Edward Clarke is transported back to his own Brideshead-style Oxford paradise

I was rereading the opening of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited the other day in preparation for a critical reading class at the Department of Continuing Education.

In the event, and perhaps not very surprisingly, we got stuck on a passage from James Joyce’s Ulysses, and didn’t make it to the Waugh excerpt. Nonetheless, it is the inferior Oxford, rather than the superior Dublin, novel that has lodged in my head.

I hadn’t picked up Brideshead since I was about to come up to Oxford for the first time as an undergraduate almost 20 years ago. So I was half-horrified to discover that I am now exactly the same age as the disillusioned narrator who “at the age of 39... began to be old”: someone who ‘felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out’, and had ‘developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers’. I’m not quite at the stage where I regularly drink “three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less”, but I do find myself sometimes going ‘to bed immediately after the nine o’clock news’, which I don’t even bother to watch any more.

The first book of Brideshead is set mostly in the 1920s, in the Oxford of the narrator’s undergraduate days, and is called “ET IN ARCADIA EGO”, “and in Arcadia I am”: the narrator has been transported back to paradise through memory. Waugh may be alluding to Poussin’s elegiac painting of that name, in which shepherds point to the phrase engraved on a ruined tomb, or perhaps a less famous painting by Guercino of two shepherds staring at a skull. Either way, the darker point is that even in the idyllic and half-rural realm of Oxford there is also death.

The problem with teaching undergraduates is that they seem to remain the same age year after year, while I just get more and more decrepit, and from that perspective Waugh’s tag has a poignant ring of truth to it, as if I am becoming slowly a memento mori. With devastation, I also accept the fact that my Arcadia, Oxford in the mid 1990s, will never match the glamorous, almost innocent, Oxford of the early 1920s.

While it’s true that I didn’t send or receive a single email during my undergraduate days and that all of my essays were handwritten and read out over a glass of sherry to a tutor who was sometimes even languishing in his bed, it can hardly be said that we were consuming baskets of strawberries with “a bottle of Chateau Peyraguey” like Sebastian and Charles in Waugh’s novel.

I caught an old friend recalling recently on Facebook the ‘afternoons on the lawn outside of the moat’ of our old college, playing croquet. While he did admit that it was “usually with so much Pimm’s in our systems that we don’t recollect much”, he neglected to mention that the “moat” was built in 1963.

I think my friend was asserting his credentials as a new member of the “United States Croquet Association”, but I wonder if I should feel so nostalgic these days for the summer that Labour won the General Election and no one really owned a mobile.

As Dickens observed in another text we didn’t get around to in my critical reading class, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”