Self-Scrutiny

Self-Scrutiny

I

think writing aphorisms suits me because I have a fundamentally untidy mind. I keep promising myself I will find the time to tidy it up, but so far have never managed to get round to it. Procrastination, of course, is one of the symptoms of an untidy mind.

            I was pleased to learn from a psychologist when I was doing military service that I had a Stanford-Binet IQ of 164 (160 Wechsler). Unfortunately, he did not tell me that I was lacking in a quality which such IQ tests did not measure, namely, simple common sense. Nor did he tell me that I was selfish, ungrateful and often unreliable, as my mother and sister frequently pointed out. If only I had been able to trade off some IQ points for some common sense and a better character, I would have been spared a great deal of later suffering.

            I now realize that certain masters who disliked me at school were quite right. I daresay that, had I met myself in my teens, I should have been tempted to administer a good thrashing. Looking back, I can see that whatever my other strong points, my friends and family were right in telling me that I was devoid of common sense. It took me decades to acquire it, painfully. A pity it couldn’t have been made into an academic subject and taught in school, where I could have acquired it quickly and systematically and later produces a certificate to show I possessed it.

            Why is it that students who least need common sense always study subjects like Law, which helps to inculcate it common sense, while students who lack it study subjects which cannot make up for this deficiency, like Arts or Science? The answer is to be found in the New Testament, namely that “To them that hath it shall be given, while from them that hath not it shall be taken away”.

            I was lucky to be educated in a single-sex school. The presence of girls in the class would have made it almost impossible for most of us to concentrate. We would crowd to the window if a girl so much as appeared on the drive. Boys in co-educational schools seldom do as well as those in their single-sex rivals. Testosterone needs isolating.

            My natural religion is Buddhism. I am completely at home in it, as I could never be in any other creed. Past lives (many in East and Southeast Asia) have wrought this. I am struck by the fact that K., my closest friend for years when I was younger, has also become a Buddhist, having arrived at Buddhism from Marxism via Existentialism. He claims he remembers our being together, centuries ago, in a monastery. We were both rather rebellious monks.

            I dreamt about Cambridge for years after I went down. I owe that university an immense, forever unpayable, debt. My seven years there (four as an undergraduate Major Scholar, three as a Bachelor Scholar of my college) shaped my intellectually for life. I have never found a university that came near it, except perhaps for the American Ivy Leaguers. No wonder it consistently ranks as Britain’s top university. Most universities today have become over-crowded intellectual refugee-camps, filled with the bewildered intellectually displaced, many of whom are travelling on false passports.

            In my day, Oxbridge was heavily afflicted with young fogies. “Is there life before death?” I used to murmur despondently, as I listened to their self-satisfied platitudes in the Junior Common Room debates. They were invincibly conservative public school or grammar school boys who wore sports coats and cavalry twill trousers; sported old school or college ties; derived their limited opinions from the Daily Telegraph; went to church of college chapel regularly on Sundays, clad in three-piece suits; avoided sex or even heavy petting before marriage; took rugger, rowing and cricket with devout seriousness and behaved decorously at all times, even during May balls. Typically, these young geriatrics were reading Classics, Law, Medicine or Estate Management. They almost never read Natural Sciences, Moral Sciences or English. They were prone to writing irate comments in the Junior Common Room complaints register about members of the college who behaved in one of the many ways of which they did not approve. The predominance in the Establishment of such young fogies who had mellowed imperceptibly into old fogies eventually drove me in desperation to leave England.

            I once applied for a post with the British Council, hoping to find refuge overseas from Anthony Eden’s England. When I appeared before the interviewing panel, my heart sank. It appeared to be composed entirely of middle-aged Oxbridge fogies, one of whom I recognized as a former young fogie from my own college. Need I say that I did not get the job?

            I took five Firsts in four years at Cambridge, in English and Oriental Languages, taking parts I and II of the Oriental Languages Tripos together in my final year. Since for over half this time I was married, living on a shoestring, my second child being born on the day my final results appeared, I still wonder how I accomplished it.

            I fell into sinology almost by mistake. I went to the Senior Tutor of my college, Peter Hunter-Blair, an Anglo-Saxon scholar, to ask him permission to sit for the Charles Oldham Shakespeare scholarship examination, which I was pretty sure I could get. To my astonishment he said, contemptuously: “Is this the best you can do, Frodsham? Pot-hunting!”

            Taken aback by this unexpected reception, I replied, somewhat lamely, that it was a highly prestigious pot. He then asked me if there wasn’t some other subject I should like to study, pointing out that if I took another First in English (the results were due out the following week), the college would continue my major scholarship. To this day I do not know why I told him I should like to study Chinese, a desperately recondite subject in those days. Surprisingly, he was enthusiastic about it, for reasons which still escape me. Probably he though, rightly, that I needed taking down a peg or two and that the difficult Oriental Languages Tripos might administer a salutary drubbing.

            That morning I walked over to Selwyn Gardens, to see Gustav Haloun, a German scholar who held the Chair of Chinese. He grilled me for half an hour or so before accepting me and then sent me off with a letter of introduction to the Oriental Languages Library in Brooklands Avenue, where I borrowed a dozen or so grammars and histories. By the time term opened in October, four months later, I had already ploughed my way enthusiastically and autodidactedly through the classical Chinese of the Xiao Jing (Classic of Filial Piety) and a large chunk of Mencius and The Analects, as well as being somewhat acquainted with 3,000 years of Chinese history, philosophy and art. I could also read simple modern Chinese, though I found the texts boring after the classical ones. Perhaps all this was simply due to the karma of a previous life – or lives – finally coming to fruition. Many of the major decisions of our lives are taken for reasons of which we are consciously unaware, though like hypnotised subjects, we always have a semi-plausible explanation for our actions.

            I was lucky to have encountered a benevolent Professor of Chinese who would take students. The story goes that an earlier incumbent of the Chair had sat stony-faced listening to students explaining why they wanted to read Chinese before replying: “There are about 100,000 Chinese books in the University Library. When you have read them all, come back here and I’ll recommend some more”. I have the uneasy feeling that this story might well be true. All too often, some Cambridge academics saw students as simply a damned nuisance and were under no compulsion to accept them.

            Professor Haloun died of a coronary on his fifty-second birthday, a few months after I had begun to study under him. His death shocked me so greatly I could not open a book for a week, but simply walked around in a daze. This was my first close encounter with the death of someone I knew and greatly admired. Some deaths, the Chinese say, are as heavy as Mount Tai. His was one of them.

            The time I have frittered away watching TV or indulging in idle conversation would have sufficed to enable me to master at least half a dozen languages. But what would I have done with them except perhaps to watch TV or chatter idly in the languages I had acquired?

            

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM