The Best of Pickering

At Cambridge

At Cambridge “we take americans for many reasons. Either they are scholars, which you are not,” Tom Henn began after I had been in Cambridge four weeks. Tom was right. I had not come to Britain to study. I had been a student at Sewanee, so disciplined that classmates called me “Machine” and sometimes made whirring or clanking sounds when I entered a room. Tom did not explain clearly why St. Catharine’s admitted me. The college’s reasons were probably as vague as my reasons for applying. In part I applied because I did not receive a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Although I never expected to win a scholarship, I didn’t think I would be rejected either, and until December of my senior year, when I was interviewed by the Rhodes Committee, thoughts of green quadrangles, madrigals at dawn, and strawberries and cream for tea occasionally drifted through my dreams. Unfortunately, I bored easily and interviewed poorly in those days. Bromides did not bubble naturally and smoothly from my lips, and when asked a hackneyed or ponderous question I had trouble keeping my tongue in check. When asked about the mission of the United Nations, I tried to liven up the interview and said, “On the radio the other night, I heard a preacher say ‘U.N. or U.S.—what’s it going to be? We have to choose.’ That struck me as interesting.” That, alas, did not interest the committee, and drawing wit and wisdom from a highland preacher, I must have appeared remarkably provincial. In truth, I was provincial, not, however, because of preachers. Only rarely did I hear preachers on the radio, and, when I did, I paid little attention to idea, listening instead for colorful language. In part I applied to Cambridge because I suspected that I had received a narrow education. At Sewanee I was a bookworm, studying seven days a week, thinking little, and observing less. Moreover, at that time Sewanee itself was provincial. Ten thousand acres atop the spur of a mountain, the college was contained both physically and intellectually. Among students cults of the South and the Christian gentleman ›ourished, and form 130
often seemed more important than substance. “Our glorious mother ever be,” students sang in the alma mater. Sewanee was a kind of mother, nurturing and protecting but also smothering. Much as ‹rstand second-year courses in English were restricted to “great writers”— Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Dante, Lucretius—so the whole university seemed turned toward the past, not a past of butchery and injustice, a past to anger and quicken, but a past of tradition empurpled by sentiment , a past so superior to the present that it sapped vital curiosity and led to cool satisfaction. Even when problems beyond the mountain touched the college, Sewanee transformed them into the quaintly anecdotal and thus reduced their signi‹cance. Until my last year Clara’s, the lone restaurant at Sewanee, was segregated. Then some people from Chattanooga staged a sit-in that coincided with the annual meeting of a secret college society . During the meeting students drank heavily, after which they roamed about waving lanterns and singing songs about George Washington . More raucous than melodious, the singing disturbed the early evening nap of an ancient relic of a bishop of Arkansas. “Jerry, what’s that noise?” she asked a student who rented a room in her house. “Oh, it’s nothing, Miss Amy,” he said. “It’s just a bunch of men from Grundy County, going down to Clara’s to hang the sit-iners.” “Dear me,” Miss Amy replied. “I don’t mind the men hanging those people, but I do wish they would give them a trial ‹rst.” I didn’t know to which college to apply at Cambridge, and since no one at Sewanee seemed able to advise me, I chose St. Catharine’s on a whim. Because my mother was named Katharine and once went to St. Catherine’s School in Richmond, Virginia, and because a girl named Catherine was on my mind, I picked St. Catharine’s. Realizing that the deadline for formal applications had long passed, I wrote a letter to Tom Henn, who supervised English studies at the college. I decided to read English at Cambridge because I had majored in English at Sewanee and didn’t want to study hard for examinations. Tom agreed with me. “If you wanted to be a student,” he told me shortly after my arrival, “you...