It can illuminate how language works and how stories carry meaning. But, as Seamus Heaney put it, striving to write well helps tune the ear to the hum of a writer.
It’s a direct, though unforeseen, consequence of those radical 1960s ideas of valuing individuals and encouraging self-expression and confidence. Creative writing can be a way of reading, and it fires up students who, used to browsing Wikipedia, can be reluctant to read a whole book. How would you mark Wuthering Heights? (‘Emily, I think you need to reorganise the chronology.’) Or assess Gertrude Stein? (‘Have you heard of commas?’) I try to bring in Renaissance ideas of imitatio, and teach by example, of past masters and mistresses. I am not one of them, but I can see the problems. Where previously we had scraped by on the odd payment from the BBC, we were suddenly valuable for our publications, and for our public activities: radio, telly, public appearances, newspapers, national and international influence.Ĭreative writing is a controversial subject, and many who teach it don’t defend it as a proper discipline. (In some universities, such as Bath Spa, hundreds of undergraduates enrol on creative writing courses every year.) The trend was reinforced by the goals set for universities by government (‘outputs’, ‘impact’), which stirred up a brisk traffic in writers. When I arrived at Essex ten years ago to teach in the department of literature, film and theatre studies, a wholly unexpected rise in the teaching of creative writing was just beginning, and it was led by students who, as ‘customers’, could dictate terms in the new market. Constable condensed the dominant myth of the English countryside in his painting of a haywain standing in a cattle pond a little way to the north. Sloman spurred on the building of a tremendous library (now named after him) and pictured a future that would bring students from all over the world to rural Essex, a place with a long history of boat-building and Dionysiac boho revels: Francis Bacon, John Deakin and ‘Dicky’ Chopping, who made a fortune designing the dust jackets for James Bond books, all drank in the Rose & Crown on the quayside at Wivenhoe. Dawn Ades’s work on Latin America inspired artists from all over the continent to donate paintings and sculpture, so it has a collection unrivalled by any other UK institution. Robin Blackburn on slavery, Angela Livingstone on Tsvetaeva, Ernesto Laclau’s charismatic mystifications. The political disturbances there in 1968 were notorious, but the novelty of the university’s ideas about teaching was known to him too, its innovations in comparative studies, its sympathy with poets, translators, excitable theorists, its egalitarianism. When Derek Walcott accepted an invitation to become professor of poetry in 2009, he had a trace memory of this experimental, cosmopolitan place, so surprisingly based in Essex. So universities must go on being places of scholarly investigation.’ He insisted on the importance and independence of academia: ‘A professor can speak out on national issues of science and scholarship,’ Sloman said, ‘as a scientist in a government research centre cannot. The walls between subjects were to be taken down: Sloman was a Hispanist, and an advocate of comparative studies English literature would be read alongside Russian and American, North and South, all in their original languages (he hoped to extend to the Far East, too). Essex was organised co-operatively between students and teachers: no more dons, high table, senior common room, colleges or houses, gowns. The challenge could be met, he believed, ‘only by radical innovation’. They were part of a utopian experiment in modern education, a big university – the plan was eventually to take as many as twenty thousand students, a huge number at the time – purpose-built, as Albert Sloman, the first vice-chancellor, declared in his Reith Lectures of 1963, to sustain ‘the pressures not only of expanding numbers but also of rapidly expanding knowledge’. The University of Essex opened to its first students in September 1964. 6, beanbags, and this and that kind of grass. I took my Californian friend inside, to get a feel of the hessian-clad walls the cloth is a little frayed by now, but the décor still gave off aromas of patchouli, Nesquik, joss sticks, Players No. That was last summer, and new brutalism in academia was taking on another meaning. T he professor from the West Coast stepped out of the taxi and looked around, head tilted back and swivelling from one looming grey tower to another as she assessed the flint-studded concrete ramparts of the library.
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