—
Ananda and Hilary Burton didn’t get on. This was established early, though there was a show of encouraging cordiality on Dr. Burton’s side. Ananda wasn’t decided if he wanted to have sex with Dr. Burton, though at times he thought he did, but not at the cost of his dignity as a young man of letters (that’s how he conceived of himself) — and he wasn’t sure if she wanted to have sex with him, though there were times he thought she did, despite (or maybe impelled by) their unspoken animosity. The problem should have been clear, but it wasn’t, at least to Ananda: that Dr. Burton was a feminist, and a rather sophisticated advocate of French feminist critical theory; and that she saw Ananda as an unreconstructed Romantic, thin but glowing with universal ideals and an unforgiving discontent with all he deemed unworthy of “literature.” Ananda, typical of his gender, took “literature” as a given, a sacred fact. Imagine his confusion when he had to write his first tutorial essay on Troilus and Criseyde, and discovered that the word “poet,” as he understood it, was quite inappropriate to Chaucer. Nevertheless, he decided he’d ignore this, and gave a positive spin to his piece, pretending Chaucer was a Romantic poet. At the tutorial, Dr. Burton, trying to hide her exasperation, brandishing his essay, said: “You write very eloquently, Mr. Sen”—it took three meetings for her to graduate coquettishly to his first name; she’d even asked whether she was pronouncing the simple monosyllabic surname accurately—“and what I like is that — unlike my other students — you’ve taken the poem for what it fundamentally is: a love story!” How could he not? He was a passionate apologist for love. He was like a virginal Victorian girclass="underline" love and sex existed in separate compartments. He would argue and argue that year and the next for love in the jaded circles of the English department — the Vision of Eros, which, as Auden had said, was near-impossible to champion. For to speak of love was like “talking about ghosts”—“most people had heard of them, but very few people knew one.” He sensed that Hilary Burton’s encouragement was a backhanded compliment. A connoisseur of literary insincerity, she herself was being completely insincere: and wanted him to know it. Last time, she’d suggested that Troilus and Criseyde was not so much a poem as a forerunner of the novel, exemplifying not the poem’s “truth” but the novel’s “light and shade.” This observation was symptomatic of a general call to arms within the department, and he first became aware of it in Dr. Burton’s room; that the student needed to be educated about how the idea that literature was a repository of emotion and spontaneity was only a relatively recent Romantic fiction, no more than two centuries old, that most students had been schooled, without being aware of it, in this Romantic notion, and now required to be disabused, that there were swathes of writing before Romanticism that demonstrated that literature was not truthful and spontaneous, but deceptive and constructed. This project within the corridors and rooms of the department — a crusade, as Ananda viewed it — was one of the causes of his misery. How could this version of things account for the palliative effect Edward Thomas had on him daily, or for lines that “moved” him in poems he didn’t entirely understand?
—
Dr. Burton was a medievalist. She was an expert on Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The one reason that Ananda didn’t dismiss Dr. Burton’s preoccupations out of hand was because he’d read somewhere that Ted Hughes had been nourished by these strange consonantal poems — whose language was as harsh as the English winter. The recent English poets Ananda had read a great deal of: Larkin, Gunn, Hughes, Causley, Tomlinson. One of the reasons he’d gravitated towards this college — making the voyage out from Bombay, where the college had no separate meaning for him, unlike Oxford or Cambridge — was because Stephen Spender was here. When he applied for a place, he knew Spender had retired — only just — and, even today, this was a cause of heartbreak. Not so long ago, Spender hovered in these corridors, near these portals, until, coinciding with Ananda’s advent, he had withdrawn completely into late-night television shows, radio talks, and journal-publishing. If only Spender had frequented these corridors now, Ananda wouldn’t have been so unhappy. It was not so much his poems Ananda cared about — although he loved Hughes’s and Larkin’s work, Spender’s poetry hadn’t made an impression — as the appearance (slightly stooped; tweed-jacketed; with a blue-eyed angelic face, like David Gower’s) and the persona he’d encountered in World within World: sensitive, with a youth of mildly adventurous left-wing predilections, but a firm believer in poetry’s sacrosanct qualities (“I think continually of those who are great”). If only Spender had survived in the college to Ananda’s arrival, he would have recognised in him a kindred soul, a person moved invisibly by the poetic. Ananda would have hesitantly shown his poems to Spender, who, in his excitement, would have got them published, just as Spender’s friend Auden had once tremblingly, in astonishment, discovered the nineteen-year-old Dom Moraes’s poetry on a visit to Bombay, and been instrumental in its publication. That collection, as everyone knew, was the one book by an Indian to win the Hawthornden Prize, its author the youngest to have received that accolade. If Ananda had won the Hawthornden, he wouldn’t have been as young as Moraes, but young enough. Instead, he’d come to the college just a little too late. He recalled that Spender, in his memoir, had mentioned a teacher in his school, St. Paul’s, who’d said to him, “You’re unhappy in school, but you are going to be very happy at university.” Ananda had almost taken heart from this, because he too was miserable in school; but, unlike the youthful Stephen, he found he was very unhappy in university too. He didn’t mind. A part of him knew that he’d one day be happy. That state of being was firmly — and securely — reserved for full adulthood, when he’d probably be married and famous; just as, when he was a child, he’d concluded it was reserved for his late teens. To Hilary Burton, he hardly ever mentioned the contemporary poets. The only recent writer that she seemed halfway enthusiastic about was a woman called Julia Kristeva. “This is a wonderful book!” she’d said deeply, huskily, imparting a sensual emphasis to “wonderful,” as she lifted, from her populous, fusty bookshelf, a gleaming tome with a blue cover, Desire in Language. Again, sex seemed to be introduced into the frame of the tutorial, and he wasn’t sure if she was making a pass.