'A Golden Age' I experienced

The centenary E. F. C. Ludowyk Memorial Lecture was delivered by Professor Yasmine Gooneratne at the University of Peradeniya Senate Room recently. Here we publish excerpts of the speech.

Poetry, therefore, is an art of imitation.... that is to say, a representing, a counterfeiting, or figuring forth to speak metaphorically. A speaking picture, with this end: to teach and delight. - Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poetry 1595

SPEECH: It was many centuries ago that the Athenian leader Pericles gave the world his views on memorial lectures and orations. 'It is hard to speak properly', he said, 'upon a subject where it is even difficult to convince your hearers that you are speaking the truth'. The University of Ceylon at Peradeniya in the 1950s is one such subject.

I have often found, when it comes up in conversation with the friends who were my classmates or near-contemporaries, and who are now scattered all over the English-speaking world, that Peradeniya in that particular moment in time is invariably referred to by us all in terms that are never applied to any other place or period.

Of the terms most frequently heard in connection with the life that we experienced there, one is "A Golden Age"; another is "Arcadia". 'It was a magical time', says one former classmate. 'It was idyllic,' says another. Our companions - some of them husbands, wives, or children who did not share the Peradeniya experience, and who now have to hear us talk about it ad infinitum, look sceptical. They don't believe us.

This need not surprise us. The life of this country has moved so fast, and in so many unexpected directions since the 1950s that the past even the recent past - is easily forgotten. Indeed, it seems sometimes to me that in our inability to recollect history, and our reluctance to learn from it, our people suffer from a form of collective amnesia.

And so, using the authority conferred upon me by the University's kind invitation to me to deliver the 2006 Ludowyk Memorial Lecture in celebration of the birth centenary of the great educationist whose influence shaped my life and the lives of my generation, I think it is my duty to affirm that what we say about Peradeniya is absolutely true.

"Peradeniya? Three years in Paradise," a classmate said once. 'And at the end of it, they even gave us a degree!'

What was it that made Peradeniya so special? Quite apart from its magnificent setting in the hill country, and the quality of life that it bestowed on the students who entered its portals from every part of the island, the academic corridors of Peradeniya in the 1950s were peopled by remarkable personalities.

It was as if all the intellectual brilliance in our country had been concentrated in one spot. If the University had been a stage, we students would have been witnesses to the performances of a stellar cast. For me, as an Arts student reading for an Honours degree in English, the English Department was, of course, the undoubted centre of the Peradeniya paradise, a world populated by erudite, witty and dedicated dons.

Doric de Souza, committed leftist, legend in the area of Language and Linguistics, who kept his politics and his teaching fastidiously apart; Hector Augustus Passe, specialist in the poetry of Milton and devotee of Conrad; Robin Mayhead, fresh from Cambridge where he had been a disciple of the legendary F.R. Leavis, and a contributor to the literary journal, Scrutiny; his South African successor, Brian Smale-Adams.... And leading the procession, the modest, unassuming, benevolent and yet somehow quietly dominant, figure of Evelyn Frederick Charles Ludowyk, eminent Shakespearean and presiding genius of the Dramatic Society, who had been to me a legend long before he materialized at Peradeniya as a flesh and blood person.

This was partly because of the reverence in which Professor Ludowyk's name was held in the Ceylon in which I had been growing up, and partly because of the respect with which it was mentioned by every adult I knew, in my family circle and outside it, who had any connection with education.

My English Literature teacher at Bishop's College, Mrs Pauline Hensman, and her husband C.R. Hensman who was concurrently teaching English at St. Thomas's College, together with their circle of gifted friends which included Basil Mendis and Regi Siriwardhana, had been among Ludowyk's students at the University of Ceylon in Colombo.

When my eldest sister Gwen went to University in Colombo, she too had read for an English Honours degree under Ludowyk, Passe, Doric, and Robin Mayhead's predecessor, the Australian Peter Elkin.

There was hardly a day in my school life when my sister, returning from lectures at Thurstan Road, Did not have a story to relate about what had happened in class, what Professor Ludowyk had said, and how he had said it. University life, it seemed to me as I listened to Gwen, was one continuing drama, and at the centre of that drama was Professor Ludowyk.

I did not, however, get to meet the great man myself until the day came when, having sat for my University Entrance examination, I was summoned to a scholarship interview at Thurstan Road.

I have recently transformed that early experience into fiction; and even though in the shortened extract I am about to read from the novel I have just published, the names of all the committee members I encountered that day (with one exsection, that of the Vice-Chancellor of that time) have been changed, Professor Ludowyk will probably be easily recognizable to Sri Lankan readers under the fictional name I gave him, which is that of one of our Dutch Governors of the 18th century.

To me, as to every writer of novels, fiction, no less than poetry, is what Sir Philip Sidney defined as 'an art of imitation.... that is to say, a representing, a counterfeiting, or figuring forth to speak metaphorically.

A speaking picture'. James Boswell, you may remember, created his great portrait of Dr. Johnson by recording the conversation of his mentor. Professor Ludowyk, whose lectures had the ease and openness of fluent conversation, is often remembered by the words that students such as myself memorized or took down in the form of notes.

My fictional portrait of Professor Ludowyk in The Sweet and Simple Kind is meant to show that he knew very well when not to speak, because words would have been wasted. By contrasting him with his ultra-nationalist colleague in that brief extract from a novel, I hoped to capture an endearing aspect of Professor Ludowyk's personality which was, that his devotion to English literature thankfully stopped this side of idolatry.

The 1950s was a period during which people seemed prepared to kill each other on questions of language and cultural identity - indeed, as we were to see in 1958, they did kill each other on such grounds - but Ludowyk ignored the barbs and insults that flew hither and yon on the campus at Peradeniya as various among his colleagues whose names are now best forgotten leapt on the nationalist bandwagon to denigrate the imperialist's language and the (largely Burgher) academics like Ludowyk, LaBrooy and passe who continued to value and use it.

It was during the 1950s that a member of Ludowyk's circle of friends, the satirist E.M.W. Joseph, published weekly parodies of English literary classics in his newspaper column as 'Sooty Banda', in the guise of gems in a Golden Treasury of Trilingual Verse.

Joseph's parodies are triumphs of comic ingenuity that can still make a reader smile, but there was a message implicit in them at the time for the country's chauvinists, in the fact that the full range of the satirist's wit could only be grasped and appreciated by readers whose literary taste was not blunted by communalism.

Always avoiding the extremes of malice and vulgarity, Joseph's 'trilingual' versions of well-known passages from Milton, Wordsworth, Johnson and Gray create - especially when read aloud in the tones reserved by Sri Lankan elocutionists for the English classics - an exquisitely comic effect.

Joseph awarded an honoured place in his trilingual Treasury to Gray's great poem, the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which no less a critic than Samuel Johnson had considered the finest poem in the English canon:

Oft did the goyam to their kaththa yield

Their nagul oft the vayal haarathi

How jocund did they drive their gon afield,

How bowed the gus beneath their pol-adi...

Ludowyk did not purse his lips and take offence at such sacrilege. He was himself a master of parody, as every student-actor knows who has had the experience of being gently ridiculed - 'sent up' - by his director at the party following a DramSoc first night, or the privilege of being shown in the Passes' photograph album a memorable photograph of Lyn Ludowyk on the deck of what looks like a Channel steamer, bidding (in the character of Mary, Queen of Scots), "Farewell to France!".

He was keenly aware of the folly of pretentiousness, and was perfectly capable, not only of composing 'tri-lingual' conceits of his own, but of introducing them into his teaching.

'The dictionary tells us,' he once said while defining the various literary devices with which he expected a class to become familiar, 'that Onomatopoeia involves the choice or formation of words that imitate or suggest the sounds that they stand for, "We looked up "onomatopoeia" in the Oxford English Dictionary," and found that it offered us as examples of the "onomatopoeic", the words plop and sizzle. How much more effective and memorable was the home-grown example provided by Professor Ludowyk!

She came running down the stairs in her wooden clogs - takang bookang, takang bookang...."

The aim of creating 'a speaking picture' in art, according to Sir Philip Sidney, is 'to teach and delight'. Every student whom Ludowyk taught left the university with a personal list of delightful memories.

Advice, when he gave it, was pithy and memorable: like his words to a beautiful but brainless undergraduate, the daughter of an old friend, who had confided to him that her life's ambition was to become a London model. 'You will be choosing,' he warned her, 'a way of life in which you will have to claw your way to the top. It will not be enough to do as you do here, drift about your parents' house like an untidy houri.' Another student who, under the influence of first love, had taken to skipping her tutorials with Professor Ludowyk, was handed a note from her tutor. It contained a reference to a poem by Robert Browning. When she looked up the reference, she found that a message from Professor Ludowyk was embedded in Browning's text: 'Escape me? Never!'

As a first-year student at the University of Ceylon, the highlight of my first term at Peradeniya was, without any doubt, Dr. Ludowyk's weekly class in Practical Criticism. (Years later, thousands of miles away in Australia, I was assigned an Honours class in The Literary Uses of Language.

It was another place, another phrase; and yet, beneath the fashionable, updated vocabulary, I recognized an old familiar friend: "Practical Criticism", the method of literary analysis which had identified Ludowyk at Peradeniya as a disciple of F.R. Leavis, I.A. Richards, Denys Thompson and the Cambridge School; and which later, when I was invited in the 1970s to write studies of Jane Austen and Alexander Pope for Cambridge University Press, was to mark me out - not entirely justifiably, I should add - as "a Leavisite".)

"Practical Criticism", for the benefit of those persons here who are unfamiliar with the curriculum of the 1950s, was a subject to which an entire paper was devoted in the Final Examination for the Honours degree in English.

In one part of this paper, candidates were expected to analyse a piece of English writing (usually poetry) and express an opinion regarding its literary quality. In another part of it, they would be presented with two, possibly three, passages of writing on the same or a similar theme, asked to compare them, and rate them in order of literary quality.

The third part of the paper - and to me the most enjoyable, as well as the most difficult - presented candidates with a selection of prose and verse passages, and asked them to 'place' each passage with 30 years of the time of its composition.

It will be seen that to acquit themselves creditably in such an English paper as this, candidates whose first language was not English had to work towards developing not only analytical skills, judgment and good sense, but a command of logic and a lively sense of English historical continuity.

They had to learn, in fact, to feel 'at home' in the world of English letters. Professor Ludowyk made the nurturing of these qualities in his Honours students his especial concern, and his wit and obvious enjoyment of the subject made every Practical Criticism lecture a delight.

When the news got around the campus that Professor Ludowyk would be leaving Sri Lanka at the end of that first term in 1956 and settling in Britain, I decided that I would attend every lecture of his that I possibly could, whether that lecture was intended for my class or not. This didn't prove to be too difficult.

Nobody objected, for instance, when I sat in on a Final Year course on Modern Poetry, a notebook in my hand and my fountain pen at the ready. I transcribed the notes that I made then into a Monitor's exercise book, and treasured them for years afterwards.

They have survived the experience of migration, and thirty years of living and working in Australia. Especially precious to me are the notes I made while sitting in on Ludowyk's Final Year lecture on Browning and Tennyson.

Creativity in that part of the English Department which involved itself in theatrical activities was strongly focused, then, not on the writing of plays, but in the extra-curricular acting of them, i.e., in representing on the stage for the pleasure and instruction of audiences, characters and incidents that had had their first existence as words on the printed page.

Many tributes have been paid, notably by Shelagh Goonewardene in her book This Total Art, and by Veville Weereratne in Applause at the Wendt, to Ludowyk's tireless and inspirational work in and for the sri Lankan theatre.

On the academic side, the teaching of drama, which was part of the Honours curriculum, was Ludowyk's special interest and concern; and the plays we studied in the classroom, from Marlowe and Shakespeare to Synge and Eliot, were illuminated by our teacher's devotion to theatre, and the skills that he demonstrated and generously passed on.

Looking back today from the vantage point of 2006, I remember Ludowyk and the rich intellectual life that he and his colleagues created for us during the "Golden Age" that the University experienced in his time; and I can paraphrase the words of Harry Judge, who once immortalized in an unforgettable speech on England-Australia Test Match of the 1960s, to say to the world that we too know what it means to have trod in our youthful days the high slopes of Olympus, and held converse, however briefly, with gods and heroes.