I’m on an academic-themed novel run at the moment, after Donna Tartt’s Secret History. Tom Sharpe’s Porterhouse Blue is, in its way, as concerned with tradition as Tartt’s novel, but has a totally different tone, one of rambunctious satirical comedy. In short, a Cambridge college, Porterhouse, acquires a new Master, who attempts to modernise affairs much to the chagrin of the old dons and staff.

Like all really good, enduring comedies (e.g. Withnail & I), it’s also about something – in this case, the absurdity of tradition and the absurdity of modernity. In our ghastly modern times, it is fashionable to critique tradition by pointing to its silliness & occasional inhumanities, without admitting modernity’s faults (a regulated, inescapable inhumanity, among others). Much of the novel is seen through the eyes of Skullion, a loyal college servant who has overseen decades of tradition.

He went back into the Porter’s Lodge and sat down again with his pipe. Around him the paraphernalia of his office, the old wooden clock, the counter, the rows of pigeonholes, the keyboard and the blackboard with ‘Message for Dr Messmer’ scrawled on it, were reassuring relics of his tenure and reminders that he was still needed. For forty-five years Skullion had sat in the Lodge watching over the comings and goings of Porterhouse until it seemed he was as much a part of the College as the carved heraldic beasts on the tower above. A lifetime of little duties easily attended to while the world outside stormed by in a maelstrom of change had bred in Skullion a devotion to the changelessness of Porterhouse traditions. When he’d first come there’d been an Empire, the greatest Empire that the world had known, a Navy, the greatest Navy in the world, fifteen battleships, seventy cruisers, two hundred destroyers, and Skullion had been a keyboard sentry on the Nelson with her three for’ard turrets and her arse cut off to meet the terms of some damn treaty. And now there was nothing left of that. Only Porterhouse was still the same. Porterhouse and Skullion, relics of an old tradition. As for the intellectual life of the College, Skullion neither knew nor cared about it. It was as incomprehensible to him as the rigmarole of a Latin mass to some illiterate peasant. They could say or think what they liked. It was the men he worshipped, some at least and fewer these days, their habits and the trappings he associated with that old assurance. The Dean’s ‘Good morning, Skullion’, Dr Huntley’s silk shirts, the Chaplain’s evening stroll around the Fellows’ Garden, Mr Lyons’ music evening every Friday, the weekly parcel from the Institute for Dr Baxter. Chapel, Hall, the Feast, the meeting of the College Council, all these occasions like internal seasons marked the calendar of Skullion’s life and all the time he looked for that assurance that had once been the hallmark of a gentleman.

When I think over the past, and what I miss, it is of course the architecture, the ethos of the old scholars (now mostly dead or retired or fired, to make way for the fashionable new academic), but also the people, the type. It once made sense to talk of a “gentleman”, of a man who acts according to a higher standard where it counts. Today, were one to say a coarse TV presenter or a traitor like Tony Blair is “not a gentleman” people would simply jeer. The notion of being a gentleman has been replaced by being a good SJW, a shrieking blue hair with BPD, or a smirking Blairite bureaucrat parroting the latest buzzwords (tolerance, respect, diversity, etc.)

Now sitting there with the gas fire hissing before him he searched his mind for what it was those old men signified. It wasn’t that they were clever. Some were, but half were stupid, more stupid than the young men coming up these days. Money? Some had a lot and others hadn’t. That wasn’t what had made the difference. To him at least. […] He spat into the fire affectionately and remembered an argument he’d had once with a young pup in a pub who’d heard him going on about the good old days.

‘What gentlemen?’ the lad had said. ‘A lot of rich bastards with nothing between their ears who just exploited you.’

And Skullion had put down his pint and said, ‘A gentleman stood for something. It wasn’t what he was. It was what he knew he ought to be. And that’s something you will never know.’ Not what they were but what they ought to be, like some old battle standard that you followed because it was a symbol of the best. A ragged tattered piece of cloth that stood for something and gave you confidence and something to fight for.

It’s not that the past was perfect, merely that the flipside of pointless snobbery was a reverence for the things that really mattered. And there is something endearing about the snobbery; for example reading this passage in 2020, where every grubby polytechnic calls itself a university, is an amusing experience – it concerns a research graduate called Zipser, with an undergraduate degree from Durham:

The Porter seemed to regard him as an interloper, and lavished a wealth of invective on him normally reserved for tradesmen. Zipser’s attempts to mollify him by explaining that Durham was a university and that there had been a Durham College in Oxford in 1380 had failed hopelessly. If anything, the mention of Oxford had increased Skullion’s antipathy.

I rather like a world where the University of Durham is regarded as a made-up institution. That’s snobbery done right. Even at my alma mater, which was not Cambridge, there was a pleasant sense of being excluded, by not having gone to one of the very best public schools, not having a Norman family tree, and so on. For me, it was somewhat like going to the theatre and knowing that I would always be in the audience, observing the curious ceremonies of those on stage:

‘Crumpets,’ said the Chaplain scurrying out of the bathroom. ‘Just the thing. You toast them.’ He speared a crumpet on the end of a toasting-fork and thrust the fork into Zipser’s hand. Zipser poked the crumpet at the fire tentatively and felt once again that dissociation from reality that seemed so much a part of life in Cambridge. It was as if everyone in the College sought to parody himself, as if a parody of a parody could become itself a new reality.

Of course all this has been undone now, and the parodic old dons have been replaced by parodic SJW blue hairs and their ilk. For example, the University of Durham’s website is full of such multicultural wonders:

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