512
PARTISAN REVIEW
question that is answered by rapping out a name or a quotation.
Who plundered the Begams? Who was beheaded in an open boat?
Who caught the Whigs bathing and ran away with their clothes?
Almost all our historical teaching was on this level. History was a
series of unrelated unintelligible but- in some way that was never
explained to us-important facts with resounding phrases tied to
them. Disraeli brought peace with honor. Clive was astonished at
his moderation. Pitt called in the New World to redress the balance
of the Old. And the dates, and the mnemonic devices! (Did you
know, for example, that the initial letters of "A black Negress was
my aunt: there's her house behind the barn" are also the initial
letters of the battles in the Wars of the Roses?) Bingo, who "took"
the higher forms in history, reveled in this kind of thing. I recall
positive orgies of dates, with the keener boys leaping up and down
in their places in their eagerness to shout out the right answers, and
at the same time not feeling the faintest interest in the meaning
of the mysterious events they were naming. '
"1587?"
"Massacre of St. Bartholomew!"
"1707?"
"Death of Aurangzeeb! "
"1713?"
"Treaty of Utrecht!"
"1773?"
"The Boston Tea Party!"
"1520?"
"Oh, Mum, please, Mum-"
"Please, Mum, please, Mum! Let me tell him, Mum!"
"Well; 1520?"
"Field of the Cloth of Gold!"
And so on.
But history and such secondary subjects were not bad fun. It
was in "classics" that the real strain came. Looking back, I realize
that I then worked harder than I have ever done since, and yet at
the time it never seemed possible to make quite the effort that was
demanded of one. We would sit round the long shiny table, made
of some very pale-colored, hard wood, with Sim goading, threaten–
ing, exhorting, sometimes joking, very occasionally praising, but al-
