literature, from late medieval times up to the end of the nineteenth century. It is a notorious fact that French and English are the two European languages hardest to translate into each other. I felt the difficulty right away, and was enthralled by being allowed to enter a completely un-English world.
Rather massive reading in the literature of antiquity had a different effect. It felt like bathing in two grand non-Christian civilizations. Because we scholarship boys were regarded as the school’s intellectual elite, we were allowed to read almost anything, even erotic passages, though the teachers often skipped them out of embarrassment. The ancient cultures we were trained to admire and the contemporary culture into which we were being educated were miles apart. While we were taught to be ashamed of, and hide, our bodies, the statues of ancient Greece were almost entirely and unashamedly nude, and very beautiful. Homosexual behaviour in 1950s England was still a criminal offence, and could put people in prison for years, but ancient mythology was full of stories about gods falling in love with human boys or young men. Ancient history offered plenty of examples of young lovers going bravely to war together and dying in each other’s arms. Then there was a gorgeous goddess of love, and a naughty little boy-god with a bow and arrow to back her up. Christianity seemed dull and narrow-minded in contrast.
One other notable aspect was that we were seriously taught how to write. We had to practise writing poetry of our own in Latin, and translate English poems into Latin. We also studied carefully the great masters of English prose from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. Finally, we had to memorize and publicly recite many poems in different languages. To this day, I still have in my head poems in Latin, Greek, French, German, Russian and even Javanese.
I did not know it at the time, but I was lucky to be among almost the last cohort to have these experiences. By the late 1950s, the practice of memorizing poems had almost died out. Classical studies in the old broad sense, considered as the basis for a humane education, was also being pushed aside by subjects thought more useful for careers, the professions and modern life in general. Moreover, coarse Anglo-American was becoming the only ‘world language’, at a great loss to the planet.
I did only one thing at Eton of which I am still proud. The teachers regularly used corporal punishment, which was supposed to ‘toughen us up’. Worse, however, was that the boys in the senior class were permitted to beat smaller and younger boys. With the help of some close friends, I persuaded my classmates to break with this tradition. When we became seniors we promised all the young boys that there would be no more beatings – naturally, we were, for a while, quite popular.
Strict as Eton was, it made plenty of room for holidays. When I won the scholarship to Eton, my loving aunt took me to Paris for a week of sightseeing. I bought a French comic at a kiosk near our hotel, and in it came across a scene in which Tarzan was making Jane some sexy jungle clothes, which surprised me very much. I had always assumed that Jane sewed her own clothes, never imagining that Tarzan would do such a thing. When I raised this with my aunt she laughed aloud, so I had to fight back a bit: ‘The French have the best designers in the world, and they are all men!’ Later on, I went bicycling in Holland with some schoolmates, and spent summer holidays with my mother’s best friends, one who lived in Austria, and another who kept a villa near the border between Switzerland and Italy. So I had plenty of opportunities for adolescent fun outside Ireland and England.
If Etonians could make brief trips abroad, high-ranking foreigners could also visit Eton. In June 1953 came the spectacular coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, to which all monarchs or their representatives were invited. Japan’s Emperor Hirohito was not acceptable to British public opinion because of his role in the Pacific War, but Akihito, his very young son, was deemed fit to attend. We scholarship boys were told that Akihito would visit Eton, and that we should be well behaved and respectful. Actually, we were rather hostile in principle, since the war had ended only recently. But when Akihito arrived we were stunned. He was a small young man, only a little older than us, wearing simple dark clothes and walking between two gigantic Scottish soldiers, almost as if he had been arrested. He was almost silent, timid, insecure and very gentle. Suddenly, many of us felt that in some ways he was just like us.
In my senior year at Eton, I won a scholarship to go to Cambridge University. In those days, youngsters studied intensively to get in, but once there they were not expected to study very hard, and most of them (then mainly boys) spent their time drinking, playing cards or sports, going to the movies and looking for girls. Drugs, I think, did not feature at the time. Later, in America, I was surprised to find quite the opposite: high-school students do little work, while college students have to study hard if they are to do well in later life.
Cambridge in the 1950s was still quite conservative. Sociology had only recently been introduced as a discipline and was highly controversial. There was no political science, and anthropology was still in its infancy. The scholarship I had received was in the field of classical studies, but I soon decided I should switch to a field more useful for the future. Since Cambridge boasted a number of world-famous economists – Keynes, who already had passed away by the time I arrived, had studied and taught there – I chose to study economics. I quickly discovered that I had no talent for the subject, was easily bored, and did not do well in the final examinations for the first year. Rather weakly, I resolved to return to classical studies, learning from my seniors that the final examinations for the bachelor’s degree were easier than the competitive examination I had taken to get into Cambridge in the first place.
So I spent most of my last two years in college reading whatever interested me. Mostly literature and history. I still have the notebooks in which I recorded everything I read. Though embarrassed by some of my choices, I am still impressed by the sheer number of books listed. Maybe this behaviour stemmed partly from my social immaturity: I was a shy boy with no social graces. I did not drink much, hated dancing (pre–rock-and-roll days), and had no idea how to talk to girls.
But Cambridge was important to me for two quite different reasons. Even though it was located in a small provincial town, it had what one could call an art-house repertory cinema. This was a revelation to me. At Eton we were not allowed to go alone to the movies, and in Ireland the available films were mostly westerns and gangster pictures. Now, in college, I was offered only the international best. I was overwhelmed by Japanese cinema, then at the height of its global prestige: Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu, of course, but also other directors of the same generation. This is where my lifelong love affair with Japanese culture began. Revolutionary Soviet films from the 1920s and 1930s were another revelation, though not so sharp, since I had started learning Russian at Eton with the hope of reading Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoyevsky, Goncharov and Leskov (my favourites) in the original. It was a refreshing experience to compare what I read in Russian novels with what I saw in revolutionary Soviet cinema. France, Italy, Germany and Sweden (Ingmar Bergman) were also well represented. One of the best things about the Cambridge art-house cinema was that it showed a lot of black-and-white films, which came to form the base of my cinematic aesthetic. Even today, I find black-and-white much more real and alive than colour.
Frequent attendance at this cinema also initiated my political awareness. In those days, after every film, the audience had to stand to attention while the national anthem was played to accompany Technicolor images of poor young Queen Elizabeth on horseback. This was a real ordeal. With tears in my eyes from Tokyo Story, or fire in my blood from The Battleship Potemkin, it was torture to endure this authoritarian monarchical nonsense. Quite soon, I learned how to make a dash for the exit just as the national anthem started, with plenty of irate patriots ready to grab me or hit me on the way out. So I became a naive but committed republican.
My second formative Cambridge experience occurred during the Suez Crisis of 1956, when British and French troops, colluding with the Israelis, invaded Egypt to block General Nasser’s attempt to nationalize the body that regulated international traffic along the great French-built canal. I was not in the least interested in this crisis. However, one afternoon, as I was walking back to my room across one of the university’s athletic fields, I noticed a small crowd of brown-skinned
