LIFE IN WAUGH-TIME: BRIDESHEAD v HITLER
Not Far From Brideshead: Oxford Between The Wars
Daisy Dunn Weidenfeld & Nicolson €28 ★★★★★
Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited created an image of Oxford that, even now, is hard to shake off. Waugh’s aristo hero, Sebastian Flyte, is an alcoholic who carries a teddy bear called Aloysius everywhere he goes. His friend Anthony Blanche is outrageously camp, affects a stutter and dreams of being ‘manhandled’ by the local lads. Narrator Charles Ryder is the token middle-class boy whose eyes are dazzled by the decadence of people who enjoy set fire to college furniture. In this clever, engrossing book, Daisy Dunn sets the myth of inter-war Oxford (right) against the reality. In some cases the borrowings are easy to spot. Poet John Betjeman did indeed carry a teddy bear called Archibald Ormsby-Gore, while Ryder is Evelyn Waugh himself, a publisher’s son equally appalled and impressed by the toffs of the Bullingdon Club.
And then there’s a stream of gorgeous young men, probably gay but possibly not, who float around quoting Greek at each other (always a clue). As well as John Betjeman, there are the poets C Day Lewis and WH Auden, not to mention art critic Harold Acton and poet Brian Howard. Waugh admitted to merging the last two to create Anthony Blanche. Women, unsurprisingly, are thin on the ground.
Dunn’s particular interest is the way in which the spirit of inter-war Oxford, for good and for ill, was shaped by the classical syllabus. Her unlikely hero is Maurice Bowra, the clever, closeted classics scholar who is the obvious person to become the next regius professor of Greek. The problem is that not only is his scholarship a bit old-hat, but Bowra was also gay at a time when homosexuality was a crime. News of his social adventures in anything-goes Berlin meant that it was EW Dodds, an obscure Irishman from Birmingham University, who got the job.
To say that Oxford was upset is putting it mildly. Dodds, a genuinely clever man, found himself sent to Coventry. People walked out of rooms when he came in, and some dons refused to let their undergraduates go to his lectures. Bowra congratulated Dodds through clenched teeth and went out of his way to make his life as unpleasant as possible.
Sharp-eyed Waugh, meanwhile, was taking notes. He put Bowra into Brideshead as Samgrass, an Oxford academic who is a social climber and a bit of a bore.
This might all sound parochial, but as Daisy Dunn shows, there was something greater at stake. While Hitler and his henchmen were busy building the Third Reich along what they fondly imagined were Ancient Greek lines, fascists such as Oswald Mosley went out of their way to win Oxford over to their cause.
Oxford, to its credit, refused to cave in. Many dons, including Dodds, went out of their way to help Jewish classicists get posts in Britain. A huge number of Greek scholars trained by Bowra joined Bletchley as code-breakers. And it is this Oxford, brave and progressive as well as decadent, spiteful and shockingly misogynistic, that Daisy Dunn brings to life in this thoughtful, compelling history.