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PARTISAN REVIEW
born, as Robinson Crusoe was at least free to explore his Desert
Island, seemed and seems to me an unspeakable injustice; for the
condition of being a prisoner
in
the world is a fundamental reality
overshadowing all the political and social arrangements which have
grown in the course of generations.
It may be objected that Oxford
in
my time had, after all, to a
great extent become a working class environment. Were there not
many working class students and even teachers of working class origin?
There was, indeed, even a working class college, but as a result of the
Oxford tradition which is to isolate tendencies within itself, few
people outside a working class college would be aware of its existence
as an influence in the University, any more than they were aware of
the Church college, Keble. To us undergraduates, our Oxford uni–
verse was not, as might appear to an outsider, all equally "Oxford."
There was a hierarchy of values by which to be at a college neglected
by members of other colleges was as though not to be at Oxford at
all. We thought of the University as consisting of several colleges
which represented certain values and interests, whilst others were re–
garded as almost nonexistent entities where the students led negligible
lives, and to know someone from one of these absurd places required
explanation. Thus the tradition by which the Oxford mind is able
to ignore things by creating pockets of mental vacuum around them,
was incorporated within the hierarchy of the colleges themselves,
several colleges being little more than social abysses, engulfing their
undergraduates in oblivion among their contemporaries at the more
favored colleges.
When I was at Oxford there were of course a good many stu–
dents of working class origin, but they did not really broaden the
outlook of the University as might have been expected. What usually
happened was either that they were so poor, so exhausted by the ef–
fort of winning scholarships during many years, so much involved in
the long grind of their lives
in
which Oxford was but an episode, so
little able to meet the public school boys on equal terms, that they led
obscure lives secluded in their work; or else if they overcame these
difficulties, they gradually became absorbed into Oxford, adopting all
its standards, and becoming more Oxford than Oxford itself.
Money played a more decisive part
in
deciding the boundaries
of one's life at Oxford than in any other society I have known. The
