No doubt you want to know what happened next: patience, I’ll come to that anon. First, I must explain something of the mysteries of the academic “talk.” In the seventies, the show business side of academia involved a very definite hierarchy of style. As with most things English, implicit class distinctions abounded.
The lecturer with no pretensions at all turned up with a little box of slides to be loaded into a Kodak “carrousel” projector. An agreeable ennui would then descend on the audience who languished in almost complete darkness, their only stimulation – apart from the speaker’s disembodied voice – coming from the occasional slide inserted upside-down. Lecturers with pretensions, albeit not very many, demanded the right to operate the slides themselves. This involved the use of a long cable filled with enormous promise from the audience’s point of view, trailing as it did through the speaker’s legs into the darkness. They were rarely disappointed.
The overhead projector arrived as an alternative about that time, but the same perverse class distinctions set in immediately. It soon became obvious that to lay any claim to credibility your stack of acetate slides should on no account be legible and certainly not photocopied. The best in that genre were handwritten offerings, preferably with coloured annotations, apparently done in great haste and appearing as a kind of mirror writing.
Given all this, you’ll no doubt guess what defined the pinnacle of style in those far-off days. And you’d be perfectly right: no projectors; no slides; no sheets of slippery acetate. Above all, no notes. Just a piece of chalk, and a trusty blackboard. This last should preferably still bear vestigial traces of some prior undergraduate lecture. In which case it was de rigeur never to clean it sufficiently, the speaker using fists or parts of their clothing to clear little patches in which to write.
Naturally, I had carefully prepared my talk on remote priming. Well, you would, wouldn’t you – called to Little Oxford by the Sea? And naturally, given the venue, the choice of style was determined. Yes indeed, chalk and blackboard it was to be. The word brio featured a lot in my fond imaginings during those fervent preparations. Thoughts cunningly pre-prepared would bubble up impromptu, as from some mighty wellspring. Something like that. Not forgetting adroit use of the bit of chalk.
You recall I’d reached the part of my tale when a rather battered me was to be ushered in to meet my benevolent host. I must say, the reception was disconcerting. He didn’t bat an eyelid. A blood-stained shambling wreck of a man is hurriedly pushed into his room and all he does is glance up, shuffle a few papers, and say, “You’ll have had something to eat?”
Now I’ve added the question mark out of politeness, but in truth there wasn’t one: he was simply making an assertion. One that did nothing at all for my stomach, because, if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll recall I’d skipped breakfast after a troubled night, and the day was fast wearing on. Furthermore, although his sang froid was no doubt admirable, it had one distinct disadvantage from my point of view. If he wasn’t going to remark on my peculiar appearance, how they hell could I? It seemed I was doomed to give my talk looking like Quasimodo on a particularly bad day.
But we haven’t reached the talk yet. First, there ensued with my host possibly the oddest conversation of my short life to that point. The subject was a book by a chap called Terry Winograd, much in vogue at that time, describing a computer program he claimed understood natural language. I suppose I could have said, “Nothing to do with me, old boy I’m here to talk about priming.” But no, to my astonishment I heard myself saying that Winograd’s claims were dreadfully over-egged. Palpably true, I may add, and a view shortly thereafter shared by Winograd himself - but isn’t there a proverb about not poking bears?
I paid dearly for the acts of whatever hubristic devil had got me by the neck. Blame it on hunger. Blame it on Dettol. Blame it on whatever you like. I suffered a prolonged and merciless interrogation at the hands of my suddenly not-so-benevolent host. It seemed to go on for about a fortnight. I recall it got quite heated now and then. And I can’t honestly say I came out of it all that well.
As all this was going on I was constantly reminded of my first meeting with the redoubtable Oscar Oeser. The conversation that ensued is set out in Oscar & Lucy and has its comic side. I had been ushered into Oeser’s room to hear that I had travelled all the way the Australia in the entirely erroneous understanding that he had offered me a job. Things like that start you thinking you might be cursed.
I don’t remember that Sussex talk very well but I do recall my host, restored to benevolence, stationing himself on the floor propped against the first row of seats, legs splayed out towards me. It seems it was a favourite place - there were plenty of seats. He went to sleep shortly after I started, only waking near the end to ask a question about something no longer legible on the blackboard.
We come at last to the curse of precocious talent. Somebody took me aside later that night and explained that my host often entertained himself by eating visiting speakers, particularly the young and green. In any case, I was told, he wanted to take me down a peg or two. Which brings me to my point. Perhaps that is the inevitable (and necessary) fate of the precociously talented.
I should qualify that last word – it sounds immodest. A more accurate term would be hedgehoggedly – a pity it doesn’t exist. Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished between two types: foxes, who know lots of things and hedgehogs, who know one big thing (he got the idea from the 7th-century BC Greek poet Archilochus). For Berlin these were immutable dispositions. I venture to disagree. The precociously informed is, of necessity, a hedgehog – there are not enough hours for it to be otherwise. The best you can do is await foxiness, should it chose to come.
Mind you, wisdom doesn’t necessarily come with age. I forget who said it, but it’s certainly true: sometimes age just shows up all by itself.
Next week I want to consider hedgehoggedliness in the young writer. Your assignment is Lucy.