Authors: Helen de Witt
He said: Checkmate. And he said: I know what you think you’re doing, but it’s stupid. It’s not the same.
And HC said: It’s a game. It’s a stupid game. Opening, middle game, endgame, opening, middle game, endgame, opening middle game endgame. Let’s set the clock to 5 minutes.
RD said: It’s not the same.
HC said: 10 minute game.
HC set out the pieces and he started the clock. They played 5 games and RD won 4.
RD said: It’s not the same.
They played until 2:00 in the morning. RD kept saying It’s not the same, but he was laughing now because he was winning most of the time. You are probably thinking that HC was letting him win but he wasn’t. HC had none of the Socratic scruples that plagued RD, but he carried sportsmanship to so fanatical an extreme that it had a very similar effect; he knew he would have no real competition if RD was not there, & left to his own devices & composing Socratic answers to Gorgianic questions RD was certainly not going to be there. So even though he could hardly keep his eyes open he said to RD: Don’t think of arguments. Look at a question and say: Queen’s Indian. Sicilian Defence.
RD thought this was ridiculous but no sooner had he dismissed it as ridiculous than it suddenly seemed to him, as a matter of fact, that you actually could start a discussion of the influence of Homer on Virgil using the Sicilian Defence.
Ruy Lopez, said HC, pursuing his advantage.
RD: Ruy LOPEZ! How can I POSSIBLY use the Ruy LOPEZ?
HC hesitated—
RD: If they set the question they are OBVIOUSLY, ALWAYS white.
& he was again briefly plunged into despair.
HC: Black to win in 4 moves. Two knights & a rook, checkmate in 6.
No, said RD, and he stood up and wrapped his arms around his head in a pretzel formation. He paced up and down & at last he said: Yes. NOW I see. He said: You don’t actually ARGUE all the way THROUGH you decide the endgame you want to play you incorporate an opening which might lead to it by REFERENCE as it might be Black played an unusual version of the Queen’s Indian you incorporate the middle game largely by REFERENCE—
Whether this really is what you do or not RD did get in under the impression that you did and get a scholarship on the strength of [opening] [middle game] endgame, and he and HC were friends & rivals. HC made him go in for prizes because if he won a prize RD had not gone in for it would not really count, & every time he had to play chess with RD to counterbalance the hold Socrates had regained on his mind in the meantime. He had to play chess to counteract the influence of Fraenkel.
Fraenkel was a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, and on coming to England he had been made Professor of Latin at Corpus Christi College and gave seminars on Greek. Very few undergraduates went to these, and the few that went went with the approval of their tutor because Fraenkel was very formidable. Somehow or other HC heard of these seminars and instantly decided to go. He asked his tutor and his tutor said he thought it would be better to wait, and HC thought: But that’s stupid, if I go now people will always say He went to Fraenkel’s seminar in his first term when he was only 15. His birthday was in mid-October, and if he waited even a term it would be too late.
Now if HC went RD had to go too, because otherwise HC would have felt he was getting an unfair advantage. RD was naturally diffident and said he thought he should wait till his second or even third year; a chessboard was no use in a situation like this, but HC with the genius of desperation said That’s ridiculous, and stealing shamelessly from Socrates he said there was no shame in ignorance but in the refusal to learn. He said he had heard that Fraenkel had deplored the lack of rigour in English scholarship; he said surely it was of the ESSENCE that they should not pick up slipshod methods at the very OUTSET of their scholarly careers. RD said Yes but he probably won’t let us in the class and HC said Leave everything to me.
HC was 15 and looked 12. He went over to Corpus before breakfast and waited outside Fraenkel’s room, and when the great man appeared he brought out the phrases ‘slipshod methods’ and ‘outset of scholarly career’. He was taken into the room and shown some Greek he had never seen before and made to comment on it, and when he did not absolutely disgrace himself he was told that he and his friend could come to the class on probation.
Now Fraenkel once said in a class that a scholar should be able to look at any word in a passage and instantly think of another passage where it occurred; HC was unperturbed by this remark, but RD took it to heart, and the longer he worked the more any text was like a pack of icebergs each word a snowy peak with a huge frozen mass of cross-references beneath the surface. So that now in addition to Socratic reservations on answering any question was added a conviction that in any linguistic analysis a real scholar would haul up the whole iceberg. Meanwhile HC was horribly bored by the class, he found the business of loading a line with comment excruciatingly boring; he was only able to cheer himself up by remembering that he had only just turned 16.
Five terms passed and it was time for Mods.
The night before the first exam other candidates went over the arguments for and against a single author of the
Iliad
and
Odyssey
while HC and RD sat over a chessboard with HC saying Opening middle game end game and RD saying it’s not the same and HC saying 5 minutes.
HC and RD had now come to the part of the course which concentrated on history and philosophy. HC wanted to change courses & study Arabic & dazzle the Oriental Institute, but not only had RD taken to heart the words of Fraenkel and Socrates, he had also taken to heart the words of Wilamowitz, and he said in anguish that Wilamowitz had said that the study of history and philosophy was an essential part of Altertumswissenschaft and what was he to do? HC said they should study Arabic and dazzle the Oriental Institute, but RD said the core of the subject was the exploration of valid modes of reasoning about the subject. Whether this carried weight with HC is not known. He was not one to take things to heart, but he was a sportsman, and he could not bring himself to go into a course where he would have no competition.
Seven terms went by and it was time for Greats, the last exams of the course. RD came to HC’s room. RD felt that having spent two and a half years learning valid methods of argument it was contemptible to cast them aside just as though he were a 19-year-old entrance candidate with no real training in philosophy, and on the other hand he thought he must be missing something since philosophers and historians did after all set the exams and appeared to expect the candidates to take them. He walked up and down talking about Socrates & Wilamowitz & Mommsen waiting for HC to get out the chessboard, & sure enough HC brought out his chessboard.
They began to play without a word. The timer went before RD had made his fifth move. HC set the clock back & began putting the pieces back. RD put his head on his hand.
He said: It’s not the same.
He said: Is there no END to this?
HC said: You’ll never have to take an exam again.
HC said: Well maybe just one.
What? said RD.
All Souls! said HC, who hoped to be the youngest fellow in a hundred years.
RD said: I can’t do this any more. I can’t do this to PHILOSOPHY. I can’t write some piece of rubbish in half an hour and say they MADE me do it.
HC said: Opening middle game endgame.
RD said: I can’t do this anymore. He said in anguish: What am I to
do
?
HC set out the game. He set the clock. RD raised his head. He stopped saying what am I to do. He played rapidly and confidently. He won in 23 moves and he said
But it’s not the same.
They played, and RD won 10 games out of 10.
He said: But it’s not the same.
5 minutes, said HC.
RD won 10 games out of 10. He did not say But it’s not the same. He did not say What am I to do?
The first exam was the Plato and Aristotle paper.
RD put on a black suit and white tie. He put on his scholar’s gown. The icebergs bore down on him. Socrates stood silent at his shoulder. He looked silently down at the paper.
Looking up he saw that the invigilator was JH, a man who had been working for the last 20 years on a book on
Republic
X. In those days it was possible for a man to be the finest Platonist of his generation and not publish for 20 years. There was a question on
Republic
X. Now RD saw what he must do.
He wrote: I am not so presumptuous as to attempt in 40 minutes what Mr. JH has not achieved in 20 years. That took a minute. The implication of the sentence, however, was that Mr. JH had been wrong to set the paper, & it took him 2 hours and 57 minutes to decide that it would be more insulting to spare a philosopher what he believed to be the truth than to hand in the notebook with this sentence on the page.
He spent the rest of the week punting on the Cherwell.
HC got the top first that year, and RD got no degree of any kind.
Now as soon as HC saw the list of vivas he knew that he had got a very good first and RD had not, because RD’s name was not on the list. There were three days of vivas after HC’s: he had three days in which to enjoy his victory.
Then the class list went up and he discovered that RD’s name was not on it. He had TRICKED HC into going on with the course with all his talk of Wilamowitz, and then he had cheated. Now the congratulations of the examiners seemed empty and stupid. HC stalked up and down shouting, he said no one would give RD a job, no one would give him teaching, he would end up working on a dictionary or an Oxford Companion, he’d get kicked off for missed deadlines, he’d end up marking A-levels and getting kicked off the board, he’d end up teaching
English
as a foreign
language
. RD was rather tired. Everyone can imagine a life’s regret for a moment of cowardice, but you could just as easily regret a moment’s courage; RD thought that everything HC said might well be true (as in fact it was), and the years after this moment of courage might make him capable of regretting it. Still, it was done.
HC stalked out of the room. He got a Fellowship at All Souls at the age of 19 but all the fun had gone out of it.
RD got a job at a crammer’s.
I said I thought a crammer was a place that helped people to pass exams.
Sibylla said Yes.
I: Wasn’t that a problem?
Sib: Well, it wasn’t a problem in one sense in that RD thought it was perfectly acceptable to take an exam to get INTO a place where you might improve your logical faculties, he just thought once your faculties were improved you shouldn’t trample underfoot what you had learned and accept an accolade for doing so, but it was kind of a problem in that the students found the chess rather hard to follow. RD would start talking about Lucretian elements in the
Aeneid
& go to the board & talk about developing the argument on the queenside under the impression that he was helping the students with their exam technique, or he would say Now let’s look at some basic mating positions & have trouble with discipline. So he lost the job and got another job.
HC & RD still went to Fraenkel’s classes. Afterwards they would come out into the front quadrangle at Corpus, there is a statue of a pelican on a pillar in the centre of the quad and RD would pace in anguish around the pelican. HC was getting more and more depressed. Each day he went into the Bodleian at 9:00. At 1:00 he went back to college for lunch, and at 2:15 he was back in the Bodleian. At 6:15 he went back to his college unless of course it was the day of the seminar. Sometimes he worked in the Lower Reading Room, and sometimes he called up a manuscript and worked in Duke Humfrey. There would never be anyone to compete with ever again.
He was weary of philology, weary of tracing the corruption of sounds in their written relics. He wanted to go where a language was not written. He wanted to go where all utterances died with breath.
Then he heard that there was a strange silent tribe in the desert of Kyzylkum. They refused to let anyone who was not of the tribe know its language and any member of the tribe who repeated a word in the presence of a foreigner was punished by death.
HC did some research and he eventually came to the exciting conclusion that the references to a lost silent tribe in four or five separate historical traditions might be to the same tribe which being nomadic had ranged over thousands of miles for thousands of years. He decided to find it.
He spent seven years learning Chinese and Uralic and Altaic and Slavic and Semitic languages, and at the end of his Fellowship he set off for the desert.
It was not easy to get to Kyzylkum. He tried to fly to Moscow but he could not get a visa. He tried to get over the border into Turkmenistan from Iran & was turned back. He went to Afghanistan & tried to cross the border into Uzbekistan & was turned back. Then he thought perhaps he could go to Pakistan and cross the Pamirs to Tajikistan and so trek on to Kyzylkum but he was turned back again.
Then he decided to start his quest at the other end. His theory was that the tribe ranged all the way from the Mongolian plateau to the desert of Kyzylkum and he now decided to make for Mongolia instead.
He travelled to China, pretending to be a simple tourist.