He wrote: I am not so presumptuous as to attempt in 40 minutes what Mr. JH has not achieved in 20 years. That took a minute. The implication of the sentence, however, was that Mr. JH had been wrong to set the paper, & it took him 2 hours and 57 minutes to decide that it would be more insulting to spare a philosopher what he believed to be the truth than to hand in the notebook with this sentence on the page.
He spent the rest of the week punting on the Cherwell.
HC got the top first that year, and RD got no degree of any kind.
Now as soon as HC saw the list of vivas he knew that he had got a very good first and RD had not, because RD’s name was not on the list. There were three days of vivas after HC’s: he had three days in which to enjoy his victory.
Then the class list went up and he discovered that RD’s name was not on it. He had TRICKED HC into going on with the course with all his talk of Wilamowitz, and then he had cheated. Now the congratulations of the examiners seemed empty and stupid. HC stalked up and down shouting, he said no one would give RD a job, no one would give him teaching, he would end up working on a dictionary or an Oxford Companion, he’d get kicked off for missed deadlines, he’d end up marking A-levels and getting kicked off the board, he’d end up teaching English as a foreign language. RD was rather tired. Everyone can imagine a life’s regret for a moment of cowardice, but you could just as easily regret a moment’s courage; RD thought that everything HC said might well be true (as in fact it was), and the years after this moment of courage might make him capable of regretting it. Still, it was done.
HC stalked out of the room. He got a Fellowship at All Souls at the age of 19 but all the fun had gone out of it.
RD got a job at a crammer’s.
I said I thought a crammer was a place that helped people to pass exams.
Sibylla said Yes.
I: Wasn’t that a problem?
Sib: Well, it wasn’t a problem in one sense in that RD thought it was perfectly acceptable to take an exam to get INTO a place where you might improve your logical faculties, he just thought once your faculties were improved you shouldn’t trample underfoot what you had learned and accept an accolade for doing so, but it was kind of a problem in that the students found the chess rather hard to follow. RD would start talking about Lucretian elements in the Aeneid & go to the board & talk about developing the argument on the queenside under the impression that he was helping the students with their exam technique, or he would say Now let’s look at some basic mating positions & have trouble with discipline. So he lost the job and got another job.
HC & RD still went to Fraenkel’s classes. Afterwards they would come out into the front quadrangle at Corpus, there is a statue of a pelican on a pillar in the centre of the quad and RD would pace in anguish around the pelican. HC was getting more and more depressed. Each day he went into the Bodleian at 9:00. At 1:00 he went back to college for lunch, and at 2:15 he was back in the Bodleian. At 6:15 he went back to his college unless of course it was the day of the seminar. Sometimes he worked in the Lower Reading Room, and sometimes he called up a manuscript and worked in Duke Humfrey. There would never be anyone to compete with ever again.
He was weary of philology, weary of tracing the corruption of sounds in their written relics. He wanted to go where a language was not written. He wanted to go where all utterances died with breath.
Then he heard that there was a strange silent tribe in the desert of Kyzylkum. They refused to let anyone who was not of the tribe know its language and any member of the tribe who repeated a word in the presence of a foreigner was punished by death.
HC did some research and he eventually came to the exciting conclusion that the references to a lost silent tribe in four or five separate historical traditions might be to the same tribe which being nomadic had ranged over thousands of miles for thousands of years. He decided to find it.
He spent seven years learning Chinese and Uralic and Altaic and Slavic and Semitic languages, and at the end of his Fellowship he set off for the desert.
It was not easy to get to Kyzylkum. He tried to fly to Moscow but he could not get a visa. He tried to get over the border into Turkmenistan from Iran & was turned back. He went to Afghanistan & tried to cross the border into Uzbekistan & was turned back. Then he thought perhaps he could go to Pakistan and cross the Pamirs to Tajikistan and so trek on to Kyzylkum but he was turned back again.
Then he decided to start his quest at the other end. His theory was that the tribe ranged all the way from the Mongolian plateau to the desert of Kyzylkum and he now decided to make for Mongolia instead.
He travelled to China, pretending to be a simple tourist.
HC joined a package tour to avoid suspicion. The tour included a visit to Xinjiang, a province in the far northwest of the country; his plan was to leave the group at Ürümqi and make his way to the Mongolian border. On the second day of the tour it was announced that the Xinjiang leg of the tour had been cancelled to allow more time for celebrated landscapes of art and poetry.
The group took a train to a town in the south. The buildings had posters of Chairman Mao on their sides. No one in the town had a copy of the Dream of the Red Chamber. There were no books in the town or if there were no one would tell HC. There was no jade, there were no pictures. It was an odd place he said for the children all seemed to be boys. The people there seemed to work very hard, but on a field outside the town the parents and the little boys would gather to fly kites, and these were the most beautiful kites he had ever seen. They were a brilliant red, and each had a picture of Chairman Mao on the body of the kite, or two or three characters representing one of the sayings of the Chairman. A steady wind always seemed to flow across the field, and the fiery dragons shot up into the air as soon as they were released.
He did not think he would find the silent tribe, but if he did not go forward where else was there to go? As long as he felt that he had turned his back on England he was all right, but if he turned his face to it he thought that he would turn to stone.
He pretended to be sick, and when the group went on he stayed behind.
One day he stood watching as the kites flew far overhead, the Chinese characters tossing this way and that in the air. The written language was constructed of ideograms compatible with many spoken realisations of the words & he felt that people spoke here any way they liked, while the written language flew on kites overhead. He felt at last free of philology. He thought Why should I inspect the lost silent tribe are they not just as silent if I am not there? But what was he to do if he had no quest?
He watched the kiteflyers and he saw that there was a child with no kite. The child would run now to this group now to another and be pushed away. Once the child ran by HC. It was snivelling and covered with sores and it looked different from the other children in the village. He said something and the child said something he could not understand, he thought that it must be the dialect. He said something else and the child said something else and suddenly he thought that he understood a word here and there, but if he understood them they were Turkic words made strange by the Chinese intonation. He said something in Turkish and he tried it in Karakalpak and Kyrgyz and Uighur and the child looked at him as though it understood. He asked someone if he could meet its parents and he was told it had no family. He thought that the child might come from some Turkic tribe in Xinjiang or perhaps it came from the lost silent tribe itself, but what difference did it make.