Looking for Class

by Bruce Feiler

  “A what?” he asked.

  “A somebody,” I said.

  “I’m Nick,” he replied.

  “Then you’re a nobody?” I said.

  “I wouldn’t know. Who’s a somebody?”

  “I wouldn’t know either. But a somebody knows. I’m told that that’s the first sign.”

  Lucy and Hillary nodded approvingly. They gestured for Nick to move on. I straightened my back like an upstanding pupil who had just passed the first of many tests on his way to becoming potty-trained in the anatomy of hip at Clare. The next test, they said, would be harder.

  The night had begun slowly. Ian and I were wandering around the Clare gardens after dinner, talking about our problems with work and the difficulty of finding a date for the ball. In one last attempt before May Week—the annual exercise in indulgence, intemperance, and creative intercourse that follows the end of Easter Term—we decided to embark on a college pub crawl, a rather desperate invention in which we would go to various college bars, have a drink, and seek out sharks. At first we tried Emmanuel, but nobody was there. Next we tried Sidney Sussex, but only found bedders. Finally, we headed for Magdalene, home of Louise Rogers—Ian’s phantom love—but all we found was a scruffy bartender reading a porn magazine. Dejected, we dropped off at Gardenia for a doner kebab and headed home.

  On the way we ran into Louise. She was skipping across the Market Square when Ian, suddenly undejected, went darting after her. They kissed twice on the cheek. She tightened the bandana around her head. “So, did you enjoy your trip to the Leper Colony?” Ian was asking as I arrived. Louise Rogers was the kind of person who thrived on danger. She had visited Morocco over Christmas, gone to India over Easter break, and was planning a trek around the Thai Golden Triangle over summer vacation. She was tough, well traveled, hard at heart, but just soft enough around her eyes to make Ian go weak in the knees.

  “Listen,” he said, not wasting time, “I was just wondering…”

  “Sorry,” she responded, not waiting around. “I don’t have time. I’m off to catch a film. But hey, I’m having a drinks party Friday night. Why don’t you two stop by?”

  She kissed him twice, smiled blandly at me, and skipped across the square into the arms of a waiting man, who was one week unshaven, greased like a dipstick, and dressed, like her, in leather. We tucked in our tails and slumped off toward Clare.

  “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

  Ian was licking his wounds in the corner and I was having a drink at the bar when Hillary plopped down beside me several minutes later. She was dressed, as always, in a baggy red frock. Her hair, as ever, was stuck in a bun. Her hands, as usual, were fingering a novel: Sexing the Cherry.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “Because nobody comes here on Thursdays.”

  I looked around at the two dozen people scattered throughout the room.

  “Nobody?” I said. “Surely there must be somebody here you know.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I know everybody. And trust me, they aren’t here.”

  Cambridge has a strange sociology. It’s the only place I’ve ever been where fifty people can be nobody, and five people can be everybody. The Cambridge school of sociological linguistics goes something like this: somebody walks into a crowded bar, looks around for a moment, then declares definitively, “Oh, nobody’s here.” That somebody then walks into a near-empty bar and announces unabashedly, “Great, everybody’s here.” Perhaps this unique census technique has something to do with the lack of numerical training among the literary elite, or perhaps it’s the general obfuscatory atmosphere of the average smoke-filled, dimly lit pub, but regardless, I was determined to unlock the secrets of this social code.

  The first qualification for being a somebody, according to Hillary and confirmed by Lucy, who soon joined us at the bar, is that somebodies know who they are and nobodies have to ask. The next determinant, they said, is the number of people who consider a person to be a somebody. This led me to propose a formula. It happens that the only way to enter the Clare JCR pub is to descend a winding flight of stairs into the basement of B Entryway. As a result, whenever people in the bar hear footsteps coming down the stairs, they turn to see who is arriving. The longer people stare at the stairs before turning back to their drinks, I suggested, the higher the status of the person arriving.

  “But that won’t work,” said Lucy, the more legalistic of the two and the one with bushier blond hair. “If a bunch of nobodies are sitting at the bar and a nobody comes down the stairs, then they will all look up.”

  “But that never happens,” I protested. “Every time I come down here, the same group of people is sitting at the bar.”

  “That’s because everybody always sits there,” said Hillary, a linguist by training and a model by sight, whom Ian had long ago decreed was the most beautiful woman in college.

  “So how many somebodies does it take to make everybody?”

  “It’s not the number of somebodies,” corrected Hillary. “It’s the absence of nobodies.”

  “I see. So five somebodies can be everybody if no nobodies are present?”

  “Yes.”

  “And anybody can be somebody?”

  “No.”

  “Only fifteen percent,” added Lucy.

  “You mean only fifteen percent of Clare College is somebody?” I asked.

  “Maybe fewer,” she said.

  “So it’s like getting a First. A set number of people become somebody every year.”

  “If they’re lucky,” said Hillary.

  “And they’re blond,” added Lucy.

  “Don’t tell me,” I sighed. “Somebodies prefer blondes.”

  Sooner or later, almost every conversation I had in Cambridge returned to a single theme: class. Class is to Britain what race is to America—a burden, an obsession, and a potential fatal flaw. As a child, I had always heard that America was a land of social mobility, while Britain was a land of social rigidity. What I found in England was a network of classes that was not only much more fluid than I expected but also much more venomous.

  Having outgrown the division between “upstairs and downstairs,” inbred and out, the British today have dozens of different subspecies of classes, which have literally hundreds of different names. The tortured titles the British assign their classes have become such a mouthful to pronounce that they often sound like names of teeth: upper-middle-lower bicuspids; lower-upper-middle canines. Cambridge—long home to the late-blooming, uppercut, wisdom-teeth set—in many ways embodies the social changes that the country as a whole has undergone. Until the twentieth century the university was dominated by a rigid class structure, with fee-paying upper-class undergraduates being waited on by a small number of lower-class sizars. In that system, for all its faults, a student’s status was rarely in doubt. But these days, when fees are paid by the state and entrance is earned by exam, the student body has become more meritocratic, and, by extension, much more middle-class. Students, as a consequence, must fight for their status.

  Of course, social jockeying is not a new sport at Cambridge. Yet its practice does seem to have changed in recent generations. When American Norman Podhoretz arrived at Clare in the late 1950s, he was surprised by the social climate he found. A working-class boy from Brooklyn who had won a scholarship to Cambridge from Columbia University, Podhoretz was amazed at the instant status he received upon matriculation. “As far as [the porters and servants] were concerned,” wrote the future literary critic, “so far, indeed, as the whole of England seemed to be concerned—I was a Clare man and therefore a ‘young gentleman’ to whom amenities, privileges, and deference were owed as by natural right.” Podhoretz came to believe that the biggest difference between American and British students lay in their attitudes toward ambition, which he related directly to the presence of a strict social order in England. The British system, he observed in his autobiography, “seems to set fairly predictable limits on a young man’s future and
discourages appetite and demand.” The American system of social mobility, by contrast, “sets no limits at all, and tells a man his social identity is something to be earned.”

  I have no doubt that Podhoretz’s observations were accurate; indeed, many students I met at Clare seemed to fit his description precisely. But for the most part, Cambridge in the 1990s presents a different state of social affairs. With the arrival of more students from state schools and the inclusion of large numbers of women, the cozy, clubby atmosphere of the past has given way to a new open social playing field. Simon was a perfect example of that change. His grandfather, a self-taught man, had worked his way through the civil service but had hit a glass ceiling because he lacked higher education. Simon’s father, an only child, was the first member of his family to attend university but, after leaving Oxford, opted to work in a foreign company because he felt excluded from the true British elite. Simon, an only son, was sent to a prestigious boarding school and then moved on to Cambridge. But still his status was in doubt. He looked, sounded, and played squash like a Yah; yet he studied the NARGiest subject of all, engineering. His image was up for grabs.

  Simon stepped aggressively into this void and spent his first two-and-a-half terms assiduously building a reputation. He went to the Clare pub almost every night; never had fewer than two pints but always stopped short of six; never borrowed money from others and always laughed at their jokes; and, above all, never talked about his work but always got it done just in time. In the spring, however, with exams in sight, Simon changed his daily habit. He made a rigorous revision schedule; started setting his alarm clock; and even purchased special study enhancers, including lucky pencils, jars of chocolate, as well as special glucose tablets called Dextro Energy, the “Official Energy Products to the British Institute of Sports Coaches.” He also gave up drinking for a week, to make sure he wasn’t an alcoholic. Here he ran into trouble.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said to me early that week. “I’m totally embarrassed. Humiliated. Nine months of work lost in one episode.”

  “What happened?” I said.

  “I ordered a Coke at the bar.”

  While it may be difficult to destroy a reputation with one errant night at the bar, the point of Simon’s fear was all too clear: status, and, with it, class, is no longer given out free at Cambridge; students today must go looking to find it. I decided to give it a try.

  “I want to be somebody for a day,” I declared.

  Hillary was sitting on the edge of her stool. Lucy was leaning against the brick wall.

  “You can’t,” said Hillary.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because a nobody can’t be a somebody.”

  “But I’ll learn,” I said.

  “It’ll take time,” said Lucy.

  “And money,” Hillary added.

  “How much?”

  “About five hundred quid a year for beer,” she said.

  “And five days a week in the bar,” Lucy added.

  “What about tobacco?” I asked.

  “Nobody smokes his own fags,” Lucy said. “A somebody nicks them from somebody else.”

  “In that case I probably should have some on hand. What kind do you recommend?”

  “Camel Lights,” Hillary said.

  “But I know somebody who smokes Marlboros,” I said.

  She flung her wrist in mock repulsion. “Everybody used to smoke Marlboros,” she said. “But then somebody changed to Camel Lights. They’re much more healthy, you know.”

  Lucy laughed at the nick at Simon.

  “Okay,” I said, straightening up in my chair. “I think I’m ready. Where do I begin?”

  “All right, then?” said Hillary. She licked her lips and smiled.

  “‘Whenever you’re ready,’” I said.

  She shook her head disapprovingly. “That’s no good.”

  “What’s no good?”

  “‘Whenever you’re ready.’”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s too eager.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “‘All right, then?’” Lucy interrupted. “It’s a question.”

  “A question?” I said. “What does it mean?”

  “How’s your sex life?” said Hillary.

  “Sorry?” I stammered.

  “Perfect.”

  “What’s perfect?”

  “‘Sorry,’” said Lucy. “If someone propositions you with ‘All right, then?’ the correct response is ‘Sorry.’”

  “This is crazy,” I said.

  They looked at each other. “This is life,” they agreed.

  A young woman with her dark hair in a ponytail walked up to the bar from the JCR and ordered a lager and lime. Hillary and Lucy prodded me forward to take my next test. I stepped to the counter and bowed my head.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the woman, a first-year I had seen on the river. “All right, then?”

  “Sorry?” she said.

  “Oh well,” I said, sensing failure. “Thanks anyway.”

  “No,” whispered Lucy. “You’re premature.”

  “Oh,” I said, lifting my chin. “Um, would you like to nick a fag?”

  “No,” she replied. “But I do need some friction.” She pulled a cigarette from her jeans pocket, and I, at wit’s end, swung around for advice.

  “She means a light,” muttered Hillary.

  “Don’t blow it,” whispered Lucy.

  I swung back around and gaped at the fag dangling from her lower lip. “Sorry,” I stammered. “I don’t have any friction. I’m afraid I’m premature.”

  Later, when I was lying in bed next to Hillary, it seemed rather odd that I would be sitting beneath the Clare Chapel in an underlit, whitewashed, Camel-Lighted pub, trying to learn the lingo of the Oxbridge somebody class. When I first came to Cambridge, I expected that most of my friends would come from my course, from the supposedly elite group of people that the Centre for International Studies had gathered from around the world. But except for the occasional weekly lecture or a chance meeting in the U.L., I almost never saw my fellow students. When one of my classmates complained about this to Mr. Langley, he responded curtly, “What you are requesting is an American seminar. This is Cambridge. We believe in the tutorial system.”

  One by-product of the vaunted tutorial system in Cambridge is that students—both graduates and undergraduates—are so isolated within the confines of their own college that they find it almost impossible to meet people in other parts of the university. Simon felt so trapped in the social machinations of Clare that he had nobody to turn to outside of college when he began having difficulties with Lucy. Susanna, the rowing coach, felt so excluded from those same social circles that she wanted to start her own drinking society. For a foreigner, with no friends from home or from a previous school, the social networks are even harder to penetrate. Unlike Norman Podhoretz, I was not granted immediate status as a gentleman at Clare; in fact, I was kept away. Slowly, with the help of Simon and Ian, I did become friends with many members of Clare. By participating in events like rowing and Rag Week, I began to feel a part of the college. Still, it was not until the middle of Easter Term that I truly became eligible to become an insider.

  The reasons were twofold. First, the color of my neckwear. By standing in front of five hundred people at the Union with a red, white, and blue bow tie knotted around my wing-tipped neck, I forever guaranteed my reputation—no matter how loudly my normal wardrobe protested—as a verified American eccentric. Even people who were not in the chamber came up to me for several weeks after the debate to congratulate me on my performance and ask me if I planned to wear the same tie to the Clare May Ball.

  Second, and more immediate, the hair color of my friends. Lucy, Hillary, and their fellow first-year Jo were known collectively, and sometimes enviously, as “the Blond Posse.” As I began to spend more time with them, and, more importantly, as they began to spend more time with me, my reputation soare
d. Their attention, no matter how fleeting, may not have been enough to secure me a spot in Debrett’s Peerage, but when on that Thursday night in late May two of the women widely believed to be the most beautiful in college actually came down the stairs into the crypt bar and sat down next to me, it set off sparks in the ranks of Clare not unlike ones last seen in England when a group of similar Colonial eccentrics tossed bales of homesick British tea into Boston Harbor. Then, the British were enraged that a bunch of American nobodies would even contemplate splitting from the Motherland, not to mention the even less pardonable sin of dropping the tea into the water before the milk. Now, a little over two hundred years later (the average span of British short-term memory), the process was reversed, and the natives at Clare were equally enraged that an American nobody had come back to Cambridge—wet nurse of the Motherland—to drink freely from the Holy Grail and become, however briefly, a somebody.

  “You need some work,” Lucy insisted when I returned to the fold.

  “You’re too aristo,” Hillary said.

  “Too what?” I asked.

  “Too aristocratic.”

  I pulled my hands from my blue jeans.

  “You need more sarky,” Lucy announced.

  “What’s that?” I pleaded.

  “More sarcasm.”

  I wiped the frown from my face.

  “And your hair,” Hillary said, mussing my scalp with her fingers. “Too straight. Your face, too clean.”

  “Don’t shave for a while,” Lucy advised. “And get yourself a leather jacket.”

  “You could wear an earring,” chimed Hillary.

  “Or bracelets from Africa,” her friend enthused.

  “I suppose everybody’s been to Africa,” I said.

  “And Amsterdam,” added Lucy.

  By this time in the evening the concentration of so much activity in one area of the bar had begun to attract a crowd. I was sitting in the corner, facing the stairs. Lucy, Hillary, and now Jo—a first-year art historian and cello player whose blond hair reached halfway to her feet—sat in front of me, facing inward. And Ian and several boys from the snooker table were standing just behind the Posse, staring quizzically into our circle as if they were trying to catch a glimpse of some exotic animal at a zoo. Mark, the Union president, was there, with his half-shaven, half-shaggy hairdo. Next to him was Kirk, whose hair was greased up atop his head like the rear end of a duck. And the final person was Nick, the third-year with the wiry hair I had spoken to earlier in the evening. Together, with their mohawks à la mode, they looked like a band of Indians displaced from their native land.