In some ways, Westminster spoiled Oxford for me. By the time I went up, in the autumn of 1988, I had already done medieval cloisters and archaic slang like ‘subfusc’, which meant formal clothing, and ‘battels’, which meant bills. Half the people at Oxford were from Westminster or Westminster-ish places – academic public schools like Eton and St Paul’s and Winchester – and, like me, brimming with entitlement and floppy hair. Crossing Magdalen Bridge, I nodded at many of the same faces as in Westminster’s Little Dean’s Yard: the location had moved fifty-six miles down the M40 but the population was to a great extent the same.
I was by now eighteen, having taken a year off to give nature a chance to make me a fraction more man-like. The less said about that year, the better. It’s a tradition of British public school children to travel to the developing world between school and university. The idea, I think, is that the imperial powers of yore did too little to harm their former colonies and so it falls to the younger generation to hobble them further by arriving in hordes as unqualified and incompetent volunteers.
My stay in Zimbabwe was definitely educational, though sadly not for my students as I quit halfway through the posting, unable to keep control in the classroom. I had been struggling from the get-go: with no natural authority or instinct for the job, I had tried to bond with students by being silly and making them laugh, which turned out to be a short-term strategy. My classes became unruly; fewer and fewer homeworks were handed in. I was putting children in detention en masse, trying to claw back some control, to little avail. Then my dad wrote to say he was coming to the country and wanted to visit. I sent him a mealy-mouthed letter of non-encouragement, feeling it undermined the purpose of my being there, which was, I supposed, to remove myself from my normal milieu and develop my autonomy. The Great Traveller dropping by, checking up on things, would have felt like being upstaged.
He arrived unannounced in the middle of a maths lesson, having taken a two-hour taxi ride from Harare. ‘Lou, I couldn’t reach you on the phone.’
I hugged him. He began taking photographs and the students erupted. I still have the photos. I’m smiling, surrounded by overexcited children. Maybe it was what I needed: to recognize the whole misadventure of ‘teaching in Africa’ as play-acting, something I was too young and too immature to know how to handle.
I muddled on to the end of the term, then handed in my notice and went travelling in Zambia, Malawi, and Botswana. Given that the idea was to teach and help out, not up stumps halfway through the job, you could say that my going and then leaving was worse than not going at all – and I wouldn’t argue with you. I sometimes wonder how different the fate of the African continent might have been had I stuck it out.
Arriving at Oxford, I’d planned to take it easy, kick back a little, start to enjoy life – go out bird-dogging chicks and banging beaver. Or if that couldn’t be arranged, maybe take a long walk through Magdalen deer park, holding hands and talking about Ian McEwan and Paul Auster. But, despite my best resolutions, working less proved more difficult than you might think. Something in me kept driving me to study. My subject was ‘Modern History’, which in classic Oxford style meant everything after the end of Roman Britain. During a one-to-one midway through my second term, Magdalen’s head history tutor, Angus Macintyre, told me he thought I was on track to get a first in the end-of-year exams. This had not previously occurred to me as a possibility but from then on I saw it as an obligation. The beaver banging and tail-chasing, already delayed, now drifted further behind schedule as I applied myself to essay writing and rote learning with my wonted obsessiveness while all the time being aware, like a rider on a startled horse, that I needed to slow down, that I was in danger of missing out, of letting student life pass me by.
At the end of my first term I struck up a romance with a fellow student. She seduced me, coming round to my bedroom half-drunk one evening and saying, ‘Kiss me.’ She’d also been at Westminster – she was, by coincidence, the ‘doll’ I’d ‘spilled my sheets over my fever-soaked bed’ about. In the play. And possibly in life. Her name was Sarah. (Her name wasn’t Sarah.) Fiercely intelligent, thoughtful and argumentative, she came from a Jewish family in north London that was in its way as status-conscious and idiosyncratic as my own, though less liberal and less at pains to signal its bohemian credentials. There was no question of smoking ganj with the parents in Sarah’s family. Raised like a caged veal, as the American writer Shalom Auslander once wrote of his upbringing, she’d been shielded from pop music – or maybe had just taken no interest in it – until her adolescence. She was intensely self-conscious of her privilege and spoke an English so correct that people sometimes thought she was foreign. Around her I could pass as something of a hipster.
Once every couple of terms I would break up with her, imagining a wealth of romantic opportunity waiting to be taken. Then reality would sink in, I’d be alone and she’d call, or on at least one occasion she climbed through the window and we’d find ourselves back together again. My relationship with Sarah continued, with breaks and intermissions, over the next twelve years.
At the weekend, when I’d finished studying, I’d hunt for house parties among the student lodgings up and down Cowley Road and Iffley Road, senses primed for any open doors and the sound of music emanating from them – it was a little like a game in which the objective was to become inebriated in a stranger’s kitchen. Sometimes I’d take the coach down to London to visit Adam and Joe, and Zac, who was starting a career as a comic-book artist. These were my most dedicated years of pot-smoking and, with Joe, I’d walk down to Armoury Way, round the corner from the Arndale Centre in Wandsworth, to buy an eighth or a sixteenth of hash from a West Indian dealer called The Professor who lived in a flat in a twenties Peabody Estate-style housing block. Later The Professor gave way to an older man named Coarsey – the spelling of his name is pure conjecture on my part – whose services we used for five or more years.
The flat was barely furnished, with a TV and a bed. It was a little like visiting a B&B, the awkward feeling of doing business in someone’s home. Joe and I would joke that we worried Coarsey seemed lonely or that business had dried up, since we never saw much evidence of other customers. I’d try to start small talk about rap. ‘So, what do you think of the new Big Daddy Kane album?’ For some reason these conversational gambits did not lead to the fantasy of respect and comity that I’d dreamed of, and occasionally I wondered whether Coarsey might not be pining for a transracial friendship that could be a beacon of brotherhood for the world. One time Joe returned from a solo journey to Armoury Way to announce that Coarsey had asked, ‘Where’s Glasses?’ That was about as far as we got in the warmth stakes.
Often we’d go to Zac’s place in his dad’s flat off Finchley Road in North London. Zac’s dad was a Napoleon obsessive, his sitting room a vast library of leather-bound books about the armies of the French Empire and Waterloo. Early in the evening he’d sometimes come and say hello and we’d make conversation. ‘They got so desperate they drank horse piss, didn’t they, Dad?’ Zac said. ‘All right, lads, have fun,’ Zac’s dad would say. Then, surrounded by the walls of dusty volumes, we’d get high and listen to whatever new hip-hop was out – BDP, Public Enemy, EPMD, Schoolly D – or tapes of Tim Westwood, the Capital hip-hop DJ, flattering ourselves that we were plugging in to important bulletins from dissident America. We’d put tracing paper on the record player and scratch records and improvise rhymes over break beats.
I subscribed to Hip Hop Connection, a British rap magazine. It mainly covered American hip-hop but the editors tried to support the nascent UK scene. British rap was then spotty at best. There was Derek B, who was a pale photocopy of an American MC. MC Duke was more interesting – he styled himself like a country squire, with tweeds and jodhpurs and a shotgun, ready to hunt some grouse. The least embarrassing UK rapper was Silver Bullet, a verbal spitfire from Aylesbury who used alliteration in his lyrics in a manner reminiscent of the Beowulf poet.
I bought a couple of British rap albums out of a sense of obligation, one by the Demon Boyz, another by Ruthless Rap Assassins. Neither was very good. Feeling burned, I wrote to Hip Hop Connection, complaining about their uncritical promotion of British artists. ‘Let’s face it, UK hip-hop sucks,’ I said, signing off, ‘King Lou-E, Oxford’. They ran the letter. A couple of months later there was a special letters page given over to replies, all of them negative. One began: ‘King Lou-E, dope name, pity about you being such a fucker.’ The editors wrote, ‘This is just a small sampling of the literally sackloads of mail we received.’
Left to right: Zac Sandler, me, Joe Cornish, and Adam Buxton.
In my third year, with finals on the horizon, my world became smaller still as I redoubled my academic efforts. When the time came to choose a specialization, I focused on philosophy and sociology, areas of inquiry that purported to provide world-encompassing solutions, frameworks for understanding the big questions in life. History came easily – the memorization and grinding through reading lists, the marshalling of arguments, ‘on the one hand this, on the other hand that’ – which prejudiced me against it. I romanticized subjects that struck me as more mysterious and difficult: the grand narratives of figures like Marx or Hegel or Auguste Comte, the pessimistic liberalism of Max Weber, the idea that lives in the West are becoming bureaucratized and regulated and imprisoning, that society isn’t progressing but getting worse, and the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault and his view that our bodies and lives are always being shaped and disciplined by dimly understood cultural forces, that even apparently benign concepts like freedom and justice are masks for deeper and more insidious forms of power. I spent a term studying the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century – Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Boyle, Newton. I read philosophers of science like T. S. Kuhn, who maintained that scientific progress is much more erratic and less purely empirical than it appears, and Paul Feyerabend, who went further, holding that the supposed methodology of science was no better and no more truthful than mythology or magic.
At the same time, I enjoyed these concepts more as a spectator than as a believer, in the spirit of George Orwell when he wrote, ‘There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.’ I found myself drawn to fundamentalist figures like Robespierre or the thinkers in George Woodcock’s book, Anarchism: Sergey Nechayev, the Russian revolutionary who slept on bare wood and advocated terrorism and murdered a former comrade. I was fascinated by people who acted at odds with norms of behaviour – people unmindful of conventional ethics or even of commonly acknowledged reality, expressing the darkest parts of the human heart often out of a misplaced idealism.
If there were any ideas that stuck me with me from my entire three years at Oxford, they were to do with the contingency of beliefs, the ways in which we are all prisoners of our own place and time. Slaveholders and pederasts in Ancient Greece. Godbotherers in the Dark Ages. Torturers and witch-hunters in early modern England. And, as much as I enjoyed the ingenuity of the theories of philosophers and sociologists, where I found writing to admire and connect with tended to be in the surprise of tiny commonalities and little beacons of shared humanity across the centuries, in the humane and intimate essays of Michel Montaigne, in the gossipy little biographies of John Aubrey. Something in their combination of remoteness and familiarity was oddly reassuring.
As time went on I saw friends making plans for their future, setting up appointments with careers advisers, going to jobs fairs, meeting emissaries of big companies. It was faintly worrying. I had no idea what I might do in the future. By now I had contributed the occasional article and film review to Oxford publications, and drawn some comics and written a humorous rap for a student comedy magazine – the Queen delivering gangsta verses in the style of NWA, boasting about her riches and sexual prowess. But the idea of being a writer didn’t seem especially realistic and as my graduation date approached I looked out at the inhospitable world feeling like a prison inmate after years of incarceration who doesn’t know what the Internet is or how to work a mobile phone.
I wondered about pursuing a postgraduate degree, maybe becoming an academic, and I applied for and got a place at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies. The embarrassing part of my brain began to hope I might do well enough in my finals to get the nod from All Souls, the semi-secret Oxford College for the crème de la crème of academics, a kind of brains trust where the fellows are released from having to do any research. They sit around at their formal dinners having big thoughts. It’s like something from a James Bond film except, instead of a shadowy group of supervillains bent on world domination, they are tweedy academics dribbling into their soup – that seemed like a job that wouldn’t be too demanding. Professional boffin insulated from the world.
When the finals results came, I got a first. With the amount of work I did, it would have been pretty weird if I hadn’t. The notice came by post – there was also a message from one of the history dons. It said how many Magdalen history students had taken firsts that year, going on, ‘but yours was by some way the highest and must have been close to the top of the entire year.’ The phrasing, which I unintentionally memorized, warmed my spirits in low moments for several years afterwards.
The summer after I graduated I postponed my place at SOAS and flew to Boston. I did it on a whim, wary of the London jobs market, which was then in the throes of a recession, thinking I could postpone any decisions about my future and work by taking a few months off in America. The first Gulf War had been fought earlier in the year. Margaret Thatcher had recently left office, and the mood in Britain was bleak. The hectic and high-paced era of the eighties – all shoulder pads and yuppies in braces and ‘when it hits eighteen buy it all’ – had given way to a hangover of gloom and joblessness and shoulders tragically reduced to their natural proportions.
By now, Sarah had taken a job teaching English in a remote area of China for a year. We were spending some time apart, by mutual agreement sowing some wild oats, and for several weeks I mooched at my dad’s house at Cape Cod, visited family, hung out with Marcel, who had taken a job writing the news for a start-up cable station in Boston, the Monitor Channel. On a whim, I took the train to Los Angeles, riding over in an Amtrak sleeper car, spending much of the time in conversation with the train attendants, who were all black and – confusingly – fans of Phil Collins.
I was staying with my uncle Peter, an author and Arabic translator, at his apartment in Long Beach, a small city south of Los Angeles. For several days I made sorties to sites around LA: a pilgrimage to Compton, spawning ground for the rap group NWA; a road trip down to to the Mexican border city of Tijuana. But the trip was mainly memorable for an outing to Hollywood where, amid the array of flea-bitten attractions, shops selling plastic Oscars, fly-by-night guys with vans advertising ‘tours of stars’ homes’, I passed a tall old distinguished-looking building advertising the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibit, a museum dedicated to the life of the founder of the religion of Scientology.
I had heard a little about Scientology – my uncle Peter, who like me had a certain fascination with the macabre and the taboo, had described it to me as a mysterious and secretive spiritual organization, created by a science-fiction writer, which numbered Hollywood stars among its devotees and used hard-sell tactics on its parishioners to make money out of its religious services. Going into the museum, I’d expected a half-hour ramble around an unintentionally humorous slice of roadside Americana. Instead I was dismayed to find I was chaperoned by a very slow-moving docent. The displays about Hubbard’s early life worked hard to create the required impression of a spiritual prodigy of world-changing stature. They made a great deal out of his having been an Eagle Scout at an unusually young age – my dad had also been an Eagle Scout; impressive as it was, I reflected that it didn’t necessarily qualify him to start his own religion. There were illustrations of LRH as a teenager trading gnostic insights into life’s big questions with Native American shamans in Montana and wrinkly Asian holy men in Lhasa or Ladakh.
Finally, after forty-five minutes or so, I overcame my natural urge to be obliging, and said, ‘I’m so sorry, but I really have somewhere I need to be.’ The staff looked at me as if to say, What could possibly be more important than finding out you are actually a trillion-year-old space alien? Eventually I made my way out, having promised to return the following day, which needless to say I didn’t do.
I’d been planning to head back to London at the end of the summer, but as September approached, figuring I had nothing pressing to do there, I decided to stay in America.
For several months I lived in Boston with my brother, sleeping on his futon. I found a job in a glass-blowing studio next door to an Asian bookstore where Marcel had briefly worked as a sales assistant. The studio, which belonged to a sleepy young glass sculptor called Tony Devlin, mainly produced cherub goblets. These were ostentatious gold-coated objets d’art – the kind of goblets Uday and Qusay Hussein might have enjoyed using to drink the blood of their enemies. They sold in high-class stores for large sums and, supposedly, were made in accordance with an age-old Venetian glass-twisting technique. In fact our guilty secret was that only the cherubs themselves were sculpted. The base and bowl were cannibalized from mass-produced glassware. It was my job to remove the stems from the store-bought goblets, grind the ends down and fix the cherubs in the middle using a glue that was activated by UV light – I had to wear special goggles when I did it.
My other job was to hold Tony’s punty rod until the blob of glass on the end heated up – this is not a weird sexual euphemism but technical glass jargon, as any fellow glassworkers among my readership will recognize. Later on, after I left, Tony told me he’d found a brick that did the same job of holding his punty in place just as well as I had done. He said he’d nicknamed the brick ‘the Louis’.
Never having aspired to make cherub goblets, I was feeling directionless and unfulfilled. My parents had split up by now, and while it had been abundantly foreshadowed, it was still weirdly upsetting and at the same time a little bit exciting. I felt licensed to feel a level of anger and alienation that was already in me. I had the feeling that at the point of leaving home, home itself had disappeared – and not just disappeared but been exposed as hollow, based on lies and improvisations. A Potemkin village erected by its own inhabitants to convince themselves that they were normal and well cared for. Looking back, with my own children as my future judges, I see these characterizations as unfair, but it was how I felt. And in a positive way, emerging from the fog of my own indoctrination, I felt what was probably a salutary urge to make something of myself, to separate myself from my family, to prove something, though exactly what was as yet unclear.
If I’d been predisposed to become a jihadi or a white nationalist terrorist, it probably would have happened around this time. Instead I started trying to teach myself Russian. That lasted about two days. I thought about joining the marines. I read books full of angst and grandiosity: Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche and Hunger by Knut Hamsun and Notes from Underground by Dostoevsky. I jotted down philosophical aperçus and wrote 800 words of a memoir. Based on paper-thin knowledge of the then-fashionable theories of postmodernism, I said things like, ‘Art is like a chicken running around with its head cut off. It’s dead, it just doesn’t know it yet.’ Full of ambition but with no clear sense of direction, I had the strong sense it was time to start my life, and no idea how to do it.
