Obiter Dicta

Sunday October 14^th.

My last blog, on the subject of my Director of Studies at Edinburgh University in the 60s, caused some amusement. Hence – another memory of the time.

Lectures were given in the George Square Lecture Theatre. Some lecturers were erudite in their subject but inexpressibly dull. But there was Dr. Hamilton, who lectured one unforgettable lecture on the subject of Troilus and Cressida, one of the highlights of the autumn term.

            To begin with, before he started his lecture, a university servitor set up over the lectern an angle-poise lamp, with its beam trained on where his notes would be. This beam was bright. A rescue team could have found a chimney sweep lost in a pothole by the light of it. This will underline the thickness of the man’s sight. Indeed, when he appeared a few moments later, hesitantly stepping out from behind the curtain with an oxterful of notes and moving towards the lectern, it was obvious to all of us that he was navigating by echo location.

            He wore spectacles with lenses of extremely thick glass and constantly smoked black cheroots in a cigarette holder gripped between his front teeth. He had an engaging smile, which betrayed the gap between these front teeth and gave him the air of a slightly more professorial version of Terry-Thomas. He slid his glasses off his nose and on to the top of his head, then placed his notes on the lectern and squinted at them from no more than three inches away.

            “Righty-ho,” he announced jauntily, sliding his spectacles back on to the bridge of his nose, “that all appears to be in order. I once arrived to lecture on Jonathan Swift to Junior Honours, you see, and found to my horror that I had not brought my notes on Swift but, instead, a batch of loose-leaf recipes that my wife had been sifting through, the night before, looking for her recipe for mulligatawny soup.”

            That got us on his side for a start. He next took a huge pull on his stogie and coughed a lung up before he found the ashtray by the side of the lectern and balanced the smoking stinker on its rim. Gradually, he brought the alarming wheeze under control and his  countenance lost some of the rich plum hue it had so quickly developed. “You will see,” he continued in a voice like a housefly, “that I have a visual aid with me.”

            In fact, including the refracting-lens glasses and the searchlight, he had several. He was, however, referring directly to an epidiascope which another servitor had set up prior to his arrival. This was a machine which projected images on to a screen behind him.

            “I intend,” he said, “to illuminate my talk today with some images relevant to the topics under discussion. Troilus and Cressida,” he continued, “is a play where neither group of characters deserves the reader’s or audience’s sympathy. The Greeks, to quote Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 And All That, are right but repulsive, whilst the Trojans are wrong but romantic.” He took a pull at the cheroot and grinned his Terry-Thomas smile. “The Greeks may also be said to be concerned with romance in the sense of teenage infatuation whilst the Trojans are just out for … dare I say it? … a good fuck.”

            The audience gasped, tittered or guffawed according to their breeding.

            “Now, I have here, to illustrate my thesis, some slides which I have prepared to add to your enjoyment of this appalling play. Had I had my choice, I would have been lecturing today on Measure for Measure, a far superior play and one in which I attracted some favourable reviews when I played Angelo as an undergraduate, many years ago. I mean that I was the undergraduate, not that I played Angelo as such.”

            Titters titted round the hall. He footered ineffectually about the sides of the epidiascope for a bit and then said, “Anybody know how to work this bugger?”

            A gung-ho and crew-cutted young man in an Arran sweater, whom I instantly loathed, leapt up from the front row and pressed a switch on the gizmo. Light was projected on to the screen and the audience gave them both a round of applause.

            “Well done, that man,” said Hamilton. “Now. Slides.”

            There was a long cardboard box of slides by the side of the lectern. Hamilton was obviously in quest of this now, because he slid his glasses back on to the top of his head, gripped the sides of the desk in both hands and approached his face very near to the surface of it, before sweeping it from side to side. People were stuffing hankies in their mouths.

“They’re by the lectern,” someone shouted.

“They’re where?” shouted back Hamilton.

“By the side of the lectern!” a chorus bellowed at him.

“Ah! Right. Good for you.”

            He swept a hand across the surface of the desk and capsized the box of slides on to the floor. They fell with a noise like a gravy boat full of teeth hitting a parquet floor. People were openly guffawing now. Two or three with the proper Christian attitude vaulted up on to the dais to help him retrieve them. They scuttered about on all fours while Hamilton stuck his cigarette holder in his teeth and favoured the rest of us with a bashful grin. “Oops,” he said. “Blind as a bat, you see.”

            Eventually, all the slides were picked up and replaced in the box but now, of course, entirely at random.

            “Thank you! Thank you all!” he beamed and swept his arms widely. “Now. Troilus and Cressida.” As he spoke, he footered a slide into the machine like Blind Pew threading a needle. “Now, let’s see…”

            The slide was of a crumbling frieze on a ruined wall, somewhere in the windswept plains of Attica. It featured men in helmets and tunics fighting with swords and shields. Hamilton peered at it like a mole playing Mr. Magoo, then remembered that his glasses were on his head and swept them back down on to his nose and peered even harder.

            “Doesn’t really help,” he muttered and walked over to the screen so that most of the slide was now projected onto his back and the effect was somewhat spoiled. “It looks like chaps,” he anounced, “fighting with swords. I can’t remember that one. Or indeed, why it’s there. Unless it’s because the Greeks and the Trojans were fighting each other with swords. Yes, that’s probably it.”

            He put in another slide. It was upside down. A howl of laughter made him look up sharply and grin the gap-toothed grin, while puffing on the cheroot. “Have I ballsed it up again? Par for the course, I’m afraid. Snafu.”

            “It’s upside down!” the students yelled, like kids at a pantomime.

            He looked long at the slide. It was of a vase. “You’re right,” he said.

            He put it in the right way up and then walked up to it again, with his glasses on the top of his head and stared at it. “Ah!” he said. “It’s a vase. A Greek vase, probably. No other reason why it would be there. And, as you can see, there are two more chaps on it. Hitting each other.”

            More slides followed, some correctly inserted, some requiring to be so. Each was of a frieze or a statue or a painting or a vase. All featured warriors hacking lumps off each other the Classical way. And, every time, Hamilton said, after some time for scrutiny and reflection: “Mmm. Yes. More chaps hitting.”

            People were pissing themselves. This went on for a time. The finest moment came when a slide showed what was obviously a younger Hamilton, with his wife and family, dressed up as Classical figures. Hamilton wore a coal scuttle on his head with a pastebrush tied to it, a short pleated skirt and sandals, and a blanket for a cloak, fastened at his neck by a cameo brooch. He was striking a suitably impressive Hellenic attitude, with a short sword – obviously plastic - in his hand. His wife, a woman of ample figure, was wrapped up in a bedsheet and had a string of leaves in her long and grey hair. Her eyes were hideously made up like some 1920’s vamp in a silent movie. One hand was placed against her brow and the other trailed in a languorous but heartrending manner behind her. Both wore expressions of utterly fervent gusto, as the totally deranged often will. Their children wore loose white gowns and sandals; one carried a carafe and the other a decorated vase. Their expressions were glum and glazed. You could tell they hated their parents.

            By this stage, grown men were weeping with laughter.

            “Ah, I remember this one. This is a tableau vivant …” (he pronounced the phrase ringingly in italics) “… that my wife and I mounted some years ago now, on the occasion of Haddington Miner’s Gala, to represent the fall of Troy. I am Paris, abductor of Helen. My wife could not be prevailed upon to play Helen and assumed the alternative role of Cassandra. My children are generalisations to represent the culture and the civilisation lost at the sack of Ilium.”

            The auditorium hummed softly with the throbbing sob of adult laughter.

            “I believe the townspeople were much impressed,” he said as a tailpiece.

            Oh yes, they were there. Some dog-faced and horny-handed sons of toil were assembled loosely in the background, staring in wild surmise at the unhinged toffs. The auditorium was ringing with laughter. Hamilton grinned his grin, clamped his holder between his gap teeth, slid his glasses down on to his nose and approached the lectern again.

            “Right,” he said. “Well, now that I’ve set the scene, consummated the marriage as it were, let us turn our attention to the play.”

            He took the top sheet of his notes in his hand, slid his glasses back up on to his head, held the sheet directly in the glare of the anglepoise lamp and brought his face to within a few inches of the paper. “Troilus and Cressida,” he said. “Written about 1602, and known to us in two versions: the 1623 Folio version, of course, and the Quarto version of 1609…”

            And the bell rang. Hamilton lifted his eyes from the page and said sadly, “Oh. Shit.” He was, on the instant, treated to a standing ovation. People leapt up from their seats, furiously clapping and cheering, whooping and hallooing. I’m sure the thought ran through their minds to mob Hamilton, lift him bodily from the dais and bear him shoulder-high from the hall. If they had had bonnets, they would have cast them high in the air and shouted, “Huzzah!”