Dear Diary: Romping
What to do with the pile of fiction — that is the question.
At bottom, I suspect that there was some sort of train wreck: books that novels weren’t entirely congenial, all being read at once. Two are rather hard-boiled (Falconer and Hard Rain Falling) while two are British/Overseas (How to Paint a Dead Man and Bone China). All are well written, but all have strokes against them. I don’t want to read about (a) prison life, (b) marginal frequenters of pool halls, (c) being stuck in a crevasse — another kind of prison, or (d) decayed colonial gentry. No one could make these topics interesting to me, so all that good writing is rather thrown away. I read with pleasure but only after having forced myself to open the books; and I never want to go back for more.
Instead, what I want to read is The Night Climbers, a caper novel that falls somewhere between The Secret History and Dorothy Sayers. Ian Stourton has acquired his title by the ingenious clipping of a longer one: The Night Climbers of Cambridge, by the pseudonymous Whipplesnaith. Originally published in 1937, The Night Climbers of Cambridge has been brought out more recently by Oleander Press. Here is the opening of Chapter Eleven, “Trinity.”
With the Guide-book in our pocket and high expectation in our hearts we go to Trinity, the aristocrat of the college climbing-grounds. King’s can offer some more severe climbing, St John’s has strong counter attractions in the New Tower and the Bridge of Sighs, the Old Library is a safter romping-ground, but Trinity heads the list. It has everything in its favour. It is more extensive than other colleges, and offers every variety of easy and difficult climbing test. The roof-hiker can wander over many furlongs of roof-tops, alone with his thoughts in an empty world, so near and yet so far from the world of sleeping men below.
There is nothing quite like the austere, “I want to be alone,” rogue male British undergraduate. He knows nothing of the world, but he already overflows with its cares. Treating the university as a pocket Himalaya is a good way to clear the mind, what?
By Ian Stourton’s day — The Night Climbers appeared in 2008 — the sleeping men below were approximated by sleeping women, sometimes very closely. Otherwise, I expect, his Cambridge would not be unrecognizable to Whipplesnaith.
I don’t recall how I found out about night climbers. It was in connection with the Daily Office, of course, and I may even have given the matter a link or two. But what I also did was to go Amazuke and order books. Of course it was a mad impulse. I would never be a night climber; it’s not my kind of mischief at all. (I altogether lack the desire to “prove myself physically,” whatever that means.) And I still don’t understand just how Oxbridge functions as an educational institution. There seem to be fearsome examinations, but what comes before has never quite made sense. The Night Climbers of Cambridge suggests that the point of a university education has little to do with classrooms.
But I was always in or about some sort of trouble as an undergraduate; frankly, I think it’s a miracle that I lived through it. (There were at least two serious brushes with fatality — even if neither broke the skin.) And I am going to bring my experience to bear on the pleasure of reading The Night Climbers (the novel). The only thing more terrifying than recalling my reckless collegiate exploits is to imagine my little grandson growing up to follow in my footsteps. It ought to be very scaring.  Watch for tweets.
It would seem that the thing to do with the fiction pile is to ignore it. Maybe it will just go away.