Melancholia
Instead of working on my dissertation, I began to think obsessively about Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencholia I (1514), which I thought looked like me (more so now than then, since I have gained 25 pounds). The main source of my melancholia was that many of my friends from last year were gone.
“I feel like I am just going through the motions. There are a lot of new people and they are all very excited, of course, just like I was last year. I am benevolently tolerant. I had a couple of lunch dates with some new people who want to know about the GRC.1
A woman from Trinity College [Mary Marcy, now president emerita of Dominican University of California] wrote me a note and asked me to have lunch with her to discuss the GRC. Apparently, Anton, who came to dinner at Keble, had referred her to me. So, I am going to meet her at Halifax House and hope that Anton doesn’t show up and make a fool of himself there. I hope it is not some kind of plot that he has devised to humiliate me in another situation.2
The woman who lives upstairs from me is working on a second BA in English. She’s from Japan and I am supposed to have lunch with her in the Junior Common Room at the English Faculty building to show her where it is. So, I feel like I am spending, not a lot, but a certain amount of time as a social obligation to new people in terms of showing them what’s available at Oxford. Of course, I had to go to the first MCR [Middle Common Room] dessert and meet a number of the new people as well. The smoking was so bad that I had to leave after an hour because of my asthma.
In terms of the old people who are still around, Karen (the woman who used to live across the hall from me) and Lawrence are both living in some sort of religious hall called St. Gregory’s where the assistant chaplain Corky Miller is the warden. I am supposed to have tea there tomorrow and I will check it out. The good thing about knowing about St. Gregory’s (and knowing the warden there) is that they have a guest room that I can arrange for people who are visiting me.
[Tape damaged] is no longer here. He took a job with a bank in the City. He’s an international financial manager. It seems to me a strange position for him to end up in. In a way sort of sad, apparently, he just left Oxford shortly before the term started, and he was very sad about leaving. He submitted his thesis; it has not been defended yet. He completed it over the summer. Alain, the French Canadian, is still here, but his girlfriend Helene has gone to work in the City. It seems like a lot of people end up working in the City. I don’t know what that means exactly. For me, it sounds like death and banishment from Paradise. I guess that’s where a lot of people from Oxford end up.
Mark Stone also moved to London. When I talked to KP last week, he told me that Victor Lal [at that point a refugee because of the 1987 coup in Fiji] had a position at Queen Elizabeth House in Oxford.
I still haven’t done any work on the thesis, partly because of this manuscript that has to take priority at this time. . . . I talked to Moses last night. He is still willing to help me at least translate the essential pages of Bérard [a book that I needed for my thesis], but I am not inclined to rely on him too much. . . . He showed up at my room unexpectedly around 10:30 at night after having drunk three or four beers at Linacre [his college], so he was a little looped when he arrived. He has moved to married housing at Summertown.”3
John Aubrey’s Malady
April 1643
“Camp fever is raging in Oxford. I have fallen sick with smallpox: it will unpolish my complexion. My father is summoning me home again, for fear I cannot recover in this disease-ridden city. But I am bedridden and cannot leave, nor do I wish to. I know what a lonely life awaits me in the country, far from books, far from ingenious conversation. Whereas here I lie, a scurvy antiquary, entertained by my faithful friends at least. Mr William Radford, in his third year here at Trinity, comes to see me every day for several hours, saving me from melancholy. Dr Ralph Kettell, who cannot be reconciled to long hair, or hairy scalps as he calls them, once cut off Will’s hair with the bread knife from the buttery hatch when we were all eating in hall. . . . Smallpox is periodical. There was smallpox in Sherborne during 1626 (the year of my birth), and during the year 1634, and it has been back again since Michaelmas last year. Such facts and observations in the great towns should be recorded but few care for these things.”
June 1643
My father’s caution has prevailed. I am come home again to a sad country life. I recovered from smallpox after the end of Trinity Week (Trinity Sunday was 4 June) and my father sent for me. . . . I am in the prime of my youth and I am without the benefit of ingenious conversation, and have hardly any good books. I am almost a consumptive.
July 1643
Dr Ralph Kettell has died. He was a good man and a good president of Trinity College. He was over eighty years old, but I believe would have lived well for longer without these wars. He might even have made a century. The wars grieved him deeply. He was used to being in charge of Trinity absolutely. It was hard for him to bear the affronts and disrespect of the soldiers garrisoned at the college.4
Prior to Aubrey’s illness, he commissioned a drawing of Osney Abbey.
February 1643
“Osney Abbey is a ruin in Oxford, just south of the Botley Road. . . . The ruins should be drawn for future generations before they disappear further. I could do it myself, but not well enough. Osney and posterity deserve better. I will find someone skilled to do it.”
“I hope I can find someone to draw the ruins of Osney Abbey before they fall down. I have sought out William Dobson, the court painter, in his rooms on the High Street almost opposite St Mary’s Church. Dobson is a painter of genius, but poor. He became court painter just last year after Van Dyke died, at a time when everything was changing. . . . In his studio today I saw a wonderful work in progress: a sumptuous portrait of the Prince of Wales [Charles II], commemorating his participation in the Battle of Edgehill. . . . Dobson is probably too occupied to draw Osney Abbey for me himself, but he says his friend and assistant Mr Hesketh will do it for twenty shillings.”
September 1643
“There has been an explosion at Osney Abbey, where they are making gunpowder for the King. I thank heaven that I had the remains of the abbey drawn before this happened. I was fearful the ruins would collapse from neglect, but war has helped them on their way.”5
A Sad Ending
April 1646
“The war goes badly. There is little food and no cheer in Oxford. Mr Dobson is running out of painterly materials that cannot be sent for or fetched from London. The war has reduced the thick impasto of his earlier canvases to thin skim paint. Even so, he works with what he has. There is a new portrait of the King in his studio, nearly finished. It is done almost entirely in black and brown. The King wears military dress: his proud head and shoulders fill the canvas, ready to do battle, yet there is anxiety, sadness about his dark eyes.”
June 24, 1646
“On this day Oxford surrendered. . . . Sir Thomas Fairfax, Lord General of the Parliament’s army, has set a good guard of soldiers to preserve and protect the Bodleian Library. It is said that during their garrison of the town, the King’s army did much damage to the library, embezzling the books and cutting off the chains that hold them in place. Lord Fairfax is a lover of learning, who will take care that our noble library is not further destroyed.”
October 1646
“The painter William Dobson has died, aged just thirty-five. Like other supporters of the King who have left Oxford now the Parliamentarians have it, he came to live in London recently. But he was soon imprisoned for debt and died in poverty.”6
Such as it is, the collateral damage of war.
For a description of the GRC (Graduate Representative Council), see Institutional Identity at the Personal Level.
For more on Anton, see An Affinity for People, especially Poets.
For more on Moses, see May Morning in Oxford.
Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey, My Own Life (New York: New York Review Books, 2015), 53, 54, 59.
Ibid., 49, 52, 62.
Ibid., 68–69.
As someone who loves learning for learning's sake (at least, when I choose what to learn), and who also saw advanced higher education as a means to social mobility, I was first perplexed and then aghast to realize that I had misunderstood in the first place, and then been overtaken by cultural change in the second. Most people at University see it as a means to gain or cement wealth and social position. For those who love to learn, they are helped on that path as an advocation. For those who take up learning as a career, as academics, then they had better begin with the sort of privilege that propels them to the highest reaches of the profession, since the profession as a whole has been brutally deprofessionalized over the past three decades. Not to be melancholic, or anything. As for the jerks, I would be astounded if other women didn't realize what, exactly, they were.
I cannot help but note in this essay and the comments, of how when one says "study" and education", it is all matters of the mind-testing, facts, memorization, rote detritus that spawns little greatness. However, when people talk of "learning" it is always preceded by emotions, such as enjoyment, love, passion, and yes even the flip side of melancholia or even sadness at the loss of learning. I appreciate the title "A Delicate Bloom of Learning".