27th October 1984

Literary Virgins

William Boyd’s account of Felix Cobb’s unhappy days at Oxford in An Ice-cream War is extremely convincing.  What is so good about it is the way he manages to evoke both the unhappiness of Oxford during the Great War and the all-pervading unhappiness that is peculiar to Oxford and Cambridge – a sad, empty, melancholy mood which never changes.  What is this curious mood which seizes the Oxbridge undergraduate not long into his first term and which so many writers in their turn have seized on in their recollections of the two great universities, creating from it prose which is deeply haunting, entirely unforgettable?  The mood which pervades Chapter 8 of Part 2 of An Ice-cream War is the same one that Nabokov conjured so brilliantly in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.  It is even present in certain sections of Brideshead Revisited. 

I think it has a lot to do with the people who experienced the mood.  Generation upon generation of callow young men with high hopes doomed, if only they knew it, to disappointment.  They leave their after-image on the place – the ghost of a feeling which clings to the colleges as tenaciously as does the creeper to the stonework.  Their massive young egos, their tiny experience of life, their cherished visions of vast horizons, their narrow and confined, myth-ridden, hand-me-down milieu – all these things combine to create a feeling as lonely and as desolate as the sound of the doors banging on those chilly staircases on a rainy November afternoon.  One thinks of peas in a pod all rattling round a universe of their own egotism. 

Yet how can one be free of egotism at that age and in those conditions?  The callow young man can inspire a feeling akin to pity when he’s not arousing one’s resentment.  The callow young man of this variety is the type of the literary virgin.  Unoriginal in his originality, miniscule in the size of his ambition, more doomed than almost any other literary archetype.  Only the virgin proper is more doomed, I suspect.

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