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the union’s ‘dirty work’. I saw the letter which Donald Trelford wrote to the unions telling them to accept the new technology or leave the paper. In the scandal of the fake Hitler diaries in 1983, everyone comes off badly. Hugh Trevor-Roper, who attested to the diaries’ authenticity, didn’t have good enough German to make such a judgement, especially after only a brief look. The only person who emerges with credit is the detestable David Irving, who thought the diaries were bogus. The story is one of stupidity, ignorance, greed, and incompetence, from the editor, Charles Douglas-Home, and proprietor down; I am astounded that elsewhere Stewart is able to praise those who lowered themselves into the Hitler quagmire. Did it never occur to anyone to ask if a Hitler diary, even if authentic, would be worth millions of pounds? The issue is ably discussed in Bruce Page’s The Murdoch Archipelago, listed in Stewart’s bibliography but not cited in his footnotes. Another big set piece is Stewart’s account of The Times’s campaign in 1999 to expose the Tories’ treasurer, Michael Ashcroft, as a crook – a witch-hunt that failed. Peter Stothard, the editor, imagined that ‘kicking the [Tory] party when it was down was the best way to restore it to its feet’. Two Labour supporters drove the hunt. Stothard denied that The Times had paid someone to hack into the Tory bank account. Stewart drily observes, ‘This was, technically, true’: the paper had hired private detectives ‘and had not chosen to get involved in the methods by which they obtained results’. This ‘gave the impression that the hunt was being pursued with gleeful expectation’. More damningly still, ‘Information has been shared between Tom Baldwin [one of the lead reporters on the story] and Government and parliamentary sources in a manner that made The Times look as if it were in cahoots with a Labour conspiracy against a Tory treasurer.’ By now, after dozens of stories, The Timeswas facing a gigantic libel suit. And here we discover that Stewart’s oft-repeated assurance, supported by past editors Simon Jenkins and Peter Stothard, that Rupert Murdoch did not interfere in the running of The Times, does not stand up. Alarmed at the prospect of a multimillion-pound libel penalty, Murdoch – understandably – met Ashcroft. A front-page ‘Correction’ stated that: ‘The Times is pleased to confirm that it has no evidence that Mr Ashcroft or any of his companies has ever been suspected of money laundering or drug-related crimes.’ Some time later Stothard was named ‘Editor of the Year’. The citation included praise for the Ashcroft campaign: ‘having got the story, The Times just wouldn’t shut up’. If The Times had gone to court and lost many millions of pounds in damages and costs, Stewart contends, it would have ‘ensured not only the abrupt termination of Stothard’s editorship but, more importantly, it would

have inflicted a wound to his paper’s integrity’. Furthermore, ‘Had The Times lost in the High Court, this [Stothard’s] courage would have been decried as criminal.’ The Times’s proprietor dismissed the entire event as ‘a black eye’. Actually, Murdoch had saved Stothard’s and the paper’s bacon – by decisively interfering in an editorial matter. No one on the paper suffered for the Ashcroft neardebacle; as with the Hitler diaries scandal, there were no resignations, no sackings – except that in the Ashcroft affair, it seems, the long-experienced deputy editor, John Bryant, who disliked this campaign, was possibly dropped because his views ‘may have rankled with Stothard’. With perhaps only one exception Stewart speaks admiringly, occasionally absurdly so, of all the editors, managers and journalists in the Murdoch years. He is equally admiring of Rupert Murdoch, who once claimed that his greatest achievement as a ‘patron of the popular arts’ was to save The Times. This is the first time I have heard The Timesdescribed as a ‘popular art’. The Times’s story is told well here, though there are plenty of details that many might dispute. Graham Stewart, who interviewed me at length, gives me my say over almost ten pages. He only partially accepts it, which is his right. To say he is fair may sound tepid. Actually it is high praise. To order this book at £24, see order form on page 78

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006
GENERAL

V ALENTINE C UNNINGHAM PERILOUS PROFESSORS

F ACULTY T OWERS : T HE A CADEMIC N OVEL ANDITS D ISCONTENTS

★By Elaine Showalter (Oxford University Press 166pp £12.99)

E LAINE S HOWALTER ’ S SUBJECT isn’t any old campus fiction – novels about universities in general or student life at large: that mass of fiction beginning, it might be, when Thomas Hughes’s hero left Rugby and ‘went up’ to Oxford in Tom Brown at Oxford, the genre coming of age in Evelyn Waugh’s deliciously malicious Decline and Fall. Professor Showalter’s concern is, rather, that much smaller corner of this unforeign field which academics have dubbed the Professorroman– novels about university teachers, the doings of lecturers and professors in their departments and faculties, in particular those written from the Fifties to the present day. Our very lively and likeable Dante to this educational Purgatory and Inferno – mapped decade by decade as the novels appeared – says this is her favourite reading. Since she’s been a professor of English (at Princeton most notably) it comes as no surprise that she seems to like reading most about English departments and their staffs. Indeed, what’s especially grabbing about her report is its perpetual air of insider trading. She knows intimately what the novelists are enthusing about (occasionally) and grousing about (mainly). She knows the professorial authors who go in for the Professorromanin such numbers, knows the departments whose powerplays, careerisms and other misdoings they’re shopping, knows the villains hidden and hiding behind the fictional masks and the pseudonyms. Her career has been their career; their distresses and pushinesses, their ideological manoeuvrings (to do not least with the rise of Theory) have been hers. This is Elaine Showalter the celebrated feminist critic and historian speaking. She’s even a character in some of the novels she has us alight in. No wonder this is her favourite stuff. She glances at alleged fictional precursors: Middlemarch, with dried-up Casaubon cast in the role of selfishly ambitious, wife-hurting scholar; Barchester Towers as a model of sort-of learned men’s institutional infighting; Dorothy Sayers’s Gaudy Night as a case of donnish bitching with murder in its heart. But the true instigators, or loud missionary voices, of the mode for Elaine Showalter are C P Snow in The Masters and Kingsley Amis in Lucky Jim. And no one, I guess, would quarrel much with that. The Masters is clearly a Fifties version (by a devoted

Trollopean, no less) of the common Thirties academic plot in which (as in Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodging) murder takes place in an Oxford or Cambridge college, except that in this story of the election of a new Master for an old-fashioned Cambridge college it’s ambitions for high office and place that get murdered. Snow founded a vision of the modern quadrangle as a home for careerist grasping and bitching, a killing field for academic selfhood and rightful scholarly ambition. For its part, Lucky Jim– that lovely undoing romp through the intellectual shallows of an English provincial university, an academic dump licensing powerful ogres (the grisly madrigal-singing head of department Professor Welch), cultural pseudery, intellectual bad faith and inadequacy – simply kills off the very idea of the modern university with a set of hollow laughs. We laugh, of course, at Jim Dixon’s pratfalling struggles against the Welch regime, his pointless research on ‘this strangely neglected topic’, his wonderfully hopeless and drunken ‘Merrie England’ lecture, but as Showalter rightly insists this comedy is very black indeed. And for her, Amis’s importance consists precisely in setting going a line of fictions in which satire and satirists engage with a history of steady institutional decline and failure. It’s a pessimistic business, this late-twentieth-century phase of university education which Showalter presents her chosen novels and novelists as marching in step with, decade by decade right up until now. It’s a scene in which the melancholy of teachers and taught mounts steadily. Faith in the good of the university seeps away. A kind of wholesale treason of the clerks sets in. The old men thwart and resist the young, especially the women. The young, and the women (to Showalter’s feminist dismay), tend to collaborate in the institutional nastiness. You have to get ruthless in turn or you don’t get tenure. The tenured oppress the tenure-needy. The most terrible careerists run the show, get the power, the dollars, the sex. Modern academic politics are revealed as rather special encouragers of nastiness. The ivory tower is now a Stasi fiefdom. Forget any idea you might have had of an academic pastoral, let alone a utopia. Myopically, these profs get ever more solipsistically ruthless and power-crazed as the influence of English studies shrinks within the university and the world. It’s the perennial tragedy of big fishes – not to say Stanley Fishes – in ever-diminishing ponds. No wonder the professorial writers of the Professorromanturn out so many crime stories: death after death in the English department or at the academic conference – by the likes of Amanda Cross (Carolyn Heilbrun), or Joanne Dobson. (Elaine Showalter particularly likes a sharp feminist-academic sleuth.) Of course, theory, theorists and anti-theorists – depending which side of the Theory Wars of the Seventies and Eighties an author stands on – are especially lampooned, and charged with causing lots of the recent trouble. Just in case you were unaware of who the

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