of Milton.’
Ah but. We have plucked out and looked at the great products of each institution. What do such traditions do to the generality of graduates? These great medieval towns are there to educate are they not? As a teacher I can only abominate a place whose history instructs its students that the prime ministership is theirs by right, that luxury and sybaritic pleasure and a kind of grand world snobbism are permissible or even natural. Cambridge with its humanism and tolerance, its methodologies and system, may, at its extremes, turn class smugness into treachery and self-hatred, but in the end I would rather have taught a traitor than a prime minister.
Enough madness. There really is no reason left in me. Hatred is irrational, how can I hope to rationalise a disgust and a contempt? Suffice to say that I shall be wearing light blue all over today and hoping for a second successive victory on the tideway.2 I shall return you to Oxford’s favourite son Nedwin. If you have been, you’ve only yourself to blame.
1It was eventually Sir Roy Jenkins who was appointed to that office.
2It was not to be. The Dark Blue buggers won it and have done every year since.
Trefusis on Old Age
I can’t remember what the cause of my absence was. It is probably as Trefusis says.
Hello. It’s very comforting to find myself back behind the microphone again after so disturbingly long an absence. My apologies for relinquishing the old Saturday morning stand go to those of you, particularly Mrs Bertilde Medicine of Homerton, who like to use my voice on the wireless to threaten their children with. The reason for my spell away from this space is a submission to a really rather virulent bout of laziness, which was complicated by a further recurrence of the old indifference and chronic indolence which afflict me from season to season. I’m almost fully recovered now, though still subject to moments of apathy and idleness. It’s a problem old flesh is heir to. When you arrive at my advanced mileage it is surprising how almost nothing seems to matter any more. Forty-three years ago I crossed two continents and three mountain ranges in order to obtain an original manuscript of the Sanskrit Ranahabadat for which I paid half a year’s stipend. Only yesterday I spilt a mug of the regular seven o’clock Low Fat Instant Horlicks all over those sacred pages and my only concern was with the waste of milk. Plus ça change, plus c’est complètement différent.
Yet there are those older than me, oh yes. The President of the United States of America can give me two years. It is customary amongst thrusting, urgent young comedians, commentators and the like to represent him as a silly, dithery old man incapable of sentient articulation or rational thought. It is of course so easy to mock. At least I find it easy. It’s difficult to mock sane, intelligent, honest people, but it is almost childishly simple to mock hare-brained, senescent pithecanthropoids like America’s Chief Executive. He really is a monstrous old dotard, isn’t he? But then you see this is what happens if you invest power in the old. Can you imagine a personage such as, for instance, myself organising economies or representing nations? It is a laughable notion, and yet I have twelve and a half times the intellect, humanity and wisdom of Ronald Reagan. That doesn’t stop me from being a cretinous old idiot and a full stick short of a bundle, mind you. But that is pardonable, indeed it would be an essential quality, a sine qua non in a politician: my abiding sin, and what completely disqualifies me from being able to hold high office, is that I simply do not care. And it is quite apparent that this lethargy, this supreme indifference also afflicts Mr President. He frankly could not, in Rhett Butler’s endearing phrase, give a damn. This quality is charming in the old so long as they do not wield authority: in my case it results in a fine, free insouciance in my attitude to form-filling, tax paying, traffic regulations and micturational control. In the case of Reagan, however, it manifests itself in such startling incidences of floutings of international law, decency and protocol as have recently been witnessed in his hideous, mad dealings with Iran.
It is alarming to realise that the man with the most power vested in him on God’s shining earth is almost certain to care more about whether or not passing his morning motion is going to be more or less painful than it was last time, than he does about the wicked immorality of his administration in its attitude to neighbouring countries. It really won’t do. How can it do? It can’t, of course. It can’t do. No, of course it can’t. Stands to reason.
The American people seem to be very fond of the old darling, however, which buffets me back and forth between hope and despair. Despair because it is quite evident that our generally pleasant species has little time left and hope because it is clear that should I piddle down the staircase or fail to pay my yearly taxes I will be able to apologise in a voice shaky with emotion and get clean away with it.
Well, it’s March and there’s no escaping the fact, March is bath month. Time for Andidge, my gyp, to fill the tub and soak away the dirt of another year. People ask me why I take a bath in March every year and I reply tha
t it would be unhygienic and insanitary not to. But before I leave I must take this opportunity to reply to Nilyard Standeven of Archbishop Browning’s School Wisbech who asked me if I would like to address his school on an improving topic. I have two disquisitions, Mr Standeven, and should be delighted to deliver either to your academy, they are the Doric Particle In The Later Fragments Of Menander (with slides) or Nitroglycerine: A Practical Course For Beginners. Take your pick and let me know before the Second Sunday in Lent. Meanwhile all of you, if you have been, hello.
Trefusis’s Obituary
VOICE: Dr Donald Trefusis, Regius Professor of Philology at the University of Cambridge and Extraordinary Fellow of St Matthew’s College, has been thinking about death.
There used to be a curious convention in the electric cinema, deployed to convey the passage of the years. Deciduous calendar pages peel and blow away, fluttered by the gale of time. Like so many kinematographical fancies, this one has lodged in my own mind and at the turning of the year, there always flashes upon my inward eye the picture of a great white leaf stamped 31st December 19x peeling off to reveal 1st January 19x+1. Sometimes, the image is clear enough for me even to read the motto beneath the date. This New Year’s maxim, for instance, was ‘Kindness costs nothing’, a rather peculiar little lie – I have no idea whom they were trying to fool with such nonsense. However the passage of time, the annual January gas explosions and the death of liked ones have contrived to put me in morbid mood.
When a Fellow passes away, I mean Fellow in the technical sense here, at this College, there is a tradition that the only obituaries published by the University or faculty magazines and periodicals are those written by the deceased his or herself. It is the business of a Fellow, from the moment of election, constantly to update such a notice, against the possibility of an untimely gathering to God. It occurred to me, given the rubbishy and hypocritical outbursts made on the demise of Harold Macmillan by prominent nonsenses all over the country, that you might like to hear my current obituary, updated last October before the publication of my More Ionian Particles. I hope it might set you about a similar task and let my own words on my death serve as a model of their kind.
The philological establishment was set about its ears last night by the cruel snatching away at the early age of seventy-four of one of its brightest lights, Donald Neville Scarafucile Packenham-Sackville Trefusis, who died peacefully in his sleep/fell into the River Cam/ate a botulistic scallop/was foully murdered by a bookseller/took his own life/was electrocuted by wetting his bed with the electric blanket still switched on/fell into an acid bath … delete where appropriate.
It is hard in a few words to sum up the life achievements of this extraordinary man. Of his published output we need only say that the fourth edition of the Cambridge Philological Bibliography (ed. Trefusis) devotes twelve pages to his extended works alone. Of his character we need only say that he was as reviled, scorned and despised as any pure academic.
Born to a life of Edwardian splendour in 1912, the only son of Lady Dolorosa Sackville-Packenham and Herbert Trefusis the lepidopterist and amateur comedian, Trefusis was educated at Winchester and St Matthew’s College, Cambridge, where he read Mathematics, becoming Senior Wrangler of his year in 1933. An early interest in Philology was consolidated when, after work on cryptanalysis with Alan Turing in 1939, he was invited to join Hut 8 at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire at the outbreak of the war to assist the team set up to crack the German Enigma codes. His breakthrough on plug-board equivalency helped ensure the total and reliable decryption of German naval transmission traffic throughout the war.
But in 1946, his St Matthew’s Fellowship still kept open for him, he returned to Cambridge with a new interest in Philology and Structural Linguistics that was to absorb him for the rest of his life. Mathematics became only a secondary interest, though its techniques enabled him to devise his famous Fourier analysis of embedded sentence structure in 1952, when he discoverd the simple equation ‘theta is greater than or equal to gamma-shriek over upsilon, where theta is a preconditional morpheme predicated by the sentence complement phi’. This opened up a whole new field in linguistics, enabling Trefusis to learn seventeen languages in six years, to add to his already impressive polyglottal store of twelve fluent and thirteen reading languages. His knowledge of seven Vietnamese dialects proved invaluable to the ultimate victory of the Vietcong over America. Indeed his work for International Communism, both as spy and as recruiter of agents for the Soviet Union, China and his beloved Bulgaria, cannot be overestimated.
To those who knew him and worked with him, Trefusis was catty, rebarbative and treacherous. He gladly let fools suffer and it is said of him that his impatience and intellectual conceit was almost Oxonian in its breadth. He believed, however, in students, teaching for forty years with undiminished pleasure. His hatred and contempt was reserved entirely for his colleagues and for journalists, whom he would often go out of his way to kill. He married, in 1943, Dagmar, the daughter of Sir Arnold Baverstock the noted child-molester.
In 1986 a new career opened up for him as popular wireless essayist on BBC Radio, where his laboured pedantry and contrived acidity won him a new, unlettered audience. It is perhaps the ordinary Briton who will be most affected with delight by his passing.
The death of Donald Trefusis leaves a gap in British academic life that is easy to fill. Application to St Matthew’s College, King Edward’s Passage, Cambridge.
There! Simple, manly and refreshingly dishonest. May I suggest that you resolve to write such a piece about yourselves this year? It will save your family and friends the pain and embarrassment of having to make up lies themselves. If you have been, I don’t see why not.
Trefusis Nibbles
The Regius Chair of Comparative Philology in the University of Cambridge, which has been filled by my round, ample and spreading nates for the last fourteen years, was instituted by King Edward the Seventh in the year 1903 to further, as the Charter rather endearingly phrases it, ‘the better understandment of tongues around the Empire’. A question often raised, I believe in querulous and envious tones, in the Senior Combination Room of St Matthew’s College, is how my little wireless essays, such as the one you are just about to stop listening to, can in any way be said to contribute to the better understandment of anything. It was therefore with some pleasure that I received yesterday, grâce à the producer of this programme, something closely touching the bailiwick and purview of my professorial chair. It was a copy of the new Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary. The handsome, leatherbound, exquisitely tooled despatch rider who delivered the book at the London address where I have been staying recently as a guest of the Bloomsbury Carpathian Exiles Theosophy Circle made me ponder once more on the strange obsession within London of delivering everything by motor bicycle. Whenever I favour the Metropolis with a visit I find it impossible to talk on the telephone to a Londoner without somehow agreeing that something should instantly be delivered to me. I spoke to my publisher yesterday for example. Within five minutes he had offered to bike over a cup of coffee, two mint imperials and a clipping from this month’s Which Radio Pager. But I meander from the gravamen of my discourse. The panniers of one of the many riders who visited me yesterday were weighed down by the new Collins English Dictionary: the purpose of this substantial and awesome volume is to provide clear, readable definitions of modern English vocabulary for the learner. It is all rather fascinating.
The editor-in-chief, Professor Sinclair, has excluded words which he claims have no current circulation in speech. Thus the verb ‘percuss’, as he has been publicly explaining, is refused admission, it being argued, I think perhaps fairly, that English speakers rarely if ever talk of percussing things or of themselves being percussed. What is notable however is the style of the definitions. We are all used to a terse, stripped language in our lexicons and it is interesting to peruse a dictionary where full sentences are given. Let me follow this dictionary’s example and, i
nstead of telling, let me show. I shall compare Chambers, usually regarded as the best modern concise dictionary, with this new Collins. I take a word at random like ‘nibble’. Chambers has this to say.
Nibble, v.t. to bite gently or by small bites; to eat a little at a time – v.i. to bite gently; to show signs of accepting as an offer, or of yielding, as to temptation (with at): to find fault – n. the act of nibbling; a little bit – nibbler; nibbling. – adv. nibblingly [origin obscure; cf. L.G. nibbelen, Du. knibbelen.]
Collins is altogether more relaxed, not to say saucy, about the whole thing.
nibble, nibbles, nibbling, nibbled. 1 If you nibble something or nibble at it, 1.1 you eat it slowly by taking small bites out of it, for example when you are not very hungry. EG Just nibble a piece of bread … She nibbled at her food. 1.2 you bite it very gently. EG She nibbled my ear lobe playfully.
2 When a mouse or other small animal nibbles something, it takes small bites out of it quickly and repeatedly. EG They like to nibble at their food throughout the day … It was nibbling a carefully chosen leaf.
3 A nibble is 3.1 an act of biting something gently or quickly. EG A few licks and nibbles quickly put him off. 3.2 in informal English, a light meal which you eat when you are in a hurry or when you are not very hungry. EG. Do you fancy a nibble?
Well, Collins ignores the wider possibilities of nibble taken up by Chambers, the sense of accepting, or being about to accept, a challenge, a piscatorial metaphor unless I mistake, drawn, I say, from the enterprise of fishing, but otherwise they seem to be in agreement. Though what Collins means by ‘a few licks and nibbles quickly put him off’ I would not venture to guess.
That tells you something about the style of the work. What of its content? How modern is it? Well, Chambers recognises the word naff in its sense of naff off, but Collins doesn’t give it house room. Collins does have an entry under ‘street credibility’, however, Chambers has none. An odd definition from Collins. ‘If someone says you have street credibility or street cred, they mean that ordinary young people would approve of you and consider you to be a part of their culture, usually because you are modern and fashionable rather than old-fashioned; an informal expression made popular in the 1980s’. Many political nuances have been glided over there. But perhaps that is understandable. What is more surprising is that they would allow a foreigner to make free of words like ‘blighter’ without warning them that they have a jocund and far from street-credible smack to them. Chambers is happy to admit that blighter is a word customarily used in a playful manner, but Collins is more serious. ‘Someone you refer to as a blighter is someone you do not like, or who you feel has done something wrong.’ You see you can’t do it, you can’t collect, mount and stuff words and hang them like trophies. However pretty the display case, a butterfly pinned against a card is not the same as a butterfly in flight. Perhaps the next soi-disant modern dictionary will have scratch and sniff sections to help with the flavour of words. But I’m very much afraid that foreign students in Cambridge will this term be uttering cries of ‘I say, stop it you beast’ and ‘Have you bounders no street cred at all, dash it?’ I do hope so.
