It's a Don's Life (5 page)
Authors: Mary Beard
18 August 2006
I am still reeling from the reaction to my ‘Keeping Sex out of Scholarship’ blog. More than a year ago, I reviewed a book
in the
TLS
(a
Dictionary of British Classicists
), in which I pointed out how the reliable stories of what is euphemistically known as the ‘wandering hand’ of Eduard Fraenkel,
a Professor of Latin at Oxford, had been ignored. I wrote that I had an ambivalent reaction to what Fraenkel was supposed
to have done: on the one hand, sisterly outrage at the abuse of male power; on the other, a wistful nostalgia (shared, I can
assure you, by many of my age) for an earlier era of pedagogy, an age perhaps of greater innocence. What was the reaction?
I received just a handful of letters from outraged pupils of Fraenkel, denouncing me for sullying the memory of their teacher.
A couple of weeks ago, I return to the issue briefly in a blog. This gets suddenly picked up by the media, from the
Mail
to the BBC. This time I am denounced for exactly the opposite crime. Now I am supposed to be the out-of-touch Cambridge don
who ‘hankers after’ an age when professors slept with students. Not what I said, and not true.
Let me say again (I’ve found myself saying this often over the last couple of days), I do not condone sexual harassment or
‘hanker after’ a return to the old world. ‘Wistful nostalgia’ is a very different reaction – which doesn’t involve trying
to put the clock back. We can, after all, have wistful nostalgia for the nicotine culture of half a century ago, and the swirls
of smoke around Bogart’s head in
Casablanca
, without deciding to go out and buy a packet of Marlboro – and without being unaware that, if he went on like that, Rick
would die a very unpleasant death from lung cancer.
By far the best encapsulation of the ambivalence I was trying to express is to be found in Mary Warnock’s memoirs. Warnock
was one of Fraenkel’s ‘girls’ and she very nicely gets across both the sense that she had benefited from the high-octane pedagogy
that he offered some of his favourites, and the sense that some students were terribly damaged by it.
For me, the whole reaction to what I wrote feels even odder because I am not even in the country. I am at Pompeii, getting
some work in for the next book I should be getting on with. Yesterday, as I was exploring the site with the husband and an
Italian colleague, the mobile phone kept going and re-going (the reception is a bit wobbly at Pompeii) – wanting quotes or
more articles. What I decided not to say is that I was actually in the middle of an exploration of Pompeian so-called ‘brothels’,
wondering what the criteria should be for identifying them. That would have been throwing too much of a delicacy to the wolves.
So what have I learned from all this? Well, first, be very careful what you say in the silly season of August. But, on the
other hand, the reaction – silly and inaccurate as much of it is – shows that this a difficult subject that people do want
to discuss. I would also advise friends and colleagues not to give an interview to the
Today
programme on a mobile phone from the back of a bar in Pompeii station. It’s hard to get the point across!
Comments
The link between
eros
and pedagogy is well-established and made explicit by, among others, Plato – perhaps a clearer thinker than most journalists.
What’s alarming is that we have even come to suspect the coupling of, not
eros
, but
philia
with teaching. Shall we return to the days when teaching was in the hands of avowed celibates (and we know where THAT led)?
Maybe so, in these curious times when we are scared of everything, just like a bunch of big babies.
But a couple of personal observations. My old headmaster once said to me that 90% of schoolmasters were paedophiles at heart
– who else would want to spend his working life among adolescent males except one who genuinely loved them? The other 10%,
of course, were pederasts, and they were the ones to keep an eye on. A distinction we have lost.
And, at the university level, I am proud to say that I was inducted into the pleasures of the bed by one of my supervisors,
some 10 years older than I. It was an unalloyed joy – I hope, for both of us – and it stimulated not only my erotic sensibilities
but also my interest in the subject she taught: two great gifts which have given me delight to this day. I will be grateful
to her for ever, and my gratitude is only increased by the certainty that the withershins of anxious, unthinking PC will never
know anything like it.
MICHAEL BYWATER
19 September 2006
Professional classicists have a habit of pouring cold water on popular facts about the ancient world. Take something that
everyone thinks they know about Greece and Rome, and the finger-wagging scholar loves nothing better than saying it’s wrong.
Well, for a change, the good news is that Nero did fiddle while Rome burned. It just depends what you mean by fiddle.
Most people, I fear, take ‘fiddling’ in the wrong sense.
This struck me when I was reading the previews in the weekend papers of the new BBC series of Roman drama-docs I’ve been involved
with. The first episode features Nero (don’t ask me to explain here and now, but the episodes don’t move in chronological
order: the ‘earliest’ programme, featuring Tiberius Gracchus, is actually episode three).
With good historical credentials, Nero is shown being an energetic and responsible emperor in the aftermath of the Great Fire
of Rome in 64 ad. He provides emergency housing for the victims and sets about rebuilding the city in a way that wouldn’t
make it such a tinderbox in the future. This idea obviously appealed to the TV critics – more than one of whom wrote something
along the lines of, ‘So Nero did not fiddle while Rome burned. Rather he returned to his capital to help his people...’ In
fact, the same thought appeared so often that I began to suspect, correctly as it turned out, that they had lifted it straight
from the BBC’s own publicity material.
Hang on, thought the smirking don. These guys obviously think that Nero has wrongly been accused of ‘fiddling’ in the sense
of ‘footling around’. In fact, Nero’s ‘fiddling’ was a wholly musical gesture. What the phrase refers to is his playing, if
not the violin (= fiddle), then its nearest ancient equivalent, the lyre.
For, before he got into his emergency response mode, according to the historian Dio, he went up on the roof of the palace,
put on his lyre-playing outfit and sang a song on an all too apt subject – the ‘Fall of Troy’. Suetonius in his biography
of Nero has a similar story of the singing (though minus the lyre). Nero’s crime was not ‘footling around’. It was that his
first instinct in the face of crisis was to take refuge in the arts and high culture.
Whether we will ever now rescue what I think of as the ‘real meaning’ of this phrase is doubtful. In fact, it may be a better
idea to celebrate the shift of meaning rather than pedantically lament it. It certainly makes it more easily applicable. When
George W. Bush was widely accused of ‘fiddling while Rome burned’ as New Orleans drowned, I don’t think his detractors had
in mind a misplaced devotion to high culture.
29 September 2006
Reviews don’t make a blind bit of difference to how a book sells. That, at least, is the popular wisdom among publishers.
That means Jeffrey Archer’s latest ‘novel’ can get rubbished by the critics and still make millions (the vast publicity budget
presumably helps). Or, the other way round, there are thousand and thousands of marvellous books, greeted rapturously by reviewers,
that have failed even to pay back their meagre advance. A nice review warms the heart of the author but it doesn’t have much
impact on the cash registers.
True. But it does rather underestimate the point of the whole reviewing business. Of course, working on the
TLS
, I’m biased – but I am committed to the idea that reviews have an important part to play in (for want of a better word) literary
culture. Not only as a guide to the quality of what authors and publishers turn out, but also in their own right – as comment,
criticism, insight, and a good read.
So how do I choose reviewers for the Classics books when I’m at the
TLS
? In a way it’s a bit like a dating agency.
That is to say, the art of getting a good review (and by ‘good’ I don’t mean ‘favourable’) is marrying up the right reviewer
with the right book, even if at first sight they make an unlikely couple. I have three basic rules of thumb.
1
Never send a book to someone if you already know what they are going to say. Despite what people often think about the ethics
of the reviewing trade, there really isn’t much interest, for me at least, in fixing up a review that merely hands someone
a free platform for back-scratching or denunciation. Of course, sometimes you get it wrong ... you publish a withering critique
of someone’s life’s work, then a few months later a friend explains that the reviewer and reviewee had actually had a grudge
match going on since the playground. But I can put my hand on heart and say that I’ve never knowingly done that. And I make
it my business to keep abreast of people’s quarrels!
2
Step outside the box. At first, you might think that a new book on (say) Ammianus Marcellinus, written by one of the two living
experts on this (frankly not much read) late Roman historian, is best reviewed by the other one. In fact, he or she might
be the worst of choices. For a start there’s the last problem to bear in mind: the chances are that these guys have either
long been riven in dispute over their unlikely favourite author, or are else best buddies. But, anyway, the acutest reviewer
is often someone who works in a related but slightly different area, or someone who’s long been a secret fan of Ammianus (you
have to keep your ear to the ground in this trade) but has never actually written on him. That way you get the insider’s and
the outsider’s perspective. Insider’s: because you do want to learn from someone who knows whether this book basically passes
muster. Outsider’s: because you want someone who can represent the potential reader and can ask whether there’s something
interesting for us in all this.
3
Remember that it all takes time. Time from reviewers, to do a careful, interesting and well-written job. My heart sinks if
I ever hear someone boasting how they knocked off a quick
TLS
review before breakfast. (I’ve been known to point out, waspishly, that it probably would have been a better review if they
had taken longer.) But also time from the commissioning editor. You need to explore beyond the front cover and the first few
pages of the book you’re sending out. If you want to arrange that delicate marriage with a reviewer, you really do have to
have an idea what the book is saying (not what the blurb says it says). Put simply, a good review editor takes time to get
to know their product on the inside.
A pity, after all this care and attention, that reviews don’t have more impact on sales.
2 October 2006
Tuesday is the beginning of the Cambridge academic year – and thousands of new students have turned up. Going through the
elaborate welcoming routine, I find it impossible not to remember what it felt like more than 30 years ago when I was in their
place.
For a start it was much less elaborate. Nowadays the kids go through almost a solid week of induction, so intensive that I
can’t imagine much of it goes in. There are briefings on Health and Safety, tours of the various libraries, computer training
sessions, meetings with student reps of the Faculty, JCR tea parties and ‘bops’, plagiarism avoidance classes (well, almost)
... and that is before they have been to meet any of their teachers and lecturers.
I remember it all being much more down to earth. A big college ‘feast’ with a pep talk from the Principal, a brief meeting
with our Tutor and Director of Studies – and off we went, in at the deep end (and amazingly we did soon manage to fathom how
the University Library worked).
Apart from the predictable anxieties and indiscretions of the first few days (which I do not intend to share!), I now remember
only two things of those first encounters with the College Fellows.
The first was telling the Principal, mingling after her pep talk, that I did not intend to eat ‘in hall’ while I was at Newnham,
but to make
coq au vin
(it was the 70s) in the student kitchens. I must have delivered this with unnecessary emotional force, since 30 years on she
remembers our conversation too. The second was the meeting with my excellent, but appropriately terrifying, Director of Studies,
who reminded us very firmly that we were at Cambridge at the expense of the tax-payer – and that tax-payers would expect us
to work just as hard as they did: 40 hours a week, 48 weeks a year.
If someone had said to me then that just a few decades later I myself would be standing up in front of a new group of undergraduates,
I would never have believed it – and frankly even now it’s a bit hard to take in. What do you say? In my case, what am I going
to say to the assembled first year classicists in the university – more than 80 of them – on Wednesday?
Well, sadly, you can’t use the tax-payer line anymore. They’d probably lynch you. Most of these students, after all, are taking
on a whacking debt for the privilege of a university education.
Most likely I shall concentrate, like last year, on the different kind of skills they will need at university from at school.
Whatever the merits and demerits of the modern sixth-form curriculum, it certainly doesn’t teach independent learning. When
they arrive, they are used to a ‘target’ approach to education (if you make the following four points and show that you can
recognise a subjunctive you will get an A). They also tend to imagine that the only time they are actually learning something
is when someone is standing up in front of them, teaching them.
I shall try to convince them (with only a modicum of success, to judge by past performance) that intellectual endeavour goes
beyond targets – and that the time when they really learn the most is probably not in the classroom but when they are by themselves,
reading hard in the library.
The point I want them to grasp is that one of the aims of the devoted, skilled, inspirational and expensive teaching we offer
is to give them the confidence to be able to explore the world of learning on their own.
Comments
You could try telling your students they are extremely lucky. I took my undergraduate degree with the Open University, and
am taking my MA with the same organisation. We didn’t have the huge asset of a university library on site, and really had
to self motivate from day one. I am lucky to be situated reasonably close to a Classics library I can access, but my borrowing
rights are not as generous as the ‘on site’ students. Our tutors are brilliant, but remote. And a substantial majority of
us are holding down full time jobs while studying. I would give a great deal to be one of your students at Cambridge.
JACKIE
