Elizabeth Finch
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Synopsis
'The task of the present is to correct our understanding of the past. And that task becomes the more urgent when the past cannot be corrected.' Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration – always rigorous, always thoughtful. With careful empathy, she guided her students to develop meaningful ideas and to discover their centres of seriousness. As a former student unpacks her notebooks and remembers her uniquely inquisitive mind, her passion for reason resonates through the years. Her ideas unlock the philosophies of the past, and explore key events that show us how to make sense of our lives today. And underpinning them all is the story of J – Julian the Apostate, her historical soulmate and fellow challenger to the institutional and monotheistic thinking that has always threatened to divide us. This audiobook is a loving tribute to philosophy, a careful evaluation of history, an invitation to think for ourselves. It's a moment to reflect and to gently explore our own theories and assumptions. It is truly a balm for our times.
Release date: August 16, 2022
Publisher: Vintage
Print pages: 192
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Elizabeth Finch
Julian Barnes
ONE
She stood before us, without notes, books or nerves. The lectern was occupied by her handbag. She looked around, smiled, was still, and began.
“You will have observed that the title of this course is ‘Culture and Civilisation.’ Do not be alarmed. I shall not be pelting you with pie charts. I shall not attempt to stuff you with facts as a goose is stuffed with corn; this would only lead to an engorged liver, which would be unhealthy. Next week I shall supply you with a reading list which is entirely optional; you will neither lose marks for ignoring it, nor gain them by relentless study. I shall teach you as the adults you undoubtedly are. The best form of education, as the Greeks knew, is collaborative. But I am no Socrates and you are not a classroom of Platos, if that is the correct plural form. Nonetheless, we shall engage in dialogue. At the same time—and since you are no longer in primary school—I shall not dispense milksop encouragement and bland approval. For some of you, I may well not be the best teacher, in the sense of the one most suited to your temperament and cast of mind. I mention this in advance to those for whom it will be the case. Naturally, I hope you will find the course interesting, and, indeed, fun. Rigorous fun, that is. The terms are not incompatible. And I shall expect rigour from you in return. Winging it will not suit. My name is Elizabeth Finch. Thank you.”
And she smiled again.
None of us had taken a note. We gazed back at her, some in awe, a few in puzzlement bordering on irritation, others already half in love.
I can’t remember what she taught us in that first lesson. But I knew obscurely that, for once in my life, I had arrived at the right place.
Her clothes. Let’s start at ground level. She wore brogues, black in winter, brown suede in autumn and spring. Stockings or tights—you never saw Elizabeth Finch with bare legs (and you certainly couldn’t imagine her in beachwear). Skirts just below the knee—she resisted the annual hemline tyranny. Indeed, she appeared to have settled on her look some time ago. It could still be called stylish; another decade, and it might be antique or, perhaps, vintage. In summer, a box-pleated skirt, usually navy; tweed in winter. Sometimes she adopted a tartan or kiltish look with a big silver safety pin (no doubt there’s a special Scottish word for it). Obvious money was spent on blouses, in silk or fine cotton, often striped, and in no way translucent. Occasionally a brooch, always small and, as they say, discreet, yet somehow refulgent. She rarely wore earrings (were her lobes even pierced? now there’s a question). On her left little finger, a silver ring which we took to be inherited, rather than bought or given. Her hair was a kind of sandy grey, shapely and of unvarying length. I imagined a regular fortnightly appointment. Well, she believed in artifice, as she told us more than once. And artifice, as she also observed, was not incompatible with truth.
Though we—her students—were between our late twenties and early forties, we at first responded to her like kids back at school. We wondered about her background and her private life, about why and whether she had never—as far as we knew—married. About what she did in the evenings. Did she make herself a perfect fines herbes omelette, have a single glass of wine (Elizabeth Finch drunk? only if the world turned upside down) while reading the latest fascicle of Goethe Studies ? You see how easy it was to stray into fantasy, even satire.
She smoked all the years I knew her. And again, she didn’t smoke like anyone else. There are smokers who patently enjoy every burst of nicotine; others who inhale with a sense of self-loathing; some display it as a style habit; others again, annoyingly, claim to have “only one or two a day,” as if they were in charge of their addiction. And—since all smokers lie—“one or two” always turns out to mean three or four, even half a pack. EF, on the other hand, displayed no attitude to her smoking. It was something she did which required neither explanation nor ornamentation. She decanted her cigarettes into a tortoiseshell case, which left us playing Guess the Brand. She smoked as if she were indifferent to smoking. Does that make sense? And if you had dared to ask her, she wouldn’t have fallen back on excuses. Yes, she would have said, of course she was addicted; and yes, she knew it was bad for her, and also antisocial. But no, she wasn’t going to stop, or count how many she smoked a day; such matters were very low on her list of concerns. And since—this was my own personal deduction, or rather, guess—since she had no fear of death and nowadays judged life somewhat overrated, the question was really of no interest to her, and therefore shouldn’t be to you either.
Naturally, she suffered migraines.
In my mind’s eye—my memory’s eye, the only place I can see her—she is standing before us, preternaturally still. She had none of those lecturer’s tics and tricks designed to charm, distract, or indicate character. She never waved her arms about or supported her chin in her hand. She might occasionally put a slide up to illustrate a point, but that was mostly unnecessary. She commanded attention by her stillness and her voice. It was a calm, clear voice enriched by decades of smoking. She wasn’t one of those teachers who only engaged with their students when they looked up from their notes because, as I said, she didn’t lecture from notes. It was all in her head fully thought out, fully processed. This also compelled attention, reducing the gap between her and us.
Her diction was formal, her sentence structure entirely grammatical—indeed, you could almost hear the commas, semicolons and full stops. She never started a sentence without knowing how and when it would end. Yet she never sounded like a talking book. Her vocabulary was drawn from the same word-box she used for both writing and general conversation. And yet the effect wasn’t archaic in any way, it was intensely alive. And she enjoyed—perhaps to amuse herself, or to surprise us—throwing in the occasional phrase of a different tonality.
For instance, one week she was talking to us about The Golden Legend, that medieval assemblage of miracles and martyrdoms. Gaudy miracles and instructive martyrdoms. Her subject was St. Ursula.
“Cast your minds back, if you will, to ad 400, a time before Christian hegemony had been established on our shores. Ursula was a British princess, daughter of the Christian King Nothus. She was wise, dutiful, devout and virtuous—all the usual moral accoutrements of such princesses. Also beautiful, that more problematic accoutrement. Prince Etherius, son of the King of Anglia, fell in love with her and asked for her hand in marriage. This placed Ursula’s father in a dilemma, since the Angles were not only very powerful, but also worshippers of idols.
“Ursula was a bride to be bartered, like many before and since; and being wise, virtuous, et cetera, she was also ingenious. Accept the offer from the son of Power, she told her father; yet attach conditions which will impose delay. Ask to be granted three years of grace, so that Ursula could make a pilgrimage to Rome, during which time young Etherius was to be instructed in the true faith and then baptised. Some might judge this a deal-breaker, but not the love-struck Etherius. The views of the King of Anglia are not recorded.
“When news of Ursula’s planned spiritual escapade got out, other like-minded virgins flocked to her side. And here we hit upon a textual nub. As many of you will know, Ursula was accompanied by eleven thousand virgins; those of you familiar with Venice might recall Carpaccio’s sequential representation of the story. Such a package tour to organise, and Mr. Thomas Cook had yet to be born. The textual nub I mentioned concerns the letter M, and what the original scribe meant by it. Was it M for Mille, thousand, or M for Martyr ? Some of us might find the latter reading more plausible. Ursula plus eleven virgin martyrs makes twelve, also the number of Christ’s Apostles.
“Still, let us allow the story to proceed in Technicolor and CinemaScope, techniques which Carpaccio did much to popularise. Eleven thousand virgins set off from Britain. When they reached Cologne, an angel of the Lord appeared to Ursula, with the message that after leaving Rome she and her cortège were to return via Cologne, where they were to acquire the holy crown of martyrdom. News of this endgame spread through the eleven thousand, to be greeted with staunch rapture. Meanwhile, in Britain, another of the Lord’s ubiquitous angels appeared to Etherius, instructing him to meet his intended bride in Cologne, where he would also acquire the palm of martyrdom.
“Everywhere she went, Ursula attracted more and more followers, though the total is not recorded. In Rome, the very Pope joined this female host, and in doing so brought upon himself calumny and excommunication. Meanwhile again, two villainous Roman commanders, fearing that the hysterical success of the expedition would further the spread of Christianity, arranged for a Hunnish army to massacre the returning pilgrims. Conveniently, a Hunnish army happened to be besieging Cologne at that very time. We must allow for such narrative coincidences and angelic interventions: this is not, after all, a nineteenth-century novel. Although, as I say that, nineteenth-century novels are full of coincidence.
“And so Ursula and her vast entourage reached Cologne, whereupon the Hunnish army turned away from their siege machinery and began slaughtering the Eleven Thousand Plus with—and the phrase was a banality even in ad 400— ‘the savagery of wolves falling upon a flock of sheep.’ ”
Elizabeth Finch paused, surveyed the room and asked, “What are we to make of all this?” And into the silence she gave her reply: “I propose: Suicide by Cop.”
Elizabeth Finch was not in any way a public figure. You will google her with little result. If asked to characterise her professionally, I would say that she was an independent scholar. That may sound like a euphemism, even a truism. But before knowledge became officially housed in academe, there used to be men and women of the highest intelligence who privately pursued their own interests. Mostly, of course, they had money; some were eccentric, a few certifiably mad. But money allowed them to travel and research what and where they needed, with no pressure to publish, colleagues to outperform or heads of department to satisfy.
I never knew Elizabeth Finch’s financial position. I imagined she had family money, or an inheritance. She had a West London flat in which I never set foot; she appeared to live frugally; I assume she arranged her teaching to allow her time for private, independent scholarship. She had published two books: Explosive Women, about female anarchists in London between 1890 and 1910; and Our Necessary Myths, about nationalism, religion and family. Both were short, and both out of print. To some an independent scholar whose books are unavailable might seem a laughable figure. As opposed to the scores of tenured dolts and bores who would have done better to keep silent.
Several of her students subsequently made their names. She is acknowledged in some books of medieval history and female thought. But she was not known to those who did not know her. Which may sound self-evident. Except that nowadays, in the digital landscape, friends and followers have come to mean different, watered-down things. Many people know one another without knowing them at all. And are happy with that superficiality.
You might think me old-fashioned (but my case is not relevant). You might think Elizabeth Finch equally, if not more, old-fashioned. But if she was, it was not in the normal way, that of embodying a previous generation whose truths had now proved wan and withered. How can I put it? She dealt in truths not from previous generations but from previous eras, truths she kept alive but which others had abandoned. And I don’t mean anything like “she was an old-fashioned Tory/liberal/socialist.” She was outside of her age in many ways. “Do not be taken in by time,” she once said, “and imagine that history—and especially intellectual history—is linear.” She was high-minded, self-sufficient, European. And as I write those words, I stop, because I hear in my head something she once taught us in class: “And remember, whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.” It is a rule of thumb I have tried to obey.
The class soon shook down into groups and cliques, by the usual method of hazard and intent. Some of it was based on the choice of drink after class: beer, wine, beer and/or wine and/or anything else in a bottle, fruit juice, nothing at all. My group, which shifted easily between beer and wine, consisted of Neil (i.e., me), Anna (Dutch, so occasionally outraged by English frivolity), Geoff (provocateur), Linda (emotionally labile, whether it came to study or life itself ) and Stevie (town planner looking for more). One of our bonds was, paradoxically, that we rarely agreed about anything, except that whatever government was in power was useless, God almost certainly did not exist, life was for the living, and you could never have too many bar snacks in noisy packets. This was a time before laptops in class and social media out of it; when news came from newspapers and knowledge came from books. Was it a simpler time, or a duller one? Both or neither?
“Monotheism,” said Elizabeth Finch. “Monomania. Monogamy. Monotony. Nothing good begins this way.” She paused. “Monogram—a sign of vanity. Monocle ditto. Monoculture— a precursor to the death of rural Europe. I am prepared to acknowledge the usefulness of a monorail. There are many neutral scientific terms which I am also prepared to admit. But where the prefix applies to human business . . . Monoglot, the sign of an enclosed and self-deluding country. The monokini, as facetious an etymology as it is a garment. Monopoly—and I do not refer to the board game—always a disaster if you give it time. Monorchid: a condition to be pitied but not aspired to. Any questions?”
Linda, who often seemed to be suffering from what she quaintly called “heart trouble,” asked anxiously, “What have you got against monogamy? Isn’t it how most people want to live? Isn’t it what most people dream of ?”
“Beware of dreams,” Elizabeth Finch replied. “Also, as a general rule, beware of what most people aspire to.” She paused, half-smiled at Linda and addressed the class through her. “Enforced monogamy is as much to say enforced happiness, which we know is not possible. Unenforced monogamy might seem possible. Romantic monogamy might seem to be desirable. But the first normally collapses back into a version of enforced monogamy, while the second is liable to become obsessive and hysterical. And thereby lies close to monomania. We should always distinguish between mutual passion and shared monomania.”
We were all silenced, taking this in. Most of us had had the average sexual and amatory experience of our generation: that’s to say, far too much in the opinion of the preceding generation, and pathetically little in the view of the next, pressing generation. We were also wondering how much of what she said was based on personal experience, but none of us dared ask.
Linda, to her credit, pursued the matter. “So are you saying it’s all hopeless?”
“How does the witty Mr. Sondheim put it?” And Elizabeth Finch actually half-sang: “ ‘One’s impossible, two is dreary, / Three is company, safe and cheery.’ Which is one way of looking at the matter, to be sure.”
“But do you agree with that, or are you just avoiding the question?”
“No, I am merely offering you the alternatives.”
“So are you saying that Etherius was wrong to go to Cologne?” Linda, as we were learning, took classes very personally, even those on medieval religion.
“No, not wrong. We all pursue what we think is best for us, even if it means our extinction. Sometimes, especially if it means that. By the time we attain it, or don’t, it is usually too late anyway.”
“That’s not much help,” said Linda, with a kind of whiney fierceness.
“I am not employed to help you,” replied Elizabeth Finch, firmly and yet not rebukingly. “I am here to assist you to think and argue and develop minds of your own.” She paused. “But since you ask about Etherius, let us consider his case. As Ursula’s betrothed, he accepted her conditions: that while she undertook her pilgrimage to Rome, he would study the Christian texts, be convinced of their truths, and be baptised into her religion. How much this must have enraged his father, the King of Anglia and a most notorious pagan, we are not told. But in any case, an angel of the Lord appeared to Etherius, instructing him to meet Ursula in Cologne, where they would suffer glorious martyrdom together.
“What are we to make of this? On the emotional level, we might regard it as an extreme, indeed fanatical example of romantic love. In other hands, it might have a Wagnerian aspect to it. On the theological level, his behaviour might be regarded as a gross form of queue-jumping. Also, we must consider the effect of enforced chastity on the young human male—and, for that matter, on the young human female. It can manifest itself in all forms of morbid behaviour. Were Ursula and Etherius, betrothed now for three years, allowed a nuptial night in advance of bending their necks before Teutonic swords and offering their breasts to lances and arrows? We must rather doubt this, for indeed, the conjugal thrill might have changed their minds.”
Afterwards, at the student bar, some of us started straight in on the hard stuff.
I trained as an actor; that’s how I met my first wife, Joanna. We both had the same inchoate yet unshakeable optimism, at least for the first few years. I got small parts in telly and did voice-overs; together, we wrote scripts and sent them off into the howling winds. Our repertoire also included doing two-hander gigs on cruise ships: comedy, patter, a bit of song and dance. My most consistent source of income was playing a mildly sinister barman in a long-running soap (no, not a famous one). Every so often, for years afterwards, people would accost me with, “You know, you look just like Freddy the Barman in, what was it called—NW12 ?” I never correct them to SE15, just smile and demur: “Strange, isn’t it, quite a few people have told me that.”
I worked in restaurants when the jobs dried up. That’s to say, I was a waiter. But I had, or could assume, a presence, so got promoted to front of house. And gradually I stopped resting and then stopped being an actor. I knew some food suppliers, Joanna and I decided to live in the country. I grew mushrooms and, later, hydroponic tomatoes. Our daughter Hannah no longer said, with childish pride, “My dad’s on the telly,” and bravely tried putting the same verve into “My dad grows mushrooms.” Joanna, who was more successful than me at acting, decided it would be better for her career if she lived in London. And if I didn’t. So that was that, really. Yes, you can still spot her on telly, she’s often in . . . oh, sod it.
When I told Elizabeth Finch that I had been an actor, she smiled. “Ah, acting,” she said, “the perfect example of artificiality producing authenticity.” It made me feel rather pleased, indeed valued.
EF, as we now privately referred to her, stood before us, handbag on the lectern as usual, and said: “Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness. The only thing in life which is clear and beyond doubt is unhappiness.” And then she waited. We were on our own. Who would dare to speak first?
You will note that the quotation was unattributed. This was deliberate on her part, a useful trick to help us think for ourselves. If she had identified the source, we would start thinking about what we knew of the life and work of the person quoted, and about received opinion. We would bow in reverence accordingly, or the opposite.
And so we had a lively discussion, pitching still-youthful hopefulness against mature scepticism—at least, as we saw it—until she chose to reveal her source.
“Goethe, than whom few of us can hope to live a fuller or more interesting life, stated on his deathbed—he was eighty-two at the time—that he had only ever felt happiness in his life for one quarter of an hour.” She didn’t raise a physical eyebrow at us—it was not one of her gestures—but she raised a metaphorical, or even moral one. And so, as a class, we took that on board and started discussing whether to be a great—or even minor—intellectual was to be doomed to unhappiness, and whether people on their deathbeds made such remarks (which sounded patently untrue to us) either because they couldn’t remember, or because downplaying such a major aspect of their lives made them less reluctant to die. At which point Linda, who was always fearless about saying things the rest of us found naive, if not embarrassing, suggested:
“Perhaps Goethe never found the right woman.”
In the presence of another lecturer, we might have felt free to snigger. But EF, while rigorous in her own thought, was never dismissive of our ideas and offerings, however meagre, or sentimental, or hopelessly autobiographical. Instead, she would transform our paltry thoughtlets into something of fuller interest.
“We must certainly consider, not just in this class, but outside it, in our own turbulent and fretful lives, the element of chance. The number of people we deeply meet is strangely few. Passion may mislead us furiously. Reason may mislead us just as much. Our genetic inheritance might hamstring us. So might previous events in our lives. It is not just soldiers in the field who later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is often the inevitable consequence of a seemingly normal sublunary existence.”
At which Linda could not help looking a little content with herself.
Obviously, I can’t promise that those were exactly EF’s words. But I have a good ear for voice, and in reconstructing how she spoke, I hope that I do not caricature her. I probably paid more attention to what she said and how she spoke than I did to anyone else in my life, before or since. Maybe at the start of both my marriages; but then, as EF had just advised, “Passion may mislead us furiously.”
The ease with which she talked about the life of the heart, and included it naturally in a course of “Culture and Civilisation,” made her a target for satire in the first weeks of term. Boys—even thirty-year-old men—being always boys, there were whispers and guffaws.
“Guess what? Her handbag fell open and there was a James Bond novel inside.”
“I saw her being picked up last week in an E-Type Jag. Driven by a woman!”
“Took old Liz out last night and showed her a good time. Had a drink or two, quick bite, down a club, turns out she’s a hot dancer, then back to her place, she gets out her stash, rolls us a couple of joints, and then”—whereupon a smirk might cross the boy-man’s face—“and then, no, sorry, a gentleman never tells.” As you may imagine, there were other, more baroque versions in which a gentleman did indeed tell.
Such reactions came from those uncertain how to deal with her poise, and disconcerted by her authority. Their fantasies may have been misconceived; but at the same time there was something racy about Elizabeth Finch. If not actual and present, then potential. And when I set my own mind to wander, it might easily throw up an image of EF, say, in a first-class sleeping compartment on a train crossing a darkened landscape; standing at the window in silk pyjamas, stubbing out a last cigarette, while a mysterious and now unidentifiable companion lets out a soft nasal whistle from the upper couchette. Outside, beneath a gibbous moon, she might discern a canted French vineyard or the dull shimmer of an Italian lake.
Of course, such fantasies define the fantasisers more than their subject. Either they presumed a glamorous past, or an imaginary present in which she sought compensation for the life she actually had; and further presumed that, like everybody else, she was needy and dissatisfied in some way. But this was not the case. The Elizabeth Finch who stood before us was the finished article, the sum of what she had made herself, what others had helped her make, and what the world had provided. The world not just in its contemporary manifestations but also in its long history. Gradually, we understood, and cast aside our clumsy musings as early, otiose reactions to her uniqueness. And without appearing to make any effort, she subdued us all. No, that’s not quite right: it went deeper. Rather, she obliged us—simply by example—to seek and find within ourselves a centre of seriousness.
Linda came to seek my advice. This isn’t something that often happens to me: I don’t appear to be the counselling type. And as it turned out, she wanted to ask my advice about asking EF for her advice. I deliberately didn’t quiz her, because with Linda it was bound to be some emotional drama. Besides, I thought approaching EF was a bad idea. She might be willing to discuss Goethe’s love life in class, but that didn’t mean she would be able, or willing, or even permitted by the college to give a student advice outside the lecture room. But I soon realised that Linda didn’t really want my input; or rather, she wanted my input as long as it coincided with what she’d already decided to do. Some people are like that; perhaps most. So, to make her feel better, I shifted my position and approved her intention.
A day or two later, I was sitting by myself in the student bar when she appeared and sat down opposite.
“EF was wonderful,” Linda began, already welling up. “I told her my heart trouble, and she was very understanding. She put out her hand and put it down like this close to where I was.” Linda now did the same, laying her hand palm-down on the table. “And she told me that love is all there is. It’s the only thing that matters.” And then she—Linda, that is—burst into tears.
I’m not at my best in situations like this, so I said, “I’ll get us another drink.”
When I got back from the bar, she was gone. All she left behind was a damp palm-print halfway across the table, where she had laid her hand in imitation of Elizabeth Finch. I sat there and thought about Linda, probably for the first time. And the fact that EF never patronised even her most blurted opinions made me think about her
She stood before us, without notes, books or nerves. The lectern was occupied by her handbag. She looked around, smiled, was still, and began.
“You will have observed that the title of this course is ‘Culture and Civilisation.’ Do not be alarmed. I shall not be pelting you with pie charts. I shall not attempt to stuff you with facts as a goose is stuffed with corn; this would only lead to an engorged liver, which would be unhealthy. Next week I shall supply you with a reading list which is entirely optional; you will neither lose marks for ignoring it, nor gain them by relentless study. I shall teach you as the adults you undoubtedly are. The best form of education, as the Greeks knew, is collaborative. But I am no Socrates and you are not a classroom of Platos, if that is the correct plural form. Nonetheless, we shall engage in dialogue. At the same time—and since you are no longer in primary school—I shall not dispense milksop encouragement and bland approval. For some of you, I may well not be the best teacher, in the sense of the one most suited to your temperament and cast of mind. I mention this in advance to those for whom it will be the case. Naturally, I hope you will find the course interesting, and, indeed, fun. Rigorous fun, that is. The terms are not incompatible. And I shall expect rigour from you in return. Winging it will not suit. My name is Elizabeth Finch. Thank you.”
And she smiled again.
None of us had taken a note. We gazed back at her, some in awe, a few in puzzlement bordering on irritation, others already half in love.
I can’t remember what she taught us in that first lesson. But I knew obscurely that, for once in my life, I had arrived at the right place.
Her clothes. Let’s start at ground level. She wore brogues, black in winter, brown suede in autumn and spring. Stockings or tights—you never saw Elizabeth Finch with bare legs (and you certainly couldn’t imagine her in beachwear). Skirts just below the knee—she resisted the annual hemline tyranny. Indeed, she appeared to have settled on her look some time ago. It could still be called stylish; another decade, and it might be antique or, perhaps, vintage. In summer, a box-pleated skirt, usually navy; tweed in winter. Sometimes she adopted a tartan or kiltish look with a big silver safety pin (no doubt there’s a special Scottish word for it). Obvious money was spent on blouses, in silk or fine cotton, often striped, and in no way translucent. Occasionally a brooch, always small and, as they say, discreet, yet somehow refulgent. She rarely wore earrings (were her lobes even pierced? now there’s a question). On her left little finger, a silver ring which we took to be inherited, rather than bought or given. Her hair was a kind of sandy grey, shapely and of unvarying length. I imagined a regular fortnightly appointment. Well, she believed in artifice, as she told us more than once. And artifice, as she also observed, was not incompatible with truth.
Though we—her students—were between our late twenties and early forties, we at first responded to her like kids back at school. We wondered about her background and her private life, about why and whether she had never—as far as we knew—married. About what she did in the evenings. Did she make herself a perfect fines herbes omelette, have a single glass of wine (Elizabeth Finch drunk? only if the world turned upside down) while reading the latest fascicle of Goethe Studies ? You see how easy it was to stray into fantasy, even satire.
She smoked all the years I knew her. And again, she didn’t smoke like anyone else. There are smokers who patently enjoy every burst of nicotine; others who inhale with a sense of self-loathing; some display it as a style habit; others again, annoyingly, claim to have “only one or two a day,” as if they were in charge of their addiction. And—since all smokers lie—“one or two” always turns out to mean three or four, even half a pack. EF, on the other hand, displayed no attitude to her smoking. It was something she did which required neither explanation nor ornamentation. She decanted her cigarettes into a tortoiseshell case, which left us playing Guess the Brand. She smoked as if she were indifferent to smoking. Does that make sense? And if you had dared to ask her, she wouldn’t have fallen back on excuses. Yes, she would have said, of course she was addicted; and yes, she knew it was bad for her, and also antisocial. But no, she wasn’t going to stop, or count how many she smoked a day; such matters were very low on her list of concerns. And since—this was my own personal deduction, or rather, guess—since she had no fear of death and nowadays judged life somewhat overrated, the question was really of no interest to her, and therefore shouldn’t be to you either.
Naturally, she suffered migraines.
In my mind’s eye—my memory’s eye, the only place I can see her—she is standing before us, preternaturally still. She had none of those lecturer’s tics and tricks designed to charm, distract, or indicate character. She never waved her arms about or supported her chin in her hand. She might occasionally put a slide up to illustrate a point, but that was mostly unnecessary. She commanded attention by her stillness and her voice. It was a calm, clear voice enriched by decades of smoking. She wasn’t one of those teachers who only engaged with their students when they looked up from their notes because, as I said, she didn’t lecture from notes. It was all in her head fully thought out, fully processed. This also compelled attention, reducing the gap between her and us.
Her diction was formal, her sentence structure entirely grammatical—indeed, you could almost hear the commas, semicolons and full stops. She never started a sentence without knowing how and when it would end. Yet she never sounded like a talking book. Her vocabulary was drawn from the same word-box she used for both writing and general conversation. And yet the effect wasn’t archaic in any way, it was intensely alive. And she enjoyed—perhaps to amuse herself, or to surprise us—throwing in the occasional phrase of a different tonality.
For instance, one week she was talking to us about The Golden Legend, that medieval assemblage of miracles and martyrdoms. Gaudy miracles and instructive martyrdoms. Her subject was St. Ursula.
“Cast your minds back, if you will, to ad 400, a time before Christian hegemony had been established on our shores. Ursula was a British princess, daughter of the Christian King Nothus. She was wise, dutiful, devout and virtuous—all the usual moral accoutrements of such princesses. Also beautiful, that more problematic accoutrement. Prince Etherius, son of the King of Anglia, fell in love with her and asked for her hand in marriage. This placed Ursula’s father in a dilemma, since the Angles were not only very powerful, but also worshippers of idols.
“Ursula was a bride to be bartered, like many before and since; and being wise, virtuous, et cetera, she was also ingenious. Accept the offer from the son of Power, she told her father; yet attach conditions which will impose delay. Ask to be granted three years of grace, so that Ursula could make a pilgrimage to Rome, during which time young Etherius was to be instructed in the true faith and then baptised. Some might judge this a deal-breaker, but not the love-struck Etherius. The views of the King of Anglia are not recorded.
“When news of Ursula’s planned spiritual escapade got out, other like-minded virgins flocked to her side. And here we hit upon a textual nub. As many of you will know, Ursula was accompanied by eleven thousand virgins; those of you familiar with Venice might recall Carpaccio’s sequential representation of the story. Such a package tour to organise, and Mr. Thomas Cook had yet to be born. The textual nub I mentioned concerns the letter M, and what the original scribe meant by it. Was it M for Mille, thousand, or M for Martyr ? Some of us might find the latter reading more plausible. Ursula plus eleven virgin martyrs makes twelve, also the number of Christ’s Apostles.
“Still, let us allow the story to proceed in Technicolor and CinemaScope, techniques which Carpaccio did much to popularise. Eleven thousand virgins set off from Britain. When they reached Cologne, an angel of the Lord appeared to Ursula, with the message that after leaving Rome she and her cortège were to return via Cologne, where they were to acquire the holy crown of martyrdom. News of this endgame spread through the eleven thousand, to be greeted with staunch rapture. Meanwhile, in Britain, another of the Lord’s ubiquitous angels appeared to Etherius, instructing him to meet his intended bride in Cologne, where he would also acquire the palm of martyrdom.
“Everywhere she went, Ursula attracted more and more followers, though the total is not recorded. In Rome, the very Pope joined this female host, and in doing so brought upon himself calumny and excommunication. Meanwhile again, two villainous Roman commanders, fearing that the hysterical success of the expedition would further the spread of Christianity, arranged for a Hunnish army to massacre the returning pilgrims. Conveniently, a Hunnish army happened to be besieging Cologne at that very time. We must allow for such narrative coincidences and angelic interventions: this is not, after all, a nineteenth-century novel. Although, as I say that, nineteenth-century novels are full of coincidence.
“And so Ursula and her vast entourage reached Cologne, whereupon the Hunnish army turned away from their siege machinery and began slaughtering the Eleven Thousand Plus with—and the phrase was a banality even in ad 400— ‘the savagery of wolves falling upon a flock of sheep.’ ”
Elizabeth Finch paused, surveyed the room and asked, “What are we to make of all this?” And into the silence she gave her reply: “I propose: Suicide by Cop.”
Elizabeth Finch was not in any way a public figure. You will google her with little result. If asked to characterise her professionally, I would say that she was an independent scholar. That may sound like a euphemism, even a truism. But before knowledge became officially housed in academe, there used to be men and women of the highest intelligence who privately pursued their own interests. Mostly, of course, they had money; some were eccentric, a few certifiably mad. But money allowed them to travel and research what and where they needed, with no pressure to publish, colleagues to outperform or heads of department to satisfy.
I never knew Elizabeth Finch’s financial position. I imagined she had family money, or an inheritance. She had a West London flat in which I never set foot; she appeared to live frugally; I assume she arranged her teaching to allow her time for private, independent scholarship. She had published two books: Explosive Women, about female anarchists in London between 1890 and 1910; and Our Necessary Myths, about nationalism, religion and family. Both were short, and both out of print. To some an independent scholar whose books are unavailable might seem a laughable figure. As opposed to the scores of tenured dolts and bores who would have done better to keep silent.
Several of her students subsequently made their names. She is acknowledged in some books of medieval history and female thought. But she was not known to those who did not know her. Which may sound self-evident. Except that nowadays, in the digital landscape, friends and followers have come to mean different, watered-down things. Many people know one another without knowing them at all. And are happy with that superficiality.
You might think me old-fashioned (but my case is not relevant). You might think Elizabeth Finch equally, if not more, old-fashioned. But if she was, it was not in the normal way, that of embodying a previous generation whose truths had now proved wan and withered. How can I put it? She dealt in truths not from previous generations but from previous eras, truths she kept alive but which others had abandoned. And I don’t mean anything like “she was an old-fashioned Tory/liberal/socialist.” She was outside of her age in many ways. “Do not be taken in by time,” she once said, “and imagine that history—and especially intellectual history—is linear.” She was high-minded, self-sufficient, European. And as I write those words, I stop, because I hear in my head something she once taught us in class: “And remember, whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.” It is a rule of thumb I have tried to obey.
The class soon shook down into groups and cliques, by the usual method of hazard and intent. Some of it was based on the choice of drink after class: beer, wine, beer and/or wine and/or anything else in a bottle, fruit juice, nothing at all. My group, which shifted easily between beer and wine, consisted of Neil (i.e., me), Anna (Dutch, so occasionally outraged by English frivolity), Geoff (provocateur), Linda (emotionally labile, whether it came to study or life itself ) and Stevie (town planner looking for more). One of our bonds was, paradoxically, that we rarely agreed about anything, except that whatever government was in power was useless, God almost certainly did not exist, life was for the living, and you could never have too many bar snacks in noisy packets. This was a time before laptops in class and social media out of it; when news came from newspapers and knowledge came from books. Was it a simpler time, or a duller one? Both or neither?
“Monotheism,” said Elizabeth Finch. “Monomania. Monogamy. Monotony. Nothing good begins this way.” She paused. “Monogram—a sign of vanity. Monocle ditto. Monoculture— a precursor to the death of rural Europe. I am prepared to acknowledge the usefulness of a monorail. There are many neutral scientific terms which I am also prepared to admit. But where the prefix applies to human business . . . Monoglot, the sign of an enclosed and self-deluding country. The monokini, as facetious an etymology as it is a garment. Monopoly—and I do not refer to the board game—always a disaster if you give it time. Monorchid: a condition to be pitied but not aspired to. Any questions?”
Linda, who often seemed to be suffering from what she quaintly called “heart trouble,” asked anxiously, “What have you got against monogamy? Isn’t it how most people want to live? Isn’t it what most people dream of ?”
“Beware of dreams,” Elizabeth Finch replied. “Also, as a general rule, beware of what most people aspire to.” She paused, half-smiled at Linda and addressed the class through her. “Enforced monogamy is as much to say enforced happiness, which we know is not possible. Unenforced monogamy might seem possible. Romantic monogamy might seem to be desirable. But the first normally collapses back into a version of enforced monogamy, while the second is liable to become obsessive and hysterical. And thereby lies close to monomania. We should always distinguish between mutual passion and shared monomania.”
We were all silenced, taking this in. Most of us had had the average sexual and amatory experience of our generation: that’s to say, far too much in the opinion of the preceding generation, and pathetically little in the view of the next, pressing generation. We were also wondering how much of what she said was based on personal experience, but none of us dared ask.
Linda, to her credit, pursued the matter. “So are you saying it’s all hopeless?”
“How does the witty Mr. Sondheim put it?” And Elizabeth Finch actually half-sang: “ ‘One’s impossible, two is dreary, / Three is company, safe and cheery.’ Which is one way of looking at the matter, to be sure.”
“But do you agree with that, or are you just avoiding the question?”
“No, I am merely offering you the alternatives.”
“So are you saying that Etherius was wrong to go to Cologne?” Linda, as we were learning, took classes very personally, even those on medieval religion.
“No, not wrong. We all pursue what we think is best for us, even if it means our extinction. Sometimes, especially if it means that. By the time we attain it, or don’t, it is usually too late anyway.”
“That’s not much help,” said Linda, with a kind of whiney fierceness.
“I am not employed to help you,” replied Elizabeth Finch, firmly and yet not rebukingly. “I am here to assist you to think and argue and develop minds of your own.” She paused. “But since you ask about Etherius, let us consider his case. As Ursula’s betrothed, he accepted her conditions: that while she undertook her pilgrimage to Rome, he would study the Christian texts, be convinced of their truths, and be baptised into her religion. How much this must have enraged his father, the King of Anglia and a most notorious pagan, we are not told. But in any case, an angel of the Lord appeared to Etherius, instructing him to meet Ursula in Cologne, where they would suffer glorious martyrdom together.
“What are we to make of this? On the emotional level, we might regard it as an extreme, indeed fanatical example of romantic love. In other hands, it might have a Wagnerian aspect to it. On the theological level, his behaviour might be regarded as a gross form of queue-jumping. Also, we must consider the effect of enforced chastity on the young human male—and, for that matter, on the young human female. It can manifest itself in all forms of morbid behaviour. Were Ursula and Etherius, betrothed now for three years, allowed a nuptial night in advance of bending their necks before Teutonic swords and offering their breasts to lances and arrows? We must rather doubt this, for indeed, the conjugal thrill might have changed their minds.”
Afterwards, at the student bar, some of us started straight in on the hard stuff.
I trained as an actor; that’s how I met my first wife, Joanna. We both had the same inchoate yet unshakeable optimism, at least for the first few years. I got small parts in telly and did voice-overs; together, we wrote scripts and sent them off into the howling winds. Our repertoire also included doing two-hander gigs on cruise ships: comedy, patter, a bit of song and dance. My most consistent source of income was playing a mildly sinister barman in a long-running soap (no, not a famous one). Every so often, for years afterwards, people would accost me with, “You know, you look just like Freddy the Barman in, what was it called—NW12 ?” I never correct them to SE15, just smile and demur: “Strange, isn’t it, quite a few people have told me that.”
I worked in restaurants when the jobs dried up. That’s to say, I was a waiter. But I had, or could assume, a presence, so got promoted to front of house. And gradually I stopped resting and then stopped being an actor. I knew some food suppliers, Joanna and I decided to live in the country. I grew mushrooms and, later, hydroponic tomatoes. Our daughter Hannah no longer said, with childish pride, “My dad’s on the telly,” and bravely tried putting the same verve into “My dad grows mushrooms.” Joanna, who was more successful than me at acting, decided it would be better for her career if she lived in London. And if I didn’t. So that was that, really. Yes, you can still spot her on telly, she’s often in . . . oh, sod it.
When I told Elizabeth Finch that I had been an actor, she smiled. “Ah, acting,” she said, “the perfect example of artificiality producing authenticity.” It made me feel rather pleased, indeed valued.
EF, as we now privately referred to her, stood before us, handbag on the lectern as usual, and said: “Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness. The only thing in life which is clear and beyond doubt is unhappiness.” And then she waited. We were on our own. Who would dare to speak first?
You will note that the quotation was unattributed. This was deliberate on her part, a useful trick to help us think for ourselves. If she had identified the source, we would start thinking about what we knew of the life and work of the person quoted, and about received opinion. We would bow in reverence accordingly, or the opposite.
And so we had a lively discussion, pitching still-youthful hopefulness against mature scepticism—at least, as we saw it—until she chose to reveal her source.
“Goethe, than whom few of us can hope to live a fuller or more interesting life, stated on his deathbed—he was eighty-two at the time—that he had only ever felt happiness in his life for one quarter of an hour.” She didn’t raise a physical eyebrow at us—it was not one of her gestures—but she raised a metaphorical, or even moral one. And so, as a class, we took that on board and started discussing whether to be a great—or even minor—intellectual was to be doomed to unhappiness, and whether people on their deathbeds made such remarks (which sounded patently untrue to us) either because they couldn’t remember, or because downplaying such a major aspect of their lives made them less reluctant to die. At which point Linda, who was always fearless about saying things the rest of us found naive, if not embarrassing, suggested:
“Perhaps Goethe never found the right woman.”
In the presence of another lecturer, we might have felt free to snigger. But EF, while rigorous in her own thought, was never dismissive of our ideas and offerings, however meagre, or sentimental, or hopelessly autobiographical. Instead, she would transform our paltry thoughtlets into something of fuller interest.
“We must certainly consider, not just in this class, but outside it, in our own turbulent and fretful lives, the element of chance. The number of people we deeply meet is strangely few. Passion may mislead us furiously. Reason may mislead us just as much. Our genetic inheritance might hamstring us. So might previous events in our lives. It is not just soldiers in the field who later suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. It is often the inevitable consequence of a seemingly normal sublunary existence.”
At which Linda could not help looking a little content with herself.
Obviously, I can’t promise that those were exactly EF’s words. But I have a good ear for voice, and in reconstructing how she spoke, I hope that I do not caricature her. I probably paid more attention to what she said and how she spoke than I did to anyone else in my life, before or since. Maybe at the start of both my marriages; but then, as EF had just advised, “Passion may mislead us furiously.”
The ease with which she talked about the life of the heart, and included it naturally in a course of “Culture and Civilisation,” made her a target for satire in the first weeks of term. Boys—even thirty-year-old men—being always boys, there were whispers and guffaws.
“Guess what? Her handbag fell open and there was a James Bond novel inside.”
“I saw her being picked up last week in an E-Type Jag. Driven by a woman!”
“Took old Liz out last night and showed her a good time. Had a drink or two, quick bite, down a club, turns out she’s a hot dancer, then back to her place, she gets out her stash, rolls us a couple of joints, and then”—whereupon a smirk might cross the boy-man’s face—“and then, no, sorry, a gentleman never tells.” As you may imagine, there were other, more baroque versions in which a gentleman did indeed tell.
Such reactions came from those uncertain how to deal with her poise, and disconcerted by her authority. Their fantasies may have been misconceived; but at the same time there was something racy about Elizabeth Finch. If not actual and present, then potential. And when I set my own mind to wander, it might easily throw up an image of EF, say, in a first-class sleeping compartment on a train crossing a darkened landscape; standing at the window in silk pyjamas, stubbing out a last cigarette, while a mysterious and now unidentifiable companion lets out a soft nasal whistle from the upper couchette. Outside, beneath a gibbous moon, she might discern a canted French vineyard or the dull shimmer of an Italian lake.
Of course, such fantasies define the fantasisers more than their subject. Either they presumed a glamorous past, or an imaginary present in which she sought compensation for the life she actually had; and further presumed that, like everybody else, she was needy and dissatisfied in some way. But this was not the case. The Elizabeth Finch who stood before us was the finished article, the sum of what she had made herself, what others had helped her make, and what the world had provided. The world not just in its contemporary manifestations but also in its long history. Gradually, we understood, and cast aside our clumsy musings as early, otiose reactions to her uniqueness. And without appearing to make any effort, she subdued us all. No, that’s not quite right: it went deeper. Rather, she obliged us—simply by example—to seek and find within ourselves a centre of seriousness.
Linda came to seek my advice. This isn’t something that often happens to me: I don’t appear to be the counselling type. And as it turned out, she wanted to ask my advice about asking EF for her advice. I deliberately didn’t quiz her, because with Linda it was bound to be some emotional drama. Besides, I thought approaching EF was a bad idea. She might be willing to discuss Goethe’s love life in class, but that didn’t mean she would be able, or willing, or even permitted by the college to give a student advice outside the lecture room. But I soon realised that Linda didn’t really want my input; or rather, she wanted my input as long as it coincided with what she’d already decided to do. Some people are like that; perhaps most. So, to make her feel better, I shifted my position and approved her intention.
A day or two later, I was sitting by myself in the student bar when she appeared and sat down opposite.
“EF was wonderful,” Linda began, already welling up. “I told her my heart trouble, and she was very understanding. She put out her hand and put it down like this close to where I was.” Linda now did the same, laying her hand palm-down on the table. “And she told me that love is all there is. It’s the only thing that matters.” And then she—Linda, that is—burst into tears.
I’m not at my best in situations like this, so I said, “I’ll get us another drink.”
When I got back from the bar, she was gone. All she left behind was a damp palm-print halfway across the table, where she had laid her hand in imitation of Elizabeth Finch. I sat there and thought about Linda, probably for the first time. And the fact that EF never patronised even her most blurted opinions made me think about her
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