The Professor of Poetry by Grace McCleen – review Jul 20th 2013, 08:00
This solipsistic followup to a celebrated debut falls into the trap of myth-making about Oxbridge
Grace McCleen's award-winning debut novel, The Land of Decoration, centred on an isolated child, Judith, who makes a toy world in her room and comes to believe she can perform miracles. It is a compelling work, full of thrills and peculiarities; as is McCleen's website, which reveals that she not only shares some of Judith's upbringing, but also makes toy people, quaint as sixpences.
The Professor of Poetry is contiguous again – in fact, McCleen tells us, both her first books were cut from the same "unworkable" original novel. This seems to have been an autobiographical text: both McCleen and Judith spend their childhoods in a strike-torn Welsh mining village, while both McCleen and Elizabeth Stone, the central figure of The Professor of Poetry, attend Oxford University. Both books share a distinctive gothic, bookish vision. Oxford here is a lovely toy, garlanded in heightened prose and bedecked with cod names out of Zuleika Dobson. It is inhabited by beautifully lit undergraduates and mythic types such as pixie-ish Albert, the "white-haired, rosy-cheeked porter" "beaming" from his lodge.
This doll-making effect comes partly from a tightly solipsistic narration, focused at all times on the heroine – a very convincing point of view for 10-year-old Judith, but rather less so for a woman supposed to be 50. Elizabeth, in fact, seems to be stuck at 19, constantly reliving her college experiences, and without having acquired any friends, property or memories since. Her preoccupations, too, are undergraduate: whether music is greater than words; other people snogging; canonical poets; the impossibilities of girlish "chit-chat"; virginity; and, overwhelmingly, whether she can write an essay/exam paper/book about Wyatt/Marvell/Eliot good enough to impress her tutor, the emblematically named Professor Hunt.
As a major driver of a plot, this last lacks urgency. All the more so because Edward Hunt, unlike Judith's unreliable friend God, is, despite the Bach and Joy Division in his record collection, an entirely static character who murmurs: "Your submission essays were extraordinary. I knew I wanted you from the very first lines," as early as Elizabeth's admissions interview, and carries on in this vein in the many detailed accounts of tutorials that follow.
It seems unlikely, though, that McCleen set out to tell an entertaining story. Novels, she tell us, should aspire to "spiritual" greatness, and The Professor of Poetry is about "time and stillness and music". She seems a furiously serious writer, still smarting from superficial readings of her first novel, which she wished to be seen as a metaphorical account of faith. Clearly then, it is to the ideas embodied in this book, and not to its often powerful depiction of a priggish, proud and desolatingly lonely personality, that she wishes us to respond.
Of the ideas, then, and seriously, I would like to observe that only a tiny portion of Oxford is a "city of books", and this part is built with money and privilege as much as by "sages" and "scrolls"; that tutorials should not be the stuff of laboured breathing; that a tutor who needs his students to love him is a creep; that time passes in the university as everywhere else, despite the fancy dress; that shagging your tutor is not the apotheosis of learning, still less the point of a life; and that this sort of myth-making about Oxbridge gets in the way of grown-up intellectual life in this country.
Further, that women who despise women's talk despise themselves; that Sylvia Plath is not a "moribund female" but a writer much like McCleen; that poetry is made out of the meanings of words as well as their music, and you can prove this theory by listening to verse in Finnish; that novels are made of words, too, and people, and exchanges between people; and it is the depths and dynamism and communality and even comedy of these, not something "spiritual", that make novels great; that, though this particular novel is elegantly composed and contains beautiful passages, it is also conservative and anti-feminist; and that porters are full-sized people who don't say, "I always knew you'd be one of those that stayed with the books, Miss Elizabeth", nearly as often as they say, "Get off the grass".
• Kate Clanchy's Meeting the English is published by Picador.
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