Christopher Prendergast

Christopher Prendergast interviewed by Alan Macfarlane on 27 February 2024, edited by Sarah Harrison

[AM – Alan Macfarlane; CP – Christopher Prendergast]

AM

So, it's a great pleasure to have a chance to talk to Chris Prendergast, whom I've known for some years now. And Chris, I always ask when and where were you born?

CP

I was born in September 1942 in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

AM

Right. And then I ask always about people's ancestry as far back as they would like to go. Usually, they go back to grandparents on either side or both.

CP

Well, there are two lines here, as with every person born into this world, I presume. There's the paternal line and the maternal one. I'll start with the maternal one. My mother was the daughter, born in Dublin, of emigre Ukrainian Jews. My grandfather, my maternal grandfather, was press ganged by the Tsarist regime into the Russian army and taken across the border into Russia. He then managed, and apparently this is rare in the annals of Tsarist conscription or press ganging, he managed to escape and he made his way across Europe. Quite how, I don't know. But he ended up in London, where he met my grandmother-to-be, also a refugee, a Ukrainian Jewish girl, but who'd left Ukraine more for economic reasons and had found some work in London. They met in London, got together, decided to do what so many Eastern Europeans had done at the time, to emigrate to the United States. So they went up to Liverpool, got tickets on a ship, travelling to New York. The ship, however, stopped off for reasons I really can't remember in Dublin. I think it was for technical reasons. My grandfather-to-be said to Elizabeth, my grandmother-to-be, Oh, I have a relative here in Dublin, should we go and see him? Because they had a few days in dock at Dublin, they went and liked Dublin so much that they cancelled the trip to New York, stayed in Dublin, settled there, and had lots of children, seven in all, 5 daughters, 2 sons. One of them was my mother, Celia, and she married an Irishman, also born in Dublin, whose father, Patrick Prendergast, was an emigre from County Cork. There were apparently lots of Prendergasts in Cork, who left Cork for Dublin. Patrick, and my paternal grandmother, Mary, got together, married and had various children. One of whom died in the war, and one of the others was my father. So my father and mother to be meet in Dublin, fall in love, and then there are all sorts of complications to do with the fact that, on the paternal side, the family is Catholic, and on the maternal side is Jewish. But my father, as an adult, is a militant, founder member of the Irish Communist Party, which makes things very complicated. There are lots of stories there, but I'll pause.

AM

Yes, well, you published a very interesting piece in the London Review of Books about your family (under the title 'Vote for Prendergast and Piss where you like', so readers can fill in some of the goings-on of your family history there. Well, let's come down then to your parents. What were they like? What did they do?

CP

Oh, well, my mother, I'm not quite sure what she did as a young woman before I came into the world or before I was sufficiently conscious as a human being to know what she was doing. What I do know is that she was an actress, and she spent some time in London as an actress for the Unity Theatre. I don't think it still exists. It was in the Euston, Kings Cross area. It was a left-wing theatre group, and it may have been there rather than Dublin that she met my father, but I'm not sure about that. So my mother was an actress. She was quite successful, but never a fully-fledged professional. She was once approached by Charlie Chaplin and offered a part in one of his movies. I can't remember which one, and she declined it because she was pregnant with me. As for my father, along with being an active member of the Irish Communist Party, his work was mainly in the Irish trade union movement. I can't exactly remember what his functions were in the Irish TUC, but he was sent en mission, so to speak, to Belfast to work on trade union issues where I was born. My mother went with him from Dublin.to Belfast, where I was born.

AM

That's what they did, and what was their character like?

CP

Are we still in Ireland? Because if you ask what my parents did, there is of course what my father did when we emigrated to England, but that's a later chapter of the story. But your personality stuff first, yes?

AM

Yes, personality.

CP

Okay. Well, my mother was – it may have something to do with her having been an accomplished actress, but boy, she could be emotionally rather difficult, And theatrical. My father was great company, especially down at the pub. He was a very serious drinker, but also an extraordinarily gifted story-teller. The principal features of my experience of him as storyteller? – well, there are two in particular that I will always recall. One is delight at his outstanding narrative gifts (one of the higher forms of Irish blarney), but the other was unbearable irritation at the way he could pause and delay the rhythms of the telling. He would tease (and not only me, but also his drinking buddies in the pub) by digressing into another channel that apparently had something to do with the story and indeed ultimately did, but as you listened, made you absolutely furious on the grounds of its apparent total irrelevance. I like to think of him as a natural brother of Laurence Sterne and James Joyce.

AM

Well, from then on to what he did when he came to England.

CP

Ah, yes. Well, that's another bit of a tale because the contract with the trade union, the trade union job that he had working in Belfast came to an end. He could have gone back to Dublin, but it wasn't that clear what he would be going back to. So he and my mother decided to emigrate to England. One of my mother's sisters, Millie, married a guy called – I've momentarily lost it – oh, Sidney, that's right, Sid. He had got into the clothing industry and he'd set up something very ambitious, quite how I don't know, in Leeds. He owned two factories manufacturing clothes as well as employing a fair number of people, as salespeople. All was going well, and he offered my father a job. Exactly what kind, I don't know. So Jim and Celia left for Leeds in 1947. By then also I also had a baby brother, a sister arriving not long after. A few years went by, and then everything went pear-shaped because Uncle Sid went bankrupt. And what he then did, he burnt down the two factories and claimed the insurance, but he was rumbled. And as a consequence of being rumbled, he and Millie fled. They got a cheap trip to Australia, emigrated and never came back.
And then in my family everything fell apart then. We left Leeds. My mother, young brother, and by then young baby sister, they all went back to Dublin to live with Elizabeth, our maternal grandmother. And my father went to London looking for work. I was farmed out to some relatives just outside London, near Twickenham. I lived there for a year until my father did find work in London, working for British Rail. We reassembled and rented a place in the Caledonian Road in Islington, dead opposite Pentonville Prison
The family was thus reunited and recreated until my father and my mother decided to split up some years later. I think I'm rambling a bit here.

AM

No, no, I think that probably fills in enough of that earlier thing. So turning to you, what is your first concrete memory?

CP

Well, I know the location, if not necessarily the specifics. It's Belfast. So I'm in Belfast. I'm born in Belfast. Of course, I have no memory of my birth, or more generally, baby memories. If I do, they're lost, and that word gone forever. But, I have some as a young boy, a very young boy. One is of the day I was playing in the front yard of the house we lived in, and I fell over on my cheek, and it was all bruised and some horrible colour. My mother came out and picked me up, but the thing I remember is that she was angry that I'd been so careless as to allow myself to fall over, and dammit, you know. So that was one. Another is a memory of my father taking me, in 1942 or 1943 ,Yeah, I must have been about five, to the movies. It was a film about a jail break, and all these prisoners revolting, and these cops armed with guns. I remember making friends with two youngsters, a boy and a girl, and we'd go to some park somewhere in the Belfast vicinity, and we built one of those sort of wigwam houses out of trees, and that I have a very vivid memory of. Oh, and there's my dog, Rusty. My lovely dog was a mongrel. When we immigrated, my parents told me that he'd been knocked over by a car or a bus or something, so I wept and grieved and so on, but I was told the truth many years down the line. That was a fiction to cover up what they had actually done. They had the dog put down because they felt they couldn't emigrate with a dog, so that's a vivid memory.

AM

So, where did you first go to school?

CP

I first went to school, I went to some sort of kindergarten thing in Belfast, but I have no recollections of it at all. The only thing I remember is the school organising this and that (it was during the war, and there were all sorts of shortages and so on). One was a shortage of hot water, so once I was bathed in a portable bath in the playground. I have no other memories of the War, apart from the fact that my father, having already fought against the Fascists as a Brigadista in the Spanish Civil War, left Belfast, volunteered for the Air Force, and was trained as a rear gunner for the Lancaster bombers, just outside London. But he only ever went on one actual military sortie and then the war was over. I don't think he gunned down any Nazi aircraft.

AM

You went to school in London.

CP

Yes, eventually. However, my first English school was in Leeds, a primary school, and I've got fairly vivid memories of that, mainly for two reasons. One is very embarrassing. On my birthday, it must have been my sixth or seventh birthday, I was given a birthday present by my parents, and it was a lovely edition of the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, and I was very proud of it as well as very pleased to have it. And so I asked my father if I could take it to school (where I wanted to show it off). He said, yes. So I walked to school, it was quite a hike, with this lovely book under my armpit, and on the way something terrible happened to me. I needed to have a poo, and I couldn't make it to the loo on time. I got to school, incredibly embarrassed. I mean, you know, I've shat myself. So I go up to one of the teachers and I explain that it's my birthday, but something's happened. And he said, well, you'd better go home. So I went back, never got to show off my birthday book, had to walk home in a state of ignominy. But Hans survived in my company for many years as a true treasure, though later displaced in the pantheon of heroes by Mark Twain.

But the other school adventure that I remember very vividly was one day I was walking home from school past a house with a front garden, and there was a dog. I can't remember what type, but I walked past and I whistled, and he jumped over the fence and followed me. And so we go to the park and play, and this went on for months. He just joined me, and why his owners didn't lock him up, I don't know. And then one day we're in the park and running around and so on, and this other dog appeared from nowhere, bigger and stronger and fiercer, and went up to my dog and bit him. And my dog shot off, and I never saw him again. So every time I left school, I'd walk past and look in, but he was never there. My first major loss. Yes. Sorry. Oh, God. I fear I'm wandering and meandering.

AM

No it's fine. As I said, I'm a shepherd.

CP

Okay, Alan. Oh, I should also put into the record, my name is not just Christopher Prendergast, it's Christopher Alan Joseph Prendergast.

AM

C-A-J, yes, I remember the initials on King's...

CP

Yes, anyway. So we're two Alans.

AM

And I should have said that it's particularly delightful to be talking to you, Chris, about memories, as one of the world's experts on Proust.

CP

Yes, well, Proustian memory is a very specific animal. He doesn't just remember things. Memories that matter in Proust are triggered.

AM

Yeah, well, we'll come to Proust probably later. During this time, say between about five and ten, were there any things you were particularly interested in? Hobbies, passions, pastimes that you really loved, apart from stray dogs? Did you read a lot or did you collect things?

CP

I read quite a lot, but not huge amounts. I was still pretty young. My father would read to me and tell stories. I can't remember any at all.

AM

You didn't fish or go and collect bird's eggs?

CP

No.

AM

Because you were in Leeds, I suppose.

CP

No, I didn't do anything like that. I mean, we'd go to Dublin in the holidays, the school summer holiday, and I would spend the time mostly at my maternal grandmother's house on the South Circular Road. But I'd also spend some time with the paternal grandmother, Mary, who was lovely. Well, they were both lovely. But these were interesting experiences because with my maternal grandmother on Saturday morning, I would have to go with her every Saturday morning to the synagogue. She was a devout Jewish woman. And so I'd sit in this synagogue and there would be these rabbis reading from the Torah, whatever it was. All I knew is what my grandmother told me, that they were reading from Scripture, And I never understood any of it. And then on other Sunday mornings, I sometimes went to spend the day with my paternal grandmother, Mary, and she would take me to Catholic Mass, with priests chanting in Latin and waving incense burners. So it was all a bit mixed up. And back in London, of course, there was huge disapproval of this, because my father, as a fully paid up, card-carrying Marxist, was fully on board with Marx in defining religion is the opium of the people, I shouldn't be going to a synagogue, I shouldn't be going to a Catholic church. But he got over it.

AM

So, as the son of a Jewish mother, officially you're Jewish.

CP

Well, a lot hangs by that 'officially'. I never felt myself to be Jewish. When I left King's, at the moment of leaving, I thought I really was leaving in the sense of never coming back. I ended up coming back five years later. But anyway, I was offered a job in New York. And I went to teach at the City University of New York Graduate School, or Graduate Center as it's called. And of course, as you know, New York is a very Jewish city, so I got to know lots of New York Jews. And they were curious about my background and my history. And I'd tell them the story of my Jewish mother. And they'd say to me, well, then you're one of us, for the reason that you, Alan have just given. However, I would amiably protest, saying I would not allow anything to do with my biological origins to determine my identity. And they took it rather well. I mean, they saw it as a clever joke, although, really, I didn't intend it as a joke. I've never felt Jewish, and I've never felt Catholic. But my father wasn't Catholic. I mean, he was born into a Catholic family, and his mother was fairly devout, as I've just explained. But from his young teens onwards, he had wanted nothing to do with religion.

AM

So you've never been inaugurated into any of these religions, bar mitzvahs and all?

CP

No. Well, I was circumcised. And that's part of the story in the London Review of Books. My father's despairing at this for ideological reasons, and then happily bumping into a communist rabbi. And the whole thing is solved at a stroke.

AM

Well, I hadn't realised you could be a communist rabbi until I interviewed Julian Huppert, the ex-member of parliament for Cambridge. I asked him what he was, and he said he was an atheist Jew. He didn't believe in any of it, but he was.

CP

Join the club!

AM

But subsequently, and irrespective of whether you were inaugurated in any way, what has been your religious position, as it were?

CP

Well, there hasn't been one.

AM

None at all?

CP

No. I've never been tempted by faith. Yes, I mean, there are aspects of religious ritual and practice that I've admired, but especially when they are performed inside glorious buildings. So it's rather aesthetic, while ideologically and in terms of deeply felt belief, it's nothing. While I have been intrigued by readings from the Bible, I've never felt in any way influenced by that.

AM

And you've never felt any God-shaped hole inside you?

CP

No. No. I mean, you've got to remember I was raised in the Marxist milieu for which religion was the opium of the people, and you shouldn't get addicted to opium. It seemed to be the thought.

AM

Right. Well, that's disposed of one large area of inquiry. You then went on to beyond preparatory school, so to speak, to your next school. What was that?

CP

When, after the Leeds diaspora, we reassembled as a family unit in London, my father had found a flat somewhere, the upper part of a house (the lower part was owned by a doctor, and he had his surgery there too), as I previously mentioned, on the Caledonian Road in Islington, right opposite Pentonville Prison, which was an endless source of curiosity. especially when they did hangings. I was still in this flat when the last hanging took place. One didn't see it of course, but you did see the crowds gathering.

AM

They have flags on them?

CP

No, I can't remember exactly. I just remember the crowds.
Anyway, so we settled in Islington, and I went to a local primary school called Thornhill Primary School. That was very successful. I enjoyed it a very great deal. Unfortunately, round about age 10, I think, I fell in love with one of the girls, and it was heartbreaking, because when you do that at 10, you're not going to get anywhere. It was a lovely moment. But anyway, I did the 11+, and the plan at the time, the assumption was, that I would go to one of the London grammar schools, but this coincided with my parents splitting up, and everything was pretty chaotic. It's quite a detailed story there, the various things that happened to us, and including to me. One is a story of eviction, when the doctor who owned the Caledonian Rd house kicked us out. But there was this school, I don't know if you've ever heard of it, called Woolverstone Hall, in Suffolk, just outside Ipswich. It was originally owned by the Merchant Navy. They wanted out for various reasons, and sold it to what was then the London County Council. And the London County Council used it as a school for London kids who'd passed the 11+, but who, for some reason or other, usually split families, would benefit them to go there, rather than stay in London. So I was sent off to Woolverstone Hall, as my first secondary school, and I was there for several years, until I got expelled.

AM

It was a boarding school, presumably.

CP

Pardon?

AM

A boarding school?

CP

A boarding school, yes.

AM

A male, all-male?

CP

Yes, it was a boarding school, and it was all-male. Many years later it became a boarding school for girls. It's now a day school for girls. But anyway, I went to Woolverstone Hall, and would come back to London in the holidays, rejoining my mother and siblings, and the various chapters of the post-Caledonian Road eviction. That's a whole story in its own right. It was very, very difficult and very complicated. My mother hated my father once they split up, and I was the only one of the children who was really allowed to see him. I was very fond of him, and I couldn't stand the way my mother bad-mouthed him. I had endless rows with my mother, endless. Returning home to London for the holidays was all a bit trying, and one day she showed up at Woolverstone Hall to tell me she herself couldn't stand it anymore, because I was too obstreperous, and to inform me that arrangements had been made for me to go and live with my father during the school holidays. Despite feelings of abandonment, there were also feelings of release. I thought, oh, that's an agreeable prospect, and my father had remarried somebody whom I liked quite a lot. So I went to live there with them in the holidays. But back at school (to round off the Woolverstone story– because it's got a little kicker in it that you'll appreciate), what turned out to be my final year there though not my final year in terms of schooling, A-levels and so on. The English master (Ian Bell was his name), every year directed the school play. In my final year we did a Russian play (I don't recall which). I played the part of an elderly Russian nobleman and had to have my hair dyed grey. For this purpose and other make-up operations, Bell ambushed his daughter, Ursula and a school friend of hers. Bell and his family lived in Ipswich and came in to teach. Ursula and friend went to school in Ipswich. Anyway, he brought her and friend in to do the make-up. One of my co-actors and good friend, Andrew, fell for Ursula's friend while I fell immediately for Ursula, and she for me. So we started seeing one another clandestinely. It was all very innocent teenage stuff, you know, just a few hugs and kisses. And then something drastic or dramatic happened. There was a dance, a kind of ball, involving one of the schools, the Ipswich school. We six-formers were allowed to go to it and so I went with the friend. The bulk of the six formers and returned on the school bus. Andrew and I went in on our bikes, which had the benefit of making life altogether more flexible. We met up with the two girls in some bar, then to the dance, but not for very long. From there we went back to the other girl's place, and did a bit of hugging and kissing and so on, and then left late. Naturally, we had to invent a story to explain and justify our late return to the school, all the other boys having returned on time by bus. So the line we were going to spin, was that while cycling back, and we had a hugely delaying puncture, and that we had to wheel back to Ipswich in the hope of get it repaired. However, on that particular occasion,the gods decided to throw the dice in a very particular way. While cycling back, we did have a puncture (Andrew's bike). . So back we went (wheeled) to Ipswich, and to the only place that seemed open, and to the stationmaster's office. I played the card of my father as comrade working for British Rail while asking if perchance he had or could access the gear for mending a puncture. Here the gods dealt the cards differently. Yes, I do, he said. So we mended the tyre, and then set off à deux laughing to thoughts of good luck and of the girls all tucked up sweetly in warm beds. .

But by then it was about between one and two o'clock in the morning, and as we're cycling along the country road to Woolverstone Hall, a car draws up, and it's an irate headmaster out looking for us. Anyway, the upshot of this tale is that the gods played a different hand. I was expelled, mainly at the insistence of Ursula's father (of whom more anon). I returned to London, and signed up for the local grammar school, Marylebone Grammar School, where I completed my A-levels and more general education, before heading off to university.

AM

Most of the illustrious people I know were expelled for some reason. I was one of those boring people.

CP

Oh, jolly good. Oh, great. Were you?

AM

No, I was one of the boring ones who wasn't.

CP

Oh, the one in Oxford?

AM

Well, that was the Dragon School. I wasn't expelled from there. Sedbergh. I wasn't expelled from either. Perhaps, at your second grammar school, you specialised in arts and humanities, and did A-levels in what subjects?

CP

At Woolverstone Hall, I was studying French, German and Economics. For some reason I can't for the life of me recall, while French and German at A-level were two year courses, I was down to sit the A-level in Economics after just one year. My expulsion meant sitting the exams in London. I took them at County Hall and, despite all the turbulence associated with being expelled, got a fairly good result. As for the other two subjects, German and French, I had another year to go, and that's what I did at Marylebone. But at the school, there was also a sixth-form 'essay society', created by the headmaster. and which required interested members to write a lengthy essay at some point in the course of the school year on a topic of our choosing. No, Alan, not Proust, as you've just guessed. I'd never even heard of Proust by then. Remember I'm in a Marxist household. I chose Dialectical Materialism as my topic, thus composing a very long essay on Marx and Engels. I treasured it but unfortunately lost it somewhere down the line. So, part of that year was taken up with writing this gigantic long essay, but the principal objects of my attention remained French and German. Again, I did well, but when I applied for university, ... Oh, well, I don't know if you want to get to that, that's another tale.

AM

Yes, we'll save university for university in a moment.

CP

Yes, okay.

AM

But at the school, were there any teachers who particularly influenced you or inspired you?

CP

Yes, my French teacher, John Phillips, who studied French at Oxford. He was a true intellectual, the teacher who really inspired me, along with the headmaster. He was an Oxford classicist and a very clever man (altogether different from the Headmaster of Woolverstone; but there lie other exotic tales, best parked at least for now) . But I had less to do with the breath of fresh air that was the Marylebone headmaster than I did with my French teacher, John Phillips, and he was truly inspiring. When my school years at Marylebone came to an end, and before I went to Oxford (originally I was supposed to be going to Cambridge, but that's another story I'll tell you when we get to it). But before going to Oxford in the autumn of 1961, under some scheme or other, I got a grant from the London County Council to go and spend three months in Germany. One with a family just outside Bonn, one in Stuttgart, and one just outside Kassel, with someone who had a kind of castle, and who was a very good friend of John Phillips. Both were super intellectuals and they knew everything. I mean, what for me counted as everything then. For me these were incredibly informative moments.

AM

And is there anything else specific about schooling? I mean, were you in dramatic performances?

CP

Yes. The highlight of my two years at Marylebone Grammar School was playing the part of, I hesitate, King Lear.

AM

I knew it would be Hamlet or King Lear.

CP

I played King Lear and I didn't play Hamlet, I'd love to have done so. And I have terrific memories of Lear, of his rages and his sorrows.

AM

So you inherited your mother's dramatic skills.

CP

Perhaps.

AM

So let's just end by hearing the story of why you didn't come to Cambridge, and why you went to Oxford.

CP

Well, when I was still at Woolverstone Hall, I was entered for the scholarship entrance exam at St John's, Cambridge. This arrangement remained in place after my expulsion, and so in December 1960 I went from London to spend a week taking exams and being interviewed at St John's. But towards the end of the week something happened which blew my candidacy to pieces. The something is bizarrely connected with the Ursula story Things were going quite well, or I felt they were, all the way through the week up to the last exam on Saturday morning. Also in Cambridge was a friend of mine from Woolverstone Hall, who was also applying, but in his case a shot at Trinity. After the Friday exams we met up to go for a drink, during which he said to me, Chris, do you know who's in town, in Cambridge? I said, no, what do you mean? He replied, to my amazement, Ursula, with a friend. Naturally I asked if he knew where? Yeah, he replied, just around the corner. So off I went to knock on the door, and was welcomed in. It was all very amiable. At about 11 o'clock, I left to go back to St. John's, only to discover that it was locked. I hadn't the faintest idea of how to get in. So I went back to Ursula's place and asked if I could spend the night there. I spent the night, innocently if uncomfortably, on the floor. But by the time I woke up and got back to John's the following morning, I'd missed the exam. That blew it, as the amiable Fellow in German later informed me.
I went back to London not quite knowing what to do next. But my French teacher, John Phillips, he said, look, why don't you, it's not too late, why don't you put in an application for Oxford and in particular Keble College, which had been his college. So he wrote to the Fellow in French, to ask if he'd like to take a look. The answer was yes, so in January off I went, for the first time, to Oxford. I didn't sit an entrance exam. I was just interviewed and offered a place. But I then risked all by moving the goal posts. While thanking them for the offer of a place, I said, although, I've got in on the back of French and German, what I really wanted to do was PPE. Miraculously, they said OK, you can do PPE. So I showed up in the autumn of '61 ready to embark on PPE (enamoured of Philosophy (Dialectical Materialism!) Economics (A-Level) and Politics (Home), but was informed to my consternation that the first term was going to be not solely, but massively dominated by introduction to symbolic logic. I said, I don't want to do symbolic logic. I want to do philosophy and some economics and politics, especially politics. Especially I want to 'do' Jean Paul Sartre and that kind of thing. So I just wandered off the, you know, the PPE ranch and went back to French and German.

AM

OK, well, at that point, I think we'll just...

CP

Oh, we've got to go. [to lunch]

AM

Chris, back to Ursula.

CP

Briefly, but entertainingly, two things. First of all, after my expulsion from Woolverstone Hall I painfully lost touch with Ursula. And I saw her about three times on three occasions. And then that was that. I never saw her again. I have no idea what became of her. The first was the one I've already told you about, here in Cambridge where I was destroying my chances of getting admitted to St John's. The second is bound up with politics. I was a regular marcher in the Aldermaston marches while at school and then Oxford. On one of them, I'm walking down Whitehall and it's pouring with rain. Somewhere out of nowhere on the pavement, there's this spectral appearance. It's Ursula. And so she joins me and we walk down in the rain, holding hands, get there, listen to Michael Foot give speeches and so on. And then there was nothing to do but then to say goodbye. And we did. And then the final occasion was in a jazz club in London. I used to go there quite often with my then girlfriend. And who walks in but Ursula, with her new boyfriend. A brief hello and then that was the end of that. But I want to close the Ursula saga with a little tale about her father, Ian Bell, the English master who was instrumental in my expulsion, indeed its key agent. Bell read English here at King's. This is pertinent to what I'm about to narrate. He was in the habit of performing as cool, laid back, open to all kind of personality. He would occasionally arrange little tea parties with sixth formers to shoot the breeze in a very sort of laid back fashion with us. What do you think you'd like to do when you've completed your A-levels? What are your ambitions and blah, blah. We all knew that he hated being a school teacher. So one day I asked him a question, , and you are now about to be informed of an interrogative counterfactual which I particularly treasure, having written a book about counterfactuals. One day, at one of these laid-back gatherings I bounced the standard question back to him: if you hadn't been a teacher, what would you most like to have been? And, just like that, out popped the answer: a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. I was impressed, though the occasion was of course before my expulsion, and before I came to detest him. For many years I longed to bump into him on the street somewhere and for him to ask me what I was or what had become of me.

AM

Oh, I'm a fellow of King's College.

CP

Yes, yes. think of the vindictive (but of course also infantile)pleasure of throwing in the face of the man who got me expelled because I was fond of his daughter an update of this kind

AM

That's nice. So to Oxford, you read French and German.

CP

Yes.

AM

Were there any particularly inspiring teachers there or lecturers that you remember?

CP

Yes. Initially, I was far more interested in things German than in things French until my final year, when the focus switched. But in my first two years at Oxford, I was basically studying German literature, history of ideas, stuff like that. And in my second year I had to make some choices. In German, one of the specialist options was Nietzsche. So I went for that while knowing next to nothing about the topic, and it was like a bomb going off in my head. I'd never come across stuff anything like Nietzsche's stuff. Anyway, I was taught by two people. There was David Luke Christ Church. He was very, very good. The other one, Malcolm Pasley at Magdalen, didn't teach me one-on-one. He gave a lecture course on Nietzsche which I attended religiously, unlike most of the other Oxford lectures of my time there. The relevant tale here however is one of the shrinking audience. At the beginning of term, there was a fair number of us, but a number that gradually diminished. The topic of the final lecture was going to be an explanation of the idea of Eternal Recurrence, a doctrine in Nietzsche that I found frustratingly incomprehensible, well aware that it didn't just mean everything happens again twice. So I was really looking forward to this clarification. On the day of the lecture, I show up and am the only student to do so. I sit there feeling a bit uneasy, waiting for him to show up, which he does. In he walks in, looks around, he sees only me. He nevertheless walks onto the platform, gets his notes out, puts them on the rectum, and he looks around the lecture hall. There's still nobody but me. At which he says, I don't think I can give this lecture. There's nobody here except you. And I said, but you were going to explain to me the meaning of the eternal recurrence, thinking, oh, maybe he'll take me off to a cafe or something. But he didn't. He just picked up his notes and walked out. So I've resented him ever since. I was absolutely convinced that I was about to be on the receiving end of a major intellectual revelation. To this day, I'm still baffled by the doctrine, though that may be intrinsic to it.

AM

So, again, what else were you doing in Oxford? Were you still acting or sports?

CP

Yes, I did some drama. Keble, my college was very active in the theatre culture of Oxford. The last thing I did was play a part in an Elizabethan comedy in the gardens of Exeter College. I've forgotten which play it was. It wasn't Shakespeare.



AM

You never came to see the plays in Worcester College Gardens?

CP Ah, no, I saw some. I saw a performance of Midsummer Night's Dream.

I was acting in that. I was playing the guitar. I was the only person they knew.

CP What year were we in?

AM

This is 1963, probably. Oh, yes. And the problem was that I was busy and I could never remember the lines. So every evening I used to make up whatever the famous song is in Midsummer Night's Dream, where they're singing about love and so on. And people would come up in a bewildered way afterwards and say, how strange. It doesn't seem very familiar, that what you sang.

CP

Well, that's not surprising. It may be the performance I saw. But I will always remember it. It was just magical.

AM

Went out onto the lake.

CP

Yes, precisely because of the lake. Yes. Well, well, well.

AM

So that, as it were, is was when we first met. Anyway, so, and politics? Any politics?

CP

Well, that, given the prehistory, is a rather unusual feature of my Oxford life. I didn't get involved in student politics. I went on a couple of demos and, as I mentioned earlier, I was a religious participant in the Aldermaston marches and the whole anti-nuclear campaign. But I was on the left and I had convictions which informed a lot of what I did and how I thought about this and the other. I went to Oxford in the company of Karl Marx and he stayed with me throughout. But I was never a member of the Communist Party. I had too many reservations of an obvious nature, you know, the Hungarian uprising, what happened in Czechoslovakia and all the rest of it. My father was uncomfortable with those moments, but he never really answered the questions that I rather brutally put to him. Anyway, never mind that. So I didn't really get involved, although I would certainly have self-described as left. No, I didn't. I didn't join any of the societies.

AM

Didn't you?

CP

No.

AM

No sport?

CP

Yes, I did play some rugby. I played rugby at school and I was quite good at it. And I played a few matches for Keble, my college, and a little bit of cricket. Yes, but I wouldn't describe myself as outstanding. No, but I did go on to play. I went to France for a year, I intermitted to go to France. I taught in a lycée in Le Havre and I joined the Le Havre Rugby Club and played a few games with them. But I got so battered by really seriously professional rugby players that that was an end of it. I gave up after that.

AM

So is there anything else about those three years? Did you have love affairs, for example?

CP

Yes. Well, I told you the last time I saw Ursula was when she walked in with a boyfriend in this jazz club where I was with a girlfriend, . And it was, you know, like most young love affairs, they're a bit turbulent. I would often go down to London from Oxford for us to spend the weekend together. The end of my second year at Oxford, I broke it off because I just felt I was too young, it was too early to commit. And then I went off to France for a year to Le Havre, came back, called her up and bingo, we're sort of back together. I returned to Oxford for my final undergraduate year. She comes up to Oxford to see me from time to time and gets pregnant. And that's our first daughter. And shortly before she gave birth, we got married. Why am I telling you this ? Oh, you asked me if there were love affairs. Oh, yes. So yes, yes.

AM

And what about music? I haven't asked you about music. Has that been important in your life? Do you play or listen a lot?

CP

Not really, I learned to play the drums when I was at Marylebone Grammar School. And I got to know this guy who played the piano . Sometimes he did jazz routines, and sometimes rock and roll, mostly as pub sessions world. So I sometimes would go with him. He would play the piano. He had a couple of guitarists and I would play the drums, but I didn't do it at Oxford. No.

AM

What about listening to music? Listening to music?

CP

Oh, listening to music. Yes. Again, it didn't figure large in my early childhood. My father wasn't remotely interested in music apart from Irish rebel songs and Spanish ones. He fought in the Spanish Civil War. But apart from rock and jazz, music played virtually no role of substance in my early life. But then along came Nietzsche exploding in my head like a bomb going off. It's because of Nietzsche that I learned about this guy called Richard Wagner. And I started listening to Wagner. And boy, what a trip that was initially. Yes. Oh, yes. Tristan and Isolde just melted me. I mean, it's about melting, of course, of identity and death. But I was just completely, you know, swept away by it.
And then later I calmed down and developed tastes and loves, crucially Mozart and Beethoven who still remain my great loves today, though I'm also a sucker for early English music, Byrd and Tallis above all..

AM

I might have guessed. So, what degree did you get in the end?

CP

Oh, it was in French and German.


AM

But I mean, what level of degree? You passed?

CP

Yes, I passed. Yes. I didn't get a first. Another tale of blowing an exam paper, but not because of a girl or being locked out of college. I was told later by, one of the examiners, Merlin Thomas, who taught at New College, that I'd blown the German philology paper, which I most certainly did, simply because I hadn't prepared for it properly. I was confronted with a whole suite of questions I couldn't engage with. Merlin said that in every other paper I got a first. But the semi-débacle of the Philology paper did for me. Wholly deserved. I mean, I was supposed to know this stuff and I didn't, though curiously I very much enjoyed reading and studying medieval German poetry.

AM

And what did you do after?

CP

Ah, well, getting my Oxford degree overlapped with my getting married and then our daughter's Kate birth shortly after finals. And so there was a whole suite of questions about what to do. But I didn't want to give up the academic life, certainly not immediately. And the timing coincided with Oxford inventing something, a new course. It was the BPhil. There was one in philosophy and there was one in literary studies, introducing something called comparative literature, which had hitherto been unheard of at Oxford, although, of course, some of the academics thought comparatively and published accordingly. Anyway, I opted for that. It was a two year course. My future was still unclear at the end of those two years, very foggy. I'd applied for a few jobs elsewhere, but didn't get any of them. However, as the BPhil came to an end, one day Merlin Thomas, at New College, asked me what my plans were for the following year. Were you going to embark, for example, on a PhD? And I said, maybe. I'm not sure. He said, anyway, look, a colleague of mine at Pembroke College called Robert Baldick is going on sabbatical for a year. And he's asked me if I know of anyone, a graduate student, who might be able to step into his shoes for a year. And Merlin said, well there's this graduate student, Christopher Prendergast, whom I can recommend. And so I taught for a year at Pembroke. And over the course of that year, I again applied for jobs elsewhere. One was at Leicester. I can't remember exactly where now. But a job came up in Cambridge, in the French department. And so I applied for that and I got it.

AM

And you came to Cambridge in...

AM

This was about '66?

CP

'68.

AM

So you came as a college, I mean a university teaching officer.

CP

I was an assistant lecturer in the French department. And then, and this is another long story, we probably haven't got time for it all, there is the collegiate aspect. I was approached by two colleges, Trinity and Downing. And I went from Oxford to visit them and for them to check me out. I had a long afternoon in Trinity. I couldn't believe my eyes at the arrogance of the place and the assumption that obviously I was would say yes to the offer of a Fellowship. And then precisely for that reason, I said no. And for some years, there was a handful of Trinity fellows whom I'd met in the course of that afternoon and whom I'd occasionally bump into going up Trinity Street who would look at me with something approaching awe, or just sheer bafflement at the strangeness of a specimen who said no thanks to a Trinity offer. Nobody turns down the offer of a fellowship, unless they're insane. Anyway, I went to Downing instead, though that can't plausibly be described as an outstanding success. I lasted two years. Then there was a huge scandal, to which I wasn't a party. I was a party to the discovery of it. It concerned the disgraceful fixing of an election to a junior research fellowship. Three of us rumbled it and we went to the Master to ask 'what are you going to do about it? Basically nothing was the practical answer, to which our response was, okay, we're resigning. One of us went off to London, another to Jesus and I came to King's. That was in 1970.

AM

That's why you're one year senior to me. So, we'll skip over King's since we both know it pretty well. Except I'd just like you to, if there were any King's fellows you were particularly close to, Tony Tanner or anyone, I don't know.

CP

Yes.

AM

You could just say something about them.

CP

Yes. I was very close to Tony. We had overlapping academic and intellectual interests, especially in the literary sphere. And he became a very close friend. For example, when my then marriage finally collapsed, and I was temporarily homeless after a brief sojourn in college, a few months down in Bodley's. Tony had this house up on Alpha Road and he was living on his own and invited me to move in until such time as I'd sorted things out as to where I was going to live. So I moved in and lived there for just over a year. Tony, of course, was also an alcoholic. So it proved to be a very, very boozy year. I drank too much and he drank far too much. But, on the other hand, Tony, was a very complicated man. He had been a stalwart friend at a time of huge difficulty and stress for me. But he also associated friendship with forms of loyalty that sometimes were excessively demanding and crucially so in my case. I moved out of Alpha Road to a house in Grafton St. We remained good friends. Indeed he was instrumental in signing me up for a book series on Cities and Literature. He did one on Venice, I did on Paris. But a few years after I moved out, I was offered a job in New York. When I told him that I was leaving King's and going to New York, he went into an immediate sulk and then he never spoke to me again, or hardly did. It was all very sad. But Tony was, is, an important King's figure in my early King's years, very important. Who else did I know? Gosh.

AM

Frank Kermode?

CP

Yes, I knew Frank, though the terms of my acquaintance with him weren't like those of my acquaintance with Tony until it all went a bit pear shaped. Yes, who else?

AM

Bernard? Bernard Williams?

CP

Oh, Bernard. We got on very well. Although he was a bit awesome. He was too bloody clever, you know, and so could all too easily be experienced as intimidating. A destabilising feature of Bernard's conversational style was the articulation of the word 'really?' after an argument one had made and thought a clincher. Far from it. Do you 'really' mean what you're affirming?

AM

And Patricia?

CP

Patricia, yes but later, when Bernard became Provost, yes, we got on extremely well. And then I have a very fond memory of Bernard and it's the following. After he'd left King's, he went to Berkeley, and this is overlapped with my years in New York. When I left, I assumed it was for good. But in reality I went with an insurance policy in my back pocket, and also a question I'd rather hoped not to have with me. I was going to make a new life, embark on new adventures etc. Cambridge had agreed to keep my job here open for up to five years. The option plagued me It proved to be not just insurance, but also the question I'd hoped to avoid but which in the end I couldn't just ignore So here I was, heading into my fifth year in New York, undecided, and feeling rather oppressively perplexed. And I thought I'd seek Bernard's advice. I called him one day, he was in Berkeley, I was in New York. I said, Bernard, I'd appreciate your advice on something. And he said, sure, fire away. So I explained my dilemma, but I packaged it in the following form, and this is the real kicker. I said, Bernard, if you were me, what would you do? He paused and then said, 'but Chris, I am not you', philosophically the exemplary answer and which left me to make the relevant decision on my own. I wasn't really asking him for advice, although he did give it to me, and it was: I should stay in New York.

CP

And then, talking of Provosts, there was also Edmund Leach, Provost when I arrived at King's in 1970. I got on very well with Edmund. Very well indeed.

AM

Why did you like Edmund so much?

CP

Because, well, I liked him personally, but there was an intellectual hook. I show up in Cambridge in 1968. 1968 is a talismanic year for the sort of thing that I was interested in. It was the moment when the so-called French Theory Revolution washed over the shores onto these blighted isles, and all sorts of interesting things were happening, the ideas of Roland Barthes and the adaptation to literary studies of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the whole structuralist moment. And Edmund, as you know, better than I do, Edmund was one of the first English anthropologists who made something of Lévi-Strauss. And we'd have conversations, Edmund and I, about something called structuralism. Of course, I was coming from a different neck of the woods. But we had quite a lot in common. So that was another bond. Of course, there were moments when Edmund was intolerable, when he'd lose his temper. Not with me, but just generally. And I often found that quite tiresome. But I was very, very fond of Edmund. And I read Lévi-Strauss, not all of it, but I read a fair amount, and it really was because of him. I also got on well with Celia, Edmund's. wife.
She would invite me out to Barrington where they moved after Edmund's ceased to be Provost and subsequently fell seriously ill. My last meeting with Edmund was when he was bedridden, and he was basically non-compos. He just looked at me, although I'm sure he recognised me. It was a very sad moment, but also testimony to how much I liked and admired him.
AM

Did you know Ernest Gellner at all?

CP

Ah, yes, I did. And I was very fond of him too. Ernest, of course, was like dynamite, intellectually. And I found this fascinating. And we'd have all kinds of conversations about, well, French structuralism, for example. And I liked him very much. But there came a moment when my liking for him was dented, because you know how aggressive Ernest could be.

AM Aggressive in writing, not personal.

CP

Well, I don't mean he'd bully you. No, he'd just be opinionated in ways that could be slightly crushing. Anyway, and this is a case in point, when I stood up to him. There'd been a piece in the TLS by somebody (whose name I can't remember) about the Spanish Civil War, and I was very annoyed by it, because it was hostile to the International Brigade, which my father served in, and nearly got killed. He was seriously wounded and was invalidated out of the war. Anyway, I read this piece and, as I say, was very annoyed by it. And for some reason (I don't recall which), I was having a chat with Ernest, and I drew his attention to the piece. And, mainly because he disliked the Left, he said something pejorative about the brigade, the International Brigade. That did not go down well with me, and I ticked him off in no uncertain terms: Oy! you don't talk about the Brigade and my father like that, Ernest, I won't have it. He was a bit shaken by my vehemence. But otherwise, we got on extremely well. And when I learned that he'd just dropped dead in an airport, I was really upset. Were you close to Ernest?

AM

Very close, yes. I'll tell you afterwards about that.

CP

And I did admire him. Intellectually, I really admired Ernest.

AM

Did you know Martin Bernal?

CP

Yes, I did know Martin Bernal. But a relationship such as it was didn't end very well.


AM

So, let's move on. We've got 15 minutes or so. I'd like to talk about your work. Desert Island stuff. You have three pieces of your work which you want the world to remember you by, so to speak. What are they and why?

CP

Yes, it's a fairly hard choice to make, but given that you're asking me to do it, I think I would certainly take with me… There's a book I wrote called The Order of Mimesis, which starts with Aristotle's doctrine of mimesis and travels through an intellectual history into a literary history, mainly about the 19th century French novel and the emergence of a doctrine called realism, literary realism, that it had its theoretical roots in the ancient concept of mimesis.

AM

Remind our viewers what mimesis means.

CP

Ah, you have to read it. As you know, mimesis literally means imitation. So, mimetic art, in this case literary art is a depiction, representation of the world but not just descriptively in descriptive passages of prose, but also narratively. The structural articulations of the story will be telling you something about the world as it really is. That's a rather naive summary of what mimesis is, and what Aristotle himself meant by it is a whole scholarly ball-game in its own right. For that reason, my book is theoretically actually quite dense, and not a straightforward, easy read. One might get a bit tired reading it on the legendary desert island. But, given the nature of your question I would take it with me. That would be one. Another would be a book I wrote, which ought to be dear to your heart for a reason I shall shortly come to. It's called Paris and The Nineteenth Century. It was mainly about literature, but also had chapters largely devoted to painting and photography (famously, the photographer, Nadar). It's coming out in Chinese, as you probably know, courtesy of Cam Rivers. So, I'd probably take that one with me. And then if I've got three, the third choice, of course, by being the only one left, is fraught with difficulty. But I think I would probably take with me, partly because I really enjoyed writing it, and partly because it was a departure from the sort of thing I normally did and still do. This was, well, multidisciplinary, but a lot of philosophy in it. It's the book I did on counterfactuals (Counterfactuals. Paths of the Might-Have-Been). I was absolutely fascinated by the topic. I won't say any more about it here, but if I get a copy to you, I hope you enjoy it. But it was for me a radical departure from my usual fields of scholarly work. There's no literature in it, apart from a section on Sophocles and Oedipus Rex, and the last chapter, which is centrally about the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, in relation to the category of the counterfactual. So, I'd probably take that one. Probably, but one never knows for sure, until the choice is upon one.

AM

Putting the same question in another way, if you had to say what you think, what serious difference you had made to literary studies, or whatever field you define yourself within, your major... I mean, in history, it's usually you've discovered some strange document or something, or strange tribe in anthropology, or some theoretical system. So, I could say this was my breakthrough, and people, if they ever remember me, will be because of that. How would you describe that? That no one had thought of before.

CP

Oh, sorry, something I haven't done?

AM

No, no, no. Something that isn't a counter of anything. Which sort of idea do you think was most...

CP

I think probably the Mimesis book. I was fascinated, always have been until this late stage of my life, absolutely fascinated by the term and the concept of representation across a whole semantic field, indeed including the political meaning of representation. But it was mainly artistic, and that book is probably, theoretically the most dense of my books, which I'm going to interpret solely for myself as a compliment. But I think it's the one that's had the most influence, certainly on students. I'm often told by my younger colleagues, that their students are told to read it. And when they do, lights start to go on. So I guess, as a memento of my own time as a teacher, it would have to be that one.

AM

And Proust, I mean, I don't know why I've got this vision that your main interest is Proust, but tell me why I should read Proust. I'm one of these people who's read the first volume several times, and then somehow something intervenes, and I never get further. But my mother read the lot, several times. So why Proust?

CP

Well, I think it's a question that's absolutely impossible to answer. I'm often confronted with readers who get no further than you with Proust, or even less far, and then they cease reading it. The argument I've invariably put to them when this has come up, whether from students or from friends is: if you get beyond the point where you've broken off, you will end up hooked, and it's always worked, always. This is not an answer to your question. It's just a description of what's typically happened, in my experience, of that particular syndrome. And why do they get addicted? I mean, what is it about Proust? Well, I don't really know. It's manifestly a long and complicated story. The best but under-informative answer is simply that Proust is a great writer. I'm going to leave it at that. He is a great writer, in many, many dimensions, from the intimate to the more public and the collective. A la recherche du temps perdu is in many respects the historical chronicle of a whole social class, the post-revolutionary French aristocracy in the late 19th and the early 20th century. And in that dimension, although stylistically he's completely different, he's in the company of Balzac and so on, whom he hugely admired. But there's also something magical about Proust. Obviously, it's got to do with his powers of evocation, and the powers of evocation are, in turn, if not exclusively, to a very large, almost defining respect, based on this mechanism called the involuntary memory. You touch something and bingo, it suddenly triggers something that you'd forgotten, to all appearances definitively. But it's not just idle forgetting. It's something fundamental in your life, something that happened to you, or some experience that came you way. Proust is the author par excellence, at least in my knowledge of literature, who grabbed hold of that and knew how to articulate it, how to represent it, and to make it the scaffolding of a massive novel. I've written two books about Proust, and was the General Editor of the Penguin translation. So Proust has occupied many years of my academic life. And I am still at it, most recently on the topic of Proust and Still Life painting.

AM

Well we'll have a word about that afterwards, but the last thing, perhaps. I know your current wife. Do you want to say anything about Bridget?

CP

She's going to love current!
Well, Bridget is extraordinary. I mean, of course, she was here as an undergraduate . But I came in 1970 and she showed up, I think, around '75. I was around and very active as a tutor. But I didn't know her then at all. Paths never crossed. But the fact of her having been a student here at King's and experienced things intellectually of a kind that I associate with my own King's history, is part of the material of our bond. And she's also a wonderful artist.

AM

I still remember your account of when you met her and walked from East London to Hampstead, talking for hours on end.

CP

Indeed. A life changer, to this very day

AM

Very romantic. Anyway, on that romantic note......