Do campus novels reflect the reality of university life? When I was a Fellow of Peterhouse, back in the Eighties, I was asked with tedious regularity whether the experience resembled Porterhouse Blue, Tom Sharpe’s grotesquely overblown satire. But even as I (truthfully) denied it, a few vignettes would slide past my mind’s eye — such as my very first Governing Body meeting, when, sombrely robed, the Fellows debated, hotly and with manifest ill-will, whether the vomit by the chapel was beer- or claret-based.
This was, of course, a matter of college politics. In every faculty or university, you will find the progressives ranged against the traditionalists, the puritans against the cavaliers, the utilitarians against the idealists, left against right, science against humanities. The vomit might have been left-wing (a by-product of the Students’ Union bar), or right-wing (spewed out by the would-be toffs of the Pitt Club). Divisions in Peterhouse in that era ran deep and rancorous.
One can see why novelists are attracted to the campus novel — which Showalter, following David Lodge’s criteria, defines as a novel set in a university which concentrates on the teachers rather than the students. This necessarily excludes a vast range of ‘varsity’ novels, from The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green through Brideshead Revisited to I am Charlotte Simmons, but gives an excellent focus to the book.
The fellowship of a university or college offers a novelist a ‘small world’, in the title of David Lodge’s novel: a tightly-enclosed enclave in which passions run high, with malice whetted by intellect; and in which ambition and self-esteem (and their bitter grey shadows, frustration and an all-pervasive sense of failure) are fuelled by a shifting but brutally clear power-structure. There are gulfs of status between student and post-graduate, and between CV-conscious junior fellow or still insecure, ever-climbing lecturer and the professor who has attained the Olympian plateau of tenure.
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