I first met Mr Prynne (J. H. Prynne to his fans, Jeremy to his friends, and Mr Prynne, forever, to me) at the first of my interviews to study English at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. I’d stayed there the night before, and the students who happened to be there, and who happened to be in English, said: ‘he’s the one to impress’.
His rooms were up a U-shaped set of stairs in a sixteenth century building (doorway to the right where the woman walks in the picture above), with duck-egg-blue walls, Chinese paintings, floor-to-ceiling books, and a large desk by a small window overlooking Caius court. Off it was a cubby-hole with a computer that wrote bright green on black. Upstairs were his Chinese books. I’m not certain that I ever saw the upper room, but I have an image of it.
‘Take a pew, take a pew’. He lisped even his Ts, and I’m pretty sure he used this phrase on this first occasion as on all others. After a few minutes I decided that I was being put off by a trumpeter rehearsing in the next room, and dared to ask whether the noise would be carrying on throughout the interview. ‘I don’t know. Why? Do you play the trumpet?’
I had submitted, on request, a piece of practical criticism. Mine was about ‘The Old Pantry’ by Peter Scupham. Mr Prynne took my handwritten sheets, glanced at them, and then launched into a history of pantries: their origins, their uses. After a while, without any mention of my essay, he moved on to something else. We touched on my essay about Wuthering Heights, but whenever I used the phrase – which I had not been taught not to use – ‘my teacher says’, he jerked us on. He talked far more than I did. A propos his tendency to speak far more than his pupils did, a friend in my cohort reflects: ‘I always had the impression that he was assessing the sound of the echo of his voice, coming back off us. But who knows exactly how he received what he needed, in deciding whom he wanted to invite.’ He went on: ‘In any case…did you also get an ABC offer, as far as A level grades was concerned? I assume all of us did? I loved that. Clearly not just a reference to basic literacy in general, and therefore both a Prynne joke (inadequate word… better: play) and of course another blow gladly struck against the system (as with eschewing exams)…. but also to Ezra Pound‘s ABC of Reading. At least… I always took it so.’
In the first week of Michaelmas term 1995 he gathered together his first years, quoted some lines of poetry, and asked us who that was. In the silence I offered, tentatively, ‘is it Keats?’ ‘Of courth it’th Keath’ he replied, in genial impatience.
During our first term he called us to the Church of St Edward’s King and Martyr – a tiny church in central Cambridge where he was friends with the vicar – to hear him read, in his gown, from the pulpit, a funeral sermon by Jeremy Taylor. We were not allowed to write notes. That evening he summoned us to his rooms to reconstruct its argument. Back then, he explained, people had memories. Parents would test their children about the contents of the morning’s sermon as he was testing us.
He never mentioned his poetry. He was the college librarian, and it was in any case the college tradition to stock all books by Caians, but the library had nothing of his. I put in a book request to buy his Collected Poems, and they appeared.
He lectured in the English Faculty, on Wordsworth amongst others, but he was most himself, as a teacher, in supervisions, where he veered between lengthy disquisition and lengthy silences for us to think. He taught everything from medieval to modern poetry, and much that wasn’t poetry. He did most of the college teaching for the medieval paper, most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and ‘Practical Criticism’; this last, weekly throughout the three years. He would give us extra sessions, on demand, on our own choices of texts, in our own rooms. He gave sessions after we had finished our degrees, during the last month or so of balls and graduations before we left. He would often start after the appointed time, sometimes wildly so. And he would always overrun, often wildly so. He would hand out each week’s Practical Criticism text the week before, printed on the thickest possible cream paper with laid lines. My friend pointed out at the time that speaking on a text in front of him was like moving a hoop mounted on a stick along a curvaceous livewire. As long as his accompanying ‘mmm’s went from low to high you knew you were doing fine. When they fell from high to low, you knew you had hit the wire. His marginal annotations on essays were in distinguished, faintly gothic, red rollerball. ‘You sometimes’, one told me, ‘grab hold of a poem so hard that it momentarily stops breathing.’
He often taught by anecdotes – for example about the time that he was part way through giving a lecture on Tennyson, and realised that he was bored of what he was saying. He stopped. The pens taking notes continued. But when they too stopped, and people looked up to see what was going on, he said: ‘I am going to make a suggestion. For the rest of this lecture series, I am offering to compare the works of Alfred Tennyson with those of Thomas Hood. I want to put Tennyson to the test of Hood, and see what survives of his seriousness. But I am not forcing this on you. If you would like me to change this lecture series in this way, please put your hands up.’ Nobody put their hand up. After a pause, Mr Prynne continued with his lecture on Tennyson.
Often he repeated his anecdotes, without any apparent memory of having told them before, but for the fact that the moral which he extracted from them would sometimes differ diametrically between successive retellings. One recurrent anecdote which stayed the same, though, was about a former student of his who had graduated and become a carrot farmer. The anecdote always trailed off, as though into the earth.
He didn’t believe in exams. Every other college had internal English exams at the end of the first year, since in the tripos system there are university exams only at the end of the second and third years. Explaining Caius’ anomaly in this respect, he said: ‘There are far too many exams in the world. I’m not going to create any where there aren’t any already.’ As a result, the Easter term of the first year was spent in supervisions and essay-writing rather than revision and examination. He didn’t seem to care at all about exam results.
He particularly enjoyed dissertations. The English Faculty required all colleges to submit their students’ draft titles by a certain point, for central approval. Prynne thought this process ludicrous, and always submitted, for each of his students, the title ‘English Farce’. He would act as a supervisor or backup supervisor on pretty much anything. I found the Newnham supervisor of my second year dissertation on George Eliot a little bland, and sent him my draft for a second opinion. He gently and totally took apart not just my dissertation but a great part of me – moral mission, the standing apart from a situation in judgment of it, mid-Victorian certainty. I had traced diligently round the circumference of the matter, he said, without having penetrated it. It felt as though he had pulled out the plug from a sink inside me, and I watched myself spinning down the drain. For about twenty-four hours I was numb, colourless and impressed – before ordinary life came crowding back in, and the plug settled back into place.
In the twenty-four hours before we had to submit our dissertations to him, he was generally available. In my year someone had lost his work, or just hadn’t done it, and Prynne installed himself in the student’s room to type whatever he dictated through the night. Within an hour of the deadline he would instal himself in the college computer room, where the printers were, and smile from his great height as we sweated about with line spacing and footnotes and wordcounts and paper jams. Finally he would cycle our bundled dissertations, at the last possible moment, over the Cam to the Faculty for submission.
He was sceptical of Lawrence, though least of all of Aaron’s Rod. He admired Patrick White and Paul Bowles. Sympathising, when we were struggling with Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, he called him ‘a tough nut to crack’. He disapproved of most modern disciplines, such as media studies. A bizarrely high proportion of people in my year went through phases of thinking that they wanted to change to Part 2 in other disciplines – music, art, social and political sciences. He gently ridiculed the idea in each case, and we all – thanks to him – dropped the idea. He encouraged nobody to do postgraduate study. Working out what we wanted to do after we had graduated he left up to each of us to work out, except via such gnomic advice as that concerning carrot farming, and assurance that subjects such as media studies were all bosh.
Once a term he invited us, via cards in our pigeon holes, to drinks in his rooms, dress ‘utterly quodlibet’. His own dress would, as always, be his black velvet jacket, white shirt, orange tie, grey trousers and black shoes. He would stand behind his desk and pour out an infinite supply of red and white wine, taking none himself. Wine would be spilled. He would gaily take salt, kneel down, and sort it out. We would see, through a haze of alcohol, the same books that he drew on to make his points in supervisions. Sometimes we would take them down ourselves. The music was often Chinese, and for those who were still around at two or three in the morning he would get out his paint brushes and teach us the basics of Chinese calligraphy. He spent the parties fanning himself. Once he fanned me, and when I protested that it was not he that should fan me, he said that I should learn to take. Those parties smashed to pieces the boundaries between ‘work’ and ‘life’, between intellect and emotion, in both directions.
He came to my birthday party during my final year with a bottle of college wine in each hand. He installed himself in the inflatable blue PVC armchair in my room, looked benignly on, and teased my hanging spider plants as ‘very bourgeois’.
He stayed in his rooms until an hour so late that no-one was ever up to see it. Having gone home at some point, he would return in the late morning. As a result, if ever it was late and you were drunk, or distressed, or both, there was a good chance that you could try his door and be invited in for life advice, or discussion of a poem, or both. A friend of mine once went to him in distress about relationship matters. ‘Sex’, Prynne told him, ‘is very inadequate to express our love. But it’s the best thing we’ve got.’ He was known to be married, and the college story had it that he had told his colleagues of his marriage only in retrospect. When one of them asked ‘and what is her name?’ he said ‘Mrs Prynne’. He was known to have two daughters, and his view of child-raising that it was ‘great fun’.
Summoning my heart into my mouth at some point near the end of my third year, I told him that I was ‘very sentimental’. ‘Fierthely so’, he answered.
I thought it a contradiction in terms that he should ever die. If ever he does, Cambridge will be filled to bursting with those who have known him, coming from the whole world for his funeral.
