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Sport 28: Autumn 2002
May 1986
May 1986
Jeannette says that she thinks that university perpetuates the system. That it's not for her, loftily, as though anyone (me) who does well and somehow benefits from their degree is somehow more a product of, or has more stake in, the system. Of course I'm doing a BA in English literature—which apparently won't get me a job. ‘But look at the syllabus,’ she says. ‘The syllabus is the system.’ She's talking about the money/work system and I think she should make a distinction between economic organisations and a thing—the syllabus—that is, in itself, only a set of distinctions. I study English literature and I let someone choose these books for me. I can read other books myself. I get my degree. My degree is another distinction, for employers perhaps, but Jeannette knows I'm planning not to use it, I'm planning to be a writer, which I think puts me in the work, but not the money, bit of the system.
When I said that, as a writer, I got something out of my English literature degree, and thought other would-be-writers might too, Jeannette said, ‘Well, I want to write but I don't think studying English at university can help me do that.’
I wrote my two novels pre-university, pre-my formal study of literature—one good, one bad. I've nearly finished the one I started in Bill's course. I've tried it both ways. To give Jeannette credit she did say she thought it was my enthusiasm that allowed me to enjoy my degree. I said, yes, I even enjoyed, or at least was glad to have experienced, the alienation and disillusionment of—for instance—not enough woman writers in the syllabus. Jeannette thinks I'm being bizarre. She says, ‘So what are you going to do about that?’ But it was useful, and moving, to find page 131 out that university wasn't, in the end, my place—that it could have been, and wasn't. And since I'm not going on with it, I can't change what gets taught. All I can do is pick up a straw in my beak, fly up under the eaves, and put it in place, then go back for another, and another, until my nest is ready. All I can do, is patiently work my way into the house.