The Yanks at Oxford

The head porter of Christ Church, Oxford University, bustled up to an American student one day last week to ask a most unusual favor. The porter wanted the Yank's signature in his "Blim [Blighters I've Met] Book"--an honor reserved only for Christ Church students who have made a special mark at Oxford. As everyone at the university knew, 23-year-old Donald Hall of New Haven, Conn, deserved such special attention: he had just won Sir Roger Newdigate's Prize for English Verse--the first American who ever did.

Hall was not the only Yank Oxonians were talking about last week. A notice on the university bulletin board announced that Manhattan's F. George Steiner, also 23, had run off with the second top literary honor, the Chancellor's Prize for an English Essay. Indeed, commented the Isis, Oxford had never before felt such an "unmistakable transatlantic influence . . . The American may hustle and bustle like Mr. Babbitt selling his motor cars,* but in Oxford he tries hard, means well, and he gets things done."

Even before 1952, as the Isis noted, the university had grown used to seeing Americans do things in sport. But the invasion of the cultural fields was rather a newer phenomenon. A 27-year-old Brooklynite named Sam Kaner had taken over the Experimental Film Group, and last week his Between Two Worlds was picked as the only amateur 16-mm. film to represent Britain at the August festival in Venice. Meanwhile, the awesome Oxford Union had Illinois' chipper 28-year-old Howard E. Shuman as president, and the new literary editor of the magazine Cherwell was California's Peter S. Steffens, son of Lincoln Steffens. As for the select (16 members) Writers' Club, it had five U.S. members, including President Bynum Grten of Louisiana and Geoffrey Bush of 'Vermont, winner of the Isis short-story contest.

"Frankly," concluded the Isis, "this list appalls us, for if this is what has emerged from these seven years since the end of the war, we shudder to think of what the next seven years will have to offer . . . We cannot put the blame on transatlantic enthusiasm: enthusiasm is a good thing anywhere, and if the American can talk the hind legs off an English donkey, it is the donkey's fault. The trouble, we think, is not that Columbus went too far . . . On the contrary, it is that we permit this influence, however well-intentioned, to encroach too much upon the English preserve. It is a sad reflection on our initiative. If the solution is to abandon the leisurely mediocrity which is still our stigma, then it is high time we got down to it."

* The original George F. Babbitt, according to his creator, Sinclair Lewis, sold real estate.

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