In Britain, no phrase fills the listener with such revulsion, hatred and envy as “We were at Oxford together.” It suggests old-money snobbery and the worst kind of cronyism–the right tie, the right accent, and someone with the IQ of a pound of potting soil gets in places where you can never get. (The phrase “We were at Cambridge together,” on the other hand, is relatively meaningless.)
Having said that, I can now announce that Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair who has just been appointed the new editor of the New Yorker, and I were at Oxford together.
Before the bile rises in your throat, and you imagine me calling on this old-school-tie connection and getting a job at the New Yorker $80,000 a year by writing small, dry snippets that begin “We were waiting to cross Fifth Avenue the other day…” let me tell you exactly what it actually meant to have been at Oxford with Tina Brown.
In 1971, in the first week of my first year, I came out of a thoroughly incomprehensible lecture on Gerard Manley Hopkins—I was still going to lectures, a habit that last about another three weeks–and saw a short attractive blond undergraduate standing at the kerb. What set her apart from the scores of other young women streaming into and out of the building was her coat.
It was a waist-length affair, sleeveless if I remember correctly, made of squares of different-colored fur. It managed to be at the same time aristocratic and pauperish, classy and yet with a hint of the beggar’s rags, for being working-class was very much in fashion, and looking working-class was the next best thing. The French would call this style gamine—street urchin. It probably cost a fortune.
She looked up and down the street, and her blond hair swished this way and that across the collar of her extraordinary coat. I fidgeted from foot to foot, wondering if I dared say something to her. Then a sports car pulled up (no student I knew had any kind of car, let alone a sports car), a tall, well-dressed man apparently in his mid-twenties jumped out, they embraced and dashed off, leaving me standing on the kerb in a derisive fart of exhaust.
Over the next couple of years I made friends with a gang of women in Somerville College, Oxford. They were all down-to-earth, frighteningly well-read and great company, and occasionally they mentioned someone called Tina Brown, whose room was just down the corridor. They all knew her, though they hardly ever saw her: she was always busy working on her play, which was said to be brilliant, or writing the notorious article about Oxford for Cosmopolitan, according to which we all spent our time drinking champagne and going to balls and driving around in Jeremy’s E-Type Jaguar, whose seats reclined far enough to make the 69 position a working proposition. She was the kind of student who gave Oxford a bad name, or a good name if you owned an E-Type, and we detested her.
In June 1974 a few thousand students and I walked into the Examination Schools, a vaulted series of buildings with the dimensions of a large museum, to sit our finals, a grueling series of written exams that lasted several weeks and covered everything we had learned in the whole of our university studies. The procedure was made less nerve-racking by the fact that we all had to wear full academic dress–black academic gown, black shoes and white bow tie with dark suit, white shirt, white bow tie for the men, white shirt and black skirt for the women–which made everyone look refreshingly silly.
We were seated in alphabetical order, and as I walked down the aisle looking for Mr. Timothy Brookes, I saw a card that read Miss Christina Brown. My desk was two behind hers. I waited, curious to see what the notorious Tina Brown looked like. Minutes passed. The hall filled up. The exam papers were passed out; and then, with a nonchalance that suggested that rules were made for little people, she strolled in a minute late and sat down, sidesaddle, in her desk. It was the same bob of blonde hair, and even in academic regalia she managed to take my breath away.
I lowered my head and addressed question 1: “Wordsworth’s poetry is the poetry of the Fall, poetry in which childhood represents a state of grace, and hence maturity a period of disillusion. Discuss.”
Even then, I knew that for some of us maturity would be a period of disillusion, but for others it would be the opportunity to ascend through a series of states of grace, and though I had never heard of the New Yorker at that time of relative childhood and knew of Vanity Fair only as a novel by Thackeray I had never got round to reading, I had a pretty fair idea of where Tina Brown would be after Finals were over and we were all driven out of this extended golden childhood we had been granted.
Of course, this is for your ears only. As soon as I’ve finished this, I intend to write a letter to accompany my latest submission to the New Yorker.
Dear Tina: we’ve never actually been introduced, but we were at Oxford together. I was a friend of your friends at Somerville—Chris Turvey, and Manya, and Corrinne, and Tina Rogers.
Surely you remember us all. Surely.
First broadcast on National Public Radio in 1992.
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3 users responded in this post
3 – the ending is hilarious. I laughed even though it wasn’t a surprise. Nice description and interesting essay.
3 – Yes, it has everything I like. England. Laughs. and Tina Brown – I’ve loved her work for years. This is a strong #3.
1. Woke up disturbing feelings of being outside
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