Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

  “I’m so confused,” she suddenly cried. “I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know what to do with you….”

  Rachel had the charming, at times frustrating, habit of living every moment as if it were three. Perhaps she picked it up from Virginia Woolf, or perhaps from the water in Oxford, but a remarkable number of our conversations followed a similar pattern: remembering the past, how silly we were then; fretting about the future, how serious we would be; and all the while ignoring the present, how could we make the right decisions? Universities are thought to be cut off from life—separated from the pressures of “real” time. But time does tick for university students, often in suprisingly powerful ways. The reason is simple: anytime you take a group of precocious young people, cut them off from the outside world, and give them unlimited time to think, they invariably spend most of their free time thinking about themselves.

  Later, after Rachel had calmed down and I had picked up the second dropped ball, we took a walk around the rare-book shops of Oxford looking for a copy of To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s ode to the passing of time, which I had promised to buy her as a Valentine. No shop had a copy of the book, but one dealer, Mrs. Christine Martin, did have some thoughts on the topic of students—what they should learn while they’re in school and what they should not forget.

  “Do you know the story of Atalanta?” she asked us after sharing with us her theory on the fear of heights.

  “Is that the one about the race?” I asked, thumbing through volume six of Winston Churchill’s official history of the Second World War.

  “It’s actually about love,” she corrected me. “Atalanta was a beautiful maiden who feared marriage and lived in the woods. But her many suitors would not leave her alone, so Atalanta—the daughter of the king—announced that she would become the bride of any man who could defeat her in a foot race. Any man who lost to her, however, would have to be put to death.”

  Rachel peered around the corner from a particularly dusty strip of Thomas Hardy novels. “I think I remember this story from when I was a child,” she said. “Something about apples.”

  “That’s right,” our guide continued. “Many men tried to defeat her, but all of them faltered. Until one young man, Hippomenes, went to pray before Venus and ask for her assistance. Venus gave the boy three golden apples. When the race began, Atalanta was faster, but just as she seemed to pull away, Hippomenes tossed down the first of his golden apples. Atalanta didn’t pick it up, but she did hesitate for a moment, thereby allowing the boy to jump into the lead.”

  Mrs. Martin arrived back at her rolltop desk and sat down with a slight spring in her legs. Her alcove was a nest of yellowed papers, splintered bindings, and mottled-leather covers in an otherwise tidy orchard of shelves. A four-prong fan hung limply from the ceiling, fussing up dust from the cracks in the floor and blending in fumes from the kerosene stove. The shop smelled like a mixture of Dickens’s Bleak House and Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper.”

  Atalanta quickly reclaimed the lead, she said, so the boy was forced to drop the second of his apples. Again Atalanta paused, but continued to run. Finally, as they neared the last turn, Atalanta regained the lead and seemed on the verge of winning the race when the young boy tossed the last of his golden apples at the foot of the finishing line. “Atalanta hesitated for a moment,” she said. “But this time she could not resist the temptation and reached to retrieve the apple. Hippomenes won the race.”

  Rachel applauded her performance and ambled over to the desk with a big smile on her face.

  “Not so soon,” she said. “You haven’t heard the end of the story. Venus was so upset that she did not receive gratitude from the couple that she turned them into a pair of lions and harnessed them to a chariot for the rest of their lives.”

  “That’s not very romantic,” I said. “I thought you said this story was about love.”

  “It is, young man. You shouldn’t think love is about two people who simply fall for each other and live happily ever after. Love is more than ambition, it’s more than desire. It’s a struggle, and the only way to triumph is to come face-to-face with your own mortality.”

  “Your mortality?” Rachel said.

  “Your death,” she repeated. “Without pain, or the threat of pain, your joy is always diminished. Think of the war. The men and women who come back from battle have a heightened sense of death, so they have a heightened sense of life. The students when they come up to university have no fear of dying. They are on top of the world.”

  Rachel was rapt by the woman’s authority. The two of them stared at each other as if in a trance. I felt as if I were being locked out of a private conversation.

  “And what happens to them?” Rachel asked.

  “The same thing that happens to you,” the woman said. “They learn it. Somehow in the course of their time here, they learn what it means to die. By the time they leave, they have often experienced pain for the very first time. It’s the greatest thing you learn in school, and the hardest to teach. It’s called growing up, my dear, and it’s not in any book.”

  Rachel thanked the woman, accepted her card, and came hurrying down the stairs after me, already halfway out the door.

  “Books?! Bollocks. Who needs them? I learned most of what I know from the front seat of a bus.”

  Harriet Catterall was sitting at an antique cherry table on Kensington Place eating roast beef and Yorkshire pudding from the back of her fork.

  “The front seat?” I said. “That’s surprising. I would have guessed you’d prefer the back.”

  She looked at me with a grin. “The front’s got a better view.”

  The longer I stayed in England, the more I discovered that almost everybody I met had a different opinion of the purpose of higher education. From learning to be a gentleman to learning to read my horoscope, from practicing literary criticism to winning the race for love, the goal of higher education seemed to shift depending on the seat one occupied, or the seat one hoped to acquire. Not long after my trip to Oxford, I was invited to a luncheon party in London at the posh Victorian home of a friend of a friend, where the touchy topic of Oxbridge education came boiling to the surface.

  “Just look at me,” said Harriet, a thirtyish woman who was plump in the cheeks and the waist. “I went to one of the best public schools in this country and it didn’t do me a damn bit of good. All they taught me was how to pour tea.”

  “But Harriet,” interrupted her boyfriend, Mark, “you’re different.”

  “Damn right I am.”

  “So you can’t use yourself as an example.”

  “The hell I can’t!” she demurred. “I didn’t learn a bloody thing in school because my teachers all had polo mallets up their bums. I didn’t know what I wanted to be when I was sixteen. In this country you have to decide then, so I went to America and learned everything I need to know on the streets. Screw all this university business. Now I got me a job that makes twice as much money as you.”

  Mark Riley did not return her fire, but stared down the handle of her knife. Unlike Harriet, who had returned from her unconventional jaunt in America and opened her own independent catering firm with recipes she learned from abroad, he had proceeded orderly through state-sponsored schools, moved on to the University of London after failing the entrance exam to Oxford, and later passed the qualifying test to become an actuary.

  “I want my child to be successful,” he said in a dispassionate air that masked his intensity. “To do that he has to work hard. Very hard. If the only way to gain power in this country is to go to Oxbridge, then my child will have to excel in school.”

  “Well, you can forget having a child with me,” Harriet snapped. “I don’t want my child to go to Oxbridge. They’re too isolated and don’t know anything about the streets.”

  At this word her neighbor Charles, who had been quietly minding his peas and stews, perked up and leaned into the brawl.

  “I think you would be m
aking a grave mistake not to send your child to Oxford,” he said. “It’s the greatest education in the world.”

  Charles Stanton was a graduate of Eton College, which we call a high school, and St. John’s College, Oxford, which we call a university. He was a tall, dapper man in his late twenties, with flowing blond hair, a thin, sly smile, and a bank of misaligned British teeth, purple from too much wine. When he first arrived at the party, two hours late from a pub, I asked him what he did.

  “I’m an actor,” he said.

  “Are you working?” I asked.

  “Well,” he responded. “Think of me as Robin Hood: I steal from my parents to make myself poor.”

  He went to pour a drink.

  “The purpose of higher education is to remove a man from the streets,” Charles said, gesturing to Harriet with a dip of his nose. “That’s the great contribution of the English. America just doesn’t compare. I remember when I was in school, I once played in a golf tournament in the Bahamas. My opponent was an American. I was fourteen; he was eighteen. But I was much more sophisticated than he was. He didn’t even know any Latin.”

  “Who gives a damn about Latin,” countered Harriet.

  “I do,” Charles responded. “And you should, too. The people who are successful in this country are the ones who can talk about the cherubs on the ceiling or the painting on the wall. In America they teach their young how to fight, how to make war, how to beat up each other. In England—especially at Oxford—we teach our students how to behave.”

  Harried scoffed at his prepared speech, but Mark nearly applauded. “Bravo!” he cried, uplifting his glass to clink with King Charles. “In America students learn to make war. In England we learn to make tea.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention….”

  A sweatshirted student stood on top of the snooker table in the Junior Common Room of Clare and tapped a cue ball against a pint glass.

  “Please move away from the centre of the room,” he said. “The race is about to start.”

  In Cambridge, February is the cruelest month. The food that during Michaelmas Term seemed humorously flavorless begins somewhere in the middle of Lent to turn unbearably bland. The sun that even at the height of summer merely provides occasional lighting sees fit by the middle of winter to retire before afternoon tea and not return until the following morning, well past coffee hour. The cold that threatened all through the fall settles into College rooms by Valentine’s Day like an influx of rodents that refuses the daily exterminating balm of two coats of sweaters and a pot of hot tea. At Yale students confronted the onset of winter by creating an institution called the February Club, which sponsored a party every night of the month for frosty scholars to come in from the cold. At Cambridge students took a similar tack by cobbling together a series of relay races, charity bashes, and thematic cocktail parties into an annual event known as Rag Week.

  Rag Week, similar in frenetic tone to Greek Week at American universities, is nominally about raising money for charity. The idea of linking rags, or pranks, with charity began after the First World War with the widespread celebration of Poppy Day on the Saturday nearest to Armistice Day. Over time the ritual was shifted from Michaelmas to Lent and expanded to include a massage marathon, a hitchhike to Paris, and a grand prix race around the streets of Cambridge using rolling beds as cars and pushing students as fuel. The highlight of Rag Week at Clare occurred on the last Saturday of the month with the annual Pie & Pints Relay Race. The rules of the race were quite simple. Each paying contestant must drink a total of five pints of beer and in between each round he must run to the far side of the room and eat, in succession, an orange, a bag of crisps, a pork pie, and a Cadbury’s Creme Egg.

  “If you knock over a pint, you are disqualified,” the judge announced. “If you don’t eat all of the food, you are disqualified. You are, however, allowed to discard the orange rind.”

  A cheer went up from the hundred or so students gathered beneath the whitewashed vaulted ceilings of the Clare crypt lounge.

  “Where should we stand?” I asked Simon, who was already craning his neck for a view of the starting line.

  “Near the drinking?” he suggested.

  “How about near the food,” said Lucy, Simon’s newest girlfriend, who had all but moved into V Entryway after Simon gave up Kiet Khiem for Lent. “There’s likely to be more action there.”

  “Are you ready?” The starter called. “Three, two, one, go!”

  The four contestants rushed from the snooker table, where the food was displayed, toward the “table-footie” (foozball) table at the end of the room, where the beer was perched. The referee ran along beside them lugging an oversized white bucket.

  “What’s the purpose of the bucket?” I asked Simon as the first round of beer sailed down.

  “It’s a vomitorium,” he said.

  “Does that mean we should stand back?”

  “Not necessarily,” answered Lucy, a feisty, first-year lawyer from Clare. “Just watch out for flying debris.”

  The first person to arrive back at the snooker table was Henry, a first-year engineer and close pal of Simon’s. He scurried up to the table, took a large bite of orange peel, and spat it onto the ground. Moving with the force of a forward swan dive, he plunged into the core of the nonnavel orange and devoured its contents with three gargantuan sucking motions. After he finished, he deposited the flayed peel on the ground, bowed to the cheers of the audience, and hurried back to his remaining four pints.

  Two other athletes—Paul, a spiky-haired third-year and Jeff, a ringer from another college—quickly followed. They were trailed by the last contestant, Mark, a prominent, army-coated lefty from Clare who was currently making news on campus by serving as the first liberal president of the Union Society in over a generation and by boasting the weirdest haircut in town with half his scalp shaved from the bottom up and the rest of his hair left to hang down in a samurailike ponytail.

  Mark was less flashy than the other competitors, yet more strategic. Conserving energy, he hovered near the back of the pack as first Paul and then Jeff dropped out somewhere between the orange and the bag of crinkle-cut, sea-salted, cheese-and-onion-flavored potato crisps. By the time he arrived at the third hurdle, a hockey-puck-sized pub pork pie with a raw chili pepper inserted enemalike up its bum, he was within striking distance of the leader. He downed the pie in several bites, spit out the pepper, and staggered slowly across the Buttery tile, saving his energy for the inevitable confrontation with young Henry the First-Year.

  As one of the few events in the year that drew participation from all the colleges, Rag Week revealed a lot about how students view their relationship with the outside world, and about how they feel they should spend their time while inside the university. Almost everyone in college participated in one event or another. But, befitting the Elysian qualities of Cambridge, most joined out of a feeling that might best be described as intelligentsia oblige. Few of the students involved knew which charities their money was going to support, and even fewer put themselves out to assist these organizations in any way other than drinking on their behalf. Unlike at Yale, for example, where social work was so trendy during my time there that it became almost obligatory, I met no one in Cambridge in the course of a year who did volunteer work. Those on the outside may idealize Oxbridge and the manners its students supposedly learn, but those on the inside spend little time wasting those manners on anyone else. Indeed, with its glorification of drinking, emphasis on public humiliation, and general celebration of bad taste, the Pie & Pints Relay Race was the perfect allegory of the underside of the Cambridge myth. Here were students chasing students across the floor in the crypt of an antique church, clambering higher and higher into drunken oblivion, lifting themselves into an orbit of superficial prominence, while all the time sacrificing their insides on the altar of hubris.

  After close to half an hour the race came down to two finalists who hobbled up to the snooker ta
ble to face the final barrier between them and pubwide adulation—a six-ounce milk-chocolate egg inside of which was a white liquid center and a candied bright orange yolk. These candy treats, known as Cadbury’s Creme Eggs, are the closest thing the British have to a national snack. I had eaten my first one in Ian’s rooms only the week before and had to let some of the white candy syrup dribble out into an ashtray before I could get it down. I could not imagine eating one in front of a hundred screaming classmates with an orange, a bag of crisps, a pork pie, and four pints of beer already inside my stomach.

  The finalists reached the table at almost the same time. Henry the First-Year picked up his egg and began to peel off the outer foil as if it were a shell. Mark the President, proved more experienced. He grabbed the chocolate egg, slammed it into the table, and began to eat it from the inside out. This fit of inspiration garnered him precious seconds as the two wobbled toward their final pints just in front of the upright piano. The crowd, like polite guests at the final hole of a golf tournament, followed the two toward the table-footie table.

  “Come on, Henry! Do it for the first-years.”

  “Hurry up, Mark. He’s catching you!”

  The boys did their best to drink with haste, but inevitably more beer dribbled down their necks than flowed down their gullets. First Mark, and then Henry, put down the pint glass. But both were still half full. Mark pounded his chest and began anew; Henry slapped his head and reached for his pint. His stomach, however, reached out first, and with a synchronized finish worthy of Chariots of Fire, the audience cheered, the cameras flashed, as Henry the First doubled over in pain and Mark the President tossed his empty glass into the air.

  The race was over. The river was run. But instead of a victory celebration, the two finalists clasped each other around the waist and headed off—like Hippomenes and Atalanta—directly to the loo.