Whoever admires Oxford as the citadel of tradition where Charles I raised his standard against the rebels, or as the university of Newman, Keble, Pusey, and the return to orthodoxy, or as the historic home of ideals that, as Arnold felt, wage unceasing war with meanness of spirit, will find but cold comfort in Auberon Waugh’s second novel.
In Path of Dalliance, a likable naif named Jamey Sligger graduates from an upper-class Catholic school and goes on to Oxford, only to find its ancient halls infested by Aldermaston marchers and outright Communists, all of whom agree in demanding immediate war with South Africa and abortions at government expense for “progressive” coeds. Matthew Arnold considered Oxford the antithesis of Benthamite philistinism, but the canaille Sligger meets there make Bentham seem genial and almost chivalrous. Waugh’s subject is thus the decay of the educated classes and the decline of traditional institutions. The Oxford of Newman seems now to be the Oxford of the “new” Anglican thought. Waugh conducts us among his decadent grotesques with extraordinary comic skill, and reading Path of Dalliance is rather like going on a trip to the ocean bottom in one of those French diving machines: the fauna glimpsed are bizarre. The experience is all the more chilling because Waugh’s characters, bathless and chanting their preposterous slogans, have inherited Magdalen, Christ Church, the Cherwell, the Broad, the playing fields, and all the rest.
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