Letter: Michael Horovitz on John Bayley’s literary symposiums at Oxford

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/16/michael-horovitz-john-bayley-obituary-letter

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One detail in Valentine Cunningham’s revealing obituary of John Bayley diverges from my own observation of the academic and writer, regarding his periodic bursts of apparently uncontrollable stuttering. Cunningham writes: “The stutter remained usefully on call all his life, helping in his dedication to an appearance of agreeable buffoonery. Under that mask a far steelier person could pursue his own way.”

My acquaintance with Bayley was closest during a term of weekly literary classes that he co-hosted with Nevill Coghill and Lord David Cecil in the latter’s rooms in New College, Oxford, in the late 1950s. I was one of a dozen or so undergraduates from other colleges recommended to these lively symposiums by our tutors. Each week’s discussion focused on a specific work, and when the subject was Joseph Conrad’s story Typhoon, the exchange of ideas got severely disrupted every time it fell to Bayley, that week’s chairman, to utter this tempestuous title. Since he was reluctant to consider any word completed for him by anyone else as having been said, this placed a limit on the number of other words transacted.

It may be that, like TS Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock, Bayley was in the habit of seeking “to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”. But his stuttering on those afternoons struck us students as guileless and poignant, rather than consciously programmed to his own advantage.