Can it really be half a century since the publication of Porterhouse Blue? Tom Sharpe’s classic, scabrous satire on Oxbridge life was a novel so trenchant that it moulded – and arguably redefined – how the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, those twin bastions of erudition and academic excellence, were perceived by generations of undergraduates, and many more besides.
Having studied at Cambridge, Sharpe knew the types he was lampooning – fusty, vainglorious and bitter academics – “obtuse men, small men for whom Porterhouse was the world, and Cambridge the universe”. When he died, aged 85 in 2013, obituaries called Sharpe “the master of campus comedy fiction”. When Porterhouse Blue was published in 1974, it became part of a genre already a staple of British post-war literary culture: the campus novel.
As a setting, the campus effectively functioned as a microcosm, hermetically sealed and immured from the real world. With their hierarchical structures and often deeply unhappy characters, struggling with lives filled with discontent, failure, jealousy and pathos, campuses were fecund ground for novelists, many of whom were academics or teachers themselves. For several decades, campus-set novels set the pace in British literary fiction – until the forces of cultural and social change led to their decline.
Sharpe’s masterpiece is set in the fictional Porterhouse College, Cambridge – renowned for its antediluvian traditions, academic mediocrity and penchant for gastronomy. Dons tend to suffer debilitating strokes, affectionately termed a “Porterhouse blue”, brought on by overindulgence at High Table, whence the novel’s title. This cloistered, staunchly conservative milieu is discombobulated by the arrival of a progressive master, who, animated by a desire for social justice, is keen to modernize the college he once unhappily attended, be it by admitting women undergraduates, installing contraceptive machines or a self-service canteen.
A battle ensues with the college’s traditionalist faction, led by the dean, the senior tutor and Skullion, the deferential head porter, a man who understands his place in the world only through the lens of the college hierarchy he has helped buttress with 45 years of loyal service. Throw in the renowned broadcaster Cornelius Carrington, presenting a hatchet-job television documentary on the college, and the diehard reactionary General Sir Cathcart D’Eath (both Porterhouse alumni), and the novel is comedy gold, replete with Machiavellian machinations, ruthless duplicity and a memorable denouement.
Porterhouse Blue was immortalized in the popular consciousness by the 1987 Channel 4 adaptation, starring David Jason as the dutiful Skullion, Ian Richardson as the uxorious, liberal master Sir Godber Evans and John Sessions as the hapless, socially gauche and sexually repressed graduate student Zipser. The novel is both timeless and of its time, with a few egregiously racist epithets that date it. But it is still exceptionally funny, possessing not only raw comedic power and satirical potency, but also a rare intelligence about the psychological motivations of an ostensibly scholarly community.
With his elegant prose, Rabelaisian humor and farcical plot devices – be it Zipser’s inability to resist the charms of Mrs Biggs the bedder, inflatable prophylactics or nocturnal explosions in medieval towers – Sharpe is a gifted comic writer in the English tradition of Charles Dickens, P G Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. At its heart, his novel is about reluctance to embrace change, and is a devastating critique of Oxbridge college life – one that questions the purpose of a university education and delights in skewering the social mores of the establishment. The campus-novel genre effectively began in the early 1950s, a time when post-war universities were springing up and expanding to accommodate military veterans and a new generation of people educated to degree level, who were needed in order to grow the economy and help the country recover from the privations of war.
There had been antecedents to the genre – including Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911), and Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). But the campus novel was firmly established with C P Snow’s cerebral, emotionally nuanced The Masters (1951), which deals with the politics of academia and the scheming surrounding the election of a new master at an unnamed Cambridge college.
Next came Kingsley Amis’s mordantly amusing Lucky Jim (1954), a send-up of post-war academia’s pretensions, featuring protagonist Jim Dixon, a disenchanted history lecturer at an unnamed red-brick university, whose academic mishaps and romantic vicissitudes are chronicled in what was probably Amis’s tour de force.
The genre reached its zenith in the 1970s – perhaps unsurprising, given that compared with the 1960s, when only 4 per cent of people in the UK went to university, that figure had risen to 8 per cent a decade later as universities expanded to take students from disparate social classes and backgrounds. As social mobility increased, campus novels provided a welcome place where the traditions of the past, the flux of the present and hopes for the future could all be interrogated.
With their hierarchical structures and often deeply unhappy characters, struggling with lives filled with discontent, failure, jealousy and pathos, campuses were fecund ground for novelists.
Along with Porterhouse Blue, the decade saw the publication of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man (1975) – a salacious satire of academic life set in the fictional new “glass and steel” university of Watermouth, depicting the sexual dalliances and political intrigues of sociology lecturer Howard Kirk and his wife Barbara; Frederic Raphael’s The Glittering Prizes (1976), set partly in Cambridge; Michael Frayn’s play Donkeys’ Years (1976), a farce about an Oxbridge reunion; and David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975), a clever and humane novel about an exchange between English lecturer Philip Swallow and US academic Morris Zapp from the respective, fictitious universities of Rummidge and Euphoric State in the equally fictional town of Plotinus, “situated between Northern and Southern California”.
All captured the zeitgeist and preoccupations of their time, when the tectonic plates of social class, educational aspiration and the new “isms” were rubbing together, often discordantly. Howard Jacobson’s Coming From Behind (1983), featuring priapic Jewish protagonist Sefton Goldberg, an English teacher at a West Midlands poly, and Lodge’s Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988), the concluding parts of his campus trilogy, were more touchstones to the genre. But the genre was arguably on the wane, out of step with the asperities of Thatcherite Britain and economic recession, when higher education had, for some, become less important as a means to self-improvement.
Greater accessibility to tertiary education in the past 30 years has perhaps sounded the death knell for the British campus novel. Under Tony Blair’s Labour government, the democratization of higher education was a priority and in 1999 a target of 50 per cent of young people going to university was set. One can only surmise that, with its cachet of exclusivity gone, what is now quotidian and familiar to many is less appealing to treat in fiction.
Yet despite the fetishization of British academic life over earlier decades, and some recent laudable offerings, including Elanor Dymott’s Every Contact Leaves a Trace (2012) and James Cahill’s Tiepolo Blue (2022), the British campus novel now seems moribund, a relic of a bygone, more optimistic and ebullient age.
Could Porterhouse Blue be written today? I doubt it. Campuses are fraught with obstacles for the contemporary novelist. With its pursuit of diversity, unremitting focus on students as consumers and proliferation of low-value degree subjects, higher education has changed inexorably.
Modern campuses are already so dangerously close to parody that satire is either redundant or off limits, for fear of falling prey to that career-destroying scourge, cancel culture. Conversely, one could argue that there has never been a better time – or need – for a Sharpe, Amis or Lodge to take aim at the foibles and peccadilloes, and puncture the intellectual vanities of a new generation of undergraduates – and academics.
I’d wager that the recent sight of students protesting in support of Palestine by occupying camps in the august environs of the Radcliffe Camera, Oxford, and King’s College, Cambridge – both hitherto hallowed spaces – would have been enough to give anyone, including even the most bien pensant of liberals, a Porterhouse blue.
Lindsay Johns is a writer and broadcaster
