Balfour Trinity Tales: Trinity College Dublin in the Sixties

Trinity College Dublin in the Sixties
1. Auflage 2009
ISBN: 978-1-84351-241-7
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 296 Seiten

TCD of the sixties was an unusual, even unique institution, where a motley collection of students from England, Ireland and many other parts of the world came together at a fascinating time in the post-war period. TCD then was a remarkably small, mainly Protestant university, curiously cut off from, but also part of an old Catholic city. It was an eccentric little world. Trinity Tales explores this sixties milieu through thirty-six different autobiographical lenses, including works by Derek Mahon, Brendan Kennelly, Edna and Michael Longley, Roy Foster, Jeremy Lewis, Ray Lynott, Rock Brynner and Donnell Deeny: alumni who overlapped, played their part, and in turn involved later alumni. This book is an invaluable record of a culture in transition, handsomely illustrated with photographs.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Balfour, Sebastian

Leseproben

THE GREENHORN

bernard adams

I LIKE THIS WORD because it so exactly describes the person who arrived to study modern languages at Trinity in September 1957. I was remarkably green and certainly horny. I was Green in the Irish political sense, a little proud of being a Dubliner and rather less proud of the odd, repressive Free State that was my native land. I was a United Ireland man, I suppose, but also strongly aware – having spent six years at school in Northern Ireland – of just how hard and immovable the Orange stumbling block remained.

No, it was socially, interpersonally, that I was really green – timid, uncertain, blushing inexplicably, unreasonably in awe of the boundlessly confident young men and women who came from across the water to study at a university that had a remarkably persistent social and intellectual cachet. This greenness was not really supposed to be part of the plot – send boy to public school, tough regime, bleak buildings but inspirational shades of Oscar (Wilde) and Sam (Beckett). A polished, sporty, intellectually curious young man was supposed to emerge – ready to leap from his schoolboy diving board into the cerebral swimming pool of university life.

But it was a very young, very unpolished eighteen-year-old who actually emerged from this educational process in 1957 to study ‘Mod. Lang.’ – Spanish and English. It’s perhaps better to dispose of the horny teenager here; he remained soppily romantic and unrequitedly lustful (Larkin was almost right in my case) for the whole of his university career. It would be ungallant and unwise to name or count those who were the recipients of his bungling attentions.

There was to be no swimming-pool dive – more a cautious toe-in-the-water approach followed by slow acclimatization. Disgracefully, I chose to live for at least half of the time at home – delighted with the comforts after the damp rigours of the Enniskillen monastery, Portora. This homeiness hobbled for a start my participation in what was potentially a lively environment – and one that benefited enormously from the benign invasion of more worldly-wise English students. I was not adept at sherry – yes, sherry – party conversation. I did not have the skills for a Brideshead-over-the-water existence. I was a far too occasional visitor to the debating societies that relieved the splendid cultural isolation of a student body, parts of which tended towards a vague Home Counties conservatism. We needed reminding that Ireland and The World lay outside the gates of our charming eighteenth-century pleasure dome where many – including me – lived in Keats’ ‘Chamber of Maiden Thought’ and the pleasure principle ruled.

I did a bit more of a plunge with Trinity News, the rather more tabloid of the two College newspapers. I jumped in largely because I was pushed by one Frances-Jane ffrench, an older female person with an elevated pedigree and a lot of patience. She printed my articles and helped me eventually to become editor for a term. During that spell I had the good fortune that a natural-born columnist, William Oddie, the tall, pleasantly padded son of a Yorkshire woollen mill, began to write his delightfully witty Martin Marprelate letters. (Prelates and priests played a sizeable role in his later career: he ended up as editor of The Catholic Herald.)

The English Department was a polite shambles for most of my time at Trinity. There was a huge syllabus, patchy lectures and exams at the end of the summer vacation – now hard to believe, but a huge incentive to term-time social excess. Course work, essays and tutorials were almost unknown. H.O. White had been in charge since, I believe, the late 1930s when legend has it he was chosen ahead of Louis McNeice for the Chair of English. White seemed incredibly antique to me, a man with a shiny pink face often scarred by a rashly wielded razor. I cannot remember a single word of any of his lectures and, looking back today, it seems to me that he presided over a huge missed opportunity – to specialize in the study of the Anglo-Irish cultural heritage – much of it provided by former TCD alumni, Swift, Burke, Goldsmith, Synge and Beckett, to name but a few. (Thankfully, that opportunity was grasped soon after I left.)

There must have been fifty students in my English year – worryingly, only two stand out. Brendan Kennelly was a little older than me. He was a lot wiser – having already spent time working in London. He looked a little like a young priest who already knew that the seminary was not for him; he had begun to write his poems and to help others, like me, struggling to express raw feelings in memorable words. Harden Rogers, brilliant and mysterious and Northern, I sadly never got to know. My memory of her is that she smoked with dedication and seemed to be always surrounded by a male phalanx of formidable Ulster bodyguards. This must be a fantasy. Why didn’t I just go up and talk to her?

I remember enjoying the lectures of A.J. Leventhal, who, I later discovered, was the lover of the marvellous Trinity star of the 1920s, Ethna MacCarthy, whom Beckett admired to distraction. Also I have a vivid image of Alec Reid – with his shock of white hair; his poor sight, his physical helplessness contrasted with great intellectual energy. In my last year, 1960/61, the English Department was taken over by Professor Philip Edwards. He brought order and focus, and a new lecturer – a Dr Walton, who introduced us to the revolutionary idea that there was a huge critical literature out there and that reading our set texts and simply giving our own views on them was insufficient. The shock of the new was considerable but healthy. Nevertheless I found that in my finals I had to face the formidable but kindly Dr Pyle for a Chaucer viva – which involved reading some of the text out loud. Now I don’t think there were any Chaucer lectures, nor any tutorials – or maybe I was just such a head-in-air that I missed some academic trick. My performance was a disaster – and I do believe, an unnecessary one.

The Spanish Department was a different matter. Lean, streamlined, focused, properly managed by an ex-naval officer and immensely distinguished Cervantes scholar, E.C. Riley. ‘Ted’, as I got to call him much later, did not do inspirational, flamboyant lectures. All that was required was for him to tell us in his incisive way about Federico García Lorca, read a poem or two, analyse The House of Bernarda Alba and I was hooked, enchanted – for life, as it turned out: in 2001 I wrote a play about Federico and his relationship with Dalí and Buñuel.

Like many fellow students I had taken up Spanish at the age of eighteen and my grasp of the written language has always been shaky, so doing English-into-Spanish prose for Ted was an ordeal. How I longed for them to come back with minimal red ink marks, but how rarely they did. Daniel de W. Rogers and Keith Whinnom were the other lecturers in the Spanish Department. Señora Doporto, if I’m not wrong a Civil War refugee from Soria, charmingly taught us to speak. I remember a delightful remark from a fellow student after one of these classes, a very clever girl from the Isle of Man called Judith Cowley. I had been deploying a small talent for mimicry and speaking fairly confidently if not very correctly in Spanish. ‘It’s funny,’ she said, ‘you know … you sound so much more in command of the situation in Spanish than you do in English.’

Dan Rogers was a young, friendly lecturer with an infectious laugh and a love of cricket – which he was able to exercise to the full when he moved to Durham where he haunted the county ground. Later, I believe he grew a little sad, but in the late 1950s he encouraged me, perhaps more than anyone, in my uphill battle to write Spanish decently and inspired us all with his gloriously full-blooded account of the amorous Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario. Keith Whinnom, sandy hair, dry, accentless voice and with a wit to match, had the difficult task of turning us on to linguistics. This he tried manfully to do, but the hormones turned us – or perhaps just me – towards the Golden Age drama, the swashbuckling Lope de Vega and Tirso’s Don Juan.

This Spanish Department had youth, scholarly distinction and personality. It’s not surprising that, despite its small size – perhaps just a dozen in my year – a remarkable proportion of its students went on to make their mark. The hard-hitting historian of modern Spain, Sebastian Balfour, is one; the distinguished BBC film-maker Mike Dibb, is another … and the list goes on. Perhaps the most extraordinary of all E.C. Riley’s intellectual scions is Ian Gibson. Writing in Spanish, he has, more or less single-handed, invented literary biography in modern Spain, and in a long writing life has mapped a huge swathe of his adopted country’s twentieth-century cultural and political history. Oddly enough, my first connections with him were sporting – he was an outstanding natural athlete. I first met him playing in the final of a badminton tournament, saw him score a fine try in a club rugby match at Lansdowne Road and, later, take an astonishing running, diving outfield catch for my cricket team on our local London suburban ground. He was a year ahead of me at Trinity and I remember making fun of his meticulous organization of his lecture notes and reading lists. Imitation might have been a better reaction. He worked hard and played hard. I seem to remember him hanging rather precariously from one...