Acts of unkindness are like brands upon the soul, which a thousand subsequent acts of kindness cannot remove. I remembered such an act when I went to the Lamb & Flag pub with friends during the first week of Hilary term.
During Michaelmas term, I had a beer there with a friend who was married and whose wife was not in Oxford. I felt like he was pressuring me to enter a relationship that went beyond friendship. He bought a second round, then went to the bathroom. I decided to flee the situation, so I asked an older man at the next table (who seemed to be eavesdropping) if he could tell my friend that I had left. He responded in a mincing voice that irritated me, “What about your beer?” “You drink it!” I snapped back, then tossed my head and walked out. So that is what really happened. When you are writing (or recounting a story), however, it is perilously easy to slip off the rails. For example—
Here I was, having a beer. I remembered something that happened at a table across the room. I was having a beer with a married friend, whose wife did not live here. He was pressuring me to do something that I did not want to do. He went to get a beer for me and left it at the table. I did not want it. When he went to the bathroom, I was pressuring a stranger to tell the married friend that I left.
“What about the beer?”
“You drink it!”
“I want to tell you something.”
“I remembered something I want to do.”
“Your friend across the table is married.”
“That is what this is about.”
“Why?”
“I do not want to drink with him or do something.”
“Are you married?
“I want to go to the bathroom.”
I left the table. The friend was across from me at the bathroom.
“Not here! I want a stranger. You are married.”
He remembered his wife was a stranger to him. He left. I remembered the stranger across the room.
“Did you drink the beer?”
“I was having the beer when you left.”
“Get me a drink. I need one now.”
This was actually a writing exercise (write a 200-word story using just 50 words) suggested in George Saunders’s recent Story Club newsletter “The Opposite of Worry.” The true story had not changed, but weirdly enough, this writing exercise somehow removed the branding.
The Lamb & Flag
The Lamb & Flag was the unofficial pub of Keble College. It was a two-minute walk down the often dark passage on the right, through a courtyard (aptly named the Lamb & Flag passage), and into the back gate of Keble.
This ancient pub, which had been operating since 1566, was moved to this site in 1613 but was forced to close in January 2021 due to loss of revenue on account of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, the Inklings Group has now rescued the pub as a site of historical interest because its members frequented the Lamb & Flag and the nearby Eagle & Child pub. Kate O’Brien, chairman of the group, said, “We are determined to ensure that the next 408 years of this beloved pub will be as fun, interesting and impactful as the last 408 years. Our hope and belief is that the pub will remain as a community asset at the centre of the magical Oxford scene.”1
In addition to the Inklings, it is rumored that Thomas Hardy wrote much of Jude the Obscure at the Lamb & Flag pub. I have not yet found evidence for this. We know that Hardy visited Oxford a few weeks before beginning the novel, but he also visited other places that were used as models for the novel, which consists of six parts, only two of which take place in Christminster (which resembles Oxford).
Jude the Obscure
I was introduced to Thomas Hardy’s novels at the age of 24. My boss, who was a few years older than me, said that Return of the Native (1878) was his favorite book. It seemed an unusual choice for a Vietnam vet who had served his time as an accountant in Saigon. I read it because I wanted to understand him better, but the book was no help (or perhaps I didn’t want to see what the situation really was). However, I loved Hardy’s writing and went on to read Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). As J. Hillis Miller wrote, “In Hardy’s world what you want you cannot have, and what you have you do not want.”2
When Jude’s schoolmaster Mr. Philottson leaves the village to pursue a university degree at Christminster, Jude takes to the road, hoping to have a glimpse of the dreaming spires. And by now, “he was getting so romantically attached to Christminster that, like a young lover alluding to his mistress, he felt bashful at mentioning its name.”3
In Jude, the 1996 film version of the novel (directed by Michael Winterbottom, starring Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet), Philottson tells Jude: “If you want to do anything in life, Jude, that’s where you have to go, even if it means giving up everything else for a while. You have to read your books while your friends are out playing. . . . Study every chance you get. One day it’ll all pay off, I promise you. Once you’re there everything is open to you. You can become anything you want. You can choose your future.”
You can watch the film in pieces on the above YouTube channel or all of it on the free Internet Archive.
There is a scene that takes place in a tavern that bears a resemblance to the Lamb & Flag. Jude, now grown up, sought distraction “in an obscure and low-ceiled tavern up a court which was well known to certain worthies of the place and in brighter times would have interested him simply by its quaintness. He sat there more or less all day. . . . In the evening the frequenters of the house dropped in one by one, Jude still retaining his seat in the corner.”4 And just as it is today (125 years later), a mixture of town and gown show up to drink and talk about the shortcomings of the Dons, magistrates, and Christminster society in general.
However, Jude was not in a positive frame of mind. His application to Christminster had been rejected. The Master of Biblioll (read Baillol) College had written “judging from your description of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that you will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade.” Jude “re-read the letter from the Master, and the wisdom in its lines, which had at first exasperated him, chilled and depressed him now. He saw himself as a fool indeed.”5
It is not until years later that Jude comes to terms with his failed dream. The question he and others had to grapple with was “whether to follow uncritically the track he finds himself in, without considering his aptness for it, or to consider what his aptness or bent may be, and reshape his course accordingly.” Jude says, “I tried to do the latter, and I failed. . . . However, it was my poverty and not my will that consented to be beaten. It takes two or three generations to do what I tried to do in one.”6 True enough, three generations after Hardy’s time, a working-class background is no longer an obstacle to attending university. Still, in the first week of Hilary term 1986, I did not know whether I too would live with a failed dream as Jude did.
In 1920, Hardy was awarded an honorary degree by Oxford. Ralph Pite writes, “Acceptance by the institution he had attacked so fiercely in Jude was particularly precious to Hardy. It finally put to rest his sense of exclusion—his feeling that his working-class, provincial origins had condemned him to being a perpetual outsider.”7 If that is the case, Hardy was deluding himself. My own experience at Oxford revealed that everyone was both an insider and an outsider.
Closely intertwined with Jude’s dream of attending university was his desire to be with his cousin Sue, whom he met at Christminster. Unfortunately, he was already married when they met. Had Sue walked away in the beginning as I did, the story would not have ended tragically. But that is all I will say about that.
“Historic Lamb & Flag Pub in Oxford Is Saved from Permanent Closure.” The Oxford Magazine, October 5, 2021. https://theoxfordmagazine.com/news/historic-lamb-flag-pub-in-oxford-is-saved-from-permanent-closure/.
Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, with Introduction by J. Hillis Miller (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), xiii.
Ibid. 22.
Ibid. 145.
Ibid. 142, 145.
Ibid. 406-407.
Ralph Pite, Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 445.
As always, a great read! The one sentence that remained with me is: "My own experience at Oxford revealed that everyone was both an insider and an outsider." I presume there is much to be said about that.....