a fond farewell to those famous chums of yore

When I was active on Tumblr, back in the day (like, in 2012), it was at the height of the craze for The Secret History. Donna Tartt’s debut, based heavily on her own time at Bennington College, follows a group of classicists at an elite academic institution, who murder one of their friends and end up disintegrating around the shared secret of his death. It had everything that 2012 Tumblr ate up: tragically beautiful young men! Pithy quotes about the philosophy of beauty! A kind of blood-soaked aspirational aesthetic that lent itself well to desaturated photos of marble!

The Secret History is a really good story. I like it a lot. As a story about the darkness attendant to academia, it is wildly and deliberately off the mark. Its main character confesses in its opening paragraph his fatal flaw, which colours his narration throughout: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. Dude is not telling the story he actually lived; he’s telling the story the way he prefers to recall it. His unreliability saves the book from being a straightforward encomium to cruel and violent elitism, which makes it all the more extraordinary that so many readers seem to miss it.

I studied for a three-year undergraduate degree at the University of Cambridge. I applied because, at a formative age, I was told by a teacher that I should be aspiring to Oxford or Cambridge, please. I had very little sense of the class divide that separated me from the Oxbridge institution; I had been told what was expected of me, and I’d read His Dark Materials early enough to solidify the instruction. I threw myself into my studies until I arrived in Cambridge on an unseasonably sunny October morning, my life packed into the boot of the family car. The three years that followed were impossible. I remember very little of them; I don’t remember how I survived.

People who study at Oxford or Cambridge for three years are signing up for nine intensive eight-week terms. There aren’t any pauses mid-term, and the workload is unrelenting. The atmosphere is one of neurotic, anxious hypercompetition. Put hundreds of people who were the smartest kids in high school into the same city; they will lose their minds trying to be the biggest fish in a very deep pond, or they will drown. There’s a lot to be said for it, if you can cope with the pressure. Problems arise when you can’t. In Cambridge, at least, the support systems in place for undergraduates were limited at best and inaccessible at worst.

People buy into the Oxbridge ideal: there are baby clothes for sale in the tourist-tat shops in Oxford that say ‘born to go to Oxford,’ like that’s not an insane and cruel expectation to put on an infant child. People buy into the Oxbridge aesthetic: though the last thing I want is to direct more vitriol her way, look at Caroline Calloway, who built her brand on an idealised version of Cambridge, right down to producing merch for an imaginary Cambridge college. (I honestly can’t fault that, as a business decision; if Harry Potter taught us anything, it’s that people love a good House.) Calloway has since spoken about the addiction she struggled with while studying at Cambridge. What does it say about the actual, material horror of elite academia, that it surprises me less when people almost overdose than when they claim to have had a good time?

Here’s the actual dark academia vibe: I helped lead a campaign to recruit a college counsellor, and went to speak to the senior tutor armed with evidence to support that request. I had barely gotten out a sentence when the senior tutor blithely said, “Well, we could sack the college nurse, if you really want to hire someone new.”

Another example: I went into my third year acutely aware of my ongoing mental health crisis, and tried to tell my dissertation supervisor at our first meeting that I had spent much of the previous year suicidally depressed. She nodded, passed no comment, and pressed on. Months later, when my depression was bad enough that it started to affect my work, she asked me whether I was making an effort at all, and whether there was any point in her talking through the feedback she had given. I was too ashamed, too convinced that I was in the wrong, to report any of this to my Director of Studies. I stopped contacting my supervisor; a generous friend studying for a PhD helped me to edit and refine my dissertation. My supervisor did not at any point reach out.

Another: A kid with autism and a series of physical disabilities came up to college while I was there, and asked for the heavy fire doors to be made operable with wheelchair-height buttons — which, according to UK disability law, they already should have been. The college had kicked that can down the road, promising to fix it when someone who needed button-operable doors was admitted. Not only did they not fix it; they continually threatened this student with eviction from her lift-accessible room, and when she sought assistance from the disability advisory service, they put pressure on her to take a year out (with the implicit threat that, once she had left, she would not be given leave to return). She was one of the smartest, most capable mathematicians I ever met. I don’t know whether she graduated, in the end.

One more for the road: my college hosted its first ever Alumni Ball in 2013. In the interest of security, they advised all the students resident on-site that we would be required to vacate our rooms until 3am the morning after the ball. We were expected to leave our homes, throw ourselves on the mercy of friends at other colleges, and continue paying our termly rent as though there had been no interruption. Whether or not we had anywhere to go was not their concern. No provisions were made for students at risk of being made homeless for a night.

The most beautiful room I ever lived in.

Asking me if I regret going to Cambridge is like asking me if I regret being alive. I can’t conceive of an alternative anymore. I got out with my life and a 2:1 degree; after a couple of years working retail, squandering all my much-vaunted Potential (tm) and disappointing my mother, I now have a literary agent and a full-time job I enjoy. (I live in Oxford, where I work for a college within the university, as part of the office that tries to support students in difficulty while on course. I couldn’t have been persuaded not to go to Cambridge, when I was seventeen; I am trying to do what I can for the current generation of kids who won’t be told, and can report from the ground that there are slightly better systems, now.)

But I don’t look back on my time there with fondness. In my third year, I lived in the most beautiful room I think I’ll ever live in, and I wasted all the time I had there lying in bed and crying. My enduring memory of second year is a memory of playing an internet flash game in pyjamas in the middle of the day, unshowered and unhappy and acutely aware that I was failing the person I had it in me to become. I drank too much. I didn’t eat enough. I saw my friends for supervisions, or for exhausted evenings spent on our separate studies. We weren’t murdering each other in elaborate orgiastic frenzies; the students who vanished at Cambridge vanished quietly and alone, into their rooms and into intrusive thoughts of world-ending failure. Sometimes, we resurfaced for graduation.

The History Boys gives Hector, the eccentric and pitiable schoolmaster, a line that should have warned me away. “I was confusing learning with the smell of cold stone,” he says, reflecting on his own Oxford years. I learned. I learned a lot, even. But I don’t know how much of it was what I was meant to learn.

Don’t get me wrong: like I said, I love The Secret History, and I genuinely think we’re fortunate that Donna Tartt saw fit to turn her completely deranged college experience into art. (You’ve read the oral history, right? We’ve all read the oral history?) But I’m thankful for the caveat that Richard Papen offers on the novel’s opening page. Underneath that morbid longing for beauty (which is terror), the true terror is the ugly banality of it all. Death is still death, even dressed up in stately old buildings and ancient tradition; the loss of the illusion is its own kind of knife in the gut.