My Recollections of Geoffrey Rans, Head of English, 1953-60 By David Handforth (At WLHS 1946-54) |
Geoffrey Rans came to West Leeds as head of English in succession to Oswald Harland in the Michaelmas term of 1954. His previous post had been at Barnsley. He appears in the staff photos for 1956 and 1959. Also as headmaster in the play Vice-Versa 1959. He taught me for four months. I visited him whenever I was in Leeds during the following five years, not more than five or six times in all. During that brief acquaintance, he changed my life profoundly and influenced me in ways that bring him to mind in things I do, read or write just about every day. Geoffrey died in 2001 in Canada, where he had held a chair in English at the University of London, Ontario, for many years. In Canada, he had become a highly regarded authority on the Leatherstocking novels of Fenimore Cooper. Replacing Oswald Harland was not an easy business. The man was an institution, popular with boys, much admired and with a reputation that went well beyond the school. An occasional broadcaster and journalist as well as teacher, he had recently published his North Riding volume in one of the county history series popular at the time. Oswald, and his distinguished elder brother, Sydney, were graduates of King's, London, where as students they had been very friendly with Storm Jameson, also from Yorkshire, who was friendly with Oswald for the rest of her life, and who thought highly of, and praised in print, the four or five novels he published between 1929 and 1940. 'Pop', as we and many generations of West Leeds OBs knew him, had also written a number of pastiche westerns, which made him all the more impressive to those of us in thrall to the genre. I remember ordering one from Armley library in Branch Road: 'Round-up at Lanahan Gulch'. I found it disappointingly dull but did not detract from Pop's presence and allure. He represented a type of sophisticated, gentlemanly Yorkshireman who had neither abandoned his homeland nor adopted the manners of the south. Since he continually reminded us of his North Riding heritage, he may have felt that straying as far south as Leeds was treachery enough. I was particularly alarmed at 'Pop' Harland's departure. He had begun to pay attention to my reading over the previous year or two as a preliminary, I hoped, to preparing me for Oxford. In truth, he had begun to coast a little during his final year. He still offered startling perceptions and insights in class but increasingly resorted to writing out on the blackboard what were in effect model answers to potential A-Level questions and bidding us copy them down. His handwriting was as elegant, precise and minuscule in chalk as with the pen and he could fill a blackboard with a thousand words or so at a time. I still remember whole phrases from one such treatise on 'Nature in "King Lear"'. Pop had begun to invite me occasionally to lunch with him and his wife at Morra Head, his Wetherby home. I was asked again during the summer holiday following his retirement. He was full of praise for the young man about to take his place, saying he'd been at the appointment interview and had been impressed the moment Rans entered the room, with a copy of a newly-published Evelyn Waugh novel under his arm. I noted the technique and adopted a version of it myself a few years later. Pop had been white-haired, grandfatherly, relaxed, resolutely northern, rather countrified in his favourite, open-pocketed, Donegal jackets and beige cashmere pullovers. Rans was heavily built, dark of hair and complexion, purposeful and exotic. He could have come straight from the Vienna of Berg and Wittgenstein. An aura of film noir hovered about him. Geoffrey was familiar with and fond of Vienna but had at the time a stronger love of Italy. His interests ranged from literature and philosophy to languages, classical music, the great period of Viennese and Habsburg operetta, film, cabaret, theatre, opera, the visual arts, wine and cookery, especially French and Italian but he knew quite a lot about Hungarian cuisine, too, and made a gulyas to dream of. He was, I think, the child of an immigrant Polish Jewish family and had been born in Nile Street on the edge of Shoreditch. His father had been a cabinet-maker. Geoffrey began his university career at King's College, University of London, (strangely, Harland's alma mater, too) under Denis Saurat, who must greatly have influenced his approach to Milton and Blake, which was inspirational. For some reason he broke off this course and went into the army. He may have been old enough to be conscripted in the last year of the war rather than for later national service. After the army, he went up to Trinity, Cambridge, and took a double first in English. During his time at Leeds he also worked on a PhD at Leeds University Dept. of English [Ed]. Whatever misgivings we may have had to begin with, Geoffrey hit us like a tropical storm. I had already taken A-levels and was in my third sixth-form year. I took the usual lessons on the timetable. In addition, Geoffrey gave weekly, sometimes twice weekly, Cambridge-style supervisions to me and to Arthur Marsden. We wrote him essays in preparation for each session. As he lodged immediately across the road from my parents' house, these extra-curricular meetings were very convenient. His landlady, an elderly Scottish widow and an acquaintance of my mother's, liked to let a room to a male teacher. 'Women', she told my mother, 'are too much of a nuisance, forever washing their smalls'. Geoffrey was, among his many other skills, a good mimic. He used to entertain Arthur and me with impressions of Leavis, 'Dadie' Rylands, 'The Brigadier' Tom Henn and other Cambridge luminaries. Although never an undergraduate at 'the other place', he had a version of Maurice Bowra, who he referred to as S'Bowra in ironic acknowledgment of the socially ambitious then Warden of Wadham's recently acquired title. Oddly, Wadham was the college he advised me to apply to as an Oxford alternative should I fail to make Cambridge. He did the police in different voices; Lord David Cecil and 'Freddie' Ayer in their own. He found characteristics of his landlady entertaining and in class would tell us how when serving his Sunday breakfast she asked him to disregard her 'dishabills'. Looking back, I do not know how he managed it. During one term from September to Christmas in 1954, in addition to devising and implementing a reading and essay plan for Arthur and me for the Cambridge open award exams at the end of November, he took us all in class through Shakespeare's 'Antony', 'Hamlet', 'Measure for Measure' and 'Othello' as well as metaphysical poetry, concentrating on Donne and Herbert. He read Swift to us. Not the well-known works but 'Portrait of a Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed', a description full of Swiftian revulsion of a superannuated Drury Lane prostitute and his 'Celia, Celia, Celia sh-ts' as it was printed in the good Dean's day. He read Sterne's Sentimental Journey to us, the Sea Eclogues of the real if improbable William Diaper, a protégé of Swift's who the Dean tired of and dropped, together with extracts from Diaper's translation of the unforgettable epic of Oppian's Halieutics or Lives and Loves of the Fishes, with its remarkable passage in heroic couplets on the copulation of tortoises. We read Ibsen and Gerard Manley Hopkins, were introduced to the Leavisian. Cambridge critical dating exercises (dating unseen passages by reference to evidence within the text), read a fair number of Shakespeare's sonnets, a good deal of Milton and Blake. With him, we discovered Henry Reed, Laurence Durrell, Emily Dickinson, e e cummings, Don Marquis, Ogden Nash, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore. He read aloud to us enough of Kingsley Amis' recently published 'Lucky Jim' to have us weeping with laughter and scouring Leeds bookshops for our own copies. He did a series of classes on advertising (this was years before Vance Packard's 'The Hidden Persuaders'), circulating examples of advertisements for comment on the techniques employed. He made us laugh by producing New Yorker ads that touched on social superiority ('The slowest made shoes in America') and cartoons that parodied the ads - man lying spreadeagled on road, cop bending over to catch his dying words, 'It must have been a Lincoln, officer. It had that big car feel'. He introduced us to Marx Brothers films; to Groucho and Perelman one-liners ('I never forget a face. In your case I'll make an exception'), and, to my amazement and enlightenment, devoted at least a third of one lesson to a critical analysis of the visual narrative in 'Shane'. Beyond the Manchester Guardian, Observer, and Time and Tide reviews I regularly read, and my own attempt to explain to myself why I had been so greatly affected by Carol Reed's 'Third Man', a few years earlier, it was the first experience for all of us, I think, of a serious, critical approach both to genre and an individual film. He brought a record player into class - a better one than the usual one we heard in the music room - and played us Tom Lehrer records, accompanied by an impression of Lehrer performing to students in the lecture theatre before he abandoned Harvard for entertainment. He played us Eartha Kitt, especially her version of 'Let's Do It', 'An Old-fashioned Girl' and 'Monotonous', the latter then recently performed in a stage revue in London. He introduced us to parliamentary sketch writers in the political weeklies, in particular to Bernard Levin's Taper column in The Spectator (available every week in those days along with the New Statesman and Time and Tide in the school library). Levin's pieces at that period were peopled with Swiftian caricatures of particularly despised politicians with the names Levin had indelibly imprinted on them - Sir Shortly Floorcross for the renegade Old Alleynian, one-time Labour attorney-general and veteran of the 1945 Nuremberg Trials, Hartley Shawcross, and Sir Reginald Bullying-Manner for the then unpopular Tory junior minister, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller. During my individual supervision sessions, he played a recently released recording of George Malcolm performing Scarlatti on the harpsichord. The instrument was the kind of post-Dolmetsch, multi-pedal brute now happily extinct that no decent baroque player would be seen dead near today. Malcolm's musicianship and precise fingering were no less magical even with the tin-tray sound of that period. He played Schwartzkopf - singing Lieder, as the Countess in Figaro's Hochzeit, but also as Hanna in Lehar's Lustige Witwe, a work he adored. Although I'd been introduced to a wide range of music at home, including Lehar, this was potent stuff. When I got my first record player a year or so later, these - and Eartha Kitt - were among the first records I bought. All this in one term. Arthur Marsden and I both won open awards to read English at Cambridge in the exams held in November/ December 1954. Most of the credit for this is due to Geoffrey's tireless, enthusing, detailed preparation of us and his relentless critical assessment of our efforts. He could be scathing. He knew I played the piano - after a fashion. One day he asked me if I was any good. I said I thought not. 'Like your tennis?' he asked, which he had seen me play, in passing. He paused. 'You know,' he said, 'I don't think I could spend time on anything unless I knew I had the potential to be outstanding at it.' On another occasion, when I'd said something that offended his taste, he remarked, 'David, you cannot help being a gentile. You do not, however, have to be genteel'. During my undergraduate years, I made occasional visits to Leeds (my parents were then living in Redcar) and he always invited me to dinner. Geoffrey had by this time taken a flat in Headingley and was doing some part-time work at the university. Dinner a deux with Geoffrey was a cookery lesson, a wine tasting (a bottle between us per course), a musical recital on the gramophone, and a session on aesthetics and the visual arts. Those were the days of the Gregory Fellowships at Leeds University. Geoffrey knew the Gregory Fellows well (poetry, painting and sculpture). In the late 1950s both Terry Frost and Hubert 'Nibs' Dalwood were in turn fellows. Geoffrey had their work on his walls and standing on his floor. He also knew a sculptor who worked in miniatures in lead. He taught at Bootham. I forget the name. His work featured on Geoffrey's mantelpiece. Preparation of the meal was always shared. I learned some of my earliest cooking skills in my few visits to his kitchen, supplementing what had I learnt from my mother and grandmother. He had idiosyncratic ways with coffee, insisting that the best results were to buy half Jamaica Blue Mountain and half a mocha roast as beans, then to warm them gently in a grill pan before grinding.. I still use his half-and-half mix but have reneged on the warming and grinding. I remember buying the first paperback editions of Elizabeth David's Mediterranean and French Country Cooking and suspect this was also owing to him. I discovered Raymond Postgate's original version of the Good Food Guide around the same time, whether through him or not I can't now clearly remember. I must surely have retained some talent for discovery of my own. This is only a fragment, still more remains in my memory, of the riches Geoffrey made us aware of. As I wrote at the beginning, it represents fewer than four months of full-time teaching, together with a few visits to his flat and a fairly regular correspondence during my time at Cambridge. It came to a sad end. When I went down from university, I had decided to teach English at least for a few years and wrote to tell Geoffrey of my first post at a reasonably good independent school at what I thought was quite a good salary for the time (and for my lack of experience). It was probably a smug letter. He was furious and wrote back very briefly. I think he was understandably annoyed that I'd not gone into the state sector but it was the pay that really made him explode. He said I'd been taught by far better people than me (he instanced Pearson, with whom he'd become unexpectedly friendly and supportive) who were earning less at the end of their careers than I was being paid to start. It was scandalous and I should be ashamed. I had, and still have, a huge regard for him and was shocked by his outburst. I wrote apologetically but never received a reply. The break with someone I owed such a debt nagged at me for years. I knew he'd married and gone to Canada. In the days before the internet, I trawled intermittently and in vain for his name through university yearbooks, faculty lists and publication records. Late in 2001, I put his name into a search engine and found him in Ontario. I e-mailed cautiously. I had an immediate, warm reply. I e-mailed again and received another prompt but brief response saying that there was some incompatibility between our e-mail servers, that he disliked e-mail anyway and would I please write him a proper letter, telling him what I'd been up to since we'd last been in touch, adding characteristically, 'marks will be deducted for style and content'. Fortunately I had written even in our brief e-mail exchange how much his influence had marked my life and career. I set about composing a 'normal'
letter. It took me a week or two and ran to several pages. I took a lot of care
over it - to inform him; with luck, to amuse him and to minimise the possibility
of deducted marks. Some months passed and I received no reply. Towards the spring
of the following year I received a letter from his widow (his second wife) to
say that she'd come across my letter among Geoffrey's papers. She said he'd read
it and had been pleased to hear my tale and had been very gratified that I'd valued
his teaching. He had died very shortly after receiving it. |