Books: Class Report

A MIDDLE CLASS EDUCATION (425 pp.)—Wilfrid Sheed—HoughtonMifflin ($4.75).

At Oxford,* “snob” is not just another four-letter word but a way of being. Class, according to the despairing cry of Poet John Betjeman, is the primary English passion, one that has survived the welfare state and the shrunken horizons of em pire. The subject, class, and the scene, Oxford, form the substance of this depressing but enlightening fictional report on what might be called the Cold War Generation.

The author, Wilfrid Sheed, 30, an Anglo-American-Australian (and son of U.S. Roman Catholic Publisher Frank Sheed), has written a quiet, sound little story, but probably one destined to make a punctuation mark in the long catalogue of those who attended Oxford and survived to write about it. The book denotes a haunting change since Max Beerbohm’s glittering undergraduate duke, orator, wit, scholar and élégant set Zuleika Dobson and the Isis on fire, or even since Waugh’s Lord Sebastian Flyte lugged his Teddy-bear to the barber’s.

Twilight of a Virger. The present undergraduates, Novelist Sheed deposes, are a dim lot, meanly concerned with security and job worthiness, impervious to general ideas, irreligious but without any definite atheist convictions, leading a sex life that is Casanovanic in theory but monastic in fact, boorishly bathed in beer, sweating out a degree and fighting to smother a lower-middle-class background with the correct set of socially acceptable diphthongs. The non-hero of this cad’s paradise is John Chote, president of the junior common room at Sturdley College, an ancient, deliquescent foundation with a Victorian Gothic façade, where no memher has won any academic distinction since the 13th century.

Chote is revered as a rake but is actually “virgers.” (U.S. students of fictional manners may find Chote’s virginity—after two years’ service with the British army of occupation in Vienna—somewhat hard to credit.) He pretends not to work, but sneaks off after a few raucous beers at the local pub to do a bit of secret studying. On a scholarship he has gone to a minor but passably posh school, and his family, which has invested all its hopes in the possibility of his sliding into the mysterious, U-type Brahmin group of English society, cowers amid the potted plants and wireless set in lower-middle-class Pimlico.

Chote is less than a simple climber. He is an empty man, one of nature’s nihilists. For every serious matter he has a tweeded pose and a hollow, echoing gibe. He even sneaks into one or another of Oxford’s numerous, empty churches, but nothing happens in the gothic twilight.

Security Syndrome. Gradually the reader comes to see that the book is really an indictment of education as a class-apprenticeship. The college warden is a businessman whose carefully cultivated eccentricities (e.g., gardening seminude) are bogus, the college chaplain is a neurotic without faith, and the scholars are without scholarship. Typified by Chote, the non-U students of Sturdley are obsessed to an indecent degree by love of money and of security. In this situation, the usual English envy-hatred syndrome focuses upon the American undergraduates who resent being taunted for having money, especially when they don’t have it. One Yank at Oxford suffers one gibe too many at American opulence, McCarthyism, U.S. football and so on, and retorts with tart justice: “At least we don’t sit around talking about pension plans before we’ve even graduated.”

Thus Author Sheed sums up the strange paradox that the Socialist welfare state, instead of liberating the mind from economic concerns, has actually committed its favorite sons to a slavish preoccupation with wealth and the good will of the master class. The special irony of that situation is expressed in the novel’s epigraph from Hilaire Belloc:

Be taught by this to speak with moderation, Of places where, with decent application, One gets a good, sound, middle-class education.

* According to one version, it was the custom for sons of the British nobility to sign Oxford college registers fit. nob. — short for filius nobilis, son of a nobleman — and they were hence known as “nobs.” Those who had no such claim but liked to associate with the aristocracy became known as quasi nobs, hence “snobs.”