by Bruce Feiler
In a crusading effort to find the truth and preserve the good name of the university, the Weekly Revue actually contacted Miami University and discovered that it in fact offered no scholarships of twenty thousand dollars. The “first national student newspaper” even contacted the English Department at Miami and learned that “no one had ever heard of Cynthia Shepard.” In the end, the valiant journalists saved the name of their national treasure and concluded that the American was probably the trickster, trying unsuccessfully to bluff her way into the Greatest University on Earth. The moral of the story, the paper suggested, was that substance always triumphs over style, and all the smooth talk and cunning plots of Hollywood-America are not enough to dupe the lords of the realm and keepers of the plot at the University of Cambridge. “Arriving with such a sorrowful, heart-rending story, how could anyone possibly refuse her a place?” the Revue wondered in its coup de grâce. “Well,” it boasted. “Cambridge did.”
IV
LOVING
Cold Sharks and Scorpions
Though I am young and cannot tell Either what Death or Love is well,
Yet I have heard they both bear darts, And both do aim at human hearts.
—Ben Jonson
“Though I Am Young,” 1641
“Bruce, you wanker, come inside. Wait till you see what I got.”
Ian Zahir opened the door of his top-floor rooms in the Old Court of Clare and pulled me inside by the lightweight sweater one seems always to need in Britain.
“What is it?” I said.
“A letter,” he gushed.
“From whom?”
“I’m in love.”
He spread his arms like an opera singer and arched his back in crescendoing glee. Collapsing back on his unmade bed, he plucked a guitar from beneath a pile of open Penguin Classics and began to strum a song: “I’m beautiful, she’s beautiful, we’re going to fall in love…. I’m sexy, she’s sexy, we’re going to frolic in the mud.” It wasn’t poetic, it hardly even rhymed, but in the ardor of the moment it was the most romantic song that Ian had ever heard. He let out a joyous, deep bass laugh and rushed forward to embrace me. “I’ll write it down, I’ll call her. I’ll sing it beneath her window…. Do you want to hear it?”
“I just did.”
“Not the song, fool, the letter.”
He dropped his arms from around my waist, stuck his hand down his faded jeans, and pulled a card from the band of his bikini undershorts.
“Listen: ‘Dear Ian, Sorry I haven’t returned your phone calls recently. I have been working very hard on a paper on Hobbes. I have to meet my supervisor late next week, maybe we can meet after that….’” He closed his eyes and swooned.
“That hardly sounds ravishing to me,” I said.
“No,” he snarled. “It’s the end. Look at the signature.” He turned the card toward my face and pointed to a mass of wide loopy letters with an occasional curlicue hovering over the clutter like a halo trying desperately to dot a wandering i.
“It’s very elegant,” I said, “but I can’t read it.”
“Neither can I,” he admitted. “But you see that mark there, it matches the first letter of her name. And this one here, it must be an o, because it’s got the same shape as in ‘Hobbes.’ So I did a little work.” He pulled from his pocket a wad of tissues, pen caps, and cash-machine receipts, along with a college housing memo on the back of which was a complex cryptographic chart. “I figured out that these three letters must be the same, along with this one here. So that if you turn the letter to the light and if you squint your eyes just a little, then—yes, then—you can read her signature: ‘Lots and lots of love, Louise.’”
Ian Zahir, a graduate student in SPS—social and political science—would break any code or cross any bridge for a chance at falling in love. A recent alumnus of Clare, he would also burst either one of his lungs for a chance to tell his tale. If Simon was charming in his youthful thoroughbred, slightly lanky gait, Ian was passionate in his full-bodied, leonine, slightly menacing prowl. Half-Persian, half-British, and native of a wholly rich suburb of London, Ian was more than commonly vain and wore his generous golden locks moussed with a sculptor’s care so they framed his face like the mane of a sphinx.
In sport Ian was a fencer. Having taken up saber at age thirteen, he had earned a Cambridge Blue by competing against Oxford, and was currently spending several days a week training for the British Olympic team. In play he was a dartsman. Even though he rarely drank, never smoked, and hadn’t even sampled drugs, Ian was obsessive about two things: showers, which he took four times a day, and darts, which he played incessantly until he started to perspire or began to lose. Usually these occurred at about the same time. For despite his athletic condition, Ian was self-consciously skinny, and in an effort to disguise what he considered to be his only discernible flaw, he constantly wore several baggy T-shirts next to his body, several baggy lightweight sweaters over those, and at least one baggy camel-hair blazer on top of all that, so that he looked perfectly mastadonic in size and was perpetually hot.
I first met Ian at a port-tasting party for new members of the Clare MCR—the Middle Common Room, where graduate students can drink grown-up drinks and make childish jokes without competition from freshers or fellows. I was sitting on one of the tattered grey sofas sharing obligatory chitchat with several members when Ian plopped himself down at one end of our circle, turned his back, and glared out the window at King’s. For several minutes he was silent, almost brooding, until he heard me mention the word Japan, at which point he spun himself around, threw his hair into our ring, and, without so much as introducing himself, began to fire nonstop questions directly from his outstretched finger into my withdrawn face.
He was a classicist, he said, and wondered if I knew about the similarities between ancient Greece and modern Japan.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I did.
This was important, he observed, not some casual notion. Had I realized, for example, that both classical Greece and contemporary Japan had arranged marriages?
Yes, it so happens, I had.
No, wait, he said, there’s more. Was I aware of the fact, for instance, that ancient Greece and modern Japan were both shame cultures, ones in which social groups were so powerful they shamed their members into following their rules?
Yes, it turns out, I was.
One by one, the other guests retreated as Ian, point by point, became more animated, hunching his back, pinching his thumb and forefinger together, and jabbing them together into my eyes. Finally, after about a dozen such questions, he leaned back, finished off his glass, and declared, “Good. Now that I know what you believe, let me tell you about me.”
He didn’t shut up for a year.
“So you see,” Ian said, flinging Louise’s letter high into the air and jumping, boots first, onto his unmade bed, “she finds me irresistible.”
“I think maybe unavoidable is a better word.”
“Let’s go sing her my song.”
“We can’t,” I said.
“Why not?” he insisted.
“She’s trying to write a paper on Hobbes and you’re supposed to be cooking me dinner.”
“Oh, shite,” he muttered. “I almost forgot. Did I tell you Dr. Kramer is coming? I’d better take off my jacket, I’m sweating like a pig.”
It is a truth universally acknowledged, Jane Austen might have written, that a single student in possession of a good education must be in want of sex. Cambridge, for all its high-minded pretensions, is no exception to this rule. The image of celibate student-monks scurrying up and down staircases, meeting with learned dons, and engaging in one-to-one tuition of the most enlightened kind may be fine for tourists and parents but would come as quite a surprise to the bedders and porters who see the underside of an undergraduate’s life, not to mention the inside of his bed-sit chamber. If anything, Cambridge today is a sexual melting pot where the inexperienced meet the idealistic, the promiscuous meet the
repressed, and where classical Aristotelian notions of love meet modern sexual perversions of a type of which Jane Austen never dreamed. It is, in short, a laboratory of love—one into which I plunged headfirst and out of which I emerged tongue-tied, with a fatal attraction, a modern melodrama, and a fairy tale, all to my name.
Traditionally, Cambridge has had an uneasy attitude toward love and sex. For much of its history abstinence was the norm, the result of the three axioms that guided university admittance for all but the most recent century: a student had to be English, had to be a member of the Church, and had to be a man. Dons, for example, were forced to remain celibate if they wanted to keep their posts. To be sure, Cambridge students got around these limitations in all manner of ways that reflect in retrospect the sharpness of their minds and the dullness of their social lives: Samuel Coleridge, for one, was corresponding with one woman in London while engaged to another in Oxford; Rupert Brooke invited Virginia Stephen (soon to be Woolf) to go skinny-dipping with him in the Cam. For the most part, however, Cambridge men dealt with their forced isolation by saving their love for formal balls after term and savoring one another in college with drinking bouts, sporting matches, and an occasional experimental fling. In Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh’s classic evocation of Oxbridge innocence, Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte enjoy a blissful coexistence during term that is only made grander by the plush surroundings and nameless freedom of their amor platonicus. (Homosexuality is not mentioned in the book; it was illegal until the 1960s.) After graduation Charles turns to art, marriage, God, and finally to love in the person of Sebastian’s younger sister, but is never able to recapture the romance of his collegial youth.
With the arrival of women in recent times—first at affiliated colleges a century ago, then at Cambridge colleges in the 1960s and ’70s—love moved from the department of abstract philosophy to the associated faculties of chemistry, biology, linguistics, and geography (your rooms, or mine?), as well as, in more recent years, international relations. According to old university hands, particularly Terry the Matchmaker-Porter, the arrival of women has coincided with a decline in the quality of rowing, a rise in the price of a haircut, a reduction in the amount of studying, and a rise in the cumulative grade point average (women tend to score higher than men). In the late 1980s, when Magdalene became the last college to admit women, it immediately saw its standing in the academic ladder jump from its perpetual contentment near the bottom to a dizzying perch near the top, thereby aggravating in many of its lager-loving, male-chauvinist alumni an acute agrophobia.
Academic performance notwithstanding, the university elders were not pleased with the decline of morals that accompanied the arrival in recent decades of so many fresh parvenues. On one of my first days in Clare, I went into the Porters’ Lodge with Halcyon to register our bicycles with the college. Terry was giving us instructions on how to mark the bikes with a security code: C468190. “What does the C mean?” Halcyon asked. “Why, Clare College, my dear,” he told her. “Only a girl would ask such a question. About the only thing they’re good for is dancing with and looking at.”
To guarantee that the only thing Cambridge “boys” do with Cambridge “girls” is dance with them and look at them, colleges instituted a variety of neo-Victorian rules to restrict every other conceivable alternative. The Clare College Student’s Guide, for example, enumerated one full page of restrictions covering parties. “Parties are defined as lively gatherings of more than ten people,” the guide informed. “If the number does not exceed 25 it is a ‘small party’ and may be held in your own rooms in College.” If you want to have more than twenty-five people, the guide said, your gathering must be classified as a “large party” and may not be held in your rooms. Music, defined by implication as “lively sound,” may be played at small parties provided the following conditions were met: 1) it is played on Friday or Saturday night; 2) it ends by 11:45; and 3) it is not unduly loud. The key to the college’s chaperoning command was that if you wanted to have any kind of party, be it large or small, be it for sipping or for sharking, you had to get written permission from the head tutor of the college. Moreover, if you wanted to use your room (i.e., a small party), the tutor would require you to get a written release from every member of your entryway, a process which in effect nullified the entire enterprise since most entryways had more than twenty-five people and since college etiquette demanded that you couldn’t very well get someone’s written permission for a party you didn’t invite them to attend.
Totalitarian regulations notwithstanding, the college eventually realized that rules against lively gatherings might restrict the mingling of more than twenty-five people but would have little effect in deterring the even more pernicious mingling of only two. A new set of regulations was in order. “Guests may enter and leave College at any time up to midnight,” the guide instructed. If members wished to have a guest spend the night, they could rent a visitor’s accommodation from the college. Failing this, students could put guests up in their rooms, but 1) only for one or two nights, 2) only on a “camp bed” rented from the porter, and 3) caveat cupid!—only with written permission from the tutor. In all the annals of the college this rule was undoubtedly my favorite. The potential ramifications were endless: “Just stare into the candle a little longer, darling, while I run tell the tutor I picked you up in the pub.” Of course, this approach would not be possible either, I discovered, because candles are also forbidden. Unwittingly, I had discovered the sacred heart of the familia Cantabriggiensis. For generations of Cambridge students—past, present, and future—the mark of maturity in a man’s life is when he brings a girl home to meet his tutor. And if a young man chooses to ignore this rule and invite a girl to his rooms for some untutored, unpermitted repose, then some colleges in Cambridge might still charge the offender a two-pound, term-end “brothel fine,” for inordinate wear and tear on the bed.
The cumulative effect of these regulations is often like a giant prophylaxis on the lifeline of the college. Sex is a common topic for discussion at Cambridge, but, with a few glaring exceptions (notably Simon, above my head), seems not to be a common activity. From the opening days of term, for example, university periodicals began dishing out advice to lovelorn undergraduates. “Stress-Relieving Tip of the Week,” wrote Varsity in its Week 2 edition. “ALWAYS MAKE IT A ONE-NIGHT STAND.” “If someone invites you back for ‘a nice cup of coffee,’” the newspaper advised, “do not reply ‘but I thought we were going to have a shag [screw],’ as the two are synonymous. If a ‘non-sexual’ cup of coffee is on the agenda, this will be clearly specified. Once you are ‘chez them,’ do not immediately look around for the kettle.” Instead, “a favourite tactic is to remove one item of clothing, saying ‘Oooh, isn’t it hot in here,’ and insist on sitting down on the bed. According to our extensive research, a good snog [necking] should follow shortly.”
At Clare this advice seemed to have little effect. HAPLESS SHARKS SEEK HELP FROM UNEXPECTED SOURCE, whimpered a headline in The Procrastinator, the weekly gossip rag. “The Clare Sharks are suffering from their worst start to the season in living memory,” the paper reported. “It was always going to be a tough game for the lacklustre lads, up against one of the toughest defences in the league, but they continue to be plagued by poor finishing as numerous scoring opportunities went begging.” The article, which singled out the particularly poor efforts of Coach Peter de Clare (“perhaps he needs a little technical refinement despite being built for the game”), ended by sounding this humiliating warning knell: “Time to wake up, sharks! The other teams in the league are beginning to capitalise on Clare’s stunning lack of success, as sharks as far apart as Trinity and even Oxford scored away wins over the weekend.”
The bawdy report did not go unnoticed, and a week later an outraged letter appeared in The Procrastinator. “I was sorry to read last week about the lack of success of the Clare Sharks 1st XI,” wrote a third-year historian who was head of the Cambridge Lesbian and
Gay Campaign. “I’m not surprised they’re not getting much sex, though, as I think women generally prefer to have sex with people who acknowledge them as human beings. Perhaps the sharks can’t do this because they’ve got a massive collective castration complex, and have to channel their deep fear of women into rampant misogyny.” Back and forth the two sides went, the future leaders of the Western world, with the detractors accusing the original writers of homophobia (“I suppose the sharks can’t bear the thought that gay men might be having a better sex life than they are”) and the writers accusing the detractors of distorting the truth (“He assumes knowledge of people’s motivations based on erroneous assumptions; he was not possessed of all the facts pertaining”). Finally a letter appeared after several weeks that seemed to sum up the entire episode: “It seems incidents like these are one of the consequences of living in a goldfish bowl…albeit a fairly large and comfortable goldfish bowl with thirteenth century architecture.”
What struck me about this exchange was how much it reminded me of my own undergraduate days: clever, sophomoric, and tasteless jokes on one side compounded by clever, radical, and trendy rage on the other. One group of undergraduates so craves sexual bliss that it develops a childish obsession; the other so wants to transcend the act that it descends into an ideological temper tantrum. Perhaps Clausewitz was onto something, it occurred to me, and love is just the continuation of politics by other means. Indeed, at Cambridge—as elsewhere—love is like war for many people, and sex is its chief battleground. And as I watched the battle unfold, I couldn’t help wondering why there appeared to be so little correlation between performance in academics and proficiency in love. If anything, there seemed to be a conflict between the two. Clare students, for all appearances, could pass rigorous entrance exams but not get dates for Saturday night. They could read romantic poetry and incite chemical attractions, but not translate these abstract ideas into actual practice. In the laboratory of love these days, the public discourse on relationships is emphatic and impassioned, while in private the conversation is much less dogmatic and much more deeply felt.
