Kindred Spirits by Jeremy Lewis

Author:Jeremy Lewis [Jeremy Lewis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571252985
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2008-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Nor was I any happier living in Oxford. I had never lived in a place so full of people I liked, so crammed with kindred spirits; whereas in East Sheen we greeted the few neighbours we knew with, at best, a peremptory ‘Good morning,’ we hailed their Oxonian equivalents as friends; and yet – by some perverse paradox − I found Oxford’s cumulative effect intolerably claustrophobic, narrow and self-regarding in a manner that was, perhaps, inevitable in a rather rarefied community which, however likeable and liberal-minded its constituent parts, seemed as one in regarding its particular ways of thinking and behaving as unquestionably superior to those that prevailed in the barbarian world beyond. No doubt there was some truth in this, but I found myself longing for the anonymity, the vulgarity and the variety of London, for neighbours who had never heard of Brasenose or the Master of Balliol or Chatto & Windus, any more than I had heard of their commodity brokers or double-glazing businesses − both of which, like a college or a publishing house, were self-contained, hierarchical worlds of drama and gossip and intrigue, all-absorbing to those within and meaningless to those without, and (no doubt) demanding kinds of intelligence and knowledge that were different from, but not necessarily inferior to, those that prevailed in the half-fearful, half-arrogant world of North Oxford, the inhabitants of which liked to pretend that, had they so chosen, they could have run any business one cared to mention with far more success than the current incumbents, while secretly suspecting that the world outside might have proved chillier and less respectful of academic excellence than they liked to imagine. And when I overheard some amiable, reclusive don (whose brasher colleagues were hard at work extracting money from Japanese industrialists) speak with disdainful hauteur of the world of trade or industry, my hackles rose on behalf of an army of commuters and tired businessmen. As an editor with OUP I was considered persona grata, and was warmly welcomed in by tweed-jacketed men and apple-cheeked, woollen-stockinged women whose tastes and interests and attitudes of mind I found far more sympathetic than those of the average commodity broker or double-glazing salesman, had I known any to judge them by: but Oxford brought out the philistine and the populist in me, neither of which lay far below the surface, and I found myself eagerly championing the case of reps and middle managers, and pining for a glimpse of a chalk-striped suit or a cheeky chappie’s pork-pie hat, with a feather in its band.

Nor was I won round by kindly invitations to lunch or dine in various colleges. I longed, in London, to be asked to the Garrick or the Savile or the Travellers’ or even the Reform, with its clientele of grave-looking civil servants, Arthur Marshall oddly incongruous among them, and I liked nothing better than to stand at the bar of one of these places hemmed in by red-faced lawyers and literary men tossing

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