OXBRIDGE ENVY

When one sends one’s children to Harvard or Yale, Princeton or Stanford, one has to be a considerable ninny to believe that they will receive a serious education. Political correctness, the lowering of standards generally, and other educationally deflationary measures of our day have done a good bit to shrivel the adjective “higher” in higher education.

What one can safely believe is that, barring serious breakdown or illness or infection with a political virus, sending one’s children to one of the seven or eight schools with social cachet in this country will set them socially and professionally on their way. They will have a credential, they will make useful connections, they will be launched. I know a man who got three high-level jobs and met his wealthy wife through his Princeton connections. Had he gone, say, to Ohio State, his income would probably be half of what it is today. One of the earliest uses of the word “network,” after all, was in “old-boy network,” and the old boys in question were those who had gone to one of three or four Ivy League schools. Today Stanford and Berkeley, and perhaps Duke, Virginia, Georgetown, and Vanderbilt, have joined the network. All ring the snobbery gong.

I myself went to the University of Chicago, and if it rings the snobbery gong at all, it scarcely gives off more than a ping. Chicago graduates (I speak here not of the graduate or professional schools) do from time to time distinguish themselves, but their worldly success rate is low, perhaps because they are taught a certain contempt for such success. Snobbery is not part of the deal at Chicago, unless it be intellectual snobbery. It was the right place for me when I went there, and I never yearned to be elsewhere. Besides, given the quotas against Jews at most Ivy League schools at the time — the middle 1950s — I, not all that powerful a student to begin with, was unlikely to have been allowed into the various yearn-worthy schools anyhow.

Not until I first saw Oxford did I feel a deep yearning to have gone to another university. I was already in my thirties when I first visited Oxford. As I walked through the various colleges — Balliol, Merton, New College, Wadham, All Souls — I felt as if I had missed out on something momentous. Paul Theroux has recently described feeling very differently when first confronted by Oxford. “I knew I did not belong, that I would never belong. . . . Being a student here seemed to me like my being an actor in a pageant in which I did not know any of my lines.” I myself should have liked even a very small part in the pageant.

Over the years I have read a vast number of Oxford and Cambridge memoirs and loved especially those chapters set at Oxford in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in some ways the greatest Oxford novel of them all. All writing about Oxbridge — the portmanteau word combining Oxford and Cambridge — suggests easy intelligence, elegant indolence, high wit, and sometimes great intellectual firepower. My reading has given me a fair amount of information about the leading Oxford characters, beginning with John Henry Newman and Mark Pattison and Benjamin Jowett in the nineteenth century.

The twentieth century continued to toss up interesting Oxbridge characters. Professor William Spooner, warden of New College who gave his name to the oral tic known as Spoonerisms (“a half-warmed fish” for “a half-formed wish” was only one among several notable examples). F.F. Urquhart, a Balliol history tutor known as “Sligger,” who cultivated undergraduates at his Alpine chalet on the slope of Mont Blanc, was another famous Oxford character. In the last generation, the generation now all but gone, Maurice Bowra was an authentic Oxford character (someone remarked that he gave up smoking and listening at the same time), and so was Isaiah Berlin, the worldly historian of ideas and famously loquacious talker, who died this past year and represents perhaps the end of this remarkable generation.

Owing to my having edited the American Scholar, I came to know — sometimes in person, sometimes through correspondence — some of this generation of notable Oxbridgian figures, among them H. R. TrevorRoper, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, and John Sparrow. Vastly different though they were, the one quality they had in common was a certain appealing boyishness. Perhaps this came from the fact that they were so successful as students when boys; perhaps it came from their never really having left school. All seemed much merrier than American academics, who retain their immaturity but usually combine it with a weighty wet blanket of gloom and depression.

I met John Sparrow — the subject of The Warden, a fascinating new book by John Lowe just published in Great Britain — through my friend Edward Shils, who himself lived half the year in Cambridge and was a fellow at the college called Peterhouse (but never, for reasons still unknown to me, Peterhouse College). Edward had brought Sparrow to the University of Chicago in the hope of setting up an appointment for him. A black-tie dinner at the faculty club was given for Sparrow, and after the dinner, Edward and I joined him in his rooms at the faculty club. He was a man of middling height, square-shouldered and broad-chested — as a boy he was a serious footballer — with thick, dark hair.

More than a touch drunk, still in his dinner clothes, Sparrow reclined on his bed, a bouquet of roses in his arms, and began to attack dogs.

“So uncritical,” he half lisped, “so sycophantic, so loathsome in their unabashed adoration of their owners. Odious creatures, really.”

“Mr. Sparrow,” I said, “I hesitate to bring this up, but as it happens I own a dog. He is a very small dog, to be sure, but I have grown greatly attached to him.”

“How old is he?” Sparrow asked.

“Nine years old.”

“I see,” he said. “Well, keep him till he dies. But, pray, do not replace him.”

Funny stuff, I thought. And there were other amusing bits. During the Suez crisis, he described his own college, All Souls, as “a hotbed of cold feet.” Informed that a junior fellow was giving up his rooms to marry, Sparrow remarked: “Fancy giving up All Souls for one body.” Write five or six great poems, Randall Jarrell once said, and you become a great poet. Make five or six remarks such as John Sparrow’s, and you become known as a great Oxbridge wit.

One of the small penalties of growing older, of having been around the block a time or two, is the loss of awe. I have lost much of my awe of Oxbridge. Unlike Richard Ellmann, the biographer of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde, I would not accept a teaching job there — not that one is in the offing — at less money and at greater physical discomfort, merely because, as in Ellmann’s case, Oxford beckoned.

Poor Oxford and Cambridge, even they have suffered devaluation in recent years. It hasn’t helped that William Jefferson Clinton — along with Robert Reich and George Stephanopoulos — won Rhodes scholarships to Oxford. (Yes, Cecil, no need to tell me it isn’t what you had in mind.) Handsome resume entry though it may be, attendance at that ancient university appears not to have laid a glove on them, so untouched by it do they all seem, either intellectually or socially. I know other gringos who have come away from a few years at Oxbridge similarly unchanged.

I still wish I had gone to Oxford or Cambridge, but I wish I had done so thirty or so years before it was possible for me to have done so. My reverence for Oxbridge is now chiefly for its past. Such figures as Berlin, Sparrow, and Trevor-Roper represented that past, at least in this century, at its most interesting. Education in classical languages still prevailed; learning itself seemed, somehow, classical. “What do you call a ‘good Latinist’?” Hugh Lloyd-Jones, a former Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford once asked me. “Someone who doesn’t know his Greek,” he replied to his own question.

Most of these men, being academics and having lived sedentary lives, are not quite worthy of fulldress biographies, but that scarcely means that their lives are devoid of interest. A biography by Michael Ignatieff of Berlin, who was more worldly than most of the Oxbridge figures, will soon be published. Meanwhile, John Lowe’s The Warden is not a biography but what its author calls “a portrait,” which relieves Lowe of the burden of exhaustiveness that contemporary biographies seem to require.

What arises from Lowe’s excellent book is not only a strong sense of a remarkable man who, in his own judgment, was a failure, but a clear view of non-scientific intellectual talent in a society that, in its day, cultivated and revered such talent much more than it has ever been cultivated and revered in the United States.

John Sparrow was born in 1906, the oldest of five children, near Wolfver-Hampton, in the Midlands, the son of a wealthy scion of ironmasters. His father, Lowe reports, “was a disagreeable man, and all his children disliked him and were afraid of him.” The important figure in Sparrow’s life was his mother, an intelligent and unsentimental woman to whom he was always devoted. He was a notably precocious child: “talking at six months,” Lowe reports, “an early reader, and always clever beyond his years.” As a boy, he became a serious book collector.

How far beyond his years soon becomes, as Lowe recounts it, astonishing. A naturally good student, he made his way to the top at every school he attended, including Winchester, where two later-famous classmates were the political journalist and Labour-government cabinet minister R. H. S. Crossman (or “Double Crossman,” as Maurice Bowra called him) and Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour party from 1955 until his death in 1963. Winchester was a forcing house for left-wing politicians, but its reigning political climate seems not to have touched Sparrow, whose conservative views emerged from the school quite unimpaired. He proceeded from Winchester to New College, Oxford, but not before a stellar example occurred of the astonishing precocity I have just mentioned.

At seventeen — please note: seventeen — Sparrow published, with Cambridge University Press, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, by John Donne, edited by John Sparrow, Scholar of Winchester College, with a Bibliographic Note by Geoffrey Keynes, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. (Keynes, brother of John Maynard Keynes, was perhaps the great bibliographer of his age.) Later, while still an undergraduate, young Sparrow edited for the Nonesuch Press Abraham Cowley’s The Mistress and Other Select Poems. Still in his early twenties, he wrote essays and reviews for various London literary journals.

Sparrow was supposed to write a biography of John Donne; it never got done. He was also supposed to write a biography of Mark Pattison; it, too, never got done, though he did give a series of lectures on Pattison that now exists as a slender volume entitled Mark Pattison and the Idea of a University. But for the most part John Sparrow smoked what Balzac called “enchanted cigarettes” — that is, he planned books that never got written. The verdict appears to be that he squandered his considerable intellectual gifts on occasional intellectual journalism, controversy, and happy sociability.

Edith Wharton, in her memoir Backwards Glance, says that it is probably best never to have been considered promising. John Sparrow was considered extremely promising right out of the gate. Doors kept swinging open for him: scholarships, membership in exclusive cliques, publishers’ contracts, excellent job offers. At Oxford, he studied “Greats,” the arduous course of classical and philosophical subjects then at the heart of Oxford undergraduate education. His senior philosophy tutor was H. W. B. Joseph, a man famous for his logic-chopping rigor, who brought out the already considerable analytical power of the young John Sparrow, though Maurice Bowra thought that Joseph brought out the pedantic and arid side of his friend John, killing the would-be poet in him. Sparrow’s perfectionism probably finished off the scholar in him.

One gets the sense, reading John Lowe’s book, that Sparrow would have preferred above all to be a poet. He wrote a small number of poems, all solidly made and many highly amusing, but none attaining to the magic of great poetry. “He would have given his soul,” Lowe notes, “to have written one great poem.” Yet he knew he hadn’t it in him to do so. “Self-knowledge,” Sparrow wrote the art historian Kenneth Clark, “at least saves me from being a not-quite-first-rate something-or-other in the world of art or letters.”

Instead he decided upon the law. By all accounts Sparrow was on his way to a brilliant career as a barrister. The way had been largely paved for him through his reputation at Oxford, where he quite naturally won a first, and he was taken up by one of the most successful of London firms. He was good at law, temperamentally and intellectually suited to it, but then he was good at just about everything he attempted. His problem may have been that of drowning in a sea of possibilities.

In 1929, at the age of twenty-three, Sparrow was elected a prize fellow of All Souls. Sparrow’s fellowship allowed him to keep one foot in London, where his law practice was, and one in Oxford, where his heart remained. In later years, he would write: “I think my greatest desire is to be really learned: to know all about history and literature and thought. Not to write or teach; just to know. And I think that the best thing I could make of myself could be a learned man, in accordance with the ideal of Newman or Mark Pattison.” All Souls offered the perfect conditions in which to achieve this.

“My idea of heaven,” opined Sydney Smith, “is eating pate de foie gras to the sound of trumpets.” My own idea of heaven is a college without students — and this is precisely what All Souls is. Perhaps its closest model in the United States is the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, with All Souls having the advantage of not being occupied exclusively by scholars. Many of its fellows — prize and honorary — have been men in public life, known by the academic members as “Londoners.” The result is an institution devoted to the highest learning but nicely leavened by the metropolitan spirit.

Sparrow himself spent his week in London, his weekends in Oxford, enjoying what certainly seems the best of both worlds. Yet his happiest days seem to be those when he was an infantry officer during World War II. He loved the camaraderie and the responsibility. In 1951, when the wardenship of All Souls became vacant after the death of then-warden Humphrey Sumner, Sparrow decided after much dithering that he wanted to become warden. Isaiah Berlin — who got off the mot that “one Sparrow does not a Sumner make” — thought him unsuited for it and claimed that he would vote for Sparrow for prime minister of England or president of the United States but not for warden of All Souls. Sparrow failed to be elected the first time he sought the job, and a figure from outside the college, an economist named Hubert Henderson, was named warden. But ten days later Henderson had a stroke, and another election was held, and this time Sparrow triumphed.

Sparrow was warden from 1952 until 1977, and did as little as possible to change anything in the college. He brought out and hung some of college’s finer paintings. He made some quite decent appointments. He kept up the college’s Codrington Library. Yet, as John Lowe writes, “he had no plans for the academic future of the college, since he had no interest in academic life.” He viewed All Souls as the best of all private clubs — men’s clubs, let it be added — and was intransigent about any change that might disrupt the tenor of the place. Whenever reform raised its insistent head, “John confounded his enemies, within and without the college,” Lowe writes, “mainly through delaying tactics which allowed enthusiasms to cool and majorities to wither away.”

John Lowe, who is more progress-minded than his subject, notes that, “like so many of his generation, John hated the modern world.” All Souls was, for the most part, a damn fine place in which to hide not only from the asperities of the modern world but also from those even of Oxford. Sparrow was happy as warden — from every indication, extremely happy. It carried a light load of work and a heavy load of prestige, a tidy cachet in snobbery. Lowe notes that “there are seventy-two letters [to Sparrow] from Edith Sitwell, carefully preserved by John. She did not keep one of his replies. Ironically, from the moment John was elected warden of All Souls, she kept all his letters, while he ceased to keep hers.”

Sparrow had a genuine gift for sociability. Being warden allowed him to exercise that gift, playing the perpetual host, a role he adored, and at no cost to himself. Witty, charming, provocative, he had a taste for controversy, both in person and in print, and published a slim volume, Controversial Essays, on such subjects as the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the private life of A. E. Housman, and what the gamekeeper was really doing to Lady Chatterley. John Sparrow, as you may already have surmised, was a homosexual — a fact that his biographer does not in the least scamp but treats with delicacy and in just proportion. Sparrow seems to have had only one long-lasting homosexual relationship, and, later in life, he had a love affair with an Italian woman about which not all that much is known.

Many though the pleasures of being head of an Oxbridge college must be, there is nonetheless something unreal about it. One lives for years in a grand setting in beautiful surroundings with lots of servants, a continual social stir, and the regular companionship of learned and often witty people. The cruel twist is that, at retirement, it is all withdrawn. The withdrawal may well be tougher for a bachelor than for a married man. Certainly it was hellacious for Sparrow, who took it very hard.

Sparrow described his own retirement as “exile.” In retirement, his drinking increased as did his irritability. He became insulting to the point that he was barred from the college. Edward Shils’s plan to get him a permanent appointment at the University of Chicago became impossible to arrange when he appeared there for a second set of public lectures and performed poorly. His drinking aided the destruction of his memory. Although Lowe does not emphasize it, Sparrow was said to be in especial terror about the prospect of death; as it turned out, his death, at the age of eighty-five in 1992, was a relatively easeful one, occurring at home and among friends.

John Lowe deals with Sparrow’s life in a sympathetic yet critical spirit that one would like to think Sparrow himself would have approved. He conveys how pleasant it was to be in his company when Sparrow was at his not infrequent best. He remarks on Sparrow’s disappointment at not having been knighted. Admiring his lucid and forceful prose style, Lowe treats Sparrow’s sporadic writings with serious respect and is less hard on his low productivity than Sparrow himself was.

Lowe judges Sparrow to have been a not very good warden, arguing that “he was determined to keep the college as he liked it without really considering its role for the future, or its contribution to the life of the university, or, indeed, the wishes of his colleagues.” Earlier he writes, “One might plead that he sincerely believed that he was preserving the college from dangerous intrusions, but it would be truer to say that he was striving to ensure that it remained the way he personally wanted it.” Hard though it is, this is probably just.

And yet one has to admit that Sparrow was impressive even in failure. If he was unable to write the great poem or produce the significant work of scholarship, or to turn back the clock (the great dream of all romantic conservatives), he nonetheless fashioned himself into an extraordinary figure. And a figure of Sparrow’s kind is unimaginable outside Oxbridge: someone who is witty and learned, and who had, as he once put it in another context, “the courage of his conventions.”

Which brings me back to the yearning for something one has never known. Because of the characters therein assembled, the Oxbridge of John Sparrow’s generation, for all its shortcomings, was an intellectual carnival of the highest power and a place of inexhaustible interest. I still regret not having been there.

Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.