Over the last twenty years I have been to numerous WEA classes.
The Workers’ Education Association is a body created, like the Open
University, by the Labour Party, to provide further education for
those thirsting for knowledge and who did not, by and large find
much to quench it during their school years.
Oxfordshire provided a multiplicity of these classes, and on the
quest once again, I found I was studying Shakespeare in Abingdon,
Philosophy in Burford, the First World War in Wantage, and English
Literature almost everywhere. In my academic rush to acquire new
knowledge, and the prosaic rush to drive frantically through the
countryside in order to arrive at the correct college, school or
where ever the classes were being held, I confused Shakespeare with
Nietzsche, Nietzsche with Siegfried Sassoon, and Kafka and
Kurt Vonnegut simply not read at all. (Probably because I did not care
for either of them.
I had, during my class-going years made a few assessments of the
tutors’ role in the classes – success or lack of it. These are they. As
many more women go to classes than I do, certainly in the arts
subjects (I can’t vouch for Car Maintenance), male tutors are more
popular than female tutors. Male tutors teaching Hardy, Byron,
Wordsworth, Keats and so on are automatically associated with
romantic male emotions. In these tutors can be seen, by fairly
desperate and disparate women, poetic and understanding men
who, given a chance, could and would quote passionate and
romantic lines from favourite authors when smitten with love
themselves. In fact, these tutors would do no such thing, anymore
than the average Englishman whose knowledge of poetry is minimal
or non-existent. But that is something these mature students would
not ever wish to believe. However, to be so revered by his students is
to the ‘romantic’ tutor’s advantage. Such trust is put in his every
word that he can get away with little or no class preparation. One
such tutor told me that at breakfast before his morning class he
opened the set book, selected a passage wherever it fell open, and
talked about that passage during the two-hour session. With a coffee
break and lots of questions like “Do you think Sue Brideshead really
enjoyed making love to Jude or was it just another of her
perversities?” which started the whole class off on personal
memories of one sort or another, the tutor could then sit back and
the class rolled along by itself.
Much the same power that doctors possess over patients, tutors
possess over students. It is the power of superiority. They
supposedly know things, important, exciting, interesting things that
the rest of us would like to know but which we do not know. Their
esoteric knowledge and the mystery surrounding it is their pulling
power. Hence the reason why passions between doctor/patient,
tutor/student, teacher/pupil, vicar/choirboy or girl, abound in the
hearts of the uninitiated. During the twenty years or so attending
classes I have met numerous tutors, and am now of the opinion that
they possess no magical qualities whatsoever. No more, at least,
than could be found in any man in an average bus queue at an
arbitrary bus stop anywhere.
The English Literature class I attended in Oxford was very
depressing. Charles Dickens, it appeared, did not write novels that
wended their way through adventures of a fairy-tale nature with an
underlying social message. No, according to the new structural
criticism, we were told, he simply wrote a series of words that had
‘meaning’ in themselves. Herman Hesse wrote in “Writing on
Literature (Vol 2)” that “clever talk about art and literature has
become a mockery and an end in itself, and the striving to
understand them through critical analysis has done untold harm in
the elementary ability to see, hear, and to be carried away.’’ I agree
absolutely with this statement.
While I was queuing to be admitted to the class in which Dickens
was horribly assessed, a young punky man stood behind me drawing
on his cigarette.
“What made you choose this class particularly?” I asked him.
“Well, I fell out with my girlfriend last week,” he said, “so I went to a
film by myself, I saw Educating Rita and fancied Julie Walters no end.
Fucking lovely she is. So, seeing this class advertised I came along
hoping to meet someone here like her… .”
Looking at the other students later in the evening I felt he might
be disappointed. Even the youngest lady was in her thirties. I did not
see him during the two classes I did attend, so assume he hadn’t
been lucky with a look-alike Rita, and had therefore traded in
Dickens et al for the Duck and Drake down the road.
This literary criticism I felt, was not an exercise in which I wished
to take part, so I left that class and started one of my own. It took
place around my kitchen table. To find enough students I advertised
in the local paper’s Personal Column. (I got some funny replies. I
think some of the men who answered confused ‘English Lessons’
with ‘French Lessons’ as advertised in Soho shop windows in the
1950s). I also had some friends who, keen to improve their
knowledge of Jane Austin, Henry James, DH Lawrence, and the like,
came to the classes. An impoverished graduate, who was writing a
thesis on Anthony Powell, agreed to teach us. Unlike others I have
mentioned he was extremely conscientious, punctual, and spent long
hours preparing our classes. Over the two years that the classes took
place, we tackled several Victorian novels and became familiar with
their plots and characters. The eight members of the class (no room
at the kitchen table for any more) were female, and a rare
contemporary breed, happy housewives. Mutual interest in
literature bound us as fluctuating prices ties other housewives, and it
was a sad occasion when we had our last class. I bought several
bottles of wine which we started to drink at about 10.45 am and
continued drinking until lunch time. The students took turns to recite
their favourite vignette, poem, or passage. Liz MacFarlane, a former
member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, performed last. She
read Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken which briefly is
about two choices – the obvious one and the other one. The narrator
took the other one. During the applause which followed her
rendering there were few dry eyes, and in the following weeks I
greatly missed the work and the fun of my Tuesday morning
literature classes.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment