by Bruce Feiler
“So how would you describe the normal life at Cambridge?”
He hesitated for a moment. “It’s what we call ‘the Game,’” he said. “It’s gone on longer than Wimbledon and will go on for another century to come. It’s not normal, but it doesn’t have to be. It doesn’t change, and then why should it. We like it the way it’s always been.”
I stood up to go. I thanked Terry for his kindness, turned in my key, and submitted my pledge of obedience that said I hadn’t put tape on the walls.
“There’s one more thing I have to ask you,” I said, as Terry walked me through the Lodge and reached to open the door.
“What’s that?” he said.
“Did you make me into a gentleman?”
He stopped and appraised me from head to toe, as he had done the first night we met.
“Well,” he said, twisting his mustache. “All I can say is that I made you a little smoother around the edges. No more squirrel guns and raccoon caps for you. I can take credit for that.”
“Yes, you can,” I said. “And you should.”
I bowed my head as he liked to do. He reciprocated and stuck out his hand.
“Now go on,” he said, “and Godspeed—from a common man, from a friend.”
“I’ve decided,” Ian announced. “I’m going away.”
The day after my farewell with Terry, Simon came up from a brief stay in London and we headed away in a “hire car” toward the region that road signs in England refer to as THE NORTH. The first stop on our farewell tour was Sheffield, a once-thriving steel town, where Ian was competing in the World Student Games. We watched the following afternoon as Ian—in full form—danced and dodged and eventually defeated a Hungarian and an Italian, before being dislodged himself by a one-armed Canadian. The next day, with Ian in tow, we drove farther north to our true destination, to Castle Howard, the country’s most prominent—but least likely—memorial to Oxbridge elegance. This grandiose mansion, begun in 1692 by the 3rd earl of Carlisle, has become a Mecca for middle-class Brits to pay their last respects to the aristocracy, ever since it starred in the 1980s television series Brideshead Revisited. For me, however, it proved to be not so much a tribute to the past as a sign of the times.
I went to Castle Howard at the end of my year, as I went to Cambridge at the beginning, expecting to be overwhelmed by the grandeur and the sophistication. Instead, I was surprised by its garishness and vulgarity. The earl’s descendants, forced to accomodate the hording public after World War Two, have used their nouveau riches to buy a squadron of paddleboats with swans on their bows and a platoon of trolley cars with circus lights on their roofs to escort guests around the estate and shuttle them off to the Adventure Playground, where they can ride the plastic water slide and play pin the tail on the obelisk. Disney has not only invaded the Cam, but with this “Six Flags over the Realm” has all but co-opted the Crown.
That afternoon, before driving to the station to drop off Ian, who was heading back to Sheffield, and Simon, who was going home to Tokyo, I suggested we have a farewell drink. We were sitting in the Castle’s Refreshment Centre, not far from the overflowing Coach Park, when Ian wrapped his fingers around a cappuccino cup and announced that he was giving up the law and going on a trip instead.
“But where?” I asked.
“Greece,” he responded.
“But why?” Simon wondered.
Ian smiled.
When I met Ian at the beginning of the year, he was uptight and upset, upbraiding me and everyone else with his most recent book-learned idea. Simon, for his part, was just the opposite, upbeat and upright—but with little or nothing to back him up if he should take a tumble. By the end of the year the two of them had changed roles. Ian, the scholar, was abandoning the academy and leaving his beloved books behind. Simon, the dilettante, had succumbed to his twenties by purchasing a Filofax and even composing a summer reading list. His first book, which he brought along on our trip and revealed at our coffee table, was Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.
“No!” Ian howled when he saw the title. “Don’t you know that philosophy fucks you up? Don’t you know that it takes young minds and turns them into ideologues? You should stop before it’s too late. You should stop before I did.”
Simon was nonplussed. “It helps me get to sleep,” he said.
Ian was not impressed. “It will make you stay awake. Listen, think back on this last year. I bet you remember what happened to your body as much, if not more, than what happened to your mind. If you stay in school long enough, you begin to believe you can separate the mind from the body. But it’s not true.” He turned to me for support. “Think of rowing,” he pleaded. “Think of Rachel.”
“I think that was a fantasy.”
“That’s not the point,” he snapped. He sat forward in his chair, rattling his cup in its saucer. “The point is that life isn’t two separate spheres—wisdom and desire. It’s a fusion of the two. There’s a great quote from Aristotle….” He pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment, then snapped his finger in remembrance. “‘No one who has not tasted true love is truly knowledgeable.’”
Ian slumped back in his chair. Simon picked up the clue.
“So that’s what you’re going to Greece for,” he said, “true love?”
“I’m going because I don’t want a life that ends, ‘Game Over, Low Score.’ I want to win big.” He took a sugar cube from the plastic bowl and placed it on the table. “You see this cube,” he said. “That’s a note. Middle C, let’s say. In Western music you take this note and build on it. You develop it, embellish it, cultivate harmonies around it. But there’s a problem: in the end, you always come back to the same note.”
He took another sugar cube and placed it on the table beside the first.
“This is also a note,” he said. “But it’s an Arabic note. In Arabic music, the more you develop, the more you stray from the original source. I have both of those notes in me, both of those voices. So now I’m going to stray for a while, to break away from all the harmony.”
I sat forward, about to interrupt.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “But don’t worry. I promised my mother I’ll come home in a year. I still want to be successful. I still want my life to end on a major chord.”
Simon leaned across the table and smiled.
“Would that be a one-handed or a two-handed chord?” he asked.
Ian grinned at both of us, then popped the cubes into his mouth.
“Two.”
I headed north.
During all the time I had spent in Cambridge, I had never taken part in the one true English obsession—walking. Walking is to the British what driving is to Americans: a tradition, a birthright, and the most efficient way to avoid other people. Americans invented drive-ins, drive-thrus, even drive-by shootings, while the British invented the Proms (a popular summer concert series in which participants walk around during the performance), the Wellington (a fashionable rubber boot for walking in the mud), and the pelican crossing (a type of crosswalk into which any person can step and instantly claim the right-of-way). With only one afternoon to walk, I drove to a recommended spot in the Yorkshire Dales, picked up a map from the local pub, and headed out under overcast skies in the direction of a nearby knoll. Despite my year in England, however, I was unprepared for the rain.
Out on the dale the landscape was varied—hard rock in some places with a sharp edge, rolling fields in others with classical overtones. A series of homemade paths cut across the fields, through a minefield of live sheep droppings and over a matrix of meandering stone fences. The smell of lamb musk and fertile soil blended in the air into a kind of English stew. As I stepped and climbed and sniffed and walked (walking, that is, on the grass), I could not avoid the temptation to lose myself in my farewell scene.
Britain had been a continual surprise to me. When I first moved to Japan, five years before Cambridge, I expected to be different, an American abroad. But
I soon discovered that even though I looked like an outsider, when I opened my mouth and spoke Japanese, I could sound, even act, like an insider. In England I had the opposite experience. With several exceptions (the most notable being my straight American teeth), when I walked into a room, I looked like a native, but as soon as I opened my mouth, I would reveal myself to be a Colonist and, by extension, a secondary being. At first this bothered me. I wouldn’t talk to store clerks or chat with barbers for fear of being prejudged (“We English don’t easily forget”; “Don’t forget to look both ways”). Gradually, however, I changed my mind as I adjusted my view of my hosts, as well as my view of myself.
Like many Americans, I came to England with a nagging sense of intellectual inferiority. England, in my mind, was not only older, but wiser as well. As a child, I was surrounded by the symbols of English eminence. The spokesmen on serious television commercials always had English accents, while the McDonald’s spokesman was dressed like a clown; the marmalade my mother spread on her toast was “Made in England,” while the Pop-Tarts I ate were made in Illinois; my father’s favorite television show was Masterpiece Theatre, while I preferred Gilligan’s Island. Like an adolescent craving parental acceptance, I felt at times as though I could never be intellectually validated until I proved myself to be as cultured as the British.
A year in Cambridge cured me of my inferiority complex. Not only could I do the academic work at one of England’s ancient universities, but my American interdisciplinary background made the task easier. Not only could I comprehend the famed subtleties of the Queen’s English, but my straightforward American style proved more versatile. Not only did I gain a certain self-confidence at Cambridge, but I did so while remaining young, free, and American. And, like Ian, once I had realized my pursuit—once I had proved myself to myself—I didn’t need the approval of my pursued anymore. I could leave Cambridge, secure.
After several hours on the dale, I began to lose my bearings. I was still heading in the same direction—up the path I had followed so closely, away from the flatland and toward the hills. It had begun to rain, lightly at first, as if watering the grass, then harder and harder like an incoming storm, until water was streaking down my neck and splashing up my legs. I was growing disoriented. Looking at my map, I decided to abandon my quest for the lake and turn toward a paved road off to the east. I hurried in that direction, hoping to follow the road back to town, or maybe catch a ride. The rain was heavy. Night was falling. I was feeling cold. Arriving at the edge of a field, I scrambled to the top of a shoulder-high fence and was preparing to leap onto the road, when a car came speeding up the hill to my right, slammed on its brakes, pressed on its horn, and came to a stop in the exact location where I was about to jump. I looked at the driver, then down at the ground, where I saw for the first time what he had seen and what might have saved my life: a small white lamb, walking on the water, which flowed like a river, and making its way, like a wayward child, to the other side of the road.
AFTER CLASS
Unlike preparing for a Cambridge degree, writing a book requires a one-to-many tuition of the most exhaustive kind. Using my best American-style English, I would like to thank the many who stand behind the one whose name appears on the cover.
First, I would like to express my appreciation to some of the numerous people at Cambridge who offered me friendship and support: Anne, Christopher, Elizabeth, Fuchsia, Jamie, Kirk, Richard, Rob, Sean, Sophie, Stephen, Terry, and my friend and adviser from beginning to end, Christopher Reohr. The people closest to me, of course, knew I was writing a book, although everyone I met did not.
Meanwhile, back at home, my agent, Jane Dystel, never wayered in support of this project and always managed to cheer me up. My editor, Jonathan Karp, never failed to improve the manuscript and always did it with style. In addition, many other people assisted along the way, by offering support, answering a question, or simply providing me an excuse to get out of the house. These include: Peter, Katherine, and especially Margaret Bergen, Ruth Ann and Justin Castillo, Karen Eastman, Ben Edwards, Jan and Gordon Franz, Ivan Held, Jessica Korn, Fred Lane, Katherine and Will Philipp, Dee Brock and Linda Resnik, Alex Beers and David Shenk, Jeffrey Shumlin, Max Stier, Jane von Mehren, and Dominic Ziegler.
Finally, I would like to pay special tribute to the members of my family, otherwise known as my “editorial board.” My parents, Jane and Ed Feiler, not only read each draft and approved each revision, but also built my desk. My uncle Henry Meyer proved that wit is not exclusive to England; it also thrives in Mississippi. My sister, Cari, in addition to frequently lending her advice and even more frequently her car, managed in the midst of my failed sharks to meet, date, and marry Rodd Bender. My brother, Andrew, despite having attended the “other place,” poured mind and soul and more than several pints of red ink into this book and shares in its authorship. But leading the way, both in years and in class, was my grandmother Aleen Feiler, who has long been the first to read, encourage, share, and lend. It was she, ten years ago, who first allowed me to travel, and this book, an overdue thank-you, is dedicated to her.
Learning to Bow, my book about life in small-town Japan, was published a month after my return from Cambridge. Within a month of that, I had received three letters: one from a woman in Japan requesting a date; one from a man in Arizona requesting a job; and one from a woman in Wisconsin who said that my book had inspired her to move to Japan and who thanked me for including a bibliography for further reading.
On the outside chance that that woman has now returned from Japan and is considering a move to England, I offer the following brief list of works about Cambridge. This survey is not meant to be exhaustive, but rather to include only those books I found particularly helpful (and ones that are available in the United States).
Fiction. The Literary History of Cambridge, by Graham Chainey (U. of Michigan), lists 111 works of fiction published between 1844 and 1984 that relate in one way or another to Cambridge. Of the ones I read, the two I enjoyed the most were Jacob’s Room, by Virginia Woolf (Harcourt), and Maurice, by E. M. Forster (Norton). The most obvious book to read that is not on the list is Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh (Penguin), which is nominally about Oxford, a distinction that is irrelevant to everyone in the world except those who attended one or the other and who love to exaggerate the differences between the two in a vain attempt to satisfy their own sense of individuality. Lastly, perhaps the best novel I read about Cambridge was written by an American (gasp!), in American English (ya-hoo!). The book is Bruce Duffy’s The World as I Found It (Ticknor & Fields) and it describes in loving, fictionalized detail the lives of philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell, and G. E. Moore.
Nonfiction. Sadly, there is no general-interest nonfiction portrait of Cambridge, and even if there were the author would have been hard-pressed to produce a work half as good or as witty as Jan Morris’s Oxford (Oxford U. Press). Meanwhile, for pure historical background, I found many books invaluable, among them: A Social History of England by Asa Briggs (Penguin), British Society Since 1945 by Arthur Marwick (Penguin), and The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy by David Cannadine (Yale). For a readable history of the social impact of Oxford and Cambridge, I recommend Noël Annan’s Our Age (Random House), a “group portrait” of English intellectuals in the twentieth century.
Finally, to my friend in Wisconsin, if you do make it to England, be sure to pick up a copy of Clive James’s May Week Was in June (Picador), which is not only an amusing look at Cambridge but also one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Otherwise, the train leaves from King’s Cross, the cost is twenty quid, and don’t forget to look both ways.
About the Author
BRUCE FEILER is the New York Times bestselling author of six books, including Learning to Bow, Walking the Bible, and Abraham. A contributor to National Public Radio, he writes for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Gourmet. A native of Savannah, Gorgia, he lives in New York City.
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Praise for
Looking for Class and Bruce Feiler
“Pomp, circumstance, and eccentricity…. Entertaining…. Looking for Class is, for most of us, the closest we’ll get to the intense, odd, wonderful world beyond the ivy-covered gates.”
—Buffalo News
“Delightfully witty…. Full of anecdotes and food for thought.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Refreshingly, Feiler is accurate in describing the class that arises in this hothouse.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Marvelous…. Brideshead Revisited meets Fast Times at Ridgemont High.”
—Boston Globe
“Bruce Feiler is a keen and thoughtful observer.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Feiler, a superb narrator and storyteller with a gentle, ironic sense of humor, also possesses a potent intellect that at moments blazes forth, illuminating everything in its path.”
—Washington Post Book World
Books by Bruce Feiler
Under the Big Top A Season with the Circus
