WHAT BECAME OF OLIVER BENTLEY?(romantic lyricism)(Critical Essay)

AN ESSAY ON ROMANTIC LYRICISM

WHEN I WAS a junior boy in the English boarding school where I spent six years, there was a senior called Oliver Bentley. Now, these the early 1960s and, while the school was an extraordinary one in its conception and purpose (to give an Eton-like schooling to boys from educationally-disadvantaged backgrounds) it was conventionally hierarchic in its inner workings. Though fagging had disappeared, the model for relations between junior and senior was The Feudal System, in which juniors in their crowded, dishevelled dormitories were equivalent to villeins, and the seniors with their white shirts, cufflinks and Old Spice talc were grandees at court, and lived in upper-storey rooms where everyone, including the housemaster, knocked before entering. This was the Great Chain of Being, and in common with its medieval model everyday life, for juniors at least, was a subject one.

To this day I do not understand the psychological laws by which, almost instantaneously at the start of a school year, one could recognise from a new intake the Assailables and the Non-Assailables. But for the former there were forever the sudden headrappers, pummellers, towel-switchers, wristburners and threat-merchants waiting sportively in drying room, shower-block, or those dark crannies where the raincoats hung, in order to make life a little more vivid for some unwary soul at the grottier end of the Chain. More generally as a junior, there was the daily angst of being found out for whatever--negligence, impertinence, gormlessness, or some infringement of some unwritten law.

To the scoffs and disdain of the grandees and middling barons one either grew inured or was made blunderingly self-conscious as to all the unsightly habits in one's personality. And it is true that these social realities were interspersed with occasional coarse pleasures, scrimmages across the dormitory beds or the hurling of someone's hairbrush or shoe from hand to hand, as well as the disingenuous enthusiasms for pop-singers or soccer stars, or "crazes" that came through the school as mysteriously as German measles or a given formula of joke. Our emotions were painted by Breughel, our script was closer to Brecht than Kipling.

In time one grows up. But having once lived in this total environment, one never grows out of those feudal relations. It is the imprint of an ur-authority, overlaid by subsequent freedoms, but never effaced by them. Never in my lifetime will I be able to talk of the seniors of my schooldays as mere seventeen-year-old boys--which is what they were. In that chain of being into which we were locked, I am forever a self-conscious twelve-to-fourteen-year-old and they are forever remote as a life at court. And were I to meet one now, I would be taken aback, I am sure, to discover how he is an inch or so shorter than me, strangely bland in manner, speaking with a tinny, congenial, collusive voice of things I never knew we had in common.

This is why the exceptions from that far-off society become numinous in recollection. Oliver Bentley, or Ollie, as he was known, had wavy fine-blonde hair, a fair, open countenance and well-proportioned physique. He was an inch or two under six feet and, until he left the school at the end of the second year sixth, he had been the champion sprinter over the 100, 220 and 440-yard track events for several seasons running.

Champion seems a pedestrian word to use for him. When he came around the track on Church Field, a white figure slightly ahead of a cluster of other white figures, made somehow more vivid by the deep green of the background oak trees and the yellowy green of the mown grass, it was as if we could see the air moving back in shock waves around him. It was as if his speed were a phenomenon that had broken free of the gross pounding of plimsolls and panting for breath of the other runners only a few paces behind, because for all the urgent momentum in his headlong pace there was also a charged poise. The running track was lined with hundreds of spectators and all of us were yelling like fiends and jumping up and down like molecules in a boiling liquid. Yet equally it was as if, at the centre of our shrieks and excitement, there was a still point, a recognition that here, in these fleeting seconds, we were watching an instance of human grace and power that would imprint itself on our memories and haunt us for the rest of our lives.