9 West Road Volume 14, 2014

9 West Road

News from the Faculty of English Volume 14 Autumn 2014

english.cam.ac.uk

Minute to Midnight

I

write these words in the dying days of David Trotter’s enlightened but imminently ancien régime, as I prepare to take over from him on 1st October as Chair of the Faculty. I am used to this kind of transition taking place in the depths of the summer vacation, when presumably it is felt that nothing too serious can go wrong, or there is at least time to dispose discreetly of the bodies. So I have been imagining a meet in the grey dawn in the middle of Magdalene Bridge on 1st August, David approaching from one side, pulling behind him a little truck loaded with box files, and an envelope containing the combination for the Faculty safe, me pacing towards him from the other. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realised that our minuteto-midnight handover at the end of September was a sign of how confident we are in the powers of our administration to keep things going smoothly and undistracted by foamy epiphenomena like an incoming Chair. I have learned over the two years I have been in the Faculty of English how fortunate we are in our administrative colleagues. Indeed, one of the first things that struck me, as I walked along the first-floor corridor of the Faculty of English, is that all our administrators had their doors ajar, and it remains a symbol of their openness and cheerful availability. I look forward to their gentle but firm support. My office is close enough to Vicky Aldred’s office for her to be able to hear my moans and, if necessary, to be able to talk me down from the window-ledge.

Before joining the Faculty of English, I spent more than three decades in another institution which, like Cambridge, people found it very difficult to leave (as opposed to ‘get out of’). The loyalty that this University and Faculty inspires means that parting with long-serving colleagues,

as we have recently done with Helen Cooper and Stefan Collini, is a glum and wrenching thing. But it has been a countervailing delight over the last two years to have sat in so many appointment panels, and to see new young colleagues arriving in West Road, with shining morning face, seemingly on every Uni4 bus. It is exhilarating to have so many new faces, and exciting to think of the new ideas and energies they will be imparting to us.

It ought to be obvious to everyone that Cambridge has a formidable concentration of talent and possibility, but that it could be even more formidable if it could find ways to match that concentration with more lines of connection. I have had enough experience of neurotically overmanaged academic organisations to know how dull and stifling it can be to be in a department which pretends to know and to be able to direct exactly what all its academics are doing. But academic researchers in departments of literary study and related areas are realising, somewhat agreeably, that connectedness need not mean panoptical surveillance and that our teaching and thinking can be richly charged and radiated by being connected up with the work of others.

The movement from the venerable Camtools (‘more than venerable, dead’, as Beckett writes somewhere) to Moodle will provide opportunities for us to share teaching resources not just with students but with each other. The research networks we set up a couple of years ago (known for a brief wink as ‘hubs’ but then mutating into the more companionable ‘groups’) have been generating plenty of opportunities for this to happen. We have also had some very conspicuous successes in attracting funding for collaborative research projects, and I hope that our research groups will help us build on

this success by generating ideas for bids and providing support and sharing expertise in grant-seeking. Nobody should underestimate the work that is involved in putting grant applications together, but this needs to become as familiar a part of our culture as it is in the sciences. You can’t win a prize if you don’t buy a ticket.

There are some dark clouds on the horizon which threaten some uncomfortable drenchings. One of the biggest challenges we face in the Faculty is with graduate recruitment, at a time when sources of funding are drying up, and applicants will be swallowing very hard indeed before taking on any more debt, even supposing they can get loans.

But we cannot afford to let graduate recruitment flag. Graduate students, especially PhD students, are our future.

They raise the intellectual temperature and keep their supervisors supple and alert to new perspectives; they are not only ideal ambassadors for the work we do, they can act as nimble neurotransmitters between us. So we will need to be vigorous and ingenious in fundraising to support them.

Here, for the time being, endeth the lesson. I will admit that I have been looking forward with excitement as well as apprehension to what I might be able to do as Chair of the English Faculty. Cambridge gives up its secrets slowly and seductively – I can remember my delight when, after a year and a bit, it was explained to me what ‘the University Chest’ was – but I look forward to the melting away of many more obnubilations.

Steven Connor Chair of the Faculty Grace 2 Professor of English and Fellow of Peterhouse College

Contents

Faculty People

Faculty People

2

Re-Writing Virginia Woolf` Malachi McIntosh

4

The Centre for John Clare Studies

5

‘Did you do “the Moralists”?’

Stefan Collini

6

The Silent Morning Trudi Tate

7

Stirbitch Michael Hrebaniak

8

Library News

9

We remember

10

Read Any Good Books Lately?

Faculty Recommendations

14

Your Say

15

What.Where.When.

16

If you have any comments or suggestions, or if you know of anyone who might like to receive this newsletter and is not on our mailing list, please contact:

Kasia Boddy Newsletter Editor Faculty of English 9 West Road Cambridge CB3 9DP Or email: newsletter@english.cam.ac.uk

We are sad to report the deaths of four former members of the Faculty - Marie Axton, Anne Barton, Marilyn Butler and Howard Erskine-Hill – and include some tributes, some of which were originally given at their memorial services.

2014 also saw the retirement of two members, and former chairs, of the Faculty: Helen Cooper, who joined the Faculty as in 2004 as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, and Stefan Collini, who joined the Faculty as Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature in 1986.

Stefan writes in this issue about the Moralists paper, which he did so much to develop. We wish Helen and Stefan all the best in life beyond West Road and hope they keep in touch.

Happier news includes the appointment to the Faculty of two new lecturers, Ruth Abbott and Sarah Dillon, who introduce themselves below.

Professor Christopher Cannon, formerly a member of the Faculty but currently teaching at New York University, will return as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature in 2015.

To find out what other members of the Faculty have been doing, see www. english.cam.ac.uk/people

Ruth Abbott University Lecturer in NineteenthCentury Literature and Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College Practically speaking, almost all of my research has been on notebooks, especially those of nineteenth-century writers, and most especially those of William Wordsworth and George Eliot.

This means that a lot of my work has been archival, and I’ve spent time as a visiting scholar at Cornell University, the Yale Beinecke Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the New York Public Library, and the archives of the Wordsworth Trust in Grasmere. But all my archival work is driven by literary and interpretative questions, and one of the guiding aims of my research is to show that archival and literary critical work can be mutually illuminating.

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Many of the interests that led me to look at writers’ notebooks in the first place don’t initially seem to have much to do with notebooks at all: my work on Wordsworth’s notebooks began as a project on his blank verse, and it has been shaped by my preoccupations with metre and reading practices; my work on Eliot’s commonplace books grew out of an interest in her own work on theories of versification.

So my first, forthcoming, book, Wordsworth’s Notebooks, is a study of the complex manuscripts in which Wordsworth worked on unpublished, fragmentary passages for his never completed project of writing a great philosophic poem, but it is also a study of his blank verse, while the new project on Eliot’s research practices that I have been developing over the last couple of years aims simultaneously to address her multidisciplinary, multilingual commonplace books, and her work on questions of form.

My aim, however, is to demonstrate that such matters were importantly interconnected for Wordsworth and Eliot themselves.

For both writers, manuscript practices and intellectual interests or compositional purposes had an essential rather than an arbitrary relation to each other: Wordsworth didn’t just fill his notebooks with blank verse, he also used them in unique ways to reflect upon his period’s doubts and complaints about the form; Eliot didn’t just fill her commonplace books with quotations about form, she also used them to test those aspects of form that most preoccupied nineteenth-century intellectuals. If these are notebooks that reveal important connections between aspects of literary form, such as genre and versification, and aspects of material form manifested in manuscript and reading practices, they are also notebooks that reveal an experimental self-consciousness on the part of the writers who made them.

Notebooks offer a way of studying, close up, the effects and significance of the forms in which writers have tested, embodied, and reshaped ideas. This is a line of inquiry that runs throughout my teaching as well as my research.

Besides manuscript studies, I have particular interests in how literary writers relate to and embody different kinds of knowledge, especially philosophy, in the ways in which nineteenth-century lyric shaped early silent film, and in the ways in which literature is interpreted and remade in recitation and song.

Because I am interested in the longer term development of particular compositional and reading practices, my research and teaching often extend back into the eighteenth century, and forward to the present day.

I began my life in Cambridge as an undergraduate student of English at Clare College, where I stayed for an MPhil and PhD, before working in Oxford as a junior research fellow and lecturer, and then returning to Cambridge as a fellow, lecturer, and director of studies at St John’s College. With the start of my new Faculty post, I’ll be joining Lucy Cavendish College and taking up an early career fellowship at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities. It’s a privilege and a pleasure to be working in the Faculty that gave so much to me as a student, and I’m looking forward to all that I’ll learn from new students and colleagues in the years to come.

Sarah Dillon University Lecturer in Literature and Film My return to Cambridge has brought full circle a geographically and disciplinary mobile academic career. I first came up to Clare College in the mid 1990s to study philosophy only to change to English in my first term and then return to philosophy for my Masters at the University of Warwick. After completing a doctorate at the University of Sussex which straddled the two disciplines, I began my professional career at the University of St Andrews with a Lectureship and then Senior Lectureship in Contemporary Literature. I remained at St Andrews for 8 years before returning to Cambridge in April of this year. Whilst at St Andrews, my disciplinary interests widened to include the relationship between literature and film – the focus of my lectureship at Cambridge – and between literature and science. Essentially, I am interested in investigating what is unique about literature by exploring its encounters with other ways of knowing, understanding and exploring the world.

My first book, The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007), examines how the metaphor of the

palimpsest in modern and contemporary literature and philosophy helps us understand ideas ranging from the structure of the mind to the nature of history, time and sexuality. In my current work, I am completing two quite different strands of research. One is a project entitled Deconstructing Film, which aims to be the first book-length study of the relationship between deconstruction and cinema. Similar to The Palimpsest, the book again weaves together a diverse range of contemporary philosophical, literary and cinematic texts; here, ones that touch on, or are touched by, the philosophy of deconstruction and the idea of cinema as, in Jacques Derrida’s phrase, ‘the science of ghosts’. One of the many joys of Cambridge is the opportunity it provides to integrate teaching and research; my new MPhil option will be driven by this research and will be available to students both in English and those taking the interdisciplinary Screen Media and Cultures MPhil. The book to be completed after that is drawn out of my collaborative work on the Scottishbased What Scientists Read (www. whatscientistsread.com) project, an interview study of the reading habits and histories of contemporary scientists.

I have also published two edited collections on contemporary writers: David Mitchell: Critical Essays (2011) and Maggie Gee: Critical Essays (forthcoming Spring 2015). These are part of my Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays Series (www.gylphi.co.uk/series/ ContemporaryWriters). I created the Series in order to fill a gap in contemporary literary studies and to create dialogue between scholars and the living authors on whom they are working. This work also feeds into my teaching, particularly on the Part II Contemporary paper, and is characteristic of my regular positioning at the meeting point of disciplines or fields: alongside my academic work, I am passionate about public engagement. I was a BBC New Generation Thinker in 2013 and have broadcast on Radio Scotland, Radio 3 and Radio 4. The conference room, the lecture hall and the radio studio all feed my thinking and writing in their own unique but curiously complementary ways.

William Wordsworth, Dove Cottage Manuscript 16, c. 1798-1800 english.cam.ac.uk

3

Re-writing Virginia Woolf

I

n April 2013, only a short time before I became inured to, but nonetheless frightened by unexpected emails from strangers asking me to read their work, I received a short message from an artist called Kabe Wilson asking if I’d be interested in hearing about ‘a major exhibition piece’ which ‘hybridizes British (specifically Cambridge-based) modernism with African-American/ Trinidadian radical literature’. I paused and thought, ‘Sure’. In hindsight, it was a wonderfully targeted pitch. My research of the last two years had been almost wholly focused on Trinidadian authors, I was and am still endlessly interested in radical literature, and I had become, by default, a ‘modernist’ at my college. I wrote back that I was free to meet. ‘Look for dreadlocks’, he replied.

A week later, Kabe Wilson and I sat together in the café of the Alison Richard Building and he elaborated on the specifics of his project Of One Woman or So, a novella but also a multimedia work, completely written but in important ways still in progress.For several years, he said, he had been experimenting with ways to ‘connect the literary with other artistic forms’ by creating paintings and pictures derived from literary sources. In 2009, after completing an MPhil in Criticism and Culture in the English Faculty, and visiting an exhibition on Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own at Lucy Cavendish College, he decided to undertake a largescale experiment, one that would satisfy a long-held desire to create a novel using all the words of a canonical piece of literature. Over the next four years, with the assistance of electronic texts, databases and word processing programmes, Kabe digitally captured all 37,971 words of Woolf’s book, collected them in matrices and then rearranged them into his autonomous but wholly predicated novella Of One Woman or So. His ‘author’ Olivia N’Gowfri is an anagram of ‘Virginia Woolf’, his title a reordering of ‘A Room of One’s Own’, and his text, in his words, a ‘recycled’ piece of ‘literary criticism’.

Of One Woman or So tells the story of Olivia N’Gowfri, a young mixed-race English undergraduate at Cambridge who, according to Kabe, ‘struggles with the elitism, the male chauvinism and the Eurocentricism of the place’,

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the work as ‘literary criticism’ I took it as a canny kind of product placement, but once he explained Of One Woman or So’s gestation it became clear that that wasn’t the case. Despite being a mixed-race Cambridge alumnus himself, Kabe stressed the narrative was not autobiography but a wider comment on elitism and the way Black Britons have been written out of Britain’s history. A Room of One’s Own famously contains one use of the word ‘negress’ in a short passage where Woolf describes the differences between men and women by claiming it ‘is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her’ – a ‘negress’ here neither a ‘woman’ nor ‘English’ but merely a material with which a concept of ‘Englishwoman’ can be made.

After reading Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, where she wonders if Phyllis Wheatley could express

Virginia Woolf is the bearded figure on the far left

a feeling of alienation that leads her to the works of the Black Power activists Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and the decision that, like Brown, she must try to ‘burn down’ Cambridge.

The novella tracks the birth and then alteration of this urge, climaxing with Olivia’s decision to find a different, more creative and potentially more subversive way to rebel against her exclusion. What Kabe showed me in April 2013 was his not-quite complete effort to transform this narrative, existing up until then in a purely digital form, into a physical artefact: a word-by-word cut and pasted paperback which cannibalized a copy of A Room of One’s Own to make the N’Gowfri text. When he first described

herself in Woolf’s terms because she was a slave who owned neither a room nor herself, and Jane Marcus’s essay ‘A Very Fine Negress’, which critiques the racial bias of Woolf’s text, Kabe reflected on how it might be possible to invert A Room of One’s Own and make the presence it pushes aside into its centre – to co-opt its words and insert a perspective that it takes as empty, in order to forge a link between ways of seeing that are ostensibly disconnected.

Kabe describes his novella as a way of expressing adoration for Woolf while critiquing her exclusionary vision, and a means to showcase the complicated nature of her influence while revealing how he, implicitly the type of reader she seems to

The Centre for John Clare Studies have never expected, is assessed by and assesses the work through its words. Much commentary in Of One Woman or So is implicit, its surface an Oulipo-like game of play with constraints, the text making space for many things unimagined in its source or by its author to make Woolf speak of Jay-Z, Kanye West, ‘Single Ladies’, the philosophy of C.L.R. James, The Wire, bell hooks, and Simone de Beauvoir. It functions best with an awareness of this playfulness, its hyper-modernist monologue style enriched by a knowledge that the book both is and isn’t Virginia Woolf.

Thirteen months after our first meeting, Kabe expanded his engagement with Woolf into a performance piece called ‘The Dreadlock Hoax’, which he staged in Woolf’s former drawing-room in Bloomsbury. The title is a reference to and remaking of Woolf’s 1910 ‘Dreadnought Hoax’ in which she and other members of the Bloomsbury group dressed as Abyssinian royalty, with blackened faces, in order to gain access to the HMS Dreadnought. Dressed in drag as Woolf c.1931, with his black dreadlocks dyed grey, Kabe read out a speech explaining the creation of Of One Woman or So. But unbeknownst to his audience, what he read was yet another remix, this time of Woolf’s 1937 essay ‘Craftsmanship’. He said, among other things, that ‘words live on, their reputation come be broken and disinfected but each carries that trace of past meanings, and old language has an opening that is everlasting and many-sided […].The multitudinous meanings of words in they English languages mean there are enough possibilities to write whatever we want.’

For more on Of One Woman or So, to read the text of ‘The Dreadlock Hoax’ and to watch my interview with Kabe Wilson, see: www.dreadlockhoax.co.uk Malachi McIntosh

T

he verse and prose of John Clare (1793-1864) speak to major contemporary preoccupations: ecology and biodiversity; vulnerable environments and communities; mental health; social and cultural dispossession. Reflecting a shared scholarly interest in Clare we have established within the Faculty a Centre for John Clare Studies, in the year marking the 150th anniversary of the poet’s death. The Centre is an international forum for the academic discussion of Clare’s work, and of related literary, historical, ecological and political subjects. Our core activities include a regular discussion group and annual symposium. We hope to encourage visiting scholars as well as graduate students with relevant interests to come to Cambridge, and to place the Centre at the heart of major scholarly projects in the coming years.

Cambridge is ideally placed for this: Clare was born near Peterborough and lived there until his removal to asylums in Epping Forest and subsequently Northampton.

The vast majority of his manuscripts are kept in public collections in Peterborough and Northampton. We have formed strong collaborative links with those archives and with the cottage of Clare’s birth, established as an educational centre in 2009 by the John Clare Trust (www.clare.cottage.org).

Clare is perhaps best known as an advocate of wild nature. He also loved his own cottage garden, and was a dedicated botanist, meticulously documenting (in prose as well as poetry) the natural world surrounding him. In our inaugural meeting we talked about Molly Mahood’s analysis of Clare in her comparative study The Poet as Botanist (2011), before visiting the University’s remarkable Herbarium, now housed in the Sainsbury Laboratory at the Botanic Garden. Christine Bartram’s wonderful tour of the collection, with an emphasis on specimens from Clare’s local area, illuminated the preceding discussion and also paved the way for our first symposium, held in September in the Botanic Garden.

Diverse speakers including Fiona Stafford and Richard Mabey (presently Visiting Fellow at Emmanuel College) addressed the theme of 'Clare, Botany and Classification in the Early Nineteenth Century'. We explored the tantalising parallel life of Clare’s contemporary John Henslow, the charismatic botanist, geologist and founder of the Botanic Garden; its former Director, John Parker,

Some of Clare’s manuscripts and drawings on display at Peterborough Museum.

illustrated this with a fascinating tour of the systematic planting, revealing the Garden as a living embodiment of the systems of classification with which Clare so inquisitively engaged.

We are committed to reaching beyond the academy too. This year we curated a major exhibition in Peterborough Museum which drew on rarely-seen manuscripts and associated artefacts to further the public understanding of a celebrated but sometimes misunderstood local writer. We were also invited to work with UnEarthed, a project involving five artists with a residency at Clare Cottage. Researching Clare’s life, work and legacy, they produced a series of installations and interventions in the Cottage, exhilarating and profoundly revelatory of numerous aspects of Clare's own complex life and writing. These astute critical responses to Clare will be exhibited this autumn in Northampton and Peterborough. We hope to build on this experience by collaborating on a further series of artistic residencies.

Meanwhile we are planning further public activities, beginning with our participation in an interdisciplinary panel on literature and the environment during the Festival of Ideas in Cambridge.

For information on all the Centre’s activities, including the monthly discussion group (which will address diverse aspects of Clare’s work from lyric form and literary influence to religion and community), see www.english.cam.ac.uk/research/johnclare.

Paul Chirico, Mina Gorji and Sarah Houghton-Walker english.cam.ac.uk

5

‘Did you do “the Moralists”?’

The English Moralists – from Plato (above) to Sartre (right)

‘I

really loved doing the Moralists - it was the best thing about the whole three years.’ No doubt various Tripos papers have, over time, had their devotees. Part II papers, in particular, which allow both for intellectually more ambitious work and for more selectivity, tend to figure prominently in such recollections. But the paper formally called ‘The English Moralists’ has, over

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many decades, attracted more than its share of excited or appreciative responses from students who have enjoyed its distinctive mix of literature, moral philosophy, cultural criticism, and political thought.

The earliest form of the paper dates from the very foundation of the two-part English Tripos in 1926, when its main proponent was the King Edward VII professor, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (generally known as

‘Q’ - or, by the more irreverent, as ‘SwillerHooch’). To colleagues he could be elusive about quite what the new paper would involve: ‘His usual retort to a question was a lyrical outburst on the glories of their writings issuing into a roll-call of the great names: “Hooker - Hobbes - Locke - Berkeley - Hume”; and ending with an exhausted “my God” as emotion got the better of him’. (Tillyard, Muse in Chains, p.108).

From the start, Plato and Aristotle figured as honorary English writers on the grounds that it was impossible to understand a good deal of later English thought and literature without them. A similarly hospitable welcome was subsequently extended to other major figures in the European tradition of ethical reflection, with the result that eventually Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montaigne and others joined the company.

Throughout, the title ‘The English Moralists’ has been retained as a term of art, signifying the broad tradition of ethical reflection relevant to students studying English.

The figure most closely identified with the paper in its early decades was Basil Willey, who was appointed to a post in the Faculty in 1934, and succeeded Q in the King Edward VII chair in 1946. Tillyard says, with perhaps some exaggeration: ‘One can say that Willey made the Moralists paper and that the Moralists paper made him’ (Muse, p.118). His major (and still useful) works were all connected to his teaching for the paper: The Seventeenth Century Background; The Eighteenth Century Background; Nineteenth Century Studies, inevitably followed by (creativity in titles clearly not being his strong suit) More Nineteenth-Century Studies. After his retirement in 1964, he was presented with a festschrift: The English Mind: Studies in the English Moralists presented to Basil Willey, edited by Hugh Sykes Davies and George Watson. In the same year Willey himself published The English Moralists, which he unapologetically described in the blurb as being ‘based on lectures delivered at Cambridge University during the past 35 years’.

Other colleagues contributed to university teaching for the Moralists in the post-war decades, including Dorothea Krook, whose Three Traditions of Moral Thought (1959) explicitly derived from her lectures, and in 1961 Raymond Williams was brought to Cambridge partly in order to

The Silent Morning

provide teaching for the paper, following the great success of his Culture and Society 1780-1950, published three years earlier. Following Willey’s retirement in 1964, John Beer was appointed to take over the main part of the lecturing for the paper. The zeitgeist of the 1960s and 1970s left its mark, as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud became regular topics, and there were also more openings for work on recent and contemporary analytic moral philosophy (the paper has for a long time been known, with affectionate irony, as ‘the English Moralists - from Plato to Sartre’).

In 1973 John Casey, who had studied Moral Sciences for Part I and then English (including the Moralists) for Part II, was appointed to a Faculty post, and through his tenure did much to sustain interest in the ancient and medieval parts of the paper alongside the more fashionable modern sections. Faculty colleagues such as Eric Griffiths and Stephen Heath also sometimes lectured for it, while a good deal of supervising was also done by college and freelance teachers, including John Newton and Chris Bristow. I was appointed to a Faculty post in 1986, from a background in intellectual history, and for the next 20 years responsibility for Faculty teaching principally fell on John Casey (mostly pre-1750) and me (mostly post-1750).

Other colleagues such as Fred Parker, Simon Jarvis, and Phil Connell also contributed regularly, while in 2006, following John Casey’s retirement, Chris Tilmouth was appointed to cover similar areas.

The Moralists paper is unique among English courses at British universities, and the work which it has stimulated has had a more than local impact, signalling

not so much ‘interdisciplinarity’ as a refusal to let conventional boundarymarking altogether determine the intellectual life. Indeed, in some respects the paper, like certain other features of the Tripos, might be seen as offering a form of resistance to the wider pressures towards academic specialisation, encouraging both teacher and student to engage with a broad range of ‘great books’ and a variety of genres of ethical reflection. The Moralists always sat very well alongside Tragedy, as Part II opened out into wider literary and intellectual traditions, while a small number of students with pronounced theoretical interests combined the Moralists with the paper in the History and Theory of Criticism, which nearly all those named here also taught. It remains to be seen how the reorganisation of the structure of papers in Part II that came into effect this year will affect the fortunes of each of its constituent papers hereafter; there is a risk that the Moralists paper will seem to have been subtly downgraded, perhaps over time reducing the numbers who opt for it. Those numbers have been broadly stable in recent decades, and the paper has clearly met a need for those students who have wanted to combine their study of the conventional forms of English literature with more philosophical, ethical, and intellectualhistorical interests.

Naturally, I hope the paper continues to thrive for many more years yet, but given this change (and - a more personal perspective - given that I retired at the end of September 2014), this seems a good moment to attempt to preserve some record of the life thus far of this much-loved paper. So, if you have any reminiscences of your experience of taking it, or simply want to record its importance to you during your study of English here, please write to me, either by email to sc107@cam.ac.uk or by post to the English Faculty, 9 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP. ‘The Moralists paper seemed scary at first, but in the end I just loved it.’

Discuss.

Stefan Collini

O

n 11th November 1918, at precisely 11 a.m. British time - 12 noon German time - the infernal noise of the First World War came to an abrupt end. Almost everywhere in the war zones, the machinery of warfare stopped at the agreed moment. Those present found the experience eerie. The greatest war in history ended not with a bang, nor a whimper, but with the most profound sound of all: silence.

And after that silence - what? Käthe Kollwitz's sculpture, The Grieving Parents (1932), now in the Vladso cemetery in Belgium, was one response to that silence; her youngest son Peter had been killed in October 1914 and is buried nearby. The many ways in which Kollwitz and other British and German artists and writers addressed, questioned, and remembered the Armistice and its silence are explored in The Silent Morning: Culture and Memory after the Armistice, a collection of essays edited by Trudi Tate and Kate Kennedy (2013).

Trudi Tate english.cam.ac.uk

7

Stirbitch

‘K

now your own small patch,’ writes Iain Sinclair in London Orbital (2002) ‘and the rest of the world becomes readable.’ But readability is only possible when localised, empirical knowledge of a landscape is underscored by a shared cultural memory or, as the Sufi scholar Henri Corbin suggests, is rendered ‘imaginal’ by a set of established mythopoeic resources.

One such terrain that remains unread in such terms is Stourbridge Common, situated at the Eastern boundary of Cambridge on pasture between Newmarket Road and the River Granta.

For more than 700 years this hidden and marginal space hosted a fair - known originally as Steresbregge, from a cattle crossing over Coldham’s Brook, and latterly as Sturbridge or Stirbitch. It was awarded a Royal Charter in 1199.

Originally founded to support the inhabitants of the local Leper Hospital, the Fair rapidly outgrew its host to become a event of Northern European significance and an epicentre for many forms of cultural and biological transaction (hops brought to the Fair from Kent in 1624 today grow feral on the Common). The bulk of the internal trade of Britain flowed to this site; currents of people and information accompanied the goods. Stirbitch was an entrepôt to Europe via the Wash, the mid-Anglian pivot of the four quarters, and a radiating node of the medieval and early-modern mental map. ‘Stourbridge Fair, is not only the greatest in the whole nation, but in the world,’ declared Daniel Defoe in A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724), recognising, even at its nascent ebb, ‘a well-fortified city [with] the least disorder and confusion . . . that can be seen anywhere with so great a concourse of people.’

The Fair was the inspiration for John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) - “all that is there sold, or that comes thither is vanity . . . This fair is no new erected business; but a thing of ancient standing” - and the source for Newton’s optical instruments and for Byron’s bear. Ned Ward of Grub Street (‘The London Spy’) supplies a more profane commentary in A Step to Stir-Bitch Fair (1700) which anticipates the stance of Baudelaire’s flâneur and is earthed in the ‘vice, merchandize, and

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The Leper Chapel of St Mary Magdalene in Barnwell

amusements [that] draw the Cambridge youth, London traders, Lynn whores and abundance of ubiquitarian strollers, all [of whom contribute] something to either the pleasure or profit of one another.’

In addition to mirroring the town’s binary tensions, with Corporation and University proclaiming separate opening ceremonies, the Fair’s historical development suggests an analogue of the movement from an economy of subsistence to that of surplus and, by the nineteenth century, the formalised business of pleasure. The stress on trade is subsumed by that of spectacle in Henry Gunning’s 1854 account, which records freak shows parading dwarves, giants, faeries, animal menageries, fortune-telling pigs, dogs solving arithmetical problems, waxworks (including a life-sized nude woman), rope dancers, puppet shows, tumbling and slack-wire performances and astronomical clocks, all of which were subject to fines and attempts at prohibition by the University.

Today the site yields neither presence nor knowledge of this temporary polis, other than in the Norman husk of the Leper Chapel of St Mary Magdalene in Barnwell and a small annual commemoration by the charity ‘Cambridge Past, Present and Future’ (www.cambridgeppf.org). Patchily documented in local newspapers beyond reports of prosecutions for mis-selling

or inexplicable violence, and all but unrepresented visually -- as is often the case with rural rituals -- the Fair comprises an acute instance of culture without archive. The space yields no apophenia; no cumulative signs of sediment or ruin that might allow the mind to locate itself against a referential field; and no historiographic privilege of word or artefact for interpreting urban subjectivity.

The signifying potential of this liminal zone is therefore frustrated with little to grip beyond survivals of the Fair’s ephemeral avenues in the names of local streets (Garlic, Oyster and Mercers Row).

This is consistent with an event which annually performed its own erasure. “In less than a week,” notes Defoe, ‘there is scarce any sign left that there has been such a thing there, except by the heaps of dung and straw and other rubbish which is left behind, trod into the earth, and which is good as a summer’s fallow for dunging the land.’ The decline of the Fair also marked the permanent end of community experience afforded by the ‘grotesque body’ of carnival which, to Mikhail Bakhtin, signals a zone of declassification: a theatre for shifted shapes, confounded categories and counterfeited roles, where gaps in identity proliferate away from sanctioned urban rhythms of labour and leisure.

Stirbitch could not be further from

the staged ‘heritage’ sets of cities that encode memory within a space as a means of legitimising the identities imposed upon individuals and groups.

Poised between orders both official and countercultural, the question of vanishing necessarily informs any attempt to represent the deletion of a seven-century continuity of experience, a practice ironically consistent with the medieval refusal to memorialise the burial sites of lepers. We are left with superimpositions within material space of layers of nothing: of an absence of presence, or presence of absence.

The site thus presents itself as a mnemonic to reflect more widely upon the relationship between habitat, performance and cultural memory. As the subject itself expressly concerns performance—an act taking place inside the constraints of temporal and temporary space—any ensuing encounter demands a complementary methodology. To perform the Fair is an act of haunting, where the reinscription of the past upon the terrain of the present goes beyond representation

into enactment, and beyond mirroring into witnessing; where signs spectrally emerge and instantly dissolve. Such an approach lies in contradistinction to the theorist Henri Lefebvre’s admission of the social geographer’s inevitable defeat in that texts and maps can never transcend social discourse, and always reiterate a ‘Cartesian grid’ abstracted from the lived sense of place.

A resulting imaginary of the Fair’s unique formation might yield insights into the spatial performance of social life and the affective ties between people and the physical contours of the land.

This might, in turn, address questions of policymaking concerned with the relationship between extant sites and their ‘disappeared’ events, which troubles conventional distinctions between product and process. This is implicit within UNESCO’s adoption in 2003 of the Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage that extends the definition of history to embrace expressive forms carried within cultural practices, including festive events.

Embodied forms of knowledge are then

always in situ, which, by coincidence, is the name of the experimental theatre group (www.insitutheatre.co.uk) that stages productions in the Leper Chapel.

Performance here takes on a radical imperative. To conjure Stirbitch is to incite the experience of a fully participatory habitat that throws into relief a consumerist culture of passive spectatorism, where the encoding of labour and ecological damage in production is beyond view or detection.

The Fair affords a portal for imagining alternative forms of sociability and encounter. For the continuities and ruptures inscribed within a restless landscape create a world that its inhabitants know and are shaped by -- and in the textures of which they dwell.

Michael Hrebeniak Michael is College Lecturer and Director of Studies of English, and Admissions Tutor (Arts) at Wolfson College. He will be working on a monograph and film about Stourbridge Fair as a CRASSH Early Career Fellow during Lent 2015.

Library News Summer 2014 - ten years after the Faculty Library opened in the new West Road building - brought about a revamping of the entrance and issue desk area. Now completely self-service for borrowing and returning (and self-service fine payments on the horizon), the library staff want the new desk area to be focused on helping students and academics with the other more important queries that they have.

We want to maintain our friendly and approachable service and by separating out functions of our space for users, we have already seen the positive impact of the recent changes.

Right: David Rushmer, Helen Murphy, Charlotte Hoare and Libby Tilley at the new Faculty Library entrance desk.

Photograph ©Jamie Tilley www.jamietilleyphotography.co.uk english.cam.ac.uk

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We Remember Marie Horine Axton 1937–2013 Show-biz was in her blood.

Marie was born in smalltown Ohio, where her parents, trapped by the Great Depression, joined a troupe of puppeteers with college friends. Marie, an only child, sat in the touring van among the marionettes for Taming of a Shrew and Peer Gynt. During long tours she lived with her grandparents who had a one-horse lumber yard. After the War, the puppeteers went to New York to the 1947 World Trade Fair. The puppets flopped on Broadway but Chuck wrote jokes for radio and television to support his own playwrighting. Marie slept in a closet in the entrance hall of a two-roomed apartment above a bar, shared with another family. Times got better and they moved to Central Park West. Marie went to New Lincoln School, played flute in Columbia College’s summer orchestra, crossed the Atlantic on the Liberté at sixteen to improve her French and discover Food.

At Radcliffe - the women’s college of Harvard – she majored in History and Literature (England, France, Russia) and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1959, a year abroad at Girton, taken to gain perspective on life choices, became half a century.

She struck us freshmen as grown up and exotic but full of enthusiasm; she was unfazed by Girton’s lack of heating, by her tiny north-facing cell in Orchard Wing, by the hundred-yard dash to a bathroom, stove or washing machine, by the food (macaroni cheese with rice and mashed potato was a staple). These were no impediment to a passionate life of the mind. The college had a wonderful library and outstanding teachers in English: Joan Bennett (metaphysical poets, George Eliot) was later our neighbour; Mary Ann Radzinowicz (Milton) and Anne Righter Barton (Shakespeare) were new from America; M.C. Bradbrook (Elizabethan drama, later Mistress of the College) was Marie’s staunchest supporter.

By Easter term 1960, when the Orchard lured me to Girton daily for tennis and reading under the apple blossom, Marie and I had staged medieval plays in the Eagle pub yard and toured the Wye Valley in my

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ancient Austin Seven: we knew that we wanted to spend our lives together. Thanks largely to Ottilie Hancock’s scholarship fund, Marie stayed to take Part II of the English Tripos, graduating in 1961, a year ahead of me, and started research on Shakespeare and the Inns of Court revels, supervised by M.C. Bradbrook. We married in 1962, surviving the Great Freeze of 1963 in a rare centrally-heated flat. Myles and Lucy were born, we completed two PhDs in four years and began supervising. Childrearing and the Remington typewriter were shared by shifts.

When Marie’s mother died and I got a fellowship at Christ’s, she put family first. While the children were at school she worked in the garden shed, turning her thesis into The Queen’s Two Bodies (1977).

It went on to win the Royal Historical Society’s Whitbread Prize and has been seminal in the subject. Marie was elected to a Research Fellowship at Newnham College, where she remained until her early retirement in 1999. Many Newnham English students will remember her Shakespeare teaching and her enthusiasm for drama. For twenty years she chaired the Theatre Syndicate (overseeing the ADC) and was Trustee of CU Opera Society. In 1977, Marie and Raymond Williams edited English Drama: Forms and Development.

Essays in Honour of M.C. Bradbrook, which went into its third printing in 2010.

In 1979 Marie became Junior Proctor of the University, the first woman in the office at either Cambridge or Oxford. Not content with mere administration – at which she was formidable – she wrote a pamphlet for the Undergraduate Societies Syndicate on how to keep accounts. For praelectors in the Senate House, she compiled a pictorial record of academic dress, with swatches of silk and baize from university tailors. She designed her own proctorial dress (Tudor black velvet) and knitted so as not to waste time in the Council of the Senate.

In 1984 Marie was appointed Assistant Lecturer, then Lecturer, in the Faculty. She was centrally involved for many years in the Faculty’s ground-breaking MPhil in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, teaching textual studies and nurturing work on the history of the book and the material text. This particular Cambridge tradition has, over time, done much to reorient the study of English Renaissance literature, and

Marie's legacy is seen clearly in the Centre for Material Texts (www.english.cam.ac.uk/ cmt) and the Faculty's new Part II paper ‘Material Renaissance’.

Marie continued to work on Elizabethan drama and manuscript studies.

Together we founded the Tudor Interludes - editions of fifteen plays from the 1530s.

In retirement Marie founded and edited Renaissance Texts From Manuscript, a series for which many of her former graduate students contributed scholarly editions. A project on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and the iconography of time led her to work on Petrarch and his first translators - ‘Triumphs of English’: Henry Parker, Lord Morely, Translator to the Tudor Court: New Essays in Interpretation, which she coedited with James P. Carley, was published in 2000. Her bibliographical studies ranged from the Elizabethan lawyers, Edmund Plowden and Thomas Norton, to paper-making in James VI's Scotland, to Hemingway's unpublished manuscripts.

Most vacations meant filial trips to New York. But a fortunate break in the Channel Islands in 1979 led us to undertake the creation of a historical archive for the Seigneur of Sark. Our Calendar was published by HMSO in 1992. Fascination with the Sark discoveries led to retirement there, to conservation of the Elizabethan windmill and to setting up a museum and archive library. Marie became the first librarian and archivist of La Société Sercquaise and recovered Sark's earliest court records, which had been lost for 200 years.

After ten years suffering from Parkinson’s Disease and dementia, Marie died peacefully in January this year. I continue our joint work in Sark and take delight in the visits of our six grandchildren and their parents.

Richard Axton, with some additions from Gavin Alexander and Kasia Boddy

Anne Barton 1933–2013 By the time I came to Girton as a Research Fellow in the mid-sixties Anne was already an established presence. Yet ‘established’ isn’t the right

word for the free-spirited, witty, elegant young woman who became my immediate colleague and friend. I remember her room with its spinet (or was it a harpsichord?), the beautiful green thick wine glasses that were part of her hospitality, the trees outside the windows, an air of freedom and of larger worlds beyond. She often went barefoot; she dressed with ease and precision. She moved like a dancer. She laughed a lot and she made us all laugh too. She was shrewd and serious in her assessments of our pupils and their promise.

She concerned herself with their needs and was formidable in her criticism. Girton in those days was still a little etiolated in its atmosphere and Anne never took too seriously the demands that the college made towards conformity. She didn’t eat in Hall because she liked her privacy and –as she said- her steak and red wine of an evening.

But she was generously accessible to her students and to those of us who worked with her. There was always a tonic sense in Anne’s presence of how comedy alerts us to the world, but how it grates close alongside sadness, sometimes tragedy.

In 1972 Anne left Girton to take up a Chair at Bedford College, University of London, and to live more of the time with John Barton. During the period that Anne was at Girton we were still a women’s college. We still in those days had a corner in brilliant young women because the other colleges were not yet mixed. Anne could be exasperated by the cavalier abilities of our students and she was a sharp-eyed Director of Studies, pincering those who missed supervisions and expected native wit and public school charm to do it all for them.

She was also stalwart in her support of those who needed it.

I particularly remember that quality.

For example: one of our most gifted undergraduates became pregnant in her third year as the outcome of an undergraduate romance and the college took for granted that she must go down.

Even worse, her local council withdrew her grant. Anne and I knew that Mary needed to graduate that year. She did not have money or resources to delay. Moreover, she was a brilliant young woman of much stamina and was determined to finish Part II. In the event, we persuaded Girton to allow her to complete her degree (though she had to live out under the tutelage of a Fellow) and she got a high 2.1 just before

the baby was born. Mary Cutler went on to be one of the group of scriptwriters who brought The Archers into the modern age. She said to me recently that one of the most valuable things for her at the time was that Anne did not treat the situation as if we had all wandered into the gloom of a Hardy novel. She saw the absurdities in the college’s position as well as the pain and hopefulness in Mary’s. Anne was determined and yet light in the support she gave.

Anne offered our pupils the clear air of a fine mind at work, seriously engaged with their thinking. She was a witty and sustaining colleague. She was also a generous host at Hillborough her beautiful Warwickshire manor house, where we visited her several times with our then-small youngest son (he curled up at ease with the big dog, a thoroughly Tudor pair). I remember her happiness especially there: a fine cook who enjoyed the food she prepared and shared, a musicianly woman walking at liberty among the fields around the house and down to the river.

Gillian Beer

Marilyn Butler 1937–2014 Most of us, who knew Marilyn in many different capacities, will perhaps most immediately recall the vividness of her presence, how she was interested in everything, and made everything seem more interesting; and also her extraordinary warmth and generosity. That vividness and generosity informed her academic life. She energised and she enabled. She was utterly original in her thinking, she asked new questions, she transformed the fields in which she worked. But she was never interested simply in pursuing her own intellectual trajectory. She made the work of a whole succeeding generation of literary scholars possible, not merely because she opened up new fields of enquiry and new ways of seeing, but also because of her warmly encouraging interest in their projects, and the work she did to further their careers.

It is her own work, however, that we should remember first. Much of what Marilyn pioneered has entered into general

currency: to adapt what Virginia Woolf said of Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘her originality has become our commonplace’. So it is worth pausing to stress just how important, and how original, her contribution has been. She took literature seriously as a sophisticated form of thinking about social and political issues, as a distinctive mode of entertaining, refining and testing ideas.

Her first three books on individual authors – Edgeworth, Austen, and Peacock – shed a quite new light on the writings of her subjects by demonstrating the intelligence and the subtlety with which they were participating in lively contemporary debates. Then came Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries, a study of what Marilyn called the ‘various and contradictory’ literature of the romantic period. This was a book that found tens of thousands of readers. It was brief and accessible.

But it was also underpinned by massive scholarship. And, as its reviewers noted, it was quietly revolutionary. It opened up not merely a whole new way of seeing the period it dealt with, but a whole new way of understanding literary history: one that stressed the interconnections between writers, and brought their writing to life by showing how they were responding to one another and to a larger history. That seminal book was to be followed in the 1980s and 90s by a series of major essays on the later romantics: essays that appeared in counterpoint with a second series of hugely influential essays in which Marilyn confronted the theoretical problems that she felt were raised by her work. She was leading the way by then also in the emerging field of feminist scholarship.

She was ahead of the wave in everything. She early saw the importance of proper scholarly editions as essential tools for new thinking. She worked closely with Pickering and Chatto during their early years, recognising the opportunity they brought. With Janet Todd, she produced a pioneering edition of Wollstonecraft; then oversaw editions of Godwin and Edgeworth. Her work on editions for classroom use was also pioneering -making available new versions of Austen, Edgeworth, and above all Frankenstein.

One edition, for Cambridge, of the political prose of the 1790s, opened up an entire field to a new kind of critical scrutiny and shaped future understanding of the period.

In Thatcher’s divided Britain, Marilyn english.cam.ac.uk

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stood for inclusiveness. In her questioning of the accepted canon of literature, in her pioneering editing projects, she brought marginalized writers back into dialogue with better-known ones, illuminating both in the process. Her literary history – drawing as it did on her wide-ranging reading in social and political history, in anthropology, in political theory -- challenged disciplinary boundaries. She deliberately wrote with a clarity that made her writings both influential within the academy and, as Christopher Ricks once put it in a laudatory review, ‘uncondescendingly open to a much larger world.’ For she liked to remember that she was the daughter of a man who wrote for 12 million people every day, Trevor Evans, industrial correspondent of the Daily Express. Her books, especially those on Jane Austen and the Romantics, reached a stratum of the reading public that did not usually read literary criticism but that wanted to think seriously about literature.

Marilyn was inclusive too, in her ready responsiveness to others’ work. She was always quick to see the point and to make connections; genuinely interested, even when that work was very different from her own. ‘Her scepticism was always friendly,’ Paul Hamilton wryly recalls. She was a wonderfully friendly presence at seminars and conferences. Indeed, her infectious sense that all those present were engaged in a shared project changed the nature of such occasions. Stefan Collini remembers of the intellectual history seminar that he and she convened together in Cambridge for seven years: ‘She never went in for the clever logic-chopping put-down when someone made a not very well thoughthrough contribution, but always went out of her way to find something suggestive or useful in the comment. Her warmth was in that sense intellectual as well as personal.’

More formally, she helped to further many book projects and careers, in her work for Cambridge University Press, as editor, with Jim Chandler, of the distinguished series Cambridge Studies in Romanticism; and as a supervisor of countless graduate students.

Underpinning all was her sense of academic work as a collaborative process, of the intellectual life not as a competition but as conversation: a conversation that she found endlessly fascinating.

By the 1980s Marilyn had acquired a world-wide reputation. Romantic studies when she came on the scene was dominated

by Americans: she established a distinctively

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British presence. From the 1980s onwards she lectured internationally, at most of the top dozen American universities and in Australia, India and western Europe.

But her mature career coincided with an unprecedented period of cost-cutting for universities. Like other senior academics she was diverted into vastly‑amplified systems of appraisal and assessment. She didn’t shirk. She sat on national committees; she commented to the press or broadcast on educational and literary topics; on a quite different level, as a Regius professor at Cambridge, she took more than her share of the burden of administrative tasks. And all the time, there was the enormous unsung labour of reading graduate work and book proposals and writing the sharply perceptive references that launched dozens of people on their careers.

Yet Marilyn always remained her own person; she never thought of herself as a star. I remember asking her, a few months after she arrived in Cambridge, how she was finding it. She replied by saying something that most of us have felt, but that I can’t imagine another Regius professor admitting: ‘I live in mortal terror of being found out.’

Her shrewd sense of what was going on in a situation was always tempered by a sense of its comedy. In the heady days of high theorizing, she was, for example, wonderfully funny on her own invisibility as a middle-aged woman, among the leather jackets of the mainly masculine young turks of the left. If she was an intellectual trail-blazer, she was never a solemn or selfimportant one.

In her last years, Marilyn was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. She faced her illness, and she bore it, uncomplainingly; without anger, with extraordinary courage, and even with grace. But she was cut off far too soon from the conversation she loved. It is some small comfort to the many whose work of very different kinds was inspired and made possible by hers to realize that she is still very much part of an ongoing conversation, still a vivid presence in many a debate.

Here, speaking for all, are the words of the authors of two recent major scholarly publications, dedicated to her: Nigel Leask and Philip Connell: ‘This project would have been unthinkable without your inspiration and example…’

Pamela Clemit: ‘For Marilyn Butler, who blazed the trail.’

Heather Glen

Howard Erskine-Hill 1936–2014 My first meeting with Howard was the most intellectually frightening experience of my life. It was the winter of 1993, I was 17 and callow, and Howard and Mark Wormald were interviewing me for possible admission to Pembroke. I was shown into Howard’s room, greeted warmly by Mark, and then realised that of my other interviewer I could see nothing but a silhouette.

This was in the days before interview training: we’re now taught how to set students at their ease, pay attention to the layout of the rooms in which we interview, and generally to offer a feng shui of calm and parity. Not back then. Howard was seated in front of a window through which white winter sunshine poured, backlighting him so that he was only an outline. The outline proceeded to interview me, piercingly. Occasionally there came a lethal twinkle from his spectacles. The event has the clear impress in my memory of all such primal scenes: he asked me about Keats, and I offered inanities about urns and nightingales. He allowed me to talk about Seamus Heaney, which I did with energy but imprecision. And then he asked me about Henry Fielding, and whether I knew why Fielding had turned from drama to prose fiction. By huge chance I did: Walpole’s Theatrical Licensing Act of 1737, a piece of stage legislation that unintendedly changed the course of the English novel.

The silhouette paused briefly and nodded, clearly surprised that I had salted this fact away. It was the straw of hope to which I clung while waiting to hear if an offer was forthcoming.

One was, I came to Pembroke, and for my first year there was not only taught

by Howard, but also found myself his neighbour on N-Staircase: a proximity he bore with remarkable tolerance. In that year I did little to endear myself to Howard, including – unaware of his life’s commitment as a scholar – telling him that the one Augustan I didn’t want to study was Alexander Pope, whom I found ‘tedious’.

Howard was still fond of reminding me of that faux pas nearly twenty years later. It has been one of the consolations of reading the many tributes sent in by Howard’s

former students to learn that I was by no means the only person thus to have calumnied his hero.

Patiently, though, and with the austere passion that characterised much of Howard’s life, he led me – as so many others – into the magnificent intricacies of literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, introducing me to writers of whom I cannot now imagine being innocent: Vaughan, Herbert, Traherne, the antic canticles of Kit Smart and his cat Jeffrey, and the wunderkammerish arcana of Thomas Browne’s prose. Somehow, he made the devotional and political contexts of these distant writers at least visible to us. His knowledge was so exceptional in its density that I felt it first as a reprimand, then as a spur. If it seemed at times that he understood the decades of Jonson or Dryden or Browne more subtly than he did the 1990s, this was itself a form of inspiration, whereby scholarship – after the Paterian example – could act as a kind of time-travel. Jodie Ginsberg, another former student, recalls the same sense of out-ofepochness about him, noting that she would not have been surprised to discover, in the Collected Poems of Alexander Pope, ‘An Epistle to Professor Erskine-Hill’.

Howard’s tastes were by no means confined to the long eighteenth century, however. Although the Derrida affair means that he is recalled unfavourably in certain quarters as an anti-avant-gardeist and a conservative, he could in fact be open both to experiment and to contemporaneity. He was one of the pioneering supporters in the Faculty of the study of what was then called Commonwealth Literature, and he often put difficult modern work in front of his students: I remember Thom Gunn’s poetry of the AIDS crisis, plenty of Beckett, the strange prose mysticisms of Robertson Davies, BS Johnson, even once some Jeremy Prynne.

Approaching a supervision with Howard, whatever the subject, you were always nervous, for you knew that there you would be tested. There was no winging it. Dan Burnstone nicely remembers ‘the steep and echoing climb to Howard’s room, where he would be found sandbagged by stacks of books and papers, the typewriter on the table’. Howard possessed an X-ray vision, which was able to see through flannel and fibs. Ignorance was acceptable to him, but laziness was not.

I speak mostly of my own experience of Howard’s teaching not because I think it to be singular but because I know it to be typical. Time and again, in the memories of former students that have reached me, the same virtues and qualities are mentioned: a generous wish to share knowledge rather than to hoard it. An asceticism of manner that could not disguise a warmth of heart. Courtesy, principle, loyalty. A wit, sharp-edged sometimes; a fondness for comedies of manners both on the page and in life. Patience with confusion, a readiness to teach the average with the same commitment as the brilliant. He was not, certainly not, an easy supervisor, and his manner did not, certainly not, work for every student. There were those who found his shyness to be an aloofness, his distance a kind of chilliness.

But he was, at core, a teacher as well as a scholar. Kate Beales recalls overhearing him saying once, wistfully, that ‘All I want to do is to inspire my students with a love of literature’. Alex Went speaks of a ‘dry but kindly inquisitor who always seemed to carry his learning lightly.’ Nick de Somogyi describes him as ‘a man of utter principle, above all in the spiritual generosity of his – and blessedly our – education (a word for which he lived),’ and notes acutely that Howard wanted ‘to encourage thinking, not acolytes’. Saul Rosenberg recalls him as ‘the single most formative influence on my intellectual life’; Saul went on to write a doctoral thesis on Faulkner, which he dedicated to Howard.

When I graduated, Howard bought me from the market a little late nineteenthcentury edition of Henry Vaughan, bound in soft calfskin, with a gilt owl impressed onto the cover, and an inscription in his slanting copperplate. I still remember my pride at the beauty of the book, and the generosity of the inscription. I later found out that, characteristically, he had bought and inscribed a book for every English graduate that year.

Mine was signed off, ‘In friendship, Howard’. But the notion of becoming friends with Howard was then preposterous. What would we say to each other? What interest could he possibly find in conversation with me? However, like numerous other former students, I did become friends with Howard. It took time – more than a decade in fact; time for me to mature and him to unbend. Though

dissimilar in numerous ways, we shared a city, a profession, a love of literature, and a passion for mountains and mountain culture. We met, talked, drank – usually in the Champion of the Thames. I felt guilty when I did not see him for six months, anxious at his loneliness, aware of my busyness. He was supportive of my writing, about which he wrote me letters I greatly value, and he watched my academic career within Cambridge and the English Faculty with paternal vigilance. More than once, I know, he stepped in to do battle on my behalf, though typically he did not tell me had had done so until long after the conflict had ceased.

In March last year, I took Howard out for lunch. He drank red wine, apologetically, and we talked about Pope, mountains, sailing, Macedonia, and limestone. He wept a little, as he did more and more often in his final years, and as we were bidding farewell he took from his knapsack a huge leather-bound and gilt-tooled book, entitled Footsteps of Dr Johnson, by George Birkbeck Hill, published in 1890, and rich with maps and engravings. He gave the book to me – as he had been giving books, I knew, to others.

It was a means of divesting himself of his chattels as he aged, yes, but also a substitute means of expressing affection, given the difficulty he found in speaking plainly of emotion. ‘To Robert’, the inscription began, and it ended: ‘From his old teacher, Howard Erskine-Hill’.

We embraced awkwardly, my old teacher and I, and that – until the hospital – was the last time I saw him: walking stiffly off down Pembroke Street towards College. It felt that a great distance had been travelled since I first met him as my interviewer, and though I could not help him with his unhappinesses (as no one could help him), I felt intensely glad (as many have felt) first of his teaching, and then of his friendship. The silhouette had been filled in, and the man was unforgettable.

Robert Macfarlane

english.cam.ac.uk

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Read any good books lately?

Members of the English Faculty tell us what books they’ve recently enjoyed.

help me. Incidentally, the communication techniques it describes also work well on spouses, colleagues and students, though if your partner has read it, he may get cross and accuse you of ‘doing that book’ on him.

Kasia Boddy University Lecturer in American Literature and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College If you want to escape cliché, try Lore Segal’s semi-autobiographical novel Her First American (1985). When Ilka Weissnix arrives in New York, she is immediately disappointed for everyone she encounters seems to be a Viennese refugee like herself; she even recognises the fabric on a woman’s dress – ‘those German prewar cottons were like iron and had outlasted Great-Aunt Mali, as well as Ilka’s father, three aunts, four uncles, and two of the cousins who used to gather for Aunt Mali’s afternoons of Kaffee und Gugelhupf”. And so, like so many before her, Ilka decides to head west in search of ‘real America’. Thinking of herself, in Thoreau’s phrase, as a ‘Great Western Pioneer’, Ilka is delighted when her train stops in Nevada , ‘the middle of the New World’. But the man she meets, ‘her first American’, is not a laconic cowboy but a stout, middleaged, angry black intellectual. Cue an unexpected sentimental education.

Michael Hurley University Lecturer in Victorian Literature and Fellow of St Catherine’s College Two books in particular surprised and delighted me this summer: Angela Thirkell's Summer Half (1937), and John Bradshaw's In Defence of Dogs (2012).

I was so taken with Thirkell's airy but mordant wit that I immediately went on to read her autobiography, Three Houses, and her break-through novel, High Rising - but neither seemed to me anything like as good. Then again, I enjoyed Summer Half over a couple of hot, lazy days on holiday with friends in a country house. Whereas back home, with an early autumn (and work commitments) threatening, it is perhaps understandable if Thirkell's world of indolence and idealised folly struck me as more chastening than charming. Context may also have informed my joy at Bradshaw's book (I read it while camping with my family, with my own dog at my

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Helen Murphy Assistant Faculty Librarian

side). But Bradshaw offers science rather than sentimentalism, and so his wise, authoritative and compassionate study is as likely to thrill (those capable of being thrilled by canine science) in any setting.

Amy Morris University Lecturer in American Literature How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish is a book I go back to it every time our household starts to deteriorate into warring factions.

Besides helpful advice, it includes hopeful cartoons that show parents who say really mean things miraculously transforming into paragons of positive communication. Given that the book was first published in 1980, its ideas are not new, but (for me) they are far enough from ‘common sense’ that I am constantly having to relearn them.

Faced with fractious children and my own fraying nerves, I’m struck by the thought that maybe world peace begins with learning how to get along better at home, and this book has been sent to

My recommendation is One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson. It’s pitched as the story of America’s ‘coming of age’, the year Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, Al Capone’s power reached its peak in Chicago, a time of prohibition and the talkies, Mount Rushmore and sensational murder trials, and the Yankees’ best season ever. In Bill Bryson’s hands, though, the ridiculous and the eccentric take centre stage. His trademark lies in the way in which he manages to elevate how frequently Charles Lindbergh went to the loo during the flight (twice, apparently) to the same status as the flight itself. It’s hardly serious history, but for anyone interested in what Calvin Coolidge’s valet rubbed on his head over breakfast, or how a former housewife from California took down some pretty scary mobsters, or why you probably don’t know the name of the first woman to swim the English Channel, then One Summer: America 1927 is a hugely entertaining and completely fascinating diversion.

Adrian Poole Professor of English, Fellow of Trinity College A new discovery last year was the great novel Beware of Pity (1939; German title: Ungeduld des Herzens) by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, previously only a name to me. It was recommended in the course of a supervision on the Tragedy paper by an exceptionally clever and well-read Part II student. Not the only such good tip from him and indeed many others over the years in the twoway street that is teaching-and-learning.

CORRECTION On page 4 of the 2013 issue we mentioned ‘grapheme’ when we meant ‘graphene’. Thanks to Paul Humfryes for pointing this out.

Your Say After reading last year’s Newsletter, many of you wrote responding to the issue and with your memories of Helena Shire and other Faculty members. We include some here, and look forward to responses to this year’s issue. We only have room, however, to include pieces with a Faculty connection.

Peter Baker (Kings 1962) Ali Smith’s piece on her book Shire catapulted me back to the Autumn Term of 1962 when the new English students at King’s made their way (in their gowns) for their first tutorial. Unexpectedly, the tutorial was not to be held in the College or any other University building but at the tutor’s house. We were to embark on medieval literature and the tutor was Helena Shire. We gathered nervously in her sitting room (in our gowns and she in hers). Mrs Shire was friendly but slightly formidable. She considered we should start with Chaucer as we would all be familiar from our A-levels with at least one Canterbury Tale. We murmured agreement.

‘Good,’ she said in her lilting Scottish brogue, ‘We shall begin then this week, with The Canterbury Tales.’ ‘Which tale?’ one of us asked tentatively. ‘All of them,’ she replied with a twinkle in her eye. And thus our journey through English Literature at Cambridge began. The Canterbury Tales in a week, Troilus and Criseyde, the next week; the Poems, the next week; then Dunbar and Henryson. And later of course with other tutors, great authors were swallowed in a week. I was fortunate enough to have inspiring English tutors in John Broadbent, John Gross, Tony Tanner, George Steiner (very formidable) and charismatic lecturers: Broadbent again (‘Paradise Lost was the birth of the blues’), Raymond Williams, John Stephens, F.R. Leavis, C.S. Lewis. But it was Mrs Shire who set us on the path of intensive reading, lively discussion and incisive writing and, above all, an ever increasing love of literature. And, after a lifetime of teaching, lecturing in, advising on and inspecting English in schools and colleges, here I am fifty years on still reading.

Gill Foulds (St Edmunds 1980) In 1980, I was the second-oldest undergraduate in Cambridge, so I was told, and I read English from a gloriously eccentric base at St Edmunds College. St Eds put me in a group of undergrads at

Fitzwilliam and we were lucky enough to go in a gaggle to Helena Shire’s house for some special lessons. Helena’s enthusiasm and scholarship lit up the medieval period in brilliant colours that have never faded for me. Upon reflection, I think that her wild, spontaneous approach to life and to teaching encouraged me to behave as she did in the very happy years I spent after Cambridge, teaching in St Andrews and in Bristol. At Helena’s house, we never knew what would happen next. On one occasion she took all the men upstairs to help her turn a heavy mattress. On another, a lady in an unremarkable hat walked past the house and the lesson stopped. ‘Oh look!’

Helena cried, ‘There goes Queenie Leavis!’ and we had a kind of reverent silence before medieval discussions resumed. Helen made a great point about the uncertainty of life. This, of course, was such a strong obsession in her specialist area of study.

The Grim Reaper was always on her mind but the result of this was her infectiously exuberant enjoyment of every minute that was given to her and to us. No one was given a cheque, as far as I know, but Helena’s influence proved priceless to me.

Valerie Grove (Girton 1965) Anne Barton - then Anne Righter - was our Director of Studies at Girton in 1965.

Our other great teacher was Mary Anne Radzinowicz. It was a very enlightening experience to be taught by Mrs Righter from Vassar, author of Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, and Mrs Rats, as we called her, author of American Colonial Prose, from Columbia and Radcliffe. I think the American element added a lot to our perspective - and they both had an amazing glamour. They were quite unlike. Bobby-Anne Righter ‘like a sexy Lady Macbeth’ as Simon Hoggart wrote in Varsity; Mrs Rats looked like Lauren Bacall. Both smoked throughout supervisions: Anne Righter Gauloises; Mrs Rats Consulate Menthol. Mrs Rats told my peer group that since I spent my time on Varsity I was obviously only interested in writing journalese - and I started in Fleet Street two days after degree day and have been there ever since (mainly The Times now).

Alison Light (Churchill 1973) I have many memories of Helena Shire she taught me in 1973 - I remember her kindness: when I had bronchitis from the foul Cambridge weather my first winter and was laid up in the (very modern and comfortable) sick bay in Churchill she came to visit and brought me a box of Meltis Newberry Fruits which I had never seen before and thought both exciting and glamorous. Our English group used to go for medieval translation classes and be addressed formally - in my case - as ‘Miss Light’. She had a catering size tin of Maid Marian coffee - vile but enjoyable - and made us all a cup. Then she would stand at the bottom of the stairs and call, ‘Tedday, Tedday?, would y’like some coffee, Tedday?’

Answer came there none and we were all convinced ‘Teddy’ didn't exist. The classes were in her home in Bulstrode Gardens close to F.R. Leavis who was sometimes encountered walking up the Huntingdon Road at a perpendicular angle into the wind, and on one alarming occasion pottering in his garden. I also remember that it was Helena Shire who once told me - when I was in the sickbay, I think, and feeling low - that what mattered in the end was not ‘having a career’ but ‘having a LIFE’. I shall always be grateful for that.

Alexis Lykiard (King’s 1957) Cambridge English in the late 50s/early 60s was an invaluable ethos for a wouldbe writer, and King’s itself proved a most stimulating college. I appreciated too, how lucky and privileged I was to be there – particularly as a former Greek refugee who’d learned English only from six onward. John Raven, KC Tutor then, said mine was the first Open English Scholarship the college had ever awarded. At 17, I sensed myself some sort of foreign anomaly or historical milestone: later I guessed his, and John Broadbent’s, congratulations were nice ways of keeping me up to the mark, with a burden of responsibility to achieve the First they expected of me. Broadbent, who was then in charge of our English course, was a distinguished Milton specialist, a lecturer, critic and editor with a wide-ranging intellect and formidable analytical skills. But Tony Tanner (like english.cam.ac.uk

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myself a new arrival at King’s), was younger than most of the other dons, and had a very different style and approach.

Supervisions, discussions and drinks with him were altogether more relaxed. Witty, encouraging and enthusiastic, he seemed like some ideally convivial contemporary who shared one’s own pleasure in cinema, jazz and whole areas of literature (American, for instance) at that time almost entirely excluded from the English curriculum. He accordingly brought out the best in me and so many others. Tony proved a helpful adviser too during the year I edited Granta. To one issue, in fact, he contributed poetry, and a fine article entitled – ironically now, since all who knew Tony surely dislike the past tense when referring to him – ‘The Strong Present Tense in American Literature’.

Just how inspirational a teacher and friend Tony Tanner was, I tried to suggest in the Introduction to my Selected Poems 1956-96; he’s also mentioned with affection in my 2006 book Jean Rhys Afterwords. I shall always remember Tony as the best teacher and critic of English-language literature anyone could wish to have encountered.

Joe Palmer (Trinity 1950) I read English at Trinity in the early ‘50s. ‘The Commission’ by Ali Smith stimulated a warm rush of nostalgia for those years. Helena Shire was my supervisor for two years and, although I enjoyed my English studies, I have since regretted being generally indolent and failing to use fully opportunities for wide reading. Supervisions with Helena were delightfully different from any similar encounter with other senior members of the University. They normally took place at her lovely home in Hobson’s Conduit,

and I was always very conscious that it was very much a family home. In good summer weather we would recline on rugs on the lawn in a semi-circle around Helena. She wore her wide-ranging scholarship lightly and elegantly, and incidental comments made during the supervision opened small windows on her underlying humanity, for example a passing comment on support for the Jarrow hunger marchers whilst she was studying in London, and her relaxed and often humourous relationship with her daughters. Warmest thanks to Ali Smith for reviving these recollections and writing so simply and beautifully about Helena.

David Pirie (Queen’s) I found Kristen Treen’s ‘At the Museum of the Confederacy’, a small part of her work on modern memory and the American Civil War, very much to my taste. I'm sure too, that many readers interested in American Literature and Military History will find this PhD fascinating. I read English at Queens’ College in the early 70s after agonising about whether instead I should have chosen History since as a young boy I was particularly interested in the American Civil War. My great great uncle, Archibald Forbes, was a renowned war correspondent in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and two of my favourite writers were Walt Whitman and Ernest Hemingway. It would have been ideal if I had been able to combine English and History along the path taken by Kristin Treen. She explains the importance of material texts concisely and excitingly with two examples, one in particular: ‘The half-finished sock, constructed from unravelled Union tents,

constitutes for me a kind of text in itself, an act of creation which tells a story about protest and subdued silence.’ I wish that in my time at Cambridge the Centre for Material Texts had been a flagship there. I look forward to reading the book of the PhD in due course. And well done the English Faculty for helping to produce such fine research. It beats the old style, including research along the lines of ‘Milton's Uses of the SemiColon’. All the best for further volumes of ‘News from the Faculty of English’.

Ruth Saunders (Selwyn 1978) Reading 9 West Road is always a pleasure and reminds me of the many terrific teachers I encountered while at Cambridge. In the most recent edition Claire Wilkinson’s note on her PhD on the literature of financial crises stood out in several respects. First, her topic has obvious crossover appeal beyond the academy. Secondly, she spent a couple of years working in the city before starting her PhD. And thirdly, she writes with a clarity and brevity that are unusual in academic prose. May I suggest that these points are related directly to the discussion on the future of research in Professor Trotter's editorial? Individuals who start a PhD after work experience, and who, as is common in the United States, where I live, self-fund or find research scholarships, not only bring valuable learning and insights to their research. They have also demonstrated initiative and drive that will help them in their academic careers, if they wish for them. These are the types of students that the University should be seeking out and welcoming with open arms.

What. Where. When.

The Faculty has hosted a wide variety of other events in the last year, and recordings of some of them can be found online. You can, for example, listen to Caryl Phillips’s Graham Storey Lecture on ‘James Baldwin, Richard Avedon and the Pursuit of Celebrity’ - http://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1667315 - or see what happened at the Writing Britain 500-1500 conference, which took place in July, and which, while, focusing on manuscripts and scribes, was the first Faculty event to have a live Twitter feed (#WritBrit2014).

WordFest has renamed itself the Cambridge Literary Festival www.cambridgeliteraryfestival.com. The majority of events take place in December and in April.

In March 2015, the Poetry and Memory Project - www.poetryandmemory.com - will be put on a conference at Homerton College, bringing together researchers, educationalists, poets and performers to discuss the place and value of memorisation and recitation.

To find out what Faculty members are contributing to the University’s annual Festival of Ideas, see www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk For up-to-date information on more events of interest in the Faculty and beyond, look at our website and calendar www.english.cam.ac.uk/events.