[ilds] Cambridge or not

[Denise Tart & David Green]

I wonder if the question of Larry's efforts to attend Cambridge and or Oxford could be settled by inquiring after the fact to those institutions??

Surely they would have records??

Be that as it may, I sense in Larry a deliberate anti intellectualism. Perhaps as an overprivileged raj colonial he felt no real need for the university. Perhaps as an aspiring bohemian writer he saw it as a waste of time and full of cant and monastic scholarship.

I note many of Larry's friends appear to be drifters like himself: wayward aristocrats, fellow bohemians, local school teachers and peasants.

I've got this thing about Larry and peasants. I think, especially after his post adolescent days as described by brother Gerald in My Family and other Animals, and after the diplomatic years, he liked to see himself as one: the woodcutter, the stone wall builder, the 2 litre of wine a day man (not uncommon in the part of France here he lived), the man who hewed novels and poems out of the landscape and the experience of life, the man who wore checked flanelet shirts and heavy corduroys. I think he hated all that academic stuff. He liked clever talk and was very well read, but well read in an untutored way. He devoured libraries of books like litres of wine but he did not apply the acamemic method because he did not know it for one thing and probably did not want it anyway.

Not convinced at all by the fake Irish thing. "Land of my fathers, my fathers can have have it!" as Dylan Thomas said of Wales

Larry was trying to emulate Oscar Wilde, the Irish Gentleman who stood up to the English establishment. Well, old Oscar went to prison and Larry went to the Mediterranean and my ancestors came to the Australia for much the same reason.

David


16 William Street
Marrickville NSW  2204
+61 2 9564 6165
0412 707 625
dtart at bigpond.net.au
www.denisetart.com.au
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