William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

Every Friday the school runs a discotheque and for an hour or so in the evening an astonishing transformation occurs in the nearby side streets. The disco throbs away in the gym and all the boys disappear — waiting inside, I assume. Hesitantly, the girls gather in the quiet roads in small groups, affecting indifference, but undoubtedly lured by the occasion. The T-shirts, running shoes and jeans have been abandoned for jumpsuits, lurid boob-tubes, high heels and make-up. There is little conversation, just an elaborate nonchalance as they gather, and an astonishing frisson of pubertal sexual tension charging the air. And then, as if on some silent signal, they are gone, and the gymnasium booms to the music. I’ve no idea what happens at the disco; I assume, like all adolescent experiences, that it’s nothing like as exciting as the anticipation. It goes on well into the night and sometimes I ring up to complain about the noise.

When I first came to Oxford I was — as I think everyone is when they arrive — in awe of the place and its occupants. Starting a thesis proved harder than I thought and like most baffled post-graduates I convinced myself things were going well by drawing up reading lists of staggering erudition and irrelevancy. Cautiously peering round the upper reading room in the Bodleian it seemed to me that everyone else there knew exactly what they were doing. Most of my companions seemed tense, humourless types, immersed in their work with a kind of obsessive ascetic fervour which was not a little depressing. Still, in the endless summer of 1976 it wasn’t too hard to forget them and the frontiers of scholarship I was meant to be pushing back. The daily heat was as heavy as a glass door and the quadrangle lawns were parched and ochrous. I saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream in St John’s College gardens, cycled about in my shirtsleeves, went punting. The Emperors’ Heads around the Sheldonian were renewed, Magdalen Tower hadn’t yet assumed its mantle of scaffolding and the excellent Browns Restaurant had opened on the Woodstock Road to wild acclaim as the queues of Oxford’s bright young things testified.

Steadily, remorselessly, I got to know more and more about Percy Bysshe Shelley and the first faltering chapters of my thesis were set down and a fascination with my subject began to grow. I came some way towards understanding the blinkered vigour of those scribbling away around me. I also got to know Shelley a lot better than I ever expected when I discovered a hitherto unremarked and unpublished piece of Shelley marginalia. Sandwiched between some speculations on Democritus’ age and a rough draft of “The Colliseum” in an uncatalogued folder of loose holograph sheets I came across a curious sketch, the significance of which was not immediately apparent. I turned the folder upside down and there it was: a page-sized phallus drawn with all the attention to detail of a bog-door graffitist. Such are the more arcane insights scholarship provides.

It wasn’t until I came to Oxford that I met my first real writers, though none of them actually lived in the place. I did some work for Isis in my first year and in the course of this had the good fortune to meet and interview Gore Vidal, Martin Amis and Frederic Raphael. All were genial and encouraging, and thus encouraged I entered a short story for an Isis competition judged by Iris Murdoch and John Bayley. I came third. The next year I entered another — this time judged by Roald Dahl — and came second. I wisely didn’t go in for a third, thinking the upward progression in itself a sufficient sign. I started sending stories into magazines. I felt that my big break had come — and that first truly public acceptance is a vital confidence booster — when London Magazine agreed to take a story for its summer double issue. That was in 1978.

A lot of writers live in and around Oxford, quite a few of them novelists — Iris Murdoch, A. N. Wilson, Susan Hill, Brian Aldiss and John Wain, for instance. There are probably many more but I don’t know of them. Novelists, it seems to me, keep themselves very much to themselves and exhibit none of the solidarity and establish none of the social relationships that the poets do. There are many more poets in Oxford than novelists, and most people who do any form of imaginative writing here write poetry, I would say. Indeed, all the writers I know or am acquainted with in Oxford are poets. And of all the writing forms it is the one currently flourishing here. Several highly regarded poets live in the city or teach at the University and the “poetry scene,” such as it is, appears fairly active — lots of readings, a successful festival, encouragement for young writers and so on.

I have done all my writing in Oxford. My first novel and my story collection were written here, and, so it seems, my second novel will be too. But none of them has been about, or set in the city. Just why this should be so, I’m not exactly sure, because generally the place has a strong inspirational effect on writers. It’s not so much a question of prudence but is rather, I think, a lack of curiosity. Perhaps it’s also because when I started to write the rush of blood to the head that Oxford supplies had more or less spent itself. And again, the things that make Oxford special — its attractions and advantages — are so self-evident, have been so frequently described, eulogized and written up in all manner of ways that it doesn’t take all that long for Oxford to seem terribly familiar. It’s the Manhattan syndrome again: everything you expect of the place is here, right down to the last cliché. A deadening air of predictability settles over the city. Some views and buildings retain the occasional power to enchant, but — with rare exceptions — most of the people you meet about its streets can be categorized with a frightening swiftness, to such an extent that latterly what have come to engage my attention more and more are the exceptions to its magic lantern image. There are the glue-sniffers in Bonn Square; there’s the Madam who controls the tarts in Jericho, the witty nutters patrolling the coffee bars cadging money off terrified tourists (“If I wasn’t mad,” I heard one bellow at a horrified couple, “how would you know you were normal, eh?”); and the thirteen shabby drunks I once saw — including a gap-toothed young woman — passing round a sherry bottle in unconscious parody on the Radcliffe Camera lawn …

Two or three months ago I was walking down Brasenose Lane — the alley that cuts between Turl Street and Radcliffe Square. There’s nothing special about this featureless passageway. At the Turl Street end people park motorbikes in it and your hair is likely to be ruffled by gusts of Mazola-laden air from the Exeter College kitchen extractor fans. A bit further down it gets cool and dark where it’s bounded on one side by the high walls of Exeter’s garden and on the other by Brasenose and is overhung by thick plane and chestnut trees. I quite like Brasenose Lane, it’s badly lit and at night can be quite spooky and evocative. During the day it acts as a kind of shadowy prelude to the more evident splendours of the Rad-cliffe Camera, the Bodleian, All Souls and the University Church which confront you at the end of your gentle descent from the Turl. On this occasion I was about halfway down when I spotted three soggy heaps huddled together at the foot of the Exeter garden wall. They were three derelict drunks — Oxford has a sizeable population — sleeping off their midday soak into oblivion, cider and sherry bottles scattered about like shell cases round a gun emplacement. One of them saw me coming, hauled himself to his feet and lurched towards me. “Hey. Hey, peace man,” he yelled, weaving up, an exceedingly filthy Scottish hippie, bombed out of his skull, about twenty-four or twenty-five. “Hey, man,” he breathed. “Ah’ve written a pome. Wantae read it?”