The fake’s progress

Ever since Dixon’s pie-eyed lecture on Merrie England in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim there’s been a hunger for more exposures of the pretentious absurdities and backbiting jealousies of academia. Here’s another from a distinguished professor of English at London University who’s presumably seen a great deal of it. Perhaps it’s because of this that David Nokes’s book is much closer to farce than to the reality you find, say, in C. P. Snow’s novels set in a Cambridge college or Malcolm Bradbury’s satires on life at the redbrick and new plate-glass universities. In these books people must have seen glimpses of themselves or at least recognised others, but I can’t imagine anyone seeing either themselves or anyone they know in The Nightingale Papers.

To Danny the academic business is a bluff and a game. Standing in for a colleague, he delivers a lecture on The Rake’s Progress but finding he’s got the slides in the reverse order explains he did so deliberately because ‘it demystified the iconic status of the images’. McWhinnie, his tutor at Oxford, though, is a sincere phoney who after reading two editions of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, one of 1805, the other of 1850, realises how ‘the alteration of adjectives, the transposition of metaphors and rearrangement of lines’ can improve the poem. He goes on to gain an Oxford fellowship by showing ‘the cultural scars’ that occur between Trafalgar and the coming of the Crimean War. McWhinnie, because he considers himself to have had a good war, has a mania for war references like these and looks for them even in the most innocent of lyrical poems. If there are none, he says, ‘absence is presence’. Of course, of course!

Danny attends a conference on the poet Thomas Madoc held in a godforsaken Welsh mansion where the Nightingale Group, as the poet and his circle in 1793-6 came to be called, lived and wrote.