Leon the Huguenot remembers an English professor who made him feel even more insignificant than he is.

The Blue Niles

I grew up in a rather sheltered environment; in a small provincial Australian city.  We had one small bookcase full of books and that made us fairly unusual in our street.  In most other houses the only book was the telephone book.  My family was not strong in the literary area and I do not think we have changed much.

Into my world, at about age 13, came the Niles – Professor Nile and his family.  I had heard of Prof Nile by reputation.  My tutor, a rabid, uncritical, Anglophile, was enraptured by him; how he could speak; how he could put his words together.  Warbeck apparently considered Nile, a professor of English, to be one of the wisest men to have walked the planet.  This was based on Nile’s educated, well-modulated English accent rather than any content.

After winning a scholarship, I found myself at the same school as his son, Derek, and in the same year.  Somehow Derek and I hit it off despite the fact that I was a barbaric Australian and he was a scion of the English master-race.  He was less critical than his father because he was a lot younger and had not yet developed such exacting standards.  Derek and his brother, Simon, were a strange pair though.  They had been imbued with the attitude that English things were superior and Australian things were definitely inferior.

My first meal at the Nile house was a tense affair.  Prof Nile seemed to be ready to pounce on anything I said.  I was well aware of this so I said almost nothing.  I did make a comment about some event having had occurred three times “in a row”.  He could not let that pass.  Immediately I was castigated for not having used “consecutively” since, of course, three events could not physically be placed “in a row”.  Thanks, Prof.  That lesson has stayed with me for decades along with the feeling of tension that accompanied it.

The two brothers became periodically far worse after their regular journeys back to the “Mother Country”.  On returning to Australia, they would keep their watches on Greenwich Mean Time for weeks.  This would result in such personal chaos that they would eventually revert to local time, but reluctantly.  I have to say I delighted in hearing of the appointments and lessons they had missed due to their faulty GMT conversions.

They would describe, in detail, how they would get from one tube station to another on the London underground including all possible alternative routes.  I was not to visit London for perhaps another 15 years so it was meaningless to me; I felt excluded from their conversation.  Of course, they did not want to exclude me since I was an important component; I was the one who was to be made to feel inferior and I confess I did.  I wanted to be like them but it seemed I was permanently blighted by being born Australian.  

There was no comfort coming from father and mother Nile.  Prof Nile would criticise the ABC news for being preceded by the “Majestic Fanfare”.  He considered no serious news service required a musical introduction.  Mother Nile would criticise our money, our food, our artists, our music, everything.  Both of them had special criticism for those areas in which we aped the British.  Our London-style buses were nowhere near as good, our thoroughly British trains were lacking, and areas which had been named after British suburbs and towns were mere shadows of their namesakes.  There seemed nothing of Australia they liked.  At the time I never openly questioned why they had come out here or why they stayed; yet they stayed and stayed. 

I had not yet come across the term “Whingeing Pom” and, of course, it is not politically correct to use such terms now, not that that would stop me.  This English family found fault in everything around them and spoke loudly about those faults.  They could not be covered by the WP appellation; they were in a class of their own.

I continued to be friendly with the Niles for several years – up to and a little beyond my commencement at University.  To try to improve my ability to converse with them I read well and voraciously.  It seemed to make no difference.  Every time I had a meal with the Niles I was once again put in my place by the breadth of knowledge of the parents, and the Australophobia of the children.

For my sixteenth birthday, I had asked for the Shorter Oxford Dictionary.  I thought that, if I mastered that, Prof Nile might take me seriously.  He was a walking dictionary himself and his pronunciation was impeccable.  I aspired to be like him and made up my mind that I would read through the Oxford Dictionary from A to Z.

 I started my task and had not got much beyond Aardvark when I realised that this was an impossible task because it was so terminally boring.  There were also the various exigencies of life as an 18 hear old which were crowding in.  I never did finish reading the Shorter Oxford but I find if I can keep the topic in the As before Aardvark, I can hold my own in any conversation.

As a defensive reaction to their apparent detestation of and disdain for Australia, I developed a dislike for England.  It was not a great step to take since the members of my mother’s bridge club, with their periodic trips ‘Home’ (although all had been born in Australia), and the interminable, ghastly slide evenings that would follow their return, had made me determined at age eight that I would never consider Britain in that way.  I knew my first overseas trip would be to Europe but I resolved not to use London or Britain as a base as so many of my contemporaries did; I would not visit Britain at all.

I was quite pleased when The Times was bought by an Australian (much less pleased now he is an American), Harrods by a Saudi-Arabian, and other core British institutions were picked off one by one.  However, the diminishing influence of Britain in our region did not result in our asserting our sovereignty and standing on our own feet as some nations might have done.  We just clutched for the apron strings of another major power and continue, even now, to clutch at those same apron strings, our foreign policy virtually determined for us.  

The Nile family gradually broke up.  The parents returned to England but, with delicious irony, both boys married Australian girls and settled down in Australia.  After years of decrying Australia and Australian things, they had discovered at least one thing they liked about the place.

Sadly, Mrs Nile died about three years after their return home.  I next saw Prof Nile quite by chance in the city.  He was actually glad to see me.  Now there was no criticism; no correction of grammar.  For him Australia, for all its deficiencies in his eyes, had become almost as much home as his beloved England.  And there were people here just as dear to him as any (not that I included myself among that number). 

I don’t know what caused that change; perhaps bereavement and age.  And, perhaps, the realisation that the idealised England of their imagination was becoming less and less like the England they were living in.

As part of my voracious reading, intended to rescue me from what the Niles appeared to consider abject barbarism, I search the school library for more and more obscure titles.  Finally I came upon what I think, even now, would be considered one of the daddies of them all.  One of the crowning achievements of the life of that great German philosopher, Immanuel Kant.  Even now my heart sinks just to contemplate the book – The Critique of Pure Reason. No, I did not read it in its original German as “Kritik der reinen Vernunft” but I might as well have for all the meaning I extracted from it.  I am not sure if the copy I borrowed was the Kemp-Smith, the Meiklejohn or some other translation; again, it would not have mattered.  It was 250 pages of the densest, most obscure writing I have ever come across (this was in my pre-Public Service days).  I was able to understand it sufficiently to realise that the author was of formidable intelligence but the reader was not. 

I do not think I attempted the book to impress the cleverest boy in the class although that may be debatable.  By then I had realised that all such attempts on my part to impress that gifted Adonis just succeeded in making me appear more stupid. 

No, I was driven to reading the book because of the Niles.  By the time I finished the book, with my brains almost sore with effort (although I know they have no pain receptors), Prof Nile had returned to England.  I was never able to casually introduce into a conversation the concepts of synthetic truths versus analytic truths, and a priori  knowledge with him.  If I had he would have possibly rejected Kant because Immanuel, like me, was not English and, in any case, I was not expressing myself with perfect grammar and diction. 

So the whole thing had been futile.  No, not quite futile.  The gifted Adonis met me in the library one day and said he had noted I had the book out.  I had not realised, although I should have, that he was on the library committee.  The Kant had possibly not been borrowed for fifty years.  He gave me a superior, deprecatory smile – one I recall to this day – so I felt even worse.  I knew he knew I had taken the book out to impress and that I could not possibly have understood it.

I have not read Kant since although I now have two copies of the Critique that remain unread.  I bought them in the hope that, with age and experience, the fullness of Kant’s meaning would burst on me like a revelation.  Fat chance of that now!  But I am not in such awe of Kant as I was, though, of course, he remains an intellectual giant.

I was introduced to the Compact Classics by my sister in law.  She was in the book trade and had obtained them free since they had not sold well presumably due to their relative lack of sex and violence.  But, in each of these three volumes, there were dozens of great works – of the Western canon of course – summarised completely in two pages!  The Origin of Species – two pages; the Canterbury Tales – two pages (not in Middle English); most remarkable of all, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – two pages.  These made the Readers Digest condensed versions seem verbose. 

I looked down the contents to the Ks.  Ah yes, Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason in just two pages – two very readable pages.  All these years later I now know what he was on about.  Very reassuring the author of this summary states:  “The text, however, is notorious for its difficulty due to its long, dense passages and unusually obscure concepts.  Indeed, interpreting a typical paragraph, especially for a modern-day reader, is often akin to trying to decipher an unknown foreign language.  Kant’s own colleagues- trained philosophers who studied the text in its original German – complained about its perplexing vagueness and ambiguity.” 

Prof Nile, where are you now?  I want to talk to you about the Critique of Pure Reason. Alas, it is too late; no Prof Nile.