East Oxford — Old Marston excepted — is bland and unremarkably modern in character. To the south lie Cowley and the British Leyland works.
Auden’s poem on the city perfectly captures the spirit of the place, the
Stones in those towers … utterly
Satisfied with their weight.
And, in the next verse, fixes Cowley in so far as it impinges on the minds of the University’s population:
Outside, some factories, then a whole green county.
“Some factories,” a meagre parenthesis for such a significant portion of the city and whose inhabitants probably supply 90 percent of the “town” in the famous Oxford polarity. Indeed town and gown seem as irredeemably divided as ever, almost as if some secret treaty has been signed, sectioning the city into discrete no-go areas almost as effectively as Derry. The Broad, St Giles and the Turl remain sedate and studenty on the most frantic Bank Holiday, while Cornmarket and Queen Street bulge with shoppers and garish consumerism.
Yet Cowley has developed its own character regardless, and the Cowley Road is probably the most heterodox and interesting thoroughfare — from a sociological point of view — that the city possesses. Its punks, rude boys and rastamen populate the edges of the University’s hallowed precincts and occasional epidemics of “student-bashing” provide more potent reminders of the “town’s” virile existence. And, nowadays, from the lawns of Garsington you can see the BL gasometer heavy on the horizon.
In the street where I live the graffiti on the walls says “Ordine Nuovo,” “PCI” and “Autonomia Operaia”—the lunatic extremes of Italian politics come to north Oxford. This year has definitely belonged to Italy, edging out France in Oxford’s huge floating population of language students. Near my flat there’s a school which runs summer courses for foreign students and from the window of the room where I work I can see them trooping up and down the street — vivid, lissom teenagers, smoking and lounging, the boys crass and arrogant, the girls sticking together, arms linked, eyes full of suspicion, or else dragging their feet, carrying their bordeom like rucksacks.
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.