Wisely and Well

Abstract

In The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis portrays an Oxford entrance interview that takes an unexpected turn. The hero, Charles Highway, has planned every aspect of his application carefully. On discovering that his interviewer is young and politically active he quickly adapts his outfit and prepares to be as left-wing as possible. After the tense opening pleasantries the first question is, however, ‘do you like literature?’ Dr Knowd then dissects his pompous essays, pointing out the way they flaunt their cleverness while taking writers to task according to spurious and self-serving criteria. Just when the outcome seems inevitable, however, Charles is offered a place, because of the danger he might get worse if he was taken elsewhere. The parting advice is to do a lot of hard thinking, to ‘read the poems and work out whether you like them’.1 The hero is only temporarily chastened, and is soon wondering whether he might be better off at another college. The scene is neatly judged, though, and it turns away from a more predictable version of the interview encounter and the course of study beyond, where the naive enthusiasm of the young bibliophile runs into the harsh judgement of the professional critic, and is gradually tamed. (One of my friends tells his own story of this sort, wherein his attempt to attribute beauty to a poem was met with a derisive two-word snort of which the first word was indistinct but the second word was definitely ‘construct’.) Dr Knowd, for all his commitment to radical causes, maintains what must have seemed, in 1973, like an unfashionable commitment to pleasure and evaluation as two fundamental parts of literary study. They may be merely an apprenticeship – he suggests that ambitious theoretical perspectives could come later – but the scene's surprise value resides nevertheless in the endorsement of a love and respect for literature as the most important things an aspirant student might cultivate.